Semipop Life: Stronger than a Nineties trend
Kalie Shorr, Lucy Dacus, Dawn Richard, Billy Nomates, and more!
Kalie Shorr: I Got Here by Accident EP
I admit I harbored a moment of doubt when I counted one good song out of three on her first EP of the year, until I realized it was a (Dixie-no-more) Chicks covers record. As someone whose first post-vaccination concert was the Jagged Little Pill anniversary tour last month, I have no qualms about her second, though it’s unlikely Aging Alt FM will give her more airplay than Bro 101 did. She reconfigures the formal and linguistic tricks she learned as a Song Suffragette, most ticklingly when she brings new meaning to the term “pregnant pause”, while her literary peak is “I was born twelve hundred feet from the ocean/Two hundred feet from a bar”. She also borrows the Morissettian technique of spitefully cramming way too many syllables into a line, except when she does it I can make out the words. Five good songs out of five is my count this time, thanks to more open-book family history, a little sprightly pain, and a lot of disdain well-aimed so as to avoid collateral damage. She only has to scratch her nails down Amy’s back metaphorically for you, and her, to feel it.
Grade: A (“I Heard You Got a Girl”, “Amy”, “Love Child”)
This lapsed everything and family friend of Tim Kaine is even more not-my-thing than her sometime bandmates Bridgers and Baker, who at least offer traditionally assertive rock singing and dedication to maximal drama respectively. Just about every aesthetic decision she makes goes against my personal preferences (I basically always love Auto-Tune, but not here.) Sarah McLachlan, among other Lilith Fair regulars, is a key predecessor, except Dacus’s threats of murder are more credible. Yet the storytelling on Home Video is near-undeniable, and if drama per se isn’t her bag except on “Thumbs”, she holds your hand hard through the least surprising emotional beats. Part of a geographic-generational cohort who rejected their parents’ Christianity and heterosexuality out of spiritual necessity, she didn’t find liberation as joyful as she might’ve hoped. To work out why, she grapples with her past, analyzing past interactions that were significant or embarrassing or everyday weird, like hanging out with the Slayer fan at Vacation Bible School. Though epiphanies are rare, progress through the constant accretion of minor self-discoveries is more true to life. And if she writes an ending where she sails off with her best friend from high school, the ending where she becomes someone who can make a living out of music in 2021 is at least as incredible.
Grade: A MINUS (“Thumbs”, “Christine”, “VBS”)
Manu Maltez: O Rabequeiro Maneta e a Fúria de Natureza (2018)
The One-Handed Fiddler and the Fury of Nature is an album/book/cartoon from yet another multimedia São Paulo artist that’s heavy on narrative I don’t have the Portuguese to appreciate. Auto-translating Maltez’s archived website indicates that topics explored include various fluidities (represented extremely symbolically by trans singer Assucena Assucena), along with the usual country-and-the-city stuff. More comprehensible to me are the fetching arrangements, featuring oompahing clarinet and some kind of post-noise proto-violin. The guitars are especially memorable, with co-producer Rafa Barreto’s electric a hard-assed contrast to Maltez’s incisive acoustic. Maltez’s singing is pretty hard-assed too, as yours might be if you were drunkenly telling the bar the story of how your fiddling hand came to be replaced by a jaguar’s paw. The ensemble coheres most menacingly on “Fúria da Natureza”, which sounds like an N.K Jemisin demigoddess collecting herself before wreaking vengeance for the destruction of the Amazon. Sudden drowning or slow burning? She’s got options.
Grade: A MINUS (“Fúria da Natureza”, “Baile Marvado”, “Pata de Onça”)
Though I was one of a handful of extremely online aesthetes who considered her the most consistent R&B artist of the 2010s, I was wavering by the turn of the decade when she seemed to be spending more attention on her probably more lucrative Adult Swim side hustle than on sharpening New Breed. Here she goes back to her roots, meaning not reality TV but New Orleans. We get age-old rhythms (especially in her singing) mixed with up-to-the-minute world party beats, and also the Moonlight Sonata because why not? It’s ambitious, but allowing for a little jazz funeral unruliness, she has the vocal, writing, and yes, conceptual chops to mostly pull it off—her boast that “my interludes is better than all your EPs” is mostly correct. The occasional sci-fi trappings you can take metaphorically, while the stuff about her family you can take very literally. When her mom drops in to say that the only man she ever loved was Dawn’s dad, there’s no doubting her.
Grade: A MINUS (“Bussifame”, “Radio Free”, “Le Petit Morte (a lude)”)
Robyn Ottolini: The I’m Not Always Hilarious EP and The But I’m Not Always Sad Either EP
Last year’s and this year’s four songs apiece from the rising country hope of Uxbridge, Ontario—Toronto exurbs rather than Alice Munro territory. Her biggest CanCon hit so far is last year’s “F-150”, which tries too hard to find parking for its oversized signifier (if she breaks down every time she sees a Ford pickup, she needs to work from home for a while.) The rest of I’m Not Always Hilarious has more resonant takes on break-ups and never-happeneds from the point of view of someone whom a post-one night stand ghosting can mess up for quite a time. As you guessed from the title, But I’m Not Always Sad Either is much more fun, not least for the denser and beatier production, though the non-hilarious half of the diptych makes the second’s gratification feel earned. The chromatic melody of “Hold Me Back” convincingly simulates irate drunkenness, while “Sincerely, Drunk Me” convincingly simulates shameless drunkenness (the neologism “Hakuna Ma-Vodka” is nothing to feel guilty about) that bachelorettes wherever the CanCon equivalent of Nashville is would enjoy singing along to. When she’s sober, she loves her daddy, although I’m sure she’s fond of him when tipsy too.
Grade: A MINUS (“Hold Me Back”, “Sincerely, Drunk Me”, “Trust Issues”)
Witch Camp (Ghana): I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used to Be
Ian Brennan and Marilena Delli, instigators of the Zomba Prison Project, produce another album with a bleak, compelling backstory. These recordings were made in three communities formed by women exiled due to accusations of witchcraft, with musical accompaniment often consisting of percussion using whatever kitchenware and debris is at hand. Even compared to Zomba, this is a downer—titles include “I Trusted My Family, They Betrayed Me” and “Everywhere I Turn, There Is Pain”. But there are moments of great beauty, like when the strummed who-knows-what of “We Are No Different Than You” gives way to the chanted catharsis of “Love”. The hidden track after the official closer (“Left to Live Like an Animal”) sounds like it slows and pitches way down a solo woman-and-pot performance; it's uncanny.
Grade: B PLUS (“We Are No Different Than You”, “Love”, “Left to Live Like an Animal”)
Isaiah Rashad: The House Is Burning
Huh, a 2021 rap album that sounds good: clear, expressive rapping over understated beats that consist of ear-pleasing tones. Rashad’s West Coast/Southern rap fusion is too low-key to ever be as profitable as Roddy Ricch’s, but I appreciate his geographical flexing, bringing palm trees to Three 6 Mafia, and his acknowledgement of past difficulties without getting lachrymose. He goes out of his way to get the best out of his collaborators—best Smino verse ever, and what would’ve been the best Doechii verse in a world where “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” didn’t exist. Fortunately, low-key as he is, Rashad doesn’t want us to live in that world.
Grade: B PLUS (“Claymore”, “Lay wit Ya”, “What U Sed”)
Billy Nomates: Emergency Telephone EP
Though there are proportionately more tunes here than on last year’s self-titled, she’s not a natural melodist, so you’ll need to listen a lot if you want to sing along. And the appropriately titled “-” notwithstanding, it might be worth it. Like a manga protagonist, she has a knack for uniting her personal travails as a woman exiled in Guykingdom with the fate of the planet: if you ask “which climate” when she sings “the climate ain’t right”, the answer is all of them. Her synth game remains strong, and I hope she gets the band and in particular her drummer brother out of quarantine for the next LP.
Grade: B PLUS (“Heels”, “Right Behind You”, “Emergency Telephone”)
The first five or so times I typed the title I wrote Razor Blade Suitcase, if you hadn’t worked out what years I was in high school from the top review. Like Gavin Rossdale, big-hatted Greenwich Village resident Duff pretends, not especially convincingly, that she’s from somewhere else, and if you’re going to do that you need at least four or five tracks as good as the self-explanatory opener “Go Fast, Don't Die”. The tally gets pretty close: “Done and Done” the most successful Lucinda rip, “Angry to Bed” sensible, “Flying Paper Planes” bang bang click ka-ching. Plus she and producer Eric Ambel are a better guitar duo than Rossdale and whoever the other guy in Bush was.
Grade: B PLUS (“Go Fast, Don’t Die”, “Done and Done”, “Flying Paper Planes”)