Semipop Life: Moving past tears

Adrianne Lenker, Tyshawn Sorey, Vampire Weekend, Waxahatchee, and more!

Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future

One of the best electric guitarists of her indie generation shelves her main axe, instead soundtracking the opening “Real House” with Nick Hakim’s piano and “a few tiny notes on the violin”: gutsy at a time when many streamers quit an album as soon as they encounter negative space. Put the album on loop and move on to the 12-string accompanied second track, “Sadness as a Gift”, more in line with past Lenker downer highs yet formally searching, with a chorus accumulating amplitude as it repeats. “Fool” does have electric guitar, but subordinated to a Philip Glassian arrangement that turns Facebook updates from blood and chosen family into casual prophecy. The album then settles into an acoustic guitar-driven equilibrium, centering lyrics that mix up striking imagery (“a needle shining like a diamond in the desert”) with gnomic koans (“water like a washing machine”). Her singing on “Vampire Empire” is outstanding even compared to the Big Thief version, with the “chills”, “drills”, and now “gills” sounding less like hooks and more like organic expressions of amphibiousness or some parallel debinarization. By the time she claims the piano stool for herself on “Evol”, she’s chiseling down to the connotations of individual sounds: the consonants and vowels that combine into the imperfect heteropalindromes “teach”/“cheat” are as uncanny as the black and white keys of C sharp. And soon, if you trusted my instructions, the dissonant chords and exquisite devastation of “Ruined” flow back to “Real House”, childhood and adulthood collapsing into each other, moments of love and death and her mom finally crying searing themselves in your brain as they’ve been seared into hers. As close to a raggedly perfect album as After the Gold Rush.

Grade: A PLUS (“Sadness as a Gift”, “Vampire Empire”, “Fool”)

Shikamoo Jazz: East African Legends Live (1995/2022)

To even the better-informed fans at the English WOMAD this was recorded at, the sole obvious “legend” here would’ve been adopted East African Mose “Fan Fan” Se Sengo, who alone of the guests sticks on stage for most of the show, playing co-lead guitar. Shikamoo proper is made up of former members of Western Jazz and similar acts who played along the Cuba-Congo continuum, led by Salum Zahoro of Kiko Kids, legendary in the sense that almost none of their music was findable outside of the most obsessive 7-inch collections until recent years. The opening tracks are classic muziki wa dansi, with guitars high, clean, and in tune. Things get trickier when the senior guests show up. First there’s Kenyan recording industry pioneer Fundi Koude, in his early seventies at the time. The band plays two of his Indian-tinged Latin classics with modern flourishes, plus an eerie vocal combo on “Nakuomba Radhi”. Older still (obits estimated her lifespan as c. 1910–2013), taarab singer Bi Kidude is in strong voice, soaring over Kasim Mponda’s keyboard beds. For his part, when Fan Fan brings it back home to speed sebens, it’s fun fun.

Grade: A MINUS (“Narum Kaloma”, “Beru”, “Nakuomba Radhi”)

Tyshawn Sorey Trio: Continuing

Sorey reunites with pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer for a set dedicated to Harold Mabern and very much in the spirit of McCoy Tyner. While I, philistine that I am, can’t say I don’t crave a sax, this is a clear improvement over Mesmerism: there are only four tracks, and each gets at least ten minutes to develop. “Reincarnation Blues”, written by Wayne Shorter for the Jazz Messengers, has a languid flow, with Sorey keeping things on track with a big backbeat and Brewer striding on opening and closing solos. Brewer gets heartbeat duty on Ahmad Jamal’s “Seleritus”; this has the most magical trio work, with Diehl making every chord count through control of voicing and Sorey showing two light hands, before Brewer returns with chromatic low-end counterpoint. The standard “Angel Eyes” is the least interesting choice, but you bet they make it pretty. Last, Mabern’s “In What Direction Are You Headed” at last gives Brewer and Sorey a chance to syncopate hard, and even Diehl’s glissandos are funky, as he and Brewer take turns adding impeccably timed bursts of melody.

Grade: A MINUS (“Seleritus”, “Reincarnation Blues”)

Jacques Greene: ANTH01 (2021)

Early 2010s singles from one of that era’s major electronic producers, subgenred as “UK Bass” (though he’s from Toronto) or “Future Garage” (though there’s nary a flying car.) I’d pigeonhole it as house-but-classy. If you think that sounds too close to house-but-boring, you’re not all wrong at first, but track 5, “These Days”, hits on the right groove/prettiness/groove combo by joining bass percussion to waterfall arpeggios, and Greene cruises right on the speed limit for the rest of the album. Subsequent tracks have further cool tricks—the computer funk of “Ready”, the fetching whine on “Quicksand”—none of which disturbs the peaceful vibe. R&B-leaning singers are given respect; maybe a little too much in the case of How to Dress Well. The culmination is the one song I heard and loved at the time, 2011’s Ciara-sampling “Another Girl”, which cut-and-pastes her phrases and oohs to transform her into a visitor from an alternate, better future than the one we’re in. Another girl, but the same.

Grade: A MINUS (“Another Girl”, “These Days”, “Ready”)

Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us

Title’s promising—the only things Ezra has ever had anything meaningful to say about are theism and other such undergrad philosophy staples (at an honors level, lots of problems with the Ivy League but humanities education ain’t one)—yet we don't get much more than “The world looked different when God was on your side” on “Capricorn”. Fortunately, there are musical distractions, like an effective session sax blast on "Classical", plus at last some good guitar again: guess they found the hard drive with their highlife MP3s. While Koenig’s reached the “everything feels recycled” stage of his tune writing, almost everything from Modern Vampires is sound enough to hold up to reuse. If you then ask why not just listen to Modern Vampires again, well, that’s always a good idea, but this time the philosophy has a lightness that’ll help you be equanimous about the roof getting ripped off your Boeing. And Koenig’s singing has adapted well to parental boyhood, with “Mary Boone” having stern low notes that don’t preclude yelps.

Grade: A MINUS (“Pravda”, “Gen-X Cops”, “Classical”)

Waxahatchee: Tigers Blood

No matter how valuable a sideperson MJ Lenderman is, K. Crutchfield still isn’t in the mood to rock out as emotionally as she did as at her peak (Out in the Storm and you know it), so I do start to nitpick. The medium-high held chorus notes get repetitive, and none of her tortured poetry is as deep as her “I get bored, I get bored”. Whatever. When she’s in a more conversational mode, she can still scene-set like Godma Lucinda, only sometimes having to namedrop large Midwestern bodies of water. Her heartland landscapes are illuminated by just as valuable sideperson Phil Cook’s banjo and dobro and uh marimba. And if you must spam medium-high held chorus notes, it works best when you still have a slight waver in your voice, so that “hail the darkness you can befriend” seems to betray some ancient suspicion that the darkness may still surround monsters, or at least mosquitoes.

Grade: A MINUS (“365”, “Ice Cold”, “Bored”)

AyooLii 10K

The current most interesting bedroom-street rapper is a Kenyan-born Milwaukeean who started out in YouTube comedy before becoming a bewilderingly prolific muso, dropping 70-odd distinct releases last year, with titles like “77 Percent Divorce Rate” and “Everytime I Pop a Pink I Feel Like Naruto”. His albums and EPs are inconsistent, so here’s a playlist I made of his ten solo songs with at least 10,000 plays at the time of construction. The production is in the Cheesehead style, with constant clapping and clipping creating a lo-fi feel; the playlist chronological so you can hear him and main producer ThatguyEli progress from hooky one-finger ditties to next-level weirdness. Highlights include “Smackin Crackin” (rhymes with “bad backin’”), “Smackin Town” (the city known as Funkytown before the introduction of MDMA), and “Jungle” (“this ain’t Benihana’s, this is Mickey D’s.”) He even says “feng shui” right. Funny guy, get in on him before he isn’t.

Grade: A MINUS (“Smackin Crackin”, “Shmackin Town”, “Enchantment”)

Dev/Null @ The Lot Radio 02-19-2023

“2 Hours of Rare, Old, Exclusive and Forthcoming Jungle/Hardcore”, and even to someone who lacked the stamina to spend the Nineties doing speed in a disused gasworks, this sustains interest most of the way (1:31 is a good time to bail, though you’ll miss some wubbliness on the way out.) Amidst the percussive foofaraw, there are plenty of moments of beauty, with warm synths and futuristic pianos trading off. The beats themselves are, as advertised, hard, with breaks reinforced by artful bleepery and varied production tricks that let each hi-hat thwack proof of its existence. The transitions are well-plotted, often with a sample from an anonymous diva or Janet Jackson signaling the regime change. The exclusive/forthcoming tracks are often from Devnull’s 8205 Recordings, a home for scene veterans. What did the guy who did Liquid’s “Sweet Harmony” ever get up to afterwards, you, a disused gasworks speed-doer, ask? Why, he made drum & bass.

Grade: B PLUS (Van Cleef: “Life Began Changing”; Model: “Echoez”; Janet Jackson: “Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun)”)

Fires in the Distance: Air Not Meant for Us

Four-piece whose Bandcamp tags are “doom metal”, “metal”, “melodic death metal”, and “Connecticut”. They’re willing to risk schlock, with a string quartet in the opening minute, but neither the chunk-chunk ka-chunk nor the fast-triplet solos of the guitars are compromised, and the singer growls if you care about that. Yegor Savonin’s keyboards pump up the melodic quotient, especially on the instrumental “Adrift, Beneath the Listless Waves” and its companion “Psalm of the Merciless”, on which his tinkliness cuts against the basement riffs without crossing into proggery. He writes the lyrics as well, which are… kind of fine? They’re angsty poetry (“Winds, frigid rain, accents to my soul/Each arrow’s knowledge gained, regardless what they stole”) that, grammar aside, is prettier than I managed when I wrote angsty poetry. Screaming at the void is cathartic; having a rainbow around while you do it doesn’t hurt.

Grade: B PLUS (“Harbingers”, “Psalm of the Merciless”, “Wisdom of the Falling Leaves”)

Heaven Pierce Her: Ultrakill: Infinite Hyperdeath (2020) 

“ULTRAKILL is a fast-paced ultraviolent retro FPS combining the skill-based style scoring from character action games with unadulterated carnage inspired by the best shooters of the ’90s. Rip apart your foes with varied destructive weapons and shower in their blood to regain your health.” Now guess what the soundtrack to this game sounds like. Ultrametal? Ultrafast breakbeats? Oh right, both, of course. It’s not as harmonically sophisticated as Machine Girl’s work on Neon White, but it might be even more functional: distorted guitars, the odd ominous piano, and/or a fjucking harpsichord banging out simple tunes at 170 bpm are just the thing to inspire you if you’re blasting your way through Dante's Inferno with a nail gun, or doing something equivalent on Earth, like grading. The only drawback: some slow ones.

Grade: B PLUS (“Castle Vein”, “Into the Fire”, “A Shattered Illusion”)