Semipop Life: From generation to generation

James McMurtry, Mary Halvorson, Samia, (sighs) fine, Lil Wayne, and more!

James McMurtry: The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy

McMurtry’s Americana keeps a-rolling, with tunes obligated to quaver before dropping down for the important lyrics—“Trade Center’s gone”, etc. Unlike other bards who write at his level (C. Finn, T. Swift), he’s never put any superfluous skill points into singing; still, he isn’t getting worse, and his cover of Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song” improves on the original. His ability to draw a bigger picture remains his point of difference, and he’s as well-positioned as anyone to zoom in on Our Current Bullshit. The “South Texas Lawman” is a bad cop disinterested in the wider world (Houston), yet one of his families is across the border and thus in some sense part Mexican. He’s just one guy, and one might hear his despair and say fuck it, let him call it the Gulf of America if he’s going to walk into it. But then “Sons of the Second Sons” generalizes: so much of America came from “products of genocide” coming here, laboring sweat-soaked and building a nation imperfect and marvelous—which their male lines are proud of, even as they collectively vote for the implosion of the state. Hard to rebuke McMurtry’s lack of melodic delicacy when it ain’t no fun to sing those songs no more.

Grade: A MINUS (“Sons of the Second Sons”, “South Texas Lawman”, “Broken Freedom Song”)

Mary Halvorson: About Ghosts

You know what to expect from a full group Halvorson record; the only question is if it’ll be slightly better or slightly worse than usual, and I think it’s the former. The distinguishing feature, apart from the leader sometimes fiddling with a Pocket Piano, is saxes: most tracks feature one or both of Immanuel Wilkins’s alto and Brian Settles’s tenor. They’re well-used on “Carved From”, where after the head Halvorson takes a trademark solo with note-bending and double-stops for emphasis, followed by Wilkins slipping between very Halvorsonian arpeggiation and more trad free wailing. He takes a more show-offy turn on “Absinthian”, inspiring trumpeter Adam O’Farrill to do the same and reminding you these are all very good players. There’s plenty to enjoy when they’re saxless, like “Amaranthine”, firmly propelled by Nick Dunston’s bass and Tomas Fujiwara’s snare and with an elegant Jacob Garchik trombone solo, while viber Patricia Brennan, who’s become a major star since the last Halvorson sextet album, completes the palette. Their finest since 2022’s Amaryllis, which might not seem like long, but they have high standards.

Grade: A MINUS (“Carved From”, “Absinthian”, “Amaranthine”)

Edna Martinez Presents Picó: Sound System Culture From The Colombian Caribbean

This highly purchasable selection opens with token traditionalist Ghanians Wulomei before getting to Martinez’s intercontinental M.O. with an Angolan group doing merengue. Then Nigerian Zeal Onyia plays a high register trumpet solo; some Colombians dink things up with some cumbia; Peacocks International supply ’70s highlife; Pedro Lima represents São Tomé, having listened to a shitload of soukous; West Nkosi attempts a boy band; c. 1960 Cubans show up on a French label. It’s too late to stop now: the band Zaire are, confusingly, more South Africans; Martinez lengthens Algerians Afous, shortens Zaïko Langa Langa, and puts a donk under Guadeloupean composer Erick Cosaque; Puerto Rican rustic La Calandria rues her heartbreak; African System International are a Nigerian band led by a Cameroonian that again sounds Congolese; Carlos Diaz gives us son not yet salsa; and by the time Tanzania’s Tabora Jazz Band plays us out we’re lucky if we know what decade it is. The beats, in all their diversity, show the ultimate compatibility of Afropop and Latin musics, creating a CD (or extended double vinyl) length party that’s inviting rather than overbearing. If it’s not quite as golden as the Diblo special, it’s a model to aspire to.

Grade: A MINUS (“Egbe Ne Lueli”, “Ajaccio”, “Anavdhou”)

Samia: Bloodless

Kathy Najimy’s kid: hardly worth mentioning by today’s nepo standards, save that it might’ve helped fund a New York-Nashville-L.A. curriculum vitae to find her artistic calling. While she’s ended up in lower-cost Minneapolis, I’d guess much of the material predates her most recent move, given the nudism. Collaborators Caleb Wright and Jake Luppen, who produced Charly Bliss’s Forever, indulge in de rigueur genre play for blog attention; Samia’s focus is on getting her small-scale songs across. It’s not clear if it’s her or a doppelganger who finds that to “jack off to someone who’s pregnant” is a diverting pastime, and it doesn’t matter. She sings, with notable ease, as an every (young urbane) woman, adding a light head voice note when she’s representing interior fortitude. She pursues typical young urbane person activities: you go out, you see someone you’d rather not, you don’t want to spoil the party so you couch things in an extended animal metaphor. Like best nepo case scenario Sofia Coppola, she evokes unstructured twentysomething life: a little hollow, a little privileged perhaps, but if you’re going to feel hollow you might as well have a pool to float in.

Grade: A MINUS (“North Poles”, “Sacred”, “Proof”)

Deepstaria Enigmatica: The Eternal Now Is the Heart of a New Tomorrow

Named after a jellyfish, this might be the first free jazz group to record at Sam Phillips’s Memphis studio. Chad Fowler, the biggest name (in the software dev world at least), runs the gamut of instruments, from the archaic “stritch” straight alto associated with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, to the Otamatone, a synth with a nice smiling head you squeeze to play. Things will rumble around a legible guitar-centered or drum-powered groove, and then an uncanny transmission from the heavens or a keyboard blast from an imagined past confuses things once again. Major credit goes to bassist Misterioso Africano for holding everything together (maybe not too different a task from his longtime job doing the same, albeit on guitar, for Public Enemy.) Two-thirds of the way into the first of two tracks, when the mild guitar noise dies down and Fowler launches into a solo that’s flattened like a deepsea sole, the album threatens to reach the same level as your longtime fusion faves. If they don’t sustain this, nearly as misterioso as mid-Seventies Miles Davis is a deep place to be.

Grade: A MINUS (“The Eternal Now”)

Music for a Revolution Vol. 1: Guinea's Syliphone Recording Label (1967-1973)

Fans of 2007’s Authenticité: The Syliphone Years will recognize most of these state-approved groups and a few of the songs—maybe you too will go “oh yeah, I love that one” at Keletigui et Ses Tambourinis’ “Miri Magnin”. There’s plenty to chew on beyond that. Early Bembeya Jazz are at their Latinest with a breezy “Guantanamera” and a gutsier “Sabor de Guajira”. A Balladins highlight is the fleet guitar work on “Ka Noutea”, by the short-lived incarnation fronted by trombonist Pivi Moriba (until Sékou Touré rehabed usual leader Balla.) Less distinctive, Orchestre de la Paillote (an earlier Keletigui outfit) and Horoya Band National give initial and later samples of authenticité’s recombinations of Cuban rhythms and kora-derived guitar lines for hybrid vigor. Of the new-to-me artists, the Orchestre de la Garde Républicaine is the mothership that dates back to independence and sounds like it, Les Frères Diabaté is at least three Diabatés and a similar number of guitars, and Myriam’s Quintette (the exiled M. Makeba’s backing band) doesn’t display much authenticité at all. Great music; check for redundancy.

Grade: A MINUS (“Sabor De Guajira”, “Samakoro”, “Samba”)

Lil Wayne: Tha Carter VI

Dave Moore’s intriguing and possibly correct take that Tunechi’s taste—in music, we’ll try and fail not to get to politics—isn’t so much bad as chaotic is a distinction worth nitpicking because on “Hip-Hop” and a few subsequent moments, he does a passable impression of the Best Rapper Alive (2005–08). So when the bullshit comes, it earns a fair hearing. Jelly Roll’s secular Protestantism? Fine, we’ll let Weezy walk on water to “play pickleball with my dick today”. Bono’s secular Catholicism? Nah, we don’t need to relive 9/11 just for President Carter to rhyme “God bless America” with “Miss America”. Andrea Fjucking Bocelli? I give up, let’s let Wyclef have the lead verse on that one (and bring up the Twin Towers again.) The album’s closest in spirit to Tha Carter III: it tries to give the impression that Wayne’s shamanic talent (“everybody woke, I sell dreams”) is the most fitting way to process the contemporary omnishambles. The difference is that in 2008, you could believe the year might have a happy ending.

Grade: B PLUS (“Hip-Hop”, “Maria”, “Banned from NO”)

Tunde Adebimpe: Thee Black Boltz

“Magnetic” gets his obligation to electrorock out of the way so he can then attempt weird. He doesn’t quite succeed because he’s too empirical (he doesn’t buy the story of the man who ate the moon—his own story) and too normie (coming up with almost the same “once… or twice” construction as Gracie Abrams), but the album doesn’t suffer for it. Solo debut or no, he knows “I’m gonna need somebody’s help”, which comes from sometime jewel-runner Wilder Zoby, who improves on Dave Sitek’s Scrabble scores for personal name and instrument collection—hey, that’s a zither! His keyb part on “The Most” adds needed groove even before it goes sleng tenging. Despite this, it’s a singer’s record, with Adebimpe tender from lyric baritone to airy head voice, employing both on “ILY”. Also explicit with the L-word is “Somebody New”, which asks “how do we feed this love?” Fortunately love, being unempirical, will eat up whatever the digital harmonizer spits out.

Grade: B PLUS (“The Most”, “Somebody New”, “ILY”)

Lambrini Girls: Who Let the Dogs Out

One-dimensional and proud, meaning all the work’s done through attitude, which I’ll define to include fast chords and a heavy, agile bottom end. But it’s mostly Phoebe Lunny’s singing, and the attitude in question is mostly anger. There’s the usual stream of things to be angry about, from gentrification to nepo babies; to placate Marx, I’ll refrain from linking her grandpa’s Wikipedia page. She stretches her dimension to include sarcasm, mimicking a male critic who might take too specific an interest in women in music, and even irony, saying “no homo” to a nice face in an effort to reveal she is, in fact, homo. The obvious standout is “Cuntology 101”, where everything she does is “cunty” and therefore admirable (see, I’m not the only one in this paragraph who’s defining words to suit themself.) Perhaps this isn’t deeper than Scary Spice wanting a zig-a-zig ah—perhaps nothing is.

Grade: B PLUS (“Cuntology 101”, “Big Dick Energy”, “No Homo”)

D.Silvestre: O Que as Mulheres Querem

Still better at maintaining strings of two-minute chunks of my attention than his Brazil funk rivals, though this isn’t quite as relentless as his self-titled—for one thing, it has women on it. Distortion and gross bass stay dominant, but listen enough and you hear variety in the beats, from non-drum instruments locking in polyrhythmic syncopations on “A Sacanagem Começou” to something approaching mainstream techno oonst-oonst on “Sem Moralismo”. Moreover, there’s a surprise sound for light relief whenever you need it, like the high digital riff on “OQAMQ” that I can’t tell if he worked on for five months or five minutes. Vocals remain largely for tone color, apart from Firehill, who contra her moniker displays some uh subtlety, and “Dona Brisa”, where “Itsy Bitsy Spider” somehow gets sexualized before arachnoid synths divebomb the track in objection.

Grade: B PLUS (“Dona Brisa”, “OQAMQ”, “Corredinois”)

Tate McRae: So Close to What

Canadian former child dance prodigy doesn’t conceal the biz-abetted nature of her music career; she’s since earned her first Billboard number one by subjecting herself to Morgan Wallen. Her singing borrows from several of your 2000s faves (okay, maybe they’re all Britney incarnations), teasing you into playing Hangman to attain meanings rather than just looking up the lyrics. Her tonally not to mention ethically neutral performances lend themselves to strong flavorings, from Lostboy’s 2020-and-late vocal treatments to umami bomb Flo Milli. The persona she (with Ryan Tedder and Amy Allen) crafts is “there’s more to me than sex, which by the way I am extremely good at”, and even the harder-to-believe half of that is far from implausible. On the closer, the action deferred on her previous release Think Later arrives, armed with an acoustic guitar, proving there was and is no hurry: what should twenty-somethings be doing besides celebrating their physical vigor? Grad school?

Grade: B PLUS (“2 Hands”, “Purple Lace Bra”, “Bloodonmyhands”)