Archive | October, 2024

Arooj Aftab at Teatro Tivoli – 2024/10/28

29 Oct

Arooj Aftab is a lot of fun live. She has a tremendous voice and one that really benefits from a live stage. Her voice is incredibly rich and her Urdu music showcases it well. Additionally, she is both irreverent and hilarious and her crowd interactions are a highlight in themselves and a great counterpoint to a music that is often played too seriously.

The rest of the band does a great job laying soundscapes around her. It’s a textured sound and it evolves well over the course of each song. There’s an expert balance between the vocals and the instruments that allows the listener to move between the two smoothly. This led to a few cases where some of the instrumental solos felt like they had a hole the vocals could have filled but the excellent chemistry between the violin and guitar led to plenty of fun and an interesting new dimension to the sound.

When you put everything together, the total made for a wonderful show. There was more folksiness in both the English and Urdu songs than I expected and much more humor in the performance than I could have asked for. It’s hard to think of how this could have been more enjoyable than it was.

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Charli XCX – brat but it’s completely different but also still brat

19 Oct

This is the best victory lap that I’ve ever seen. brat was the success that Charli has chased for years while also being her best and most personal album yet. She had the frontrunner for the US presidential election channel her. She deserves the celebration of her success but she didn’t need to be so generous with it.

Every song gets a full rework in this album. She gets everyone in pop to come on to one song or another and they all get a brand new take on the material. We get some really fun moments like Yung Lean taking a spin on the chorus in “360” and Ari getting a little space to sing in “sympathy is a knife”.

Some of the guest spots stand out less simply because, while it’s nice to see so many of the pop girls in one spot, they can start to sound the same. Nevertheless, Addison Rae does well in the “von dutch” remix, but a lot of that is just how good the original is. This issue also plagues the album; the originals are just very good music.

That’s what makes this album so interesting though. Charli doesn’t settle for obvious remixes. “von dutch” is still recognizably “von dutch” but the transformation is thorough. These songs all get totally reworked and it demonstrates just how much space is left in this sound. It’s particularly good to see A. G. Cook get the space on a couple of songs to stretch out the production.

Even the songs that hew closer to the originals do well for the guest spots. Tinashe brings out a very fun double entendre for “b2b” and Troye Sivan gets to be burlier than I’ve ever seen him before. in “talk talk.” It’s a good look for him.

Julian Casablancas gets a complete reimagination of “mean girls” though and it’s a good pick for him. The Lorde remix works much better in the context of the album than as a single, as does the Billie song which provides a welcome aggressive horniness. The bon iver remix of “i think about it all the time” is an interesting change, but one that makes you wish for the old Kanye, who would have been very welcome here.

I’m just glad for Charli that she got to a place where she can break out her rolodex and throw herself a party like this and it’s not every artist that would choose to make something so innovative with it.

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Milton Nascimento, Esperanza Spalding – Milton + esperanza

8 Oct

An Esperanza Spalding album is always going to have some truly fantastic vocal work and it’s a pleasure to see her work with a legend like Milton Nascimento. The atonality in her singing is incredible in “Get It By Now” and she concludes the song on an excellent note. She also uses it well to challenge the listener in “When You Dream.”

It’s an album that could use a little more of interest, but Milton and Esperanza are both likable enough to make it immaterial and there’s enough energy to carry them through with aplomb.

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