Regina Spektor: Home, Before and After
The golden melodies no longer flow so freely, yet when she’s at the piano and the orchestra knows its place, her tunes still build line by line and reach some sort of climax without overburdening her love- and other -ologies , which remain smart, sensitive, and subtly tough, the incel one notwithstanding (“Loveology”, “Raindrops”, “Spacetime Fairytale”)
Four songs, and one’s under 90 seconds so three songs, and three good ones: number one grooves hard, Paulo Santos adds a personal orchestra of instruments to number two, and stalwart Marcelo Cabral brings his spookiest bass to number four (“Um Choro”, “Não Reparem”, “Odumbiodé”)
Foxes: The Kick
If you’re wondering how her pursuit of a follow-up hit to “Clarity” is going a decade on, she’s on a Belgian label now: a shame, because she’s well above the 2022 pop average at imbuing syllables with expression and sometimes consonants, and her median song is no worse than median CHVRCHES; unfortunately for her, pop stardom isn’t about medians (“The Kick”, “Dance Magic”, “Sister Ray”)
Greetings and paeans to an audience of Afro-Brazilian ancestral and animist spirits, whom I’m sure appreciate her scholarship and slinky melodies and Maurício Badé’s percussion when he gets to cut loose, even if they might start to get antsy as the hour mark approaches (“Patakorí O”, “Saluba”, “Feito chuva (arroboboi)”)
Florence + the Machine: Dance Fever
Only intermittently the rave-up/software update that the title and Jack Antonoff portend, it starts with “We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children”, then leaves the resolution to biography and returns to folk-rock questing and Jesus, who in a stunning coincidence comes back as a woman leading a band (“My Love”, “Free”, “Choreomania”)
The Smile: A Light for Attracting Attention
Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, the world’s last great passive-aggressive stars, quietly let the rest of their other band know they’re surplus to requirements by borrowing a Son of Kemet to create something better than the last Radiohead decade, featuring impeccable musicianship, highly examined angst, credible rocking out when they deign to do that, and slow moments of beauty that feel a bit empty by design: fun for some! (“Thin Thing”, “You Will Never Work in Television Again”, “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings”)
Kabza De Small: KOA II Part 1
Hours four and five of Kabza’s King of Amapiano series are yet more of Almost All the Same Thing, rewarding distracted listening generously and offering close listeners minor premiums in the forms of occasional ringtone-worthy sounds or non-useless vocals; beating the Flaming Lips’ 24-hour thing shouldn’t be too hard for him (“Liyangishonela”, “Ingabe”, “Rekere 2”)
The Regrettes: Further Joy
There’s no reason to doubt their joys and occasional travails are real (young people enjoy touching and being touched consensually by other attractive young people, not hard to believe); perhaps they’re slightly attenuated on record, but their la-di-das and the improved robustness of their rhythm section get their point across (“That’s What Makes Me Love You”, “Barely on My Mind”)
Pop-gone-indie trio whose gambit is that it’s enough to express queer desire simply and directly, and if you’re not the kind of killjoy who counts the number of times they say “want” over the album, maybe it is (“Silk Chiffon”, “Anything But Me”)
Young gender-balanced Cariocas bring their retromaniacal dreams to fruition, pinching from almost all eras of Brazil’s musical past and also Garcia Lorca; can be kitschy when they don’t hit it exactly right, but their enthusiasm makes up for a lot and the playing is very strong (“Baile de Máscaras (Recarnaval)”, “Baile de Máscaras (Recarnaval)”)
Moonchild Sanelly: Phases
Blue-haired South African who flits across Afro subgenres like a scatterbrained M.I.A. (make obvious jokes if you must), which isn’t a dealbreaker: the one in which she repeatedly asks “who came first, the chicken or egg?” and answers by telling us she loves chicken is irrationally endearing (“ULi”, “Undumpable”)
The Weeknd: Dawn FM
It’s not like he’s suddenly learned humanism, even compared to guest Tyler showing off his prenup, but the radio concept restricts him to making a fairly normal pop album, making it easier to appreciate his falsetto and his ability to rise above electro-house beats sure to please anybody nostalgic for MDMA trips from ten years ago (“Less Than Zero”, “How Do I Make You Love Me?”)
***
Bonus: In honor of the Singles Jukebox’s apparent passing, five of my favorite entries:
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: “Zero” vs. Taylor Swift: “Fifteen” (2009)
Still the best paragraph written about Taylor Swift: Cecily Nowell-Smith’s here.
The moment I realized that when sporadically trying to keep up with J-pop through the 2000s, I had backed the wrong horse.
Evidently this was not the hardest song to recognize the brilliance of, but the Jukebox quantified it, dammit, and did it early.
Sofi de la Torre: “Vermillion” (2014)
What I’ll miss most about the Jukebox is its ability, especially in its prime, to find these songs from artists out of nowhere or the Canary Islands who’ll never hit this peak again, and get a unusually enthused writer, often Katherine St Asaph, to describe the hell out of them: “The synths sound like she’s running, like footsteps and whirring-by neon, and the kick drum gets louder each verse, like it’s throbbing out of her skin. It’s not just lonely, it’s desolate”.
Sun-El Musician ft. Samthing Soweto: “Akanamali” (2017)
Again the Jukebox were among the first to realize South African music was beautiful again: many many hours of my listening were initially sparked by this eight point three eight.