Consumer Guide: June, 2024

An exploration of erotic and existential turmoil, five albums (across nine years) from Jon Langford, and two more from an East African supergroup. Plus: Afropop, amapiano, blues, Isbell, and Taylor.

Asake: Work of Art (Empire) Echoing amapiano log-drum loops provide Nigerian Afropop up-and-comer the sound-effect hooks those of us who can't understand what the guy's crooning about wouldn't otherwise check out ("Olorun," "Basquiat") **

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft (Darkroom/Interscope) I prepped by listening with half an ear, a proven way to find out whether music has the power to grab you even when you've slanted your consciousness elsewhere. And somehow I came away nursing the all too vague conclusion that Finneas had convinced his sister to subjugate her uncanny pop hookiness to his home-schooled avant ambitions--to put their pop-tune hooks on hold and make an album where the musical gestalt was fundamentally textural. Closer listening, however, revealed that textures or no textures this missed the point. Tunefully enough and much more decisively, it's an album that explores in shifting detail both stardom and one's early twenties as hotbeds of erotic and existential turmoil--sometimes ecstatic, sometimes fraught, sometimes joined at the hip if stardom happens to be your achievement or fate, sometimes a web of mutually exclusive imponderables. So say it's a 22-year-old seeking true love and a superstar ditto. "I could eat that girl for lunch," a lip-smacking Billie tells the world. So "Pulling up a chair/And putting up my hair," she awaits a visit. "You say no one knows you so well/But every time you touch me/I just wonder how she felt," she frets. "Good things don't last," she concludes. "So you found her/Now go fall in love/Just like we were/If I ever was," she advises. "I'm trying my best," she avers. And at 82, I believe every word. A

Christone "Kingfish" Ingram: Live in London (Alligator) Grammy-certified Best Contemporary Blues Album more notable for the artist's strong, agile fingers and strong, predictable vocals than for the songs they do their best to articulate ("Something in the Dirt," "You're Already Gone") **

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Weathervanes (Southeastern) Through an educational early run with the Drive-By Truckers, foreshortened marriages to two musicians of serious substance, struggling for sobriety, going solo, and overseeing the 2020 multi-artist voting-rights album Georgia Blue, this guitar-toting 45-year-old son of two Alabama teenagers has established himself as an ambitious, gifted, temperamental, very Southern rock and roller of undeniable talent and rare political heart. So the consistent acuity of the 15 songs here is hardly a surprise, with my special favorites the high-strung gun-violence reenactment "Save the World" and the OD tragedy "When We Were Close." How compellingly Isbell the singer can deliver these well-put words of wisdom, however, has yet to fully reveal itself. A MINUS

Jon Langford and the Men of Gwent: The Legend of LL (Country Mile '15) Having mislaid my burn of this album, which I'd spun with pleasure multiple times by then, I streamed a 13-track Spotify version before gathering the gall to launch a review, a project foreordained when on April 14 I saw Langford perform for the first time in over a decade accompanied by calm, engaged old hand Sally Timms and wild, intense Texas guitar crazies the Sadies at Sony Hall on 46th Street. Without, how to say this, putting on a show, the longtime leader of the Leeds-spawned Mekons effortlessly combined John Anderson's pure country "Wild and Blue" and Eric von Schmidt's faux Caribbean "Joshua Gone Barbados" with songs of his own devising from the opening "It's Not Enough" through the turf-defining "Nashville Radio" to the climactic Mekons statement of principle "Hard to Be Human Again." What I found most engaging and indeed moving about his set was how into it he seemed--as if he was born to perform these songs and enthralled to to sing them in a Broadway nightclub half-full of old fans who are just as enthralled to be there. And this album partakes of the same kind of what I can only call magic. A MINUS

Jon Langford & the Bright Shiners: Where It Really Starts (Norman) Reports from a world that seems to be falling apart in more ways than one ("The Emperor's Fiddle," "Sea Houses," "Discarded") ***

Jon Langford & the Men of Gwent: President of Wales (Country Mile '19) Native Welshman turned Leeds-spawned Mekons frontman turned Chicago-based songster and painter gives his roots a shot of local color and a dose of celebrity by hooking up with a band from the same hometown where he nearly drowned as a child in the swimming pool of the long-abandoned swimming pool of Bulmore Lido, now filled with stones as the song of that title reports more dolefully than you might expect from someone who almost died there. Other songs honor local busker Frankie Lodge, dead at 90 in 2019, and the title antihero, who for some reason wonders why he can't go home again after 400 Welsh citizens "living in the home of the vote" died of HIV-infected blood transfusions. B PLUS

Jon Langford & the Men of Gwent: Lost on Land & Sea (Country Mile) On melody alone these 12 boisterous songs enliven the most engaging and memorable of Langford's three Men of Gwent albums. But like democracy only even more so, modernization isn't all it's cracked up to be--much more is at stake. The town bustles even as the last murenger completes the last wall repair, with emotions pulled more literally than usual "from pillar to post." "Jitterburg jive and swing" or not, the now-bustling factory generates many broken bones. "Mrs. Hammer's Dream" fails to locate young Tommy on the ridge where she was sure she'd spied him--or was he just "Lost in the Wentwood"? The swimming can be tricky too: "There's a place let's take a peek/That's where they keep/The bodies of the drowned." Or if all this seems like too much dismaying detail, we can just keep the grim stuff down to "How dark is the night/How cold is the rain." A

Jon Langford: Gubbins (self-released) "Songs that fell between the cracks, tunes too exuberant and twisted to hang with the popular crowd, stuff he just forgot about pleasantly surprised the old Welsh bugger when he rediscovered them in the basement." In other words, not rejects so much as stragglers or one-of-a-kinds that didn't make the cut. Vocals tend more reflective than forceful, but not unanimously. Be glad Sally Timms pitches in on two complementary finales. But don't miss "Drone Operator," "Election Day," "Brixton," "Grog." A MINUS

Shikamoo Jazz: Chela Chela Vol. 1 (RetroAfric '95) In this 1995 iteration they're an East African supergroup rolling out Swahili standards for an audience that knows most of them by heart, with sweetly soulful vocals buoyed by guitars and percussion with deftly deployed extra balafon flavoring that often sounds like some indigenous vibraphone chiming and echoing not far below or behind. The opening "Bahati" and the closing "Donda La Mapenzi" are standouts. The other six tracks are pretty darn nice. A MINUS

Shikamoo Jazz: East African Legends Live (RetroTan '22) Thanks to trusted U.K. Afropop heads Ronnie Graham and Graeme Ewens (who credit a third collaborator previously unknown to me named Charles Easman), this longstanding Tanzanian band can finally be heard 7500 miles from home. The fundamental sonics and groove will be familiar enough to any Yank who's knows much soukous, but with less Cuba and extra strains of more straightforward Kenya in the groove. It's joyous and uplifting the way tourists who can't afford the plane tickets expect African dance music to be. And the music, mostly from the '90s I'm pretty sure, isn't all guitars. There are saxophones, trumpets, flutes, an organ. Sometimes the singers turn into chorales. Sometimes they just wail. A

Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (Taylor Swift/Republic) I hereby swear on the collected works of Joel Whitburn that I have streamed these 31 echoey tracks more than once or twice, was most touched by the two indicated below though that's not saying much, grant that eventually there may be more, and firmly believe she can help Biden in November so you go girl ("My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toy," "But Daddy I Love Him") *

Uncle Waffles: Asylum (Kreativekorner) Amapiano at its most purely percussive--overseen and fronted by femme DJ-producer-promoter Lungehilihle Zwane a/k/a (somehow) Uncle Waffles, softened by occasional choruses, and featuring, just in case you were wondering, the enticing opener "Sghubohandro" and the vastly successful male-Afrorapper-fortified hit "Yahyuppiyah" muscling up. B PLUS

Uncle Waffles: Solace (Kreativekorner) I don't mean to pretend that her two seven-track albums (so far) are all that distinct from each other, which is a problem critically, but if you're checking this one out maybe start with the tracks parenthesized below ("Peacock Revisit," "Waffles Anthem," "Solace") ***

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