Semipop Life: Friends and neighbors, that's where it's at

75 Dollar Bill, the Front Bottoms, Grrrl Gang, Margo Price, and more!

75 Dollar Bill Little Big Band: Live at Tubby’s

A seven-musician set performed in upstate New York on Saturday 7th March, 2020, the day before Cuomo declared a state of emergency. Rick Brown’s plywood crate remains swell and all, but as a person of simple tastes, the main reason I like this the most out of everything I’ve heard from them is it has a few more drums; rock-solid bass by Sue Garner (of the Shams!) assists as well. This extra noise only deepens the trance, with Che Chen turning up the sustain on his pet notes, letting the guests take care of melody except when he busts out his violin. They time things out well: the Ornette cover-cum-chantalong gets ten minutes, while “Like Like Laundry” gets a mere twenty (the original was over a half hour) to build brick by boring brick. Each stops at the right point: no one needs to drone on forever.

Grade: A MINUS (“Like Like Laundry”, “F. & N.”, “WZN#3 / verso”)

The Front Bottoms: In Sickness & In Flames

This New Jersey duo is pigeonholed as “emo” or “folk-punk”, though (execrable band name aside) as far as I can tell that mostly means they write concrete guitar-based songs about feelings, which is the least fashionable thing you can do these days unless you’re a rapper. Hooks and catchphrases abound, and what’s rarer, they get glued together by verses that give sense of character and place. Brian Sella is a compulsive oversharer and maybe not a sufficiently reliable narrator to be calling a song “The Truth”, but he thinks hard (too hard) about his relationship, getting his appendix out, the northern lights in Fairbanks, AK. “Montgomery Forever” uses the implosion of Jersey City’s Montgomery Gardens project as a metaphor for, well, not for getting his appendix out. In the non-metaphorical world, low-rise affordable housing has been built in its place. There’s a waiting list.

Grade: A MINUS (“Montgomery Forever”, “Camouflage”, “Bus Beat”)

Mukdad Rothenberg Lankow: In the Wake of Memories

Two warzone medics and a Jersey humanities prof unite to make Arabic-derived music that’s stately yet subtle. Oudist Mukdad plays clean leads dexterously and sometimes urgently, and is a sympathetic accompanist, plucking repeated figures and counter-figures without distracting from the melody. Nightingale and whale song expert Prof. Rothenberg plays clarinets with a melancholic breath, but while past wrongs are not forgotten (that’s why Mukdad testified against the secret policemen who allegedly ran the prison camp in which he was tortured in a major German trial last year), there’s too much beauty (and reverb) for the sadness to be unmitigated. Lankow hand-drums and percusses, helping to give the record a late-night smoke-filled room feel: figuratively, I can hope.

Grade: A MINUS (“Once Upon a Time in Damascus”, “Peshawar Repose”, “Walking Among Ruins”)

Foul Play: Origins

These ten tracks (four of which have disappeared from the Bandcamp edition) date from the early ’90s, ancient history for EDM and the peak of the English rave genre called hardcore—not to be confused with the continental techno genre hardcore, and let’s not mention Minor Threat. Foul Play, comprised of the late Steve Bradshaw, the mercurial Steve Gurley, and the garrulous in “where are they now” interviews John Morrow, are in the microcanon for “Open Your Mind” and their remix of Omni Trio’s “Renegade Snares”: drum-and-bass (mostly drums, really) in its protean form. A check of the chronology shows a remarkable increase in complexity through sampling, with dense breakbeats topped by memorable vocal lines. But the earlier version of “Feel the Vibe” is at least as charming as the more sophisticated remix: the sound of a path being carved out for a little while, before being swallowed up by the jungle. It still sounds like the future.

Grade: A MINUS (“Feel the Vibe”, “Finest Illusion”, “The Alchemist”)

Grrrl Gang: Here to Stay!

“We’re not sad, but we’re just not fulfilled,” goes the tagline of this Yogyakarta trio. This result of their ennui is what sounds to me like the most fetching college… I mean jangly pop-rock in ages—a limited achievement but a real one. For all the somewhat puzzling riot grrrl references in their press kit (must be the rrr’s), none of the members is obnoxious enough to dominate the sound, allowing their yearnings to be balanced and, what’s this, innocent. Which doesn’t make them pushovers: gender expectations and bad (male) lovers are flushed away like shits in the bathroom. If they’re queens of the neighborhood: cool neighborhood.

Grade: A MINUS (“Guys Don’t Read Sylvia Plath”, “Dream Girl”, “Pop Princess”)

Theo Parrish: Wuddaji

The house-and-stuff veteran’s return is extremely easy to listen to, which doesn’t mean it’s not complex—try notating what the hell’s going on in any given synthbass bed. His kick drum bursts and not-a-clap not-yet-a-snare drum machine shuffles are timed to confound fans of rational numbers, giving the urban a downhome flavor. The melody fragments too are amiable and sometimes, perhaps, a little too muted, though the one vocal feature doesn’t make any special impression (not ten minutes’ worth, anyway.) “Angry Purple Birds” justifies a similar length, motorvated by what might be repurposed as a car alarm, albeit a polite one.

Grade: B PLUS (“Angry Purple Birds”, “Hambone Cappuccino”, “Radar Detector”)

Margo Price: That’s How Rumors Get Started

Even more of a classic rock move than All American Made. If the arrangements are sometimes a little light-rock-less-talk, she and producer Sturgill Simpson realize better than most that classic rock was adjacent to classic soul, recruiting the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir as reinforcements on a couple of tracks. Price’s writing is less conceptually grand than before, but she’s adept at matching music to moments of revelation, like the way the chromatic decline of “What Happened to Our Love?” breaks off and returns to a major key: oh, so that’s what happened to it. And she sings big enough to do justice to a title like “I’d Die for You”.

Grade: B PLUS (“Prisoner of the Highway”, “Twinkle Twinkle”, “I’d Die for You”)

Parris: Polychrome Swim EP

Old skool dubstep lives! Okay, it’s at house tempo and the beats and sample chopping show clear Western hemisphere influence. But the moodiness and sense of space are very much in the tradition of early Burial/Hyperdub, with the three tracks here equally functional at home or in the theoretical-until-majority-vaccination club. Compared to Terrapin, Parris’s other admirable 2020 EP, the equilibria here between treble and bass, echo and pure percussion, seem a little more delicate. Best in show is “Harajuku Girls”: though it doesn’t sound anything like Harajuku, you could imagine gaijin writing longform essays about Harajuku bopping along to it.

Grade: B PLUS (“Harajuku Girls”, “Aqua Surge”)

Moodymann: Taken Away

As you may have gathered if you’ve heard Moodymann over the last quarter century, he has a knack for picking samples to enliven with loose digital musicianship. On the opener, he mashes up “Love and Happiness” with (I think) his own vocals to bemoan the perfidy of moodywomann. Wittier, if less soulful, is the police siren on the title track, a nod to his 2019 run-in with the law, when the cops arrested him at point-of-assault-weapon for breaking and entering… into his own house (America!) A DeBarge shows up for a couple of songs, and even though it’s Chico it's appreciated.

Grade: B PLUS (“Taken Away”, “Do Wrong”, “Just Stay a While”)