Semipop Life: She speeds

Pillbox Patti, Machine Girl, Lainey Wilson, CMAT, and more!

Pillbox Patti: Florida

Nicolette Hayford came from Starke, a 5k-population county seat on a stretch of U.S. 301 between Jacksonville and Gainesville best known for being a speed trap that until 2018 AAA recommended motorists avoid. Pillbox Patti emerged from Hayford as a way of engaging with her history at a level of remove. She was one of Ashley McBryde’s Lindevilleans; this eight-song record, deserved winner of the 2022 Expert Witness EP poll if 29 minutes isn’t too long, shines its high beams on a dark antithesis of McBryde’s small town. The substances in “Eat Pray Drugs” go well beyond weed, and it’s clear that Patti-the-character knows more about how to powderize Oxys than one should. Also less than benign is the crowd that shows up on a teenage visit to the abortion clinic on “Valentine’s Day”, the “last time I felt young”. If such scenes make her claim of “good people, bad habits” seem wishful, some celebration of the place that produced her is still spiritually necessary. She corrects Stephen Foster’s dialectization to “Suwannee” 171 years after the fact, thickening the air so you’re inhaling the swamp. She starts singing “Hookin Up” like a mid-period Taylor Swift without the conscientiousness before the chorus crescendo announces that yes, casual sex is glorious, though the nervous hook hangs around like those zealots outside Planned Parenthood. By the end she’s reached some kind of acceptance that the town has shaped who she is, even if there’s no way she’s sticking to the 25 mph limit as she gets outta there.

Grade: A (“Suwannee”, “Hookin Up”, “Valentine’s Day”)

Machine Girl: Neon White Soundtrack Part 1: The Wicked Heart

Machine Girl are producer Matt Stephenson and drummer Sean Kelly, once kind of industrial, now so into anime that they’re touring with 100 Gecs. Neon White is an acclaimed indie jump-and-shoot speedrun game I haven’t played because this newsletter takes time, in which Neons condemned by God must cull the demons in Heaven that yeah you’re not gonna read all that. The music, despite a consistent breakneck pace, is tonally varied, which at 18 tracks in 83 minutes it’d better be. It defaults to a circa 2000 video game vibe, with frenetic breakbeats and synth-clouds so coarse you can see the polygons. There are also technical achievements well beyond the specs of the PS2, however: “Vainglorious Chorus” lives up to half its name (it doesn’t have a chorus), with pitch-shifting that blurs the boundary between discrete and continuous. Some non-gamers might want more than the occasional big riff to help tell the tracks apart, but I can verify this puts the fun in functional even when you’re not optimizing demon slaughter. (There’s a Part 2 with 33 more tracks; I listened to the first few, verified they were chill, and will wait for someone else to post a tool-assisted speedrun of the rest.)

Grade: A (“Vainglorious Chorus”, “Cloud Nine”, “The World to Come”)

Lainey Wilson: Bell Bottom Country

She’s the first woman in a decade to have two songs simultaneously on the country airplay top ten: “Heart Like a Truck” and “Wait in the Truck”. Well, you’ve got to know your audience. Even the statement of identity “Hillbilly Hippie” starts with an F-250 before she gets to the daisies and crystals. The “hillbilly” part isn’t quite geographically correct: it’s hard to think of a current major country star who sounds more Deep Southern than Baskin, LA’s favorite former Hannah Montana impersonator; she drawls like a young Lucinda except less, ahem, mannered. When she rocks, she attacks her syllables, knowing that producer Jay Joyce has her back. The quieter ones are less consistent, but the one for her Deddy shows a sensitivity more typical of vehicles more maneuverable than the F-series. As for the hippie part, while she’s almost certainly too smart to pull an Aldean, it’s left unstated how to interpret her God-guns-country bumper sticker. Given that she makes the, ahem, idiosyncratic decision to cover 4 Non Blondes’ widely despised “What's Up?”, I think “she’s a tolerant individualist” is at least consistent with the evidence.

Grade: A MINUS (“Hillbilly Hippie”, “Those Boots (Deddy’s Song)”, “Grease”)

Anthonie Tonnon: Leave Love Out of This

New Zealand singer-songwriter, countryish with an edge sharpened here by three-quarters of the Beths, writes an album about the casualties, human or otherwise, of late capitalism—yes, yes, every album is about this, but his focus and sweep is reminiscent of no one more than fellow public transport advocate Emperor X, even if the musicianship and the theoretical apparatus isn’t quite at that level. There’s environmental degradation; there are also ordinary people and 1990s rugby league stars whose safest choice is to submit to the machine and who end up doing quite well for themselves: their tragedies are in opportunities and All Black caps foregone. The arrangements are sometimes too simple when they lean heavily on synth washes, yet he gets every song across through a committed quaver, which he has enough of a Kiwi accent to get away with. All of the above combine in the closing, drumless “Matuara Paper Mill”, in which a small town says goodbye to industry and hello to an airborne toxic event, which Tonnon makes awful in both the modern and historic senses of that word. Plans are afoot to turn the mill into a medicinal cannabis plant.

Grade: A MINUS (“Two Free Hands”, “Entertainment”, “Mataura Paper Mill”)

Benito 80: Novo Samba Sempre Novo

A tribute to singer-songwriter and TV show host Benito di Paula, whom I previously knew nothing about and I have now learned had (and has retained) one of the great ’70s mustaches. His melodies are as strong as you’d expect from one of Brazil’s premier hitmakers and nightclub acts of the era, while his lyrics are often poetic—it may or may not be fortunate that I lack the Portuguese to tell the difference between avant-garde poetry and greeting card poetry, though the one where Criolo shows Charlie Brown around Carnaval is straightforward enough. Listeners here have a chance to catch up with a who’s who of contemporary Música Semipopular Brasileira. Romulo Fróes, who co-produces with di Paula’s son Rodrigo Vellozo, enlists the Clube da Encruza’s usual Campos/França/Cabral axis to anchor the music and scours his friends and friends-of-friends lists for guest singers. There are some less usual suspects: di Paula’s peer João Bosco opens proceedings, and pandemic-era breakout star Teresa Cristina gets to sing the political one about butterflies longing for freedom. Even when the vocals are conventional, Fróes and Vellozo’s commitment to beauty comes through, with guitars and piano shimmering and Thiago França blowing up a quiet storm.

Grade: A MINUS (“Além Do Arco-Íris”, “Depois Do Amor”, “Proteção Às Borboletas”)

CMAT: If My Wife New I’d Be Dead

A quite modern, quite weird singer—she sounds like someone named Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson half-assing an accent from the high-yodeling part of the American South—and for once I think it’s a good weird, not least because she cares enough about her words to let me understand at least the important songs. These include the one about lying about moving to Nashville, the one that’s about the woman Peter Bogdanovich left for Cybill Shepherd and also about Cybill Shepherd, the one about Catholicism in which she asks why she likes Larkin (if she means anything between “Church Going” and “Aubade”, I have no idea tbh), and others: a clear majority of the twelve tracks, though the ratio doesn’t improve if you play the deluxe so you don’t need to do that. Even the (mostly relationship) ones where she doesn’t have anything unprecedented to say have proper non-assembly line melodies. A pleasure, and I hope she attempts to maintain the same level of weird next time out.

Grade: A MINUS (“Peter Bogdanovich”, “Nashville”, “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!”)

Russo Passapusso, Antônio Carlos & Jocáfi: Alto da Maravilha

Guy number one is BaianaSystem’s showrunner; guys numbers two and three were a major samba-rock duo of the ’70s who briefly dabbled with R&B tropicália oddness before settling into a lucrative career as go-to softies for telenovela soundtracks. In this pandemic collaboration, Passapusso drags them back to their roots by constructing the hardest bottom-driven funk they’ve had since 1971; in turn, their showbiz harmonies and their grounding in MPB populism keep things from getting too wiggy. My favorites are “Pitanga”, because it sounds the most like Tom Zé, and “Forrobodó”, prevented from flying off into chaos by one or the other of stalwart bassists Lucas Martins and Zé Nigro. Everyone has so much fun that even Gilberto Gil, hero of guys one through three, shows up to the party. Bring on the telenovela adaptation.

Grade: A MINUS (“Pitanga”, “Forrobodó”, “Alabá”)

King Stingray

In Australia’s Northern Territory, rock retains its use-values like a billion-year-old sandstone formation does. This sounds like your dad’s pub band, except with a didgeridoo and with most lyrics in Yolŋu Matha. The ringleaders are singer Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu and guitarist Roy Kellaway, whose respective uncle and father were Yothu Yindi’s frontman and first bassist. King Stingray brand themselves “Yolŋu surf rock”, though any surf is incidental to a very solid rhythm section and occasional shredding, while said didgeridoo enlivens instrumental passages and underscores key motifs. I’m able to recommend the minority of lyrics that are in appealingly candid English. “Get Me Out” clarifies with “of the city” (Melbourne, as it happens); the “Camp Dog” is addressed with “please don’t bite me.” That they’re young men working out their place in the world three-and-a-half catchy minutes at a time is valuable enough given how rare that’s become up over, but there are hints they could become more than that: the 4000 kilometers from Arnhem Land to Alex Lahey may be bridgeable.

Grade: B PLUS (“Get Me Out”, “Camp Dog”, “Raypirri”)

Plaid: Feorm Falorx

The eleventh album from this London electronic duo simulates (take a deep breath) a performance at the Feorm Festival on the planet Falorx (and breathe out.) There are bleeps drawn from the entire history of bloops, often with little attempt to dress them up as if minimizing bytes for interstellar transmission, meaning that even the dinky speed arpeggios on “Return to Return” aren’t over-precious. These blurps are packaged in an efficient tune delivery system—they’re old enough to know you don’t need much variation to ride a hook for three or four minutes. The end result isn’t at all original, but makes for a utilitarian time in the shade from one or more suns. Amazingly, the one that sounds like sped-up Joy Division isn’t the best one—that’d be the Kubrickian closer “Wide I’s”. One does end up questioning in what sense Plaid would serve man, given the opportunity,

Grade: B PLUS (“Wide I’s”, “Nightcrawler”, “Return to Return”)

Willi Carlisle: Peculiar, Missouri

A football captain turned Utah Phillips disciple, he sings high and not so much lonesome as self-sufficient. Tells good stories: some like the one about a guy struggling with his bisexuality plausibly about some version of himself, some not unless stage magic is yet another of his skills. He’s neither the kind of folkie to write stadium choruses or the kind of Americanan willing to shell out for some Nashville metropolitan area ringers to perk up the back half, but he and multi-instrumentalists Joel Savoy and Grand D’aubin keep things interesting by trying out a decent music store’s worth of stringed and keyed noisemakers. Best in show is “Vanlife”, in which he details the sense of freedom that comes with peeing in cans and homeowners calling the cops on you, while declining to call Elon Musk a rhymes-with-Cybertruck. I hope Willi won’t mind me calling Musk a fuck on his behalf.

Grade: B PLUS (“Vanlife”, “Tulsa’s Last Magician”, “Life on the Fence”)

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Oscar pick: Yes, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the best Asian-American movie ever and would be a worthy Best Picture, but go The Fabelmans.