RSSDean's List: 2022
Introduction moved here
- Selo i Ludy Performance Band: Bunch One (self-released '19): I first heard this Kharkiv-based accordion-balalaika-bass-drums band covering A-ha's "Take on Me" on an MSNBC segment shot early in the war in a basement bomb shelter they shared with nine other patriots, and was soon delighted to find this 2019 covers album in their "funny folk punk polka style" on Amazon. Not counting the two Rammstein tracks Alexander Goncharov intones in German, it comprises nine radio-friendly rock standards, two of the three I like most squeezed into a "Sweet Seven Nation Dreams" mockup Jack White deserves for copping the Eurythmics' bassline. What makes these songs standards is that they're catchy fun when done right, but in this context they also comprise an inspired claim on the democratic capitalism and artistic freedom even Ukrainians with surnames like revered Russian novelists want in on. This is where Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing," Bon Jovi's "It's My Life," and Queen's "I Want to Break Free" become cultural artifacts to build a dream on. With the band's drummer evacuated although Goncharov assures us he'll be back because the worst is over and the war will be won, they've been live-streaming as a trio from a grimmer looking bomb shelter on their own YouTube channel, where PayPal and Patreon options helps American admirers underwrite a rebuilding Selo i Ludy insist is no less inevitable than it is essential. With Putin apparently set on turning Kharkiv into Aleppo as I write, I just hope there'll be enough left to rebuild--with Selo i Ludy intact enough to keep pitching in. A
- Beyoncé: Renaissance (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia): I first heard the album of the year on a clogged Merritt Parkway in the rented Corolla that conveyed my family to our overdue vacation on the Connecticut shore. By the time I'd bought it at the Westbrook Wal-Mart two days later ("What's a CD?" the clerk asked), the Bluetooth-enabled car stereo version had sufficed to knock me out, and not because I instantly grokked its range of reference to the queer-identified dance effects my daughter hipped me to. I'd just had my spirits lifted nonstop by one shrewdly differentiated pop smash after another, and back in New York it connected even louder on a real sound system. Despite one that begins "I just fell in love/And I just quit my job" and stray references to "45" and "Karens just turned into terrorists," this is not a conventionally political album. It's Beyoncé as the "sexy bitch" and super-rich Basquiat owner she is, buttressed by an array of house, rap, and disco legends both cult and famed who add crucial flavor here and there--I've never enjoyed Grace Jones more. Erotically explicit, knowledgeable, and felt, with "Plastic Off the Sofa" as lubricious a married sex song as you could hope to hear, it's clearly designed as an antidote to pandemic weariness and historic despair. "Have you ever had fun like this?" Bey asks. She recommends it, and believes her finest album will generate that precious gift big-time. A+
- Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (4AD): However impressive Adrienne Lenker's skill set--and if you don't think it's worth your time go away--Big Thief's fragility has always brushed a little too close to fey for those it didn't enrapture. But on this this 80-minute let-it-all-hang-out, a breakup album and a breakout album in one convenient package, such piddling macho talking points don't apply. With no loss of Lenker's haunting trademark delicacy, Big Thief is louder here, and rocks more in a clattering kind of way. Their guitars are virtuosic like none other. The good tunes even her best albums don't guarantee abound. So that's the music part. As for the lyrics, they're so outta sight I'm gonna quote too many just in case my fellow crits missed 'em. "I got the oven on, I got the onions wishing/They hadn't made me cry, filling the sink with dishes/Letting them air dry/Waiting for the wind's permission." "When I say heart, I mean finish/Last one there is a potato knish." "I am the sweaty sheets/The wet bed/The things she'll do and the things she's said." "Ash to ask and dust to dusk." "I wanna be the shoelace that you tie/I wanna live forever till I die." A
- Willie Nelson: A Beautiful Time (Legacy): I keep up with Nelson's phenomenal if not always knockout album output better than most--this one, released April 29 to mark his 89th birthday, makes 45 solo albums reviewed plus 16 collabs. To the best of my recollection, his 2021 Sinatra tribute--the second one, That's Life it's called--seemed de trop. But from Rodney Crowell and Chris Stapleton's jaw-dropping "That one sharp conversation is still the reason why" defining the leadoff "I'll Love You Till the Day I Die," this one had my number. The five new Buddy Cannon collabs including "I Don't Go to Funerals" plus Shawn Camp's title number would have sufficed and then some. Only just when you think he's fulfilled his death-defying quota and then some come two covers it's hard to believe he's new to: Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song" implausibly topped by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and let us not forget Ringo Starr's "With a Little Help From My Friends." Both are transcendent, not to say death-defying. Can he top this come his 90th? Don't bet no. A
- Plains: I Walked With You a Ways (Anti-): Come-from-Alabama Waxahatchee great Katie Crutchfield bonds with Lone Star L.A. folkie Jess Williamson on 10 irresistibly quiet and fetching songs, most of the loveliest although not the listen-up opener by Crutchfield, with nary a cowrite although they join voices on every one. Revisiting Out in the Storm and Saint Cloud, I was startled by how loud Waxahatchee sounded, the drums especially but in truth the whole sonic gestalt even though Crutchfield's vocals are never assaultive. Here she's generally a quantum or two quieter and the drums are quieter still. Yet pealing out of the stillness the melodies are so strong that for most of the half-hour album I've found myself something like enchanted, an impressive effect given that almost every lyric taxonomizes a love too partial, and not always because the man isn't on the case. Usually, though. A
- Ashley McBryde: Lindeville (Warner Music Nashville): McBryde is less featured artist than ringleader on this concept album with its pants down. Simultaneously hilarious and sad as shit, it's the made-up songs of a simple Southern town where nobody's fucking who they're supposed to and everybody but the groundskeeper who lost his thumb in Vietnam and his wife to cancer has a drug of choice, with Bud Lite and vodka-and-Sprite barely qualifying. In the opener, Brenda had better put her bra on or she'll miss seeing Marvin next door boning the babysitter, and with a few commercial breaks it's pretty much downhill from there. McBryde takes the lead a few times, but so do Caylee Hammack, Pillbox Patti, Aaron Raitiere, Benjy Davis, and to name folks previously known to me Brandy Clark and the Brothers Osborne. Inspirational Verse I: "My stepkids hate me." Inspirational Verse II: "Jesus loves the drunkards and the whores and the queers/Would you recognize him if he bought you a beer?" A
- Buck 65: King of Drums (Handsmade): The Nova Scotian rapper born Richard Terfry is so Canadian he's had a gig as a CBC host since 2008, and although I reviewed some dozen of his long-players between 2001 and 2014, he then went on musical hiatus. So I was pleased to discover that this 21-song comeback had surfaced in June and even more pleased to soon conclude that it was his best album ever. The secret is the drums he's not actually king of, with a tipoff that arrives just three seconds in, when it becomes clear that the lead track is ignited by a James Brown homage. Although he was always beatwise enough, at 50 Terfry has done enough listening and thinking to grok how deeply percussive yet seductively sinuous the most compelling hip-hop grooves are. But he remains a word guy, and as a proud alumnus of Altered State University still loves unlikely rhymes: boondocks-boombox, crumb cake-drum breaks, SlimFast-gym class, humongous-homonculus, novelist-obelisk, Ukrainian-cranium, intensely-Zelenskyy. And when it comes to "friggin' them and fraggin' them," note that track two is built around a quick and easy recipe for a Molotov cocktail. A
- DJ Maphorisa X Kabza de Small: Scorpion Kings (BlaqBoy '19): Maphorisa is a big-deal DJ in a South African dance genre called amapiano, de Small more renowned as a producer. As with most dance genres, I know nothing about amapiano, which I gather is associated with deep house. What I do know when I hear it is a good beat--which in these variations dispenses with the r&b fours of mbaqanga for what presents itself as a consciously pan-African nod to a panoply of central African polygroove(s)--highlife, rumba, soukous, perhaps even "Afrobeats." The same pair's somewhat flightier and more divafied 2020 Once Upon a Time in Lockdown goes down too easy to suit me. This one, however, I couldn't put back on the shelf. It's all beats, so amelodic it's almost abstract at times. It provides little pitch or even texture--electronic though it presumably is, this percussion percusses so vividly you sometimes feel you can hear the drumstick that isn't there depressing the drumhead that isn't there either. The vocals are mostly chants if that, though they do vary, divided 50-50 genderwise with some kids in there too. The selling point of a record like this isn't hooks you hum. It's hooks that compel you to replay the album because you just have to hear them again. A
- Stro Elliot & James Brown: Black & Loud: James Brown as Reimagined by Stro Elliot (Polydor): This audacious object lesson in what Dan Charnas has dubbed "the sound of error" is body music with a spasmodic jerk or twist to it. Maybe you have to love James Brown to love the simultaneously awed, woke, and dismembered way 44-year-old Roots instrumentalist/beatmaker Elliot adores and messes with hybrid JB grooves on which he confers titles like "Machine No Make Sex," "Coal Sweat," and "Turn It Up Give It Shrooms." But I hope not. Because even if you've never been fooled into thinking that "Sex Machine" might just go on forever this time, you'll be electrified by every one of these 10 sub-five-minute instrumentals-with-vocals yet at the same time be glad when each workout ends, kind of like at the gym. Foreshortening a syllable here, unbalancing a mix there, squeezing sounds out of shape, fucking with perfection Dilla-style, Elliot reminds us that nothing lasts forever. But he also makes us glad we're capable of thinking it can. A
- Todd Snider: Live: Return of the Storyteller (Thirty Tigers/Aimless): This is Snider's fourth live album, and except for 2013's perfectly OK here-and-gone Record Store Day special Happy New Year Vol. 1 they're all both superb and different. Up till now, I've favored 2011's Live: The Storyteller--can't get enough of the one where Todd takes the mike by default when the bandleader is knocked cold by a drunk woman on a swing. Two of these selections are on that one too, but I don't mind hearing them again and neither will you. And not one of the eight new stories has gotten old on me after some dozen plays. True, you can just stream it and put it in your memory bank. But Snider hopes to lure you into buying the physical, so he and his faithful correspondent Diana Hendricks provide 17 booklet pages of impressionistic liner notes worth having in your actual library. A very modest sample: "touring is a slippery trick/there's only one way to do it/exhausted"; "science reports that in cognitive ratio equivalency testing,/by all accounts, eight hours of bus sleep is the same as no sleep at all"; "i didn't play any of the songs i planned to/i played green castle blues/and the rest a the set played itself//what i get to do is just a total privilege." A
- DJ Black Low: Uwami (Awesome Tapes From Africa '21): Is it gqom? Or is it amapiano? Or somehow both? Eight thousand miles from this 20-year-old beatmaker's Pretoria base, do I know enough to claim I care? Nah. Early on minimal as opposed to minimalist melodic content is provided by digital maneuvers or devices that thrum more than they drum much less clatter, kind of like a bass only not really, with the fundamental pulse usually provided by what could pass for a brushed snare. Other sounds include teenagers singing or chanting, a male or female teen going heh-heh, an adult male or facsimile singing-chanting actual lyrics echoed by a much younger voice singing-chanting. Markedly abstract, I admit. Reliably delightful, I insist. Plus you can dance to it if you have the skills, I assume. A
- Harry Styles: Harry's House (Columbia): Any pop star who can make a slogan if not an especially great song out of "Treat People With Kindness" has a head start with me, although not so's I'm inclined to give One Direction another shot. In a career that's evolved aesthetically as well as commercially, solo Harry has worked hard on the details of product placement, and on his third album he takes his boy-group preeminence well past the finest work of 'NSync or the Backstreet Boys. The payoff isn't its sexual candor--that's been there. It's more the way the horns recede after punching up the lead "Music for a Sushi Restaurant," making way for a synthesized soundscape of striking subtlety and charm that easily accommodates the acoustic guitar sonics that add extra delicacy to "Matilda" and "Boyfriend." Even more remarkable is the way the lyrics this soundscape cushion and accentuate achieve a metaphorical reach and narrative concreteness truly rare in megapop. "You stub your toe or break your camera/I'll do everything to help you through." "Science and edibles/life hacks going viral in the bathroom." "I bring the pop to the cinema/You pop when we get intimate." "He starts secretly drinking/It's hard to know what he's thinking." And plenty more. A
- Montparnasse Musique: Archeology (RealWorld): The two kingpins of this remarkable project identify African even though they grew up 6000 miles apart: Franco-Algerian DJ Bern Bella, who didn't even visit the mother country till he was out of his teens, and Johannesburg "township electro house" producer Aero Manyelo, who was born in the northern reaches of South Africa before heading south to Jo'burg with a family led by a father who was a serious jazz fan. But though there's thump aplenty in the beats the two concoct for a band named for the artiest of Parisian neighborhoods, it's striking how Congolese their groove remains. True, it's less lissome than highlife much less soukous and doesn't aspire to such ease. But it's very much polyrhythmic while rocking to beat the band. When you first play it you may think you've heard lots of music like it, but you haven't. It's not going to displace Victor Uwaifo much less Kanda Bongo Man much less Luambo Franco. But it's ready and willing to stand alongside it. A-
- Tommy Womack: I Thought I Was Fine (Schoolkids): Pushing 60 with that boy of his in college or at least out on his own, never has this Nashville lifer made more of his knack for words and the tunes to put them across than on his eighth long-player. He's so funny and humane you can't help rooting for him, which in this case means hoping he hasn't settled for a concept album about the disconnect between holy matrimony and the rock and roll life. Don't miss the closing diptych, true stories about how his much older brother Waymond once played touch football with Elvis and Waymond's beloved wife Lou once told Elvis to get lost. Then there's "Call Me Gary," about a priest he knew long ago who'd buy five-year-olds ice cream cones and then put his head in their laps. Hope that "Sitting here in Saskatchewan/Baby, baby you're the only one" is literal and "Rock and roll is a losing cause/All my old groupies got menopause" is just an opener he couldn't resist. Which may not be so easy with "Tumors in my bladder an inch from my penis/I'd appreciate it if you keep that between us." A
- Homeboy Sandman: I Can't Sell These (self-released): Twenty in all, which he "can't sell" because he hasn't cleared samples that originated with not just beatmakers from Diamond D to Umra but elements discerned in Sault's "Free" and the Fiona Apple soundtrack number "Dull Tool" as well as tunebeds traceable to Venezuelan electronic composer Angel Rada, 1957 Crescent City breakout Frogman Henry, and the Parks and Recreation theme song. He will, however, give them away via Bandcamp, and should you reciprocate with a gift of your own will gratefully accept it. This is, after all, the finest album of one of hip-hop's most prolific careers--including Aesop Rock collabs, some 25 albums and EPs since 2007. He just wants you to know that money doesn't help you play in the snow--and about a thousand other things as well. One that touches me especially criticizes as it celebrates the many bus routes of Queens. A
- The Paranoid Style: For Executive Meeting (Bar/None): The only sensible way to categorize the five dozen or so concise, literate, unfailingly catchy mid-tempo-plus songs Elizabeth Nelson has eked out or poured forth over the past decade is to slot them as pop-rock. Although she's as well-informed politically as any rocker or even rapper at our disposal--Jon Langford, can we say? a Randy Newman too punctilious to finish what he starts? Carsie Blanton or Dawn Oberg to get more obscure?--she limits the subject matter on her most playable album yet to the arts. Among the topics she addresses or at least names she drops are Steve Cropper, Ernest Hemingway, Harry Smith, XTC, Charles Bissell of the long lamented Wrens, album illustrator Barney Bubbles, half-witting Nazi collaborator P.G. Wodehouse, and partner Tim Bracy's overdue tribute to the Velvet Underground's secret weapon, Doug Yule. When she closes with a cover of Rosanne Cash's indelible "Seven Year Ache" it seems barely an upgrade technically. Her craft is that sure. But it may well leave you with the feeling that there are emotional places her music has yet to venture. A
- Miranda Lambert: Palomino (Vanner/RCA): I hope those who climbed on her fanbase circa 2005's "Kerosene" imagining that Miranda was the kind of gal who'd set a guy's house on fire have outgrown their touching belief in self-expression. If not, however, this 15-track exercise in Nashville bad girldom should do the trick. In utterly indelible songs of highly credible spunk, the TX-to-TN woman who spent post-lockdown telling the press how the domestic intimacy imposed by Covid firmed up her impulsive marriage to an NYC cop tells how one rootless heroine after another works variations on wanderlust and sexual autonomy and acting up and feeling strange and country money and rolling down the river and actual stabs at actual stability. True, these songs are naught more than skillful entertainments and proud of it. But let them be that and that alone and they're guaranteed to enlarge. A
- Amanda Shires: Take It Like a Man (ATO): Shires has told interviewers that several of the 10 songs on this album reflect dicey patches in her marriage to Jason Isbell. But that's no reason to get literal about who's who or what's what. Ultimately they're songs, which like all works of art generate formal imperatives that seldom jibe perfectly with the life experiences that got them started. They don't even leave much room for Shires's violin, and often retain a rawness that prevents them from snapping shut cleverly the way good little well-turned cheating songs do. Several project a sexuality all the more convincing because it's so raw; others end in the emotional middle, before the resolution we're craving is achieved; quite a few feel profound. The part I like best comes dead center, when one that ends "You could say it's all my fault/We just couldn't get along/And if anyone asks I'll say what's true/And really it's I don't know" leads immediately to one that begins "Just when you think you've had enough/All you could take/When you think you've got no more heart left to break/Here he comes." A
- Slum of Legs: Slum of Legs (Splurge '20): From the LGBT-friendly seaside haven of Brighton, this "queer, feminist, noise-pop" sextet has been around for almost a decade, with this 2020 album their only longform to show for it. Fortunately, thrillingly, it never quits. If you're put off by news of a six-minute opener called "Benetint and Malevolence," which I'm here to report takes off pretty quick, have faith. The title track will be right along, with hoarse, loud, violin-sawing Tamsin Chapman announcing: "We are a superstructure/Spiked with glass/We are a fur-lined rupture/A clatter mass." Sometimes they're harsh, sometimes almost choral. Always Chapman is the fearless leader. Cleansing and declamatory, a doozy and a hoot. A
- Gogol Bordello: Solidaritine (Cooking Vinyl/Casa Bordello): Now 50, Eugene Hutz obviously hasn't grown more mellifluous with the years, but the rawness isn't just physiological. Having fled Ukraine with his part-Roma family in the wake of Chernobyl 1986, Hutz spent six years getting to the U.S., where by the early '00s he was on his way to worldwide cult renown. But since he now finds his birth nation under brutal attack by a new breed of fascists, it's only natural that his 2022 songs are rawer, angrier, and less "musical" than those on 2017's Seekers and Finders. What may seem less natural until you figure out why you can't stop listening is that this is his best album ever not counting 2007's triumphant Super Taranta! Raw and angry is only a precondition--it shares its title with the imaginary hormone named on the opening track, a biochemical miracle that unites humans engaged in concerted struggle. After which the album unfurls song after song that evoke such a struggle: "I'm Coming Out" (as a human who resists "the technogenic sphere"), "Take Only What You Can Carry" (your bare hands will do to scoop water), "Knack for Life" (the faculty that helps you sense when the ice is too thin). It's "The Era of the End of Eras," and we'd better adjust. Fugazi gets a cover, Bad Brains a cameo. It's all hands on deck. A
- Sowal Diabi: De Kaboul à Bamako (Accords Croisé): With a project name translating "question" in Persian and "answer" in Bambara and an album title that begins in Afghanistan and ends in Mali, this gorgeously articulated and textured collaboration featuring musicians from many related lands including several European ones is topped off by jazzy Malian sophisticate Mamani Keita and conservatory-trained Iranian sophisticate Aïda Nosrat. You've never heard anything quite like it, and if you let it sink in a little you'll be impressed at least and transported if you're willing to be--it's enough to make you believe international understanding can be achieved from the top. Combining dance modes or honoring a deceased tabla player, juxtaposing "habit" and "feeling," following 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi here with '70s Afghan hitmaker Siar Hashimi there, the combination of juxtaposition and amalgamation is both calming and inspiring. If only life could imitate art once in a while. A
- Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga: Love for Sale (Columbia/Interscope '21): The news that this pair were revisiting their cross-generational gimmick seven years after its launch got no rise out of me, because while Cheek to Cheek was definitely enjoyable, it was often no more than that. And while the duo's young distaff half had since emerged from her shrewdly individualized carapace of glam-pop celebrity to prove a gifted actress and adaptable all-around entertainer with a high alto of near-Ella sweetness and definition and the brains to begin the "It's De-Lovely" opener with its semi-recitative "tinpantithesis" prologue, her senior partner had not only turned 95 but been diagnosed with Alzheimer's way back in in 2016. But I failed to register two things. First, all 12 titles are by pantheon wit-and-a-half Cole Porter, who not only devised the term "tinpantithesis" but festooned "Let's Do It" with "Lithuanians and Letts do it." Second, Alzheimer's has been found to be much easier on your verbal memory if you are singing, at which point lyrics you could once recite verbatim pour past your vocal cords and into the air as if they were notes on a scale, as they also are. Of course, this assumes you retain a larynx worthy of the name, which not every singer of 75 much less 95 can claim. Anthony Dominick Benedetto still has one--he sounds leaner, a bit drier, but also capable of enunciating every word in a long-cultivated New York accent whose miraculous juice and intuitive smarts could make an 80-year-old hope for a longer life than many would consider seemly. A
- PinkPantheress: To Hell With It (Parlophone '21): This TikTok-launched 21-year-old Anglo-Kenyan ex-film student was a phenom in the U.K. for well over a year before I tripped over her while trawling Spotify, where I expect many of her hooks have already enjoyed long viral lives decorating lesser music. These 10 songs clock in at 18:36 total and are most often loosely anchored by pattering beats and/or tiny keyb figures solider than her irresistibly whispery soprano, with every one some kind of gem or lesser bauble. A genius who's had problems with her A levels, a shopgirl who can now buy the shop, she has problems with love because who doesn't, although a father who long ago relocated Stateside can't be helping. Wish her well as her art turns into a career, which she knows is inevitable and is never easy for anybody. A
- Tom Zé: Lìngua Brasileira (Selo Sesc): This unexpected album by my favorite Brazilian genius comprises songs written over several years for a theater piece that deconstructs a Brazilian Portuguese it means to tell the world was always inflected by Ugandan Kimbundu, which long ago bent the language's New World variant toward vowels rather than the consonants that render European Portuguese so guttural and mean. Augmenting aptly well-lubricated lead vocals with a chorus less femme than his fans have gotten used to, the 85-year-old projects good-humored vernacularity throughout, and as usual the tunes are as welcome as reals from heaven. Lyrics are less easy to come by for us non-Lusophones, a detriment in theater music. But I hope to find more as searching and unbowed as "Unimultiplicidade," which Google Translate tells me goes "I want the unimultiplicity where each man is alone the home of humanity." Me too and maybe you. Jair Bolsonaro, not a chance. A
- Amyl and the Sniffers: Comfort to Me (ATO '21): Pay attention and what at first seems nothing more or less than the show of muscle this band needed reveals itself as serious next-level stuff. Not only have the guitar-bass-drum bulked up and Amy Taylor's shrill soprano gained focus and conviction, but the songs are meatier with no loss of the bratty lip that's her selling point. "I'm short I'm shy I'm fucked up/I'm bloody ugly" (which she isn't, natch). "I swear I'm not that drunk/I'm not that drunk/Let me into your pub" (although, true, "I distracted you with all my bullshit"). "I want to go to the country/I want to get out of here" (that one's called "Hertz"). And then, unexpectedly, at track eight where bands often hide the naff stuff so maybe she's nervous about it, one called "Capital," about how "I only just started learning basic politics" and does admittedly close, far more modestly than the rest of the lyric requires in my opinion but worth some humility points: "I love feeling drunk on the illusion of meaning." In short, as good a punk album as I let myself hope to hear. A
- Folk and Great Tunes From Siberia and Far East (CPL Music): How to describe this arresting array of 34 songs spread over two CDs from Russian "republics" I've never heard of, the first 10 Sakha/Takutia, Tuva, Altai, Mal'chik: Novosiborsk Region, Altay, Khakassia, Volge: Omsk Region, Kamchaika, Buryatia, and Sakha/Yakutia again? Granted, Tuva many of us know, the throat-singing capital of the world and the homeland of Huun-Huur-Tu, who I greatly enjoyed at Symphony Space in 1994 after ranking their Sixty Horses in My Head 20th on my 1993 Dean's List and happened to be playing shortly before this came in the mail; three of the four consecutive Tuva selections on what is designated CD1 work recognizable variations on that minor vocal miracle. But though compiler Daryana Antipova has made the dozen or two regional/national styles she's brought together abut each other pleasingly enough, their multiplicity remains a wonder less daunting than purely remarkable. Vocals tend more guttural than in Latinate tongues, and though many songs ride rousing beats, not a hint of Africa is to be heard. That's hardly to say, however, that her selections come up short on melody or drive. If only because largish rhythms have become an international sonic truism over the past half century, a few even rock in their way. But what's had me enjoying this project well beyond the call of duty is the sheer variety of the thing: the unmistakable sound of human beings who are nothing like you culturally having a good time you're lucky to partake of. A-
- The Mountain Goats: Bleed Out (Merge): It's not like John Darnielle grabbed a chance to go on either vacation or what they call hiatus. Near as we can tell he never stops, and during the pandemic he not only put out two matched if insufficiently indistinguishable live-in-the-studio jobs headed The Jordan Lake Sessions but recorded an album of songs inspired by French hellenist Pierre Chuvin and then funneled the proceeds directly to his Covid-grounded road crew. But the mere rockers in the vast ring of fans who surround his giant cult will be pleased to note that after a long keyby spell, this one leans heavily on electric guitars. As a result the tracks seem to coalesce even when you don't altogether follow the allusive logic of their lyrics, although that's less problematic than usual on the most compelling bunch of songs he's put in one place in over a decade. Good guys or bad guys, most of the protagonists here are on some edge or other in a culture stretched near the breaking point by greed and violence that have become commonplaces. The title track is a finale. It offers zero hope that all will end well. A
- My Idea: That's My Idea (Hardly Art '21): Where Lily Konigsberg's Palberta 5000 was too spare for my taste, on this five-track debut her collaboration with guitarist-plus Nate Amos is often delicate and sometimes almost feathery. And though her fragile to half-whispered soprano is obviously crucial to the overall effect, so are all the other elements, particularly when the electronic percussion doesn't so much clatter as pitter-patter. Following a miraculous earworm of an opener unconvincingly titled 'I Can't Dance" are other irresistible intimations of delight cut with insecurity: "I think it's just my mixed-up mind ain't anything about her" or "Sure looks like you're laughing at my jokes/But inside you're crying like a baby." After all, whose idea was this anyway? She really wants to know. A
- Mama's Broke: Narrow Line (Free Dirt): Steeped in folk balladry, stark yet also sprightly but seldom if ever pretty, this strictly acoustic Montreal-based Nova Scotian duo double only on banjo, with Amy Lou Keeler the guitarist as well as the declarative lead singer and Lisa Maria adding fiddle, mandolin, cello once, and extra salt. So we get "Do right man but not right now/Say that you love me but you don't know how" over plucked banjo and sour fiddle. And "But you wrote the same old story in another woman's bed/Just like all other men" only then "'Cause even when it was bad you were the best I ever had." And "But you found your joy you're God's little boy/And all those girls with their words are gonna be sorry" over faint guitar chords and painfully spare banjo. And "All the men dying with more than they can spend" followed by a just barely strummed "We can't hold it all/Our hands are just too small." Strong stuff delicately and even intricately rendered throughout. A-
- Drive-By Truckers: Welcome 2 Club XIII (ATO): Set to tour Europe after their spell in virtual quarantine, they holed up in an Athens studio and recorded seven of these nine mostly excellent if less than far-ranging songs all in a flurry. For Patterson Hood there's kind of a concept, not ordinarily one with much juice in it: the vicissitudes and occasional delights of the touring life--safe driving tips, drug casualties on both sides of eternity, success settling into something more like survival, and a title number in which Foghat tribute bands and local miscreants covering "People Who Died" enliven Muscle Shoals's only punk club. And for Inspirational Verse there's this Mike Cooley stanza: "All those well-intentioned lies/That I myself romanticized/Believably enough to pass as love songs/With more than one man on one knee/It never stops amazing me/How easily the heart hears what it wants to." A-
- Terry Klein: Good Luck Take Care (Terry Klein Music): Pragmatic g-g-b-d propels Bostonite-turned-Austinite's wide-ranging lyrics over the top when they provide the locomotion that the road-dogging opener and its child-rearing follow-up may not even need. Sadly, the metaphorical slow ones about salt and a goldfinch that follow close by need more than that. But then come five story songs that aren't really fast enough but clever or felt enough as well. Clever: "Such a Town." Felt: "Salinas"/"The Woman Who Was Lost in the Flood," which I bet he intended as a sequence. A-
- Jeffrey Lewis: When That Really Old Cat Dies (Spotify/Amazon/Apple): Downloadable as I write from Amazon and Apple, Lewis designates these seven songs "a dumping ground for tracks I didn't have any other place to put." He first uploaded them to Spotify because he'd been told "that Spotify has internal automatic compression/volume stuff, to standardize all recordings." Unfortunately, he reports, "it seems not to really work--I think the volumes are inconsistent." No audiophile myself, I'd say that's inconsequential given how much I admire these seven selections, mostly outtakes from 2015's Manhattan and 2019's Bad Wiring. The halting, tender title threnody evokes the eccentricities and need for privacy I've observed as my own cats reached their ends. But that's just a beginning here as the songs proceed immediately to the surprisingly persuasive "What I Love Most in England (Is the Food)" and continues from the last-minute birthday party announcement "You're Invited" to the climactic "Guest List Song." Inspirational Verse: "You bought me a brew once in two thousand and two/You did a favor for me and so I did one for you/Yeah I put you on the guest list and I did it on two other occasions/But when you ask the fourth time maybe that's the statute of limitations." A-
- Emperor X: The Lakes of Zones B and C (Dreams of Field): Over the ever-lengthening years Chad Matheny has carved out a principled DIY career for himself, and at some level he's proud of it. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean the world has stopped coming to an end. And it also doesn't mean that he's as inclined as he once was to keep up the good fight. Here there's a sun-powered GPS, there DHL losing your furniture, here a hummingbird better equipped to weather the storm than we are, there sketchy Syrian punks who haven't figured out how fucked they are. So if "Our lack of certainty is no excuse for nihilistic dread," well, in addition there's "no need to give ourselves a hernia/The real heavy lifting's for the young." Musically, Matheny has never been more sure-footed, but spiritually he's in a bind. So am I, and quite possibly you. A disturbing record. A
- The Casual Dots: Sanguine Truth (Ixor Stix): Where this two-gals-and-a-guy aggregation's 2004 debut was amelodically instrumental-experimental enough to slot as riot grrrl with the rough edges sanded off, their very belated follow-up is songful enough to call grrrl group even if it's grrrl group about the end of the world. Yet apocalyptic though "When those in power play their money games/They ruin this world they ruin for all" and "How could you live free?/How could you be snug in your bed?/When visions of violence/Dance in your head" may be, they don't ignore the post-erotic/romantic shortfalls political malfeasances so often fuel. On the contrary--they situate them in history. A-
- Danger Mouse & Black Thought: Cheat Codes (BMG): "Whether you're in Paterson or Pakistan," this is to inform you that Tariq Trotter's "skin tone is aubergine," which rhymes with "war machine" because the man remains a battle rapper of the old school. Fine though his three 2018-2020 mixtapes were, this collaboration took longer, aimed higher, and made the most of it. "Between Harry Belafonte and Harry Allen," conscious everyman turned hungry autodidact Black Thought is proud to show off a vocabulary and knowledge base further embellished by verses from the equally down Raekwon, Killer Mike, Joey Bada$$, and A$AP Rocky--all swamped by what we can only hope isn't the last we'll hear from the great lost MF Doom. And Danger Mouse is an equal partner at least, rejecting trap texturalism in an aural universe still overflowing with diverse, hookily beatwise inventions no one thought of before. Do not expect to hear a better-sounding hip-hop record all year. Instead pray it'll inspire or shame others into giving something similar a shot in an aural universe that still has room for it. A
- Wet Leg: Wet Leg (Domino): Not only am I taken with this Isle of Wight indie-femme duo like the rest of the world, I think it's perverse not to be. Less simple and crystalline than initial appearances suggest, their pop sopranos do occasionally swallow syllables, garble lyrics, ask what that means, and sneak in the occasional absurdity. Nor does the crack all-male backup three-piece that renders Wet Leg in point of fact a conventionally structured rock quintet let their precision get in the way of big noise or the occasional bracing distortion. And waiting in the wings is Rhian Teasdale's "longest and loudest scream," as well as occasional patches of convincing Inspirational Verse, such as: "I used to want to love you like you wanted me to/Now I wanna hate you like I tell you I do." A
- Homeboy Sandman: Don't Feed the Monster (Mello Music Group): Includes two of Homeboy's most interesting rhymes ever, but his collaborator Quelle Chris has never had enough interesting in him ("Trauma," "Alone Again") **
- M.I.A.: Mata (Island): Always longer on political instinct than political acuity, Maya Arulpragasam tossed off a whopper of a tweet to draw attention to her first album in six years: "If Alex Jones pays for lying shouldn't every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?" Although anti-vax disinformation is somewhat more forgivable in parents whose kids seem to slot vaccine-sensitive, a malady she reports befell her daughter, the illogic here is total--even assuming that Jones has a right to his evil opinions, the money he's been ordered to cough up is money he lied egregiously to obtain, where celebrities delivering public service announcements generally do so gratis. Yet even so her first album since 2016 establishes not just that her hip-hop groove and rap dialect remain her own but that after six years she's ready with fresh proof. For all her "multiple relationships, drop them like a hair flip," at 48 she's set on launching brags beyond the reach of any rival, and not just because she sometimes raps in Tamil: "Art in the Tate," say, or "See me in the rubble of a Hubbell telescope." Keeping peace in the streets one minute, she's all "put your pickets down come on and riot" the next. And please note: "The slave trade was real and so was the Holocaust. It wasn't that long ago--you can ask someone's grandma about it." A-
- Bonnie Raitt: Just Like That . . . (Redwing): It's the same old same old only if you think her traditionalist shtick is a lot mustier than it was when she invented it 50 years ago. I mean, there's an abundance of good songs here--songs with lyrics so rangy and specific that they render her fifth studio album of the century her best of the century. The two openers that chronicle love bereft and entranced like so many before them are covers this time, soon topped by the post-bereft Covid pledge "Livin' for the Ones" and a short short story in which Raitt assumes the role of a mother who opens her front door to the guy whose life was saved by the heart of the dead son she never stops mourning. Both these creations make it seem as if Raitt is missing John Prine even more than the rest of us, as does a finale sung in the voice of a murderer who finds some measure of redemption in the hospice ward of the prison he calls home. And then there's the blatantly autobiographical "Waitin' for You to Blow," where she rides shotgun on her fraught relationship with her own recovery. A-
- Craig Finn: A Legacy of Rentals (Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers): Not everybody loses in the Hold Steady frontman's ongoing series of musical short stories, but for sure nobody wins. The slightly obscure title of his fifth such album in a decade says what you need to know: the guy who sings "The Year We Fell Behind" is the only protagonist here who owns his or in one vodka-soaked case her own domicile--not even Anthony, whose parents' house was always "neat and sweet and normal." How would you calculate the chance that any of these all-white casualties of finance capital and the fossil fuel cartel goes out and votes? I'd put it near zero myself. A-
- Pony: TV Baby (Take This to Heart '21): Even in the world-weary, socially impaired pandemic era, pop songs biz or alt do have a way of gravitating to romantic themes when they're not busy advocating full-bore dancefloor escape. So the fact that lyrics like the 10 on this Toronto trio's debut album aren't more plentiful has long mystified and annoyed me. How variously, sanely, and insecurely singer-guitarist Sam Bielanski articulates the frustrations and anxieties but also pleasures and satisfactions of a love life that's sometimes on the right track and other times not is actively refreshing, not least because her telltale heart remains in the right place whether she's sad or exhilarated. Exhilarated comes in second, of course. Happy love songs--so hard to do with an edge. At least as hard as happy love itself. A-
- Phelimuncasi: Ama Gogela (Nyege Nyege Tapes): Having named their first true album after a South African killer bee they report can possess you if it gets under your skin, this seasoned mixed-gender trio of gqom activists enlisted a small phalanx of Durban producers to spruce up its get-down. Few non-Zulu speakers will find anything here that obliterates the memory of a lead track where all three leads chant "I don't feel my legs/I don't feel my hands" as if that's liberation enough while the music lasts. But just about every one of these 11 five-minuteish tracks is hooked in addition to a vocal outburst if not catchphrase. Sure the beats vary too. But not like the hooks, which serve the essential function of piling extra flavors onto a groove that never quits. A-
- Jon Batiste: We Are (Verve '21): Hard to tell exactly how many "spirits that influence me" the booklet thanks when the listing includes "the Fats', the Roys, the Charlies, the Pauls, the Kings." Pushing 70, say, most Black as is only fair but not Ludwig or Debussy (or Bob?) and you know he could have kept going because occasionally he does, like when the song with the Zadie Smith cameo namechecks the Beatles, the Stones, and the Wu-Tang Clan. A breathier singer than we and he might prefer, Batiste makes up for this deficiency with his well-schooled arrangements and all-purpose New Orleans piano plus he's got the spirit. Many feel-good musicians talk the kind of all-purpose ecumenicism favored by Stephen Colbert's bandleader. This album won the big Grammy because his NARAS brethren and sistern believed he put it into practice, and for once they were right. May such a miracle happen again, and while you're keeping your fingers crossed savor this fun fact: Batiste's grandfather was president of the Louisiana Postal Workers Union. A-
- Little Simz: No Thank You (Forever Living Originals/AWAL): This girlish Anglo-Nigerian rapper will turn 29 this month, no longer really little in the immature sense. Blessed with a soprano that remains not just cute and articulated but occasionally incisive, she's free to put serious effort into getting past the usual music-biz shortfalls--"Turn wine into water and get blood out of a stone" is how she brags it. And though she was a fighter not a lover last time, she's gotten over that hump: "Don't need much as long as I got my baby he's a rider." So what is it all for, really? "Scrutinized for freeing the truth about the system/All she wanted to do was uplift the women." A-
- Rokia Koné & Jacknife Lee: Bamanan (RealWorld): Koné was one of the less renowned West African feminists to sign on with Les Amazones d'Afrique, the permanent floating grown-up girl group nonstop activist Angelique Kidjo took over after Oumou Sangare withdrew, and in that context embraced a groove-first aesthetic. But here the more melodramatic structures of her international solo debut, produced by an ex-punk who's worked with everyone from Modest Mouse to Taylor Swift, recalls Youssou N'Dour if it does anyone, and it's to both Koné and Lee's credit that I can type those words without getting the shakes. Her instrument sinewy as opposed to sizable, declarative as opposed to sharp, Koné is gender-positive without caring whether she wears the pants; the hater-baiting "Shezita" and the kindly "Mayougouba" bespeak a spirit that's proud when it needs to be while continuing to tend sweet-tempered, its morality declarative rather than polemical. The keys-and-drums groove with which Lee drives the best-in-show "Kurunba" is deployed to lift up a middle-aged mother who's outlived her child-rearing usefulness. It's followed by the contemplative and rather beautiful "N'yanyan," which Koné reports is a traditional song about mortality. A-
- Fanfare Ciocarlia: It Wasn't Hard to Love You (Asphalt Tango '21): Initially convened a few hundred miles from Kyiv in the eastern hills of Romania near the Moldavan border, this highly professional Belgian-backed Romani horn band leads its first album since 2016 with a Bill Withers cover and fills it out with quite a few compositions by Tel Aviv-trained, U.K.-based session pro Koby Israelite. How exactly any of these facts pertain to the horrors of Ukraine with its shockingly courageous comedian-turned-president who in 2006 won a Dancing With the Stars competition I couldn't further specify at this time. But it does. Having gradually warmed to it since its September release, I was nonetheless startled to find how bracing and relevant the blaring, proactive fanfares of "Cruzzzando El Campooo" and "Pannonicated Polka" felt at this moment. May they remain unalloyed, untragic forces for good between the Wednesday when I'm writing this and the Wednesday when you get to read it. A-
- The Beths: Expert in a Dying Field (Carpark): The title track, an extended analogy between a love turned old and an academic career in an obsolescent discipline, could also be said to sum up the formal approach of this New Zealand guitar-guitar-bass-drums tuneful-not-melodic not-quite-power pop. As background music it seems pleasant but plain. The sole singer is Elizabeth Stokes, who also wrote all the songs beyond a single collab with guitarist-producer Jonathan Pearce. But soon you notice that Pearce is some guitarist, and soon after that, when you've found time to give the lyrics the attention they turn out to deserve, you can't wait to hear how the next one will turn out. The title track is dazzling flat-out, a failing relationship in less than 200 meticulously metaphorical words. But the rest are almost as articulate and also less dark: "I cave like I was built to break/You stay like it's a passing rain"; "I want to leave you out there/Waiting in the downpour/Singing that you're sorry/Dripping on the hall floor"; "It's a pain in the heart/Clean the blood from your shirt"; "If you want to whisper/I swear I want to listen"; and in summation "Mixing drinks and messages/It's been quite a year." A-
- Oumou Sangaré: Timbuktu (World Circuit): The title honors the medieval West Saharan trading hub north of Malian capital Bamako and well north of the forested Wassoulou whence emerged the music of this African queen. But the most salient reason Oumou's latest continues a phenomenal run of superb albums that goes all the way back to 1991's Moussoulou is Parisian-Guadaloupean guitarist and dobro master Pascal Danaë, who adds fresh color, sharp commentary, and outspoken propulsion to the reliable ngoni of her immemorial helpmate Mamadou Sidibé. As one of Africa's longest-running feminists, she has the guts to address the social isolation of the pandemic period. Translated, "Degui N'Kelena" advises her sisters: "Learn to rely on yourself/Learn to live alone, because no one can tell you what tomorrow will bring." A-
- Lizzo: Special (Nice Life): Catchy but not truly melodic, more dance than funk, assuming a common tongue where what once was p.c. jargon is now colloquial, this long-aborning Grammy follow-up with Max Martin in the house comes across simultaneously spontaneous and thought through and earned both ways. She's "heavy" and "big" and "thick" but never "fat"; she's "codependent" and proud she's gotten that far; she feels unending love that may well not stay that way for a clearly identified man and at least one woman and asks a major lover "Do you say this shit to other people?" She's special--and on a mission to convince us that all of us are too. A-
- Kady Diarra: Burkina Hakili (Lamastrock '21): A Burkina Faso native based in France and particularly Lyon for most of her adult life, Diarra submits her mission statement as yet another warming, rousing voice from an Africa where female singers become all too rare once the Muslim desert has morphed into the animist rain forest. Her French guitarist, Thierry Servien, leads with an irresistibly lyrical hook that's quickly augmented by multi-instrumentalist Mabouro "Smifa" Diarra (Kady's husband? nephew?), whose balafon generates throughout the album a synthlike resonance that could be electronic but never sounds "unnatural." Burkina Faso was led briefly in the '80s by visionary pan-Africanist Thomas Sankara, who was assassinated when Diarra was in her teens. By then she wasn't yet a singer by trade--she was a dancer who by the early '90s had earned a starring role in an African ballet troupe. Good for her if that troupe was half as engaging and universal as this album. But frankly, I doubt it. A-
- Santigold: Spirituals (Little Jerk): The longtime biz pro born Santi White in Philadelphia in 1976 released her first and formerly best album at 32. After a six-year layoff not counting the 2018 outtakes venture that gave her time to have twins, this is her fourth and her sharpest, transmuting the atmospheric midtempo rock-as-electrodance she's long fiddled with so engagingly into something more ominous, almost as if she's observant enough to notice that she's living in history. From the "My Horror" opener's "Here I come, there I go/I can't feel it's like I'm paralyzed" to the "Fall First" finale's "I slam the brakes but you say no way/But before you know we're there," she sounds very glad to have a companion in a struggle by no means devoid of satisfactions. A-
- Kendrick Lamar: Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (PGLand/Top Dawg Entertainment/Aftermath/Interscope): Five years after his unprecedented not to say dumbfounding Pulitzer, Compton's favorite son returns with an album only he could make. Rags-to-riches miracles are a pop music meme because in few other endeavors is the transformation so lickety-split, so unpredictable. That said, however, not many instant cynosures have the guts or brains to make much artistically of the privilege and displacement that come with instant riches and renown--that's Beatles and Dylan territory, maybe in their very different ways Prince and Neil Young, and in not one of these cases was Pulitzer-size validation part of the deal. So it's to Lamar's credit that many of his new songs deal so unbraggadociously with the obvious theme of how bizarre and confusing fame and the sudden wealth it generates can be. Sure he buys the impossible cars and exotic timepieces that signify status in hip-hop. But he doesn't so much show them off as check the appropriate boxes while admitting that he doesn't know what to make of his riches. Nor does he brag about the pussy-chasing "lust addiction" with which he saddles the long-suffering Whitney, his fiancee of seven years, the mother of his two children, and perhaps too the inspiration for the raw six-minute spoken-word exchange with Taylor Paige that Lamar unloads smack in the middle of the album, rendering it impossible to play front-to-back as music solely: a mean, painfully detailed sex fight in which the two lovers insult each other till almost the end, when out of nowhere they start to fuck instead. Also of note is the one that begins "My auntie is a man now/I think I'm old enough to understand now." Not that he does, necessarily. But anyone unimpressed that he has the decency to bring it up is living in a bubble. A-
- My Idea: Cry MFer (Hardly Art): Not only her musical collaborator but by all accounts her romantic partner as well, Nate Amos adds muscle to Lily Konigsberg's little voice, big brain, and mutable heart while also pissing her off sometimes. On their official debut album, their magic is less surefire than on their tossed-off-or-was-it 2021 EP--they definitely document or at least enact some serious conflict here. Fortunately for them and more importantly us, however, they also come together, and not just in the end either. Here's hoping that what happens next will take care of itself. A-
- Hata Unacheza: Sub-Saharan Acoustic Guitar & String Music, ca. 1960s (Canary '13): Initially assembled by de facto musicologist Ian Nagoski as an atmospheric mixtape for his Baltimore record shop, these 18 songlets from 7 African nations proved the biggest seller on his tiny label, which bemused Nagoski: "A great, little collection, but it's incredibly slight work." And slight it may be by musicological standards. But as its simple melodies range over assorted moods, they recall for me the kind of charm, at a lower level of intensity and delight, that proved so momentous on John Storm Roberts's Africa Dances half a century ago. This comparison speaks well of Nagoski's ears while making you wonder just how "slight" delight can ever be. And then at the end come two not so happy ones from tiny Burundi near the former Zaire, counted the world's unhappiest country by the UN's World Happiness Report (and what does it mean that there needs to be such a thing?). First comes Francis Muduga's deathly "Whispered Song," and you've never heard anything like it. But then follows Ntiruwama's lively "Shoza Abarinda," which is all guitar and seems a proper reprise, a proper closer, and a whisper of hope for Burundi. A-
- Leyla McCalla: Breaking the Thermometer (Anti-): In which the cellist turned Carolina Chocolate Drop sings and plays songs and other music from a theater piece about her parents' native Haiti whose full title is Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever. Since the arrangements tend leisurely and the lyrics Creole, the manifold musical pleasures on this collection epitomize a chamber folk I'd figure wasn't verbal enough to suit a word guy like me. But McCalla has become such a striking singer that I found myself captivated from the first verse. Not that her chops are spectacular here--that would spoil the effect. Murmuring and lilting without missing or bending a note, she's lovely instead, all gentle precision and outgoing care. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this impression goes against the songs' ideological grain. But that's how they sound. A-
- Ray Wylie Hubbard: Co-Starring Too (Big Machine): The 75-year-old Hubbard actually got better as his voice evolved from amelodic to just plain old, and unlikely though it may seem, his second straight duet album actually has more jam than its 2020 predecessor. It's not like Steve Earle or James McMurtry has it in him to provide much extra vocal puissance anyway, although the Shiny Soul Sisters add major cred to the slinky soul music tribute "Groove," as do the Bluebonnets to the one that rides the indelible couplet "Only a fool uh disrespect a woman/A woman is the best thing to ever take place" and references the 19th Amendment by name. Of course he's "Gonna transcend like Henry David Thoreau/Listen to the sweetheart of the rodeo." Of course he's gonna "love a woman who's pretty reckless/Wears a bullet on her necklace." It's even possible that he's "headed due east hellbent for leather/Might even get the band back together." A-
- Derek Senn: The Big Five-0 (self-released): Since the fourth and best of his steadily improving run of DIY folk-rock albums foregrounds the biggest b-day in his now definitively middle-aged life, it seemed time to Google Senn some, which yielded two facts: 1) he has his own real-estate business in San Luis Obispo and 2) present company excluded, his chief press support comes from Netherlands-based Ljubinko Zivkovic in the contrarian Americana U.K. Opening with an excellent batch of pandemic songs--"Quarantine" and "Viruses Get Viruses" surround a bereft one called "Don't Shut Down My Surf Break" ("You can unemploy me deny my PPP/Shut down the slaughterhouse I'll go without steak")--he also addresses women's rights in the Texas legislature, vasectomy meeting scrotum, the wages of the Eritrean War, and a romance that goes south in Alaska. It seemed to me he was singing more evocatively as well. But only when he closed with "Use Me" was I convinced. A-
- Willi Carlisle: Peculiar, Missouri (Free Dirt): Covering Utah Phillips and Almeda Riddle, citing J.D. Salinger and E.E. Cummings, Midwestern folkie who's proud of both labels applies his wavery tenor to "people who don't fit in." "Meritocracy's a lie," as he noted on 2016's Too Nice to Mean Much, so in this world where "somebody's true religion's always someone else's joke" you'll find detailed descriptions of living in your van and a breakout party in the Wal-Mart that serves the Kansas City suburb of his title. Pay special attention to "Life on the Fence," composed while driving to Austin and trying to figure how to explain to the woman he thought would make him "shiny and new" that he seems to have fallen in love with this guy he hooked up with in Memphis. A-
- Lady Aicha & Pisco Crane's Original Fulu Miziki of Kinshasa: N'djila Wa Mudjimo (Nyege Nyege Tapes): The simplest way to slot this raw, ebullient, technologically street-primitive, culturally avant-pop groove is post-Congotronic. Clueless as to what the words are but aware that Kinshasan instrument fabricator (from old oil cans, discarded pipes, defunct computers, etc.) Crane has been described as "a participating member node for the Data Observation Network for Earth," whereas lead vocalist Lady Aicha (named for a Moroccan goddess famed among other things for her hooves) is said to be a "performance artist, sculptor, and fashion designer," I have no idea how "street" it actually is. What I do know is that it's a simultaneously bracing and abrasive reminder that without a hint of comfort or affluence these hard-hustling Third Worlders are loud, unbowed, and sui generis. Is their music going to resolve? Is it going to get pretty? Not on your life. A-
- Mach-Hommy: Dollar Menu 4 (Mach-Hommy): Gruffly reclusive Haitian-American rapper Mach-Hommy enlists his higher-pitched mack homey Fahim to share the vocals on their second album in two years, which while it runs out of ideas quicker than any nine-tracks-in-24-minutes should is a welcome complement to its overtly educational predecessor. "When we move it's similar to tectonic plates/It's a fine line between criticism and tryna hate" is how they begin an album where dropped names include Peter Frampton, Tanya Tucker, Peggy Guggenheim, Mark Cuban, and dream hampton and dropped wisdom ranges from "getting caught up in that street life can lead to your demise" to "fun is short for fundamental." Fortunately, the latter proves a reliable aesthetic principle. A-
- Superchunk: Wild Loneliness (Merge): Beginning with impressively well-turned songs about first the pandemic and then the world that was still out there dying while we got distracted by the humans who were doing the same only faster, Superchunk's first album since 2018's deftly anti-Trump What a Time to Be Alive is a late bloomer's subtle manifesto. At 55, Mac McCaughan sings more quietly than he used to, as if he has a voice he hopes he'll need five years from now. More conscious than militant, he comes across as someone who'll fight any fight that seems winnable, but also as someone who's tender as a matter of principle. Inspirational Verse: "Well I sleep like a dog/Every sound scares me to waking/I just wanna be the quiet sound/Puts you to sleep without shaking." A-
- Dan Ex Machina: All Is Ours, Nothing Is Theirs (self-released): This is hardly the first album from Dan Weiss's outer-Philly band. But few if any of their previous songs promised anything approaching the female-male opener's indelible sendoff--"We're gonna die in this house/Baby I know that you always said it/We're gonna die in this house/Baby I know that it's so pathetic"--or essay adulthood's varying alt-rock narratives, sonics, and points of view they nail again and again on an album that maintains for 19 tracks. Sample pickup fantasy: "Please send a gorgeous woman to knife me in the throat/It's better than feigning interest in architecture." Sample sex fantasy: "I want you to plunder my insides/I want you to put me at risk/I want to cave in where I've never been bitten/I want you balled up in my fist." Solid tunes impart cred to unlikely stories in which the singer runs disconsolately for prom king or a couple cheat on each other with each other via accidentally matched Ashley Madison accounts. "The kids love torture porn and candy corn you've been warned" I'll take under advisement. A-
- Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine Vol. 2 (Oh Boy): If this wasn't volume two, I'd be ready to swear that Prine's songbook is both infinitely renewable and utterly unruinable. But although these interpreters are of a somewhat higher general calibre than on its somewhat disappointing 2010 predecessor, instead I surmise that the shadow of death added its usual measure of urgency to what is in brute fact a posthumous tribute album. For me the vocal highlights are the matched but distinct high-breaking hillbilly intensities of Tyler Childers's "Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You" and Valerie June's "Summer's End." But except for purist Emmylou Harris declining the Bette Midler Gender-Switch Option on "Hello in There," which along with "Donald and Lydia" and "In Spite of Ourselves" is my own most beloved among the uncountable Prine songs I adore, thiscollection may falter slightly but never trips up. Of course not every track is a knockout. But listen up buster and listen up good to Nathaniel Rateliff, Amanda Shires, Margo Price, Bonnie Raitt, and Sturgill Simpson. A-
- Etran de l'Air: Agadez (Sahel Sounds): Not at all slick but definitely more professional, clean-edged where one charm of their 2018 debut was how unkempt it was, the default up-and-comers of Agadez guitar generate a lot more drive this time around. Their Tuareg loyalty to an Azawad that exists primarily in their aspirations seems more presentational than activist at this moment in a crammed historical juncture with less and less room for that aspiration. But keeping the faith is a proven way to keep the music that arose with it alive. A-
- Dr. John: Things Happen That Way (Rounder): Recorded not long before he died at 77 in 2019, this sounds to me like the most committed album hard-hustling New Orleans piano maestro Mac Rebennack recorded in his last two decades on earth, so figure that he knew he was running out of time and elected to go for it. From "Funny How Time Slips Away" to "Guess Things Happen That Way" there's an elegiac fatalism to these selections younguns may not have it in them to get even when he folds in "Gimme That Old Time Religion," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and the Traveling Wilburys' "End of the Line": "Well it's all right, even if you're old and gray/It's all right, you still got something to say." A-
- Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen (Stones Throw): Cincinnati native turned Black L.A. ethnomusicologist Brittney Parks had the extra sass to send this impressively pancultural array of Afrocentric tracks she'd created to an array of producers and then sequencing whatever combinations struck her ear and fancy into an atmospheric whole. Lyrics are sometimes collegial and sometimes gangsta, sometimes romantic and sometimes domestic, sometimes metaphysical and sometimes sexual, sometimes civilized and sometimes grotty. They leave open such questions as what exactly happened in Amsterdam and the likely intentions of her roughneck cousin in Chicago. The whole sounds pretty great and also pretty atmospheric. What it all means remains to be determined, which isn't to lay any bets that that consummation will ever be reached. A-
- Mammoth Penguins: There's No Fight We Can't Both Win (Fika '19): Relocated to hightone London-adjacent Cambridge from industrial northern Sheffield and playing guitar not bass, former Standard Fare frontwoman Emma Kupa has released three albums with her two male bandmates as well as an eponymous solo job. This 2019 entry is the keeper, solid proof that at the very least she deserves a nicer boyfriend (or girlfriend, though her scrupulous second person doesn't quite cancel lines like "It was a dick move baby"). Commonsensically and prosaically but also fervently and you bet tunefully, she's trying her best and getting better at it. Sure she still suffers gaffes and insecurities she needs to get beyond. But you'll expect she's got it in her. A-
- Apollo Brown & Che Noir: . . . As God Intended (Mello Music): Forty-one-year-old Detroit alt-rap bro boosts 27-year-old Buffalo sister who instead of becoming a certified nursing assistant like the breadwinners who bore and raised her went into the hip-hop business to make her nut. Sampling James Baldwin and Rihanna, Scarface and Solomon Burke and Foxy Brown's "You tell me what I'm supposed to do with all this ambition I got," she lives by the credos "What's worse than being physically dead is mentally dying" and "Do it twice as better 'cause you got the skin of a slave." The problem she hasn't solved yet is putting her "father's mistakes" out of her mind, a failure that costs her boyfriend his life in a genuinely shocking track we'll assume is fictional as we thank the innocent bystander from Detroit for helping her put it across. A-
- Stella Donnelly: Flood (Secretly Canadian): Beware of the Dogs was what it said it was: the sweet-voiced, sharp-tongued rundown on a kennel's worth of pricks and creeps so catchy it could have fueled a songwriting seminar. Here Donnelly is sparer and vaguer, giving off the never fully defined feeling that she tried to make a go of it with a guy or two who in crucial respects passed muster--or so it seemed, until, for instance: "Levelheadedness has made for a disastrous love/I know it, you know it." Watching a movie next to a chain smoker, as she puts it, she lowers her expectations like she's dressing up for New Year's Eve. She doesn't let on when he pinches her hard underwater while kissing her sweet up top, and sometimes she feels better against her better judgment even so. But if love is what this is, it doesn't soothe her or move her, and the quiet melancholy of these songs conveys that throughout. A-
- Yard Act: The Overload (Island): They namecheck Sham 69 on their debut, a credible analogy but too tuneless even by their less than lilting standards. So instead recall circa-2005 (and still active!) Art Brut--lyrics declaimed more than sung over even barer-boned, lower-affect, four-four rock songs in which a local star gets rich enough in a village-turned-town where his football skills have never been surpassed, lettuce is cultivated in ghetto potholes, the one-eyed man was king till he lost his mind, and history is so obdurate that the club owner still won't let bands play originals. A-
- Loudon Wainwright III: Lifetime Achievement (Storysound): Just two years ago this direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant released the fully orchestrated standards album I'd Rather Lead a Band, and two years before that the half-spoken soundtrack to the Netflix special Surviving Twin, his acerbic, fondly admiring one-man show about Life magazine eminence Loudon Wainwright Jr. Since the idea on what I calculate to be his 30th album is to brag about reaching his 75th birthday, it is my sad duty to report that he did a better job on 2012's Older Than My Old Man Now, where he bragged about reaching his 65th birthday. But much more than on Surviving Twin, the most memorable stroke of which is a preposterously civilized reading of his dad's snobbish notes on the London tailor who fashioned his best suit, or I'd Rather Lead a Band, which broadens his perceived frame of reference rather than staking any meaningful claim on "Ain't Misbehavin'" much less adding his own "How I Love You" to the pop canon, this album is the 18th unmitigated keeper in what is by now a vast catalogue of bottomless facility and immense frame of reference. The most annoying track bewails a family vacation under the anxiety-prone title "Fam Vac." Thel most warming assumes the voice of a dog regretting his people's divorce. The most impressive reflects on the lifetime achievement of the title in the voice of a guy who sounds something like 50. Loudon Jr. died at 62. Assuming III cuts down on the wine, what he calls "It" may not get him for longer than he might well prefer--or so he believes at a not literally eternal 75. A-
- Pongo: Sakidila (Virgin): An Angola-born 30-year-old who emigrated to Lisbon when she was eight and first heard Angolan kuduru as a 12-year-old traveling to and from physical therapy after she failed to kill herself by jumping out of a window, she sings like singing gave her something to live for. Half-rapped, half-crooned, her songs are verbally opaque to non-Portuguese speakers either way, but their beats and hooks mix styles till they compensate and then some. As usual, I like the beaty stuff best. But soulful plaints-or-are-they like "Kuzola" and "Vida" make me wish I had a trot. A-
- A Gift to Pops: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong All Stars (Verve '21): This was organized by Pops-besotted 48-year-old New Orleans-born trumpet titan Nicholas Payton rather than Pops-besotted 60-year-old New Orleans-born trumpet titan Wynton Marsalis. So to keep his hat in the ring, Marsalis claims "The Peanut Vendor" right after Pops establishes his own inimitability by singing "When It's Sleepy Time Down South" to open and doesn't get to outgravel or outshine the ad hoc fan club here again till he and the Fleischmann Yeast Hour Show bequeath us a spoken-word closer called "Philosophy of Life." For sure others sing, particularly Marsalis drummer-sideman Herlin Riley, who takes soft-spoken passes at "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead" and "St. Louis Blues" and gets away with actual gravel on "Up a Lazy River." But the fundamental idea here is to honor his heirs' camaraderie and congeniality as a function of his inimitable genius. Only once do these inheritors mess with the canon, and on the right song too: a rearranged "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue" with Payton singing and Common having the temerity to add an up-to-date rap. Good for him. I've always believed "Black and Blue" was the only Pops standard Pops never joked around with. It meant too much. Still does. A-
- Kassmasse: Bahil Weg (Meedo): Although everything I knew about Fikru Sema seemed praiseworthy enough, I was chary of giving this breakout Ethiopian hip-hop-sorta artist the praise his music and general vibe deserved because I don't understand a word of Amharic. In a nation near neither the top nor the bottom in human rights matters, no political slant or animus makes itself known in this context unless an active interest in modernity counts, which to an extent it does. But the music is something like entrancing nonetheless, dominated by vocals that are chanted whether sung or spoken over sample beds often constructed of traditional Ethiopian sounds, which have always tended European by African standards. Some are almost orchestral, there's always a drum line, and you bet there's a Bob Marley sample too. A-
- Wiki: Half God (Wikset Enterprises '21): "Your favorite rapper's favorite rapper's poster child," Upper West Side-raised and Park Slope-based with a crucial Lower East Side stopover, it's no wonder borderline nerdy Patrick Morales appropriated his hip-hop handle from an encyclopedia. He favors "little bit of me"-"literally"-"gripped my knee" and "consciousness"-"consequences"-"competence" rhymes, and on the ideological front opposes "buying from the bougie boutique instead of from the guys." Be sure not to miss "Never Fall Off," which samples a pop-gospel oldie called "I Fell in Love With God" that sure sounds like Thom Bell to me and piles on Delfonics-style romanticism to match. Inspirational Verse: "Then one day I realized what I wanna say/But it only came out right when I was on the mic." A-
- Regina Spektor: Home, Before and After (Sire): "My mind is full of melodies/They search for homes inside of me," and although rhythm players are credited along with the strings and occasional fancy-pants brass that swell up quietly here and there, the dominant instrument on Spektor's first album since 2016 is her classically trained piano, which even so plays second fiddle to her sweet, modest, precise voice as crafted song follows crafted song and thoughtful lyric enriches thoughtful lyric. At 42 she's not getting any happier, her humanity touched with the kind of disquiet sure to make biographical fallacy fans nervous. So I guess I'm relieved to report that the finale brings her back to a home where the light is always on. And I also note that the standout "One Man's Prayer" sketches a guy who's timid till a gal shores up his confidence and what happens next is not pretty. I dare any male to cover it. A-
- Vince Staples: Ramona Park Broke My Heart (Motown): Staples is a storyteller who brags, describes, recalls, and confesses not so much in character as in an implied third person, as if the thug life is half autobiographical milieu and half mere subject matter. Rendered with a calm, articulated detail designed to convince the wannabes, bystanders, and curiosity-seeking outsiders who dominate the fanbase of any rapper who makes a good living at it, these tales of crime and punishment are longer on punishment than the run of the competition. In tone they recall the fictionalized Wu-Tang: An American Saga RZA Inc. sold to Hulu, including the parts where I can't remember who's who exactly and feel I'm learning something anyway. A-
- Fox Green: Holy Souls (self-released): Where their 2020 The Longest April was solid with impressive highlights, the songwriting on this unmistakably southern, utterly humanistic straight rock album from Arkansas tends spectacular verbally if less striking tunewise or jamwise. The lucky thing or maybe it was planned that way is that Wade Derden's mild, unaccented vocal affect suits the decency of the lyrics perfectly, turning them into something radiant from "I saw your daddy in a dream/His eyes were laser beams/He was a gamma ray" to "He's got sweet, sweet rims/And he's got you, he's got you," with the likes of "My baby is on the jail app/For everyone to see/My baby is on the jail app/But she's still my baby to me" and "Like two virgins in a sleeping bag/Tender and reckless in our love" biding their time in between. Eager to believe there's hope for America, not to mention Americana? Try this. A-
- Homeboy Sandman: There in Spirit (Mello Music Group): Angel del Villar has long been a wonder on sheer rhyme output alone, but in recent years his music has gotten too predictable--unique to him, but predictable nonetheless--to hold up its end of the bargain. That changes drastically on this EP, where the production is why you want to hear the sharp, wide-ranging lyrics again. Thank Mello Music's Illingsworth for polymath beats and samples so textural, environmental, and hooky they can set me to grinning all by themselves. And if I'm not mistaken--can't locate the reference I tripped over in my research--one of them originated with none other than Helen Reddy. A-
- Nas: King's Disease II (Mass Appeal '21): Many hip-hop fans of a certain age consider Nasir Jones's 1994 debut Illmatic hip-hop's greatest album, and for sure the Honorable Mention I gave it in 1994 was way low. There was a leanness to hisflow and timbre back then that the Pete Rock/Large Professor/Premier production honored and enhanced, and I admire how matter-of-factly unmoralistic lyrics from the Queensbridge Houses come to a proper climax with "Represent" and "It Ain't Hard to Tell." But that honest broker went what we'll call conscious gangsta with the thuggier I Am . . . and didn't regain his more humane voice until the mid 2000s trilogy Street's Disciple/Hip Hop Is Dead/Untitled--a voice that hasn't been approached again till this follow-up to its crasser namesake. I know I'm showing my age when I say EPMD, Lauryn Hill, and Eminem make it better and Lil Baby doesn't. But if you suspect I could be right let me remind you that backloading the humane stuff is an old hip-hop trick: "Composure," "My Bible," and "Nas Is Good" provide relief at the end. And oh yeah--the bottom falls out on the so-called Magic he released just four months later, summed up by this Insecure Verse: "You're top three, I'm number one, how could you say that?" B+
- Iamdoechii: Oh the Places You'll Go (Five 5 '20): "Seven years old going on 17 centuries," this Tampa Soundcloud-TikTok gal said to be 22 though she rhymes younger was inspired by Fear Factor to "make my teddy bears fight and my Barbie dolls fuck," news that prepares the listener but not her teacher for the pansexual classroom autobiography "Yucky Blucky Fruitcake." After which she launches her career proper with a grown-up "Black Girl Memoir," three sprightly pieces of high-pitched dance-pop, and one called "God' so vain and banal it's a fear factor itself. A-
- $ilkmoney: I Don't Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don't Feel Like It Anymore (DB$B): "Bitch I don't need a pistol/It's just me and my niggas versus the algorithms," begins this polysyllabist whose beats are atmospheric settings and who favors the word "bitch" while fucking women articulate enough to call him "misogynistic." But he proved such an educated autodidact--note title that chooses "Anymore" over "No More"--that I concocted the hopeless project of familiarizing myself with four of his albums, which wore me out so bad that all further exploration will remain in the wait-and-see pile until further notice. For now, however, some inspirational verbiage. "Fuck black lives matter let's go back to the days of black power." "The back of your neck looks like a pack of hot dogs." "Endoplasm reticular within cytoplasm." "I've been trying to rock this spliff since a bar back." "Labeled 'uncivilized' by a civilization participating in cannibal genocide. Any takers for Negro soup?" A-
- Mary J. Blige: Good Morning Gorgeous (Mary Jane Productions/300 '21): As I figure it, Mary's studio albums run about 50-50. So it's no surprise that when this one sounded good enough to inspire a compare-and-contrast with 2017's weak Strength of a Woman I very nearly bogged down in analogies that weren't there. Absolutely this very good album is superior while the other isn't very good at all. But it's an unmitigated must-buy only for fond reminiscers who've outgrown their completist tendencies. That said, highlights do include the 50-year-old checking herself out in the mirror in the title track (although not in any of the six gorgeous booklet photos) and a collab with dat dumbass DJ Khaled that clocks in at a powerful 2:39 (three-minute pop lives!). A-
- PinkPantheress: Take Me Home (Parlophone): Just in time for Christmas, well over a year after her debut mini-album, no more or less than three new songs/tracks. She pronounces "liar" to rhyme with "see ya" because she knows all too well that truly seeing her is well beyond his capabilities. She's injudicious enough to check out the new message on her bf's phone when she goes downstairs to make his coffee the way he likes it. She wants to be young forever or at least till she's 25 but on the current evidence would be better off rushing the next phase some. A-
- Fimber Bravo: Lunar Tredd (Moshi Moshi '21): A Trinidadian pan master who's been London-based for half a century gets uncannily relaxed and gentle identity music out of the keyblike textures he coaxes from a single steel drum and props up with subtle bass and traps. He does get laxer as the hour of music proceeds--the title number right next to the end is atmospheric and a half, and one called "Coming Home" is the fanciest and least interesting at the same time. But nothing in my experience prepared me for the sonics Bravo deploys here. At the very least, background music like you've never half-heard it before. A-
- Iamdoechii: Bra-Less (Iamdoechii '21): Self-starter leads her four-track follow-up with "PMS," employed as a verb, and then recycles the same tune on the even more sexually amenable "Truth," "Shit," and "Girls," all designed to convince listeners that her monthlies are a thing of the past--this week, anyway. I couldn't swear what kind of communion "Bitches wanna break bread like Corinthians" means to indicate, but do wonder whether any other poet, songwriter, or cult leader has provided this sexualized a context for such scripture as "Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you." A-
And It Don't Stop, Jan. 25, 2023
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