Semipop Life: Art emerges
Centuries of Sound, R.A.P. Ferreira, Matthew Shipp, the White Stripes, and more!
Brit James Errington, in the process of making an actually mixed mixtape for each year of recorded music no matter how bad it was (“1889 is by no stretch of the imagination a golden year for recorded music…”), rediscovered what Harry Smith knew and I’d forgotten: relative to trend, 1927 was probably the goldenest year ever for recorded music (1965 is the main competition.) The impetus was technological—electrical recording became widespread, and consequently a whole range of vernacular artists became economically viable on shellac for the first time. And yet that insufficiently explains the riches. You have two world-historical geniuses, Armstrong and the Bubber Miley-assisted Ellington, in their flaming youth. You have Bix Beiderbecke’s great year. You have the Carter Family and Bessie Smith and Jimmie Rodgers defining genres for decades to come. You have Charles Lindbergh being so charming you can almost see why we almost made him Führer. You have jug bands and highballers and fruit-jar drinkers. You have the fjucking Toccata and Fugue. You have Cuba and West Africa, with plenty in common even at this stage. You have the funk of forty thousand years, next to which the less-than-a-century we've since tacked on feels minor.
Grade: A (Chris Bouchillon: “Born in Hard Luck”; Tetos Demetriades: “Miserlou”; The West African Instrumental Quintet: “Adersu No. 2”)
R.A.P. Ferreira: Purple Moonlight Pages
Despite his apparently free association, TAFKA Milo keeps himself focused—“I wonder if Chance the Rapper do his own laundry?” is immediately dismissed with “Who cares?”—on his special topic, which is art, sometimes with a capital A, as well as defiantly lowercase artists. Namechecking Beat poets, he’s often vaguely Borgesian and, on “Cycles”, literally Sontagian: likely one of the few rappers with both the ideas and the art for a song called “An Idea Is a Work of Art”, though guest Mike Ladd makes a valiant effort. His first verses sound like first verses and his second verses are a land of contrasts or else arrive at the meaning of life or the middle of nowhere. Kenny Segal and friends create jazz-lite backings that aren’t exactly Steely Dan, but there’s only so much art one can take.
Grade: A MINUS (“Cycles”, “Laundry”, “An Idea Is a Work of Art”)
Matthew Shipp Trio: The Unidentifiable
For probably stochastic reasons, Shipp does the same thing he does every night—hard chords all over the keyboard on the funnest ones, a delicate touch on the pretty ones, and a groove with an Oscar-worthy funny accent on the title track—a bit better than usual. Veteran drummer Newman Taylor Baker plays a lot of dynamically controlled beats, getting uninterrupted resonance on a couple of short tracks for his trouble. Michael Bisio, Shipp’s bassist for the last decade, is a hair more subtle than I like, though his early and late arco freakouts on the closing “New Heaven and New Earth” fetchingly frame its ten minutes of tension until Baker brushes it all away. The best Shipp I’ve heard since 2009’s Harmonic Disorder.
Grade: A MINUS (“Phantom Journey”, “The Dimension”, “New Heaven and New Earth”)
Musically and even lyrically this doesn’t do much, but (more so than the subsequent Untitled (Rise)) it’s explicit often enough: “Don’t shoot, guns down racist policeman” requires no further elaboration. I don’t always know what’s a sample and what’s newly recorded and denatured so you’re not sure which Civil Rights Movement it refers to, with the fact this confusion is possible amplifying the tired-of-this-shit feeling. The drum sound is big and clear, the spoken word provides pungency to go with the somewhat sweet singing, and if the nods toward Afrobeat aren’t going to have Sons of Kemet or Burna Boy peeking over their shoulders, they symbolize effectively. Bourgeois, perhaps, but the bourgeois wing of Black Liberation deserves a soundtrack as much as anyone.
Grade: A MINUS (“Stop Dem”, “Don’t Shoot Guns Down”, “Black”)
The Plastic People of the Universe: Apokalyptickej Pták (2017)
Historically important, and also good, band I should learn more about—I’ve heard the comp Magical Nights but a double might’ve been a bit much to sink in. This 1976 live set, released with financial and ironic support from the Czech Ministry of Culture, is quite digestible: nine songs (plus some anti-authoritarian-by-existence chatter) to showcase their musicianship amidst oddly user-friendly structures. Their Zappaphilia shapes their material without overwhelming it, as by this point of their illegal careers they’re comfortable jamming things towards unorthodox directions. Their palette is broad, from Vratislav Brabenec’s avant alto to a ready-to-blow theremin, with Milan Hvalsa’s constant bass often the only thing keeping them from falling over. And if they fall: never ever gonna keep ’em down.
Grade: A MINUS (“Apokalyptickej Pták”, “Magické Noci”, “Phallus Impudicus”)
The Psychedelic Furs: Made of Rain
Better than it has any right to be, though in keeping with New Wave tradition it slacks a bit on the flip side. Richard Butler remains best in his lower, grouchier register: isn’t he pretty in wall-of-guitar, rolling-sixteenths drums, and Kenny Vandermark’s sax friend Mars Williams playing at Kenny G? Butler’s love songs come off better than his literary plays, though the one where he takes the wrong train and ends up in “Streets of Your Town” is worth the journey. Yet he’s almost as rich repeating “this’ll never be like love” as a chorus, the words lit slightly differently by each preceding verse.
Grade: B PLUS (“Wrong Train”, “You’ll Be Mine”, “This’ll Never Be Like Love”)
The White Stripes Greatest Hits
White Blood Cells evokes the brief rock-is-back moment of 2001 better than anything besides the Strokes (and it holds up better than Is This It), so the question is whether this can replace Icky Thump as my second choice, as I'm pretty sure I don't need more than two White Stripes albums. Answer: maybe? The one substitution I’ve made is to ditch the don’t-know-what-to-do-with-Bacharach for the early “St. James Infirmary Blues”. Otherwise it shows that they consistently tried to do new things, and usually succeeded. The one thing they often attempted with mixed success was arena rock, and yet they still came up with the last great arena rock song. Dun, duh-duh-duh-duh dun dun.
Grade: B PLUS (“Seven Nation Army”, “Icky Thump”, “My Doorbell”)
Two discs for $25 digital, $35 physical from a Gil Evans student turned big band leader and seven-time Grammy winner. I have few caveats about the first disc, The Digital World, notwithstanding its conservatism—a status not dispelled by her liner notes, which mix legitimate complaints about Big Tech with nostalgia for ham radio, which might as well be nostalgia for polio to me. Her pursuit of unified beauty leaves few degrees of freedom for her players, but this time they make the best of it, with guitar, sax, and electrotrumpet solos memorable for tone and sometimes for the notes. Our Natural World is the modern pastoral disc, and despite being a fellow eBird user, it’s generally too mild for me. The big exception is the mildest: little happens in “Sanzenin” besides volume hairpins and a sentimental accordion; it’s lovely. Blast it over CB if you wish.
Grade: B PLUS (“Sanzenin”, “A World Lost”, “Don’t Be Evil”, “CQ CQ, Is Anybody There?”)
Amanda Gookin: Forward Music Project 1.0
Cellist/activist Gookin commissions works by diverse women composers. The hit is Nathalie Joachim’s “Dam Mwen Yo”, where the cello is as eerie as the piped-in Creole vocals. That one's somewhat atypical in that it both has words and isn’t inspired by atrocity: here’s an instrumental about human trafficking, there’s an instrumental about access to abortion, and if you need to ask the artists’ viewpoint on the latter this record is not for you. Gookin uses a huge variety of techniques for expression, and at times achieves the most pissed-off sounding cello I can recall hearing. Some joy, or prospect of joy, creeps in at the end.
Grade: B PLUS (“Dam mwen yo”, “Swerve”, “Stray Sods”)
“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” he begins; it’s funny because he’s not. The rhymes and references continue in that vein, like a dad joke album if Dad was Leonard Cohen, although Callahan still sings too nice for that when he deigns to hit the notes. His devotion to drollery, which extends to the tunes and the occasional flugelhorn, makes this more enjoyable than anything else I’ve heard from him, but I think the Surgeon General needs to mandate that every extant print music magazine that praises this has to put that Onion “cool dad puts kid out of touch with generation” article on its back cover. Wouldn’t want the children to learn about Cuban liberator Ry Cooder until they’re ready.
Grade: B PLUS (“Pigeons”, “The Mackenzies”, “Ry Cooder”)