ALTER.NATION #92
Kate NV, Spirit Fingers, Don Bryant, Bob Dylan, Rose City Band, Phoebe Bridgers, Braids, Gum Country, Stuart Duncan / Yo-Yo Ma / Edgar Meyer / Chris Thile, Black Devil Disco Club, Roy Ayers / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Adrian Younge, Jehnny Beth
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ALTER.NATION #92 on DEEZER
Kate NV - Room for the Moon / Not Not Not
The Russian experimental pop performer Kate NV has her feet in two worlds. In one, the artist born Ekaterina Shilonosova sings and plays guitar in the fiery post-punk band ΓШ (Glintshake). In the other, she works with the Moscow Scratch Orchestra, an ensemble inspired by the improvisational pieces of the English composer Cornelius Cardew. In her work as Kate NV, she commits fully to the unpredictability and openness that unites them both... But even while Room for the Moon bursts with exuberance, NV has explained that the record was finished during “the loneliest period” of her life. With that in mind, it’s easy to see these 10 songs as a sanctuary NV willed into being, a fantasy world where that solitude could be replaced with a cornucopia of melodies. The air of escapism is palpable in the album’s wriggling synth flourishes and chirping flutes like hummingbirds...
Spirit Fingers - Peace / Kalashnikov
When Spirit Fingers issued its self-titled 2015 debut, they were lauded for their collision of genres and rhythms under a jazz umbrella of their own design. Bandleader/pianist Greg Spero's musical career includes membership in the Buddy Rich Big Band, and work with Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, and Halsey. The others include uber-bassist Hadrien Feraud (who has played with John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, and dozens more), drummer Mike "Blaque Dynamite" Mitchell (a longtime member of Stanley Clarke's band), and guitarist Dario Chiazzolino (an award-winning sideman and bandleader whose acclaimed work with Dave Liebman, Billy Cobham, and his own Principles Sound quartet help to frame their musical fireworks). As ear opening as Spirit Fingers' debut was, it merely laid the foundation for the adventure on Peace, which is much more focused and ambitious. While the group love to juxtapose genre attributes from organic and electric jazz, hip-hop, classical minimalism, breakbeat culture, and EDM, they do so here largely under an identifiable jazz fusion umbrella... The proceeding "Kalashnikov" commences as particularly aggressive jazz fusion before Feraud and Spero shift toward post-bop modalism with fine solos. Initially, Chiazzolino assists with subtle yet glorious chord shapes before delivering a breathtaking solo that simultaneously references Allan Holdsworth and Al Di Meola. Spero and Feraud embrace salsa with burning piano montunos and a dancing bassline in closing...
Don Bryant - You Make Me Feel / Your Love Is Too Late
The best Southern soul album of 2020 would also have been the best southern soul album of 1970... After William Bell and Lee Fields, the field for genuine 70s singers still sweating out gutsy, chitlin-circuit inspired testifying on a national stage gets precariously thin. That makes this follow-up even more inspirational... As soon as you push play and hear the horns rocking a tough, grinding riff on “Your Love is To Blame,” with call and response backing singers you’ll think you’ve found some lost Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett B-side. Bryant sings like he’s been holding back for the past 50 years, which isn’t that far from the truth. But all the great songs here wouldn’t mean much without a producer and arranger to make them come alive while staying true to Bryant’s organic roots and vision.
Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways / False Prophet
Bob Dylan released the dark, unruly Time Out of Mind in 1997 following two albums of folk and blues covers. It was his first original material in a decade and summed up his 20th century. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first new material since 2012's Tempest and arrives during a global pandemic and the righteous struggle for racial and economic justice. These ten songs revel in forms that have been Dylan's métier since the '60s: blues, country, folk, rockabilly, gospel, etc... "False Prophet" is a jeremiad disguised as blues house rocker. The protagonist testifies; he's a witness who confronts evil in history and real time... Rough and Rowdy Ways is akin to transformational albums such as Love and Theft, and Slow Train Coming. It's a portrait of the artist in winter who remains vital and enigmatic. At nearly 80, Dylan's pen and guitar case still hold plenty of magic.
Rose City Band - Summerlong / Reno Shuffle
Taking cues from privately pressed loner folk and independent psych-rock albums, Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo member Ripley Johnson anonymously ushered his Rose City Band project into the world with a limited-edition LP that included almost no technical information. The band was mostly just Johnson, joined by a few friends to flesh out recordings of his stripped-down psychedelic country songs. The vocals were often buried in effects and the songs stretched out from simple chord progressions into lengthy guitar explorations reminiscent of the Grateful Dead's cosmic traveling. Shortly after the album's release, Johnson went public about the project. Second album Summerlong peels back the haze of the first album for a far more country-accented set of songs. This is apparent from both the relative clarity of the vocals and the expanded instrumentation, which now includes go-to country-rock embellishments like mandolin and pedal steel. The songwriting still lies somewhere midway between psychedelia and indie country, but it leans more towards straightforward song structures and arrangements...
Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher / Garden Song
Indie singer/songwriter Phoebe Bridgers's popularity exploded after the release of her 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps. Her sad, sardonic songs were undercut by her dry wit, and her straightforward delivery of emotionally naked material placed her in a lineage of songwriting excellence that included Elliott Smith, Neko Case, and Cat Power... "Garden Song" is a gentle blur of acoustic guitars, slow-moving electronics, and lyrics rich with imagery of houses on fire, flatbed trucks covered in roses, and haunted gardens. Baritone harmonies from Jeroen Vrijhoef and the gurgling textures beneath the song add to the strange atmosphere...
Braids - Shadow Offering / Upheaval II
Braids were just entering their twenties when they released their acclaimed 2011 debut, Native Speaker, an album that seemed to glow with the discovery and experimentation of that age. They exit that time in their lives with Shadow Offering, a set of Saturn return songs that are just as expressive in how they reflect having some aspects of life figured out, while others feel infinitely more complicated... on the weighty distortion of "Upheaval ii," which echoes the rawness of Standell-Preston's vocals... A sadder, wiser, and stronger album, Shadow Offering reflects big changes in Braids' world, but proves they're still at their finest when they dig into -- and sit with -- complex emotions.
Gum Country - Somewhere / It Lives, It Breeds, It Feeds
While making catchy indie pop tunes with the Courtneys, the group's guitarist Courtney Garvin was also teaming with multi-instrumentalist Connor Mayer to write and record music that's a punchy mixture of C86-style indie pop, prime-era shoegaze, and good old-fashioned indie rock. They started off working at home on a four-track recorder, but for their first album moved to a real studio and called in Joo-Joo Ashworth of Froth to help them get the sounds they wanted. Actually, Somewhere is packed with the kind of sounds that will knock out anyone with even a vague interest in any of the aforementioned styles. The duo capture the hooky melodies and sugar-sweet vocals of classic indie pop and the layered dreaminess and hypnotic rhythms of shoegaze, then add thick slabs of guitar and the shrugging wistfulness of the best indie rock...
One of the best-known cellists of his generation and of the recording era overall, Yo-Yo Ma is recognized not only for his technical virtuosity but for his engaging interpretative ability, whether the tone is delicate, plaintive, playful, or impassioned.
The masterful skills of Edgar Meyer -- whether as bassist or composer; in bluegrass, classical, or a mix of genres -- earned him a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2002, but that is not the only accomplishment of this remarkable musician.
A virtuoso mandolin player, singer, composer, bandleader, and radio personality, Chris Thile is one of the leading lights of progressive bluegrass.
Stuart Duncan / Yo-Yo Ma / Edgar Meyer / Chris Thile - Not Our First Goat Rodeo / Your Coffee is a Disaster
With 2011's Goat Rodeo Sessions, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Chris Thile, bassist Edgar Meyer, and fiddler Stuart Duncan introduced their ambitiously playful, genre-bending mix of classical, folk, bluegrass, and global music textures. It was a hit, earning them critical acclaim and a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. With 2020's Not Our First Goat Rodeo, the quartet reunites for another stylistically far-reaching outing that matches the heights of their first. On their own, each of the group members have distinguished themselves as musical mavericks, known for their ability to straddle multiple genres with ease. Together, they bring all of their varied experiences to bear, crafting original songs that showcase their technical virtuosity and ear for melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic invention. The opening "Your Coffee Is a Disaster" is a kinetic piece built around a swooning, middle eastern-tinged riff doubled by Ma and Duncan, as Thile and Meyer offer a roiling underpinning of articulated arpeggios that evoke the circular work of Steve Reich...
Black Devil Disco Club - Lucifer Is a Flower / Sweet Sins
...Well into his seventies, Fevre bows out of the music industry with one of his most playful efforts, yet there's still more than a touch of the spookiness that made the original Disco Club so compelling. Opener "Sweet Sins" is a simmering mid-tempo lament featuring Fevre's haunted croon during the verses, then one of his signature "doot-doot-dee-doot" choruses, and a bit of bugged-out analog synth noise. While not quite as discotheque-ready as the early Black Devil material, this track is as close as Lucifer gets to its ominous hall-of-mirrors vibe...
As a member of A Tribe Called Quest, Ali Shaheed Muhammad played a pivotal role in the evolution of rap music throughout the 1990s, factoring in the development of the jazz-rooted, sample-based production approach that epitomized Native Tongues, the beloved collective of unorthodox groups that also included the Jungle Brothers and De La Soul.
All-around talent with an uncanny ability to transform his obsession with late-'60s and early-'70s music into unique, impeccably made projects. Adrian Younge was known foremost as an entertainment law professor when he provided the score for the blaxploitation homage Black Dynamite (2009)
Roy Ayers / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Adrian Younge - Jazz Is Dead 002: Roy Ayers / Solace
DJ-producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest) and R&B and hip-hop composer-producer Adrian Younge have launched a new label, Jazz Is Dead, and its first major release – a sampler was released in April – is a new album from legendary vibraphonist Roy Ayers, his first studio recording for 18 years.
The eight-track album, Roy Ayers: Jazz Is Dead 2 (JID 002) is released on 19 June and is available on vinyl, CD and as a download or stream; written and recorded collaboratively by Younge, Shaheed Muhammad and Ayers between 2018 and 2020, and recorded at Younge’s Linear Labs studio in Los Angeles, it’s claimed that the record ‘sounds both like an unearthed and unreleased album from Ayers’ classic period in the 1970s as well as something new and unexpected.
Joining Ayers, Younge and Shaheed Muhammad on the album are drummer Greg Paul, vocalists Loren Oden, Joy Gilliam, Saudia Yasmein, Elgin Clark and Anitra Castleberry, as well as trombonist Phil Ranelin and clarinettist/saxophonist Wendell Harrison of the renowned spiritual jazz label Tribe Records.
TO LOVE IS TO LIVE, Beth’s new solo album—written and produced with Savages producer (and Beth’s longtime partner) Johnny Hostile—is not a Savages record by another name. Beth sidelines the grimy, distorted guitar and reaches for a more diverse palette, including strobe-like synths, downy woodwinds, and inscrutable snippets of found sound. But there are constants: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE is rife with the same livewire intensity, the same embrace of tensions and apparent contradictions. Lyrically and musically, it vacillates between the corporeal and the ethereal, prudence and excess, softness and severity. .. Beth’s lyrics are often more evocative than they are precisely descriptive or narrative. And for all her fixation on virtue and sin, she’s not out to moralize, exactly, but rather to capture all the messiness, contradiction, and even ugliness of life. This is true even of album closer “Human,” on which she refutes her humanity altogether and surrenders her body to the cloud: “I used to be a human being/Now I live in the web.” Scientists say that whole brain emulation—actually uploading our minds—is still a distant prospect, for reasons both technological and ethical. Until then, we’re left with more analog methods of cataloging our lives and shoring up our legacies. As any artist knows, this is an imperfect, imprecise project—but that’s the beauty of it...
Kate NV, Spirit Fingers, Don Bryant, Bob Dylan, Rose City Band, Phoebe Bridgers, Braids, Gum Country, Stuart Duncan / Yo-Yo Ma / Edgar Meyer / Chris Thile, Black Devil Disco Club, Roy Ayers / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Adrian Younge, Jehnny Beth
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