RSSConsumer Guide: April, 2025
Flawlessly executed down-and-out Americana tales, a gentler approach to a veteran speed soukous master, Pepto-Bismol and other troths explored, and hilarious noises that may make your eardrums bleed.
MC Paul Barman: Tectonic Texts (Househusband Records) How about that—the wise-ass Brown undergrad who took up hip-hop a quarter century ago just so he could rhyme "hunter-gatherer" with "cunter-latherer" and "Super Bowl" with "pooper hole" has just turned 50. So to show off his maturing skills he resorts not just to the maturing likes of "formidable"-"oral skills" and "nipple play"-"hit the hay" but "humor me"-"perfumery" and even the all too fiftysomething "Are I Peewee?" So I'm glad he resumed his hobby while noting that his flow, while agile, never truly earned that terrific honorific. B PLUS
Champeta w/ Edna Martinez: Diblo Dibala Special (NTS) As I've noted before, champeta is a Colombian variant of what I'll sum up as soukous that arose half a century ago in the coastal drug entrepôts of Cartagena and Barranquilla. Back in 2007 I waxed enthusiastic about a Riverboat comp credited to an outfit dubbed Colombiafrica: The Mystic Orchestra called Voodoo Love Inna Champeta-Land, which I regret to report I can no longer locate in my shelves though it sounds good enough on Spotify. I discovered this hour-long NTS broadcast, which showcases veteran speed soukous master Dibala, because a friend recorded and burned it for me, and will note that it Googles readily enough via "edna martinez diblo dibala champeta." Old-fashioned guy that I am, I'm delighted to have the disc, which is by no means all Dibala, whose excellent 1989 Super Soukous is considerably less relaxed. But 82-year-old that I am, I prefer the gentler approach this de facto compilation favors. Greatly enjoying my second spin since breakfast as I write. A
Corook: Committed to a Bit (Atlantic) In which the musical artist also known as Corinne Savage plights their pronoun on the pointedly upper-cased "THEY!" and their troth pretty much throughout. "I came out of the womb with my heart on my sleeve," they report in their lucid soprano. "You taught me to love me/Like it was hard to love me/You were so focused on the flaws you saw/You didn't even see me," Corook tells their father (never mind "dad"). For the anxiety their daughter feels, their mother prescribes her favorite cure-all, Pepto-Bismol: "a bandaid for a broken arm/Drink it all until it's gone/Drink so we don't have to talk." Yet in the evocatively titled "Death" "a woman whose husband died suddenly" so that she "can't listen to Kenny Rogers anymore" "looked us in the eyes/Said cherish all our time/And I felt you grab my hand a little tighter." Which is why, if you turn it upside down and think about it briefly, the last words of that song are "I want to love you to death." A
The Delines: Mr. Luck and Ms. Doom (El Cortez) In this extraordinary partnership, the endlessly subtle and succinct Willy Vlautin concocts or in a few cases mayhap relates 13 down-and-out Americana tales that the endlessly calm and unassumingly graceful Amy Boone brings to life without dramatizing much less overdramatizing them. All but a few are mini-tragedies in which a limited but plausibly functional sexual partnership, initially sometimes a youngish one, is propped up by a workable job or hustle until the deal falls apart for one reason or another, health setbacks included. There are many different ways such a pattern can assert itself, all of them both different and painful. The execution is so flawless that its aesthetic achievement is actively pleasurable. But that doesn't mean you'll ever put it on for the fun of it. A
Craig Finn: Always Been (Tamarac) The verbal textures, narrative details, and credible characterizations the 53-year-old Hold Steady frontman's sixth solo album meld into its 11 songs achieve a literary pitch that could win this alt-rock lifer a short story prize. His protagonists are all full-fledged adults like him although usually a little younger, many of them onetime clergymen who are still figuring out how and why they'd ended up so, well, unfulfilled. Just because they've passed 30, their tales have gone through enough stages to accrue more incident than Willy Vlautin's, which as a result are starker and cleaner. Feels to me like a lot of these guys and gals were big Hold Steady fans a decade or two ago—which makes me hope at least a few of that cohort had happier endings. So tell me, Craig—is this how things always work out? Or is it just easier to write about than the happy endings I'm betting still sometimes materialize? A
Jeffrey Lewis: The EVEN MORE Freewheelin' Jeffrey Lewis (Vintage Voltage) What I count as the 14th long player by an East Village lifer set to turn 50 in November is also the best or damn close to it, its themes familiar but its details particular. The one about the girlfriend who always falls asleep on his shoulder before the movie passes the half-hour mark is counterbalanced by the bereft breakup song "Tylenol PM," just as the disgruntled opener "Do What Comes Natural" is sweetened by the pre-closer "100 Good Things." But aptly for someone approaching the half century mark, a closer called "The Endless Unknown" leaves the door open for a follow-up album that lands on or tries to encompass existential vastness itself. A MINUS
Mike: Showbiz! (10K Projects) Facility out the fucking faucet won't float you down to much in the way of laughs, romance, politics, or come to that hits, at least hits that will take you or your fans anywhere you all wish you could go. Not a "clown" or a "clone" just like he says; not a "showoff" or a "stunt man" either. But definitely not the "Artist of the Century" even if that's just a joke I don't get. Talented, absolutely. B PLUS
Gurf Morlix: A Taste of Ashes (Rootball) It doesn't get any easier and he knows it ("This Is Real," "Kapow Kaboom") **
PremRock: Did You Enjoy Your Time Here . . . ? (Independent) The manifestly intelligent Mark Dubuque purveys as unsullied not to say melody-free a rock-rap fusion as you could expect if not necessarily hope to hear ("Steal Wool," "Love Is a Battlefield Simulation") ***
ScHoolboy Q: Blue Lips (Interscope/Top Dawg Entertainment) Already pushing 40 somehow, this proudly old-school, inexhaustibly quick-lipped L.A. gangsta brings his own more humane thematic range and distinct musical flow to an aesthetic that seems to progress through or jump around within what I guess I should call the thug worldview call. Ever the committed cornball, I find myself especially impressed by the simple couplet "Some days you gotta be a deadbeat/When your kids gotta eat." A MINUS
Shakira: Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran (Sony Music) Nice to have her back, wish she'd done a few in English ("Punteria X Cardi B," "BZRP Music Sessions, Vol. 53") **
Skrillex: F*ck U Skrillex U Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3 (Atlantic/Owsla) After a nice 2011-2013 run as "the most hated man in dubstep" (only he wasn't dubstep really), the beaty L.A. noisemaker originally known as Sonny John Moore kind of returned to form with two 2023 albums, even winning a 2024 Grammy for the "collaborative single" "Rumble." But this comeback hoot-and-a-half is a who-knew? jamboree as continuously engaging and hilariously silly as its title. If there's a single expression of human feeling in the random verbiage that emerges here, I was too busy chuckling to notice, although "we make your eardrums bleed," while claiming too much by half-and-a-half, has its truth value if you happen to be sentimental about human voices and what many still call musical instruments. A
Spectacular Diagnostics: Raw Game (Ten Year Edition) (Vinyl Digital) None dare call this stylistically adept and varied Chicago producer art-rap, but for better and worse it's the sonics not the lyrics he's in it for, ambitious though the latter may sometimes be ("Tommy Snort," "Ridin'") ***
Tyla: Tyla (Epic) Johannesburg-born and -based ingenue feels an amapiano-textured pop I suggest she not start calling popiano ("Water," "On and On") *
And It Don't Stop, April 13, 2025
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