Some listening suggestions to help pass time in quarantine:
FIONA APPLE: “FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS” – The opener is innocuous enough, a song of unrequited love that could easily be an outtake from her last album of (Has it really been?) eight years ago. But then she holds the last note a bit too long before her voices breaks down into Yoko Ono-like wordless vocalese and the instrumental backing disintegrates. Then, a piano riff that featured in this song introduces the next, but now played with more force and propulsion, pushed along by a backing band that careens and clatters along on the verge of chaos. It’s as if she is saying “OK, that was me then, but this is me now.” A close parallel to this record, in spirit if not in sound, is Paul Simon’s Graceland. In both cases, an artist in their forties who had previously created music from the melody down or the harmony out changes tactics and starts working from the rhythm up, and it would not surprise me if this joins Graceland as an enduring classic and musical avatar of its era. Recorded at her home with an apparently more collaborative process than is usual for her, the music has a spontaneous, anything-goes quality. At times we hear her dog barking in the background, at another point she flubs a vocal line, laughs “Fuck it”, and just keeps going. Which is not to say there is anything haphazard or careless here. Meanwhile, being a Fiona Apple fan always means being a bit worried about Fiona Apple, but this time round she seems to have determined that an important part of dealing with the sexual trauma that forms the subtext of much of her work is tending to her relationships with the women in her life. That includes a middle school rival who got through to her with an offhand complement as well as the exes of her exes. I know everyone else is also telling you that you need to hear this record but, really, you do.
DUA LIPA: “FUTURE NOSTALGIA”– The line between dance and pop has been pretty much obliterated by now. That war is over, and Madonna won. So if you’re one of the last holdouts and have finally decided to acquiesce, you will find yourself confronted by a bewildering number of expertly-crafted records featuring fetching young women with good voices. So why start with this one? A couple big reasons: The craftsmanship is more than a notch above the mean, every track (save the closer with the big message) taut and propulsive at the bottom, and every track (including that big message closer) featuring melodic, sonic and lyrical hooks ready to explode up the charts. As for the voice, it’s a husky contralto with the depth and body to emerge unharmed thru the studio compression that remains de rigeur. Little things matter, too. Like the jazz harmonies that unexpectedly pop up late in the title track, and the way the first verse sent me scrambling to Google to look up architect John Lautner.
GRIMES: “MISS ANTHROPOCENE” – Separating a popular musician’s public persona from her art is not only futile and pointless. It can even be counterproductive. That would be the case here if you tried to listen while pretending not to know that the artist had just given birth to the child of a tech billionaire whose solution to climate apocalypse is the creation of an AI-controlled dystopia. Although maybe the punning title is already enough to give away Claire Boucher’s vision of a world in which drugs, violence, and bad sex assume value as reminders of the tenuousness of our very humanity. Of course, it’s entirely likely that I am taking her far more seriously than she does herself. One of the bonus tracks, ostensibly by a neofascist J-Pop girl group that “appreciate(s)”power (Could she have possibly chosen a verb more ambiguous?) suggests that is at least a distinct possibility. Anyway, this is some of her best music, with the pop moves that often sounded like genre exercises on her last LP now fully subsumed into her more avant-garde sensibilities.
CINDY LEE: “WHAT’S TONIGHT TO ETERNITY” – Cindy Lee is the alter-ego of one Patrick Flegel, formerly a member of the Calgary psych-noise band Women. Here, the noise quotient is dialed up even further, but leavened by shards of conventionally pretty pop. It’s a bit like listening to a Burt Bacharach record in a steel mill. Good stuff.
PORRIDGE RADIO: “EVERY BAD” – Nothing really new here: Swirling delay-laden guitars, sudden dynamic shifts, and mopey, self-loathing lyrics have been mainstays of rock bands with artistic ambition for some time now. But Porridge Radio’s leader and chief song-writer Dana Margolin does manage to find something compelling and fresh in the format. Her habit of repeating lyrical phrases like a mantra can get wearing at times, even if that’s the point. But this is a band to keep an eye on.
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS: “THE UNRAVELLING” – Songs like “Thoughts and Prayers”, “Babies in Cages”, and “21st Century America” confirm this by-now -venerable band’s progressive bona fides without necessarily deepening them. And, in any event, these guys are not just southern rockers, but southern alt-rockers, so this is only a matter of speaking to their natural constituency. For the type of insights that make this band worth hearing even when, as here, their music is more workmanlike than inspired, go to the first three tracks, in all of which the protagonists take to the road for a future that, while uncertain, can’t be worse than what they’re leaving behind. Red or blue seems to matter little here, and it seems unlikely these people expect answers or solutions from any politician. Which helps explain why the one thing on which both ends of America’s political divide seem to agree is the need to burn the whole shit house down.
FROM THE VAULTS:
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS: “SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA” (2001) – These members of the punk generation only fully hit their stride when they embraced their southern rock roots on this two-disc concept album recounting the saga of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The narrative also touches on George Wallace, Bear Bryant and Neil Young (the last mentioned playing a rather larger role as a musical influence), and there’s even an unbilled cameo by the band leader’s dad. Wallace’s story is followed literally to the gates of Hades, while Skynyrd’s ends just moments sooner. But the most haunting song might be “Road Cases”, where the band envisions its own future among those who didn’t burn out, but faded away.