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):
SKILL SETS NO ONE CARES ABOUT— The November, 2022 Music Round-Up
HOMEBOY SANDMAN— Bus (A Rhyme)
I’ve always liked him, been happy to hear him out there on his corner raining down rhymes, so I’m not sure whether it’s the moment or the music he has chosen or what, but he has finally gone all the way in for me this fall. Part of it’s the music, for sure; this one centers on a Sault sample, from “Widlfires”, a favorite track by maybe my favorite new-to-me artist since the pandemic dropped the lid on the world and set us all scurrying frantically all over each other.
But the music isn’t the only reason. And there I go underestimating this exceptional wordslinger again, because he doesn’t just choose well, he uses well, and a lot of phrases here feel like talismans for artists and awake people and money doubters and life livers everywhere. They’re scavenged wood slats plentiful and sturdy enough to build a raft from, one on which we can shoot the shit-rapids to somewhere safer. He’s “got a skill set nobody cares about/I make jams nobody hears about/…got so much to give thanks about”, and he knows it’s brutal out there, and he’s offering everything he’s got to anyone who’ll listen, and he’s holding out hope, because “reality could transform overnight”.
Then there’s “Bus (A Rhyme)”, almost an answer track (at least within my own listening world) to Jeffrey Lewis’s aching “Roll Bus Roll”. But where Lewis’s song is all about cones of drifting solitude— the “rolled sweatshirt” that “makes the window soft”—Homeboy’s is a cauldron of interaction, the “thirteens gaming preteens”, “cops…clocking school kids at the bus stop…”, adults at the same stop who “wave the driver off, they’re waiting for a dollar van” the people yelling “BACK DOOR” getting on and off. Everyone's fighting their way through, and “half the folks on got here with no passport”, and it really does feel like the “scenic route” even before Homeboy drops into a reverie about other bus rides to visit his “grandmoms in Astoria” or back home to the Bronx, through “2-fare zones” where “if it’s raining, you get wet/wintertime you freeze”. None of it’s pretty, a lot of it’s painful, but all of it’s a specific sort of beautiful. The kind where we find ways to live among each other if not quite together. Which isn’t the best we can hope or settle for, but is so much better than what we’ve been doing.
She has always sounded exactly like I imagined a one-time goth metal artist who wrote a Master’s thesis on narrative perspectives in Kate Bush songs and then three novels would sound: smart, sure; bloody and unafraid, check; and less gripping (or off-putting) than the above suggests.
Until this most recent record. Like Bush (or Bowie), Hval changes masks so often that I wouldn’t dare presuming that any face is more her than any other. But like late-period Peter Gabriel, she has started assuming personae that feel more familiar, somehow, driven by monstrous and beautiful feelings that are more accessible or familiar than has been her wont.
Or maybe she’s just trusting the music more. These songs still don’t have hooks or even repeating melodic cells very often, don’t obey any sort of pop (or neoclassical, or folk-ballad) structure. And yet they are approachable and warm, something you hum even as they slip around corners, beckoning you toward something else to hum. All of which suits her surprisingly plain, pleasant voice so much more than vampire songs did.
Same goes for the words: “What is far away but places to lose yourself”: “I wonder who I’d been if I never got to go/get a fine arts degree and American coffee”; “I want to live in a democracy/Somewhere art is free/Not that it ever was.” All of which have me mouthing along— humming along—and thinking, yeah. And, Me, too. And again, yeah…
The theatrical/cinematic quality that, ironically, has defined this raw, confrontational rap group was there long before Daveed Diggs’s iconic Thomas Jefferson turn in Hamilton. So it makes sense that their most unflinching evocations of the realities of not just Black America but everyone’s (I’m writing this on election day, just finished reading Paul Krugman’s column about how the MAGA takeover could leave us wishing we were Hungary, because Hungary’s takeover will prove gentler) come steeped, musically and lyrically, in delicious B-movie moves. The constantly evolving beats might as well be outtakes from the Escape From New York soundtrack, and the people— characters— in the lyrics are battened down for a siege (“Furniture to the walls, barricade you inside”) like the survivors walled up in the church in The Fog or the police station in Assault on Precinct 13.
But what’s coming for them isn’t just bullets and murder (because those are already here, have always been here, are a constant and a given). It’s a malaise that can’t quite be named, a history that keeps overrunning its banks and flooding the future: “The past smashed every wall, pillar, and floorboard/Ashes to ashes, dust in the lung”. And if this music is definitively about the terror of the American Black experience, it also feels all-encompassing, and therefore bizarrely inclusive. Call yourself doomed, defiant, implicated, privileged, doesn’t matter; what’s coming is coming for all of us.
There’s a sort of comfort in that.
At least until “He Dead”, where the survivors crawl out of their foxholes— family, education, financial solvency, religion, art, whatever any of us believed might insulate us— to count the cost.
yeule— Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty
Where Jenny Hval foregrounds unease against a backdrop of fragmented but still palpable melody, and Clipping. wields and wages war with it, this Singapore-born artist strips away almost everything that isn’t unease. The persona in these destabilizing songs feels less damaged than misassembled from skimmed internet advice, anti-depressants (and amphetamines, and laxatives), barely repressed suicidal urges, confusion, and plain old yearning for companionship (or at least someone to “pick up all my guts/spilling out, bruised up, bloodied up”).
And yet. In that very longing, there’s a flickering, peculiar sort of…I don’t know. Not hope. Just…not nothing. I’m writing this entry on the day after the election, and that flickering feeling— flicker of feeling— could almost pass for warmth.
“Friendly Machine” opens with piercing sine-wave tones that could never be described as pleasant, but there is a chime to them. Making a hobby out of liking to “search my symptoms online” doesn’t seem a prescription for heart health…but it’s better than not searching? And maybe I’m seeing what I want to, but I also find hope in the way this hurt, humming being enjoys how her machine “Pretends to wipe my memory clean/pretends to make it all go away,” pretends being the key. Meaning, they— the artist— knows. As they say— sing— later in the track, “Virtual life is altering.” In the sudden swirls of tune amid all this glimmering, bleeping wreckage, there’s an awareness of the chasm that needs filling. yeule may refer to themselves as a cyborg, but awareness of the chasm is one of the most human sensations there is.
Which is what makes me buy, and hope for, the faint hint of (self-)kindness in “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty”, which rides an almost shockingly gentle acoustic guitar strum and a tune disarming in its accessibility. This is still about veins, nightmares, blood, and desperation. But “You turn this horrible place/Into orange light.”
Makes you think we still could do for each other. If we want.
NEW ASIA— Village Dances. (scroll down at link for sample)
Both of these tracks come from a much-praised two-disc compilation called Folk Songs and Great Tunes from Siberia and the Far East. As a set, it disappointed me. The liner notes are skimpy on context, lyrical translations, sometimes even ways of tracking down more music by these artists (several of whom, of course, may not have readily accessible catalogs, which is part of the value of compilations like this). And while I have never been any sort of folk purist, some of the grafting of club-banging dance beats or western rockist guitar moves feels…I don’t know, I’m not going to say imposed, because what do I know (and the notes don’t say), certainly not denuding. I love those kinds of blends and juxtapositions and surprises when they work. Here, though, whether or not they make the music less authentic, they often make it less good.
The tracks that work, though…
Here are two blazers to drag this playlist out of its November, 2022 malaise. The Inga track, from the Republic of Buryatia, has some of that horseback bop that characterizes much of the Mongolian music I know, but the singing is different, less vibrations called up from the earth than birdsong ringing off mountainsides, the melody swooping around on its own wind-currents, diving and trilling, yanking me not just out of myself but off the ground.
New Asia hail from Altai, land of the snowy steppes, and their music shares a vibrancy and restlessness with Inner Mongolian bands I love like Hanggai. There’s a jawharp buzzing like an outboard motor behind the hurtling beat, and throat-singing that rattles the ribcage. I can’t say with any authority how much of the beat is endemic to Altai tradition and how much is their own invention or borrowed from other musics; there are moments that could pass for the Romani-infused punk punch of Gogol Bordello. What I can say is that “Village Dances” sounds not just insistent or propulsive but inclusive. Like “Yokhor”, this is a roaring celebration of people being alive together.
WILL GAMBOLA SING— Nurse on Strike
The Cluster track is from forty years ago, and plays like it has been whirring away over there in its corner ever since. Like a fairground merry-go-round the fair forgot when it left town, and it’s gone woozy, and you can hear rusted gears clicking and planks warping. But it’s still sturdy, it can still bear your weight, and it spirits you off to somewhere shadowy and just sinister enough. I suspect I will never get tired of going where it takes me.
It’s even harder to pin down what makes the Will Gambola Sing instrumental so memorable. They (it’s a band) were from Stockholm, recorded only a handful of things and then hopped on their own Cluster carousel and vanished. The ingredients are straight-up drums, a bass, a gently familiar minor-key chord progression, a reverb pedal or setting turned up just enough to lend a shimmer. But familiar as it all is, dated as those washy keyboards sound— they had to have sounded dated in 2010, when this got made—this gets under and in me the second that lead guitar starts to double back over its own arpeggio. There aren’t any surprises of note. No grandstanding leads. A few very gentle crescendos and decrescendos. But that broken chord they’ve found, played at that precise tempo, with exactly that much echo…it just keeps opening out, like a cave. And these guys know it. And they lead me down and in there with them. How reassuring, just to know there are still such secret spaces to find and walk…
“Buckle up, I guess you’d better” goes the chorus of this 2015 track from an intermittently fabulous, long-running Russian band I first heard in St. Petersburg in 2010. I could say that line seems prescient, except when wouldn’t it? Still, there’s a bounce and buoyancy to the best Mumiy Troll that is rare in my experience of rock music (or art, period) from Russia, which doesn’t mean they’re playing around or ignoring realities. You can— you will—dance and sing to this, but what you’re singing includes “…shredding our lips with swatches/Mixing blood with soda on the rocks.” Wikipedia says they’ve been outspoken and relentlessly active in support of ethnic minorities and taiga wildlife, were reportedly among the first (or the first) leading Russian acts to get behind organizations fighting AIDS there. I can’t find much news about what’s happening with or to them now. Which makes “Speed”, for all its grim intensity, seem almost like something lifted off the Golden Records included with Voyager and Voyager 2. A missive from another, more hopeful time. Not even seven years ago, when we were all so young…
One of the gentler surprises during this country’s post-millennium descent into madness has been the view of us from afar, at least among many writers I read and musicians listen to. Can’t decide if it’s \heartwarming or heartbreaking, but there’s a compassion or generosity mixed in with the horror sometimes in other peoples’ views of Americans that we rarely lend each other.
Power of Dreams didn’t exist when I lived in what was then the Trouble-haunted, hardscrabble streets of Galway in the mid-’80s, but I heard about them from friends I made there soon afterward. The first track I remember is a longing-for-all-of-it rave-up called “Never Been to Texas”, which isn’t about Texas or America, really, except in that sense of an undefined (and possibly unhealthy) yearning for adventure or acceptance. Thirty-plus years later, the band has resurfaced, sounding weathered but still restless and hopeful. The America they portray here has “No room for the weak or the thoughtful”, is constantly “selling sickness to the healthy”, but it’s also “good people/caught in a rigged system…worked to the bone and ready to snap/The pursuit of happiness is a trap”.
I’m writing this a couple days into the calm after an almost surreally calm midterm election. Maybe they’re right, and we really are going to find a way out. Meanwhile, this is a fine song to sing.
“Do It” is just another damn catchy P.O.D. jangle. Always room for one more of those on any list of mine.
Much harder to get a bead on this New York trio led by longtime scenester Mike Bones, who rip through songs like the proto-punks (Iggy, the New York Dolls) they clearly tip their hoodies to. I’m not taking at face value any lyric from an album named after a László Krasznahoraki novel. But this is a far less sanguine gif of the current American moment. “There’s black helicopters above my yard/My dad is a doctor, here is his card” goes one couplet, and that collision of entitlement and paranoia, awareness of danger and willingness to leave it to (or foist it on) others suffuses the whole song. The chorus goes “Poor people live forever/poor people work forever”.
Gentle it isn’t. Kind, either. I think. Still can’t stop buzzing it around in my ears, though. The way you rub a bruise.
AMANDA SHIRES— Hawk for the Dove
The inside photographs on Shires’s latest (and the video for this song) recall the infamous cover of the first Roxy Music record in the way they recontextualize poses and facial expressions ripped from adolescent male fantasy, to fresh, disturbing, and contemporary effect. The hunger in those looks isn’t the viewer’s, and it isn’t about or for you, and whatever it promises, it isn’t necessarily or (even likely to be) pleasant.
Ironically, her most complexly compelling lyrics to date come couched in some of her most immediate hooks. “Hawk for the Dove” may be a brooder, and the power games in its sexual politics profoundly disconcerting (“The spur of hipbones, and you pressing in/Come on, I dare you, make me feel something again”) but that tune screws hard to the singing place. The woman at the heart of it may not be happy you’re there, but knows you will be anyway.
“Serious trouble” indeed.
HOMEBOY SANDMAN— Parks & Wreck
BRYAN FERRY— I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself
Which I like in my art, a lot of the time.
Know what else I like?
Anything that helps—or makes— me “sit back, relax, and enjoy the love”, like Homeboy and Taty rapping about sex and Parks and Rec and how “the light in me stays litty.” If there’s a warmer, more affirming paean out there to the pleasures of still being here, of having someone to love and laugh and waste (meaning honor) good moments with this side of “The Magic Number”, I don’t know it, so please send it to me.
Then we can all wind down to the latest underrated, understated Bryan Ferry magic. His voice is half-shot, and his obsession with groove assembly too often substitutes for finishing writing songs (and has for forty years, now) or coming up with something new to sing about. But he remains one of the best I’ve ever heard at extracting and reconstituting the melodic essence at the heart of essential melodies. Here he is doing it again, and that makes him such grand late-night company to play alongside my favorite company at the end of roiled, troubled, bewildering days.