Semipop Life: Metropolitan exchanges

Scorpion Kings x Tresor, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, We Are the Union, Amyl and the Sniffers, and more!

Scorpion Kings (Kabza De Small & DJ Maphorisa) x Tresor: Rumble in the Jungle

The amapiano kings’ crucial addition to their fifth collaboration in three years is Congo-born singer Trésor Riziki, who as an orphaned refugee emigrated to Durban, where he washed cars and learned English; he’s now toplining for Drake. His chest and head voices overlap substantially, allowing the producers to layer them to create a sharp, resilient instrument. His best special effect is when he powers up his laser falsetto, reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s except more precise (plus he doesn’t have to sing Jeff Buckley songs), into the petawatts. He saves this for special occasions, like affirming that “La Vie est Belle”: a Papa Wemba reference, in case you missed the album’s claim to pan-Africanism. Further linguistic and sonic contributions are requisitioned from across the continent (there’s a token indie-pop song featuring Cape Town’s Beatenberg, who even dress like Vampire Weekend.) Amapiano’s genial syncopation relative to grimier grooves like gqom can feel samey even to repetition lovers, but as someone so old he still listens to albums all the way through, I can report this encompasses sufficient multitudes to maintain interest for one hour thirty-eight minutes. While effortless fun is the genre standard, here the air is often suffused with melancholy, which biographers will not find hard to connect to Trésor growing up in a country at civil war. The gently bumping bass and stentorian shaking are constant reminders that for better or worse, everything moves on.

Grade: A (“Soro”, “La Vie est Belle”, “Neriya”)

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten: (Exit) Knarr

I used up my biathlon jokes last week, so I guess I’ll talk about the album. The subtitles refer to places important in his life, from alpine village Oppdal to sprawling megalopolis Mexico City. As in any good bildungsroman, there are diverse tones and moods, though Eivind Lønning’s prominent, oft-muted trumpet makes the default vibe somewhat ’70s Davisy, especially when guitarist Oddrun Lilja Jonsdottir assists by playing Pete Cosey (though the “Miles Avenue” that’s the opening track’s namesake refers to Flaten’s pre-pandemic address in South Austin.) The bassist-composer, however, permits un-Milesian moments of orchestral grandeur that the drummers are tempted to one-two-three-four their way through; elsewhere, saxophonists Mette Rasmussen and Atle Nymo will play free at a nod. In the three decades since he came down from the mountains to go to jazz school in Trondheim, Flaten’s played with everyone (not least as the Thing’s bassist) and absorbed many discrete conceptions of beauty. Here he smooshes them all together, and while the joys are thrilling, there’s often a deep sense of peace at the center of the compositions, even in Amsterdam. In his life, he’s loved you all.

Grade: A (“Museumplein - For Amsterdam”, “A La Lala Love You - For Chicago”, “Brinken - For Trondheim”)

We Are the Union: Ordinary Life

Something draws trans artists to that title. Reade Wolcott, whose singing is appealingly unadorned, makes her story of self-destruction turning into self-discovery feel like something regular, which in art it is, whether or not the self-discovery includes one’s gender identity. The pop-curious not-too-ska punk sounds like the preference of any number of former Michiganders whose musical horizons were shaped by the soundtrack to Digimon: The Movie (2000), with the judicious trombone of Jer Hunter (enby themselves) reinforced by ringer sax and trumpet as necessary. Why the obsession with ordinariness when you know you’re going to reject it? For one thing, it would make things more straightforward: “Tessa, tell me that you love me, make it easy”, she pleads: even the horn section seems relieved she got the words out. Wolcott’s old enough to know it’s not going to be that simple regardless of what the reply is, not least because of the itinerant lifestyles of small-label musicians. It’s heartbreaking, it’s inspirational, you can sing along to it. Ditty bop sha lang lang.

Grade: A MINUS (“Morbid Obsessions”, “Boys Will Be Girls”, “Everything Alone”)

Amyl and the Sniffers: Comfort to Me

Highly charismatic bogan/hippy fronts a band consisting of some guys. The stadium-punk production does a good job of rendering any absence of musical originality beside the point, so let’s just do what every reviewer does and focus on the singer. Preferring supermarket work to the academy, Amy Taylor leaves her reading habits ambiguous—maybe she’s read a bunch of theory, she is a 21st century punk after all—but her Marxist song simply yowls “It’s just for capital/Am I an animal?” with such force that there’s no doubt an animal is one of the things she is. She’s unpredictable, needy and demanding; she appreciates blokes even though they’re shit; she’s not as drunk as she seems. She casually drops the c-word (against a man, or men) in the title of a song in which she later claims to be a businesswoman; par for the course for Australian executives, perhaps. As long as her some guys help her actualize her wrath, she should keep them around.

Grade: A MINUS (“Security”, “Laughing”, “Capital”)

Parris: Soaked in Indigo Moonlight

British post-dubstep producer whose 2020 Polychrome Swim EP I previously reviewed favorably if somewhat analogically; this succinct full-length is more creative and entertaining. Lots of people use video game coin noises, but Parris has a bunch of variations on them, changing pitches to make it sound like World 1-2 has glitched. There are plenty of beats for beats’ sake, which is the only reason beats need to have to exist, and this never gets bogged down in foggy London synths for more than a minute at a time. Poppiest by far is “Skater’s World”, in which Eden Samara sings about, well, skaters, with Parris shifting the tonal center up and down like an X Games competitor ollieing into a… grind? Yeah, analogies don’t help when I know less skateboarding jargon than dance music jargon.

Grade: A MINUS (“Skaker’s World”, “Poison Pudding”, “Movements”)

Grand Kallé & African Jazz (& Manu Dibango): Joseph Kabasele and the Creation of Surboum African Jazz

A collection of early ’60s Belgian-recorded releases from Grand Kallé’s label by his African Jazz supergroup and its derivatives (with a few mildly incongruous contributions led by Manu Dibango), of which only “Bana Na Nwa” I can recall hearing before. The resulting compilation is, somewhat unfortunately, important for an understanding of what Kabasele’s boys were willing to attempt—all manner of Latin rhythms performed in Sid Caesar-style doubletalk, Dizzy Gillespie, topical Eurotrash, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”—for money nobody but the maestro was guaranteed to see much of. While this material is not nearly as consistent as on Stern’s His Life, His Music, the performances are generally strong, although it appears that even at this stage Franco was the better bandleader, as African Jazz sometimes struggles with the classic Afropop problem of keeping the horns in the same key as everyone else. But in addition to Kallé himself, you get two of the great Congolese musicians, Rochereau and Dr. Nico, with the former at a fascinating formative stage and the latter well on his way to creating the classic soukous sound of African Fiesta. (The earlier “somewhat unfortunately” is because the only physical is an allegedly lavishly-illustrated double vinyl, while the 25 Euro Bandcamp download comes with a JPG of the cover and a JPG of the box.)

Grade: A MINUS (“Georgette Ye Ndeko”, “Twist À Leo”, “Guidado Colamano”)

Hassan Wargui: Tiddukla

Berber banjoist who played a major role in Jace “DJ /rupture” Clayton’s 2016 book Uproot, which would’ve been on my music books of the decade list had I ever got around to writing it up. For this release, the good people at Hive Mind Records are marketing Wargui as a traditionalist, even though he’s evidently using modern software to augment his sound. With guembri-plucker Omar Baloul and a trio of percussionists in tow, Wargui’s free to switch between Gnawan drone and light-touch Auto-Tune, all the time striving to express the simply-put concepts of his titles (“Time”, “Rights”, “Friendship”), and in my translation-free opinion, mostly succeeding. I’m not sure how much, if any, digital processing went into making what I think are the castanet-like “krakch” sound so delicate, but those things really clink.

Grade: B PLUS (“Tiddukla”, “Azerf”, “Isawl Omarg”)

Flukten: Velkommen håp

Yep, yet another Norwegian jazz supergroup, which like many of them features Hanna Paulsberg on tenor and Hans Hulbækmo on drums. I really like Paulsberg’s tone here: it has a pronounced rasp and doesn’t seem too “live”, appropriate for a pandemic-era recording. Guitarist Marius Hirth Klovning gets some interesting effects doubling her and supplies sharp Ribotesque interjections on demand. The stars (except when things get too ballady), however, are the rhythm section, Bárður Reinert Poulsen’s quietly steady bass contrasting with Hulbækmo’s extroverted tubthumping. Homework questions for you to Google: wtf is a “ð”, whose ass is that on the cover, and is that a fish between his legs?

Grade: B PLUS (“Pave Toten Totten”, “Velkommen håp”, “Budeie boogie”)

Squid: Bright Green Field

Not-unfamiliar postpunk territory prospected by a vocalist as unhinged as any one-and-a-half B-52’s. The occasional incongruously Teutonic beat-if-we’re-generous notwithstanding, this works because Olly Judge has a way with language and calculated yelps that emphasize that some dystopias are more fun than others. Indeed, “G.S.K.”’s tale of a civilization sputtering along at the pleasure of Big Pharma might well induce nostalgia for last season’s dystopia. They’re the rare band that’s better off doing longer songs: on “Narrator” and “Pamphlets” they get beyond summarizing art films and Ballard novels and start crashing ideas into each other. If they don’t reach a synthesis, at least give you a groove worth risking going through your windshield for.

Grade: B PLUS (“Narrator”, “Pamphlets”, “G.S.K.”)

Low: Hey What

I expected to, as usual, admire their integrity and never want to hear the album again; instead, I’ve made it through five plays without regrets. Not that I’m not going to go back and do comparative listening, but the noise guitar alternately grates and soothes like it’s supposed to, and in all but a couple of places, there’s enough forward momentum that it never gets stuck in one mode for too long. The best tunes are on “I Can Wait” and “More”, and if it’s predictable from the titles alone which of those two I prefer, I appreciate that they make a decent aesthetic case for the former.

Grade: B PLUS (“More”, “I Can Wait”, “Days Like These”)