Consumer Guide: January, 2025

A post-riot-grrrl trio that hasn't given up on love; grooves that break into tunes, sound effects, or both; alt-rappers with sonic treats; and not-one-but-three releases from our heroes in Cincinnati.

Bright Eyes: Five Dice All Threes (Dead Oceans) Now in his fourth decade on the road, the racks, and the alt-rock grind, Conor Oberst has always come across pretty much the way you'd hope from an ex-Catholic indistinguishable from a lapsed born-againer who's held onto the Bible's "the greatest of these is charity" byword by gravitating to good causes. There's been a reliable freshness about him even when the songs faltered slightly. Not here. True, the songs don't falter all that much. But because the world comes to an end, there's not much solace in them. B PLUS

Kim Deal: Nobody Loves You More (4AD) At 63, beloved Breeder-Pixie announces her autonomy so quietly it's like she has nothing to prove, which basically she doesn't (and which isn't necessarily a good thing) ("Nobody Loves You More," "A Good Time Pushed") **

Fake Fruit: Mucho Mistrust (Carpark) Led by v/g/b/k provider Ham D'Amato, yet another Berklee refugee who's gone on to louder things, this catchy-and-a-half Oakland post-riot-grrrl trio-plus hasn't given up on the heartening suspicion that love is worth the trouble even when "you're a beacon of joy or of strife for me." Usually they're noisy, occasionally they're kind of sweet, sometimes they're both, and almost invariably D'Amato's vocals split the difference between the musical and the conversational. Plus there's "Gotta Meet You," where Jeanne Oss's saxophone provides an entertaining overlay of sonic impropriety at just the moment when you're hankering for more noise. A MINUS

Inert: 2Inert (self-released) Wussy bass man chronicles the Midwest all too ordinaire ("Gen X Lament," "Slide Show") **

Kendrick Lamar: GNX (pgLang/Interscope) Blessed for decades now with near total disinterest in Drake—aesthetic disinterest especially, although I do sometimes wonder how his Canadianness inflects his Blackness and always wondered why hopeful females once found him a model of politesse when he was at least as doggish as most males in his line of work—I studiously ignored Lamar's feud or whatever I'm supposed to call it with the Toronto interloper. Instead I just took this album for what I thought it was—on its impressive surface, a musically virtuosic tour de force. Only then it was time to bear down on the rhymes, where it is my disillusioned duty to report I found predictably braggadocious autobio that was barely virtuosic at all. A MINUS

Willie Nelson: Last Leaf on the Tree (Legacy) On his 141st album, collaborations included but compilations not, the singing is faint enough that the 91-year-old seems finally to be passing his age on the outside ("Do You Realize??," "Broken Arrow") **

Phelimuncasi & Metal Preyers: Izigqinamba (Nyege Nyege Tapes) Phelimuncasi are the most prestigious and also it would seem avant practitioners of the Durban-centered South African electronic dance genre gqom. Gqom is oft said to eschew "four-on-the-floor," which among other things means many oldtimers feel it doesn't have much of what they would call a beat. The London-Chicago Metal Preyers are artier and more avant. Put the two together and they create pulsating, atmospheric music suffused with sounds, grooves, and occasionally tunelets sung, chanted, or just voiced in tongues unknown to aural tourists like me and you. Always this changeable music generates at the very least an unprecedented groove and/or gestalt that has a way of breaking into tunes, sound effects, or both. Fascinating and atmospheric, this nine-track album lasts barely half an hour. But it feels not just daring but substantial. A

Previous Industries: Service Merchandise (Merge) Initially, L.A.-based Chicago alt-rapper Open Mike Eagle and his homies Video Dave and Still Rift knocked me out with their beats or maybe just sound, not the sense of ominously encroaching maturity-cum-mortality themes they and their fortysomething-and-counting fanbase have a right to even if they seem little old to the likes of me. (As an 82-year-old let me school you, younguns: you get used to it, although senility does eventually portend.) Alt-rap hopefuls taken up by a Research Triangle alt-rock label now more than three decades old, they sound like some of those beats originate in an actual drum kit, which illusion or not is a sonic treat—lots of banging, minimal squooshing and squealing. And while I wouldn't claim there are hooks galore here, all 11 tracks are songful enough to buoy lyrics that seldom falter. "My name is Open Michael/And it's pronounced like it was fired from an broken rifle." "No retractions, no living in fractions." "I threw my caution to the wind and it came right back." "I say see you next time/I hope there's a next time." "Caught up in the riptide/Second-hand apartheid." "Indie rappers deserve government subsidies/Or else we'll make other discoveries." A

Allen Ravenstine: Nautilus/Rue de Poisson Noir (Waveshaper '21) Pere Ubu synthmaster turned commercial pilot honors the delicate sonics of "classical music" while evoking first a calm sea and then a calm Paree via aural atmospherics rather than digital acrobatics on a by now very pricey but also very streamable two-part album ("Meadowlark," "Tuxedo Moonlight," "Java Head") ***

Rosali: Bite Down (Merge) Coming up in a musical family and whatever comprises the Philadelphia freak-folk scene, Rosali Middleton found the makings of a band in Nebraska and a home near the North Carolina alt-rock label she now shares with the Chicago-to-L.A. indie rappers cited above. What grabs me about her fourth album is its get-up-and-go from the catchy riff that gooses the one called "My Kind" to the declarative intro of the next-to-last "Change Is in the Form." But I note with respect that the questioning finale "May It Be on Offer" is nevertheless just that: final. A MINUS

Lucinda Williams: Sings the Beatles From Abbey Road (Highway 20/Thirty Tigers) Of course she doesn't think she owns them now, but give her credit for not ruining them—it's been done ("Yer Blues," "I've Got a Feeling," "I'm So Tired") ***

Wussy: Cincinnati Ohio (Shake It) The first new album in six years by this legendary band from the city it's named for muffle their usual snap and forward motion for the inescapable reason that they're still haunted by the sudden 2020 death of steel guitarist John Erhardt—not because he was as crucial to their gestalt as Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker, which he wasn't, but because they both still miss him so. "I nearly called you for a ride/I hear you still," Walker reports in the opener. "Get that gun out of your mouth," Cleaver advises. Because, really, "If you want to murder something/There's at least a hundred other things/Take some comfort knowing/It won't be long until you're winged." Seldom am I drawn to albums that strive to be sad. This one not only earns the right, but makes something earned, sharp-witted, and heartening of the compulsion. A

Wussy: The Great Divide (Shake It) Released this past November 15, the same day as their first new album in six years, this more than creditable vinyl EP whose lead and title song is also on the album in a different mix documents the extent to which America's greatest alt-rock band is enmeshed in the nickel-and-dime capitalism of struggling artistes nationwide just like all such bands. Is there a gimmick? You could say so, but I'd never call it that because the extra selling point is that two of its three tracks were recorded with their steel guitarist, the late, above-mentioned John Erhardt, who'll haunt their first new album in six years forever. B PLUS

Wussy Duo: Cellar Door EP (Shake It) With Lisa Walker credited with both "synths" and "beats" (not to mention "production") as well as her usual guitar and vocals, I guess these three tracks/songs beef up her resume even though her old partner Chuck not only wrote the lyrics to both "The Man Who Walked Around the World" and "Apologize" but sings them with uncommon sweetness (and notes unobtrusively that the first "seems a little fast"). Believe me, you guys. We'll take 'em however you divvy 'em up and crave more. A MINUS

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