Semipop Life: Modern sounds
Matana Roberts, Red Velvet, Midnight, Hammers of Misfortune, and more!
ALBUM OF THE MOMENT
Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis
This grab-bag of jazz, blues, spirituals, and jaw-harpery, more Charles Ives than Harry Smith, surpasses Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile, her previous high-water mark. There’s a long tradition of black metropolitanism with Langston Hughes at or near the wellspring that attempts to recombine shards from a less urban, more Southern black history into a coherent experience — necessarily always with an acknowledgement of suffering, but one suffused with joy and freedom and with the contradictions inherent in a phrase like “Emma Jean’s white play cousin.” What sets Roberts apart, in addition to the highness of her modernism and her total respect for her sources, is her omnivorousness. As her series has wound its way nonlinearly and non-chronologically upriver, it’s accumulated additional modes and flavors: here, jug bands and barn dancers join her ever-growing second line. Whether reclaiming a shanty that drifted from the cotton fields to the Atlantic or constructing spaces for her sax or guests like Steve Swell to permeate, her purpose is always clear and her band recognizes her urgency. While she’s more than adequate as a singer, it’s her rapid yet laconic delivery of spoken words that most forcefully express that one person’s history is another’s memory, that the past isn’t even past. Roll the old chariot along.
Grade: A PLUS (“Trail of the Smiling Sphinx”, “Her Mighty Waters Run”, “All Things Beautiful”)
Red Velvet: The ReVe Festival Finale
The strongest girl group of the last decade finally, if accidentally, makes a full-length worthy of their talents and color schemes by adding three out of four good new ones to two decent EPs. Best of the fresh ones is “Psycho”, a riff on, of all things, “Creep”, compensating for a lack of Jonny Greenwood with a clever arrangement and actual good singing. Yet that track’s (psycho-)logical angle is atypical. Their comparative advantage is unadulterated sensation, as they bombard you with onomatopoeia and repetitions that register as pure sound regardless of whether you have the color-coded lyrics in front of you. It’s sunshine and sunshowers and bicycles and sand on the beach. It’s outside.
Grade: A MINUS (“Psycho”, “Umpah Umpah”, “Parade”)
Midnight: Satanic Royalty (2011)
A project of one Athenar of Cleveland, OH, this is a throwback to the point in time when black metal first emerged as a distinct subgenre, which as it happens is about the same time that This Is Spinal Tap came out. If there’s a whiff of self-parody behind titles like “Holocaustic Deafening”, the songs-yes-songs develop as efficiently as on a mid-tier Motörhead album, delivering big riffs and terse solos in three minutes a pop. The rhythm section is particularly heavy, with big backbeats and transuranic bass not without its melodic pleasures. And Athenar’s committed screaming isn’t mannered at all.
Grade: A MINUS (“Lust Filth and Sleaze”, “Black Damnation”, “Rip This Hell”)
Hammers of Misfortune: Dead Revolution (2016)
I do like how “misfortune” leaves it vague as to whether said tool will cave in your skull or whether you’ll stub your toe on the one you left on the floor after hanging up your framed Gwar poster. John Cobbett’s band unabashedly appropriate prog tricks, like the regularly shifting tonal center on “The Precipice (Waiting for the Crash…)”, while keeping each track heavy and headbangable. The slower ones are, well, slower, and I’m not sure “Here Comes the Sky” needed a trumpet outro. But this is mostly lovely, the ’70s-style solos as much as the evocation of uncannily deserted NorCal evenings, which are straight out of what we used to optimistically call post-apocalyptic fiction.
Grade: A MINUS (“Dead Revolution”, “The Precipice (Waiting for the Crash…)”, “Flying Alone”)
Old buddy of J Dilla and Moodymann comes up with his fourth or fifth solo album in sixteen years. So spelunky that Parliament’s “Knee Deep” becomes “Waist Deep”, the house beats are filled out with samples from the last half century-plus of dance music, bringing much of the New World to Detroit. While only the eternally restless would think crisp kick-and-clap ever gets tiring, Andres accommodates them by sometimes omitting the claps and sometimes gesturing towards rap roots. Perhaps the sole flaw is that 2012’s classic “New for You”, here in two not-dissimilar versions, is rivaled only by the Dillaesque “Run Dat Shit”.
Grade: B PLUS (“New for You”, “Run Dat Shit”, “Waist Deep”)