Semipop Life: All the stars approach you

Los Thuthanaka, Marshall Allen, PinkPantheress, Avril Lavigne, and more!

Los Thuthanaka

What a Pitchfork 9.3 is supposed to be: innovative, challenging, and genuinely musical. Having risen no higher than Cuzco on the Gringo Trail, I have no idea how well it reifies concepts of the Altiplano’s Aymara culture, like taypi, which band principal Chuquimamani-Condori (“Elly”) describes as “where opposites converge, where weeping crosses to melodious noise, where worlds reverse”. I can however confirm the album sounds great throughout. The electrosounds on “Q’iwanakax-Q’iwasanakax Utjxiwa” evoke the grandeur-in-simplicity of Tiwanaku stonework, with sustained chords crescendoing and changing in texture. Subsequent tracks run the gamut from abstract-dubby to abstract-dancey. Elly’s brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton adds repetitive guitar that gets warped in all manner of ways, as do speech samples ranging from “go” and “yo” club exhortations to some distorted version of the F*ck U Skrillex guy. While I could draw further tenuous connections to indigenous South American forms (hey, it worked for Neruda), the clearer precedent to me is North American postminimalism—Steve Reich abides at a La Paz street party, altitude sickness notwithstanding. A circle, an ocean, a rock: all ways to conceive of the eternal, the last having the advantage that you can pick it up and say, that’s a nice rock.

Grade: A (Parrandita “Sariri Tunupa”, Q’iwanakax-Q’iwsanakax Utjxiwa, Huayño “Phuju”)

Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons: Live in Philadelphia

Far be it from me to tell a 101-year-old what to do with himself, but to me this sounds like a superior use of the goodwill he’s been accumulating since ’58 or so. Allen’s gravity attracts all-stars from all points of the experimental music galactic disk to South Philly’s Ars Nova Workshop to mess around with himself, guitarist/Arkestra copilot DM Hotep, and their pet synths to stitch up a multigenerational space-adjacent jazz sampler. There are blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos from James Brandon Lewis and William Parker; Eric Revis and Chad Taylor are among those taking longer residencies. “Seductive Fantasy” starts things far out, with Allen’s alto and Dave Davis’s trombone blowing hard, then there’s a warp to the perigee with noise dudes Wolf Eyes piping and diddling (the vocals are ignorable.) Later highlights include the oddball tone palette of “The Hills” and the drive of “Square the Circle”, featuring the alt-rock rhythm section of James McNew and Charlie Hall—that’s two of the year’s best records a War on Drug has showed up on. Allen himself is especially penetrating in tandem with reed youngsters (they’re all youngsters to him), treating septuagenarian Elliott Levin and kindergartener Immanuel Wilkins with similar respect. The explorers who survive know you need someone to have your back.

Grade: A MINUS (“Seductive Fantasy”, “Square the Circle”, “The Hills”)

PinkPantheress: Fancy That mini-album

After global fame came quicker than was healthy, a retrenchment. There are no features, no Americanisms save for hints about her preferred hook-ups; even the breakbeats are muffled. Instead the base is UK garage, the colorings UK dance from either side of her 2001 birth year. The samples are big and obvious, like Basement Jaxx’s “Romeo”, which isn’t on the one called “Romeo” (which samples a different Jaxx track.) Pink isn’t as overbearing about her retromania as Charli, perhaps because instead of sneaking out to clubs when she was underage she stayed in her room doing her statistics homework instead. Her focus is very much on her songs, which are small and obvious; while their subjects are hardly unprecedented, she’s bloody sensible about them. She counsels moderation when partaking in the “Illegal” (it’s unstated what that one’s about, but come on, it’s just weed), and when she gets around to sex, it sounds beneficial and well-scheduled for both parties. As for that Romeo: isn’t bowdlerizing a world-historical love story for people with two-and-a-half minute attention spans what pop’s about?

Grade: A MINUS (“Romeo”, “Stars”, “Noises”)

ALT BLK ERA: Rave Immortal

A good danceable hard-rockin’ record? In this British economy? Nyrobi and Chaya Becket-Messam mix elements of the ’90s template with modern software updates. The drums and guitars are grunge (“Come on Outside” does an Oasis to “In Bloom”) and post-grunge (not nü-metal, which, us old heads remember, was worse), the programming drops wubs amidst the breaks, and the combination is scaled to shake bedroom windows. The sisters are supple singers by the standards of their predecessors: they shriek like nobody’s business, plus it’s difficult to imagine Trent Reznor and Zack De La Rocha harmonizing so well. The songwriting impresses not for delicacy of melody or verbiage but for its momentum and its ability to create the illusion of high stakes. Generalities prevail; even exception “My Drummer’s Girlfriend” seems less a portrait of an acquaintance than a rewrite of “Sweet But Psycho”. If their themes usually aren’t too deep (and they’re better off when they aren’t), the 17-to-20-year-old’s fantasy that you can keep running and raving forever suffices for an implicit topic. Brakes are for kids and parents.

Grade: A MINUS (“Run Rabbit Run”, “Come Fight Me for It”, “My Drummer’s Girlfriend”)

Robert Forster: Strawberries

After the spousal cancer album comes the bright, happy album: what a relief. Rachel Worth might be the closest precedent, yet even since then he’s refined his singer-songwriter tricks. He’s Dylanesque at making a couplet that doesn’t scan work—“I taught English, you were French, we kissed… on a bench”—without making a big deal of it. His guitar remains as easygoing as his singing is deliberate, and the arrangements don’t forego the simple pleasures of organ and light Scandijazz. Which simple pleasures are his characters’ and which are his is often blurred, except I’m pretty sure it was Karin who ate all the strawberries; forgive her, they were delicious. The uncooperative rock star on “Such a Shame”, which has another classic pause before “play the hits”, isn’t him (what hits?) but is also someone content to be a cult Australian, to the extent that he later pronounces “positively” like Dame Edna. Likewise though he’s not the youngster with an unrequited gay crush in “Foolish I Know”, he knows love rivals fruit as a reason to go on.

Grade: A MINUS (“Tell It Back to Me”, “Such a Shame”, “Strawberries”)

Avril Lavigne: Greatest Hits

An industry-changing debut, then reliably one or two hot singles per cycle: what more could you ask for from a pop career? (If your response was “two or three hot singles per cycle”: who do you think you are, Ringo/Paul?) She showed that punk, being music, could be harnessed by someone with only a thread of connection to or interest in the counterculture; after all, even that sk8er boi proves himself by finding fame and fortune. The punk personality trait she’s retained is the never-grow-up thing: bois lie, she lies, none of that is going to stop her from inviting the likes of Machine Gun Kelly around for a quickie, though the consequence is that you might have to hit skip a couple of times. What’s sustained her is the same two octaves she’s been comfortable in all career, her whoa-oahs and yea-ee-eahs surpassed by her commitment to making the dumbest rhymes work. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be compli-CATE-ed.

Grade: A MINUS (“What the Hell”, “Girlfriend”, “Here’s to Never Growing Up”)

The Young Mothers: Better If You Let It

The titular opener is the most fluent jazz-rap cut in some time, and with respect to Jawwaad Taylor, a trumpeter under no delusion that he’s Billy Woods as an MC, the lion’s share of the credit goes to the rhythm section of Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Frank Rosaly, who control and build the funk for ten minutes. The remaining four tracks are comparably enjoyable, if not as innovative. Tenor Jason Jackson holds a honkfest on “Hymn” before the band spaces out to fulfill the religious theme. “Lijm” uses hippity sections to bookend more standard free fusion; if the individual elements aren’t super-deep, the combo’s agreeable. Non-vinyl “Song for a Poet”, written by viber-drummer Stefan Gonzalez’s late great father Dennis, returns to the spiritual, with eerie treated voices and unnatural sustain. “Scarlet Woman Lodge” starts out sounding a lot like Miles-Laswell’s Panthalassa, then guitarist Jonathan F. Horne gets to have some fun and somebody throws in death metal growls as tasteful as the LP as a whole.

Grade: A MINUS (“Better If You Let It”, “Hymn”, “Song for a Poet”)

Ano: Bone Born Bomb

Alternative idol and by all accounts genuine weirdo (“I also brush my teeth while watching dental treatment videos”) Ano’s the go-to singer for anime openings and closings. That doesn’t mean you have to have to know anything about the toons to enjoy this; it’s healthier to listen to the bright “Happy Lucky Chappy” while forgetting your high school Japanese and conclude that Takopi’s Original Sin is about a nice octopus alien who isn’t doomed to repeatedly witness death or anything. Her base voice the contemporary J-pop chirp, she’s also able to channel old school bubbliness for the Ranma 1/2 remake and the end of a world for Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction. The non-soundtrack songs rock a little harder; “Bonebreaker ☆ Evening Diary” lets her scream over a clinking metallophone. The finale, from the live-action Oshi No Ko (in which she plays Mem, the sole almost normal character) shows the strength to ride out adversity. Maybe there can be a happy ending?

Grade: B PLUS (“Past Die Future”, “骨バキ☆ゆうぐれダイアリー (Bonebreaker Evening Diary)”, “社会の窓 (Social Window)”)

Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling

I don’t understand the backlash to this—can’t be that hipsters started liking Obama again. Lyrics aside, she’s always operated on the boundary of mush, and if she has fewer distinct vowel sounds than vowels, her tunes abide, and Phoenix Rousiamanis on violin and her drum team keep them distinct. The subject matter is familiar: “This is bliss, this is hell/Forever is a feeling and I know it well”—Boygenius or 2000s pop-punk slobs? But believable specificities make it real; I totally buy that Dacus’s idea of a dream-lover is someone who’ll do the crossword with her (at least the 25x25 Sunday ones that otherwise make forever a feeling.) It’s not all word games; hotel sex and stairwell fights too are part and parcel of getting on with being a lesbian. Still, maybe the most novel song is “Modigliani”, which shows the intensity of her relationship with the Boygenius she’s only in platonic love with.

Grade: B PLUS (“Modigliani”, “Ankles”, “Talk”)

Satoko Fujii Tokyo Trio: Dream a Dream

One of Fujii’s newer settings, with relatively youthful bassist Takashi Sugawa and percussionist Ittetsu Takemura. Sugawa gets plenty of feature time and gets fine tone both plucking and bowing, Takemura has a menagerie of pet rattles and rumbles, and Fujii reminds you from her keyboard-spanning storms early on the opening “Second Step” how accomplished (and prolific) a pianist she is. Titles like “Summer Day” and “Rain Drop” are evocative in a Vivaldi way. The band slow-burns the 19-minute title piece: at times every Sugawa note is monolithic, then Fujji will drop a cascade to show there’s more than one way to chisel a monument. She and Sugawa match and contrast each other’s shifts in position and intensity, with Takemura adding atmosphere, helped by the rather ECM-y recording. Free improv that shows the rewards of painstaking preparation.

Grade: B PLUS (“Dream a Dream”, “Second Step”, “Aruku”)

Coco Jones: Why Not More?

She’s Hilary in the serious Fresh Prince streaming service reboot that’s getting a rare fourth season; she’s also DefJamMoth’s young hope for serious R&B. Here, as in Bel Air, she reimagines the past. “Taste” takes the chorus of “Toxic” and adds verses focusing on the titular sense that somehow stay PG-13. She’s at her best displaying her impressive vocal range: while “AEOMG” may not make alphabetical sense, its logical low-then-high progression shows her confidence in multiple octaves. This all seems optimized for adding Grammys to the one on her shelf rather than for actual hits—the Future feature did snag her a New Zealand number 38—but the day job’s paying, so why not more? (Speaking of muchness, the Extended edition adds “Control Freak”, maybe the most promising thing on the whole project in that it has actual psychology.)

Grade: B PLUS (“AEOMG”, “Taste”, “Control Freak”)

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