Semipop Life: Oral histories

Jlin, Billie Eilish, Tyla, Fox Green, and more!

Jlin: Akoma

After 2017’s great Black Origami, she focused on commissions for classical ensembles and other such artsy types. While this paid the bills and made her a Pulitzer finalist, I’m relieved she’s again making an album on her own terms, and that her beat ability is undiminished and even more multicultural. An architect who makes her own bricks, she starts by crafting individual drum sounds and only sometimes puts them where you don’t expect. “Speed of Darkness” is danceable for humans, and if the odd accents of “Summon” seem optimized for bots, it might be time to upgrade your firmware. She incorporates rhythms novel to the Pulitzer board and me with the aid of historic and sociological research: I’ve no idea what the substantive difference is between the Morehouse and FAMU drumlines, but I trust that she does. Some bright bleep sequences resolve into near-tunes, as on “Auset”; more often she relies on odd counterpoints, with two- or three-note alternations playing off each other like they come from a world where car alarms sound pleasant. Collaborators Björk, the Kronos Quartet, and Philip Glass aren’t asked to do anything they’re not used to, but minimalists can use the work too.

Grade: A (“Open Canvas”, “Auset”, “Speed of Darkness”)

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft

Tracks 2-3-4 top “Bad Guy”/“Xanny”/“Crown” as the easiest-to-enjoy treble of her career to date. There’s cunnilingus that’s conceivably enjoyable for both parties, which in music is as rare as dentata. There’s Spirited Away: The Musical, implying she’ll be able to pick up the T for her EGOT if and when she wishes. There’s a great straight (not that kind of straight) love song, which almost goes down too easy but that’s what you get when she bothers to use her immense melodic gift. Thereafter emotions and results are mixed: “The Greatest” doesn’t work at face value or as irony, and the multipart suites sound like arbitrary Finneas beats stapled together. Still, arbitrary Finneas beats have their now-familiar pleasures, and the pair ensure every piece is tuned and hooked: indeed, the outro of “L’Amour de la Vie” has proved a banger in its own right. And “The Diner”, on which she portrays a genuine Bad Guy, opens a path to many more strong songs should she happen to find medium-term happiness. In the meantime, Eilish continues to top her pop generation’s leaderboard as a singer, with that 2-3-4 again showing the breadth of her approaches: crisp coolness, high head voice, belted amorousness. If she can’t quite do every emotion yet, she can do enough of them that you might not notice.

Grade: A MINUS (“Lunch”, “Chihiro”, “Birds of a Feather”)

Tyla

She calls this “popiano”; I think of it as R&B with amapiano characteristics. The sonics are watered (some pun intended) down for global consumption, but when isn’t that the case when a regional scene blows up? The log-donk, however tamed, is novel to northern audiences, and the general chill is a salve after decades of oversinging as soul. Tyla’s a fairly neutral vocalist; perhaps one might wish she’d kiss off clingy exes with more force. Given the brisk tempos, however, her casualness is sufficient on everything barring the Travis Scott remix, and might even be the correct choice when the material is as lascivious as the breakout single, or when wildcard guests like Gunna and Skillibeng require her to maintain some sense of order. Ghanaian-Brit main beatmaker Sammy SoSo layers her on the choruses, and a dozen co-producers contribute their pet drum sounds for depth. Another guest, Tems, demonstrates possibilities that would open up if Tyla put a little more character into her singing. For now, she only needs to coo “jump” for the world to do it.

Grade: A MINUS (“Water”, “Jump”, “To Last”)

The Core: Roots

On their first album in fourteen years, this long-running Norwegian jazz foursome sounds like they’ve been saving up their choicest tunes for the reunion. They’re very much in debt to Coltrane’s quartets, though Erlend Slettevoll’s wide-handed chords and non-linear doodles get more prominence in the mix than McCoy Tyner did, avoiding the impression that piano is secondary. For his part, tenor Kjetil Møster has all the standard post-bop tricks (I particularly like it when he shakes a vibrato so hard it’s almost staccato) and can honk in any register, keeping melodicism as his primary goal. In “Dark Star” he and Slettevoll take a simple head and add shading and, well, darkness to it, and if their relaxed back-and-forth on “Messi” resembles dynamic Argentine playmaking less than Spanish tiki-taka, you can still win a championship either way. Steinar Raknes’s grounded bass maintains the rhythmic shape, while Espen Aalberg’s big toms and hi-hat shimmies keep the atmosphere dingy, but in a spiritual way. The exception is “Orbis”, on which Møster pulls out his soprano and we get a blatant, glorious “My Favorite Things” rip. May their Tranes keep running on time.

Grade: A MINUS (“Orbis”, “The Root”, “Dark Star”)

Fox Green: Light Over Darkness

Like Luke Combs or Jelly Roll with more graduate degrees and a millionth of the streams, Fox Green are trying to revive the good parts of classic rock and Southern hospitality sans all that baggage. Compared to Holy Souls, their conception of 21st century masculinity has become more Christian: if the songwriters’ current relationship with Jesus is impersonal, they’re spiritually close to Him for wanting to let the kids enjoy their soccer game. Their inclusivity extends to instruments—flugelhorn! a fjucking fife!—and musicians, with Genine Perez and Sara Thomas singing well-placed folk-soul addenda and a guest drummer conjuring up a “Wiccan Chicken” (the Chicken Man isn’t blown up, he’s living in Little Rock and has a YouTube channel called Chicken Music Videos and Other Stuff.) The one important Southern tradition they underrate is narrative: it’d be nice to know how Sleepy John Estes hooked up with their mom, though both seem like upstanding citizens and fun hangs. But as far as aesthetic reconstructions go—easier than political ones, for sure—this one rocks from generation to generation. Now all they need is some face tattoos.

Grade: A MINUS (“One Day I’ll Get Back to Jesus”, “Jesus Loves You All”, “Drywall”)

Margaret Glaspy: Echo the Diamond

Among music nerds with a lit-heavy Substack and a distance running hobby, she’s definitely the cooler of us. Also a major guitarist, which I knew, and a major songwriter, which I was hitherto unconvinced of, meaning I postponed getting to this upon seeing the PR about how it was “informed by profound loss”. While that’s a thread on the likes of “Memories”, there are plenty of ups too. She can compete with anyone in rock at love songs where happiness is a live possibility. “Act Natural” is a physical infatuation song you can use to teach schoolchildren about colors and flowers—see, kids, that’s a marigold! Just a marigold. She delivers her political material with the quaffable acidity of a quality sauvignon blanc, fed up that she has to say this shit in the 2020s and not at all hesitant to do so. Her intensity comes from a sense of purpose not dependent on any relationship. Yet marrying a fellow guitar dork does have its fringe benefits, not least being able to pool your vintage gear collections.

Grade: A MINUS (“Act Natural”, “Female Brain”, “Irish Goodbye”)

Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive

The writing is more intimate, less grandiose than on the last record—hard to get more grandiose than calling a record Life on Earth. This time, Alyndra Segarra’s title merely echoes Faulkner, with personal history and American history spiraling, and if they’re going in opposite directions, that might make it even more conscientious to carry Narcan. Brad Cook, who produced the last couple of Waxahatchee albums, contributes meticulous recording of arrangements that can be pro forma (Meg Duffy’s guitar noises and occasional sax notwithstanding), for those who’ve longed for an indie Dave Cobb. Segarra takes responsibility for the musical interest; they can essay little variations in repeating tunelets when that fits, but often direct repetition is the savvier tactic. “Two weeks just to catch the buffalo” becomes a mantra to show that “some things take time” regardless of how often they’ve been done before. If the actionable core of the message reduces to Thom Yorke’s “hey man, slow down”, it’s easier to take coming from someone who doesn’t call anyone going fast an idiot.

Grade: A MINUS (“Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive)”, “Buffalo”, “Colossus of Roads”)

DJ Ws da Igrejinha: Caça Fantasma, Vol. 1

Ghost-type Pokémon fan Wallison da Silva is considered some kind of auteur in the scene that everyone in Brazil just calls “funk.” This collection’s certainly of more musical interest than the Anitta album, even if the Gastly evolutions and Mario Boo in the artwork aren’t the only time he skirts copyright law. Part of the Mineiro scene, where funk tends to be slow and spacious relative to Rio, his most insinuating work is minimalist, setting up a low-end rumble colored with some catchy snatch, layering vocalists on top as rhythm instruments, then dropping off-kilter percussion and maybe a wolf on top of that. His bag of tricks is finite, and with a few exceptions like nu-pornographer MC Pipokinha, the vocalists tend to be functional—well, Pipokinha’s functional too. But each track holds up for its two or three minutes, and there are moments of intensity that suggest the Belo Horizonte scene might yet have its international hipster breakout. (The three additional tracks on Caça Fantasma Vol. 1 pt2 raise the average, especially the spooky “Meu pipi no seu popo”.)

Grade: B PLUS (“Hoje Você Tá Come Sorte”, “1 2 3”, “O Famoso Mete Bala”)

Advancing on a Wild Pitch: Disasters Vol. 2

Moppa Elliott’s new group consists of his neighbors in Queens, playing “compositions named after towns in Pennsylvania that experienced historical disasters.” Sam Kulik’s trombone and Charles Evans’s baritone form the brass section, meaning deeper-not-darker tones than most other Mostly Other People Do the Killing variants. They’re at their bluesy best on “Marcus Hook” (oil tanker explosion), swinging hard around each other. “The Donora Smog” (hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide) is a quiet groover, the title belying the piece’s clarity. “Powelltown Village” and “Cobb’s Creek" (referencing the Philly group MOVE, and boy I’m not going to try summarizing that in a parenthesis) have some melodic trickiness, the latter giving pianist Danny Fox more room to solo. A few of the tracks are rather straightforward, but as long as you have Wikipedia open, there’s enough to entertain for 36 minutes.

Grade: B PLUS (“Marcus Hook”, “The Donora Smog”, “Cobb’s Creek”)

Kim Gordon: The Collective

Justin Raisen’s beats, aside from a couple of tracks where his brother Sadpony helps out (we should all be so lucky as to have a brother like Sadpony), aren’t radical—generic sub-woofer rumbling is old hat these days, no matter how much machine noise one piles on top. But if “Psychedelic Orgasm” isn’t orgasmic, at least it isn’t psychedelic either: his hard surfaces let Gordon get etching. Though her lyrics are as all over the place as ever, at her most acidic she’s a hazard, as on “I’m a Man” (“don’t call me toxic just ’cause I like your butt”). Even when the words are more “poetic” and/or about potato selection, Gordon remains one of rock’s great not-really-a-singers, evoking as much apocalypse per decibel as any screamer. Whether she’s on the side of the Angels, let alone Los Angeles, remains murky.

Grade: B PLUS (“The Believers”, “I’m a Man”, “Psychedelic Orgasm”)