Semipop Life: Everybody on the floor

Carly Pearce, Arlo Parks, Baby Queen, The Weeknd, and more!

Carly Pearce

Last year’s self-titled sequel to 2017’s Every Little Thing and the final album produced by Busbee before his untimely death again leans a little harder on modern sonics, sounding like a more grown-up version of Busbee’s legacy Maren Morris. (This didn’t make it more successful than the debut, save for radio bait “I Hope You’re Happy Now”, which was buoyed by Lee Brice’s pro forma star power.) More interesting is her extreme frankness, by genre standards, about her sexual desire: “You got my number/For a good time call me” is more direct than Debbie Harry was, even if the subsequent “whatever you want” mitigates it. You can believe she’s the kind of woman who’ll pursue a crush by sending thirst DMs on Insta, which, as it turned out, worked. She and her new husband perform an endearingly humorless duet, “Finish Your Sentences”, and it’s clear that they’ll be together for a… wait, they already divorced? And she already has a new album out about it?

Grade: B PLUS (“Call Me”, “Woman Down”, “You Kissed Me First”)

Carly Pearce: 29: Written in Stone

Gotta make hay in this biz: after the 29 EP—“the year that I got married and divorced”, according to the title track, plus there was a pandemic you might’ve heard about—sported the best writing of her career, she wasted little time expanding it to fifteen tracks.  The new songs are the second-best writing of her career, with “What He Didn’t Do” detailing sins of omission and the duet with approximately-as-famous Ashley McBride emphasizing that those guys have more than one way of making you that girl. Still, the EP’s peaks remain the standouts. She dispenses advice not, as in Taylor Swift’s year songs, from a position of omniscience, but from six inches deep in the carpet. This Ozuesque PoV lets her put across better than maybe even Tammy that in most of the country, a scarlet D is a long-term humiliation, not to mention a short-term logistical nightmare. Her indignities are dignified through the marginally best singing of her career, with Shane McAnally et al. producing a more traditional sound (meaning early Shania, okay also guest Patty Loveless.) And she rectifies herself to acknowledge there are worse things than long-term humiliations on her tribute to Busbee; she and her team summon appropriately huge snares to send him off.

Grade: A (“29”, “Liability”, “Next Girl”)

Arlo Parks: Collapsed in Sunbeams

First and foremost it's her voice: coy, yet with a strength that the multitracked choruses suggest she’s only scratched the surface of. While not commanding, she lacks the lack of urgency of many of her peers, occasionally hitting an end-of-line consonant hard to show you she means what she sings. The arrangements are strictly downtempo, veering loungey at times, but at least the drums are always clear. They mesh well with her persona: quietly and bravely getting on with an undemonstratively queer life in a world still not entirely accepting—she’ll eventually make a great therapist if she decides this stardom thing isn’t utilitarian. Her best songs have titles with girls’ names or colors or, in the case of “Hey Violet”, both. The especially touching “Black Dog” is about trying to understand the depression of a friend (“Alice”) and kind of but not quite getting it, as often happens with (us) non-depressives. But call her and there ain’t no mountain high enough.

Grade: A MINUS (“Black Dog”, “Green Eyes”, “Eugene”)

Silke Eberhard Trio: Being the Up and Down

A seamless blend of studio and live sets led by Eberhard’s dextrous alto, which sounds very Sixties without mimicking any particular player for too long. On the early cardio workout “Strudel”, she does high altitude acrobatics for a while before settling into an avant-lyrical B section that’s tuneful with weird notes. Bassist Jan Roder supports by creating groove or by bowing long notes when Eberhard’s leaning on the rhythm. Drummer Kay Lübke bangs at all volumes. Many of the shorter tracks go “Von A Nach B” in a reasonably straight line, with quick, smooth arpeggios and quicker melodic thinking. There are some changes of pace in the middle: if the deconstructed bossa is too molecular gastronomy for my taste, the hymn that starts with a long Roder feature before machine-gunning the second half is my variety of religious experience.

Grade: A MINUS (“Strudel”, “Yuki Neko”, “Hymne”)

Baby Queen: The Yearbook

All the girls are complicated, and Baby Queen is all the girls, or at a minimum the eight of them she dresses up as on the cover. But while I’m sure most of these she/hers enjoyed it when she “kissed the prom queen and burned the high school down”, she obviously finds containing multitudes unbearable when they all loathe each other. She’s unsparing towards herself in the likes of “Narcissist”, a semi-rap in the vein of Beck’s “Loser” with the meanness up to eleven, and with generational complaints not dissimilar from Gen X’s back when. What saves her from being just another clever cynic is her ability to write an unhappy song on demand, whether heartbreak-sad or why-did-I-do-these-drugs sad, and make it soar through ooh-oohs or carefully orchestrated dynamics. The album’s the work of a pop adept who’s spent more than a quarter of her adult life under a global pandemic thinking too hard about the mistakes of the other three-quarters of her adult life. I sincerely hope her next record is happier, but I doubt that’ll correlate to whether it's better or worse.

Grade: A MINUS (“Dover Beach”, “Narcissist”, “These Drugs”)

Upper Wilds: Venus

Indie noise guitar that hurdles nostalgia pits to refresh in this post-landfill age. While there are songs—love songs in fact, helpfully numbered 1 to 10—the sound, mixed into a climbing wall by bassist Jason Binnick, is paramount, with brisk riffs and ruff tones and squiggly tones and a Duracell drummer who swings those sixteenths hard. Friend of Lightning Bolt Dan Friel yowls and writes melodies like a more precise Chuck Cleaver (I know, it’s hard to imagine a less precise Chuck Cleaver.) When you’ve played to the point that the songs matter, his lyrics are comprehensible both as words and as recognizable human or musician feelings, whether they’re about secret astronaut love or the Heaven’s Gate cult. “We filled our lungs with songs ’cause we thought we’d need ’em later”, and it turns out they do.

Grade: A MINUS (“Love Song #5”, “Love Song #7”, “Love Song #2”)

Benny the Butcher: Pyrex Picasso EP

“Flood the Block”, propelled by its sample from Eurovision regular Sviva Pick, is the reason I listened and the outlier here. The rest of the time Benny makes most of the running himself, spinning sleek tales of street life in turn-of-the-millennium New York (well, Buffalo), armed and abetted then as now by his somewhat distractible cousin Conway the Machine. As much as he’s playing a character, he’s not kidding when he says “my morals come from the past”, though it’s not entirely implausible a woman who knows how to work a gas pump might put up with him until his streaming numbers drop off. On the closing diptych, Benny takes a double victory lap, celebrating his journey from prison to hanging with Jay-Z. As an artist at least, one can't say he doesn't deserve it.

Grade: A MINUS (“Flood the Block”, “Pyrex Picasso”, “The Iron Curtain”)

Punkt.Vrt.Plastik: Somit

Compared to most of the avanteurojazz this column sometimes loves, the intricacies here feel premeditated. Pianist Kaja Draksler draws heavily from classical music, and while this is fertile ground for fresh-for-1788-suckas ideas, it makes it trickier to provide the usual jazz pleasures. Thankfully, drummer Christian Lillinger sweats heavily to remind us this is rhythm music, even when the rhythms are odd or fractional. The trio are perhaps best when they dress up their complexity as something simple, as in the stuttering groove of Petter Eldh’s “Natt Raum”, or Draksler on the title track hammering with a single finger while clinking an undetermined number of pianos with her others.

Grade: B PLUS (“Natt Raum”, “If Asked”, “Somit”)

The Weeknd: The Highlights

“Blinding Lights”, the first song to spend a full year in the Billboard top ten, is by any reasonable measure the biggest English-language hit of the century unless children’s music like “Baby Shark” or Ed Sheeran counts, and is at least moderately deserving of the crown. Nothing else on this solid comp is as peaky as the peaks of one of the era’s major hitmakers should be—next best are the Kendrick and Ariana collabs that zing more in other contexts. That leaves as milestones a few smashes doctored with the assistance of Max Martin or Daft Punk (or both, to somewhat diminishing returns on “I Feel It Coming”), and “The Hills”, which at this distance one may be able to enjoy as the catchiest expression of his pickup artist bullshit.  On the lesser tracks, he makes his assholery seem like an emergent property of the background murk—a genuinely musical trick, admittedly. But I’d still like to see Adam Sandler punch him in the face a few more times.

Grade: B PLUS (“Blinding Lights”, “Starboy”, “Can’t Feel My Face”)