An Acute Case: 10 February 2023

Vernacular/literary traditions, good comedy/bad taste, and break ups/downs/throughs

Body Type: Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing’s Surprising
This Aussie Music Prize-nominated quartet formed in 2016 but had to jump through industry hoops for four years before recording their full-length debut, only for the plague to delay its release until May 2022. Abridged version: “Birth control for rock and roll.” Alive and writhing but not the least bit unsteady, their intensity is more analytical than carnal, their style archer than it is uncouth. Over eleven oddly shaped vessels, they follow their implacable curiosity wherever it leads, which is mostly back to a patriarchy they inhabit by consuming more bloke rock than doctors recommend. As bassist Cecil Coleman and lead songwriters Sophie McComish and Annabel Blackman's sweetened drawls get mixed up with the pressure cooker guitars, you might struggle to tell who’s who, but you'll have no trouble picking out the stinging takedowns, bracing reflections, and Brecht references. “If I am an animal then what makes you a man?” is research subject. “I've got a hundred million neurons floating round inside my brain and I'm looking for the same" dating profile. “Does it exist on a subconscious plane or am I making an excuse for your behaviour again?" aborted industry reprieve. Title’s a gut-punch slogan of daily life for women everywhere. A

Willi Carlisle: Peculiar, Missouri
A Midwestern punk-turned-”renaissance folklorist” who calls barn dances for a hobby, expect Carlisle’s music to be steeped in “old timey” traditions. Though as he says part of the barn dance appeal is holding hands with strangers, expect the queerness of those traditions to be of special interest. In addition to cobblers and mechanics left behind “in this age of flying cars”, his musical Crankie theatre features the victims of the speciously romanticised van life. But it’s his unsteady voice and rickety arrangements that tug at the more liminal feelings of outsiderdom. On which note: “Why’s living a lie more easy than life on the fence?” Also: “I will love whoever I well please.” The strangeness culminates on a talking blues psychodrama that starts with a welcome sign (“proudly proclaiming where the odds are with you”) to Anywhere Everywhere, USA, and ends with a globalisation-induced panic attack under the “hideous halogen bulbs” of the cosmetics aisle in Walmart. Conversant in the vernacular and literary (this is surely the first time anyone’s rhymed “Passamaquoddy” and “Bugatti”) he demonstrates how little difference there is between the two. And in case you’re wondering, Peculiar is a real place. Geographically, yes. But also culturally, socially, psychologically. A MINUS

Benjy Davis: Benjy Davis
The last of Ashley McBryde’s Lindeville co-writers has been a ghost since this 2014 solo debut failed to register. On the evidence of his soft-mouth retriever vocals and overcommitted-boy-back-home persona, it should at least have bagged him a gig as a Bro Country sensitivity editor. Still, he could stand to dial down his neediness. Like the one when he gets into bed late on a Tuesday and yodels, “ARE YOU AWAKE?!” I am now, Benjy. *** (“Here I Go” “I’m Still Here” “Bar Mirror”)

Stella Donnelly: Flood
The Sarah Mary Chadwick influence is strong, though the result is less suicidal. The formal control and thematic upfront-ness of Beware of the Dogs has slackened, with Donnelly flexing her melodic muscles sparingly. But she’s too tunesome to succumb to mood music. If this drifts, it drifts artfully, and along rather than away. Her lyrical mode is discursive as she monologues memories, thoughts, and stories whose effects rely more on accumulation than pithiness. Not to say individual lines don’t make themselves heard: “You’ve got a lot of medals for someone who is losing”; “Why’s it so paralyzing to see the one you love dance?”; “It was never going to be a good time when you said you had to talk to me.” As she's throwing away shit she made when she was five, and making mental notes to call her aunties more, assume covid plays a role. But any lockdown loneliness is mixed in with—and subsumed by—a break-up she doesn’t appear to regret, even though it still hurts. A MINUS

Jockstrap: I Love You Jennifer B
Yes, you can make enervated Hyperpop. No, you can’t dance to it. * (“Concrete Over Water” “Glasgow” “50/50 - Extended Mix”)

The Linda Lindas: Growing Up
The most winning and well-adjusted all-female, Asian-American, 11-17-year-old, West Coast pop-punks currently navigating adolescence through sororal co-dependency and fealty to their all-female, white-American, significantly older forebears. *** (“Oh!” “Growing Up” “Racist Sexist Boy”)

Santigold: Spirituals
First, there’s a hole in her head. Then her head is decaying. Next, she’s lying in bed fighting what can’t be seen. Then people are hiding from each other in their homes. That is, when they’re not just “Suffering they suffering / They catch us and they crush again.” Get beneath precisely middle-aged Santi White’s familiar singsong and dubwise rhythms and you'll suspect she’s not very well. Real life confirmation came in the form of a cancelled tour less than twenty days after this album’s release. Reason given: protecting her mental health. Her salvation is a world of sound she can lose/find herself in as required—one that goes as deep as the title suggests, with each unplaceable thingamy from her team of meticulous producers leading to half a dozen more. In the age of the Dick Clark Show, the jittery and joyous “Shake” might have accompanied a new dance craze. In 2022, it’s one more metaphor for the art of cope. Thankfully, that’s something Santi appears to have a handle on. Like when she says “Let me fall first”, someone’s there holding her hand. A MINUS

$ilkMoney: I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore
This vituperative Virginian calls himself a hobbyist rapper and full-time mycologist, and if you’re not sure how to take the latter, see the title of track two (“I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms and Bwoy Oh Bwoy”). He’s the RXK Nephew/billy woods hybrid no one asked for. But he’s such a boor that asking him for anything is tantamount to sabotage. So’s paying him, apparently—he explicitly cuts ties with previous and prospective labels in his raps, and reportedly blew the $12k Tik Tok money he made from surprise hit “My Potna Dem” on weed and his advance money for this record on, well, refer to his stated profession. Unwilling to supply hooks or even whole songs, his desire for lucidity is so strong, his mind so sharp, and his jokes so disgracefully funny that songs are what he supplies anyway. “Uncouth but somehow still astute,” he tears into blaxploitation while partaking in plenty of his own. Laugh and risk offending good taste. Don’t laugh and risk offending good comedy. A MINUS

Vince Staples: RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART
Still unable to tell the difference between a firework display and a shootout, Staples is mirthless if not totally joyless. But unlike his too-slight self-titled 2021 effort, he compensates by leaning into the natural musicality of his voice and augmenting beats that go tip-tip-tip-tap with ones that go tap-tap-tap-tip. Not a jot less committed to chronicling the emotional half-life and practical considerations of gangbanging, when he says he loves this shit like his momma, he’s talking about the woman who only told him he was special after she gave him a .38 (geddit?). When he dials up Long Beach Flowers, it’s to order a bouquet for his dead homie. To hear him tell it: “Crip and Blood shit / That’s the only thing I’ve ever been in love with”. And when he gives you a love song, the romance is between gangster and gun—the former ending up in prison, the latter stashed safely till they can “go a hunnid rounds” again. The Staples persona would have you believe he’s unable to love. But on this evidence, he’s coming round to the idea. A MINUS

Teno Afrika: Amapiano Selections (2020)
Assays the finer points of synth glitch and synth flatus, log drum deployment, and looped vowel sounds. But as more than a sampler of the genre’s core components, only comes alive in fits and starts. ** (“Storytellers” “Conka” “Lerato Le Bass”)