An Acute Case: 20 April 2024
A motormouth reckons with success, a bohemian touches the divine, and the prettiest yowl in americana doesn't miss
Grrrl Gang: Spunky!
In the punk tradition this Indonesian trio isn’t really part of except their name and label make it easy to pretend they are, these 10 songs in 25 minutes are short, smart, direct, and not without a sense of adventure—so at least they nailed the title, right down to the punctuation. Either side of a gauzy mini suite in the middle that recharges their batteries, Angeeta Sentara makes the most of a youth envious oldies would do well to remember isn’t all smooth sailing; “I’m a useless cum dump” doesn’t inspire longing sighs. But even with insecurities running amok and full-blown adulthood already in view (“you’re never gonna be this young ever again” she cheers—admittedly, while egging on a fight at a karaoke bar) she manages to relish experiences that will hopefully prove foundational: “when you hold my thigh / it’s never a waste of my time.” If that’s true after the next 22 years of her life, she’s done all right. A MINUS
Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future
“Real House” might seem like an inauspicious start—digressive story, tentative vocal, barely-there piano—but it’s tactically shrewd. The way it resolves as a roundabout account of the first time Lenker saw her mum cry sets the tone for what follows, while the style underscores just how melodically durable and compelling the other 11 songs are, even as they test the limits of fragility. Broadly, her theme is intimacy, which, even though her latest relationship is over, she still regards with doe-eyed wonder. “The mirror is your eye on mine” goes a poetic stab at its ineffability; “you're cooking dinner, it's getting round half past ten / I haven't felt so good since I don't know where and I don't know when” goes a prosaic ones. Because she’s no fair-weather bohemian, she uses whatever musical means will get her closer to the divine. Consequently, her outsider art sometimes sounds a little like insider art. But whether it’s the bent notes of “Fool”, the distorted guitars of “Vampire Empire”, or the down-home simplicity of “Free Treasure”, it all builds the case that when she sings, “I’m a child humming into the clarity of black space”, such purity really might be within her reach. A
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis
The funk is for certain, but the fun is only theoretical. ** (“That Thang” “The Time Is The Place”)
Teens in Trouble: What's Mine
Growing up awkwardly, thoughtfully, power cordially. * (“Awkward Girl” “Playlist”)
Tyvek: Overground
From 4,000 miles away, this chaos-punk sounds exactly like my idea of post-industrial Detroit: as if half a dozen laid-off machine operators broke into their old plant and attempted to restart production but kept getting the sequence wrong. Horns blare, guitar strings snap, drum sets collapse, but oddly it’s neither aggressive or unpleasant. Partly, that’s cause lead singer Kevin Boyer (the only constant in an outfit with a “past members” list exceeding 30) doesn’t yell or scream—just strains to be heard. Partly, cause the real reason those machine operators broke in is they enjoy being together. Nothing except the title track (at 6:51, three times as long as the average song here) is tuneful per se, but every song has a hook, or perhaps more accurately a snag. One of them, “Trash & Junk”, serves as a decent summary of the lyrical style, which seems like random jumble until you suspect it isn’t. Of the lines I can discern without a cheat sheet, consider these: "is it too late to be stateless?"; "redundancies from the skies above"; "everyone has now left the chat"; "I'm seeing U-Hauls everywhere"; "the algorithm screams out of cheap speakers." Makes sense in Detroit? A
Waxahatchee: Tiger’s Blood
Though she’s got the prettiest yowl in americana, I still gravitate to Katie Crutchfield’s lower register for the way it sharpens lines that can tend dithyrambic when she gives them the full works. So for me, record number six fell into place on “Bored”, with its “sage advice to rebut” and “dexterous protesting”, and kept going with the snippier still “Lone Star Lake”, whose morsels include “if I cannot tell a lie / we might be here all night” and “shirk every rule of thumb / I got more where that came from.” But as good as her phrase turning and metaphor mixing is, her appeal is still a sound that’s bright and bucolic even when she proves the veracity of the claim that “I make a living crying “it ain’t fair.”” If that sound doesn’t differ hugely from recent releases—looser arrangements maybe, plus more male harmonies than I’d like—it also doesn’t miss. And front to back, it’s more well-rounded than Saint Cloud. But that’s not three albums in a row that could’ve been called In From The Storm. Might be time to venture out again. A MINUS
Wonder Women of Country: Willis, Carper, Leigh
Three country practitioners whose grasp of the genre is so scholarly their originals sound like covers, which still doesn’t stop the one cover from being best in show. * (“Hanging On To You” “I Have Met My Love Today”)
Yard Act: Where’s My Utopia?
My initial problem with the second album from this Leeds quartet wasn’t that it propels their already funky sprech to the next stage of “I think this is what disco sounds like”; the musical advances here are obvious, though perhaps as attributable to wilfulness as artfulness. It was that I thought James Smith had his sidelined politics for the introspections of the newly-therapised mind. But what became clear is that those introspections are political in the knottiest and hence most rewarding way. Without ever telling you what it’s doing, this documents the inner-workings of a hyperarticulate working-class northerner in his mid-thirties as he’s forced to reconcile success (lower-tier—after all, Norwich is still on their tour schedule) with his anti-capitalist principles and the moral impulses of fatherhood. His conclusion, happily, is to make hits—punchy, gag-filled, unpredictable ones—while on the way confronting the childhood causes of his adult idiosyncrasies, which only makes those idiosyncrasies (namely, being a sarky motormouth) more likable. Win-win. A MINUS
Not only is Real House potentially an inauspicious start to the Lenker album it almost had the effect of confirming my suspicion of her being one of the numerous vocalists who sound so bored and enervated with their own songs that you wonder why they expect anyone else to listen to them. The rest of the album convinced me that I was wrong and she’s a major talent. I haven’t enjoy Big Thief previously but I should have another listen on the basis of how good this is. The only other one here I’ve heard is the Waxahatchee which I like though I prefer Saint Cloud which was one of my favourite albums a couple of years ago.