Joseph Spence: Encore: Unheard Recordings of Bahamian Guitar and Singing
Fleet steel-string polyphony accompanied by almost Stampfelesque idiosyncratic croaky jibber-jabber: I might be one of the ten non-folkies in the United States to whom that sounds most promising, and I even find this rough sailing at times, though eventually some kind of revelation (“Out on the Rolling Sea”, “The Crow”, “Death and the Woman”)
Rodrigo Amado This Is Our Language Quartet: Let the Free Be Men
Yet another strong album from the hardest working tenor in Lisbon, the draw this time being his interactions with Joe McPhee, who fills the higher frequencies with soprano and pocket trumpet; the two have the patience to slow-build a track over thirteen minutes, and the skill to extract patience out of their audience (“Let the Free Be Men”, “Never Surrender”)
Girl in Red: If I Could Make It Go Quiet
Not quite pop enough for pop, aside from the one Finneas touched up and the one that calls her crushbuddy the b-word, but more pop than most indie pop, and even the minor songs on the back half give a meaningful window into depression, pain, fear, and oh yeah love in the post-hetero era (“You Stupid Bitch”, “Serotonin”, “Did You Come”)
Playboi Carti: Whole Lotta Red
Now that it’s clear he’s an empty shell of a person, he’s gone all in on sound over meaning (so many kinds of high-pitched squeals!) and his ability to simulate enthusiasm does have value in this downer age; still, both novelty and avant-garde ends would be better fulfilled by fewer than 24 tracks (“M3tamorphosis”, “Stop Breathing”, “Rockstar Made”)
Red Velvet: Queendom EP
K-pop’s most consistent group remains so, with large doses of rhythmically tricky harmonies and bottled sunshine, and nothing that should obviously go on the best-of (“Knock on Wood”, “Better Be”, “Pushin’ N Pullin’”)
The Go! Team: Get Up Sequences Part One
The usual fun rarely forced too hard, with Ninja’s “Pow” as vibrant a get up/throw down feature as she’s had in years and Ian Parton’s instrumentals proving he could’ve written music for peak Sesame Street if they permitted loud drums, which sometimes they did (“Pow”, “Let the Seasons Work”, “A Memo for Maceo”)
More very good Nordic jazz, featuring Jarno Tikka’s and Tomi Nikku’s tenor-trumpet interplay on “The Gordian Knot”, where they start out in unison with impressive volume control, then essay substantial, complementary solos before harmonizing again at the end; even the harp track moves well (“The Gordian Knot”, “I Saw It in a Dream”, “Love and Maladies”)
Ten strong minutes out of fourteen: an opener that captures the complexity of Marisa Dabice’s emotional experience as well as the median song on Patience, and three that rock hard in diverse ways, including bassist Colins Regisford’s enraged BLM song (“Control”, “Pigs Is Pigs”, “To Lose You”)
Sunmi: 1/6 EP
Nowhere near as focused as K-pop peak-to-date Warning—she really doesn’t need to rap—but her and main producer Frants’s alt-neon palette and sense of within-song pacing remain distinctive, and nobody else in the genre is writing about their borderline personality disorder (“Narcissism”, “Call”, “1/6”)
Christian Reim Sextet: Mona Lisa
More very good Nordic jazz, this time recorded live at the 1973 Molde Jazz Festival: a touch well-behaved, but there’s plenty of variety, with well-harmonized speed work and sustained melodic runs, and a few brief glimpses of freedom (“Mona Lisa part 4”, “Mona Lisa part 6”, “Mona Lisa part 1”)
They toy with an uncharacteristically fancy piece of Andrew Fearn programming for 43 seconds before returning to the same old, which is not without wit, like Jason Williamson noting correctly “I’m no good with elocution” and the continuation of their amusingly petty but undoubtedly sincere vendetta against Idles (“Elocution”, “The New Brick”, “Nudge It”)
Twice: Taste of Love EP
Close to the know-nothing K-pop stereotype: preternaturally bubbly vocalists scrubbed squeaky clean creating highly if temporarily functional music deserving of a Billboard chart run that went 6-60-90-out (“Scandal”, “Alcohol-Free”)