Semipop Life: Excess at middle latitudes

Mon Laferte, Big Thief, Tori Amos, Arca, and more!

Mon Laferte Vol. 1 (2015)

After a brush with fame on a 2003 Chilean TV singing competition and a cancer scare that provoked a reinvention, her misleadingly titled fourth album made her a star. Laferte’s image-making played its part—the cover looks like Tim Burton cast Helena Bonham-Carter as a goth-curious alt-Latino ingenue—but the music more than holds up its end. Most songs concern an amor that’s inquieto, drogado, completo, and a couple of songs later, over. She has a huge voice, kind of like Björk’s if Björk was raised at a middle latitude and was human: when she belts the chorus of the career-making torch song “Tu Falta De Querer”, there’s no sense of exaggeration, just a temporary excess of emotion, such that if she makes it through the next fifteen minutes without anyone giving her a weapon, everything will turn out fine. Indeed, at the end, she buys an ice cream. (The major-label re-release, standard on streaming services, inserts “Si Tú Me Quisieras”, in which her band wants to do a perky accordion-heavy Tejano goof and she emotes all over them. ¡Tan obstinada!)

Grade: A (“Si Tú Me Quisieras”, “Tu Falta De Querer”, “Tormento”)

Mon Laferte: La Trenza (2017)

Some symptoms of second album syndrome (even though this was her fifth), as she broadens her palette beyond that of her adopted Mexico. There were commercial payoffs to inviting over Spanish classic rocker Bunbury and Colombian metaler-folkie-dance maven Juanes, and even an artistic payoff to the latter bringing around his horns and woodwinds, but on the whole her belting feels less justified this time. The one thing she gets truly passionate about: dudes smoking her weed. Fair!

Grade: B (“No Te Fumes Mi Mariguana”, “Amárrame”)

Mon Laferte: Norma (2018)

By this point a big name in Chile and a decent-sized one in Mexico, she went topless at the Latin Grammys in support of her birth country’s Estallido Social protests and got a Best Alternative Album gong for her trouble. As usual, I’m not sure what “alternative” means, apart from not reggaeton—this has a smorgasbord of styles, traditionalish save for a couple of rappy moments. She still sings big but relaxes more, rolling her r’s hard and having rather more fun with interracial erotics than is permissible in parts further north. Unifying the album are flexible melodies that she delivers like invitations. Here she plays the mid-career pop star as well as anyone, so open your heart to her.

Grade: A MINUS (“Caderas Blancas”, “Ronroneo”, “Quédate Esta Noche”)

Mon Laferte: Seis

To the continuing frustration of math and/or Spanish teachers everywhere, Seis is her seventh studio album; her eighth, a pregnancy later in 2021, was the California dream 1940 Carmen, which I played once. Seis explores the regional music of her adopted Mexico, inspired in particular by the life of gun-toting, cigar-smoking ranchera singer and lesbian icon Chavela Vargas. Laferte doesn’t go as far as having an affair with Frida Kahlo, instead projecting feminist strength while allowing herself to declare her admiration for men, as long as they’re veteran mariachi singer Alejandro Fernández. There’s a decent political song about the decline of “La Democracia” and she uses the word “neoliberalidad” in a kiss-off song. Her most effective act of solidarity, however, is to feature Oaxaca’s Banda Femenil Regional “Mujeres del Viento Florido” to brass up her lamentations on “Se Va La Vida” like it’s an early Beirut song (“Elephant Gun”, you remember.) When she follows up by getting a male banda to close with a conventional amo-odio song, it feels a touch hollow.

Grade: B PLUS (“Se Va La Vida”, “Esta Morra No Se Vende”, “Aunque Te Mueras Por Volver”)

Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

Not Exile on Main St. except that it’s long: you don’t want to do the song-by-song no matter how well Big Thief compares up in breadth. It's more like playlisting all of Neil Young’s ’70s albums and hitting shuffle, with remarkable if not unimpeachable results. You get jaw harp and fiddle and guitars adulterated to sound like metallophones, you get the whole spectrum from folk-rock to rock-folk. Mostly you get twin guitars and Adrienne Lenker responding to singular times with idiosyncratic songs and singing. She lackadaisically meanders in and out of the bullseye of every note, whereas she puts real effort into eluding straightforward meaning: there’s some breakup, some cryptic references to a cult upbringing, a lot of Thom Yorke. Her rhymes may not sum to a description of any known world, but we’re lucky that our world allows “finish”/“knish”. The downside of the shuffle approach is that they didn’t hit on a “Hey Hey, My My” or a “Not”. Back of the envelope suggests they try a quad next time.

Grade: A MINUS (“Time Escaping”, “Little Things”, “Wake Me up to Drive”)

Hayley Williams: Flowers for Vases/Descansos

While these last couple of years Paramore has been the artist most ripped off by rising Zoomers besides high-pop Taylor herself, Williams has turned to imitating… high-folk Taylor herself. Stranger still, it’s her deepest work since Paramore’s self-titled. Finding herself able to hit low notes beneath the imagination of teen stars, she still delivers choruses of appropriate size. A difference is that unlike Swift, who in her Etsy era has rattled off checks to Jack Antonoff and The National and Bon Iver’s viola guy, Williams plays everything with at least as much groove as her paramours accomplished on Petals for Armor, proving herself a sensitive acoustic guitarist in particular. Her disposition too remains non-Taylorish: guns are handled with the safety off, blood flows from amputated limbs, and it’s as unclear how metaphorically to take this stuff as it is her pagan-flavored Christianity. What’s evident is she’s sad, and that she’s the sort of person who’ll always have sad times. But now she knows what to do with them.

Grade: A MINUS (“Trigger”, “Inordinary”, “Good Grief”)

Selo i Ludy: Bunch One (2019)

Expecting fun from this Ukrainian don’t-mention-Gogol-Bordello covers band, I was worried when the opening “It’s My Life” was that one, only it turned out to be the best non-video game use of Bon Jovi in 35 years. Dr Alban and Denniz Pop’s 1992 Scandi-Nigerian hit “It’s My Life” is also stuffed in there, and is that “Apache”? The credited and uncredited mashups give pre-poptimism schlock trainspotters like moi a reason to don anoraks, in addition to bonus ironies through juxtaposition: interpolating crypto-spiritual New-Agers Enigma into “Losing My Religion” is a pretty good leg-pull on the West. The flops are A-Ha, who are a bit too dumb despite accordionist-frontman Alexander Goncharov straddling the full two-and-a-half octaves, and Mark Knopfler, who’s much too much of an asshole in or out of character. Thankfully the closing Queen song actualizes freedom, even as everyone involved understood even in 2019 how provisional it always is.

Grade: A MINUS (“I Want to Break Free”, “Losing My Religion”, “It’s My Life”)

Tori Amos: Ocean to Ocean

Since I’m not allowed to say it: “she sounds like Kate Bush on this song,” my partner Jen said about multiple songs. That’s the Bush who had a bunch of (UK still counts dunnit) hits, so it’s for the best, eliciting some of Amos’s most elegant melodies in a long while, plus some of her cheapest. She deals with the death of her mother in her own way: when she sings “I’ve been hiding your ashes under the tree house”, one doesn’t need to read interviews to be convinced she literally did. (On the other hand, on “How Glass Is Made”, she does not explain how glass is made.) No conclusion deeper than “sometimes in life a girl must tango alone” is reached, yet her journey is moving and exciting in a way appropriate for those of us finding middle age more dramatic than it was supposed to be. The little earthquakes prepare you for the big ones.

Grade: A MINUS (“29 Years”, “Spies”, “Metal Water Wood”)

Arca: KiCk i (2020) and KICK ii (2021)

Identity as subject matter for art is nothing new, whereas identity as a work of art in itself is, well okay, old hat too—why do you think the Greeks cared about Socrates, his ideas?—but precedents are sparser, with few willing to risk shitposting themselves into drinking the hemlock. Its (as far as I can tell and yell at me if I’m wrong, Arca-the-art-thing is it/its, Arca-the-person leans she/her/hers) schtick is that it can pick out contradictory stances and sublate—okay, mush—them together, so it can be nonbinary and also trans and also gay. On record this is tenable, as alts come in and out of focus, making a mere spectrum inadequate to describe gender. Of course since this is art, she makes a conscious choice as to what aspects of her identity to emphasize: proud Latinx who “got the bags to prove it” for sure, the Venezuelan immigrant whose investment banker dad put her through NYU not so much, though maybe it’s for the best that she keeps her thoughts on Maduro off-record and on Facebook, not least because it means I’m not required to have a take on Venezuelan politics in this space. Her economic privilege, however acquired, can be inferred from the famous friends who show up to play themselves (who else, what kind of freak would invite Björk around to play a blind factory worker.) Anyway, KiCk i is the poppiest and best work I’ve heard from it and has Sophie, KICK ii returns to more abstract pleasures and has Sia, and somebody else can review and correctly capitalize Kick III, Kick IIII, and Kick IIIII.

KiCk i: A MINUS (“Nonbinary”, “Rip the Slit”, “Time”)

KICK ii: B PLUS (“Rakata”, “Tiro”, “Luna Llena”)

Nathy Peluso: Calambre (2020)

This Argentine-Spanish singer is a credible rapper too, for Iggy Azalea values of “credible”, which has led to charges of cultural appropriation, which sure, and of blackfishing, for which I can find no evidence unless white-presenting girls aren’t allowed to get spray tans anymore (and maybe they shouldn’t, DHA might be gross.) Those who don’t find such matters prohibitive might enjoy her popification of recent Caribbean dance and rap trends—Latin superproducer Rafa Arcaute ensures there are hooks everywhere—and her rhyme of “viene la police” with “sientes tú mi clítoris”. Elsewhere she proposes a threesome out of indecisiveness and claims that her tetas shine (that’d be the DHA.) It’s all very silly, which as Almodóvar fans know, doesn’t preclude sexy. If Pedro can make Rosalía seem grounded, he should at least give Peluso a screen test.

Grade: B PLUS (“Sana Sana”, “Agarrate”, “Delito”)

Dream Unending: Tide Turns Eternal

What kind of wuss thinks that “death metal, but ditch the killer riffs and slop on a ton of reverb” sounds like fun? Me, to some extent. Dream Unending consists of two open-eared dudes, one growly, and some Goth poetry (among the lines that are comprehensible for reasons to be explained in a couple of sentences: “Like breath on stained glass/Our memory forever fades”, driving the simile to new heights of abstraction) over a heavy low-end that doesn’t preclude moments of ringing prettiness. Complex structures are unnecessary when they’re willing to restart the double kicks whenever things threaten to get too classic rock. They even let a woman sing—clean!—on the closer, though if they were completely committed to their bit they would’ve let her sing the whole album.

Grade: B PLUS (“In Cipher I Weep”, “Tide Turns Eternal”, “Dream Unending”)