Odds & Ends 096
Beauty Pill, Poppy, Dua Lipa, and more!
Beauty Pill: Please Advise EP
Once one gets past the disconcertingly misaligned multitracked vocals and ironic responses to Matt Damon, this is a charming, disconcerting minor record discussing tattooed love boys, addiction, and (metaphorical or not, who knows) incarceration, none of which have become less relevant over the duration of Chrissie Hynde’s career (“Prison Song”, “The Damnedest Thing”, “Tattooed Love Boys”)
James Brandon Lewis & Chad Taylor: Live in Willisau
Excellently performed of course, though merely three-dimensional compared to Radiant Imprints: they should try an all sax-and-mbira set some time (“Imprints”, “Come Sunday”, “With Sorrow Lonnie”)
Finnish quartet whose sound is most defined by the tag-team saxes of Adele Sauros and Linda Fredriksson working each side of whatever dichotomy you care to name: harmonized/opposed, lyrical/fractured, euphonious/flatulent (“March”, “Antiplace”, “For the Fallen”)
Poppy: I Disagree
Pop/metal/everything else hybrid that surprisingly is most effective at its most prog: the tapephilic and cannibalism-curious lyrics don’t remain relatable forever, but until then, \m/ (“Concrete”, “Bloodmoney”, “I Disagree”)
Irreversible Entanglements: Who Sent You?
A tight sax-and-trumpet quartet lays down a bed for Camae “Moor Mother” Ayewa, who, besides really not liking the Pope, poses much the same questions (“at what point do we give a shit?") asked by generations of activists before her; the fact that they remain unanswered, while damning, means they remain good questions (“No Más”, “The Code Noir/Amina”, “Blues Ideology”)
Andreas Roysum Ensemble
Another very good Scandinavian (this time Norwegian) big group record (this time ten pieces, most distinctively Sanskriti Shrestha on tablas), "Til Albert", at their best essaying the kind of spiritual a bunch of atheists would come up with (“Til Albert”, “Indialuring”)
Ross Hammond: Our Place on the Wheel
Jazzblues steel guitarist’s album’s merits are apparent even to a “I like it when the fast ones goes fast” philistine: Lake is quite expressive, especially on the title track, and Hammond ain't gonna play bum notes (“Our Place on the Wheel”, “Mosaic”)
Kirby Heard: Mama’s Biscuits
It's not hard to find much flashier singers singing much the same rusticker-than-thou songs, but they’re rarely so consistently well-conceptualized, inasmuch as that matters (“Mama’s Attic”, “You Don’t Have to Know Jesus”)
Chicago Farmer: Flyover Country
Cody Diekhoff pushes agrarian leftish populism with class-conscious analysis and melodies that roll out exactly as you’d expect (“$13 Beers”, “Collars”)
Dua Lipa: Future Nostalgia
She could’ve got Stuart Price to produce the whole thing if she wanted something that sounded more like an upper-tier Madonna album and less like a mid-tier Kylie Minogue album, though one can’t discount her preferring the latter (“Cool”, “Break My Heart”)