John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman is that rare jazz album that is not only a classic, but is very approachable as well. Johnny Hartman has a rich, warm voice that draws you close to the album and John Coltrane focuses completely on the sound, getting a perfect, luxurious tone throughout. Their interplay and that of their rhythm section is fantastic. Solos flow into each other effortlessly and the backing music sets a loose, fluid structure for the solos to work in. The music takes no effort to get into, but is nevertheless one of the great jazz vocal albums. This is essential for all fans of the genre and a great starting point for those who are not.
It’s ironic that Hinds released their debut album, Leave Me Alone, in the peak of winter: there couldn’t be a more carefree summer sound. The title is also ironic, because their songs are a tribute to the genuine joy of being young and free in the Spanish sun.
Hinds is an up-and-coming indie rock girl band from Madrid, consisting of dual singers Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote, bassist Ade Martin and drummer Amber Grimbergen. Their sound is characterized by a youthful vocal interplay between Cosials and Perrote, layered over delightfully unrefined guitars and bass. (It’s really more fun than it sounds.) Besides, the band has perfected the art of making videos that are essentially extended Vines: candid portraits that capture how fun it must be to hang out with these girls-next-door.
Perhaps the most noticeable element of the album is the fluidity of their DIY garage sound. It’s clear that they aren’t focusing on musical dexterity – their melodies are often picked one note at a time – but that’s what defines their rough-around-the-edges sound. Hinds makes it sound so easy that you’re left wondering if good indie rock is really that easy to make. (It’s not: you need to be that young). For example, “Chili Town” layers simple sounds of the summer over heavily-accented sing-song vocals about flirting with a hot guy. The video fits perfectly – the girls are seen hanging around their neighborhood, doing everyday activities like drinking orange juice, chugging vodka, smoking cigarettes and catching Cheetos in their mouths.
It’s also clear that the foursome – especially Cosials and Perrote – are very good friends. Their dual-vocal style works especially well on “Bamboo”, which features Cosials’ deeper, more emotive voice volleying against Perrote’s chirpy pop sound. The two girls’ strong friendship, which forms the core of the band, is evident on the video for their excellent cover of British garage band Thee Headcoatee’s 1992 hit, “Davey Crockett”. In it, Perrote sprays whipped cream into her mouth and joins Cosials to dance on a table, on a bright summer’s day. In a sense, that one scene defines the band.
In 12 short pop gems, the band has captured the cheery, lighthearted essence of youth without any typical millennial trappings. They are happy, but not self-consciously so. They are the girls next door, but they aren’t trying to be. And it is that sincere likability that powers Leave Me Alone and leaves us extremely excited about the band’s future.
There’s a lot of promise in an album like this. The old American standards are often fantastic and the combination of an old stalwart like Tony Bennett and a pop star like Lady Gaga getting together to record an album of just these tunes seems like an excellent idea. It probably even is an excellent idea, but this is not the manifestation it deserves.
Cheek To Cheek manages to neither revitalize the standards with a modern outlook nor to recapture any of their past glory. Show tunes require confidence, personality and chemistry and while the first is present in spades, the other two are only ever briefly seen. The two trip over each other constantly and both alternate between hammy and formulaic. Listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s version of the title track and you can hear a warmth and humanity entirely lacking in this album.
It’s not all lows though, the backing band does a very solid job. They lay down an upbeat, joyful jazz that is a pleasure to listen to. Also, both Lady Gaga and, surprisingly given his age, Tony Bennett are technically proficient throughout. Both of them still have great voices and are willing to draw upon them. Lady Gaga in particular has a wonderful solo in “Lush Life” that most singers, even renowned ones from the song’s own era, would struggle with.
All told, this is an acceptable album, but the standards are such for a reason and have all been played enough times to have versions that are undeniably classic. With this material, merely acceptable is just not enough.
There’s a famous essay by Roland Barthes about separating an author from his work and on the futility of using the author’s identity to try to derive a single definitive meaning for a text. With Bowie, the persona was always a facet of the work, and an important one, but one that only furthered its enigma. Where some artists seem slaves to such direct analysis of their work, Bowie transcended it.
Bowie’s influence is everywhere, from the obvious trends in music and fashion to the art styles of movies, comics and video games, to even his direct influence in contemporary culture and mainstream acceptance of once-othered groups. Time and time again, Bowie pushed at the boundaries of what human culture had achieved. The world today is a far better place due to his work. His loss is tragic and heartbreaking, but his work and is influence are immortal.
Blackstar, his twenty-fifth and final album, is new territory even for him. This is a jazz album, not rock, and an excellent one at that. The music is challenging and more than deep enough to reward you for it. The variations laid down by his band are deep and interesting. The lyrics are cryptic, but highly evocative. The experience as a whole is direct and unsettling, but distinctly beautiful. His use of the form is deft and innovative, bringing in rock and spacey-electronica into a rich jazz foundation to create a work as claustrophobic as a dungeon and as difficult to escape.
His inversions of the form are fascinating. The sax solo of “Lazarus” centers the album. The slow, mournful chant of “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is cleverly undercut by the whimsical jazz strains underneath it and the guitar solo that provides much of the real variation in the song. The clear horn opening of “Dollar Days” shifts smoothly into a traditional rock ballad. This is an intelligent album and courageous enough to revel in it.
Excellent, challenging and novel, Blackstar is the swan song Bowie’s career deserves. I highly recommend it.
British underground rapper Ghostpoet has a sound that is distinctly his own. His rap has always been hazy and mumbled and very, very atmospheric. I loved Some Say I So I Say Light for that. His new album, Shedding Skin, is probably the only rap album to be closer to The National than to Jay-Z. Sadly, that’s not really a compliment.
While this is probably the most approachable of Ghostpoet’s albums, and his literate, urban middle-class rap is something very worth approaching, it is also the least varied of his albums. like the aforementioned National, the album is pleasant to listen to, but the alt-rock beats tend to bleed into themselves quickly. All of the songs feel the same. There are bright spots, notably the title track which could be out of one of the quieter parts of Hotline Miami and Ghostpoet’s trademark ennui is delightful in points. Only he would run a chorus of “It’s just you’re forgettable / I think that’s the issue, babe.”
If you’re new to Ghostpoet and new to alternate rap, I would recommend this as a stepping stone to the rest of this interesting little corner, but for everyone else this album might just be too forgettable.
I’m just so happy that this album exists. A jazz album in 2015 that is so deeply in love with the post-bebop era of jazz is an unexpected treat. Getting one of this quality just seems unfair.
Above everything else, Kamasi Washington plays a mean sax. Listen to just how impassioned “Final Thought” is and you could be forgiven for thinking that you were back in one of the peak eras of jazz. Similarly, “Change of the Guard” evokes Coltrane with his classic quartet. This is no throwback album though. Ideas enter it from all over the place, both within the history of jazz and without. This is an epic of an album at just under 3 hours and it makes good use of all of it.
It is at its best when it relaxes into hard bop though. The rhythm section lays down backing that manages to be intricate without overpowering the rest of the sound and their solos are fantastic. The bass solo on “The Magnificent 7” and the piano on “Leroy and Lanisha” are both excellent, skillfully setting a refrain and moving everywhere in the space they contain. Similarly, the dueling horns of the energetic “Re Run Home” dance around a central conceit in the greatest of jazz traditions.
From its first moment to its final one some three hours later, The Epic is very simply a jazz classic. I highly recommend it.
Ego Death is the most relaxing album that I have heard in a long while. The soft, calm R&B here is just a pleasure to listen to. Syd the Kid sings deeply personal snippets gently enough to remove the sting and only leave the emotion.
The soothing nature of this album in no way detracts from the quality though. Your work doesn’t need to be ragged to be passionate or true. “Girl”, for instance, is beautiful in how simple it is. This is the first album I’d recommend for relaxing after a bad day and is a strong choice for if you just want to listen to some very good R&B.
Lupe Fiasco approaches hip-hop like no one else. His raps have a chain-mail sound to them, intricate and tightly linked and his subject matter is pleasantly unique. With Tetsuo and Youth we have one of his best albums, but it’s hard not to feel a little disappointed.
Lupe jumps right into the album with the “Mural”, a song dense with meaning and robust enough to last almost 9 minutes with no hook. His strengths are just undeniable, he has been an unapologetic auteur for his entire career and his devotion to the form is evident throughout. Songs like “Adoration of the Magi” and “They.Resurrect.Over.New” (featuring an excellent Ab-Soul verse) showcase his approach to lyricism. His words all slot into place perfectly, not only does every line work perfectly with the ones surrounding it but every sound plays with the ones next to it. His lyrics have always tended to the cryptic due to this, but the flow is incredible. Similarly, his viewpoint remains as fresh as ever. “Prisoner 1 & 2” goes through an entire prison, looking not only at the inmates but the guards as well and “Deliver” talks about a neighborhood that pizza men will not deliver to.
Yet, it’s hard not to feel sad that this album is not something more.”Tetsuo and Youth” just isn’t the masterpiece that Lupe has always had in him but never really been able to realize. There’s too much in there that just doesn’t do enough. The beats are mostly too generic to hold up the raps and the album doesn’t really have a stand-out track like Food and Liquor‘s “Kick, Push” or The Cool‘s “Superstar”.
This is still a good enough album to deserve a listen and I would be shocked if that does not lead to many more. After all, isn’t it a statement on the ability of the artist that I wish it was a little more?
Art Angels is entirely the album of an auteur. That means a care and dedication to the craft that, while increasingly common in pop, is still rare and noteworthy. It also means a number of idiosyncrasies. This is very much an album of an individual. That should be fantastic and mostly is, but this is an album with personality and I have yet to find a person with nothing to dislike.
I love so much about this album though. “Kill V. Maim” and “Flesh Without Blood” for instance are just perfect pop, effortless to fall into and deep enough to keep you in. There are so many ideas in these songs and all of them are good. Grimes here presents an unapologetic idea of pop that she completely owns and that is both imaginative and exceptional.
For all of that though, the album has flaws. For one, the lyrics are throwaway. This is largely fine for an album that is clearly not focused on them, but it is hard not to be a little disappointed when they turn out insubstantial. Additionally, given the variety in the album, it would be hard not to find some things to kick against. “Venus Fly”, for instance, lets down an energetic chorus with a muddled and repetitive song. Similarly, “California” and “Butterfly”, while both great songs do have moments where they seem to try to skate by a little. Also, I honestly just dislike “SCREAM”. This is the album of a person and it’s hard not to find little things about people that grate.
Overall though, this is a great pop album and it fits neatly into the current advent of female pop auteurs. I would call it a mold, but given how individual each of these artists and their albums are, that just seems disrespectful. I highly recommend this album.
Beauty Behind The Madness is the Weeknd striking out for more mainstream success. The is the end of the path that his Ariana Grande collaboration “Love Me Harder” started. This is still a Weeknd album and still has some interesting stuff, but feels something of a miss.
He had a specific emotion that he was emblematic of. The Trilogy is the feeling of walking home at night while knowing your relationship died at birth. His lyrics and his singular voice both pushed the theme to the point where the music became shorthand for the emotion. This has shades of that, and shades of a more mature look at it, in this album but it has missteps and diversions enough to distract from that core. This is not a bad album, but it is hard not to feel a little let down. “Shameless” and “The Hills” are where his music was always headed, both lyrically and musically and “Can’t Feel My Face”, while new ground for The Weeknd, is indisputably a great pop tune, but “Dark Times” for instance is just lazy tripe.
It’s hard to know who to recommend this album to. Weeknd fans will find some stuff to fall into and so will people looking for off-beat pop, but anyone looking for more than a serviceable new album is bound to feel disappointed.
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