Anne Hathaway Sings FKA Twigs’ New Song From The Film Mother Mary

Oscar-winning actor Anne Hathaway will be starring as the pop star Mother Mary in the upcoming film of that name.  The film and its soundtrack are scheduled for release on April 17, but this week the single “My Mouth Is Lonely For You” was released.  Now, if you’re gonna make a film about a pop music icon, you better get the songs right, so the soundtrack will feature songs written by Charli XCX (who’s developing quite a second career as a writer for film after her work on Wuthering Heights) and the hit maker Jack Antonoff.  This song, though, was written by FKA Twigs – who also features in the cast.  It’s got a pulsating dance beat, and it takes no prisoners, as Hathaway has to soar up to the high register that FKA Twigs herself often sings in.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbIaWNLUklY

Bruce Hornsby Releases Wide Ranging New Album

Indigo Park is the latest album by singer/pianist/songwriter Bruce Hornsby, and if you’re only familiar with his hit song “The Way It Is” (by Bruce Hornsby & The Range) or his years spent with the Grateful Dead, you might be surprised at the wide sonic net he casts.  Hornsby has in recent years spent a fair amount of time with classical music, including the often challenging sounds of modern classical, and echoes of that can be heard in a track like “Silhouette Shadows”; he’s also clearly taken a page from hip hop on songs like “Entropy Here (Rust In Peace),” a title that points to the dry humor that streaks through many of his songs.  This track, “Memory Palace,” is a collaboration with Ezra Koenig, of the band Vampire Weekend, and that group’s jangly guitar sound is very much in evidence here, while Hornsby indulges his inner math nerd with references to prime number and Fibonacci sequences.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4cyyFiSmxk&list=RD-4cyyFiSmxk&start_radio=1

MLK’s Favorite Gospel Singer Sings Again

The Kronos Quartet has just released a new album called Glorious Mahalia, a tribute to the great (many would say the greatest) gospel singer of the 20th century.  Duke Ellington was a fan and wrote a piece inspired by her, and Martin Luther King Jr famously departed from his prepared speech when his favorite singer, standing behind him, yelled out “tell them about the dream, Martin!”  Now, Kronos have worked with composers Stacy Garrop, Jacob Garchik, and Zachary James Watkins on a series of works that feature Mahalia’s voice, mostly in old interviews, along with MLK’s speechwriter, Clarence B. Jones, set within the Kronos’s strings.  It’s almost like a sonic portrait rather than a set of musical compositions, but the standout track sees Kronos accompanying Mahalia Jackson’s recording of the wonderful old spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.”  The string arrangement is restrained, but still wandering as if lost – an appropriate musical metaphor for the lyrics of the song.  By the end, though, it feels like the singer and the strings have come together through the sheer magic of her voice.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUl96HRwJKM&list=RDOUl96HRwJKM&start_radio=1

Elizabeth & The Catapult Release Responsible Friend

Elizabeth & The Catapult is an indie band led by Brooklyn singer and multi-instrumentalist Elizabeth Ziman.  She’s classically trained, but her songs have a smart, pop accessibility, and her arrangements often include unexpected touches like layered clarinets or a whistled chorus.  Her last record, sincerely, e, came out at the height of the pandemic, and was an interior album full of poignant, wry, affecting songs.  Today, she’s released a new album called Responsible Friend, which takes a more wide-angled view of things.  Even the F train gets a shout out in this track called “50/50.”  Elizabeth & The Catapult may be responsible friends, but they know better than to lecture us, so this song is about acknowledging that as bad as things are, life is also full of beauty too.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0lirIkWerQ&list=RDw0lirIkWerQ&start_radio=1,

Adrian Quesada Releases A Surprise LP

Adrian Quesada may still be best known as half of the multiple-Grammy-nominated psychedelic soul band Black Pumas.  But he’s also made a strong impression with his Boleros Psicodelicos project, which features many of the leading singers in the contemporary Latin music scene.  On the last such record, there was an instrumental track featuring the Ecuadorian-Swiss guitar duo Hermanos Gutierrez.  That seems to have set something in motion, as Quesada has just put out an unexpected instrumental LP called Trio Asesino that features his guitar, doing his own twangy, trippy portrayal of the wide open spaces of the American southwest.  Opening track “Infinito” has a particularly noirish, cinematic feel, created with just the trio of guitar, organ, and drums. 

https://adrianquesada.bandcamp.com/album/trio-asesino

Back From Broadway, Orville Peck Releases New Song

It’s been a busy year for Orville Peck.  His music career has been built on questions of identity – never seen without his trademark fringed mask, singing soaring ballads of queer love in a Roy Orbison-like croon, keeping his real name hidden but his sexual identity open – until this summer, when he took over the role of the Emcee in the Broadway revival of Cabaret, and did so unmasked.  Now, the singer born Daniel Pitout is back, in the studio and behind the mask, and about to release a new EP called Appaloosa.  Today he put out the first single; “Drift Away” has a cinematic sound and a chorus that is a massive earworm.  It’s also full of telling lyrical imagery: “singing songs that make us cry; we don’t know why” is a simple but spot-on acknowledgement of music’s power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3w7Ik-0g18&list=RDW3w7Ik-0g18&start_radio=1

A New Single From Mary In The Junkyard 

There’s always so much going on in London that it’s hard for a young band to get noticed, but the trio called Mary In The Junkyard has been touring the States this year as the opening act for the breakout duo Wet Leg, which has given them some richly deserved exposure here.  Perhaps seeking to strike while they have our attention, the band has released a new single called “Midori” – though whether that title refers to the drink, the defunct Japanese band, the anime series, or even the famed classical violinist (one of the women in the band is a violist, so not impossible) is unclear.  And probably immaterial, as the song seems to be about wrestling with a relationship that’s become somewhat barbed.  The vocals, often tremulous but occasionally aspiring to the ethereal, are a striking contrast to the track’s gusts of shoegaze-style guitar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUPl7ke87uQ&list=RDPUPl7ke87uQ&start_radio=1

A New Single From Reyna Tropical Looks South – and Further South

Reyna Tropical is the project of Fabiola Reyna, who has been a one-woman wrecking crew when it comes to the male-dominated music industry.  She founded She Shreds, the groundbreaking magazine devoted to women guitarists and bassists.  She also leads the avant-cumbia trio Savila, and has been a vocal proponent of gender equality and LGBTQ visibility in the music scene.  Her new single is called “Tu Voz,” and it has the longing of Mexican rancheras, but with a guitar part that seems to have the languid sound of Brazilian samba.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg6jKxD05Zg

Just In Time for Halloween: Lankum Covers “Ghost Town” by The Specials

The Irish band Lankum is the leading group in the style that has come to be known as drone-folk, a brooding, gothic mix of traditional folk song and storytelling married to doom-metal-adjacent textures.  Today they released their most unexpected track yet – a cover of The Specials’ 1981 hit song “Ghost Town.”  That original tune dealt with Thatcher-era urban decay and joblessness in the UK, set to the band’s typical ska beat.  Their video showed the band packed into a car driving through an empty City of London and East End.  Lankum nod that video in the stunning Leonn Ward-directed video that accompanies their song, as we see Lankum in a car speeding through an empty landscape, towards a figure moving around what looks like an abandoned prison or asylum.  Lankum’s version is eerie, and almost unbearably slow, the tension building as the harmonies grow, until finally it explodes in a burst of techno as the backing electronics take over and eventually fall apart.  The song and the video are perfect for Samhain, the Irish precursor to Halloween, when the veil between worlds is supposed to be thinnest; the themes of connection with the past and being haunted by it in the present (with many of The Specials’ lyrics still landing hard 45 years later) make this a timely release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLLnF4vxaeY

The Gothic Glory of Sweden’s Anna Von Hausswolff 

Most church organs are actually built into the church; they are part of its architecture, with pipes built into various walls.  Whether it’s being used or not, it is always there, always part of the place. That’s not a bad metaphor for how Anna Von Hausswolff uses the instrument in her latest album, Iconoclasts.  Even when you’re hearing a full rock band, eerie electronics, fiery sax solos, and Von Hausswolff’s keening vocals, the church organ is there – as a drone, as a part of the texture, or even when silent, since it sounds like this Swedish musician is singing in a cathedral.  Von Hausswolff’s breakthrough album Ceremony in 2012 was the beginning of her love affair with the instrument, and this new LP is her most ambitious yet.  Guests include the improbably tender Iggy Pop and the appropriately iconoclastic indie singer Ethel Cain, but this is very much Von Hausswolff’s show.   Dark, and somehow sounding both anguished and ecstatic, it’s another example of a Halloween release that somehow feels just right.  A good place to start might be “Stardust,” which at just under seven minutes is one of the album’s shorter tracks.  It starts, not with a sepulchral drone, but a steady rock beat, and despite some fairly experimental production, is the closest thing the album has to a straightforward rock song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpMHH_W8G9s

Danger Mouse and Black Thought Reunite For Fiery New Song

Danger Mouse, the super producer also known as Brian Burton, has had some big collaborative moments over the years, including his duo Gnarls Barkley (with rapper Cee-Lo Green) and his other duo Broken Bells (with indie rocker James Mercer).  In 2022 he teamed up with Black Thought, the rapper from The Roots, on an album called Cheat Codes.  Now, those two have released a striking new single called “Up,” which suggests that a Cheat Codes sequel might be in the works.  “Up” is on the one hand a take-no-prisoners view of oppression and obfuscation, and on the other a half-cynical, half-hopeful assertion that there “ain’t nowhere to go from here but up.”  The song features the clarion vocals of the English soul singer Rag’N’Bone Man in the chorus.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmK978jFxMk&list=RDLmK978jFxMk&start_radio=1

Take A Break From The News With Joshua Idehen

Spoken word artist Joshua Idehen is a British-Nigerian writer and performer now living in Stockholm.  Followers of the London scene may know him from guest appearances on albums by Sons Of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming.  Lately, he’s been making records with Ludvig Parment, who provides the music to Idehen’s keenly observed lyrics.  Last year he had an underground hit with his quietly hilarious, gently skewering song “Mum Does The Washing” (watch it; it might be the best four minutes of your day), and this week he released the first single from his upcoming album, I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try.  (Idehen is no fool – “Mum” will be re-released on that album too.)  The new track is “It Always Was,” and it is a wonderful antidote to the relentless tide of bad news.  “The world is loud, so we sing louder,” Idehen tells himself on the phone (tellingly, an old rotary phone) in his charming split-screen video.  Parment’s music sounds like it’s built on a sample of an old Jackson 5-type song, which fully supports the song’s good vibes.  

The only downer?  The full album doesn’t come out until March 6. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yzrDWCzPh8

The Phenomenal Handclap Band Gets Its Groove On

The Brooklyn trio known as The Phenomenal Handclap Band has just released a three-song EP (with various remixes) called We Are Worlds Away.  Drawing on Giorgio Moroder-style disco and the dance-rock of bands like Pet Shop Boys (whose song “What Have I Done to Deserve This” looms large over the title track here), the handclappers offer groovy escapist pop with luscious two-part vocal harmonies.  “Free Time” is a song whose lyrics give the 9-to-5 grind the sideye (“cause we needed more shit”), while the beat suggests your time might be better spent dancing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdeRyOzvBQM

Don Was And the Pan-Detroit Ensemble Gets A Different Groove On

Don Was has had what seem like multiple careers – the serial Grammy winner has produced albums for The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.  He’s the president of Blue Note Records, overseeing the renaissance of that label in the past decade and a half.  But he’s also a musician, whose band Was/Not Was had a hit in the 80s with “Walk The Dinosaur.”  Now he’s released a new album with his Pan-Detroit Ensemble, a 9-piece band that combines soul, jazz, Motown, funk, even reggae.  The album is called Groove In The Face Of Adversity, and at a time where adversity seems plentiful, so are the grooves.  “You Asked, I Came,” recorded live, struts along on a Bo Diddley beat, and after the catchy horn melody has sunk in, a series of tasty solos follow.  

Don Was and The Pan-Detroit Ensemble play at (where else) The Blue Note on January 12. 

https://donwas.bandcamp.com/album/groove-in-the-face-of-adversity

Asaf Avidan’s Kaleidoscopic New Album

Singer and songwriter Asaf Avidan has just released his first album in five years; it’s called Unfurl, and it’s an ambitious, technicolor sonic canvas that moves through different musical genres with almost head-spinning ease.  Folk-rock, 60s-style orchestral pop, even a bit of hip hop, are all woven into songs like “Haunted,” which showcases Avidan’s versatile, at times androgynous voice.  About two minutes in, he howls in a style reminiscent of Janis Joplin at her fiery best, but as soon as the strings come in, he’s suddenly evoking the balladry of Billie Holiday.  A moment later, he’s practically rapping over a marching orchestral beat.  The song ends with Avidan reaching for the cheap seats in a thrilling, anthemic conclusion.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMNsagzw_6I&list=RDLMNsagzw_6I&start_radio=1

Singer/producer/multimedia artist Samora Pinderhughes has a well-earned reputation for projects that tackle some of America’s thorniest problems – racial, economic, political – while cultivating a sense of community and determination.  His new mixtape, released on Monday, is called Black Spring, done with The Healing Project, a musical community of friends and collaborators.  Some of these songs we’ve heard before, but there are also new ones.  Many of Pinderhughes’ most pointed and most effective songs are also his quietest; but leadoff track “Hold Fast,” is a moment of collective action.  Layers of vocals over a repeating keyboard figure and a slow march beat give this song a sense of relentless forward motion in the face of all obstacles.    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kXhbCqEspU&list=RD6kXhbCqEspU&start_radio=1

Bright Eyes Celebrate Ska, And New York 

Bright Eyes, the band led by singer/songwriter Conor Oberst, has released a new single called “1st World Blues,” a cheeky confection that uses the sounds of ska to support shout outs to various New York places.  Yes, Manhattan gets some love, but so too do Gowanus and Staten Island.  (The song was recorded in Omaha, the band’s home town, and the last verse calls out two neighborhoods there too.)   Like ska, some of the lyrics seem to come from another time – lines about mobsters swimming with the fishes and Reaganomics all sound well past their sell-by date, but the band clearly doesn’t care.  The fun video was inspired, the band says, “by NYC ’90s hip hop, which like ska, has a long tradition of unifying people and using celebratory music to convey subversive political themes. To be played loud. Windows down. Summertime.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1cRt0QjHzk&list=RDp1cRt0QjHzk&start_radio=1

Indigo De Souza Contemplates Being A Grown Up, Someday

Indigo De Souza has just released her fourth album, Precipice.  The lead single “Heartthrob” has a relentless, krautrock rhythm that offers an interesting contrast to De Souza’s own quavery, almost hesitant singing.  One of many songs she’s written about figuring out relationships, this one seems to be about putting aside childish fantasies (“when I’m a grown up” is how she actually puts it) of finding a heartthrob and following through on what’s actually in front of her.  “I started to warm up to the feeling,” she sings, her voice practically cracking as it warms up to the song’s near-anthemic chorus.  The video, meanwhile, finds De Souza watching the “grownups” from a bouncy castle – until by the end they’re all bouncing around in there with her.  So maybe being a grown up isn’t all that, after all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QseKM81OqQ&list=RD3QseKM81OqQ&start_radio=1

The Latest Salvo From Irish Pop Star CMAT 

The Irish pop singer/songwriter CMAT (pronounced see-matt; her name is Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) has just released the title track of her forthcoming album.  “Euro-Country” is a big, technicolor pop song, the kind of thing that shoots for a 60s Burt Bacharach sound with perhaps an echo of country twang.  In other words, a typical CMAT song.  With a brassy voice and personality to spare, she writes arena-sized songs with often satirical, gimlet-eyed lyrics, many paired with droll music videos, as is the case here.  CMAT was apparently a big hit at the recent Glastonbury Festival in England, and this song suggests that her next record will propel her even further into Europe’s (and America’s?) pop firmament.

The album, Euro-Country, is due on August 29.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SVNTv44C4g&list=RD_SVNTv44C4g&start_radio=1

West African Spirituality Meets Psych-Rock In Orchestra Gold

Orchestra Gold is an Oakland band built around the vocals of Malian singer Mariam Diakite.  The group has just dropped a single called “Baye Ass N’Diaye,” which is also the name of Diakite’s spiritual teacher.  Like many West African musicians (Youssou N’Dour, Cheikh Ibra Fam, Cheikh Lo, etc.), Diakite is a follower of the Baye Fall tradition, a mystical, community-oriented branch of Islam, and you can hear some of the traditional chanting in Diakite’s vocals.  Meanwhile, the electric guitar swirls in a way suggestive of the West African njarka, or fiddle, and horns add interjections of funk over the steady, almost trance-like drumming.  

The band’s next album, Dakan, will come out in the Fall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_FKvMrMKxE

Robert Plant Returns with a New Band and a New LP On the Way

Robert Plant’s post-Zeppelin career has been a fascinating one, as he’s pursued musical interests that have seen him exploring folk music from the British Isles, West Africa, and the Near East, as well as his celebrated collaboration with Americana hero Alison Krauss.  Now he’s announced a new album with a new group of collaborators; it’ll be called Saving Grace and comes out on September 26.  It’s an album of covers, some going back to early blues by Memphis Minnie or Blind Willie Johnson, and some much more recent.  Plant has long been a fan of the Minnesota duo Low and has covered their songs before, and the single, out now, from the forthcoming album is a version of that band’s “Everyone’s Song.” Low’s original is a stomping, fuzzed-out rocker, but it does have what sounds like the world’s largest Arab drum (or oil can) thumping in the background.  So Plant has taken that as a license to reinvent the song as a kind of Near-Eastern-tinged flight of psychedelia, and at certain moments, like the line “tearing everyone apart,” he seems to do just that to the song – breaking it apart briefly before the band reasserts its trippy groove.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfcRe8NyFjE&list=RDtfcRe8NyFjE&start_radio=1

Kronos Quartet and A Starry Cast Cover Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”

Wednesday was the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test – the first explosion of a nuclear weapon; not coincidentally, it was also the date of the Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a gathering of Nobel prize winners and nuclear scientists who wanted to sound the alarm at the possibility of nuclear war in an unstable world.  They also had music on their minds, and approached the Kronos Quartet about putting together an all-star communal reworking of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”   Well, that’s the sort of thing that Kronos founder/violinist David Harrington has excelled at over the past fifty years, and he duly obliged, going through the group’s digital rolodex and convening Iggy Pop, Allison Russell, Willie Nelson, Indian legend Asha Bhosle, Laurie Anderson, and many others to create this epic 8-minute-plus version of Dylan’s cautionary, perhaps prophetic, song. The singers generally appear in pairs, while Kronos maintain an oscillating string quartet waltz beneath them, aided by members of Belle & Sebastian, Deerhoof, and the Patti Smith Group. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyH70zymBz4

Stars of Rock and African Pop Come Together – In Mexico

Africa Express is the community of musicians co-founded by Damon Albarn, lead singer of the Britpop band Blur, in 2006.  Originally based in Mali, the project has, over the years, explored African music throughout the diaspora, but now, for the first time, the rotating cast of characters has come to North America. Africa Express presents... Bahidorá is the name of the two-record set that includes the Africa Express crew, playing their mix of traditional West African and contemporary Western instruments, the gleaming indie pop of Britain’s Django Django, indie New York scenesters like Nick Zinner and Joan As Police Woman, and Mexican luminaries like the Mexican Institute of Sound, the punk marimba band Son Rompe Pera, and the trans activist/singer Luisa Almaguer.  It’s a fun, creative, energetic collection, and just before it ends, there is a wonderful cover of The Smiths song “Panic,” the song known for its phrase “hang the DJ,” which inspired an episode of the TV series Black Mirror.  The Africa Express version is called “Panico (Cuelga al DJ),” and will come as no surprise to fans of Camilo Lara, who basically is the Mexican Institute of Sound, since he has produced a whole concert of Spanish-language, Mexican-themed covers of songs by The Smiths and their lead singer Morrissey. 

https://open.spotify.com/track/7w4d3aTydpafZhWxIHcKdz?si=6c1d44091ad347c2

Disiniblud Is All About Transformation (And Not Getting Sued)

Rachika Nayar gained attention for her records that used her electric guitar as a sound source for her inventive computer music compositions.  Nina Keith first came to our attention with her album Maranasati 19111, an electroacoustic chamber music project that incorporated uncanny sound effects and field recordings.  Now, these two have formed a duo called Disiniblud – pronounced “Disney blood” although they’re not crazy enough to actually spell it that way.  Their self-titled debut album is all about transformation; like other trans artists (ANOHNI in particular comes to mind), that theme has worked on both a personal and a musical level for both, and the song “It’s Change” is a fine example.  It starts off as an effervescent, slightly lysergic celebration of transformation, with guest voices (including the distinctive ethereal singing of Julianna Barwick) and lots of altered sounds, before calming down somewhat and settling into an off-kilter piece of art-pop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_1q0pnLkA4&list=RDQ_1q0pnLkA4&start_radio=1

Hermanos Gutierrez Get “Elegantly Wasted” With Leon Bridges

Hermanos Gutierrez, the Ecuadorian-Swiss guitar duo of Estevan and Alejandro Gutierrez, have been making fans and influencing people with their atmospheric instrumental works that suggest the American Southwest, spaghetti westerns, David Lynch-style Americana, and occasional touches of psychedelia.  But now, for the first time, they’ve released an English-language song, and since neither brother sings, they enlisted their friend Leon Bridges, the popular Texas soul/R&B singer.  It’s a happy combination, since all three musicians share a love for vintage 60s/70s sounds, and the song “Elegantly Wasted,” indulges in a little classic “wah-wah” guitar and finds Bridges at his most soulful.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24uC02FZBCY&list=RD24uC02FZBCY&start_radio=1

The Melancholy Grandeur of Vines

Vines is a music project from the New York composer and multi-instrumentalist Cassie Wieland.  She creates atmospheric, uncategorizable songs out of layers of synthesizers, subtle percussion, occasional strings, and her own voice, usually electronically processed.  Wieland unveiled her Vines project in 2023 with an EP called “Birthday Party,” a collection of moody, intimate songs that was no one’s idea of party music.  Now she’s released the first Vines LP, called I’ll be here, and it too is full of darkly compelling, haunted songs, like this one called “Evicted.”  The lyrics are short and simple: “Am I getting sick, Or am I over it/Am I being born, Or just evicted.”  But as Wieland’s slightly altered vocals repeat those lines, the keyboard accompaniment grows to include the mournful trudge of drums, fragmentary piano, and a sweeping, post-rock finale.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPc-hb2LC1w&list=RDtPc-hb2LC1w&start_radio=1

Morgan Wallen Is Back, And Headed For The Top

Controversial country star Morgan Wallen dropped his new album today.  It’s called I’m The Problem, and in many ways it’s a typical Morgan Wallen record: it’s enormous, 37 tracks in all; it’s full of midtempo, at times generic songs about heartbreak and relationships going wrong; and it’s destined to top the album charts next week and, if past performances are any indication, for many more weeks to come.  The title track, “I’m The Problem,” was played live on the episode of Saturday Night Live where Wallen broke protocol by walking off stage at the end of the show; its title looks absolutely at home on what sounds like a breakup album.  But it also has a sneering quality to it, and when he sings “if I'm the problem, well, you might be the reason,” it’s not hard to hear it as being less about romance and more about hitting back at his critics.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUHtvbqQXbk&list=OLAK5uy_m7ebZ6lrVAuYpsV3W1kUm66JRCC8sqTo8&index=2

Lido Pimienta Goes Orchestral on Her New LP

The Colombian singer and songwriter Lido Pimienta is now based in Canada, and The Globe And Mail once called her “the future of Canadian rock’n’roll.”  Well, there’s still plenty of time for that prediction to come true, but Pimienta seems uninterested in that sort of thing right now.  Her new album La Belleza (“Beauty”) is an orchestral suite of songs, with an overture and lots of long passages of instrumental music, done in collaboration with the brilliant Canadian music and arranger Owen Pallett.  Despite this most Western of sounds, Pimienta and Pallett manage to honor her Black and indigenous roots in pieces like “Quiero Que Me Beses” (“I want you to kiss me”), which begins as a purely orchestral work before breaking into call-and-response vocals over a lilting folkloric beat.  

https://lidopimienta.bandcamp.com/album/la-belleza

Cautious Clay Release A Concept Album: It’s About Time

The singer, sax player and songwriter Cautious Clay (Joshua Karpeh) blends R&B, experimental pop, and jazz in his new album, which I’ll assume is the first of a series because it’s called The Hours: Morning.  Each track has a title but also an hour from 5am to noon associated with it.  The song “Promises (9am)” is a song that Cautious Clay has been patient with – he began writing it in 2017 and has reportedly reworked it up to 80 times.  The final result is a midtempo, but still propulsive song with a catchy chorus, and apparently by 9am his pipes are sufficiently warmed up that he can pull off some of his most stratospheric falsetto vocals.  

https://cautiousclay.bandcamp.com/album/the-hours-morning

Adrian Quesada Issues New Song With Hermanos Gutierrez 

Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas has a notable solo career as a leading figure in Latin Alternative music, especially with his Boleros Psicodélicos project, which recreates the reverb-soaked, guitar-heavy sounds of Latin American styles of the late 60s/early 70s like chicha.  In anticipation of his second volume in the series, he’s teamed up with Hermanos Gutierrez, the Ecuadorian-Swiss guitar duo, on a song called “Primos.”  The title means “cousins,” and since the brothers Estevan and Alejandro Gutierrez evoke the same spaghetti western soundtracks and wide open spaces of the American Southwest that has inspired Quesada, it feels like a natural fit, almost like family. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IacxS9A8keo

The Next Big Thing In Jazz Vocalists Just Might Be Lucía

Lucía is a 23-year old Mexican jazz singer who won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition back in 2022.  Today she released her debut album, also called Lucía– and it is clear what the judges in that competition heard.  Here is a singer with a voice that sounds like it’s been transported from the 1930s, performing classics from both sides of the Rio Grande.  Highlights for me include a bossa nova-inflected version of Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low” and this lovely reading of the great Mexican folk song “La Llorona” (“The Crying Woman”).  This tale of a woman condemned to wander the shores in search of her drowned children does not need an overly emotional performance; in fact, Lucía’s restraint makes it all the more poignant.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtu8B2GsIyY&list=OLAK5uy_kDr6RFGRzX04rh-2h1AGKbUsYV6fcgpmI&index=7

Erick the Architect Releases Surprise EP

Erick The Architect is one of the founders of the Brooklyn rap trio Flatbush Zombies, but last year we heard his debut solo LP, I’ve Never Been Here Before, which showed just how wide-ranging his songs could be.  The album was a musical and emotional smorgasbord – tracks that dealt with loss, with the fraying social fabric, and more.  Now comes a kind of dessert, in the form of Arcstrumentals 3, a set of three short but buoyant songs that marry hip hop and dance music.  Maximalist production, R&B grooves, and Erick’s clear enjoyment of his own wordplay make songs like “Lunchin” easy to like.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIej3LN8Qe0

A Posthumous Release from Jill Sobule

Last week, singer/songwriter Jill Sobule died in a house fire at the age of 66.  Best known for her good-natured hit “I Kissed A Girl” (done years before Katy Perry’s megahit song with the same title), Sobule wrote songs not just for the LGBTQ community but for anyone who felt like an outsider.  That was at the heart of her Off-Broadway musical F*ck 7th Grade, which Sobule was planning to release a recording of on June 6.  Today she was supposed to drop the first single, “Underdog Victorious,” and so her team has indeed put the song out, although what was intended to be a celebration (just listen to the song’s anthemic chorus), is now a memorial.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg0RVt6npUs

billy woods Releases Dark, Engrossing “Golliwog”

NY-based rapper billy woods takes a dim view of proceedings on his new album Golliwog.   The production is full of eerie sounds and ominous beats, and the lyrics offer a trenchant response to corporate greed, government malfeasance, and (as the album title indicates) the indelible stains of racism.  But sometimes the darkness is more personal, as in the striking track “Lead Paint Test,” one of several to feature Elucid, billy woods’ longtime partner in the duo Armand Hammer.  “Nuclear family/nuclear fallout” Elucid raps in the first verse.  By the time woods gets on mic, in the third verse, things have really fallen apart: “If these walls could talk they might not,” he spits; “after all, we don't.”  A couple of melodic, even heartwarming samples dot the landscape, but they serve only to highlight just how bleak things really seem. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bFGwpJ3KYk

Moses Sumney Joins Hayley Williams, And Likes It.  Maybe Too Much.

Not sure anyone saw this collaboration coming, but Moses Sumney, the extraordinary singer and songwriter whose music encompasses a kind of futurist soul and art rock, has just put out a song with Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the arena rockers Paramore.  And it works, perhaps because the song, “I Like It I Like It,” is a droll take on love and obsession.  “It’s not that I don’t like it baby,” Sumney offers at the start of the track, “It’s just that I like it/A little too much.”  The arrangement is spare, especially by the standards of both of these artists, giving the whole thing a sultry, nocturnal atmosphere.  Sumney, always attuned to how things look, directed the video which also shares the song’s wry, spare approach.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5OB461GCD8

Kara-Lis Coverdale’s Electronic Netherworld

It’s been eight years since the electronic music composer Kara-Lis Coverdate’s album Grafts, but she’s now released a new album called From Where You Came.  Although the sounds of cello and trombone (played by Kalia Vandever) feature, alongside occasional other acoustically-derived bits, the dominant sound here is the modular synthesizer and software that Coverdale uses.  The textures are lush, ranging from the spacey to the motoric, and while Coverdale’s voice is clearly heard in the opening track, other parts of the record seem to blur the distinction between voice and other instruments.  This piece, “The Placid Illusion,” offers a gently burbling rhythm with wisps of indefinable sounds woven throughout.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqM9YZWiH4c

Quinquis Releases An Album Inspired by Mermaids

Quinquis – full name Emilie Quinquis – lives on the island of Ushant, off the coast of Brittany in northwestern France.  (Her husband, the keyboardist and composer Yann Tiersen, lives there too and has made an album incorporating the sounds of the island.)  Apparently, after learning to sail, she was inspired by the tales of mermaids and other fabulous creatures living beneath the waves of the Irish Sea and the North Atlantic, and her new album, eor, is the result.  Some of the songs are soft and mysterious; others have electronic beats urging them along.  “Dec’h” is one of the latter, and speaking of fabulous creatures, has a fun video in which a plain Emilie is transformed by a bunch of drag queens.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39QEm7OyIWE