LET SOMETHING HEAVY GO:
The August, 2022 Music Roundup
If you haven’t read one of these from me before, here’s a brief user’s guide: these are tracks that are (often, not always) new to me, but not necessarily new. They’re a snapshot of my favorite listening during the past three months. A fan’s notes. Stuff to share.
Hope at least something here sends you off to hunt and listen and purchase, because all these artists deserve your ears.
(And if your hunt is successful, and you want to thank your guide, just press this little button, and receive my very sincere thanks):
LET SOMETHING HEAVY GO: The August 2022 Quarterly Music Round-Up
KARIMA WALKER—Hands in Our Names
I got to see this Tucson sound designer/singer-songwriter on a drizzly spring night a couple months ago at The Business in Anacortes, WA, in a crowd of maybe twenty other people. Her equipment consisted of a guitar suspended from her shoulders though only occasionally strummed, her voice, and an old desktop cassette player wired into a deck full of analog wave manipulators and noise gates. Some of the magic, I suppose, was the night itself—gentle rain, quiet street, just being out there instead of nowhere, which still feels tenuous, no matter what you’re pretending—but most of it was her. Meaning, in this case, the stillness she wields, and the way she listens.
For each new piece—song, sound thing—she would start by picking an uncased cassette out of a stack and snapping it into the deck, setting a hum or hiss or drone or melody fragment unfurling. Then she’d stand quiet and listen. Adjust the sound. Listen. Catch a snippet and loop it and layer it. Listen. Not all of those sounds were quiet or easy. Sometimes, she seemed so focused, I kept expecting reading glasses to sprout on her face. Eventually, sometimes, she’d start to strum. Sing. After a while, It was hard to tell in what order those things happened. It was like watching a weaver at a loom, or peering through a lab window at a paleontologist bent over and brushing at a bit of stone that may or may not contain traces of a thing that lived.
Walker doesn’t seem so much to write songs as uncover fragments, and I was a little concerned that her magic would not translate to recordings. It does, though. This track is just over two minutes long, but keeps unfolding through whole days if you let it. The melody is a ghost, but you can hum it (and, in fact, can’t not. At least, I can’t). Ideas surface in bits of phrase. “My eyes in turning/to my brother...” “Gather round the flames...” “Hidden in the...” As though she’s excavating something other than outrage that really was in us once.
Might be, still.
Like Karima Walker, this soulful UK avant-popster trades in clouds of sound as much as melody, but Tirzah’s move more, and the tunes that do emerge feel plucked from passing car radios rather than the ground. You can (and will) sway to them. Again, the lyrics signify through suggestion, worry at rather than make statements about fragmentation, or yearning for connection. Phrases like “One by one/two by two.../sing different tunes/tethering like hive minds do” could be condemnatory. But the way Tirzah delivers them—quietly but relentlessly, without wispiness or affectation--they come off as hopeful instead. “Hive” as in community of creatures who fly off on their own, bring back, make things together or for each other instead of swarm.
ROSALIA (Feat. Tokischa)—La Combi Versace
Nothing hazy or remote about this wildly gifted Spanish artist’s latest getting-out-and-about song. Inflected rhythmically and in those exhilarating vocal trills with echoes of flamenco, hip hop, and contemporary Latin dance tunes, driven by a stuttering, twitch-and-catch series of beats, “La Combi” feels of the moment precisely because of its stops and starts. Once upon a time, phrases (in translation) like “Ready for the splurge” and “Together at night” might have signified disposable party time. Right now, they’re positively aspirational.
ACTRESS—Leaves Against the Sky
London DJ Darren Cunningham’s artful, often elusive electronica always seems to be peering at me from around corners, beckoning toward spaces it has already vacated when I reach them. It can be abstract, noisy, but it’s rarely unapproachable (even if it won’t let you reach it). Here, it accomplishes for staring up into trees what “La Combi Versace” does for going clubbing. Meaning, renders it fascinating all over again by underscoring the uneasiness—the impossibility, even, right this second—of going still.
The vein of razor-edged American folk this Tennessee-via-Iowa lifer mines is the righteous, old-school, Woody Guthrie kind, and with John Prine gone, he may be the best on Earth at it now. He can and will call bullshit (yours as well as theirs). He will paint a vivid portrait of people you want to condemn, and then not let you (see his terrifying “Running on the Razor”). He will remind you in ways you thought you didn’t need about what war and violence and neglect actually cost (check out “Names”, a masterpiece). He will sing at you sometimes, in a buzzing-wasp rasp, or wrap you in a deceptively pretty melody until he’s got you good and immobilized before swooping in. And then, sometimes, he’ll turn around and remind you why days—everyone’s, including yours—matter. He’ll even help you cling to them. Because sometimes, the best and most meaningful fuck you to all the fucking fuckers is loving the world anyway. Or at least loving being in it. “Laugh a little harder/at every near miss/Live your life for...”
I know. But he’s right.
Like this.
JENS LENKMAN—Not Because it’s Easy, But Because It’s Hard
Or this:
Both these tracks come from an album called “Correspondence”, a collection of mid-pandemic letters in the form of a song exchange from my two favorite Swedish artists who aren’t in Club 8. Norlin tends to shine a light down the chasms that open up between people—give a listen to “Anna”, her kiss-off to a former lover in the form of a detailed biography of the daughter they didn’t have, or “I Don’t Sleep Well”, about exactly that, or “Last Night Bus”, one of the best tracks ever written about how people descend into hate, all recorded under her Hello Saferide guise—whereas Lenkman skews lighter, at his best achieving a fizzy romanticism free of cliché and studded with memorable, singable bits.
Interestingly, during the lockdown year, they seem to have switched personas, or at least folded into one another’s. “Mentor” still comes threaded with melancholy, but Norlin sounds like she’s living for days like these anyway. The drum machine and keyboard chords could have been played on a Casio, but that lilting tune is anything but throwaway. The lyrics remain nuanced, layered with longing, but the aspiration is unmistakable and also defiant. Opening verse: “Sing a song that wasn’t written/play a chord you never tried/Call someone who got you smitten/fuck the rain and go outside”. The hook: “Let something heavy go.”
On paper, “Not Because It’s Easy” includes the usual Lenkman quirk. There are clones involved, which (who?) he imagines helping with his “to-do list/longer than the credits of movies”. But by the end the clones have rebelled, “filmed me while they kicked my ass”, and left him strumming in his apartment where he started. There’s a hibernation riff that serves as a frame, and right at the start, Lenkman—addressing Norlin—apologizes for waking her, “my fellow bear”. The longing in that is more palpable than in typical Lenkman tracks. Or maybe just heavier.
So. One laughing and cloning his way through a weight he can’t kick. The other kicking herself out the door into the rain. Two different ways of digging tunnels with song-shaped spoons out of the giant prison we all keep not just sharing but building.
There are all kinds of descriptors I have attached in my head to the riveting Tuareg music pouring out of northern and western Africa since Tinariwen and Mdou Moctar rocketed to international acclaim during the last decade or so. None of those has been “hushed” or “welcoming”, though. It’d still be a stretch—flat-out wrong, I think—to describe this gorgeous, mournful swayer as hopeful. At its root is still separation from land and kin, and as always, there are enemies everywhere. But in its lyrics about how “my heart remains, seeking its desire” (in translation), and the night-sky beauty of that lead acoustic guitar figure, and the massed, harmonious backing vocals, and that beat that lifts you gently on its back, this track doesn’t just encapsulate longing for a place to be; it creates one.
THE GARBAGE & THE FLOWERS—Moonlight in Paris
Seems only right that the sessions from which this song comes should surface thirty years after this elusive New Zealand bunch recorded them. As with Karima Walker’s stuff, this music seems as much unearthed as written, but Garbage & the Flowers tracks feel even fainter (even when they’re loud), dusty and shattered into fragments and suggestive of whole worlds we’ll only know in glimpses. Or shards. This spectral little beauty pulls the same trick the Velvet Underground did on “After Hours”, where Maureen Tucker’s childlike voice issues an invitation to a party that could be for a ten year-old’s birthday or the end of the world (“If you close the door/the night could last forever...”). Here, a similarly unaffected Helen Johnstone rides the softest zephyr of a melody and a magic-carpet acoustic guitar strum down your ears into a shadowy spot in your brain. “Have you seen the moonlight in Paris,” she asks, then promises, “I will come to you & I will set you free.” There’s less ominous undercurrent in this invitation than in Mo Tucker’s. Wherever she wants to take us is anything but dreadful. But it does sound far.
COMET GAIN—We’re All Fucking Morons
On the other hand, maybe we don’t have to go anywhere to realize we really do still have things in common.
Or at least one thing. Might as well shout it loud.
Here’s looking at us, kid.
ME AND THE BEES—After All Your Cancers
I missed this Spanish buzzsaw of a band in their heyday, but what they left sure sounds good, now. They fill at least a bit of the gaping hole that Dig Me Out-era Sleater-Kinney dug and then left, where actual melodies you can shout meet snarling lyrics that can comfort. My favorite chorus on their 2010 Fuerza Bean album goes “Onlookers, strangers/lovers, teenagers/I hate you/I hate you/I hate you/aaahhh”, sung like a mantra for bouncing on a trampoline. This song’s (slightly) gentler, a chaser after a shot of “We’re All Fucking Morons”. Cap-gun drums, quivery lead guitar raining out of hard-strummed chords like ash from fireworks, and sweet voices just enough out of true, chanting “You talk about love/I talk about comics and songs/I know the difference/All can be good if you want.” A prescription for soldiering on. Loudly.
THE FELICE BROTHERS—To-Do List
No idea whether it’s the times or that irresistible, shambolic bashing of the drums or the amiable, ambling tune, but—like Comet Gain— these New York long-timers have never sounded sweeter. Or sharper. I’ve always enjoyed their lyrics, even when they read like Dylan refrigerator magnet poetry, but buried here are more mantras for making it through: “Buy a spinach colored dinner jacket”; “Cancel Better Homes & Gardens”; “Purchase balloons for the ballroom”; “Find out what’s killing the bees”; “...test the limits of love”; “Acquire more guilty pleasures”; “Laugh until I cry”.
Speaking of long-timers...
Jon Moen’s been a Pacific Northwest fixture for decades, playing with everyone from Elliott Smith to the Decemberists while fronting the Maroons, Perhapst, and Eyelids. Way back in his Dharma Bums days in the early ‘90s, he sang “Stayed Up Late”, a boho, twenty-something anthem-that-should-have been, and one of my favorite songs from then (“I stayed up late/trying to be an artist which was/such a waste/it’s kinda hard to harness/all the light in the world”). He’s gone on trying ever since. Every track is worth a hum, and while it’s probably true that I love Jon Moen songs, as a body of work, more than I love any specific Jon Moen song...I love his songs. This is another one I come back to, partly for that buzzing “I Can’t Get No...” guitar, partly for the raucous energy, mostly for the hook, which demands a hum. “My sensibilities are always too tame”, he sings, and that’s possibly a little true for the music he clearly aspires to make. But the rest of that verse goes, “When I’m not nailed to the ground/or running out of town/I’m basking in my sorrow and shame”, and when he delivers it, he sounds a whole lot like a guy up late, not brooding but basking, still loving every minute of chasing a light he knows he’ll never catch.
Hmm. Definitely sensing a theme. Here’s another lifer—founder and/or member of Slapp Happy and then Henry Cow, two of the wilder, more challenging rock-in-opposition (that is, prog with post-Stravinsky instead of pre-Brahms classical accents) groups way back in the ‘70s, cartoonist, radio-play author...and, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, creator of a series of the strangest, most rewarding singer-songwriter albums I know. They’re full of story and life and allusion and rhymes that sparkle and a consistent soulfulness that surprised then and surprises still. The fact that this guy has had a song covered by Leo Sayer may be the best testament I know to the it’s-all-pop school of thinking about pop.
Here’s a gloriously amoral, murky ode to wandering off piste. Our singer gets a card from old pal Bernard, inviting him to Paris to join his drug dealing gang. “As old Rimbaud said one time/’dry yourself in the air of crime’/I think you’ll like it fine, mon ami”. So off he goes. Bernard leaves. Things get squalid. Another old friend sees him on the streets, saves him from ruin—that is, himself—and nurses him “back to health/in an atmosphere of wealth and luxury”. The melody jaunts along, rueful but playful. There’s some sadness. Maybe. But no regrets.
If you’ve read these round-ups of mine before, you know I consider it unfailingly reassuring that no matter how hard I look or deep I dig, I keep finding new artists whose work I want to know or wish I’d known when it was being made. Here’s another miracle I missed. Roxy Brennan’s guitar-and-drums outfit was active mostly in Oxford and Bristol between 2012-2017. What she mostly chronicles—in deceptively offhand songs with so much more happening in them than you think—is another version of that aching, lonely, beautiful make-some-art life. The lyrics are less cohesive perspectives or stories than dangling strands of thought that hang together like a bead curtain you can pull back, slip inside. “You wrote it down and then you lost it.” “These arms/with nothing in them...”. And then—in a typical, subtly magical move, right as the beat dips and that Velvetsy little guitar riff snags on a minor-chord tangle—“In the other room,” just that phrase, repeated with a haunting and unexpected layer of sweet harmony that surges from the un-swept corners. Feels like being twenty-five (and living at 2541). And like having been that sort of twenty-five, and holding onto the most important bits of that, still.
Her social media pages suggest there’s been some renewed interest, and a couple recent shows. If I get the chance, I won’t be missing her again.
Thinking it’s been a while since Lambert actually hitched a ride or took a train, as per one verse in this never-settle rambler, but that sense of apartness has always felt real in her art. Prepackaged comes with the rarified territory in which she releases records, but she has never stopped singing like she means it, which in this case means “sunny side and over easy”, unaffectedly casual, ruefully comfortable in herself but not anywhere else. “Nowhere feels like home/So I roam from town to town/taking snapshots of the world”. Just another way of filching sweetness from days, then sharing it with anyone who needs some.
FELICE BROTHERS—Jazz on the Autobahn
COMET GAIN—Bad Nite at the Mustache
PETER BLEGVAD—Crumb De La Crumb
There’s always more to say (which is yet another miracle, one of the ones that keeps me going, whether anyone listens or reads or answers or cares). I’d rather let them say it, though.
But what I’m thinking is that if you gathered all of the above artists around a campfire, you’d have a pretty fair recipe and company for surviving even these times.
Or at least a really memorable campfire.
So that’s what I’ve done. For myself, never mind you.
But you’re welcome.
And I’m grateful.
Or as Annika says, staring down at an apple she has bought for a train ride, “It's amazingly large, this apple/ and I ‘Gram it/But it gets very few likes.”
Lambert was..unexpected
SO good...