Semipop Life: Portrait of the artist

Olivia Rodrigo, Isach Skeidsvoll, Mark Lomax II, Amaarae, and more!

Olivia Rodrigo: Guts

She’s ridiculous: in addition to being the best talk-rapper alive, she’s already historically good at rocking in the fifth octave with pop clarity, and you don’t need me to reprint the much-quoted oh-snap lines (my fave remains “blah blah blah.”) Not yet a historically great singer of slow ones—gotta save something for the third album—she can express commonplace emotions in the full knowledge that they’re commonplace without diminishing their intensity. Despite being excellent at everything the entertainment-industrial complex has asked of her, love, being <Spock voice> illogical, has been harder. Overachiever that she is, she’s made the most of that too. She’s a bitch/lover/child—not mother, gotta save something for the seventh album—and, pace Meredith Brooks, there’s never a sense that her inhabiting of disjoint identities is mere preening. She makes her initial recognition of her irrationality feel so Bildungsromany, her insecurities (unjustified but you try telling your insecurities that) so palpable. The only reasonable complaint is that there are too many non-power ballads, and after I decided “Making the Bed” is a revealing piece of writing and “Teenage Dream” is a thematically necessary ending, that leaves literal poetry class product “Lacy”. And even there I have to admire her trying to go strength for strength with Big Sis Taylor, by far her top similarity score (now that Billie Eilish has revealed, to the surprise of few, that she was a weirdo art kid all along.) Both want to give the sense of having wisdom beyond their years to help and sell to their audience, and if it’s more plausible that Rodrigo has that insight, even in the Fearless era Swift was savvy enough to realize that the appearance of it might be the essential thing. It could still turn out Rodrigo is merely ridiculous at the technical aspects of songmaking, whereas Taylor, despite having not made an LP this complete in fifteen years, has long proved herself a genius. But being the realest ain’t nothing.

Grade: A PLUS (“Vampire”, “Bad Idea Right?”, “Get Him Back!”, “Love Is Embarrassing”)

Isach Skeidsvoll: Dance to Summon

The Norwegian stars of this record (on Finnish label Ultraääni) are the Skeidsvoll brothers: composer Isach on piano, Lauritz on soprano sax, and Peder on pocket trumpet. Joined by Espen “Bobby” Songstad—good name—on tenor, Aksel Øvreås Røed on baritone, and a sturdy rhythm section, they have the personnel to blow up a racket, and they often do. “Bury Me Under a Four-Leaf Clover” careens through a South African-sounding head and flits free and back before Songstad goes apeshit. The fourteen-minute “Beer” has a middle section that’s perhaps too abstract and sometimes I can hear vocals, but at the beginning, there’s a Røed motif that the rest of the ensemble blows over with jazz funeral wildness (not worrying about being too in tune), and at the end, the motif returns low-key and hungover. “Hobo” is heavy as heck thanks to Isach’s hands, which periodically threaten to drag the band into a whole other tonality. The streaming-only “Bolero for People Feeling Blue” is one of the great celebratory pieces of recent years, with Isach back to roleplaying Chris McGregor, keeping things marching back to the tonic while the horns go on pointed explorations: Peder modest as befitting the size of his instrument, Lauritz in a parallel key, Songstad and Røed blowing big notes. All that’s missing is an amapiano one.

Grade: A (“Bolero for People Feeling Blue”, “Bury Me Under a Four-Leaf Clover”, “Hobo”)

The Mark Lomax Trio: Tapestry

Lance Johnson, Glorious Inspiration

The inspirational tapestries in question are mixed-media pieces by Lance Johnson that appear abstract but allude to graffiti and to the use of quilts for transmitting messages on the Underground Railroad. The music, a live hour in the Columbus burbs, takes a little while to settle in and then more than pays off. “Dreams” (red dominant, yellow and white scribbles) uses Lomax’s cymbals and Dean Hulett’s bowed bass to create a dreamscape reminiscent of Homer Simpson’s hot pepper hallucination, with Edwin Bayard dropping shamanic statements on sax. “Glorious Harmony” (yellow and red pieces with scratches and patterns overlaid) starts with all three of them going percussive, before a syncopated tune breaks out, and it is glorious in its unassuming way. “A Few of My Favorite Things” (reds and oranges with text like “CULTURE” and, well, “JAZZ”) explores their common likes such as Ellington and Coltrane and hip hop, and if they’re least convincing on the last of these, the track features Bayard’s most imaginative playing. Lomax remains perhaps America’s most underrated jazzbo; what New York and Chicago are missing out on is Ohio’s gain.

Grade: A MINUS (“Glorious Harmony”, “A Few of My Favorite Things”, “Dreams”)

Febem, Fleezus & CESRV: Brime! EP (2020)

As in Brazilian grime. Febem and Fleezus are very credible rappers, and although I have little idea what their slang-rich bars mean, save for footballers’ names and one line about wanting churrasco in the favela, they throw in a bunch of onomatopoeia so I can nod along with their dig-dins and the like. Beatmaker CESRV takes a broad view of what constitutes grime, with a 2-step attitude that keeps the rappers on their toes amidst his inevitable modern trap trappings. As is the funk carioca fashion, just because he has a strong tune doesn’t mean he feels you have to hear it every beat, or that it shouldn’t be played underwater. Even “Yin Yang”, on which the vocalists resort to North American-style Auto-Tunage, has its uses thanks to CESRV Brazilianizing the percussion, hitting snares early to tackle you like the São Paulo Corinthians player on the cover sending Eden Hazard flying. Chelsea may no longer make the Champions League of unethically funded soccer clubs, yet it’ll always be satisfying to see.

Grade: A MINUS (“Terceiro Mundo”, “Raddim”, “Yin Yang”)

Nastyfacts: Drive My Car EP (1981/2022)

Brooklyn teens record three tracks, on average about as good as, say, the median song on the A-side of Singles Going Steady. Songwriter-bassist KB Boyce is the obvious star, keeping the leatherette warm as a queer-pride metaphor that presumably appeared a lot more veiled in the Eighties than it does now. But also listen to the rhythm and lead guitars speed-riffing and shredding as well as anyone in the NYC area at the time, as well as Genji Searizak hi-hatting the crap out of period-accurate tinny cymbals. The tone-up change on “Get to You” works so well that they try it again with a more sophisticated power chord progression in “Crazy ’bout You” before climaxing in the original key. Under eight minutes, and that was all they wrote: the punkest of careers. Boyce now plays in trans-core supergroup The Homobiles while running POC-focused arts organization Queer Rebels, which is pretty punk too.

Grade: A MINUS (all of it)

DJ Black Low: Impumelelo

This follow-up to the great Uwami is packed with vocal and production guests adding variety and texture, with Black Low’s quirks backgrounded to some extent. Still, while this album isn’t as all-the-way avant-garde, he continues to push as far out as anyone else in amapiano. The tunes are now more conventional, going up or down where one would think they should go up or down. The innovation is that they’re now embedded in the donks: the percussion is melodic, often in notatable ways, sometimes in a “I could hum along to those snares” way. There are more standard tunes as well—even if the most memorable of those (on the unimaginatively titled “Lepiano”) is ripped off from “Mas Que Nada”, almost every song has a couple of vocal hooks to cling to. None of this is going to do Kabza De Small numbers (though I hope DJBL notes that the solo “Drive Through” is the most streamed track), but for a handful of nerds, some even in South Africa, it’s the joint.

Grade: B PLUS (“Akulalwa”, “Lepiano”, “Qhude”)

Amaarae: Fountain Baby

At her best, she combines club music and head music as well as anyone in greater R&B since early FKA Twigs, with hooks as cheap as a “ching-ching” in the Year of Our Lord 2023 allowing the what-was-that oddball noises to sneak up on you. The depth is in the beats, with genially shuffling snares and surprise rattles and the amapiano donk, here localized into something more like its analog cousin, the West African talking drum. As an Aries, I must say her writing doesn’t always repay my attention: wittiest is the Weeknd-in-the-Orient “Wasted Eyes”, about taking molly in a Tesla and/or taking Molly in a Tesla. But her vocals, deliberately restricted to her upper register, get across how much fjucking fun and fun fjucking she’s having, daring you to call her out on their narrowness. The only flops are “Sex, Violence, Suicide”—punk? in those heels?—and the power ballad closer, which requires low notes.

Grade: B PLUS (“Wasted Eyes”, “Angels in Tibet”, “Reckless & Sweet”)

Pabllo Vittar: Noitada/After

Brazil’s (and Instagram’s) reigning drag queen offered Noitada, twenty-two minutes of relatively straightforward from-the-favelas-to-the-club, in Feburary; the remix record After followed in July. Vittar’s head voice doesn’t have notable range; it’s smooth and serviceable, however, and Noitada’s varied settings put it to pleasant use without overtaxing it. After has harder state-of-the-art production, at the cost of occluding Vittar’s sizable personality. Cyberkills turns “Descontrolada” into avant-baile, with aggressive interjections and buns-of-steel beats. I think Brunoso’s “Derretida” is what they call “technobrega”, which sounds like a mix of D&B and reggaeton with some bleepery for decoration. “Penetra”, about penetrating a party, gets transformed by Pedro Sampaio into EDM so mainstream one wonders if the party was worth penetr… wait, it’s symbolic? No kidding. The albums are more effective as a pair, together offering a summary of contemporary Brazilian dance music, and an effective fjuck-the-haters.

Grade: B PLUS (“Descontrolada” (Cyberkills remix), “Ameianoite”, “Derretida” (Brunoso remix))

Sam Weinberg Trio with Chris Lightcap and Tom Rainey: Implicatures

Having gained some renown playing outdoors in NYC during COVID, Weinberg here shuffles towards the front of young saxists. He shows chops a-plenty jovially working through assorted modern modes, improvising serialist melodies as well as seeing how many ways he can color one approximate note. At times it sounds like a tenor’s Speed Braxton, not the worst thing to sound like while you’re working out your identity. “Tipped” demonstrates particular facility in his lower register, varying repeating patterns and little ornaments with longer, more complex lines. His veteran rhythm section is content to play support, notwithstanding Lightcap getting the heavy bow out on “Anytime a Pile”. I’d like to hear how Weinberg sounds in more challenging (to him) settings, but also wouldn’t mind another volume of this stuff every couple of years.

Grade: B PLUS (“Tipped”, “Pete and Repeat”, “Amaryllis Snarls”)