Semipop Life: Harder, better, slower, smoother

Victoria Monét, Rodrigo Amado, PinkPantheress, John Cage, and more!

Victoria Monét: Jaguar II

Nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy; sometimes you do have to hand it to them. Monet’s been working backrooms for a while—she’s had her name on most of the major Ariana Grande songs over the last decade—and released the first Jaguar to some success in 2020, but this is a breakthrough, and we’ll see if “On My Mama” makes a real chart run post-Christmas. The opening “Smoke”, with fellow not-super-young R&B hope Lucky Daye, sets the tone: Monét’s in a relaxed place, able to take a toke without making it her whole thing. Main producer D’Mile finds fetching settings for her, toning down OutKast’s southern funk so she can drive her Cadillac at a pedestrian-safe speed. Monét’s singing too is smooth with a knowing low-end on “How Does It Make You Feel”, yet she still has a rhythmic bite that foregrounds the lyrics. She’s had it with needy men, preferring to emphasize her and her aforementioned mama’s intergenerational continuity in fineness that deepens after childbirth. She’s even wrangled a Grammy nomination for her two-year-old, who hopefully will get something shiny to bring to her first kindergarten show-and-tell.

Grade: A (“Smoke”, “How Does It Make You Feel”, “On My Mama”)

Nurit Stark: Bartók Ligeti Veress Eötvös

The major pieces on this multigenerational tour of Hungarian modernism are two of the most challenging solo string works in 20th century classical music, which Stark confronts on two different instruments. Their difficulty contributes to their meaning, as it does in Faulkner or Dark Souls, and Stark’s touch of austerity helps to communicate it. Bartók’s Sonata for Violin Solo was written for Menuhin, who balked at the microtones and asked Bartók to let him play it with no weird notes. Stark makes fractional tones seem like a logical complement to traditional European tonality; just as impressive is her control over dynamics in the third movement as it trails off into a diminuendo of harmonics. The initial melody of Ligeti’s Sonata for Viola Solo doesn’t sound “natural” at all; Stark, however, does well to establish that humans can create and master such unnatural things. The second movement, an accelerating sequence of double stops, is considered notoriously hard to finger by those equipped to judge such things, yet she plays it with no mean swing for someone conservatory-trained. In comparison, Veress’s Sonata for Violin Solo is a cooldown jog in the park, Eötvös’s Adventures of the Dominant Seventh Chord (written for her) a lark.

Grade: A MINUS (Sonata for Violin Solo: IV.; Sonata for Viola Solo: II.; Sonata for Violin Solo: III.)

Rodrigo Amado The Bridge: Beyond the Margins

The 40-minute title track of this Warsaw live set might be my favorite thing Portugal’s most acclaimed saxist has done since 2018’s A History of Nothing. A big part of this is the rest of the cast, starring octogenarian pianist Alex von Schlippenbach (best known in the U.S. for his complete Monk), who sets the tone with big neoclassical clusters. This contrasts with Amado’s tenor, which comes from a bluesier free jazz tradition; together they vary pace and intensity deftly, trading off fast repeated phrases and cerebral mind-melds before Amado gets to hit his Rollinsesque high notes two-thirds of the way in. Rhythm players Gerry Hemingway and Semipop Life favorite Ingebrigt Håker Flaten just have fun, keeping busy when the leads are going at it and avant-funking away during rare showcase moments. Håker Flaten gets proportionately more shine time on the succinct “Personal Mountains”, while the Ayler variation “(Visiting) Ghosts” lets Amado go into abstract spiritual mode, with Schlippenbach game enough to throw in a glissando or two.

Grade: A MINUS (“Beyond the Margins”, “Personal Mountains”)

Rempis Percussion Quartet: Harvesters

This double-drummer collection from a March trip to Tours is one of four Dave Rempis releases this year on his Aerophonic label (of which I’ve previously reviewed Sirocco.) It trends better as it goes along, which is welcome given the 104-minute runtime. Rempis’s bass lieutenant here is good ol’ Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, who can smooth out the melody-percussion interplay, or keep the drummers in their place by playing his own tune in his own time. Stickmen Tim Daisy and Frank Rosaly get their own back on “Little Fascists”, constructing an ominous avant sound-world that also sends Håker Flaten and Rempis scurrying to their grimoires of extended techniques. The latter shows, not for the first time, he can do everything a saxist can do on both alto and tenor, with passages with particular soul late in “Spooky Action” (recorded for an audience of immigrant schoolchildren, with no kids’ menu deemed necessary) and interspersed throughout “Fat Lip”. Next to 2019’s The Early Bird Gets, my favorite Rempis project.

Grade: A MINUS (“Fat Lip”, “Spooky Action”, “Little Fascists”)

Horrendous: Ontological Mysterium

This Philly band’s second Decibel album of the year winner, after 2015’s Anareta, and it’s about as good. After two minutes of sustained chords whose grandeur lures in lapsed indie kids like me, they turn towards prog, like so many adept death metallers who want to challenge their chops. It suits them: drummer Jamie Knox in particular leaves nary a space unfilled on the fast bits. The guitarists are as comfortable fingering epic leads as they are making the jerk-rhythms relentlessly logical, and the production spaces the instruments without detracting from the traditional heavy pleasures of the genre. The lyrics are very Horrendous, but the singers have a ball telling us about the occult (it’s a metaphor) and an anemic dinosaur (sadly it is too) in funny ha-ha and funny not-so-ha-ha voices. By the time they get to doom-funk closer “The Death Knell Ringeth", it's the most efficient party hell has known.

Grade: A MINUS (“The Death Knell Ringeth”, “Cult of Shaad’oah”, “The Blaze”)

Cydnee with a C: Confessions of a Fangirl EP

Atlanta-to-L.A. singer who got demi-famous for a couple of Trippie Redd guest spots and for uploading Blackpink reaction videos to YouTube before last year’s single “Cry Alone” upgraded that to semi-. The six songs here are a fine attempt at the K-pop/PinkPantheress fusion that so many, including a couple of us over 30, have been clamoring for. Despite her standout hooks being appropriated from Joni Mitchell and stolen from Max Martin, she has no shortage of tunelets, and has learned from role models Rosé and Jisoo and uh Chris Martin how to make them pretty. Aktion Jackson’s beats, often simplified relative to PP save for the breaks on “Jealous”, show enough rhythm sense to propel the songs for two minutes a pop. And “Thotty” opens up subject matter previously uncovered by mainstream Korean pop (not to mention PP) relevant to at least certain fangirls, among others.

Grade: A MINUS (“Jealous”, “Don’t We Always”, “Thotty”)

PinkPantheress: Heaven Knows

2023’s been the year that she and a host of borrowers across TikTok and East Asia realized her sound could do numbers. This is her globopop bid, with the likes of Greg Kurstin punching up her vocals, and song lengths stretching towards the three-minute mark. Post-“Boy’s a Liar”, there hasn’t been a commercial dividend: for all Zoomers’ supposed parasociality, it seems getting intellectually horny over 2000s One Direction predecessors McFly is beyond their empathy, and of her guests, only Kelela matches her feel for what she’s doing (though Ice Spice’s rizz on their shared breakthrough renders being simpatico irrelevant.) But it’s an honorable effort, even if the effortlessness of her beatmaking is lost as she leaves the bedroom. She still has a rare ability to distill feelings down to their essences, and if her anxieties themselves are little different to those of everyone unfortunate enough to endure adolescence with a smartphone, her singing ensures there’s sweetness in her struggles.

Grade: B PLUS (“True Romance”, “The Aisle”, “Bury Me”)

Atmosphere: So Many Other Realities Exist Simultaneously

The opener’s chorus starts “It’ll be okay”; then follows a hour describing the ways in which things are not, currently, okay, before a reprise at the end. Slug mixes up his usual esoteric interests and quasi-surrealist statements of fact (“there’s no beef in a bowl full of rabbit food”: true!) with autobiographical snippets, making middle-aged routine healthcare rap sound more musical than [redacted out of respect for Aquemini]. Ant continues to dip into his inexhaustible supply of hooky old school (i.e. something happens) beats, tiptoeing behind Slug when he’s mood-building and buzzing him along on the more narrative tracks. There’s no reason for anyone to change their minds about them at this point: they’ll consolidate their status as Minneapolis mainstays, taking validation from their star on the First Avenue wall right above Hüsker Dü’s, whose name you bet Slug pronounces right.

Grade: B PLUS (“Bigger Pictures”, “Okay”, “September Fools’ Day”)

John Cage, Latvian Radio Choir, Sigvards Kļava: Choral Works

The title’s a misnomer. “Four²” is the only piece written for an acoustic vocal group (originally the Hood River Valley High School choir), and Cage allows an uncharacteristic indulgence in tonal harmony, notes sustaining until the conductor remembers to check his watch or has to go to the bathroom. “Hymns & Variations” is the most satisfying work for melody fans, taking two colonial hymns, dispensing with consonants (anticipating later experiments by A. Grande), and repeating them while mashing the delete button, leaving vast blank spaces that make the remaining sounds seem like Sappho fragments. “Five”, the earliest of Cage’s “number pieces”, specifies notes but not the instruments with which to play them; the choir does a fine job of helping one appreciate the tones in themselves. “Four⁶”, at half an hour the longest piece, also refuses to prescribe instrumentation and even leaves specific sounds up to the performers; choices made include “meow”, “bula-bula-bula”, and some weird throatsinging-like overtone thing. At least the Latvian Radio Choir are having fun.

Grade: B PLUS (“Hymn A (After W. Billing’s “Old North”)”, “Five”, “Hymn B (After W. Billing’s “Heath”)”)