Semipop Life: Cz-czech out my melody

Hans Winterberg, Deerlady, Fabiana Palladino, Big Freedia, and more!

Hans Winterberg/Amernet String Quartet: Chamber Music Volume 2: String Quartets Nos. 2-4

Winterberg (1901–91) was a Prague-born Jewish composer who for inscrutable legal reasons didn’t have any of his works show up on disc until Toccata Classics’ Chamber Music Volume 1 in 2018. Like many midcentury not-yet-post modernists, he has an ambiguous relationship with tonality—there are moments when I think “I can work out what key this is in” and then a few seconds later, nope, I’m wrong. In its way, though, his work is melodic, with plenty of motifs you could hum along to, in theory, if you were Schoenberg. And, reflecting an interest in Czech folk, it’s locally funky, with (temporary and contingent) basslines and all. The Second Quartet dates to 1942, before he was forced into Theresienstadt Ghetto, and while it’s dangerous to draw causal arrows from his and the world’s circumstances to his music, the whole thing is pretty fucking sad. His Third and Fourth Quartets, written postwar after he moved to Bavaria (!?), aren’t polka barrels of laughs either, but those at least leave open the possibility of catharsis. Perhaps he was just a guy absolutely willing to go where his work took him: a village dance, a former SS town, the obscure center of his own mind.

Grade: A (String Quartet No. 2, String Quartet No. 3)

Deerlady: Greatest Hits

First Nations songwriter/jazz bassist/everything-doer Mali Obomsawin got in touch with experimental guitarist Magdalena Abrego to polish up some indie rock songs. The project sat around for some months until “There There” was featured on the “Deer Lady” episode of Reservation Dogs, and they suddenly had a catchier band name than “Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego”. Obomsawin’s hushed vocals evoke folkiness, but Abrego’s ability to skronk judiciously as well as the general ominousness mean the duo also sound like Low, or why not semi-unplugged Nirvana if they’re going to use those minor progressions. Like fellow wanting-to-believe-in-thingser Michelle Zauner, Obomsawin makes her culture too vast for pigeonholing, writing universalist tunes to amplify words that both work at surface level and encourage deeper comprehension, so that you need no prior knowledge of the history of the Canadian Indian residential school system to know that “two hundred thousand years buried beneath” is describing some fucked up shit. (You should then learn the history of the Canadian Indian residential school system.) Yet there’s tenderness too, as when Abrego plucks two- or three-note chords on “There There” because who needs more? In unsettling settings, moments of calm are diamonds.

Grade: A MINUS (“Believer”, “Seeing Two”, “There There”)

Berliner Philharmoniker: The Unsuk Chin Edition

The intent is to canonize Chin, who was born in Seoul in 1961 and has lived in Germany since coming to study with Ligeti in the ’80s, as a Great Modern Composer. The Berliners and an all-star assortment of conductors make a case that listeners who use the word “uncompromising” a lot will respect. Chin’s most renowned work is her Cello Concerto, notorious for its difficulty: Alban Gerhardt, for whom it was written and who solos here, has talked about how little it cedes to the cellist in terms of natural hand and finger positions. It’s a battle between soloist and orchestra as well as between soloist and composer, with the latter playing dungeon master: maybe she wants Gerhardt to win, but there are rules, you know. The earlier Piano Concerto makes more obvious use of vocabulary developed by the Ligeti line. Sunwook Kim handles the extremes well, becoming part of the flow when the orchestra’s clattering away and making every note count when the focus is on him. With the First Violin Concerto, heavy on open strings and harmonics, it’s easier to lean back and enjoy the fireworks (though not for soloist Christian Tetzlaff.) The standout among the shorter works in the collection is “Le silence des Sirènes”, on which soprano Barbara Hannigan plays sirens Homeric and Joycean, crashing the orchestra into rocks and/or a Dublin bar, whichever canon you prefer.

Grade: A MINUS (Cello Concerto, “Le silence des Sirènes”, Piano Concerto)

Fabiana Palladino

Pop-R&B debut raved about in the UK press—well, stopped clocks and all that. She’s on Jai Paul’s label; one song features him and a couple veer too close to his work. More often, however, this is reminiscent of the Paisley Park Greater Metropolitan Area, especially when the guitars come out. “Shoulda”, co-written with Paul and her dad (who as D’Angelo knows is no mean bass player), sounds like something off Dirty Mind, sans the dirty mind. Blessed with a supple-not-overwhelming voice, Palladino makes the most out of her instrument by singing actual words—the decade of mushfog may be drawing to a close, hallelujah—and decorating them with brief runs of moderate difficulty and effectiveness. She imbues stock phrases like “give me a sign” with good old British restrained desire, like a coy mistress almost convinced to make ’em run. Despite the throwback vibe, there’s some sense of urgency, as if everyone slumming in the past would like to make it to 1999 one day, if only to see if the party lives up to the hype.

Grade: A MINUS (“Shoulda”, “Give Me a Sign”, “Can You Look in the Mirror?”)

The Fully Celebrated Orchestra: Sob Story

Though this is Jim Hobbs’s jazz-rock-loungers’s first record in 15 years, I don’t think they’ve ever stopped playing (they’ve had a residency at Boston’s Midway Cafe since time immemorial.) Replaying 2009’s Drunk on the Blood of the Holy Ones clarifies that while there’s been little change in their tongue-in-cheek attitude, they might’ve refined their musicality. Busy cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, who missed that one, returns; he relishes this opportunity to let loose, squealing at length way over yonder in his upper register. Hobbs’s alto often whines in pseudo-parallel, louchely slipping a fraction of a tone or beat away before rejoining the unison. The rhythm section gets some fun R&B vamps in, and guitarist Ian Ayers takes decent solos. Jokes aren’t stretched past their breaking point: “Tough Guy” states the head, soloists get their eight bars to growl or dickwave or swagger, there’s one more chorus and a drum roll, and they’re done within two minutes. To finish, an “Oh My Papa” shows irony can be heartfelt.

Grade: A MINUS (“Grave Merchant”, “Oh My Papa”, “Tough Guy”)

Big Freedia with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra: Live at the Orpheum Theater

Huh, all this time all Freedia needed for a first-rate full-length was a 43-piece orchestra. As the saying goes, many hands make light twerk: the strings add drama, the woodwinds make the bounce feel like a trampoline, and there’s so much ass in the brass that one hastens to tell Tchaikovsky the news. Freedia eschews the innovations of carpetbaggers like Beyoncé, such as singing in tune; it’s New Orleans, you don’t have to hit the notes, and that goes double at a funeral. Ace material from Freedia’s last decade is resurrected, prayers are answered, wiggles are re-released. Energy, seriousness, cheek, feeling, the other cheek—it’s all in her performance, and the audience responds to every part of it.

Grade: A MINUS (“N.O. Bounce”, “Chasing Rainbows”, “Rent”)

Judas Priest: Invincible Shield

Their revitalized run, kicked off by Richard Faulkner replacing K.K. Downing in 2011, continues exploring no new hells. After a synthy start, “Panic Attack” is all pace and power worthy of Painkiller, as the guitar attack builds to speed triplets and Rob Halford screams the title at a pitch I can only hope to hit in my seventies. They’re heavier again at moderate tempos, with non-melodic ch-chunking and Scott Travis playing single booming bass drum hits. The songs, kept to a sensible four-and-a-half minute average, don’t flag until the Spanish guitar comes out on the last track before the unnecessary bonuses. All that’s missing, “Panic Attack” excepted, is okay lyrics. What’s the point of bowing to genre convention and singing about a devil, literal or Trump, if you’re going to call him a “fictitious conjurer”? If Halford wants to play it close, he doesn’t have to sing about prostate cancer or his husband, but could at least follow the occult tradition of writing about cats.

Grade: B PLUS (“Panic Attack”, “Crown of Horns”, “Gates of Hell”)

Usher: Coming Home

“His best album since Confessions,” says Humanizing the Vacuum. Having not listened to all of them, I don’t know if this deserves an Alfred Is Right, but there’s much to like about Coming Home: maybe too much, in the CD-era tradition. The songwriting is the most functional that name recognition can buy: consecutive entries called “I Love U” and “Please U” are about what it says on the tin, and you could guess which song was from the Original Motion Picture The Color Purple even if it didn’t have H.E.R. on it. That all suffices to let him flex his vocal chords and even show a little maturity. His guests, aesthetically useless in themselves, get Ush out of his comfort zone—Afrobeats yay, K-pop uh—and he has no problem establishing that he’s a more accomplished vocalist than Burna Boy or Summer Walker. Only the Billy Joel localization “A-Town Girl” (groan) is pointless; leave that one for Latto.

Grade: B PLUS (“Kissing Strangers”, “Coming Home”, “Big”)

John Pickard: Mass in Troubled Times

An idiosyncratic mix of choral, performed by the BBC Singers, and organ music, performed by David Goode—perhaps the idea is to feel archaic, though the organ pieces don’t pretend Beethoven never happened and are more interesting for this. Goode’s solo Tesserae requires some patience and decent headphones, but its fragments do cohere into something worth contemplating. Orion adds Chloë Abbott’s trumpet and flugelhorn and posits that by looking out towards Betelguese some Baroque sense of discovery can be simulated without having to restrict yourself to tonalities that Bach knew about. As for the vocal music, well, the Mass is one among many, and however ideologically admirable substituting bits of the Quran may be, it doesn’t change the category. The smaller pieces, including a few motets and Ozymandias, are more effective, the latter allowing the BBC Singers to get the demolished grandeur of Walter White across. Now to work out how he wrote it in 1983.

Grade: B PLUS (“Orion”, “3 Latin Motets”, “Tesserae”)

The Neptune Power Federation: Goodnight My Children

On their sixth album, these Australians who’ve dabbled in stonerism and semi-fashionable metals are straight hard rock, while retaining their costumes and decorative skulls. It’s a better use of their skill set given somebody in the band can write tunes—likely singer Screaming Loz Sutch, who puts small shifts into her second verses to differentiate them from the firsts. Self-harmonizing up high, she gives the sense that her faux Grimm and Poe tales have aye been ready to materialize out of the ether. Guitarists Mike Foxall and Troy Scerri have licks aplenty, and whichever of them shreds on “Twas a Lie” gets to tick the 1978 AOR Solo achievement off their list. There are a few slow minutes and a more concerning number of 1978 AOR Band in the Mid ’80s minutes, but these are outweighed by the rifftastic, the creepy, and the kooky. Play it out of a very large skeleton this Halloween.

Grade: B PLUS (“Let Us Begin”, “Twas a Lie”, “Betrothed to the Serpent”)