An Acute Case: 9 June 2023

White rappers, radical gourmands, personal albums, death albums, and a song I know that'll get on your nerves

Brandy Clark: Brandy Clark
The personal album is a paradox. While the specifics of the artist's experience are unique to them, the general themes—love, heartbreak, fondness for grandma—are shared by everyone. For Clark, who’s stood out for a decade because of the novelty and ingenuity of her fictions, you’d think this would pose a bigger problem. But as those same stories are underpinned by an emotional acuity rare in even the sharpest confessional writing, her main challenge was making herself the primary subject. For that, all she needed was Brandi Carlisle bossing her around. Usually a tad too polished for my taste, here the combination of Carlisle’s neat and tidy with Clark’s word perfect is potent, with the plinked and plucked instrumentation accenting the uncommon maturity of the lyrics. In almost half, Clark is the bigger person, literally taking her unrequited love to her grave on “Buried”, negotiating a truce with her own insecurity on “Dear Insecurity”, permitting a girlfriend to live fast and loose so she’ll settle down on “Come Back To Me”, and giving her emotional resources to a friend who’s clean out of their own on “Take Mine”. The most morally ambiguous moment is when she counsels one half of a fraying couple to break up and advocates (gasp) lying. Significantly more ambiguous than when she drowns a child molester. A MINUS

Jack Harlow: Jackman.
Thoroughly decent guy. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Or, if my tally is correct, “black” more than once in thirty minutes, which I’m sure means something even if I can’t say what. Manages to fit ten songs into that half hour though, and such brevity is his friend, because I reckon he'd tie himself in knots with a longer run time. As it is, his commitment to figuring his shit out in public is highly commendable, his beats are no less soulful than anything on NO THANK YOU, and his flow makes his naysayers look like chumps. After leading with an insider’s take on white appropriation, he discharges his braggard duties with the requisite élan, only later frets about how convincing those brags are. In between come two studies of socialised masculinity that are plenty convincing—one concerning the conditionality of ridin’ for your dawgs when those dawgs have done bad things, the other giving voice to an emotionally inarticulate little brother-older brother-dad dynamic. If it takes a couple of listens before you notice they’re separate characters, well, he’s also figuring out how to rap in different voices. Sensibly, he sequences “It must be my skin / I can’t think of any other reason I’d win” towards the end, by which point you know him well enough to conclude it isn’t a dog whistle. If you miss when Macklemore was good, the wait is over. If you miss when Macklemore was funny, hang tight. A MINUS

Joy Oladokun: Proof of Life
Broken by L.A., 31-year-old desert native finds salvation in pop that’s pragmatic about coping (“we’re all gonna die” indeed) and convincing when it comes to her personality—though not her originality, which is what Mike Elizondo was hired for. ** (“Keeping The Light On” “Taking Things For Granted” “We're All Gonna Die”)

Panic Shack: Baby Shack
Boasting two chords and a right to get lairy with anyone, four Cardiff women and their stand-in drummer uplift their spirited amateurism with hooks performed with the brio of ad jingles and themes that take longer to explain than to sing. They don’t wanna hold your baby. They do want their lighter back. And if you keep looking at them like that, they will jiu jits you. As is their patriotic duty, they also hammer Mannequinn men from “London tahn”, which is more politic than crowing about metropolitan elites. Emma Harvey’s vocals are just about similar enough to Amy Taylor’s to call them Sniffy, though the way she pronounces “squirm” and hits the T in “date” stamps them with regional identity. If it's not too ridiculous to say about punk, their sound is a little underdeveloped, but they deliver on the quiet build-ups and, by the end, even start tweaking the rhythms from one verse to the next. Only turnoff is the title pun, which I could have spared you. But if it’s in my head, it might as well be in yours. A MINUS

P!nk: TRUSTFALL
Anyone who says “I want my life to be a Whitney Houston song” is a balladeer at heart, and P!nk is still the model for belters from Adele on. She's getting wiser as she gets older, so expect that she’s got better ones than this in her. And be grateful that she isn’t ready to put away her dancing shoes—as no 43-year-old should be. * (“Kids In Love” “Never Gonna Not Dance Again” “Hate Me”)

Paul Simon: Seven Psalms
A meditation on faith and death that takes its point of departure from the hallowed Davy Graham guitar piece “Anji” and, inevitably, a dream. If that has you worried about heavy-handed profoundness, rest assured that Simon’s fleet melodies and canny orchestration of elemental sound FX keep things moving. He's also such a natural equivocator that disagreements with himself are the closest he comes to preaching. The man can’t settle on anything—including songs. Though neatniks will be tempted to carve up the seven semi-distinct parts, that would undermine the gestalt of the diaphanous whole. Like the way the same tumbledown tune leads him to consider “all of life's abundance in a drop of condensation” or our time on earth as “two billion heartbeats and out” as readily as offer his pro-fessional op-in-yun in a dispute between cows or troo-loo-loo till his time’s up. When he does confront the Lord, it's to personify him as covid, the ocean rising, his record producer, his own personal joke. When he confronts mortality, he wobbles: “Wait I’m not ready I’m just packing my gear.” Only when wife Edie Brickell sings the most angelic lines on the album is he ready to meet Julio down by the graveyard. A MINUS

Superviolet: Infinite Spring
”How come all my candour comes across as grandeur?” “I'm a locket with my own face in the frame” “Calling the shots or just calling shotgun.” Non-emoting Phil Elverum here, Rivers Cuomo doing organic veg box folk there. Always tuneful. Mostly nasal. Occasionally on the cusp of something better. * (“Good Ghost” “Locket” “Infinite Spring”)

billy Woods & Kenny Segal: Maps
Pork belly brined, braised, and deep fried. Fresh mint, Thai basil, and pickled watermelon rind. Skate wing, brown butter, capers, and sprigs of thyme. Framboise, ginger root, mussels, pomme frites, and confit leeks. Chicken dotted with bird’s eye chili seeds. Conch fritters. Julienned scallions. Mezcal negronis. 2:1:1 daquiris. Off-the-block Guyanese rice and peas. In-N-Out burgers. Single origin cannabis. And before you accuse me of getting side-tracked, not only is the culinary detail a big part of why I enjoy this album, it represents a big part of Woods’s growth. The world may be a series of gamified social interactions best viewed through a peephole, but like many radicals before him, he’s having to contend with domesticity. Not that the crankiest rapper alive has become tranquil; food may be a pleasure, but dinner with the neighbours still involves whispering in the host’s ear until he’s found with a hose run from the exhaust. As for couple’s therapy on Zoom: disaster. But he’s got a reason to make it work. The closer finds him pushing “the baby” on a swing thinking how “anything at all could happen to him.” So when he raps “Kids you and your friends gon have to start again” on his DOOM/Ghostface hook-up with Danny Brown, you can be sure he’s got a particular infant in mind. Musically, it's as it was. The chipped and irregular beats still reflect his uncomfortable relationship with structure. But now they drift more than they churn. Like, well, background music at a dinner party. B PLUS