Consumer Guide: December, 2023

Dolly ranges from good fun to genius, Buck 65 ranges through the alphabet, the Feelies range through the Velvet Underground, and the Human Hearts range through simple yet well-honed melodies.

Barbie the Album (Atlantic) Put your money on the movie before the too many Kens here give you the wrong idea (Lizzo, "Pink"; Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, Aqua, "Barbie World"; Fifty Fifty, "Barbie Dreams [feat. Kaliii]") **

Buck 65: Super Dope (self-released) With 2022's King of Drums, CBC radio personality Richard Terfry returned to hip-hop after a seven-year layoff that cut his two decades as rapper Buck 65 off too short, and fans like me were glad to have him back. So of course we're even gladder he was just getting restarted--of course we can't get enough of rhymes like "Sissy Spacek/shitty paycheck/shifty tape deck/gritty latex," "M.C. Escher/empty nester," "love boat/dovecote" or the crowning "I'm not an alpha male/More like an alfalfa male" (a fib--Buck's as alpha as the alphabet he knows so well). But while no way did the beats of the percussion-savvy tracks of King of Drums stop with what the title made the most of, the musicality on this de facto follow-up, in particular the freewheeling exploitation of squelchy low-register synths that go so far as to suggest bassoons, makes it even more playable. Can it be true that he'll wind up "not a Hall of Famer but an interesting career," kinda like Kenny Lofton? Nah--he's got more range than Kenny Lofton, who in case you didn't know was no slowpoke. A

Buck 65: Punk Rock B-Boy (self-released) The only rapper I can imagine dropping the lines "Tripping on the psilocybin/Listening to Phyllis Hyman," "Sycophants shit their pants better take Immodium," or "The dildo of consequence seldom arrives lubricated" is clearly excited about being back in the business. True--sweat like Aroldis Chapman though he may, he's not gonna serve up a home run every time, or so I reminded myself three-four plays into this one. But then a funny thing happened, and it was literally funny. By the time I got to six-seven I was liking it more all over again. A MINUS

CMAT: Crazymad, for Me (Cmatbaby) Ciara Mary Alice Thompson's second album of original songs was recorded in Bergen, Norway except for one in Kingston, New York--not "California," where she threatens to flee in the opener, but not her native Dublin either. I'm on my way, she wants us to know. And while the songwriting isn't quite as strong as on last year's debut, she does well by a pervasive theme she shares with none other than album of the year favorite SZA: serial coitus, let's call it. Unlike SZA, whose vocals flex, keen, and murmur not as if but because sensuality is her default mode, CMAT's singing is leaner, cuter, and by no means shy about trying hard. But sometimes it seems as if every song finds her in bed with someone else, to less than no avail, with the title "I . . . Hate Who I Am When I'm Horny" a theme statement I wouldn't wish on people I like a lot less than I do her. "I'm sitting in an office paying 80 quid an hour to cry," she tells us. "It started ending our first week," she reckons. "No wrapped in a dressing gown, no curled on your couch," she laments. "Have fun, I'm done," she announces. "What's left for me but poetry/And getting really old?" she wonders. Most likely lots of things, I suspect. Really, girl, it's not over yet. A MINUS

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: Dancing on the Edge (Repressed) Louisville bar outfit essays longform songwriting with impressive if overly allusive hence less than altogether irresistible success ("Learn to Re-Luv," "Free From the Guillotine") ***

The Feelies: Some Kinda Love: Performing the Music of the Velvet Underground (Bar/None) In a career that was over in less than four years between 1967 and 1970, the Velvet Underground released four albums containing 37 discrete original songs, 17 of which plus the late-breaking, atypical, always welcome houserocker "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" are revived here on a single CD that lasts some 71 minutes and is also available from the streaming platform of your choice and as a heavy-duty vinyl double-LP that has its sonic attractions. All convene two well-regarded metro-area bands, NYC's Velvets with their legend and NJ's Feelies with their cult, the excuse being a live musical adjunct to a 2018 Manhattan art/memorabilia/gewgaws show devoted to said legend. Initially slotted for the exhibition's cramped performance space, it was relocated to Jersey City's 800-capacity White Eagle Hall, goosing the music decisively. True, Glenn Mercer's accomplished enough vocals serve among other things to remind you what a subtle and idiosyncratic singer Lou Reed became, an evolution that flowered every which way post-Velvets but was there in embryo from the start. But Reed's circa-1970 songbook now has Mercer's mark on it nonetheless. And the guitars--well, they're a big reason you'll want to buy these remakes. Lou Reed having proved a great guitarist, I know it verges on sacrilegious to say so, but comparison with 1969 Velvet Underground Live, the 1969 Quine tapes, and the 1969 Matrix tapes, worthy excavations all, lead me to suspect that the next time I feel like hearing this material I'll be going to my F shelves. A

The Human Hearts: Viable (Open Boat) Musically, 64-year-old frontman-pianist-songsmith-Ph.D-Bandcamper Franklin Bruno will never be any kind of virtuoso or heartthrob. Formally sapient and technically accomplished enough never to blow a note of simple yet well-honed melodies he has the good sense to design as mere albeit catchy tunes, he never misses a well-chosen note as a singer. But for all that there's something in his plain, conversational timbre that leaves the pursuit of anything that could be called beautiful to the likes of Jenny Toomey, the indie frontperson turned Ford Foundation honcho who graces several of these tracks. From the flag pin he refuses to wear over his heart to the promos he requests you save from the sell pile, Bruno writes socially conscious although not therefore ideological songs, which means he's a very smart guy who sees the world the way I and I bet you do. For the cherry on top he covers an Everly Brothers obscurity called "June Is as Cold as December." And before you go all global warming on him, be aware that June is actually just the prettiest girl in town. A MINUS

Terry Klein: Leave the Light On (self-released) "The grief is like a millstone/Grinding in my gut/It's all right when it's working/But it keeps on getting stuck" ("A Quarter, Two Quarters, and a Dime," "Oh Melissa") *

Megan Moroney: Lucky (Columbia) Yet another intelligent young woman from the new deep south who puts more smarts into her lyrics than than any two mannish alt-rock bands chosen at random. True, she does have male song doctors at the ready, although it could be that they're there primarily to help her with the kind of hooks that'll nail "Tonight my only ambition/Is to make a bad decision," "I sleep on my side/And you sleep with everyone," and "You can't love the boy more than you love the girl in the mirror." For sure the all-Moroney closer with its "I write sad songs for sad people/But I wrote this love song for you" summum gives a romantic reason to hope so. A MINUS

Azuka Moweta & Aniome Brothers Band: Nwanne Bu Ife (Palenque) Moweta's not so much distinctive as felt and textured and arresting baritone is what sells his devotion to the Nigerian highlife variant dubbed ekobe, which enlists such Igbo percussion devices as long gong, woodblock, and it says here pot. Six tracks ranging between six and 16 minutes, all of which deliver soul, groove, and an emotional authority imbued with both faith and tenderness--none of which, I'm obliged to acknowledge, would necessarily be as convincing if I understood the words. A MINUS

Dolly Parton: Rockstar (Butterfly/Big Machine) In theory this is the 77-year-old Nashville auteur's admission application to a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that in 2022 voted her in aware that it had more to gain from her than she did from it. Only then, hilariously, she claimed to feel obliged as a country artist to turn them down until she could make the grade by recording some "rock" herself, and this two-hours-plus double album is it--basically, although the concept has some give in it, a duet album where dozens of "rock" totems help her resuscitate their hits. Only problem is, its critical reception has been disgracefully snarky, especially in the U.K. but Stateside too. True, many of these tracks could be called schlocky, not least because the miraculously tolerant Parton is no disrespecter of schlock, not even in the form of Journey, REO Speedwagon, Judas Priest, Peter Frampton, and 4 Non Blondes. I'm not telling you I much enjoy any of these particular selections, although I do love how audaciously Parton stakes her claim on them. But many of the tracks that are more to my taste and probably yours range from good fun to genius. One called "I Dreamed About Elvis" features professional Elvis imitator Ronnie McDowell. Goddaughter Miley Cyrus steps up to pitch in on "Wrecking Ball." Lizzo mounts that mythic "Stairway to Heaven." "Heart of Glass" beats lissomely in a duet with Debbie Harry. Paul and Ringo join in on "Let It Be." With Mick Jagger beset by scheduling difficulties, poor guy, Pink and Brandi Carlile step up to take his place. And the eight-minute solo version of "Purple Rain" is something like spectacular. A MINUS

Piconema: East African Hits on the Colombian Coast (Rocafort) The amazing thing is what the title indicates: nine approximately nine-minute dance records (what we used to call 12-inches? dunno) originally manufactured or anyway concocted in Indian Ocean Africa but forged or maybe just postulated into a minigenre by dueling Colombian DJs back across both the African continent and the Atlantic Ocean to the South American seacoast (and then inland from there? dunno). Simultaneously delicate and utilitarian, body and spirit, barely hinting at the bassy, more muscular Cuban-derived grooves of Congolese soukous, they're engines of transcendence or maybe just the escape that's the nearest the dancers who cheered them on can get to it. A MINUS

Homeboy Sandman: Rich (Mello Music) Has re-upped his game, definitely, but not so's I buy his positions on vaccines or Joe's O's ("Then We Broke Up," "Crazy") **

Tele Novella: Poet's Tooth (Kill Rock Stars) Sailing into the past on a slipstream of mellow, marginally mezzo melody ("Rodeo Clown," "The Unicorn," "Funerals") *

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