Music Notes
By 
I saw two shows last week, part of a very busy February after a long show drought in January. The one I was most excited about Marissa Nadler, who played a little club in Providence that usually has metal shows and is a kind of hangout for the city’s alternative community. I had seen her open Big Ears last year, which she pointed was kind of weird because it was light outside and she is very much a singer of the dark corners. Indeed she is. Nadler plays what I guess is best described as goth-folk. She doesn’t lean that far into the goth thing, but a lot of her fans do and she looks the part in the sense of having very long black hair and wearing dresses that are pretty form fitting above the waist and very flowy below the waist, not exactly something you’d see by people at Renaissance fairs (by the way, what a weird subculture that is to this historian) but something not too different. Her music is extremely atmospheric, which means it’s a bit whispered and the limited instrumentation–she plays a guitar and she has a really good guitarist with her as well but that’s it–could be something that floats into the background, and in some ways it does, but then you get jolted by the lyrics, which are really amazing. Sometimes they are about lost love, sometimes they are dark (again, it’s goth folk) but then she also writes songs about unsolved crimes from the early 20th century that are really compelling as stories. She’s a unique figure on the music scene and if you get a chance to see her, do so.
I also saw Margo Price in Boston. This was the 6th time I’ve seen her. I probably would have missed this, but my wife is a big fan and I still like her too. But we have to face it–Midwest Farmer’s Daughter was an astoundingly great album, the follow-up was pretty good, and since then it’s not been super. She did a couple of albums where she decided she wanted to be Stevie Nicks instead of Loretta Lynn and there are lots of white women who want to be Stevie Nicks and the songs were largely just alright, so they didn’t register much critically or commercially. Probably because of the latter, she went back to country for the latest album, which I actually haven’t heard, though I’d seen her play some of the songs before at Newport Folk last year, where she is a regular. A couple of them seem pretty good. I will say this though–she always puts on a good, high-energy show and has a great sense of cover songs, which in this case included “Maggie’s Farm,” “Deportee” and “I Just Don’t Give a Damn,” which is one of the great George Jones tracks. And don’t knock anyone for doing a set that’s nearly half covers, that’s what country music was built upon, not a singer-songwriter fetish that has dominated post-60s rock.
There was an opener for Price named Pearl Charles. She had about as much to say about life as you’d expect from the daughter of Seinfeld’s lead writer Larry Charles. There was a song about how much she loved doing mushrooms. It reminded me of how much so many singer-songwriters today really just want to be in the Laurel Canyon scene of the 70s, where everyone looked good, the drugs were great, the sex was available, and people could pay attention to their favorite topic: themselves.
Other news:
I suppose we should a word about the death of Neil Sedaka. I have nothing to offer, but no doubt someone around here was really into him. Also, Eliane Radigue died. The French composer was one of these super influential modernists who built up worlds around soundscapes that don’t always appeal to the masses, but which, like, say, Pauline Oliveros, have become widely admired by a lot of musicians and critics. She was always kind of on the edge of my knowledge and I wish I knew more about her works. Maybe this is a good time.
I’m looking forward to Bill Callahan’s new album and here’s a good interview with him.
It seems to me that a demand for a “defining protest song” for these terrible times puts too much pressure on any one song to ever achieve it.
The University of Kansas is hosting a festival dedicated to Latin American classical music. I’m friends with a Costa Rican conductor and have learned a lot about this in recent years.
Learn more about the Punjabi disco scene.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its finalists for 2026. Wait for the aging white men to complain that this isn’t “RAWK.” Personally, I’d vote for Joy Division/New Order, Shakira, Sade, Jeff Buckley, and Luther Vandross.
This week’s playlist, in which I got to hear a lot of music since the gigantic snowstorm basically shut the state of Rhode Island down from Monday through Thursday.
- Joe Ely and Joel Gumzan, Live Cactus
- William Parker, Great Spirit
- Tom Russell, Indians Cowboys Horses Dogs
- Waxahatchee, Cerulean Salt
- The Carolina Chocolate Drops, Dona Got a Ramblin Mind
- John McLaughlin, Devotion
- Smog, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love
- James McMurtry, Complicated Game
- Ray Price, For the Good Times
- Margo Cliker, Valley of Heart’s Delight
- Neko Case, Blacklisted
- Jimmie Dale Gilmore, self-titled
- Guy Clark, Dublin Blues
- PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
- King Crimson, The Great Deceiver, disc 4
- CLAMM, Care
- Johnny Paycheck, She’s All I Got
- Jessi Colter, A Country Star is Born
- Ann Peebles, I Can’t Stand the Rain
- John Moreland, Birds in the Ceiling
- Living Colour, Stain
- Ralph Stanley, Hills of Home
- Kraftwerk, Trans-Europe Express
- Loretta Lynn, Blue-Eyed Kentucky Girl
- Herbie Hancock, Headhunters
- Tom Petty, Full Moon Fever
- Doc Watson, Portrait
- Dave Alvin, Public Domain
- Nels Cline, Consentrik Quartet
- Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
- Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation
- U.S. Girls, Scratch It
- Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
- Frank Ocean, Channel Orange
- Remember Sports, Like a Stone
- Wussy, Forever Sounds
- The Tubs, Dead Meat
- Will Oldham, Guarapero: Lost Blues 2
- Wayne Horvitz, Way Out East
- Drive By Truckers, Go-Go Boots
- Tammy Wynette, 20 Greatest Hits
- Sleater Kinney, All Hands on the Bad One (x2)
- Mannequin Pussy, Perfect
- Anouar Brahem, After the Last Sky
- Lera Lynn, Something More than Love
- Grateful Dead, Hundred Year Hall
- Neko Case/k.d. lang/Laura Veirs, Case/lang/Veirs (x2)
- Otis Redding, Otis Blue
- Buck Owens, Sings Tommy Collins
- Ernest Tubb, Jimmy Rodgers Songs
- Quinteto Violado & Zélia Barbosa, Música Popular do Nordeste 1
- Ka’hil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit
- Ka’hil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Spirit Gatherer: A Tribute to Don Cherry
- Charlie Hunter & Pound for Pound, Return of the Candyman
- Bans Manco, 2023
- Jim Lauderdale, My Favorite Place
- Bill Frisell, History Mystery, disc 2
- Serge Gainsbourg, Histoire de Melody Nelson
- Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Album Reviews:
Sextile, Push
I’m not generally a club music guy, but I will admit that the few times I’ve seen a good club dance band live–and by this I mean real performers–it’s pretty damn fun. Sextile combines club and post punk and does a pretty good job with it. Not sure every song bangs like it could, but this is solid music I would absolutely see live, even if I didn’t necessarily listen to it at home all the time. But I could see listening to it occasionally too. Would be good to work out to among other things. If anything, this actually could use to be a bit more club oriented, pushing up the beats and upping the vocals some too.
B
J Hus, Beautiful and Brutal Yard
Solid work from this British rapper, with great instrumentation and smart lyrics that do a good job exploring gender roles in Black Britain. He also raps pretty amusingly about sex, which isn’t always the case and like writing about or filming sex for mainstream movies, is harder to do than it sounds. He’s initially from Gambia and so he brings a lot of experiences, not to mention a unique accent into the mix. But it’s really the many musical influences and funky Afrobeat oriented production that really makes this a relative winner for me. Not bad at all.
B+
Jaz Karis, Safe Flight
Solid but unexceptional contemporary R&B. These slice of life songs–really, they are about pretty prosaic topics for someone who travels as much as she does–not that there’s anything wrong about that–are sung well enough, produced well enough, and click most of the boxes you want. But they don’t really exceed the box checking. It just fades into the background too easily. A pleasant enough background, OK. But nonetheless.
B-
Peggy Lee/Julian Wilson/Theo Carbo/Dylan van der Schyff, Open Thread
I fear reviewing an album called Open Thread at LGM due to commenters’ love of using open threads to go all “Can you believe that Donald Trump did that??!!!!” as if he hasn’t done those things forever. But hey, you can’t discriminate based on an album title. Also, I know next to nothing about the Australian jazz/improv scene, so I was interested in hearing something from an area about which I need to know more. This is a cello-centric album thanks to Peggy Lee, who is very much not the jazz singer. This also includes Theo Carbo on guitar, Julien Wilson on sax, and Dylan van der Schyff on drums. This is a fascinating set, deeply engaging and creating a sound universe slightly different than anything else I think I’ve ever heard. This is really Lee’s project, she wrote most of the songs at least. It’s a bit hard to describe. I could see this as a Nels Cline project perhaps. It has his sensibility. There’s so much glorious swirling noise, not that “free” or anything like a late 60s stereotype. Just four fascinating musicians taking the songs in places I haven’t been before. Well worth additional listens at the very least.
A-
Shabaka, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
Shabaka got sick of the saxophone and a big noisy band like he had with Sons of Kemet. So he started playing Japanese flutes. Unlike Andre 3000, he actually knows what he’s doing with flutes at least. This is a much more quiet contemplative album than his previous work, which is just fine. It does however veer pretty far toward the New Age and toward valuing prettiness over other values, which is the road Bill Frisell took to go from super interesting musician to pretty boring (though his latest projects have pushed back on that narrative a bit). Maybe there’s a way for westerners to play Japanese flutes without devolving in New Age pablum, but I’ve rarely heard it. For me, this would be better as a soundtrack than as an active listening experience. He is however playing his flutes with Thurston Moore at Big Ears and I am curious as hell as to what that looks like, though I wonder about the lines to get in to see it.
B-
The Umbrellas, The Umbrellas
This 2021 album is garage indie-pop of the kind where a bunch of locals decide to form a band and play music like their heroes. Well, the tradition of that is pretty much the tradition of rock and roll, especially in the U.S. It’s catchy and bouncy, can’t deny that. I’d be hard pressed to argue that this stands out from the pack. The male vocals are especially weak. But for fans of jangly indie pop, you should hear it.
C+
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics, even on a day of American warmongering like this one. In fact, it’s especially true now. We need to ground ourselves in art and beauty, even in the worst times. And these are most definitely some bad times.