Semipop Life: Anatomy of melancholy, and vice versa
Japanese Breakfast, Carcass, Neil Young, Little Simz, and more!
Japanese Breakfast: Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017)
Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee (2021)
Michelle Zauner has ground out a respectable level of semipop stardom not by making a lot of music (Soft Sounds was so long ago that the Grammy goldfish gave her a Best New Artist nom for Jubilee) but by horizontal multimedia integration—the movie adaptation of Crying in H Mart is in development, and you bet Obama is going to love it—and by making sure the music she does put out is one with the sonic zeitgeist. Jubilee thus intensifies some existing tendencies, which is progress if you like tunes and well-placed horn charts and if you’re not much of a fan of consonants. Her go-to strength remains writing: this time the keystone couplet is “I wanna believe in you/I wanna believe in something”, with the touch of melisma on the latter “believe” delaying the punchline, in turn making even her desperation something she’s reluctant to commit to. If that one’s not as funny as Soft Sounds’ keystone “I can’t get you off my mind/I can’t get you off in general”, there are still laughs here: “Savage Good Boy” could be a love song from Elon Musk to Grimes. If it’s not the reason they broke up, let’s hope it keeps them from getting back together.
Grades:
Soft Sounds: A MINUS (“Boyish”, “Till Death”, “12 Steps”)
Jubilee: A MINUS (“Be Sweet”, “Savage Good Boy”, “Paprika”)
“The major inspiration and musical foundation for most deathgrind/goregrind bands,” sez Metallum, which correctly implies they’re funny, if you find titles like “Eleanor Rigor Mortis” amusing. (You know that pun crossed John’s mind at least once.) Sometimes described as “melodic death metal”, Carcass seem more distinguished to me harmonically: chords progress the way they do in more digestible genres. More importantly, after decades of hardcores using “groove metal” as a pejorative, this is death metal that swings. Not that drummer and token youngster Daniel Wilding is playing triplets, but his accent placements create varying rhythmic patterns that guitarist Bill Steer can enheavy or play classic rock solos over as he desires. Singer/bassist Jeff Walker does the usual deathy stuff and seems to know a lot about anatomy for a vegetarian; if anything, he doesn’t rub our faces in the blood and bone chips enough.
Grade: A MINUS (“Dance of Ixtab (Psychopomp & Circumstance March No. 1)”, “The Devil Rides Out”, “In God We Trust”)
Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber: Angels Over Oakanda
For something recorded in over three years in New York, Berlin, and Stockholm (though not Oakland), the album sounds very much of a piece, and that includes the two download-only alternate versions—one twenty-two minutes, one two-and-a-half—that mean I’m not going out of my way to find a CD (though put the extras at the end of your playlist.) If electric Miles is the obvious precedent, especially when Lewis “Flip” Barnes’s mute trumpet leads the title track, there are enough points of difference: can you imagine Miles letting a woman sing? Jared Michael Nickerson is a driving force, his reprocessed descending bass lines serving as unifying hooks. Still, this is Greg Tate's vision: an urban form that’s both verbal and musical, Black and multicultural. Sometimes it seemed that Tate could write such a future into place. It falls to us to make it happen.
Grade: A MINUS (“Repatriation-of-The-Midnight-Moors OAKANDA rmx-2”, “Angels Over Oakanda”, “Lisala-Over-inna-Oakanda”)
Sax, drums, and two guitars plus some digital augmentation make up an idiosyncratic palette for improv, albeit one that the hard-working Canadian leader (this album came a near-unprecedented year and a half after his previous one) dominates. The longest track, “Heart Core”, is where guitarists Pablo Schvarzman and Diego Caicedo make themselves most useful, producing by avant standards a groove, and it’s still Carrier’s pungent phrases running up and down the range of his alto that are most memorable. On the title track, he constructs idiosyncratic quasi-melodic shapes through impressionistic placements and subtle dynamics. As for the short closer “Inner Sense”, there’s no quasi about it.
Grade: A MINUS (“Glow”, “Inner Sense”, “Heart Core”)
Nash Ensemble/Martyn Brabbins: John Pickard: The Gardener of Aleppo and Other Chamber Works
The subject matter is often dark, especially near the beginning—the title flute, viola, and harp composition is about the Syrian horticultural activist killed by an Assad barrel bomb—yet no matter how difficult beauty is to find, it’s always being searched for. After the low-end theory of “Snowbound”, in which bass clarinet and left-hand piano are more interested in the situation on the ground than in aerial delights, things lighten up, turning into fairly conventional, though agreeable and witty, contemporary classical. The Serenata Concertata even has a scherzo: not a Mozart-level barrel of laughs, but it’s the thought that counts. By the end, there’s a must-be-four-feet-to-ride ghost train and novelty songs about chickens.
Grade: A MINUS (“Serenata Concertata: III. Scherzo - Notturno”, “The Gardener of Aleppo”, “Snowbound”)
Gift of Gab: Finding Inspiration Somehow
Under other circumstances it might be worth dwelling on the ways this could be (even) wiser or more contemporary, but these aren’t those circumstances. So let’s celebrate what he achieved on this album and in the preceding quarter-century: a remarkably fast and flexible flow that barely lost a step from when flow mattered and he was top of the alphabet, and a dogged dedication to tell it like he saw it. In this light, the lack of distance between, say, “Don’t let money change ya” on Blackalicious’s 1999 “Deception” and “The World Without Money” here evidences not a lack of progression, but a strong-willed refusal to change his values while lesser MCs got rich and while vocal anti-materialism went way out of fashion. All this time, he kept an eye out for the underdog, kept believing in the idea of America.
Grade: A MINUS (“Alchemy”, “Slaughtah Dem (Godly)”, “Back to the Light”)
Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Barn
Not every song manages to get somewhere, let alone somewhere novel, and Talbot and Molina aren’t in the periodic peak form where they hammer ores into sheet metal. The last avenue for greatness, then, is a Freedom-like semi-accidental summation of The Way Things Are Now… and this gets close. The political tracks capture some of the energy of your anti-Drumpf father or grandfather or self, only instead of having to rely on memes handed up through the generations, he happens to be the most sensitive noise guitarist ever. In the end, a lifetime of experience fiddling with his whizzer isn’t quite enough to make this a classic. But at least his 50-year-old request for more barn has been satisfied.
Grade: A MINUS (“Canerican”,“Welcome Back”, “Don’t Forget Love”)
Little Simz: Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
About Grey Area my notebook says “Highly skilled MC, but so often she’s monotonous in the most literal sense, and the beats are too afraid to go full cheeseball to help.” So imagine my joy the first time I played this one, from the bombastic intro to “Introvert” to the multiple flows, many with actual ups and downs. Now imagine my joy diminishing, though not completely disappearing, with subsequent plays, as I realized she’s still kind of monotonous in the non-literal sense. Every challenge, from getting stabbed to having a terrible album title, is overcome through sheer willpower. To be clear, there’s pleasure in this: I’ve spent countless hours of my life reading Batman comics, after all. But she could use a Joker.
Grade: B PLUS (“Introvert”, “I Love You, I Hate You”, “Rollin Stone”)
Oh My Girl: Dear OHMYGIRL EP
Seven K-pop journeywomen previously subjected to indignities like releasing a concept EP called Banana Allergy Monkey (as Oh My Girl Banhana), and playing second-through-eighth elongated fruits to the more popular Pororo the Little Penguin (as PO~MYGIRL.) It's eventually paid off for them, as major hit “Dun Dun Dance” made 2021 their most successful year. And as one of the rare Korean girl groups where one notices who sings what, they deserve it. The six tracks here feature creative use of Auto-Tune and nothing too slow. If the lead single is the only shit that's b-a-n-h-a-n-a-s, “Quest” is the culmination of their aesthetic: kawaii as a basis for sorority; boys allowed but not aloud.
Grade: B PLUS (“Dun Dun Dance”, “Quest”, “My Doll”)
Speaking strictly as someone with no feel for the aesthetics of contemporary Evangelical Christianity, any denomination, I found this enlightening, perhaps because it doesn’t feel contemporary at all. If you told me these were unusually well-recorded tracks from 50 years ago, I’d’ve believed you, not least because the singing is uniformly, you know, good (how very 20th century.) Except if this was from the Seventies I might not have cared about it at all, since a major portion of the charm is that these artists have kept on doing what they’ve been doing week in, week out, regardless of changing fashions or lack of recognition. Whether this can convince anyone born after Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up” to take up their mantle is not my question to answer.
Grade: B PLUS (“I Want to Be Ready”, “Tell It”, “Stand Up”)