Semipop Life: When two worlds collide
James Brandon Lewis, Grupo Frontera, Armand Hammer, Doja Cat, and more!
James Brandon Lewis & Lutosławski Quartet: These Are Soulful Days
Recorded live after a couple of days practice in Wrocław, this real step forward for the long maligned “with strings” jazz mode was relegated to the bonus disc of For Mahalia, with Love—understandably, as the target audience for “America’s finest tenor sax player under retirement age meets a chamber group named after Poland’s foremost modernist composer” might be just me, and even I thought the gospel set seemed more promising a priori. Lewis rolls out slow, spiritual-inspired tunes that act less as bases for embellishment than as centers around which the action can take place. First and foremost this requires consistency of tone quality, and “Movement II”, from languid opening through octave-jumping avant-freakout, shows he’s as good at maintaining this as anybody working. The Lutosławskis too elide the difference between folky and modern: they do remarkably well for non-jazzbos at emphasizing the rhythm when that’s their job, bowing and pizzicatoing away as if they’re pros at another Polish art-barn dance, and showing as much control over volume as JBL does (diminuendo fans will eat up “Movement IV”.) There’s room for further exploration: only the epilogue tangles with the full potentialities of dissonance and, if I’m not imagining things, hip-hop rhythms; they’ll have the rest of the twenty-first century to work that out. As an encore, in case anyone was calling what he was wearing an outfit, there’s an unaccompanied “Take Me to the Water”.
Grade: A (“Movement II”, “Movement I”, “Movement IV”)
Grupo Frontera: El Comienzo
It’s easy, and not wrong, to credit their unprecedented rise from South Texas norteño covers band to one of the U.S.’s most streamed artists to Bad Bunny’s rizzed-up guest spot on megahit “Un x100to” and to the song doctoring and patented artificial sweeteners of superproducer Edgar Barrera. But their momentum predates Bunny hopping on, and Barrera’s work with, say, the highly competent Becky G lacks the same zing. While the band aren’t writers, they adapt well to Barrera et al.’s tales of love in an age when a cell phone battery in the red can keep you roiling in your heartbreak for a surprisingly long time. They’re very comfortable within their home territory of Mexican cumbia, with accordionist Juan Javier Cantú measured and wistful and 20-year-old singer Payo Solis deploying his considerable Romanticism without oversinging or upstaging his senior bandmates, and they can branch out to meet guests halfway (brassy ranchera with sadboi corrido slinger Junior H, rock en español with sadgirl Yahritza) and to amuse themselves (“Cuídala” is Tejano country.) Still, they’re realest when the bajo quintos and congas have full room to maneuver, with Barrera’s programming easing their passage into the digital world. Texas ain’t big enough for them.
Grade: A (“un x100to”, “Que Vuelvas”, “El Amor de Su Vida”)
Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden
Drawing from the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s sonics, this is one of Roberts’s more abstract Coin Coins, as opposed to the ones that derive more obviously from roots music (2 and 4, my previous faves.) To compensate, this might be their best-written chapter. The narrative through-line is about a mother who dies in 1925 following a violent attempt to terminate a pregnancy. Roberts’ sax and the supporting instrumentation (in particular Mazz Swift’s violin) are often harsh or disconcerting in ways that reflect hard times, a century ago or now: even the John Cage goof expresses a certain melancholy. Hope is easier to detect in the vocals: there’s spirit whenever one can speak, through one’s great-grandchild if necessary. Roberts is a heck of an actor, imbuing their character, who marries into a Southern Gothic family that would’ve preferred a cousin on both sides for colorist reasons, with a moral strength and an ability to half-chuckle from beyond the grave. If the finale, in which a Modelistean drum break emerges from a chorus of pennywhistles, isn’t exactly a happy ending, the mid-album benison and lullaby, “But I Never Heard a Sound So Long” and “The Promise”, linger.
Grade: A (“How Prophetic”, “Enthralled Not by Her Curious Blend”, “But I Never Heard a Sound So Long”)
Armand Hammer: We Buy Diabetic Test Strips
Grad school rap’s ranking duo have never been as focused as Billy Woods’s most incisive solo work, and it’s not primarily Elucid’s fault: their only cohesive album was when the Alchemist reduced them to any other talented indieheads. This gets close, however, with JPEGMAFIA’s bookending productions defining a world in which even the tangible has an air of unreality to it, not least because every fjucking website demands they prove their existence. Woods can set the bar at an unsportsmanlike height, finding a rhyme string for “niggardly” (what took him so long) and ending the first verse on “The Gods Must Be Crazy” with “Henry Kissinger my album’s only feature”, and somehow expecting his bandmate to follow that. Elucid’s most pungent contributions, as on “Trauma Mic”, are impressive on their own terms, and ground the pair’s pessimism in more proletarian concerns than, say, King David worrying about God’s opinion on the geometry with which he gets freaky with Bathsheba. Plus his bedtime stories, unlike Woods’s, don’t leave the kids in tears, which does seem age-appropriate no matter how brutal it is out there.
Grade: A MINUS (“Niggardly (Blocked Call), “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, “Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here”)
Sarah Mary Chadwick: Messages to God
The artsier arrangements, flutes perhaps excepted, threaten to turn Chadwick’s wounds into another aestheticization of pain. Though it’s a close call, Chadwick is too immediate a writer to let that happen. In a slightly better place than on Me and Ennui—couldn’t get no worse—it’s not like she’s forgiven all sins or she can’t rattle off a list of reasons to weekday drink. Whether because of her own suffering or because she’s an ahem good person (albeit who might run at an ex with eyes closed while windmilling her arms), she’s empathetic to the agonies of others. She has the ability to shift the tone of a song with a chord change, and for all her take-it-or-fjuck-you vocal fry and thick accent, for such an emotive singer (and pianist), she’s adept at deadpanning a joke. She’s learned to exist with her demons, and to appreciate beauty again—New Zealand, where even the designated shit towns have their charm, can do that for you. But sometimes you just want to feel bad.
Grade: A MINUS (“Shitty Town”, “I Felt Things in New Zealand”, “C’mon Stud”)
Lotta Wennäkoski, Nicholas Collon, Sivan Magen: Sigla/Flounce/Sedecim
This collection of Finnish composer Wennäkoski’s work won this year’s Gramophone award for contemporary recording, deservedly to the limited extent that I can tell. The minor parody Flounce is about as entertaining as the pointy-headed side of the genre gets these days: you can almost see conductor Collon swooping his arms around. Over the three movements of Sigla (titled “Sigla”, “SiGLa”, and “Sigla”) virtuoso harpist Magen sometimes forges novelty ploinks that must require some violence to his instrument; one assumes he’s gone 1968 Pete Townshend on his soundboard at least once. Wennäkoski, like her late teacher Kaija Saariaho, probes the fun stuff for meaning: if glissandos are so enjoyable, why don’t we make the whole airplane out of them? Sedecim is just serious, drawing on Nordic music and poetry from the First World War. It’s well done, but as a less-than-serious listener I prefer the other two pieces.
Grade: B PLUS (“Flounce”, “III. Sigla”, “II. SiGLa”)
Maisie Peters: The Good Witch
The curse of the “relatable” pop star is that if you’re successful, you stop being relatable and start writing songs from or about your or your bf’s private jet. Peters avoids this problem in part by being from land of permanent austerity Britain and in part by professing, on the opening track, a lack of emotional maturation since her debut. This isn’t a limitation, because a few years of artistic maturation means that she can write more searching songs about adolescent feelings in her early twenties. While there no obvious American hit potential, her writing is well-tuned and insightful even at its mopiest, often playing the “clarify the title at the end of the chorus” trick, though note that “Body Better”, the most revealing song, refuses to do this. She’s unconvincing only when she claims to be “batshit crazy”: she’s so sane, she’ll get therapy if she needs it.
Grade: B PLUS (“Body Better”, “Lost the Breakup”, “You’re Just a Boy (and I’m Kind of the Man)”)
Sufjan Stevens: Javelin
After years of reticence about his private life, he opens with a direct tribute to his late partner, Evans Richardson, that dissolves into clanking cacophony and resolves into chorused “you know love you”s, and if nothing else on the record and maybe in his career comes close to it, its straightforwardness infects the rest of the material. It’s been years since he had the chops as a lyricist to pull off artsong with consistency; this is his strongest effort since we thought we might get a third state out of him. He borrows good words (a song from Uncle Neil, a Flannery O’Connor title) and adds sometimes dodgy original words (at least the one called “Malthusian Mistress” is relegated to the bonus), and can write a vocal arrangement in his sleep by this point. Beneath the heavenly keyboards, he’s often bummed out—“I’ve nothing but atrophy”—but he’s bummed out with love.
Grade: B PLUS (“Goodbye Evergreen”, “Everything That Rises”, “Shit Talk”)
Monsieur Periné: Bolero Apocalíptico
Alt-ish Colombian group, less electro and tradder than Bomba Estéreo, who’ve reoriented towards export after 2015’s “Nuestra Canción” went TikTok viral six years late. There’s not much bolero and less apocalypse here: it’s upbeat and populist, with diversity giving it a little edge. Singer Catalina García is multilingual and relaxed in genres from reggae-lite to chanson-lite, and if you think that’s faint praise, wait until the other guy in the band tries to sing a waltz at the end. Even if the call for Latin American freedom in “Cumbia Valiente” is generic, it’s the one time García needs a little more backbone, and she brings in Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux as an extra spine. Some of the arrangements are pat, but they’re universally pleasant, and there remain parts of the world in which universal pleasantness could be liberatory.
Grade: B PLUS (“La Pea”, “Cumbia Valiente”, “Mundo Paralelo”)
Doja Cat: Scarlet
Inconsistent when she’s hit-hunting, once she’s secured half a billion streams by deploying “Walk on By” in the most obvious way possible, she’s free to get rappity. Over the first half of Scarlet, she shrugs off haters as fast as she can lose Instagram followers, with all relationships transactional save for that with her beloved hairstylist. “Demons” is the most overcast of several horror raps, and if her alleged Satanism seems sourced from Spirit Halloween, recall that her best song is about a cow costume. Then follow love songs that aren’t as ardent as ones to herself, some gauzy shit, some throwback soul-rap, Ric Flair, and a closing two minutes of her illest rhyming to date. If she’s as far away from making a great album as so many popular rappers, at least she knows what an album is.
Grade: B PLUS (“Demons”, “Fuck the Girls (FTG)”, “WYM Freestyle”)