Semipop Life: A very high shelf

Thomas Anderson, Franco, the Paranoid Style, Twice, and more!

Thomas Anderson: Hello, I’m from the Future

I’ve liked many Anderson songs before, especially those written from unusual PoVs (Donner Party member, encyclopedia fancier) but admit sometimes thinking “good songs, so what?” No such reservations here; there’s no shortage of sharp angles. Whatever happened to David Bowie’s cell phone? Who’s looking after Judas’ orphaned kids? How does Titian’s Madonna of the Rabbit help us survive times of plague and/or the running dog imperialist bourgeoisie? If Anderson’s Syd Barrett tribute isn’t that mad, neither was Roger Waters’s; meanwhile, Johnny Mercer is dropped off at Moon River’s edge with a harmonica and left to fend for himself. There are enjoyable formal exercises: if you’re writing a song called “I Just Wanna Be Entertained”, it’s fun to take route one and repeat-rhyme the last word of the title. That after all these years Anderson still sings boyishly, or at least grad-studently, adds poignancy. His anti-virtuosic self-accompaniments deploy organ and jangle for atmosphere and to channel affect, with the minor-key “Miss January” sounding like a garbled memory of “Wicked Game” and/or a Kodak ad. When it comes to the emotional peaks, the elegiac “Jenifer Never” and the flashback finale “Lincoln in a Leisure Suit”, tears will be jerked.

Grade: A (“Jenifer Never”, “Drinking from the River”, “Miss January”)

Franco Luambo Makiadi Presents Les Editions Populaires (1968​-​1970)

Another essential Congo comp from the invaluable CD-phobes at Planet Ilunga. The opening “Ku Kisantu Kikuenda Ku” was on Francophonic and the James Brown rip “Ebo Aboya Ngai” was on The Very Best of the Rumba Giant of Zaire; nothing else rings a bell for me. The period is crucial, and not only because it was the time Franco started to get chummy with Mobutu (it wouldn’t last.) Happy to give anything a try now that he was on his own label, you can hear him and his band melding the innovations of rival Docteur Nico into their own more rugged sound, beginning a process that would come to full flower in their Simaro-Mangwana 1970s. Franco sings a lot (perhaps because this was an era of high personnel turnover amongst Kinshasa bands), and while his most enjoyable vocals might be his funk grunts, he’s also compelling when pathos is called for. “Kamalandua” might have the prettiest seben, with Franco parallel plucking his own rhythm as the band grooves on. The sax work is excellent throughout, with a touch of melancholy on the minor key ones, though don’t ask me who plays what. As usual with OK Jazz, there’s also some neat harmonies, some Cubanismo, boundless joy.

Grade: A (“Kamalandua”, “Congo Mibale”, “Minoko”)

The Paranoid Style: The Interrogator

No matter how many old New Wave riffs or ex-dB’s members they jack, they’re a songs band, and in terms of both melodies and, harder to judge, lyrics, this is their strongest set since the early EPs and Rolling Disclosure. This time Elizabeth Nelson goes heavy on declarative first-person sentences, which the listener is left to decide whether to interpret autobiographically: “I would punch you in the illegal zone” one doubts, “I have solved unproven crimes” who knows, “I have bested all my peers” well yeah. Despite a refusal to state opinions explicitly (those wanting an adjudication on the Molly Maguires’ alleged labor terrorism will, like the Mollies, be left hanging), this might low-key be these D.C. boundary riders’ most political album. For all its “Magic Woman Touch” thrust, “Styles Make Fights” betrays a palpable anxiety; if Mondale was never going to beat Reagan, Dukakis-Bush was just a bad match-up, and there are points in history when you really don’t want one of those. Nelson’s found more distinctive ways to cram all those syllables in there—it’d never crossed my mind to pronounce “semi-pop” like that—such that it’s hard to imagine anyone else singing these songs. Maybe noted woman author appreciator R. Zimmerman: now that’s a kindred match-up.

Grade: A (“I Love the Sound of Structured Class”, “Print the Legend”, “Styles Make Fights”)

Ngwaka Son Systeme: Iboto Ngenge

This spin-off of Kokoko titles their first track “Okokok”, which is—don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about heteropalindromes again—a claim to continuity with the rich history of Kinshasa’s music. If anything’s flipped, it’s that these six streaming/seven download tracks are more song-oriented than most recent Congotronics, to the extent that there are Lingala lyrics on Bandcamp. Guitarist Bom’s Bomolo doesn’t exactly play like he’s auditioning for OK Jazz; his simple figures are effective, however, as he and bassist Dieu Merci Caméléon, fuzzed up by German label Eck Echo for export, provide structure for the now de rigeur empty-bottles-and-junk clatter that propels them as fast as they need to go. Leader Love Lokombe and his vocal team sing and chant and sort of rap about the ancestors and the children, and also nonsense syllables. Sometimes there’s falsetto ridiculousness, while on “Dondwa”, there’s a little Auto-Tune that contrasts with a solo Bomolo plays on an instrument Franco might mistake for the recycling. At the end there’s a Colombian dub remix; why not, they’ve earned it.

Grade: A MINUS (“Bo Lobi Pe”, “Dondwa”, “Lakala”)

NMIXX: Fe3O4: Break EP

That’s the formula for black iron oxide (see, getting a 95 in high school chemistry was useful for something.) Labelmates of Itzy, NMIXX are instead in Aespa’s lane: cosmopolitan and sophisticated, with hints of the avant-garde in, for example, the closing accelerando of “BOOM”. They’re distinguished by their singing: the backing and group vocals are especially fine. I dig the chromatic runs on “Dash” and the general enthusiasm. The leads live up to this, with Haewon (the heady one) and Lily (the belter) providing contrasting high bits, plus there are some of the most sensual “woo”s in recent memory on “Soñar (Breaker)”; you bet they pronounce the virgulilla. After the exhilaration of the first two tracks, the genre-mixxing of the rest of the record isn’t as thrilling—does any Korean group need to be localizing country-pop (ed.: yes)—yet they maintain a sense of purpose and a group identity: the de rigueur Jersey club track, “Passionfruit”, shows off their pace and precision. They’re on their way to the top commercial tier; may they stay weird doing so.

Grade: A MINUS (“Soñar (Breaker)”, “Dash”, “Passionfruit”)

Emmeluth’s Amoeba: Nonsense

Danish-born Signe Emmeluth’s staked out a distinct territory in the amiable, competitive field of Nordijazz. Her compositions are distinct from those of her fellow Trondheim grads: more jumpy, more Monky in their odd intervals and quasi-arbitrary repetitions. Improvising on her themes, her band—Karl Bjorå, Christian Balvig, and Ole Mofjell on guitar/piano/drums—are closer to the transatlantic clatter-breathe-clatter free jazz norm, yet Emmeluth, on alto, has a way of dragging them away again. Sometimes she blows a single color continuously before bending the note in another direction at a late point. Elsewhere she’ll probe at a simple phrase, wondering what to do with it; often the answer is blow it up. If this sounds abstract, you can bop along to the likes of “Shaking Tail Feathers” without worrying about whether the shaking is transverse or longitudinal. The rest of the ensemble is fine, with Mofjell in particular getting some demonstrative crashes in, but there’s no question who the boss is. Maybe not the best jazz album of the year so far; maybe the best performance.

Grade: A MINUS (“Chic Blip”, “Shaking Tail Feathers”, “Spam”)

Twice: With You-th EP

One of K-pop’s more reliable girl groups, this is their highest fluke peak since 2019’s Feel Special, earning them a Billboard number one album (though these days anyone in stock at Target can get one of those, unless Taylor deigns to block you.) Never bleeding edge, they trend-follow by making concessions towards fourth gen sonics: even the traditionalist lead single “I Got You”, with the group singing snug English messages of comfort in love and friendship, has a double-time feel. “Rush”, with lyrics by solo prospect and accidental Nazi (Google it if you must) Chaeyoung, is an admitted PinkPantheress ripoff with added harmony vocals and pop sheen, while “One Spark” feels like it’s trying to fill a breakbeat requirement on a technicality. “You Get Me” is a neat symmetric finish, reassuring their fanbase that their bromides about faith and trust conceivably apply to parasocial relationships as well. Nothing unprecedented, but with lots of tunes and unceasing professionalism to put it over the top.

Grade: A MINUS (“I Got You”, “Rush”, “You Get Me”)

Mama Sissoko: Live

Malian ex-griot Sissoko came up playing with Super Biton de Ségou before striking out on his own, getting big enough on the Euro world music circuit for Herbie Hancock and Santana to cover him before he reconstituted his old band and mostly dropped out of Western sight. This set (wrongly credited on some services to Mama “Badema” Sissoko, a different guitarist) was recorded in Paris in 1998; the bulk of the track list overlaps with that of his more polished subsequent near-classic Soleil de Minuit. Sissoko makes electric and occasional acoustic guitars sound kora-like, fingerpicking (I’d guess) each note with clarity. The band includes multiple supporting guitarists and on one track a donso ngoni; they lean into grooves that span more Malian traditions than I can name, as well as making the obligatory nod to Cuba. The two versions of “Soleil de Minuit” show their range: the first a Baobab-like simmer, the second a jammy opportunity for solos, with djembe player Dramane Diarra taking his chance to freak out.

Grade: B PLUS (“Soleil de Minuit”, “Safiatou”, “Douga”)

Heems & Lapgan: Lafandar

While the other Swet Shop Boy went and won an Oscar, Heems has spent the time since 2016 working in streaming service marketing and not changing much about his rapping. He returns with some clever lines, plenty of jk-not-jk dumb lines, and a cricket verse as uneven as the Long Island pitch at the current T20 World Cup. Producer Lapgan is the more valuable player, digging into filmi archives to find all manner of South Asian instruments to illustrate the rhymes. When it’s time for one of Heems’s patented Serious Moments on “Accent”, the cool woodwinds restrain and direct the emotion. One hopes students in Prof. Suri’s NYU course on Digital Service Providers & Emerging Markets learn there’s a world of music out there to explore, and encouraging people to do so might be more profitable than autoplaying them the latest Sabrina Carpenter single, no matter how catchy.

Grade: B PLUS (“Accent”, “I’m Pretty Cool”, “Obi Toppin (Darling)”)

Tierra Whack: World Wide Whack

Six years on, Whack World sounds prophetic now that shower microthoughts over bedroom microbeats are as monetizable as 2020s recorded music gets for non-messianic artists. This technical debut album, less striking per minute, is nevertheless endearing. Like the mercurial Chance and few others, she pulls off smooth transitions between singing and rapping, sometimes teasingly missing her notes by thaaaat much, sometimes giving spoken syllables the frequency-spectrum space of sung ones. She and/or her producers have been listening to K-pop and/or Radiohead: the more toybox the sonics, the more insistent the blown-out bass or trap rhythm that anchors them. Her suicide puns are mordant, though there are too many of them for a bleeding heart like me to be comfortable with. But for conservation’s sake, you don’t want to get too comfortable singing in the shower, let alone the car wash.

Grade: B PLUS (“Chanel Pit”, “Imaginary Friends”, “Shower Song”)