Semipop Life: Imaginary centuries

Alhaji Waziri Oshomah, Satoko Fujii, Kassmasse, SilkMoney, and more!

Apr 09, 2023

Working out whether this is good or great is tricky because it’s not clear what the basis for comparison is. As pure ’70s/’80s highlife, the arrangements offer limited opportunities for virtuosity, and the few that arise often meander. As an Islamic devotional singer, Waziri falls extremely short of (to pick the highest possible standard) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But Waziri covers both bases in a way that I don’t know anyone else does, justifying even the meandering—why rush to a third chord when all eternity lies ahead?—which makes him major (or at least more major than the 7.2 Pitchfork hung on an otherwise informative review, just don’t give numbers if you don’t know how to grade things P4K.) One point of distinction is how he makes secular and spiritual concerns inextricable, to the point that it makes perfect sense to begin an easy-going 18-minute praise song with a dedication to the managing director of Alaji Y. Sado & Sons Ltd. Another is that he’s a wife guy: Madam Hassanah Waziri and Her Velvet Voice join in on the closer, and while she’s also no Nusrat, she adds a heck of a lot of earthly interest.

Grade: A MINUS, I THINK (“My Luck”, “Jealousy”, “Alhaji Yesufu Sado Managing Director”)

Satoko Fujii: Hyaku: One Hundred Dreams

To celebrate her, yes, one hundredth album in her 26-year career as bandleader (I’ve heard three of them), Fujii throws a party in Manhattan and everybody from Wadada Leo Smith to Ikue Mori shows up. Some of the best turns come from lesser-known names: Sara Schoenbeck’s work here solo and in tandem with tenor Ingrid Laubrock doubles the number of excellent jazz bassoon performances I know (move over, Karen Borca on Jimmy Lyons’s Wee Sneezawee.) Jazz trumpet is a much more competitive field, and Smith and Natsuki Tamura—Fujii’s husband, as it happens—put in contrasting performances: the latter showing off mastery of the color wheel, the former, well, he rivals Fujii for quantity of recorded output so you should know what he sounds like by now (short version: he honks, but intellectually.) Mori gifts a tinkling, ominous intermission, and the rhythm section avant-grooves every now and then. Fujii’s piano gets the first word to show that beauty doesn’t have to be complicated, while the ensemble crashes its way to the ending, showing that sometimes it’s nice if it is.

Grade: A MINUS (“Part Two”, “Part Five”, “Part Four”)

Kassmasse: Bahil | Weg

Billed as a rapper though he sings plenty, he’s unmistakably Ethiopian regardless of mode, down to the instrumental samples, which could be and for all I know are from one or some of Éthiopiques 1 through 30. There also are trap-and-drill-never-happened throwback hip hop beats, additional voices where you might deduce the language (the chants in “Sewasew” are Daasanach) but not the century, and a few English lyrics (“fishing for the evergreen” or some such) that are inscrutable without context. With translations hard to come by, I ran “Yehagere Lij” through the machine with ambiguous results; it might be a country-as-a-woman song, the repeated “Let us be happy/That we will not forget” one way to process sorrows past. If you don’t speak Amharic and all this sounds hard not to exoticize, focus on his vocals: his relaxed precision, his trilled “r”s. I can’t tell whether this suffices to define the brand-new genre (“Antsar”) he claims for himself; as it stands, it’s just excellent music that’s familiar in its semi-familiarity.

Grade: A MINUS (“Yehagere Lij”, “Sewasew”, “Alem”)

SilkMoney: I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore

I’ll retract my recent declaration that no youngish rappers know how to have fun anymore, as long as you can accept that an album in the same spirit as earlier title I Hate My Life and I Really Wish People Would Stop Telling Me Not To is a valid answer to “what do you consider fun”. He’d be paranoid even without the assistance of controlled substances, but that doesn’t mean the algorithms aren’t out to get him. When he gets his shit together, he can spit his vehemence at fastball velocities, and producer Khalil Blu keeps things dense by sneaking in aggressive percussion and WTF samples amongst the mood synths. Would this be better if, instead of recognizing his misogyny, he wasn’t misogynist? Only for me, his audience, women, and himself. But I wouldn’t want him to get so politically correct he doesn’t make cannibalism jokes anymore.

Grade: A MINUS (“Emmm, N*gga Is You Tasty >:)”, “I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms and Bwoy Oh Bwoy”, “Cuummoney Amiliani”)

Loski: Censored

The gimmick here—lyrics that could incriminate this South London rapper get snipped out—failed to prevent him getting convicted of bringing a revolver into an Uber (which is a reasonable thing to prosecute even if his dealer made him do it) and sentenced to seven years (which is bullshit.) Judicial issues aside, he’s another example of drill avoiding its common failures of imagination when exported. One improvement is that he talks about things other than having a revolver, instead doing what critics are always claiming US drill does and filling out a picture of a brutal society, with violent beefs and mums’ houses getting shot up. He incorporates recent Atlantan syllabic innovations into a flow so working-class English it could lose a penalty shootout. When the beats resist pretentious Hollywood score synths and just hit the one hard, there’s an urgency rare in contemporary rap from any country. Nobody can know how his sentence will change him, but it’s evident it’ll waste years of a major talent’s life.

Grade: A MINUS (“Rolling Dice”, “Rolling Stones”, “P.U.G”)

Caitlin Cannon: The TrashCannon Album (2020)

She’s half of Side Pony (with Alice Wallace), whose “All the Time in the World” is considered a top five pandemic song by me, maybe Chuck Eddy, and maybe themselves. On this earlier 2020 solo album, the laugh lines aren’t quite as sharp and the altish-country backing could use a little variation. There’s more emotional range, however, most strikingly in “Mama’s a Hairdresser”, which paints her mother’s decades-long struggle to get her brother out of Alabama prison. Nevertheless, jokes abound. “Going for the Bronze” is a pretty clear position statement: “that Ivy League B.A. is just B.S.” Sexism and bullshit jobs are recurring topics, their soul-drainingness not too diminished by the usual Americana metaphors. Cannon expresses all this in a twang as natural as her hair color, understated except when she says “toolbag”. Side Pony are perhaps more likely to come up with a great record, but she shouldn’t trash her solo career yet.

Grade: B PLUS (“Going for the Bronze”, “Better Job”, “Mama’s a Hairdresser”)

OK:KO: Liesu

No idea if this young Finnish jazz quartet has heard Franco; that their drummer/composer is called Okko Saastamoinen is a more direct inspiration for their name. Okko, an ex-folkie from a little below the Arctic Circle, is the most consistent performer, bassist Mikael Saastamoinen (no relation, astonishingly) is very solid at rhythm maintenance and on his arco intro on “Kirkkis”, and sax and piano have their moments too. On the opening “Anima” (Mikael’s composition), tenor Jarno Tikka gives an ostentatious display before the piano and rhythm section show they have northern soul too. Other tracks take their time to unfurl, with intro fragments coalescing into full-fledged melodies, then progressing to Trane explorations or dour dirges, as the season dictates. While they seem more developed as a group than as individual musicians, at this stage that’s preferable to the other way around.

Grade: B PLUS (“Anima”, “Kirkkis”, “Yösalmi”)

Jinx Lennon: Pet Rent

Instructing himself and us all to “get out of your comfort zone”, he’s all over the place—in addition to standard punk foundations, this features keyboard mashing (amidst complaints about “beep-beep machines”), state-of-the-art if it were the Sixties studio effects, and freakouts hard to distinguish from noise rock. The songs, such as they are, are almost all in rant mode rather than singalong mode. As long as you accept the all-over-the-placeness as illustrating a fractured world and/or funny, this is enjoyable enough. His verbosity for the sake of it—he relishes dissing false paradise New Zealand by rhyming its place names, though one regrets he didn’t get to Taumarunui—masks frequent serious subjects (competing models of masculinity and their consequences) and sometimes even self-reflection: he ends a discussion of a past loss of songwriting mojo by screaming. Still punk, then.

Grade: B PLUS (“Age 12”, “Please Stop Talking About New Zealand”, “The Dundalk Walk”)

Hailey Whitters: The Dream (2020)

The album before Raised; if you liked that one, I’d expect you’d like this one about as much. There’s one undeniable personal song (“Ten Year Town”), there are the usual country puns and punctuation tricks; there’s something called “Red Wine & Blue” that doesn’t quite live up to its title. Most intriguingly, her slight flatness of affect produces moments of diffidence that hint at secrets beneath the songs’ surfaces. What does she really think about the “Happy People” she and Lori McKenna wrote about on Little Big Town’s behalf? What does she really think about Little Big Town? “All the Cool Girls” comes the closest to making mixed feelings explicit: they’re “a little sad, still a little drunk”, they’ve “got too much pride to let him see ya cry”. But just look at ’em shine.

Grade: B PLUS (“Happy People”, “Ten Year Town”, “All the Cool Girls”)

Immanuel Wilkins: The 7th Hand

This 25-year-old great alto hope, already on his second headlining album, has impressive chops and solid tunes. He can lead a band, granting pianist Micah Thomas much deserved solo time, and comes up with at least some good ideas, including djembes I think via the Farafina Kan Percussion Ensemble on “Don’t Break”, not including the numerology, but including flute (from Elena Pinderhughes) that for once doesn’t sound incongruous in the post-bop palette. Wilkins doesn’t have a sound quite so distinctive as to justify the closing 26-minute Trane-track ride in its entirety, let alone a 6-minute ballad, and there’s no guarantee he doesn’t turn into another Blue Note journeyman. But his upside is apparent.

Grade: B PLUS (“Lighthouse”, “Don’t Break”, “Emanation”)

Semipop Life