Semipop Life: And for my enemies, infinite breadsticks

Rosie Tucker, Amaro Freitas, GloRilla, Shakira, and more!

Rosie Tucker: Sucker Supreme (2021)

This revealed Tucker as the smartest young songwriter in broadly-defined rock, and no one noticed until after they got dropped from their label; mea culpa, because wordcels dropping Jeffrey Lewis covers is very much my beat. It was also an epic fail by Epitaph, however, who blahed the presskit with “self-discovery, self-definition, and self-redefinition”—well yeah, it’s a 2020s indie album. “Barbara Ann”, for starters, is also about fake meat, corn belt monoculture, and Midwestern anti-abortion billboards, plus California rock history even if that is their grandma’s name. Smart isn’t sufficient, of course; when Tucker simplifies on the back half of the record, it sometimes feels like the wrong terms are canceled out. The music isn’t quite as developed as it’s since become: the songs threaten to break standard structures without wandering too far, and they lean hard on repeated phrases. But Tucker has tunes and is a supple singer who makes hard words sound easy, like an American they/them Lily Allen. And “For Sale: Ford Pinto” shows they know there’s more to life than intellectual pleasures. YouTube car crash compilations, for instance.

Grade: A MINUS (“For Sale: Ford Pinto”, “Barbara Ann”, “Brand New Beast”)

Rosie Tucker: Utopia Now!

On which they accept they’re a nerd, dammit, and make the most intellectual protest album since, I dunno, Aqualung or something. Yet they don’t give up on pop sheen, meaning their new core audience is leftist culture hounds, maybe ones who’ve written critical essays on existential risk. Works for me, even if I doubt it’s emotionally healthy for anyone with, like, friends to know what a “Paperclip Maximizer” is. Critiquing capitalism is as easy as figurative wordplay (“Gil Scott Heron? more like Albatross”) and/or rhyming (“Doing your best, you regress to the mean/Stretching the truth from regret to reprieve/An astronaut trapped on a trampoline”.) Trickier tasks include hookcraft (“Big Fish/No Fun” beats out the single of the year in this respect) and, oh yeah, laying out salient features of this utopia. Like so many Romantics, Tucker starts from the mystery of the interpersonal relationship and builds from there. While this has led to the presumed-delicious Trans Pizza Party that they and their producer Wolfy run in the L.A. County outskirts, solid microfoundations don’t guarantee an accurate macro model of how the world works. But if love keeps you human and ensures your song about “unending bliss for my enemies” doesn’t mention brains in vats or von Neumann probes, it should be in your utility function.

Grade: A (“All My Exes Live in Vortexes”, “Unending Bliss”, “Big Fish/No Fun”)

Amaro Freitas: Y’Y

After three full-lengths on the post-bop to free jazz continuum, Recife’s Freitas both turns toward modern classical and adds influences from the Amazon and from multiracial regions of his country, earning an unexpected critical hit in the English-language press for his trouble. I’m happy to believe the rhythms of “baião” and “frevo” are there, despite not having any idea how accurately they’re reproduced. Percussion aside, what I hear on the solo first half is post-Cagean minimalism, colored by some hippie shit. Post-Cagean minimalism is pretty hard to mess up, so what’s more impressive is that the hippie shit—birdsong and rustling leaves and whatever he’s doing with his eBow—is just as rigorous and thought-through. Guests show up in the second half, and though this breaks the trance, there are some fine contributions: Shabaka Hutchings’s flute fits the palette very well, and if we must return to standard avant-jazz at the end, it’s better to have Hamid Drake around. Only the Jeff Parker collab “Mar de Cirandeiras” ends up underwater. Throughout, Freitas gets a remarkable range of sounds out of his piano. Preparing it with clips and seeds, he isn’t afraid to knock it around—but organically.

Grade: A (“Uiara (Encantada da Água) - Vida e cura”, “Sonho Ancestral”, “Encantados”)

GloRilla: Ehhthang Ehhthang

In addition to the precision of her Memphis drawl, what makes her unlike so many populist rappers is that she actually pays attention to her beats—and that means more than rapping in time, although in 2024 that’s nice. When 1neway gives her a stuttering bass note on “Nun of Dem”, she goes declamatory and heavy on repetition of the n-word, only she’s riding with Karri, Terica, Brittany, and Erica. On lower-key songs, her flow’s more supple, calling for unity among women rappers and disclaiming beef with City Girls’ JT—which reignited beef with JT; it’s the thought that counts. She doesn’t hesitate to call in Megan Thee Stallion’s guest star power to boost the radio single (a subsequent remix shoehorning in cousin Cardi doesn’t add much.) Before you call her the taboo word “feminist”, note that the most streamed track, “Yeah Glo!”, is an assertion of her ability to physically beat up rivals. That it’s the best song here is 2024 populist rap for you.

Grade: A MINUS (“Yeah Glo!”, “Wanna Be”, “GMFU - Pt. 2”)

Alfredo Colón: Blood Burden

Pretty impeccable credentials for a jazz artist making the first record with his name on the front, having played with Henry Threadgill, William Parker, and why not Dawn Richard. The tricky opener “V.M.C.S.” aside, his compositions are less avant than a couple of those names would suggest, with some balladeering, some blues besides the Son House cover, and plenty of Dominican influence in honor of his parents, whose Catholicism earns no less than three songs about saints (two about Saint Lucy, of Jane’s Addiction t-shirt fame.) His alto defaults to tenderness, but he can wail away when the material demands—again, Son House—and throws in a few technical passages to show he can. Lex Korten is an excellent foil on piano and weird piano (the Una Corda, which is like if the soft pedal on your upright actually worked), tinkling or crashing without drawing undue attention to himself, like his teacher Geri Allen. The whole quartet plays tight, and though there’s opportunity for them to go further out in the future, this is an impressive and moving debut.

Grade: A MINUS (“Santo”, “Our Simplest Office Clerk”, “V.M.C.S.”)

Shakira: Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran

One of our short-and-sweetest pop stars isn’t immune to inflation, exceeding 50 minutes for the first time thanks to two unnecessary alternate versions. But her eclectic career means she’s better prepared than most for the album as-playlist era, satisfied to reflect rather than set trends (having spent a lifetime total six weeks in Latin America, I don’t know why reggaeton is still the musical lengua franca.) Cardi aside, the big guest appearances are held back to perk up the middle. She visits Grupo Frontera where they live and gets more out of them than they’ve managed on their own this year, while she and Puerto Rican star Ozuna go bachata for “Monotonía” (one presumes the title is not a shot at bachata.) Heir apparent Karol G sits and learns about staying relevant and evading taxes. The through-line is aging fabulously, the poles being the Bzrp session, the decade’s iconic fjuck-you to an ex (non-Taylor division), and “Puntería”, about how the pleasures of getting railed only deepen with experience.

Grade: A MINUS (“Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 5”, “Puntería”, “(Entre Paréntesis)”)

Megan Thee Stallion: Megan

This hasn’t received much serious critical attention besides a thoughtful Pitchfork 6.6. To me it’s the most satisfying of her three proper albums, if not as consistent as EP Suga or as fun as whatever-that-was Something.for Thee Hotties. Opener “Hiss” topped Billboard in February, and among this year’s disses that have Drake as a target, it remains one of the ten hardest. After airing her grievances against certain Tory Lanez apologists, she returns to hot girl shit. There are cosmopolitan sounds (like Kyle Ricch) and subjects (like Gojo of Jujutsu Kaisen); surprise breakout hit “Mamushi” has both. Her ass, however, remains in Houston, to the extent that when she snags possibly the last UGK guest spot, she’s for once rendered respectful, at least by pimp standards. Not as focused as you’d want 52 minutes to be, but would you prefer eighteen tracks attacking Nicki and her family? (The crowd responds by baying for blood.)

Grade: B PLUS (“Hiss”, “Spin”, “Broke His Heart”)

High on Fire: Cometh the Storm

After the side project Pike vs The Automaton and a press tour on which he worked himself into a shoot over his conspiracist subject matter, Sleep’s Matt Pike here leads his other other band to a post-pandemic comeback, presumably unvaccinated, and more qualified sludge judges than me are playing “best since”. Bangers like the opening “Lambsbread” (mmm, lambsbread… oh wait, it’s a weed reference, duh) and the prog-thrash “Trismegistus” jostle with the usual inexorable chugs. Though to my ears there isn’t a classic riff, proceedings are heavy as fjuck, and Pike’s solos can still cut through the muck. Most novel is “Karanlık Yol”, on which bassist Jeff Matz grabs a baglama lute and a sitar guy and does a credible job playing in a Turkish mode while his bandmates anchor him. Eleven songs is a bit much for those uninterested in alchemy and pagan mythology, but at least they differentiate their hells.

Grade: B PLUS (“Burning Down”, “Cometh the Storm”, “The Beating”)

Liquid Mike: Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot

A clear step forward for these throwbacks: two minutes a song lets them edge towards a distinctive sonic identity. While the four-chord romp is their base form, they’re not averse to a fifth or sixth for texture, and “Works Bomb” almost has a riff. The choruses bloom cozily within Mike Maple’s vocal range and maybe even mine if I warmed up. He leans into his dayjob to the point of calling a song “USPS”, describing Michiganders and their furniture going nowhere and showing an appreciation for the sidewalk you can’t fake. The rhythm section has tightened, the synth and harmonica touches make them feel like good company, and if they used to listen to Coldplay, smoke synthetic cannabinoids, and piss themselves, I’ll let someone who got through the 2000s without doing any of those things cast the first stone. Appreciate their workmanship, and leave a cold bottle out for your mail carrier on a hot day.

Grade: B PLUS (“K2”, “Works Bomb”, “Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot”)

Kathryn Williams & Withered Hand: Willson Williams

Williams has parlayed a 2000 Mercury Prize nomination into a Britarts career, writing a novel and judging poetry competitions. Her collaboration with our favorite abyss-starer is a little too well-wrought (Cat Stevens cover notwithstanding) to be great. I’m just glad it got him out of the house. If “R U 4 Real” is obviously a repurposed Withered Hand composition (“I’m not hung like an elephant but I got a good memory”), Williams’s harmonies fill out the song by reassuring him he’s not alone in his feelings. The major subjects are finding mortal love in the mortal world and not being weekend people; the setting is a summer evening far enough north that the sun’s still up at nine, accompanied by a few friends, most of whom own Mellotrons. A minor victory; life is made up of a lot of those.

Grade: B PLUS (“R U 4 Real”, “Weekend”, “Grace”)

Chief Keef: Almighty So 2

Keef will never be my first rap choice for longer than the five amoral minutes of “I Don’t Like”, but I’ll credit him for opening up sonically and for developing, if not a conscience, some self-awareness about his unreality. The Pickett/Womack samples on “1,2,3” and the future-chipmunk backing vox on “Treat Myself” grant temporal stability to his fantasies of fighter jets and streams of piss-yellow diamonds. There are even women: Tierra Whack meets Keef on his home turf and shows “good” rapping still has value, while Sexyy Red gets him to concede the possibility of female agency to the extent of “your mama should’ve pushed your broke ass back inside of the womb”. Meanwhile, it’s not my place for me to say Michael Blackson’s allocation of reparations to MCs by skin tone on “Jesus Skit” is funny. Not at all.

Grade: B PLUS (“Treat Myself”, “Banded Up”, “Jesus Skit”)