RSSConsumer Guide: July, 2024
Jazz that swings from tunefulness to abstraction, a Nashville songbird with a can of gas and a match, Seattle self-described bit players with 13 songs in 27 minutes, & blues in search of lasting love.
Bounaly: Dimanche á Bamako (Sahel Sounds) Sunday is wedding day in his neck of the sand, and though he sings as well as plays it's his guitar not his voice that just might propel the happy couple toward the bliss they crave ("Tamala," "Mali Mussow") ***
Mike Cooley/Patterson Hood/Jason Isbell: Live at the Shoals Theater (Southeastern/Thirty Tigers) For a great band, the Drive-By Truckers don't have what you'd call a compelling sound--soloists with front-and-center showpieces, singers who can carry a track on their own, a rhythm section whose groove is an identity in motion. Ultimately, and this is unusual in any of the more muscular species of rock, their strength over some 14 studio albums has been the songwriting. But having immersed in many of these albums while reviewing Stephen Deusner's DBT biography, I was surprised to find myself returning more often than necessary to this live benefit one-off, recorded in June 2014 with all ticket proceeds forwarded to their stroke-crippled promoter friend Terry Pace but only released as a double album in 2020. It's just the three frontmen, Patterson and Cooley partners for four decades with the mercurial Isbell back in the saddle because he cares about Pace too. The beauty part is that over strictly acoustic backing and picking all three frontmen can relax and deliver the lyrics, a total of 24 of them, just about every one a pleasure to hear anew, including several all but the most devoted fans forgot existed. The gem is Isbell's "Outfit" and everybody knows it. But "Daddy Needs a Drink" provides the perfect Father's Day touch. A MINUS
Robert Finley: Black Bayou (Easy Eye Sound) This very late-breaking 70-year-old Louisiana bluesman, who I was amused as well as amazed to learn was an America's Got Talent also-ran at 65, made two predictable earlier albums with Black Keys good guy Dan Auerbach, so Auerbach's production presumably isn't decisive on this more striking one. Nor do openers called "Livin' Out a Suitcase" and "Sneakin' Around" harbinger many surprises. Grammy king Kingfish Ingram blows him away chopswise. Yet somehow he hits grooves both musical and narrative that old-timers whose appetite for blues is permanently unslaked will grab onto and hold. I was already caught up when he broke a mold with "Nobody Wants to Be Lonely," about not only visiting a friend in an old age home but swearing credibly and compassionately to come back soon, and two tracks later swears in one called "Lucky Day" to have finally met a woman he'll love for life. In pop music, that's very often an exaggeration if not a lie. But maybe not when the singer is pushing 70. A MINUS
Fox Green: Light Over Darkness (self-released) Easily the best-realized of this likable Little Rock quintet's three biggish-rock albums, smoother and more fetching musically and lyrically, with special kudos for "Sleepy John Estes" ("and my mom"), "6 Days Sober" (only every Saturday the same gal escorts him off the wagon), and "Jones Street Revisited" (which Little Rock or no Little Rock I like to imagine is about the Greenwich Village block where the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan cover was shot and my wife grew up). But the big door prize bears the unlikely title "Jesus Loves Us All," unlikely because that outsized "us" is far more inclusive than we have every right to doubt or fear as the case may be. "Here's to Little Richard," they peal, and in a world where what everyone wants is "some decent healthcare" they mean everything that implies. "One day I'll get back to Jesus," they pledge, and because they're so sure he'll be there for them they very nearly convince me--metaphorically, anyway. A MINUS
Ciara Grace: Write It Down (self-released) Her father a record producer, her mother a singer-songwriter herself, this 21-year-old debuts with 11 songs inspired by the not so distant romantic and sexual byways of high school. These the title song reports she "weaponized" "pen to paper" so that even if she forgave she would never forget. And she doesn't. Their surface polished, their details sharp, their sound dreamy, they'll convince you that she was too smart for these guys even when they were basically OK, as a few were. "When I was 16 a boy tried to tell me how I felt," the title song begins. And then goes on to make sure we get the picture: "I might forgive but sure don't forget." Not all the lyrics are that sharp; in fact, some you might forget yourself. Nor is there anything forceful in their presentation. But there's plenty of clarity. So here's hoping the right young dweeb gives her the attention and respect she manifestly deserves. B PLUS
The Gringo Pistoleros: The Rise and . . . Subsequent Fall of the Texas Alien (self released) Casually enjoyable enough to link the uncredited Tom T. Hall opener to the uncredited Grateful Dead closer (because copyrights expire sooner these days or because nobody needs these guys' paltry royalties anyway???) ("The Cat Came Back," "The Dire Wolf," "That's How I Got to Memphis") **
The Libertines: All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade (EMI) Shambolic albeit far from hookless U.K. postpunks promise never ever to cross the Atlantic again as no one over here even notices ("Mustangs," "Oh Shit," "I Have a Friend") **
Jason Moran: From the Dancehall to the Battlefield (Yes) "Syncopation is about urgency, pushing the beat ahead to apply the anticapation of the oncoming downbeat, an outlook that is inherently futuristic" writes pianist-composer-entrepreneur Moran on what is fundamentally a through-composed tribute album to the Alabama-born Black bandleader-composer James Reese Europe, although Moran gives pretty much equal credit to fellow pianist Randy Weston, who died at 92 in 2018. Some of the 15 tracks have a pop tunefulness and/or groovefulness about them--"Darktown Strutters Ball" and "St Louis Blues" are classics most listeners will dimly recognize at least, "Memphis Blues" and "Ballin the Jack" kind of but not so much. But other passages cultivate an unkempt abstraction you'll enjoy more and more as you get used to how they presage a musical complexity Moran means to remind us is on its way. Europe died at 39, stabbed in the neck by a drummer he'd just taken to task. So be sure you go away humming the finale, called simply "For James." A
Willie Nelson: The Border (Columbia) Pretty miraculous for 91, but immortality requires a different order of magnitude ("The Border," "Hank's Guitar," "Nobody Knows Me Like You") ***
Carly Pearce: Hummingbird (Big Machine) No matter who wrote 'em, and this Nashville up-and-comer has her name on all but one of these 14 acerbic tales of romantic shortfall, it's my working assumption that a gal whose love affairs fall apart all the time has been dumped or at least dismayed by a po'-faced parade of cads, dogs, and bores. So I was surprised to learn that when her 2019 marriage to newer up-and-comer Michael Ray dissolved, it was Ray who regaled the gossip sheets with plaints claiming his heart got more broke than hers did. Then I listened to his breakthrough Dive Bars and Broken Hearts EP and was struck by how dull not to say corny the songs were compared to his ex's, so maybe it was his ego hurting. If you want to start with what sounds to me like Pearce's sure shots here, try "Truck on Fire" ("So I found a little gas in a small red can/Last strike match flying out of my hand"), or "Woman to Woman" ("Woman to woman take it from me/From Texarkana to Tennessee/Ain't a roadside motel he ain't seen"). Then just play the whole thing. A
Madeleine Peyroux: Let's Walk (Just One/Thirty Tigers) At 50 and counting, onetime teenaged Parisian busker/chansonnier nails 10 adult four-minute pop songs she wrote herself, only one en français ("Find True Love," "Me and the Mosquito," "Take Care") ***
Slow Pulp: Yard (Anti-) Murmured but by no means tuneless romantic but by no means conventional girl-group style maundering that's long on guitar and even catchy sometimes ("Slugs," "Fishes") **
Wimps: City Lights (Youth Riot) From Seattle, to quote their terse, comprehensive bio: "an imperfect, live, energetic, human statement made by 3 imperfect, mostly alive, yet rapidly deteriorating bit players of various Seattle whos and whats of a time long ago and soon to be forgotten." But these 13 songs in 27 minutes are so energetic and human that by track three they prove that forgetting that time would be a major waste. Not punk in any purist or formalist way but with a speed, economy, and drive rock and roll seldom got near before punk gestated and took hold, they never claim or even aspire to a youth that for them has clearly passed. "Gravity is feeling very heavy lately," they report. "I'm a mom I worked all day," they continue. "Even on the grayest day, morning always comes," they promise. Which is how they got to make this record. A MINUS
Jamila Woods: Water Made Us (Jagjaguwar) Turning 34, the poet, Brown grad, and Chicago community organizer finds herself old enough to ponder where her love life will end up on a thoughtful, sprightly, charming 45-minute 17-tracker that mixes sung and spoken reminiscences of a bunch of relationships that end up on one that might well last even though she once thought she'd given up on it. Sung or spoken, the girlish timbre of her practiced soprano adds a charm that makes you root for her as her hopes rise and fall and rise again. But the most striking track adds up to 35 spoken seconds by a gravel-voiced guy who sounds 75 or so: "Jamila, I was a scoundrel/And I advised my wife not to marry me/I was a scoundrel/She deserved better/Some years later she rescued me out of the doldrums/A newer doldrum/And we've been together for 50 years." A MINUS
Charli XCX: Brat (Atlantic) No matter what the gossip sheets are selling, this is not where Scottish-Gujarati-Ugandan beatmaker-in-spite-of-herself XCX buries the figurative hatchet with Irish-Croatian-Kiwi singer-songwriter-if-you-insist Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor d/b/a Lorde. That hatchet was imaginary, just for show. Instead this is where Charlotte Emma Aitchison d/b/a Charli XCX and also as the one-woman embodiment of everything we mean by "novelty act" arrays a bleeping nosegay of the kind of sound-effect hooks she's been known to apologize for when she was in a bad mood and put her own name or "name" on an album constructed from dance or "dance" tracks whose charm is a beaty artificiality that surpasseth understanding. After all, understanding is a bore. B PLUS
And It Don't Stop, July 10, 2024
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