Semipop Life: The audacity of cope

McKinley Dixon, Sons of Kemet, Tune-Yards, Ashley Monroe, and more!

McKinley Dixon: For My Mother and Anyone Who Look Like Her

Finally, a rising rapper who learned the right lessons from To Pimp a Butterfly—flow with variety and density; sporadically drop showy internal rhyme displays to please whatever purists are left; use jazz decoratively rather than speaking it as a foreign language; let the drums sound like drums sometimes; continually challenge yourself, but with reason. Black trauma is a major subject, and on “Make a Poet Black” the music whips up a matching claustrophobia. Yet this dissipates at the start of the next song, where there’s warmth and humor for explicitly therapeutic purposes. It’s an individual-level treatment for a societal problem, sure, but since he doesn’t have Kendrick’s syncretic Evangelicalism or a Senate seat, what more could you ask of him? The album continues in this way, in dialectic with itself, and Dixon has the voices to feed the conversation, highbrow and gully low, pinched and chill. For all his claims of “musical time travel”, Dixon (inspired by Cowboy Bebop) made the album with a resolution in mind, so while the weight of Black existence and the ubiquitous sense of loss even if you survive doesn’t disappear, it’s alleviated by, spoiler, love, broadly speaking. Breakout artist of the year.

Grade: A (“Never Will Know”, “Grown Man Voice”, “Make a Poet Black”)

Sons of Kemet: Black to the Future

The album everyone has spent several years trying to convince me the new British jazz scene was capable of. Once the double-drummer party starts, it don’t stop (though it tapers tastefully) regardless of whether the vocalists romp over the top or peek out from contingent spaces implied by tubaist Theon Cross, who builds a melodic bottom end distinct from the New Orleans standard, though any second line would draft him in a second. Shabaka Hutchings, his chops unquestioned, is happier than usual to float along with the groove, often just essaying small but pleasing rhythmic variations, though he can still cut loose when it fits; his tone is impeccable throughout. Of the vocalists, the least natural and most memorable is Joshua Idehen on the framing tracks, where he rhymes “audacity” and “Caucasity” and throws in a few falsetto notes to indicate flickers of flame that might end up burning the whole plantation down.

Grade: A (“Pick Up Your Burning Cross”, “For the Culture”, “In Remembrance of Those Fallen”)

Tune-Yards: Sketchy

Merrill Garbus has often sounded prophetic because she acts high-millennial while being marginally older, so she gets to Big Life Choices first, whether she’s gentrifying Oakland or, on this album, making a final decision not to have children. What makes her “annoying” besides her typography is her compulsion to explain all these choices. Giving sociological justifications for irreducibly personal preferences? What is she, a critic? If so, she’s an unusual one for 2021—for one thing, her commitment to her aesthetic preferences (drums! letting Nate Brenner run amok with the low end!) has only deepened. So this is some of the best music of her career, and it feels way out of sync with the times. Give it a few years and it might seem prophetic, and probably more annoying.

Grade: A MINUS (“Hold Yourself”, “Nowhere, Man”, “Silence pt. 2 (Who Is ‘We?’)”)

Lone: Emerald Fantasy Tracks (2010)

The most recent album to make Michaelangelo Matos’s all-time top 50 for Rolling Stone. If  you’ve heard any Matt “Lone” Cutler from around the time, you’ll know what to expect: throwback Roland rave, lacking only the gratuitous drug references in the titles. No single track here is as peak-peak-peak as 2009’s “Joyreel” or 2011’s Echolocations EP, yet each makes amiable melodic progress, with misty synth beds allowing bright, soft leads to dance on rainbows, only to dissipate—perhaps the synth beds were the pots of gold all along? The album as a whole hangs together rather well for what Cutler, upon last year’s Bandcamp re-release, called “a bunch of quick rave tunes I made in my bedroom”. All-time top 50? Hey, some people love this kind of thing.

Grade: A MINUS (“Aquamarine”, “Rissotowe 4”, “Cloud 909”)

William Parker: Trencadis: A Selection from Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World

The title designates that this 10-track sampler from the 10-disc megabox that I might have time for if I get fired again is meant to function as a Gaudí-like mosaic sculpture. The exceptionally melodic opener “The Golden Light (Hymn)”, played by pianist Eri Yamamoto, is followed by a 1963 James Baldwin public TV interview accompanied trumpet and ambient ghost noises, and it continues to swing wildly from there. The compositions and arrangements are predictably excellent, albeit heavy on vocals that generally aren’t as sage as Baldwin’s, though Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez does a heaven of a job avowing it’s “A Great Day to Be Dead”. As far as the unabridged work goes, it’s hard to grok what it’s meant to look like. So: a sampler to make skeptics want to buy the whole thing. Dammit.

Grade: A MINUS (“The Golden Light (Hymn)”, “Lakota Song”, “A Great Day to Be Dead”)

Ashley Monroe: Rosegold

Country-pop leaps into the 2010s, as Monroe and her soundboys embrace plug-ins and reverb on that echo. If the songs sometimes blend into each other, like she’s making a Lo-Fi Beats to Chill on the Porch with a Fiddle and a Spliff To mix, she as usual constructs tunes with more harmonic interest than the typical country and/or pop album. While the lead single “Drive” needs a better car chase, “Gold” (produced by Nathan “hey Taylor pick up” Chapman) makes connubial bliss appropriately epic, comparing her husband John Danks (79-104, 4.38 ERA) to a pharaoh and to “Love Me Tender”. Hope she gets to play it at some other Annie’s third or fourth wedding.

Grade: A MINUS (“Gold”, “Siren”, “Groove”)

Bicep: Isles

This Belfast-to-London DJ duo got their album to #2 UK while miraculously retaining credibility with club snobs. The highlight is single of the year contender “Apricot”, which samples Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares and a Hugh Tracey field recording—and in a social justice move with actual impact, they cut a check to a Malawian orphanage to pay back their appropriation. Though none of the other vocals have the same impetus, the rest is both listenable and danceable (not that you need the deluxe edition extras), partaking in the current craze for glossy, sustained synths without going fully retromaniacal. As electronic music goes, pretty effective altruism.

Grade: B PLUS (“Apricot”, “Atlas”, “X”)

Mach-Hommy: Pray for Haiti

Mysterious (by Internet Age standards) Haitian-American makes a multi-concept album about his ancestral land and about turn of the millennium rap, though as far as I can tell not their intersection, sorry ’Clef. He raps in a low, dry-fried monotone-plus that’s deft and clear yet isn’t as expressive as his regular speaking voice in either English or Creole. The beats are often built from four-bars-or-less loops: occasionally they attain dreamstate, while more often the sonic interest is in the way they’re stitched together and in the off-kilter injections, some from guests, some found, many educational. Not quite as exciting as its reviews, but I learned about regional differences in Haitian vocabulary.

Grade: B PLUS (“Pen Rale”, “Murder Czn”, “Folie Á Deux”)

Gary Allan: Ruthless

It’s been eight years since the great Set You Free and since “Every Storm (Runs Out of Rain)”, his last country airplay number one, was knocked off the top spot all too symbolically by an Aldean/Bryan/Church Cerberus. Allan wasn’t and isn’t a good fit for bro-country, some sub-PG horniness here notwithstanding, given that he has to spell out “sex” one letter at a time. In the meantime, the audience for thoughtful-catchy exploration of traditional values and traditional women has wandered off, some into the Capitol. A shame—as he makes clear on “What I Can’t Talk About”, not only is music a way to work through complex feelings one might not be able to put into words, it’s more fun than a little glass of wine. For religion, it’s more of a complement than a substitute.

Grade: B PLUS (“What I Can’t Talk About”, “SEX”, “Unfiltered”)

Cloud Nothings: The Shadow I Remember

Dylan Baldi et al. give the impression they can produce this stuff ad infinitum, a feeling not dispelled by their posting a subscriber-only EP on the first Friday of every month, like clockwork. And they’re not standing stock still: the odd piano clink and Macie Stewart vocal may be purely ornamental, but it makes the game of  “which post-hardcore classic does this sound like” substantially more layered. Still, we critics could use some, uh, character development. They’ve been asking questions like “Am I older now or am I just another age?” throughout their semi-fame and seem no closer to answering them. That one in particular doesn’t seem too hard.

Grade: B PLUS (“Nothing Without You”, “Am I Something”, “The Spirit Of”)