An Acute Case: 22 September 2023

Various detritus: old shoes, rare fish, baseball cards

Barbie: The Album
Amidst made-to-measure snippet-songs that only suit Ice Spice: an existential Billie ballad, PinkPantheress meets River Dance, a "Butterfly" cover I didn’t know I needed, and Ava Max confirming her Eurotrash is best heard one song at a time. ** (“Barbie World” “Angel”)

bar italia: Tracey Denim
Lo-fi, low key, glamourless, and maybe even classless, this Matador-approved trio mixes dour dorm-room jams with the beery lassitude of Br*tpop while maintaining a carefully managed real-life mystery. But they’re no posers. With understated eloquence, they verbalise an enervation that in the current climate signifies politically. Non-verbally, they demonstrate plenty of drive. In the squirming and tangled guitars. In the baton-passing vocals shared between burbling Sam Fenton, cracked Jezmi Fehmi, and monochrome Nina Cristante. In the rich textural soundscapes only they can access and we’re lucky to get a glimpse of. A MINUS

Chuck D as Mistachuck: We Wreck Stadiums
For 36 of the 50 hip-hop-blessed years this MLB tie-in celebrates, Chuck D has been the genre’s pre-eminent orator: well-informed, persuasive, not unaccustomed to buffoonery. As that’s the same profile as a sports commentator, he’s the ideal frontman here. Originally conceived for TV spots, these 29 minutes have a bish-bash-bosh attack that doesn’t stop them cohering sonically or autobiographically. The latter because in addition to imbuing his prosopography with such old-fashioned concepts as good beats, Chuck demonstrates how sporting myth is entwined with individual identity. His heroes don’t appear on no stamps because they’re on his baseball cards, with the 1971 All-Stars game the night those cards came to life and 2020 the year he had to put too many of them to rest. I had to Google the meaning of “get that ivy off the walls” (see: Wrigley Fields) and the non-pun definition of “Warning Track” (a change in surface at the perimeter to warn fielders there’s a wall nearby, possibly covered in ivy). Which is fine with me. Chuck famously called hip hop the black CNN. I just checked—they cover sports. B PLUS

Coi Leray: COI
Bolshy and blatant 26-year-old all but confirms the artlessness of her style is deliberate by slapping big dumb samples on big dumbs beats for 16 songs in a row, which can’t be an accident. Now just for some memorable lines. * (“Bitch Girl” “Black Rose”)

corook: serious person (part 1)
What at first sounds slight going on vanishingly thin over seven delicate and occasionally goofy songs reveals itself to be remarkably well-wrought, with no sign of strain in 28-year-old Corrine Savage’s fluttering melodies or soft vocals. The effect (if not the finer points—Savage has a dual degree from Berklee, so let’s assume some of this is over my head) is simple, each song building to almost an imperceptible climax. But as Savage is the most thoughtful, insightful, devastating lyricist to emerge since the boygeniuses (beyond them, I’d have to reach back as far as Kimya Dawson), I’m so transfixed that perceiving nuance isn’t an issue. Some songs are inseparable from Savage’s trans experience. Some unrelated. Some are a mix. All are mixed-up. Yet they never suggest their experience is the same as anybody else’s. They’re just being the them-est of them so you can be the you-est of you. As the one called “tiny little titties” goes: “One size fits all except for me.” If the mood is more solemn than you’d like or Savage thinks (they called the title ironic), note that it doesn’t preclude a song about being a fish, a rock, and a sock with kazoo on accompaniment. A

The Cucumbers: Old Shoes
After 20 years, 80’s jangle babies Deena Shoshkes and hubby Jon Fried return with a baby of their own on drums and seven new songs, the most they could manage on the single studio day that fitted round son Jamie’s med school exams. He’s off on a psychiatry internship now and good luck to him. While they were raising him, they didn’t stop writing. Nor did Shoshkes lose any of her subtle wit or succour. Accompanied by Fried’s elegant banjo and here and there loving backing vocal, she’s an optimist with a special line in domestic keep-it-freshness. The title track’s the clincher, as title tracks should be, with its metaphor given due poignancy: “We've been through all kinds of weather / Think of all the steps we've taken together / I may not be shiny and new / But I'm the one that fits you.” Apparently, it’s a follow-up to first and only hit “My Boyfriend”, who, you may recall, doesn’t wash the dishes or the floor. Now, the only time Shoshkes loses her cool (because he still hasn’t made his will?) is on the as-advertised “I’m Over That”—as fresh and sprightly as anything else that breezes by in 23 minutes. A MINUS

Dream Wife: Social Lubrication
Probably an overreach, with the hits their forthright feminism and saucy vocals and the misses the tried and tired riffs and bungled lyrics. * (“Hot (Don’t Date a Musician)” “Leech”)

Water From My Eyes: Everybody’s Crushed
Alternately making something out of nothing and something else out of nothing, it’s not hard to hear this as radically new but not easy to understand what it’s doing. Where music guy Nate Amos’s collaboration with ex Lily Konigsberg is song-first cringe-confessional, this collaboration with other ex Rachel Brown is also song-first but Brown’s lyrical approach is more about how the words feel. Also, about counting. After all, how much is fourteen? The 90’s boy-ache in Brown’s voice is captivating both on its own and as part of the genre games that are Amos’s metier, while the freedom from meaning lets him to take his antilogic further than ever. Underpinned by a commitment to song form made plain by an opener called “Structure” and a commitment to commerce made plain by a closer called “Buy My Product”, they manage to take you with them. Learn to appreciate it and you might hear Hypopop. Learn to love it and you might not laugh “early Eno” out of the room. A