Remaster of her 1987 debut (with the question mark changed to an exclamation point), whose up-up-up tracks with prominent electric bass and British people pretending to be called Mustapha are very much of their time and very much the highlights; plus the Ndizvozvo EP in a similar if marginally more marimba-y vein (“Chachimurenga”, “Kassahwa”, “Ndikafa”)
Habitually mild, but with a charming frankness about gay love-I-mean-love—if his corniness is undeniable by the time he gets into sailing metaphors, his passaggio is so smooth that the corn becomes so much chowder; recommended for monogamists (“Same Size Shoe”, “Sailors’ Superstition”, “Malik”)
Aki Takase/Christian Weber/Michael Griener: Auge
Pianist Takase switches from lyricism to avant keyboard hammering on a dime, and her rhythm section occasionally works up a good racket (“Drops of Light”, “And If Not, Why Not”, “No Tears”)
Armand Hammer & the Alchemist: Haram
The Alchemist’s lush, scrambled alt-histories mismatch Billy Woods’s and Elucid’s brutal modernisms; forced to choose, I’ll foreground the rappers, alternately in love with and at war with the culture, from Hagler and Hearns to Bear Stearns (“Black Sunlight”, “Indian Summer”, “Scaffolds”)
This crams too much into each three-minute track: typically an excellent Woods verse, a solid Elucid verse, and often a third or even fourth chorus/outro voice that just takes up valuable NYC real estate unless it belongs to Marshawn Lynch, as imaginative a user of the English language as anyone else on the record (“Slew Foot”, “Charms”, “King Tubby”)
Miguel Zenón: Law Years: The Music of Ornette Coleman
Not the first alto I’d think of to do an Ornette album, but this free jazz for beginners squawk-bops well: speed demons and jaded make-it-newers alike will admire Zenón’s and tenor Ariel Bringuez’s fast phrases (“Law Years”, “Broken Shadows”)
Robin Thicke: On Earth, and in Heaven
After recovering from a messy divorce by marrying a much younger woman, he’s somehow more likable (attempting a Nuyorican track just because he named his daughter Lola), his falsetto still holds up, and if he’s not as talented at expressing normie emotions as Olivia Rodrigo, he still has time to learn (“Lola Mia”, “Look Easy”)
Yodelly indie-folk duo somehow ended up delivering their ensharpened and enflattened melodies about ye olde Texas on Kill Rock Stars (“Wishing Shrine”, “One Little Pearl”)
Anansy Cissé: Anoura
Pretty good desert blues guitar album #15,227 is nothing groundbreaking, just circular riffs that could go on forever but wisely quit after four or five minutes, sometimes with one-stringed fiddle, sometimes with rock and roll (“Talka (Poverty)”, “Mina”)
Ivo Perelman Trio: Garden of Jewels
Solid album from an eight-record-a-year tenor to whom I sometimes pay attention when he’s playing with Matthew Shipp (as he is here, along with Whit Dickey); somebody else can work out how it differs from their other thirty-odd albums together (“Turquoise”, “Onyx”)
Sometimes the instrumental phunk is so phat as to be irresistible; other times this needs a rapper, preferably not Freddie Gibbs—isn’t most of the surviving Wu-Tang Clan underemployed (“The Call”, “Dirtknock”)