Marina: Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land
I know Diamondless Marina is, like, Welsh, yet it’s striking for a successful artist’s wall-to-wall feminist album to wrestle so little with her own privilege (her main gesture towards solidarity, “New America”, will at best add zero to what you already know about America.) It’s like Macklemore never happened! Still, Celtic melodic tics are underrepresented in current pop, and her sheer verbosity overwhelms some kvetches about the elevated perch from which she scatters Guardian columns. Her central claim, that all this, she gestures theatrically, is men’s fault is mostly right, and the corollary that one particular guy sucks might well be right as well. Despite being unable to impart sufficient irony to “I Love You But I Love Me More”, I think she’s empathetic enough to avoid going Full Rowling; still, I wouldn’t want to tempt her with any open letters.
Grade: B PLUS (“Purge the Poison”, “Man’s World”, “Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land”)
Sleater-Kinney: Path of Wellness
A huge improvement over The Center Won’t Hold, which at the time I was too shellshocked by the Janet firing to publicly pan, so for the record let’s say B minus. Yet this was initially comparably disheartening because it isn’t an unsuccessful experiment—it feels like the best 2021 S-K can do. There’s strong veteran musicianship with little of their past urgency (but such is middle age), and fetching stretches of hook and tune amidst somewhat confused writing (but such is indie rock.) I think I’m getting accustomed to a force of nature becoming a polished, professional pair of artists worthy of support. But I still need to say the Serenity Prayer a few more times.
Grade: B PLUS (“Worry with You”, “High in the Grass”, “Tomorrow’s Grave”)
Billie Eilish: Happier Than Ever
The element and perhaps even the possibility of surprise is gone. Oh, there’s a credible bossa nova? Whatever, we’ll expect a tango next time. Far too often Finneas is happy to hang back and let Eilish make what she wants out of the song, and a little too often she doesn’t manage anything unexpected: frequently, the bad guy really is the bad guy (duh.) The clarity she sustained since she was fourteen has fogged up: her sotto voce schtick doesn’t fit her new material nearly as well, meaning she runs the risk of becoming an indie-pop mushmouth with astronomical security expenses. She’s probably too smart for that. But she might yet prove too tasteful.
Grade: B PLUS (“NDA”, “Happier Than Ever”, “Oxytocin”)
Aly & AJ: A Touch of the Beat Gets You Up on Your Feet Gets You Out and Then into the Sun
After an accident involving a radioactive Fiona Apple album title, these mildly fundamentalist Christian sisters who had a brief pop moment in the late ’00s return as a mildly woke SoCal-pop duo who drop the F-bomb in their “Potential Breakup Song” remake, sadly not included here. They’re not exceptional singers, but they know how to string chords together and deign to write actual bridges. Their lyrics show they’ve managed to live some kind of life amidst their dayjobs in ABC sitcoms and CW zombie shows: went to parties, kissed a boy or two, told Ol’ Scratch to begone. Fun enough for Haim fans, plus an illustration of how network TV is still the best available tool for social liberalization.
Grade: B PLUS (“Don’t Need Nothing”, “Pretty Places”, “Symptom of Your Touch”)
Israel-born multi-instrumentalist Aylon, who plays almost everything here, moved to Senegal to learn the sabar and can now play ten drums at once and is friends with Youssou so good for him. The opening percussion duet with the late Doudou Ndiaye Rose whips up an impressive intensity. Aylon also does fine work on the xalam (yet another variant in the ngoni family), though the instrumentals sometimes don’t supply much more than a very high level of proficiency. Fortunately there are guest vocalists to shake things up: Ethiopian singer Aveva risking but not attaining soupiness; Amy Sacko yearning for peace; the also late Khairy Arby performing controlled demolition.
Grade: B PLUS (“Xalam”, “Alafia”, “Jonibenina”)
Matthew Shipp and Allen Lowe and Gerald Cleaver and Kevin Ray. The least familiar to me is bassist Ray (not the recently fired Walk the Moon bassist, not that you thought so); he sets up the groove very well here and only strengthens it during his occasional solo features. The five tracks are varied, with plenty of blues influence thanks to the hard-blowing Lowe, as well as freer moments in which Cleaver in particular drums the group into continuously new territory. Shipp is the linchpin. “Oh Hell I Forgot That” starts at a furious pace, and while Lowe and the rhythm players take a breather every now and then, Shipp goes full bore for the whole ten minutes. Only kvetch is that the half-hour closer is half an hour; still, when I zone back in after zoning out for a bit, the quartet has managed to get somewhere different. Progressive!
Grade: A MINUS (“Oh Hell I Forgot That”, “I’m Cool with That”, “Social Distance”)
Liz Phair: Soberish
She was always first and foremost a singer-songwriter, and a subtle one (all the fucking and running notwithstanding), so I’m not surprised this took a while to unpack. The one about Guyville founding mayor L. Reed, for instance, requires the listener to calibrate the tone, since his positives are left implied—those Warhol stories were funny once, I’m sure. Other times careful attention pays off in terms of understanding her structural devices: the one that risks one of those en vogue plagiarism claims from Max Martin cleverly uses its purloined fragment transitionally, as a bridge from the complex-female-character verse to the simple repetition of “gonna leave you with my good side.” Any number of similar old pro maneuvers result in perhaps her most balanced album since the ’90s. That doesn’t mean it’s better than her self-titled—contra track 11, dosage isn’t everything, at least in art—but achieving equilibrium again after so long is like relieving a headache.
Grade: A MINUS (“Good Side”, “Hey Lou”, “Dosage”)
More in the same vein as Kin Sonic: the spirit if not the exact forms of soukous, with harmonies tightened and all manner of Westerners interloping. Given that Obama has endorsed them (twice now), they could do better with their guest list, but, well, there’s no Damon Albarn this time. Their if-in-doubt-go-go-go goes a long way, so that all the Latin American rappers have to do is keep up, though admittedly it’s only in their presence that Jupiter Bokondji’s willing to call out “yo colonisation” by name. Still, his band’s ceiling is higher when they cool down and let the songs solidify, even when the song is Boney M’s (the title track “Na Kozonga” approximates “Gotta Go Home”, where home is somewhere on a Deutsche Bahn route.) And when they have collaborators as apt as the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, it seems like they really could party every night and rock and roll all day.
Grade: A MINUS (“Na Kozonga”, “Abalegele Gale”, “Bakunda Ulu”)
Billie Eilish: Happier Than Ever
Still a teenager, assuming the normal passage of time, she’s about as well-adjusted as is possible for a woman currently experiencing megafame and a pandemic. Her concerns about her present and future are not too dissimilar from those of any college sophomore with decent TikTok numbers, who’s proportionately if not absolutely at similar risk from the sixty feverish corners of the truncated icosahedron that is the Internet. While Phi Gamma Delts can at least feel relief that they won’t be surrounded by adolescents forever, Billie’s in the music biz, so her only out is to let her sense of humor get cheaper—“I’d never treat me this shitty/You made me hate this city” is a classic couplet in this respect. She and Finneas are short on novel structural tricks, but the latter has a garden of artisanal sounds to harvest and the former is just beginning to work out all the things she can do with her voice. When the two are in sync, like on “NDA”, it sounds like a dispatch from some future that could be a dystopia or incrementally happier than ever. Which one? Shhh, not telling.
Grade: A (“NDA”, “Happier Than Ever”, “Lost Cause”)
Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives
(i) I really should read some CLR James, though realistically it’ll be Beyond a Boundary before The Black Jacobins. Outside the context of (Joseph’s words) “beautiful violent revolution”, the album title remains chic, though I wouldn’t mind clarification as to what the threshold for “rich” is: one buck more than my household income would of course be fine (apologies to perhaps the majority of my readership?) (ii) Kamau Braithwaite died February last year? Not sure if I heard this at the time and just forgot because of all the other people who died shortly afterwards. While “Kamau”, the opening track here, is not the greatest modern elegy for a political poet—that’d be Brathwaite’s “Stone”—as a tribute, it’s fitting in its vocabulary and focused indignation. (iii) With the exception of the rotating lineup of tenors (Denys Baptiste probably edges out everywhere-man Shabaka Hastings here) the band is good not great, tight rather than cosmic. But that’s fine: sometimes the words, and the performance of those words, are the most important things. (iv) These really are good words, with family and historical details filling out a unified vision of West Indies-to-England radical life, delivered by Joseph with finesse, authority, and swing. Whether it’s good praxis is beyond my ability to determine.
Grade: A (“Language (Poem for Anthony McNeill)”, “Calling England Home”, “Swing Praxis”)
Orchestra Baobab: Pirates Choice (1989)
If you got to ask…
Grade: A PLUS (“Ledi Ndieme M’Bodj”, “Utrus Horas”, “Soldadi”)