Semipop Life: I guess this is growing up

Baby Queen, Underscores, Sexyy Red, Kabeaushé, and more!

Baby Queen: Quarter Life Crisis

The Commonwealth’s most consistent pop musician of the 2020s takes one more stab at superstardom, earning herself a UK number 5 album and her name between Bonny Light Horseman and Mdou Moctar in the Bonnaroo small print. After “Kid Genius” gets her bitterness that the last couple of attempts didn’t take—yes, many frequent chart-toppers are much dumber than you, pop isn’t a meritocracy—out of the way, she gets back to her core business of recording deeply personal songs near the level of better-adjusted recovering kid genius Olivia Rodrigo. Baby Queen’s vituperative self-loathing streak (“If I could shut up/I would shut the fuck up”) suffices to explain why her career streams add up to a fraction of those of “Good 4 U”, but it’s what makes her work compelling to those of us who shared her crisis a quarter of a life ago. I don’t presume to tell her it gets better; often it does, sometimes it doesn’t. All I’ll say is that someone who can write “Dream Girl”, a song about acting bizarre within a love triangle that has a depth of feeling not incomparable to that one, has at least the potential for great happiness. (The deluxe edition’s bonus disc includes, among other old stuff, “Buzzkill” and “Dover Beach”, two of the decade’s finest singles.)

Grade: A (“Dream Girl”, “Grow Up”, “Quarter Life Crisis”)

Underscores: Wallsocket

What do you consider fun? Using every semipopular genre, former Minecrafter April Harper Grey might answer, but that’s concordant with the old values—for a while we just called that rock—with kiss kiss bang bang at least a possibility. “When’s the last time you saw someone with a ski mask and a gun?” asks the fraudster-narrator of the opening “Cops and Robbers”, perhaps concealing sheepishness that he’s resorted to embezzling from the elderly, yet still proud of his craftspersonship (and that said cops are after him.) From there unfolds a concept album regarding life in Wallsocket, MI; if the setting sometimes feels prefabricated by a Californian whose main engagement with the heartland is through horror movies, her writing is fleshy and empathetic. Though it may be spiritually correct to hate on the recurring Old Money Bitch (“did you know your parents are on Wikipedia?”), she, like the other protagonists, is making a genuine effort to understand the sometimes baffling personal and political choices her peers are cornered into. Topics of queer interest (detecting groomers, gender expressions in the pre-colonial Philippines) arise, but the main statement of trans positivity is Grey’s vocal performance: feminine, coy, steady, excited to be alive.

Grade: A MINUS (“Cops and Robbers”, “Old Money Bitch”, “Geez Louise”)

Sexyy Red: Hood Hottest Princess

Is this sexy(y)? It’s not for me to judge, since I’m no connoisseur of booty holes, though I’m sure one could come up with a rich taxonomy if one put the study in. Is this good(d) rapping? Again, I’m not sure: she’s beholden to the trend of rappers barely acknowledging the beat in order to cram their flows in no matter what; within that style, yes, she’s proficient. Is this fun(n)? Shit yeah, no booty hole pun intended. The “Female Gucci Mane” struts through cat-calling addicts and well-hung criminals, searching for strippers and hoes, among whom she’ll share nachos and drop bills like she’s fellow sexy red bouncy-assed wealth-spreader Santa Claus. So infectious is her enthusiasm for crowd-pleasing that even 2023 Nicki Minaj enjoys her cameo. “I love a bitch with confidence”, Red says, and why wouldn’t you? (The deluxe edition doubles the length to over an hour, excessive for a Gucci Mane of any gender, but biographical fallacy fanciers might use “Bow Bow Bow” and “Free My N***a” to contrast her relationships with her baby daddies.)

Grade: A MINUS (“Looking for the Hoes”, “Pound Town 2”, “SkeeYee”)

Kabeaushé: Hold on to Deer Life, There’s a Blcak Boy Behind You!

Kabeaushé, a flamboyant gender-ambiguous persona-construct honed in front of festival audiences while decked out in the worst blonde wig since Double Indemnity, is an alter ego of Kenyan vocalist/producer Kabochi Gitau, who in the past has explored the standard peculiarities for artists associated with Nyege Nyege Tapes before shifting towards intercontinental bizarreries: in an interview last year he claims “I also just discovered this lady called Kate Bush…” M.I.A. is another touchstone for the falsetto vocals, which find satisfaction in a certain girlishness. While I could use a lyric sheet, Kabeaushé has a knack for titles: “These Dishes Ain’t Gonna Do Themselves” (true) and “Go With Gut” (Gigerenzerian.) They’re proficient with FruityLoops, favoring upper register sirens and quantized guitar solos accompanied by bass for theoretical balance. Their signature, however, is to create fanfares that would get you kicked out of the cool Berlin clubs for crimes against minimalism with their own multitracked mouth. I particularly enjoy the sound effects on the one that dga-da-duh-duhs like Strong Bad’s “The System Is Down”. Now there’s some outsider art to inspire Kabeaushé’s next incarnation.

Grade: A MINUS (“High Spede”, “Mitte”, “If It’s Flying, Fly!”)

John Blum, David Murray, Chad Taylor: The Recursive Tree

Murray sounds more engaged than I’ve heard for a long time: even on 2016’s excellent trio album with Geri Allen and Terri Lyne Carrington, he didn’t stretch himself like he does here. Yet he’s not the dominant figure here: that would be Cecil Taylor student Blum, a pianist with few studio credits given that he’s played with everyone in free jazz these last few decades. Like his teacher, his default is hard and fast, but he mixes up fleet scales with his block chords in a way that doesn’t feel all twentieth century. On the typical “Kinetic Crawl”, he plays an odd pseudo-head before his left and right hands go scattering in different directions, then Murray enters with another tune entirely. Having someone to challenge him pushes the sax legend to go far out in ways reminiscent of his Eighties work, while still taking responsibility for the melodic core. For once Chad Taylor is content to sit back, nudging the odd firework towards something that needs burning.

Grade: A MINUS (“Fire in the Branches”, “Fractals”, “Hidden Thorns”)

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers: I Love You

Strong guitar leads, driving rhythm, comprehensible vocals: must be Australian women. The drummer-sung, sweet-sounding, harrowing “Never Saw It Coming” aside, this could be deeper, but they can worry about that in their late twenties. They have early twenties ups and downs to deal with: sex, relationship expectations, being disinclined to hang out with your mates because it’s a long ride into town and, I’ll add as a New Zealander, it’s Canberra (I admit the time I was disappointed by the capital’s nightlife was around the time they were born.) The way they all-together-now the “fun” of “I Used to Be Fun” across multiple syllables suggests they’ll work out how to entertain themselves in grown-up ways soon. They go full riot for the forty seconds of “Cayenne Pepper”; otherwise, main singer Anna Ryan and guitarist Scarlett McKahey are most comfortable expressing independence at punk-pop paces. Though it’s a little confusing that the chorus of “AHHHH!” is “oh-oh”, either way, they’re clearly wheeeeee.

Grade: A MINUS (“I Used to Be Fun”, “AHHHH!”, “Kissy Kissy”)

Marthe Lea Band: Herlighetens Vei

A straightforwardish Nordijazz configuration with some “world” influences and a little low-structure improv towards the end. Lea, who might be a literal Siren—‘“Sa Brugda” was sung to Marthe under water’, says the Bandcamp, po-faced—loves tunes so much she takes one from weirdo mystic Gurdjieff, and often gets some or all of the quintet to play in unison with her tenor or her flute or her udungu (an East African bow harp.) The title track has Lea play round notes in her lower register, then when fiddler Hans P. Kjorstad takes the lead, she returns with smoky accompaniment. Even when things get folky and/or synth-squiggly, the rhythm section, anchored by Scandinavia’s busiest drummer Hans Hulbækmo, keeps things trotting along: I’m not sure what “Låvebængar” translates to but it’s some kind of banger. (Google: “barn benches”, well those are bangable too.) Occasional multi- or non-lingual solo and group vocals are enthusiastic and amateurish enough not to annoy.

Grade: B PLUS (“Herlighetens vei”, “Låvebængar”, “Ayumi”)

Jeff Rosenstock: Hellmode

Many fortysomething punk lifers spent most of their youth in perpetual crisis; adding a midlife crisis to that is like water off a duck’s back. Add a climate crisis, however, and the scent of roast poultry is in the air. Hellmode frontloads anthems, starting with an echoed chorus of mostly Rosenstock asking “will you still love me” under various conditions, and no matter the answer, he’ll always have himselves. The middle is a mellower meditation on the weather in his adopted California: just because you’re praying for rain and/or for the fires to consume white supremacism, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a Highland Park sunset with your life partner and some bad wine. In case you worried he was getting bougie, he crams in some self-flagellation at the end, and if it ends up closer to the Foo Fighters than a ska-adjacent punk record should, that’s not worth giving himself twenty lashes over.

Grade: B PLUS (“Will U Still U”, “Liked U Better”, “Future Is Dumb”)

The Chemical Brothers: For That Beautiful Feeling

Everything dad-rocks and nothing ever dies, and that ain’t all bad. The Brothers make full use of their decades of experience at manipulating a crowd: here’s some very modern vocal filtering; here’s a reverby drum lead-in that nobody in the Eighties called a drop. There’s no illusion of lightness: “Skipping Like a Stone” rumbles like a motorboat. True hooks are outnumbered by harmonic pleasantries, like riffs that can’t decide whether they’ll move tonally or microtonally or both. Singers act as punctuation, so you don’t have to worry too much about context or what Beck means. Though split into discrete tracks, the work has continuity—there are gentle highs and lows, everyone learns to appreciate the ineffability of the cosmos or some such. Nothing new, but as a digest of a significant body of work, entertaining and edifying.

Grade: B PLUS (“Goodbye”, “Live Again”, “The Weight”)