Consumer Guide: March, 2025

A centenarian's big band experiment, catchy pop-rock making a big romantic leap, varied songwriting suffused with darkness and detail, and desert guitar in search of justice.

Marshall Allen: New Dawn (Mexican Summer) Kentucky-born World War II Buffalo Soldier, 17th Division Special Service Band member, and postwar Paris Conservatory student Allen joined Sun Ra's band and collective on saxophone in 1958 while also occasionally backing pioneer Afropopularizer Babatunde Olatunje on a kora he built himself. A few years after Sun Ra died at 79 in 1993, Allen took over the band while residing in the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra in Philadelphia. And eventually, on May 25, 2024, he just flat-out turned 100, whereupon Cologne-based arts acivist Jan Lankisch thought it only proper for him to celebrate by making an album that was hardly his first. Cute, right? Who could cavil about that? Only this isn't just a birthday present. It's a lively, varied, congenial big band experiment of the first order, the kind of avant-entertainment Sun Ra aimed for in principle but too often failed to finish off in practice. In notes you'll have to read with a magnifying glass, Knoell Scott resorts more than once to the words "cosmic" and "celestial." But to me this music embodies how wonderful as opposed to wondrous unmitigated mortality can be. A

Antonio Andrade: Here We Go! (Lifeshakes) Congenially matter-of-fact old-timer broadens the parameters of the great American songbook ("Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby," "Forever Young," "Love Shack") ***

Towa Bird: American Hero (Interscope) Hong Kong-born, London-raised, L.A.-based Anglo-Filipino lesbian Bird, who lifted off as a TikTok teen and will turn 25 momentarily, says she loves the "classic rock" her father fed her. She isn't embarrassed to join the millions of others who consider the Beatles "the best band in the world," although I bet she was more directly inspired by Beatles-loving Blur, who she also counts as an influence, only who needs harmonies, really? Blessed with the precious gift of tune like those two bands as she is, not one of these dozen ditties is anything less than hummable, decent, and smart. Here in "the land of the free if you can afford it," she "doesn't want another lover if it means losing you as a friend" even though "you're so sweet you're giving me a toothache." Lovers, however, continue to abound, one at a time her apparent preference but don't bet on it because she's still figuring stuff out. A MINUS

Charly Bliss: Forever (Lucky Number) First I noticed that chirpy Eva Hendricks was sounding more chipper than ever on her band's third catchy pop-rock long-player. From "Make it a habit/Love so good it's tragic" and "Hard to believe that you need me" to "It's so easy to love you/I never believed I could trust something bigger than me" and "I forgot somehow I can't do it without you/I'm yours no doubt I was always waiting for you" is a big leap. So I did some due diligence and learned that in real life the "you" in these songs is a Tinder hookup who was so taken with her that five years ago he drove hundreds of miles in Australia to be sure he caught her show—and that soon she'd pretty much broken up said band by remaining down under. Glad they're all still at it a decade after their debut and we shall see. The finale is the true capper, riding one of those indelible lines it's hard to believe no one thought of first so maybe someone did: "I want you to be my last first kiss." (Turns out there a bunch of songs called "Last First Kiss," the most notable by five producers and three members of One Direction.) A

Helene Cronin: Maybe New Mexico (self-released) A well-put-together middle-aged woman who's won some local festival prizes, Cronin is so unassuming in her electric-folk way that you may not notice the lyrical acuteness of an album where the second song goes: "Oh the one who's more in love/Is at the mercy of/The one who doesn't feel it as strong/And that's how the power lines are drawn." Or how about "I want to leave this place better than I found it/Take a breaks my heart and wrap my arms around it/I wanna put a little good out into the world/Shine a little light in the dark/I want to leave my maker's mark"? You may think those sentiments are corny, but in part that's because they're true, and seldom have said truisms been put so acutely or originally. So if you're still unimpressed maybe that's because you're an asshole. A MINUS

FACS: Wish Defense (Trouble in Mind) Their all-caps name adapted from the U.K. Factory label's numbering system, their renowned producer the late Steve Albini of Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and his own Big Black fame, this spare, loud, foursquare Chicago trio makes New Order sound like the Beatles and hence also makes them sound relatively conventional. Of course, a lot of the music we love fits that description. But their sixth album's irresistibly propulsive yet verging-on-abstract purity could make anybody who ever loved New Order consider putting it on repeat, reading along with the lyrics, or both. So I did the latter—once. Not that they're offensive the way Albini liked to be—there are even hints of empathy and conscience. But the next time I play it, and I expect to, it will be to lift myself from a mild existential funk—anything bigger much less warmer would appear to be beyond them. And they're docked a notch for their back-cover snapshot of an apparently male human being's legs straining tippy-toe on a wooden chair toward a ceiling from which hangs, one can only assume, a noose. A MINUS

Funkrust Brass Band: Bones and Burning (self-released) 2019 EP adds four identifiable songs-as-songs to their tuba-bassed sound-as-sound ("Open House Fire," "Terminus") **

Funkrust Brass Band: Make a Little Spark (self-released) Having never seen one of the live shows this Brooklyn-based brass band's fanbase kvells about, I assume their hyperactive, densely populated, quite findable "Terminus" video is a suitable introduction to their all-white, sexually integrated, determinedly eccentric Balkan-New Orleans hybrid with a fictional post-apocalypse backstory. Their latest and richest recording, while well-executed and then some, is goofier and more playful than "Terminus," although half a dozen viewings in I can't claim to have caught myself humming it on the way to the grocery store. Still, this album establishes them as a worthy, ambitious, and imaginative project. I'd go see them play in a minute if it wasn't too far away on the subway. A MINUS

GloRilla: Glorious (CMG/Interscope) From "These niggas tryin' to get me pregnant/I need to tie my tubes" to "I ain't goin' for all that rough me up and grab me by the neck," this sex object signifies as a subject. She sees herself as a conscious combatant in the war of the genders who's in it for both pleasure and autonomy and is committed enough to her own goodness to enlist the Reverend Kirk Franklin in her life quest and hint that "Stop playing with that girl" is more likely out of concern for said female than desire for the male she sees is on the make. Limited though the world she inhabits may seem, she gets quite a few distinct songs out of it. A MINUS

Patterson Hood: Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams (ATO) I found the head Drive By Trucker's quasi-autobiographical songwriting here so varied and indeed interesting that I dipped back two decades to reaccess his 2004 solo debut Killers and Stars, which I assayed in 120 B plus/A minus words for Blender but never gave it its own review in the Consumer Guide. Not bad, right, only the new one's even better. From Hurricane Helene wrecking North Carolina in the opener to the plane-crash funeral at the close, quite a few of these retrospectives tend dark. But the truly serious part is how much detail suffuses Hood's tales of eros gone wrong and pool-house suicide and Oldsmobiles that get ten miles a gallon and classy Christmas parties over an eight-year-old's head. Extra thanks to Wednesday for chipping in when appropriate. A

Mdou Moctar: Funeral for Justice (Matador) A protest record by Moctar's reckoning—against slavery, against uraniuim mines, against all the exploitations heaped on nations like his native Niger, with Libya and Nigeria north and south and arid strongholds Mali and Algeria close by to the west. I have no doubt the lyrics express and expand on his talking points. But for we who in this context needn't understand a word he's shouting, this is an exceptionally rich display of the kind of desert guitar the likes of Bombino and Imarhan deliver—only thicker, louder, angrier, and more rocking. A MINUS

Mdou Moctar: Tears of Injustice (Matador) With his focus shifted from instrumental to vocal on this acoustic album, mere Anglophones are left to get a grip on not what he's protesting, but why, preferably in a hundred words or less ("Takoba," "Imajighen") **

Eric Schmitt: Wait for the Night (self-released) The satisfactions and tribulations of an alt-rock lifer ("Tattoos, Diapers, and Pills," "Wait for the Night") *

Wavy Bagels With Driveby: A Carfull (Break All Records) Witty to goofy Long Guyland-meets-Joisey post-rap duo fool around and fall all over themselves ("Pancakes!," "Path") *

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