Music Notes
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It’s been over 25 years since Selena’s murder. Lately, she has received a lot of publicity because of her outsized role in shaping popular music in the years since. There’s a good feature at Texas Monthly on her.
Not only do streaming services not pay artists anything worth the name, but they often just don’t pay the artists at all and in fact have $424 million of unpaid royalties. I very strongly recommend you not using streaming services if possible and Bandcamp when you do and can.
Some undiscovered tapes of band music from a front line musical band from World War II have been uncovered. Such a recording has never been found before. So that’s interesting.
Music festivals are on their way back, thank higher power of your choice.
James Levine is dead. Good riddance to a pretty bad guy.
Unfortunately, Foreigner is recording new music.
Willie Nelson gave the keynote for the online SXSW this year and when the Red Headed Stranger speaks, we should all listen.
The 20 essential Pavement songs, I suppose.
I’ve long thought Kenny Wayne Shepherd was basically a guitar masturbator so seeing his award nomination cancelled because he still uses Confederate imagery is no shame on my end. But of course he’s not racist, all you have to do is ask him as if we are all the judge of our own racism.
Speaking of such things, deep within this article about the people trying to create Fox News type media in Britain is this wonderful gem:
Mr. Neil has raised 60 million pounds (about $83 million) to start the channel, including investments from the American giant Discovery and the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall. (Mr. Marshall’s son, unrelatedly, is taking time off from playing banjo in the band Mumford and Sons to “examine my blind spots” after praising a far right book on Twitter.) Mr. Neil said he expected that sum to last the network at least three years, though it’s a pittance by the standards of American cable news.
Apple fell pretty far from the tree on this one! No wonder Mumford and Sons is a soulless crap band pedaling terrible music to tasteless white people. Just like his father pedaling crap news to tasteless white people.
Album Reviews, in which I did not in fact listen to my first 2021 album release this week as expected. Maybe next week.
Dear Nora, Mountain Rock
Katy Davidson was an indie singer of the early 2000s under the moniker of Dear Nora. In 2004, she made this album of little short introspective songs that didn’t do too much, but became influential to acts that would clearly borrow from her a decade later. Girlpool is a prime example. Written as a sort of response to the Iraq War, it’s an introspective album of tiny songs sung in a very soft voice. This was re-released in 2017 and got a lot of acclaim. I’m not surprised, as it fits squarely into a rather popular type of indie folk that the Pitchfork crowd loves. There’s some nice things about this. The album works as a whole in the way that Davidson clearly wanted. But like a lot of this music, I wish the songs reached out a bit from the rather basic emotional responses; moreover, for an album that was written as a response to Iraq, having any politics at all might be nice.
B
Dua Saleh, Nür
This is a pretty interesting debut EP from 2019 Sudanese-American queer singer from Minneapolis. Does it matter that Dua Saleh is queer and Sudanese and uses the they pronoun? I don’t know, should it? It is the first thing people talk about. In any case, this is an interesting artist with a fascinating vocal style that I think is less influenced by Arabic than one might expect. But they are intense vocals and combined with a quality producer, you have a very worthy 20 minute album. Dua Saleh has turned out to be pretty prolific, so I’ll have to check more out.
A-
Jesca Hoop, Stonechild
A lot of Hoop’s earlier work left me a bit cold, but I really liked this 2019 album. Maybe it’s the subject matter, making it perhaps the darkest, most disturbing album about motherhood ever recorded. The album title itself is a referral to the horrors of lithopedia, which is a phenomena where a mother carries around a calcified dead fetus for years, if not decades. Well then. Maybe it’s that the topic really brought out her vocals in a more powerful way than in the past. Anyway, very worthy material.
A-
Slowthai, Nothing Great About Britain
One of the great things about British punk and really so much British music in the last 50 years is that life in Britain actually really sucks for the working class and music became a way to rip apart your own country. Slowthai, a working class Brit, says it all in the title. This is a man who really hates Theresa May and once used a fake severed head of Boris Johnson as a prop on stage. So, you know, I already like the guy. He also calls Queen Elizabeth a cunt in the title track. More importantly though, this does for Britain what the best hip hop does in the U.S.–it’s folk music from the streets, furious about the outrages of life, political without seeing much chance of changing the system, and just smart as hell from someone without much formal education. Beats are great, writing is fantastic. There really is so much great hip hop that has come out of England in recent years and it doesn’t get much better than this release.
A
Hater, Siesta
Completely fine if not overly original or interesting 2018 release from this Swedish pop band. More energy than some of this, but plenty of the melancholy and sadness that seems to define so much of Swedish culture. Also a bit long. Better than OK if this is your style.
B
Daniel Carter/Matthew Shipp/William Parker/Gerald Cleaver, Welcome Adventure! Vol. 1
Someone surprisingly, this 2020 album is the first time these four have played on an album together. Shipp, Parker, and Carter have played together on a number of occasions. And I am pretty sure that all of them have played with Cleaver on multiple albums. But this is the first time the four geniuses recorded an album as a quartet. It is indeed a welcome adventure. I don’t know that it is the greatest album any of them have ever made, but it’s most certainly a well above good recording that anyone who loves jazz must hear.
A-
Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, Artlessly Falling
For as lauded as Mary Halvorson’s first Code Girl album was, I didn’t enjoy it that much. It’s for the simple reason that I don’t like jazz singing very much. I find the vocal stylings frustrating to listen to and also that the great musicians are forced into the background to feature the singing. There are a few exceptions, but as a general rule, this is how I feel. I wasn’t really going to bother with Artlessly Falling, from last year, despite it also being universally lauded, but I figured I should at least give it a chance. I feel mostly the same as before, though I think I like this one a little better. Obviously the musicians are astounding. I do appreciate breaking down Brett Kavanaugh’s ridiculous outburst of male privilege in his Supreme Court confirmation hearing to turn it into a jazz poem indicting him for being a horrible person. The addition of Robert Wyatt’s vocals on three tracks also mixes it up usefully. If you like jazz vocals and music that intentionally clangs and bangs, you will love this. I do like the latter, but just the former a bit less. Me, I’ll keep buying Halvorson’s non-vocal albums.
B+
Thelonious Monk, Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960
Oh hey, it’s Monk’s lost tapes he recorded for the Roger Vadim film released for the first time. Vadim was a complete hack who was far better at bedding beautiful starlets than he was at film (I watched Barbarella for the first time ever last week and JFC). Monk…he was not a hack. He was amazing. As is well known, he wrote very few tunes and often just repeated them in various recordings, but there was so much space for creation within the tunes that he takes sounds fresh. I usually hate unused (read, rejected) takes released on archival jazz recordings. They weren’t used for a reason. Here though, they are great.
A
Esperanza Spalding, 12 Little Spells
To go back to the Halvorson review, again, I am of a mixed bag when it comes to jazz vocalist. Spalding is about as good as they get in this genre today. Emily’s D+Revolution, from 2016, is a pretty fantastic album. This is the follow-up, from 2019. It is more OK. Conceptually it’s pretty interesting, with each song representing a different body part or fluid within the body (there’s an extended version with four additional tracks/body parts covered) and the music is certainly excellent. But again, I find the vocals get in the way for me, perhaps even more so since this combines the jazz with art-rock affects. This won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album so I may well be a minority, not that the Grammys are any kind of measure for universal acclaim.
B
Eliza Carthy, Restitude
Carthy is the daughter of two true legends of the English folk-rock scene, Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson. She imbibed everything from her parents, plus modern rock and roll. In the late 90s, with her blue hair and piercings and violin, she combined the music of her parents with her own songwriting and modern arrangements and made some pretty great albums, especially Angels and Cigarettes, from 2000. She still made traditional albums too though. I had lost track of her for a long time, though I knew she was mostly making albums of traditional English folk. So I decided to check out her last album, from 2019. It’s pretty strong. Her voice is huskier now and her fiddle playing somehow more rustic yet even stronger than era. Though she’s known for her collaborative work, she mostly locked herself in her house for this one and the spare arrangements and approach shine through.
A-
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics or disease.