Semipop Life: A beautiful day in the neighbourhood
Sarah Mary Chadwick, Olivia Rodrigo, Star Feminine Band, Barry Altschul, and more!
Sarah Mary Chadwick: Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby
What marks her as someone transformed by grunge not too long after it reached New Zealand high school stereos is her absolute indifference to making things nice for the listener. She sings over piano like she’s rubbing a handful of pubes in your face, appropriate given the despair and itchiness of her subject matter (heartbreak, hating one’s mother, a suicide attempt which she helpfully dates for you.) But she lets you know it’s her. Aside from two same-sex jealousy songs, she refuses to multitrack vocals, leaving every stubbornly non-rhotic phrase isolated and defiant, her vocal fry and pitchiness proving life. The words are mordant at times (the title track has a bleakly funny interaction with an EMT that oddly parodies Courtney Barnett’s “Avant Gardener”) but the thrill is in their delivery and their context. Crucially, “That feeling like everything’s melting away” is a recalled one, and one is grateful that she survived to recall it and that beauty remains a possibility for her. If you waited a generation for Bluebaby, this is as close as you’re going to get.
Grade: A (“Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby”, “That Feeling Like”, “Let’s Go Home”)
Olivia Rodrigo: Sour
More than the mallpunk guitars and f-bombs, what makes this a throwback to an era of (real rockists remember) pop self-expression is that the songs, almost all solely by Rodrigo and Dan Nigro, are through-composed. Rather than aiming for hook maximization, the songs have breathing space to let Rodrigo flesh out her everyteen persona, and they end up being plenty catchy anyway. Yet unlike on obvious comparisons Fearless or Pure Heroine or The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, there’s never any sense that Rodrigo is somehow above the fray or has it all worked out. That leaves Taylor Swift as the closest precedent. Both show a remarkable level of craft and an attention to detail that bodes well for when market forces shunt them to grown-up music; both also use genre as a crutch when their ideas don’t quite can’t stop won’t stop, which is fine: that’s what genre’s for. Main reason this is a better album than SwiftCorp One is the singing: Disney should promote whomever coached Rodrigo into having high-end sensitivity without overblowing her patently big voice, or at least get them to oversee the next Frozen soundtrack. All that’s missing is a spark of genius: for all the merits of “Drivers License”, there’s nothing in it that suggests she’ll produce a Fearless next. But fearlessness, not to mention genius, is so some other generation.
Grade: A (“Drivers License”, “Deju Vu”, “Good 4 U”)
A gimmick, executed gloriously: teen and tween girls from a music workshop form a band and issue motivational songs that whattaya know motorvate, which, let’s be honest, probably has something to do with their location in northwest Benin. They achieve their own sound: keyboard-heavy Afropop-in-a-blender, with solo and collective vocals bringing the verve of the Go! Team bottling Lisa Lee’s lightning. Their chops are fine—Julienne and Anne Sayi, on bass and guitar, do much of the heavy lifting, but lift there is, as they combine with bashy, propulsive drums to produce varied grooves. The youngest group members, songwriter/impresario André Balaguemon’s daughters Angélique and Grâce Marina (showbiz kids even in Natitingou), handle a good chunk of the multilingual vocals; as usual with West African music, the spirit of the note is more important than the actual note. My Inspirational Line of choice is not the one about how women can be President, though if you have the capital why not, but the one about how music is a job.
Grade: A MINUS (“Peba”, “Femme africaine”, “La musique”)
Barry Altschul’s 3Dom Factor: Long Tall Sunshine
The fourth Jon Irabagon-Joe Fonda-Altschul trio record is the best of the three I’ve heard (I missed Tales of the Unforseen), feeling spontaneous despite the high-reverb studio setting. On the opening short and long freakouts, Irabagon finally sounds at home, secure that he can blow as hard as he wants while Altschul bashes away and the music will still cohere, for which tireless bassist Fonda deserves a raise. Altschul combines hard bop dynamism with the same sensitivity to what the melodist is doing that he gave to Paul Bley in the ’60s, albeit at a higher volume. The trio achieves a Monkish kind of swing on “Be Out S’Cool” and a parodic beauty (that’s still beautiful) on “Irina”. Even when Irabagon breaks out the rapid-fire sopranino, it sounds real, and it’s squeaktacular.
Grade: A MINUS (“Long Tall Sunshine”, “Irina”, “The 3Dom Factor”)
Sztu: Lances
As art-intellectuals steeped in MPB history go, interdisciplinary content creator André Sztutman has more tunes than most. This short album, recorded in time for tropicália’s fiftieth anniversary in 2017 but unreleased until his return from grad school at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, combines modernist gambits with meticulous construction and, okay, a little nostalgia. On the retro-psych tracks, he delivers extended lines with little overextension, pausing to take in the muted trumpet or ethereal backing vocals. A couple of times he lets old buddy/co-producer Thiago Nassif go nuts, resulting in something counter-cultural you can hum along to. As for the “art-intellectual” part, Sztu names as an inspiration Mallarme’s “A Throw of the Dice…” (Portuguese: “Um Lance de Dados…”) which I’m on record as claiming is the greatest poem ever. We can’t both be wrong.
Grade: A MINUS (“Resta um Gesto”, “Bicho Esquerdo”, “Rasgar o Pano”)
James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet: Jesup Wagon
Free jazz all-stars pay tribute to George Washington Carver, with Chris Hoffman’s cello theoretically allowing William Parker more flexibility to try stuff like break out his guimbri for a couple of vaguely Arabic-sounding tracks, though with Chad Taylor often heavy on the toms, the low-end gets crowded at times. (The obligatory Taylor mbira track is at least a palpable change-up.) The leader and composer cedes plenty of solo time to Kirk Knuffke’s cornet, while using his own to replay tricks he’s learned over the last couple of years, but you’re really waiting for them to play together. They do so excellently, if simply: I feel they’ve yet to take it to eleven.
Grade: A MINUS (“Arachis”, “Fallen Flowers”, “Chemurgy”)
Kari Ikonen: Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions
The 2013 Finnish Jazz Musician of the Year is also the inventor of the Maqiano™, a device that allows microtonal piano, as demonstrated in a Facebook promo video that also features his cooking and his dog. The main benefit is it lets him play Arabic maqams—modes more associated with stringed instruments like the santur—quartertones and all, with a more than acceptable dynamic range.In the impressions and improvisations, he’s also willing to give his instrument the reach-around to get harp sounds and weird glissandi out of it. Not sure if this is a breakthrough to a new range of pianistic expression or a novelty, but either way, cool.
Grade: B PLUS (“Maqtu’ah on Maqam Rast”, “Rausch”, “Koto”)
Loona: 12:00
On loan to K-biz head honcho Lee Soo-Man, they’ve evolved into the most high-style of current mega girl groups. They tame sounds from the EDM bleeding edge of four or five years ago without totally kawaiifying them, and the division of labor allots at least a few consecutive lines for each vocalist to establish a personality. The contents of said personalities remain somewhat beside the point. Though approximately zero out of eleven of them are credible as a “bad girl”, fans understand the group are playing roles that they themselves can play. Bad hair day? Bad girl. They do a slow one too, more elegantly than their competitors, but you can skip it anyway.
Grade: B PLUS (“Star”, “Hide & Seek”, “Why Not?”)
Another of Minneapolis’s infinite supply of literate singer-songwriters, this one with four decades of microindie roots rock under his belt. In that time, he’s amassed a big bag of late 20th century guitar tones and has become effortless around a chord change. While he never turned into a prepossessing singer, his almost whispered low end makes you pay attention to the words, which, shock of shocks, are often the point. Strong at the couplet level, he evokes a suburban bliss that dystopia could invade at any moment; only “Fuck the Republicans” reveals that moment was four decades of microindie roots rock ago.
Grade: B PLUS (“Dante’s Inferno”, “Day Drinking with Dracula”, “That Northtown Mall (Has Got It All)”)