Semipop Life: For your consideration 2020

Juice WRLD, Elizabeth Cook, Touché Amoré, Brandy Clark, and more

Juice WRLD: Legends Never Die

But rappers do—despite a squeaky-clean criminal record, the Feds hounded him to an OD death on an airport runway, six days after his 21st birthday. And it’s as big a fucking waste as any tragedy I can name. We called the genre “emo rap” because we lacked original language to describe what a few 808s & Heartbreak fans were uploading: expressing their thoughts and feelings without the sense of shame that comes with age and taste and wondering if one needs a beatmaker with more elite credibility than Marshmello. Among his peers, Juice was notable for his refusal of irony, and for the fact that what his relentless (and supposedly mostly improvised) introspection revealed was a naive but fundamentally decent kid. But what stood out most was his tenderness, his warmth filling the void in Auto-Tune-mediated expression Kanye never knew was there. Who knows what else he could’ve worked out.

Grade: A (“Wishing Well”, “Hate the Other Side”, “Tell Me U Luv Me”)

Elizabeth Cook: Aftermath

The best Southern rock album of the year, and maybe in many years if Waxahatchee’s too indie to count. Referencing forebears from T. Hall to J. Prine, what Cook serves up is less a homage than a metamodern deconstruction, though pace Sturgill, Cook’s usages remain on dry Earth land. In each of her settings, regardless of their exact space-time coordinates, there’s a contrast worth noting. So for example, when “Bayonette” shifts 12-bar form across the border, we’re sent hurtling towards dialectics: does the Mexico of the song consist of more than symbols and sombreros? And is the South, as constructed by country music, any more real? Armed with two chords and a lie, two Marys and a Terry, Cook depicts situations where it can’t be assumed that all parties share the same truth, yet this doesn’t mean there’s any shortage of truth in stories of Margaret Atwood’s alleged ancestor, or of the Virgin hanging out in Chattanooga waiting for her son to choo-choo home.

Grade: A (“Thick Georgia Woman”, “Bayonette”, “Half Hanged Mary”)

Thiago Nassif: Mente

On the opening track, “Soar Estranho” at first seems to refer to a particularly cranky Minimoog that is nevertheless normalized by the second verse, only for other equally strange sounds to make their entrance. That’s the story of the album, with many tracks starting with relatively few elements, then absorbing outré noises often made by outré collaborators. Ana Franco Elétrico, for instance, sings melodies of non-standard shape, and Nassif and producer Arto Lindsay tailgate her across pages of confused staves. Though Nassif’s own low-register vocals outline his tunes accurately enough, they have an air of too-hip-to-care, which fortunately for him is back on the retro cycle’s upswing, just as plastic funk is. Special mention goes to Ricardo Dias Gomes, the fourth or fifth banana of the New or No Wave band of your dreams, who plays all manner of keyboards while leaving the overcomplication to others.

Grade: A (“Soar Estranho”, “Cor”, “Plástico”)

Andrew Norman/Gustavo Dudamel/LA Philharmonic: Sustain

This half-hour piece at first takes its title literally, with long held notes producing a youngish person’s guide to orchestral minimalism. Even when the vibrato gets turned to 11, the ensuing excitement feels more like the results of natural processes than the works of mere humankind. Then the gambit is to repeat things faster and faster like it’s an EDM track, although the degree of difficulty is higher in analog, so props to Dudamel. However, its structure has a metaphorical side absent from Skrillex bangers (at least as far as I know), as it simulates the tendency for capitalism to make a lot of things go exponential, including things you really don’t want to go exponential. As the second half inverts the first, the piece achieves an idea of equilibrium, as if whatever dissonances one foregrounds now are minor on sufficiently long time scales. Whether the equilibrium permits human life is another matter.

Grade: A

Touché Amoré: Lament

This longstanding hardcore/screamo band suddenly sounds like the only all-male rock band that matters, at least critically. Certainly they owe a debt to producer Ross Robinson, kicking off his third decade of atonement for nü-metal by keeping the instruments distinct during the quiet parts and layering a stadium-ready roar for the loud ones. Yet the center of it all is always straight-edge screamer-cum-podcaster Jeremy Bolm, still haunted by death and the GOP, both of which continue to pick off those he loves. But without losing his sense of the eternal struggle as he pushes 40, which is older than the great English High Romantic poets ever got, he’s determined to get on with life, no matter how many times some new bullshit forces him to reconfigure it. Hey, if Shelley were still around, he’d probably have a podcast too.

Grade: A MINUS (“Limelight”, ‘Lament”, “Reminders”)

Daniel Bjarnason/Iceland Symphony Orchestra: Concurrence

Four works by Icelandic composers. Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Metacosmos”, packed with bass-and-percussion dramatics worthy of the heaviest Romantic modernists, is the first and easy best. Like all singularities worth their non-finite weight, it eventually destabilizes tonality, resulting in too many probable hominid fatalities to be synched with 2001: A Space Odyssey. More soundtrack-friendly to a fault is Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir’s “Oceans”, which does get some pleasing and occasionally challenging harmonies going. Piano and cello concertos, both with a folkies-go-mad-in-the-Westfjords edge, complete the lineup, with the former, by Haukur Tómasson, the more classically postmodern and stronger of the two as it jerks about its idiosyncratic avant-groove.

Grade: A MINUS (“Metacosmos”, “Piano Concerto No. 2”, “Quake”)

Brandy Clark: Your Life Is a Record

Clark is more comfortable than ever in the studio, and producer Jay Joyce is such a miracle worker he gets something resembling a good vocal performance out of Randy Newman. But you’re here because she’s the most consistent singer-songwriter of recent years, across any genre, and she does enough to hold on that title, if barely. The limiting factor isn’t the newfound focus on the personal, it’s that when she tries to open up to the world beyond, she doesn’t get beyond the Charlotte Avenue pawn shops. And yet that one nails its setting, and just about every song has a gut-twister of a line or two. Perhaps what she needs isn’t a bigger boat: it’s a plan and a canal.

Grade: A MINUS (“Long Walk”, “Who Broke Whose Heart”, “Can We Be Strangers”)

Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats: Unlocked EP / Denzel Curry: 13lood In + 13lood Out Mixx

Unlocked has the biggest Kenny Beats beats I’ve heard and maybe four real songs, and even those four are fragmentary. It’s the fragments-as-fragments that lack incompleteness, as he can take a killer opening—“My bitch bad like battle rappers that make albums with no outcome”—and see where it takes him for a verse, then drop the mic and leave it for Beats to determine what the outcome is. Still, if you’re going to do that, you might as well turn your snippets into a might-stop does-stop-after-13-minutes mix(x). So 13lood In + 13lood Out is more formally satisfying: choruses and freestyles alike have a structural role, and the sound is a bit more varied and non-overbearing. And although the rapping is strictly at a good-for-outtakes level, it does bode well that he knows what his best material is.

Unlocked: A MINUS (“DIET_”, “Lay_Up.m4a”, “Pyro (leak 2019)”)

13lood In + 13lood Out Mixx: B PLUS (“Charlie Sheen”, “Welcome to the Future”, “Evil Twin”)