Semipop Life: O.F. (Original Flounder)

Zebra Katz, Lil Baby, GFriend, Jay Electronica, and more!

Zebra Katz: Less Is Moor

After eight years that have included being a Gorillaz and moving to, where else, Berlin, here’s the “Ima Read” guy’s whatever “debut album” means these days. He brings the mellifluous sounds of malfunctioning computers and functioning computers and Cassie to the dance clubs, which have held up better as loci of the fight against oppression than the punk clubs have. His bass murmurs have an expressive range that wouldn’t be apparent from the sheet music, and the delicacy of their phrasing seems miraculous given the spiky synths that seem millimeters from slicing them up. The sheer variety of ways he delivers basic Carlin obscenities keeps things piquant as ish. Straightforward example: “Fuck bitches on the right.”

Grade: A MINUS (“Ish”, “Blush”, “In In In”)

Lil Baby: My Turn (27-track Deluxe Edition, not to be confused with the 26-track Deluxe Edition)

Key word: “Consistent”. Don’t know if it’s surprising or just very 2020 that the year’s most streamed album adheres to Ramones-level palette restriction, essaying minor variations on the same basic post-“Versace” pattern. Spice is provided by old friends (Young Thug, Gunna) and new (his gambling buddy and fellow aficionado of overpriced streetwear 42 Dugg.) Bear in and you’ll find barbed lines throughout: they’re especially concentrated on “Sum 2 Prove”, which contrasts past eviction notices with his current successes, yet still recognizes the perilous nature of black fame: “They don’t want see us on TV unless it's the news.” From there, it’s only a zoom-out to the bigger picture.

Grade: A MINUS (“The Bigger Picture”, “Sum 2 Prove”, “Whoa”)

GFriend: Labyrinth and Song of the Sirens mini-albums

Underdogs until their minor label got acquired by BTS’s management, they’ve had the best artistic 2020 in K-pop. If you want the fine lead singles (one a bowdlerization of turn-of-the-last-decade EDM, and if you thought that genre was unbowdlerizable then do I have a national song machine for you, the other compressing generations of studio perfectionism into tantalizing triples) on one disc, you might opt instead for this month’s album Walpurgis Night and yes I had to Google that, but the supporting material is more varied on these six-trackers. Stans will appreciate the Philly-quality funk-string arrangements on “Eclipse” and the eclectic second half of Song of the Sirens: retro one, trebly one that’s about dessert of course, key-change-driven Britpop ballad. Even Stangers-on might want to check that last one.

Labyrinth: B PLUS (“Labyrinth”, “Eclipse”, “Crossroads”)

Song of the Sirens: A MINUS (“Stairs in the North”, “Apple”, “Crème Brûlée”)

The Lemon Twigs: Songs for the General Public

Two Long Island brothers, only one of whom was the original Flounder in the Broadway Little Mermaid, in love with ’70s pop, dressing up, singalongs, dropping randomly-placed Dylan impressions. This is probably a concept album or something, but I liked their last one until I found out it was about a chimp going to high school so I’m not going to look it up this time. They’ve studied and honed their buddy Todd Rundgren’s chord progressions so much that their sharpened notes require no “don't touch” sign, they’re visible from so far off. Still, in a sloppy time, a spirit of self-determination combined with some damned formalist discipline has as much hey-look-at-this value as an educated chimp.

Grade: A MINUS (“Live in Favor of Tomorrow”, “Moon”, “Hell on Wheels”)

Jay Electronica: A Written Testimony

If we’re going to have Seniors Tour rap albums, which at the least is better than Seniors Tour politics, the mercurial Jay Elec shows how to do it. He mixes up flows, compensates for diminished power with tricky patterns and unexpected vocabulary, and probably subscribes to Light in the Attic’s mailing list so that the samples on his self-produced tracks mood-match those from Seniors Tour beatmakers Swizz Beatz and The Alchemist. And yet on his decades-in-the-making debut, he has to contend with Seniors Tour majority owner Jay-Z violating social distancing with shadow verses that are marginally more fluent and an order of magnitude more marketable than his, not least because Hova’s too interested in his profit margins to bring up the Salman Rushdie fatwa. But when Elec manages to brush off his boss for a minute and a half and regain control with No I.D. on “Fruits of the Spirit”, he goes on a multilingual tear that shows “Exhibit C” was only a bit of a fluke.

Grade: B PLUS (“Universal Soldier”, “Fruits of the Spirit”, “The Neverending Story”)

Troye Sivan: In a Dream EP

This mixes pretty good pop, pretty good dance, and pretty good Frank Ocean, the last of which is most novel since Ocean skipped “pretty good” on the way from great to really not great. Sivan’s crying-all-the-time is appropriate given the century to date, and his sprightly Auto-Tune-proof tenderness is heavenly. The relationship-trauma as death-dream stuff seems less so at my age, but I guess every generation of Antipodeans needs its “Pink Frost.” The one great moment (maybe aside from finishing on a fast one, sincere thanks Troye) is the whoop following “this house is on fire,” as if a “this is fine” would be too verbose.

Grade: B PLUS (“Easy”, “In a Dream”, “Rager Teenager!”)

Elder: Omens

A few years ago, circa Lore, they were a great stoner/doom band that happened to prefer long songs. At this point, they’ve turned into pretty much a prog band, with a ton of synths and keyboards, some tinkly. Yet they’ve managed to avoid backlash (or at least haven’t got kicked off Metallum yet), perhaps because it's difficult not to admire their technical accomplishments—the compositions manage to dodge boredom over their 11-minute average lengths—and the fact that their riffs, for all their complexity, still have substantial feeling in them. The only downer is that once you switch from metal to rock singing, the lyrics start to matter a bit.

Grade: B PLUS (“Halcyon”, “Embers”, “Omens”)

Julian Anderson: Poetry Nearing Silence

The title piece is based on an early version of Tom Phillips’s A Humument, which longtime subscribers will recall was one of our Books of the Decade. Speaking as one of maybe two semipopular music nerds in the world who’s looked at all the words in the book (hi if you’re reading, Brian Eno), I would’ve had no idea what the connection is without reading the notes. Regardless, the work is quite pleasant, with genre pastiches over why-not background noises such as a film projector humming. Pick of the smaller-scale works included here is the “The Bearded Lady”, a clarinet-and-piano goof on The Rake’s Progress. No special knowledge of Hogarth, Auden, and/or Stravinsky is necessary to appreciate its instrument-stretching tune-shapes.

Grade: B PLUS (“The Bearded Lady”, “My Future as the Star of a Film in My Room”, “Eygalières”)