The Bullpen 010
Some year-end EP poll contenders, plus two (2) Pope jokes
Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out
A reunion for the lucrative rap Seniors Tour, which includes the Vatican now. Filial sons though these two are, do they have anything to add to the Dead Parent genre? Actually, Malice does, while Pusha mostly wants you to know he learned the news on the way to Elon Musk’s house. So don’t set the bar anywhere near the Kendrick spot, take the rapping as serviceable, and enjoy Pharrell going extended full-assed for the first time since he became a Minios. “So Be It” makes great use of a Talal Maddah sample, while “M.T.B.T.T.F.” is throwback minimalism that’s effective when it leaves Pusha unaccompanied and less effective when it leaves Malice unaccompanied. They’ll prosper until their beefs leave them with no one to talk to on the phone. ’Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome. (“Chains & Whips”, “So Be It”, “M.T.B.T.T.F.”)
Deftones: Private Music
The Wheel of Dharma’s turned and they’re getting good reviews again. To me it mostly sounds like the last time I listened to a Deftones album in 2003: some of it’s metal, some of it’s not, Chino Moreno’s charisma makes most of it work as long as you can forgive him for getting whiny when he starts yelling at you. At times (“Infinite Source”) they lay on the effects to pander to the kids and it pushes them into new territory. Other times they sound like Jesus Jones. Still, dreams are dreamed, Chino gets to pull out all his wave-and-boat imagery to explore his interior oceans, the body is escapable for a while. (“Infinite Source”, “Locked Club”, “My Mind Is a Mountain”)
Kali Uchis: Sincerely,
Never big on rhyme, she doesn’t give up on words, she just downplays them. A singer whose smoothness has long impressed the sorts of critics who’ve used the word “passaggio” more twice (<searches archive>: uh-oh), she’s become the fun kind of languorous—her vowel-stretching makes their sounds pleasurable in and of themselves rather than pretending the length of an “oooooooh” is proportional to depth. None of this means the fast ones, some of which it would be fair to say have a beat, aren’t generally better. But nothing’s uninteresting: if the title and the runtime of “Angels All Around Me…” worry you, it does keep moving, and the sugar is natural enough to meet with RFK’s approval. Her best English-language album, though caution is still advised for diabetics. (“Sugar! Honey! Love!”, “Angels All Around Me…”, “Silk Lingerie”)
Kalie Shorr: My Type EP
No more country slumming: namechecking and soundchecking Kurt and Courtney, this is “adult alternative”. If one could question switching to a format even less welcoming to anyone who hasn’t broken through by thirty, I’m not her financial advisor, so let’s focus on the five-and-a-half strong songs out of six. Her main subject is what appears to be one specific guy, whom she’s mad at whether she’s stalking his house or unsuccessfully trying to escape him in Rome (all her exes could also be in the audience for Pontifexes.) If rhetorical-I-hope questions like “if you put your mouth on me, would it taste like her?” make it clear the narrator isn’t not over him, the EP is a cathartic attempt to put him behind her, and full of entertainment for rubberneckers. If the closing Dolly–Whitney interpolation is a bit cheeseball, she eats cheeseballs for breakfast. Hopefully not too often. (“When in Rome”, “Unkiss”, “My Type”)
Lívia Mattos: Verve
Third album from the Baiana accordionist has her both loosen up and look outward. The opening tracks feature Indian and Senegalese collaborators and are interesting without being essential. There’s also an attempt to innovate on the late Hermeto Pascoal’s “Mundo Verde Esperança”, which has one of those Star Trek spinny glass things but gets dragged down to earth fairly quickly. The loosening is more useful, with a big change (I think improvement) to her sound being the agile bottom end of Jefferson Babu’s tuba (and euphonium.) While I laud her outreach, Mattos’s own playing is most satisfying on the northeastern-style tracks, especially her virtuosic soloing on “Forrógutti”, and on “Folia de Fole”, which is a romp. (“Folia de Fole”, “Forrógutti”, “Verve”)
Peter Evans & Petter Eldh: Jazz Fest EP
Short, sweet, silly. The opening “Roulette” sloppily repeats a riff echoed by Joel Ross’s vibes, before moving into a contrasting section where Evans plays high trumpet and everybody else gets spoopy. “Dirrty Cop” is more serious, with Immanuel Wilkins playing serious alto. “The Berm” gets back to the laffs, with Andy Berman playing fractured guitar that devolves into a solo Tom Morello would be proud of. From thereon out it’s comedy gold, with violin and soprano and Alice Teyssier’s singing all pan-fried into bubble and squeak. Eldh mostly refuses the bass’s usual center-of-gravity role, instead emphasizing anything he finds amusing and/or fiddliing with his synths, so more often than not drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode is left to ensure some kind of unity; by the end even he’s given up and clangs at will. Definitely not the most precise free jazz release of the year, but what fun. (“Roulette”, “Dirrty Cop”, “The Berm”)
Peter Stampfel: Song Shards
I confess I don’t think the latter twenty-six tracks—jingles extracted from his Memory Dump for posterity—add up to much, literally: they’re under ten minutes in total. The first twenty, however, continue Stampfel’s exploration of what he can do with a wrecked voice, with Mark Bingham’s trebly guitar arrangements making him sound like an angel (the Biblically accurate kind.) He tries to find peace in a world that’ll remain fucked after he and I have gone, via philosophies grab-bagged from Buddhism, Stoicism, pop-psych, and something the most stoned person of the twentieth century once whispered to him, possibly in the mirror. “You fight for your life ’til death do you part, then you got it made” he says, and one can dream the Grammy committee for liner notes will comb through his 14,000 words to work out if he believes it. A prayer more self-evidently sincere: “Please, God, make me more wack.” (“You Fight for Your Life”, “More Wack”, “Every Person”)
Red Velvet - Irene & Seulgi: Tilt mini-album
40% of one of two reasonable choices for the 21st century’s greatest girl group do six tracks of more or less the same thing they do when the other 60%’s around, missing only a few of Wendy’s big notes. Things are generally dancey—there are some throwback beats and ever so slighly wubby low-ends, there’s borrowed rapper Julie from cancelled-in-Los Angeles Kiss of Life, there’s professionalism from the principals and all 40 writers. The only major song is “Girl Next Door”, the one co-written by Kenzie (one of two reasonable choices for the 21st century’s greatest girl group songwriter), in which I&S admire the titular spunky neighbor pretty platonically until a harmonically strange bridge makes you verify they said “mamsoge” and not “I’m so gay”. (“Girl Next Door”, “Tilt”, “Irresistible”)
Rodrigo Amado/Chris Corsano: The Healing
Newly released 2016 summit between a tenor and drummer both known for their versatility, though only the latter’s played with Björk. Pick a representative slice—say minute 7 of the opening “The Healing Day”—and you can hear just how much Amado gets up to, as the segment starts with a crescendo, flies up into the upper register, and ends up in the basement. Corsano is particularly fine on “Griot”, creating an intro that’s a statement in itself before Amado embellishes it. As someone with bass-ic tastes, I don’t expect it to go into my long-term rotation next to Amado-Corsano’s quartet record A History of Nothing, but it’s worth a few plays, and in the unlikely event that I ever get a Downbeat poll vote, I should keep Corsano in mind; Amado’s already there. (“The Healing Day”, “Release Is in the Mind”)
The Weather Station: Humanhood
The long melodic lines are there to get Tamara Lindeman’s words across, and the ideas aren’t always complex enough to justify quite so many words. There’s conflation of personal angst with enviro-political disaster, as if the important thing about mass extinction is how she feels about it. (You might counter that taking this complaint seriously would require shrugging at just about all political folk music since Phil Ochs died, to which I say uh.) Still, there’s nothing to stop you from appreciating the long melodic lines as artifacts in themselves, while the drummer and, yes, the flutist illustrate them nicely. And if Lindeman’s very much a vowel-forward singer of her time, this lets her portray the everymillennial with ease. “My pain is ordinary”, she sings, and for better and worse it is. (“Window”, “Neon Signs”, “Ribbon”)