An Acute Case: 15 July 2022
Kendrick Lamar and the age of ignorance, plus Caribbean bluez in deep space, earning your Gram Parsons stripes, and the wheelbarrow (yes, that one)
Mary J. Blige: Good Morning Gorgeous
Collects her rent money from a good-for-nothing but fails to milk Anderson .Paak for his estimable gifts. Secures DJ Khaled's hydraulic beats but also his moronic everything else. Showboats spectacularly on the title track but unspectacularly on ‘Failing In Love’. All in all, as many misses as hits, but the hits are hard. ** (‘On Top’)
Fimber Bravo: Lunar Tredd
A steel drummer floats through space, crosses paths with galactic thingamies—including squiggly telecoms signals, the death-pulse of a distant star, and maybe the plasmatic gunk of universal consciousness—and transmits his cosmic-carnival-for-one back to earth through a mass of O3 particles, which does crazy things to the warp and woof of the compositions. When he plugs into the vocoder, the anti-gravity really powers up. A NASA (or Tesla—whoever's in charge of space these days) operative in the listening post receives the transmission and is rapt by a celestial voice asking such universal questions as: "Where are you mama? Where are you papa?” On the title track, he prepares for descent, stopping stock-still and bathing in the combination of swampy ambience and 25bpm heartbeat. If the operative is still listening, it’s at this point he loses his mind. The drummer returns to base in celebratory mood, helmet filled with disembodied voices chanting, smilingly, "tappity tappity tap tap." He touches down in Africa, where he’s joined by honeyed voices that chirrup, click, and pop no less cosmically than his discoveries in deep space. A MINUS
Dai Burger: Back In Ya Mouf (2021)
Queer Queens rapper (pronounced “Day") whose dance background plays out on half these clubby songs. Like NY touchstones Minaj and Banks, she savours her flow and licks her lips over every punchline. Unlike them, the punchlines aren't always lip-smackingly good. * (‘I Luv U’)
Carcass: Torn Arteries (2021)
In which good-humoured displays of nutso guitar and demolished drums are accompanied by even better-humoured jokes, including a roll call of scalpel blade brands, Eleanor Rigby punned to death, and an anti-satanism song written with designs on Christian radio airplay (unsuccessful). Also, belated winners of the 2021 award for ‘Most Millennial Album Art From Least Likely Source’. ** (‘Under The Scalpel Blade’)
Kendrick Lamar: Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
Lamar playing the Mr. Moralising scourge of manichean discourse could be tedious, except he does it by examining his Big Missteps and mistakes so thoroughly that he turns them into universal lessons—from daddy issues and retributive miscegenation to homophobia, lust addiction, and platforming Kodak Black (that one isn’t universal). There’s a degree of performed ignorance at play, but it works because of the (somewhat shaky) therapy framework, and the fact that these are ignorant times and he's a prism for them whether he likes it or not. Plus, hip hop has always indulged ignorance. Ditto self-importance, which there’s also plenty of. And not just thematically. Cutting his cloth to the shape of his Pulitzer has pushed him towards richer textures, a new found love for piano and strings, and manically decontextualised ad libs. It's a sound as beguiling as the themes. Not always fun—at least in the orthodox sense—but as he’s repping for No Such Thing As Normal, why should it be? And who listens to Kendrick Lamar for orthodox fun anyway? A MINUS
Corb Lund: Songs My Friends Wrote
In case it wasn’t obvious, this things-to-do-when-you-can’t-tour album finds Lund covering songs by more, less, and equally talented musicians. Barring picks from Todd Snider and Hayes Carl (the mores), all are new to me, including a pitch-black number by Geoff Berner called ‘That’s What Keeps The Rent Down, Baby’, which goes: “Hush little baby, don't you cry / Please don't mind the screaming / From the man in the alley, on the small of his back / The police man's knee is kneelin' / I'll tell you an open secret, child / Not everyone is knowin' / But if that little man ever left this place / You and I would soon be goin'.” None top it for laughs or cries, but enough come close. Lund keeps the energy high, his big-shouldered voice benefitting from an equally strapping band. Jury’s out on whether the outlaw-ishness of the picks reflects the Covid wilderness or just country tropes. Star of the show is Kurt Cielsa’s walking bass. Corb may have circled the stops, but Kurt’s the one hauling ass from door to door. Elsewhere, Grant Siemens plays a lickety-split guitar. A MINUS
Lyrics Born: Mobile Homies Season 1
If this is a coping with Covid album, Tom Shimura has one strategy down pat: shagging—it helps against respiratory viruses (a trusted source says the best position for reduced transmission and improved lung function is the wheelbarrow. Just saying.) Friends help, too, which Shimura has plenty of, including them on songs and the snippets from his Instagram live series that form the album’s loose framework. That more or less shakes down as ‘Talking is good’, and when the interactions are this lively it certainly is. Except when he’s righteously pissed off on the (Brits, you’ll need your best American accent here) “anti-slant eye” Asian hate response, he’s at his best on love and sex. And not just because he has the sexiest timbre in rap. His single verse on ‘Long Shot’ compresses a years-long romantic pursuit into a whirlwind of metaphor, figure of speech, and topographical information. He follows that with ‘Everyday Love’, which—replete with ad libs that ventilate the already plenty breezy Oakland funk—finds the same couple decades later "In bed watching Netflix eating Klondike's (I got chocolate all over my face, girl)", and "Naked playing spades with a deck of cards (Whoa, careful how you shuffle the deck, girl)." It also contains his number one motto: “Let’s get naked more.” A MINUS
My Idea: That’s My Idea (2021)
An idea worth claiming, even if ‘Birthday’ has the dubious honour of combining all my least favourite indie trends—a Rostam vocal filter, glitchy drums, and some kid holding down one note on their Casio for the duration. But ‘I Can't Dance’ and ‘Stay Away Still’ are Konigsberg at her best. So unguarded it must be an affect. *** (‘I Can’t Dance’)
Peaness: World Full of Worry
Pretty plain/plain pretty harmonies, pep talks, and even peppier guitar-jangle keep the title threat at bay. The Beths, plus a cock joke. *** (‘irl’)
Kae Tempest: The Line Is A Curve
The title describes internal pressures that have left Tempest bent but not broken and, now on the other side of the inflection point, courting an uneasy serenity. But restfulness isn’t in Tempest’s nature, which producer of the hour Dan Carey makes abundantly clear by dialling down the drums and filling the air with urgent, pinging synths. When Tempest gets agitated, quickening the pace or skipping between metres, the music’s already on high alert. Danceable release to all the contraction comes towards the end. But the best bits are when Tempest is somewhere between the two, which peaks on ‘Salt Coast’. Not only an exercise in negative capability, it’s also the sweetest post-Brexit lament we’re likely to get. In the interest of spoiling a carefully composed song-poem, here are some snippets: “All dressed up with nowhere to go / I love your sleeve-pulling nervousness […] Every single inch of you is somebody's claim / The familiar refrain / Of their glory and your shame […] The colds, the flus, the reds, the blues / The buy-to-let, the play-to-lose / The straight lies, the strange truth." If you expect that kind of highwire reflectiveness from Tempest, note that the biggest surprise is how successfully they fold guests into their singular sound, from Grian Chatten and Liane La Havas to Confucius MC and Kevin Abstract. A MINUS
Joshua Ray Walker: See You Next Time (2021)
Opens with two songs that sit a little uncomfortably in their respective sentimental and yeehaw settings before sliding into a late-night groove with the comfortably grief-stricken ‘Cowboy’ and more than comfortably fabulous ‘Sexy After Dark’, which exceeds the limits of its genre trappings with ball-squeezing high notes and back-to-back horn and organ solos. After that, Walker hits the coyote howls Brooce attempted on Nebraska, doles out commonplaces like they're all he knows, burns a tank-load of fossil fuel on a steam-powered chug, makes dumpster diving jiggable, and sees the ordinary beauty in gas station roses because ordinary is what he represents. A pop-country adept with a fantastic falsetto and knack for quirking country tropes, his writing isn't yet as chewy as his sound. When he figures that out, he'll earn that Gram Parsons shirt. B PLUS