Semipop Life Presents: 2021 Post-Prandial Tryptophan Coma

Artists who could do so much better, plus ABBA

Natural Information Society with Evan Parker: Descension (Out of Our Constrictions)

Okay, this isn’t a bad album. Joshua Abrams’s minimalism-writ-larger small group is more active than they were on 2017’s Simultonality, thanks to Parker’s soprano sax preventing them from falling asleep. There’s contentment in just letting the guimbri lull you into a trance, even if, like me doing the breaststroke, they expend more energy than is necessary to go nowhere. The real reason to single this out is Parker’s tragic bout of Being an Old British (or Irish) Guy, an ailment unfortunately not limited to the aesthetically washed up. Musicians from Parker’s era often have a libertarian streak that arguably has had its artistic fruits. But one has to realize when the trance is actively doing yourself and others harm.

Grade: B (“Descension (Out of Our Constrictions) II”)

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & the London Symphony Orchestra: Promises

Sanders, among many other things one of jazz’s great ballad players, is wasted here through no fault of his own: since Floating Points foregoes any possibility of tension, they might as well have hired Kenny G. The electronic arrangements are oppressively well-mannered. Oooh, listen to my lil’ baby timbres! Aren’t they precious! When it transforms into adult contemporary classical starting from “Movement 6”, it’s a relief, even if it’s so close to being a prestige movie soundtrack you might as well stick Juliette Binoche on the cover.

Grade: B MINUS

Morgan Wallen: Dangerous: The Double Album

Thanks to a cancellation-lite that turned out to be mutually lucrative for both himself and Universal Music, this is 2021’s most played album, leading Sour by half a billion streams. In preparation for the country biz rehabbing his not quite accidental racism, let’s focus on his musical sins. It’s easy to see the appeal of his gruff low-end and surprisingly supple head voice, yet his default is an indifferent midrange that multitracking only manages to make as ungainly as thirty to fifty pitch-corrected feral hogs. This schtick allows him to rightfully criticize blue staters who think “this accent makes me dumb.” However, those used to the sophisticated wit of a Luke Combs or a Stone Cold Steve Austin will generally find it difficult to identify a smart line, no matter how long they stare at the lyrics of the Isbell cover. There’s one miracle: “7 Summers”, a whiskey-and-coke (not wine, are you a girl) fueled nostalgia-fest that believes in celebrating moments of beauty that start to look like lost opportunities once you gain some distance from them. Certainly I would’ve found it easier to decouple his few good songs from his extra-musical persona 1.75 Presidential terms ago.

Grade: C PLUS

ABBA: Voyage

It shows guts to lead off with a five-minute torch ballad that acts as if nothing’s changed in forty years, and by “guts” I mean an absolute lack of anything resembling taste. So maybe nothing’s changed. Anyone who makes it past the children’s chorus singing about elves on track 3 is finally rewarded by one with some kind of pulse, and while their melodic gifts remain as real as their lyrical banalities, making inferior versions of what you were good at in your youth is as pointless as it is for any dinosaur rock act—only more embarrassing because, thanks to tanking Swedish democratic socialism back in the day, they’re ridiculously rich. When they close with an “Ode to Freedom”, you know they’re using the Heritage Foundation’s definition.

Grade: C

St. Vincent: Daddy's Home

Four years after her most accomplished album, it’s remarkable how consistently bad this is. One might’ve guessed she wouldn’t excel at, say, funk, but here she puts on genre after genre, including ones she was previously good at, and turns each of them into a tiki bar restroom. She’s caught some flak on the way to a Metacritic 85 for incidentally trivializing her heroes (“Saint Joni ain’t no phony”! “Marie Curie glowed with fury”! “My Marilyn shot her heroin”! Guess which one I made up) (it was the good one), though one could argue that she’s showing up the narcissism of her narrator for putting herself a couplet away from Nina Simone’s civil rights activism. Except isn’t deliberately trivializing her heroes worse? The one good thing I can say is this kept her (and Jack Antonoff) busy away from artists I care about more, so don’t tell me about any mockumentary psychological thriller-comedies she may have made with Carrie Brownstein recently, please.

Grade: C MINUS

NEITHERLAND

Not great! Not terrible!

Eric Church: Soul

So much for his triple: I cut out on album one when I decided I wasn’t going to stick it out through another song with “heart” in the title, while “&” is currently available to his fan club only and nobody else seems to miss it. This one’s listenable, if unoriginal: his voice remains flexible and Jay Joyce keeps things moving. While only the single sounds like a single, the girls who like trucks and boys who like the Doors are interesting enough to spend a few minutes with. The closing track’s punchline is my pick for groaner of the year, but those of you conceived at Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts might appreciate it more. (“Hell of a View”, “Bad Mother Trucker”)

Lana Del Rey: Chemtrails Over the Country Club

The title track’s evocation of suburban paranoia, one of her two great subjects along with suburban masochism, is startling; too much of the rest is in her brittle upper register (pro tip: if you sing much more clearly and expressively low than high then maybe you should sing low more?) Not that there aren’t pleasures in the sounds and arrangements, but if this is how you get your pop kicks, consider looking for a better dealer. (“Chemtrails Over the Country Club”, “White Dress”)

Vijay Iver Trio: Uneasy

For twenty minutes this seems like a return to pre-ECM form, and then an initially enjoyable “Night and Day” keeps going and going, and after that at least there’s Tyshawn Sorey. Easy to say the solution is to just have fun, but Manfred probably thinks this is slapstick. (“Combat Breathing”, “Children of Flint”)

Zara Larsson: Poster Girl

Generic European popstar, her most distinguishing feature being the occasional F-bomb (which, even in this day and age, I do appreciate), sings generic-to-sub-generic pop songs that studiously avoid ideas less hackneyed than “I need love/Like an addict needs his drug” without getting closer to the cutting edge than a Young Thug verse, which, if you were wondering about her commitment to hip hop, was originally supposed to go to a country singer. In a rare piece of good global citizenship, America seems to have correctly determined that other countries need her more. (“Need Someone”)

Wolf Alice: Blue Weekend

Another in the assembly line of fuzz-over-songs (noun)-gaze English bands I don’t get the point of except on the fast ones, of which there are admittedly a couple here. Ellie Rowsell is ineffectually sad, Joff Oddie owns a lot of pedals, an ill-defined miserable time is had by all. (“Smile”)

Undeath: Lesions of a Different Kind

Trying to work out why this got a Pitchfork 8.0 despite sounding like every other death metal album ever: maybe it’s the words? Opening lines: “Here’s my fucking axe/I put it in your head/Instantly you're dead.” Maybe it’s the words? (“Entranced by the Pendulum”)

Good Sad Happy Bad: Shades

The group previously known as Micachu and the Shapes, so that’s two historically bad band names now. Some solid pomo-pop guitar and some dinky amusements, and as for the songwriting, see the previous sentence. (“Do It”)

Boldy James & the Alchemist: Bo Jackson

James perennially seems on the verge of finding a second note. I have issues with the Alchemist, but a shortage of notes isn’t one of them. (“Brickmile to Montana”)

Charles Lloyd & the Marvels: Tone Poem

The (positive) Jazz Times review: ‘“Exciting” may not be the operative word, but “satisfying” nails it’ (“Ramblin’”)

Cameroon Garage Funk

Analog Africa brings you yet more ’70s Afrofunk of every description, including godawful (“Quiero Wapatcha”)

ANNUAL TURKEY PARDON

Kacey Musgraves: Star-Crossed

I scanned the credits for Shane McAnally’s name before listening, and upon not finding it was sure there’d be no great songs here. And though there aren’t, for the first time she’s made a better album than I expected. She continues to develop as a singer, despite her producers’ best attempts to golden-hour her into indistinctness, and she can still average almost one killer line per song, lacking only the specialist doctoring required to turn the many (many) cliches into truisms. If and when she ever makes a country album again, it could be really good.

Grade: B PLUS (“Justified”, “Hookup Scene”, “Camera Roll”)