April 2022: listening report
How much is a package holiday to Bhora? Is the new Billy Woods a steamed risotto or a bowl of Rice Krispies? Where’s Fu Manchu on the Wet Leg debut? All the big music questions answered here.
The exhortation at the start of Hard Times Never Kill is to ‘Go Bhora’, which had me so motivated I was down the travel agent the next day with precisely that request. Turns out it means “It’s a goal”, which didn’t get me anywhere fast, but hopefully will Daniel Gonora, the blind rhythm guitarist who leads Gonora Sounds and whose survival depends on his music in an all too real way. After a video of him and son Isaac (10 at the time) playing homemade instruments on the streets of Harare went viral, he got the opportunity to make the album. Though it was hardly plain sailing from there; the sessions had to be powered by 50 litres of black-market diesel to circumvent Zimbabwe’s patchy power network. The style is sangura, which an unacademic glance at academic literature tells me defies common definitions of cosmopolitan music by being genuinely multi-ethnic and multi-national, borne as it was from Zimbabwe’s independence movement. There are strains of township jive and Congolese rumba, to name two I can ID on my own. The songs—which cover betrayal, travelling across the world to provide the bare necessities for your family, reproval for backsliders, and overcoming adversity—are rarely less than ecstatic. The band is wild and freewheeling, though, in a paradox familiar to Franco and James Brown fans, their expansive playing only proves the firmness of the bandleader’s control. Also in Brownian style, Daniel Gonora often plays hype man at his own show, gruffly cracking jokes as the band take each song to the far reaches of rapture. The star turn comes from Isaac (now 17), who’s not only playing a real drumkit but beating the shit out of it. If you hear anything more uplifting this year, you’ve accidentally hit repeat.
At the more lucrative end of the non-English music spectrum is Rosalía.
On MOTOMAMI, she grants few concessions to anglophones (other than making The Weeknd sing in Spanish), “traditional” Latin pop, or, presumably, her label, who no doubt suggested she did something with more melodic after the success of ‘Con Altura’, etc. But the only beat she’s stepping to is the one in her head. Or rather, her body, from whence these fifteen phenomenally whacky songs emanate before registering somewhere in yours (your ass, I should think). That might explain why—besides Maddy’s translation of an “I want you to do Hentai to me” here and an “I’m unusual like an autopsy with no flesh” there, and a friend in Spain reporting that Rosalía’s recent lyrics have raised eyebrows—I haven’t gone out of my way to find them in English. Maybe that prevents me from assaying just how much new ground she breaks, but as a lifelong guesser I’ll happily say “lots” and add that I haven’t heard anything as outré since When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go. There are more earworms, drops, and contagious rhythms here than on the top 40 combined—just not always where or how you’d expect to find them. I don’t know whether the sirens, stomps, handclaps, glitches, and judicious piano (the steadiest of anything you could call a musical anchor) should cohere, but through uninhibited curiosity of her body, her voice, and her sexuality, Rosalía makes them. According to her streaming numbers, a global star. According to my Spanish correspondent, a tornada live. According to me, “So, so, so, so, so, so good.” (Okay, so there’s that anglophone concession.)
For those of you still buying physical music product, please note that the photos in the MOTOMAI CD booklet may give you a…
Wet Leg are third-generation village green preservationists who don’t have to parade their quaintness because it’s in their blood. Besides, they’ve got other things on their minds than Donald Duck, Vaudeville, and Variety, including cusp-of-thirty despondency, getting sucked into their phones, obliterating everyone at this party with a ray gun, getting high at the supermarket, sexual politics both ways, and the most gut-kicking heartbreak since some kid yelled “I still fucking love you” last year. Over the course of an album, rather than scattered across singles, the demure voices that sounded merely mischievous when you still thought they were a fluke achieve a plainness so honest it’ll put bubbles in your tummy. Coy they might be, but not shy—not with lines as forthright as, “What makes you think you’re good enough to think about me when you’re touching yourself?”, “Sometimes life gets hard to deal. I like you, you’ve got sex appeal”, and “Sorry if I seemed a little bit upset when you said she looks a little bit like me when we first met.” Not to mention as dry as, “Mummy, Daddy, look at me. I went to school and I got a degree” or “I went home. All alone. Checked my phone. Oh. No.” Their emotional legibility is matched by a nothing-but-hooks simplicity possibly necessitated by their having only just graduated to Intermediate noise guitar. But while they’re so confident flaunting the commercial viability that sets them considerably further apart from their sprechpunk peers than the four miles between the Isle of Wight and the mainland, I’m all for it. As famous post-punk J.R.R. Tolkien wrote: “One chord to rule them all.”
And now to the significantly larger Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that is Shueyville, Iowa (is this right?)
On Raised, a busier band with a bigger beat anchor Hailey Whitters’ tendency for the country float that didn’t hold back 2020’s The Dream as much as let it drift. Their liveliness lights a fire under her passions, which lights a fire under her writing, which lights a fire under her singing. Neat, that. The singing’s fragrant and saucy, her writing savours sentences so packed with syllables and flipped syntax that the seams start to strain, while her passions include country customs, country quirks, country politics, country families, and country landscapes. And if that isn’t clear, she dedicates more time to piecing together the country patchwork she’s so proud of than placing herself in it. Maybe as a result she loses the personal-life details that would fill out why “Watchin’ a good thing go to hell” inevitably leads to “I know that story a little too well”. But there’s bigger-picture context a-plenty: “More cousins than we had friends / A piggyback pyramid to fit ‘em all in” or “Ain’t left, ain’t right, we’re just left right in the middle of America”. At her best, she describes her milieu and her place in it at the same time. At her most generous, she insists “everybody oughta” sample the country life once. Though she’s gracious enough to add, “I ain’t sayin’ everybody’s gotta”. So I better put ‘good country manners’ on that list.
And now, via billy woods’ childhood memories, we’re back in Zimbabwe.
I suspect woods uses the same method as me to steam his rice, and after spoiling last week’s risotto by peeking too early, I’m reluctant to take the lid off Aethiopes for fear any attempt to deconstruct the way he complexifies autobiographical fragments and historical titbits to form his personal-political analysis will end in another stodgy mess. So let’s just say this is rap where Chinua Achebe references are low-hanging literary fruit, and cite the opener, which mixes childhood memories of the security measures put in by his new neighbour (exiled Ethiopian President Mengistu Haile Mariam) and his parent’s relationship breakdown: “Some nights strange music plays, I lay in bed and listen / Downstairs I hear my mother breaking dishes, my father trippin' / It's been quite bad lately, high tension / Galvanized steel security fencin'.” That’s probably as simple as this gets. woods’ voice is a bone-dry bark, not aggressive enough to get him escorted out of the post office but enough to put security on alert. Unsurprisingly for someone who says he lives in his mind, he treats the beat like diegetic sound, and is met with similar ambivalence from producer Preservation. They aren’t talking to each other; they’re talking at the same time. Annoying when that guy in HR does it, but given woods’ level of (ahem) interiority, oddly sympathetic. Rhythms disappear as quickly as they emerge, live instruments chip in unexpectedly, and crate-dug samples from who knows where keep things off-kilter. These are the kind of rhythms you say you hear in the Snap, Crackle and Pop of your cereal while your family rolls their eyes. A healthy reminder that alt-anything doesn’t just have to be a cute aesthetic. Sometimes it’s a genuine attempt to do something radical.
As for the nearly-rans, Aldous Harding’s bag lady bit comes unstuck when you see they’re those £15 totes. It’s well-appointed freak-folk and the worse for it. Especially strange is why, with all those Velvet-y guitar parts, it doesn’t cross her mind to speed up. Full of quirky, knobbly hooks that’ll make you frown (in a good way) but held back by the timidity that’s as endemic in Indie-anything as ever. Elsewhere (Niger), Etran de K'air do the hypnotic desert blues thing more vibrantly than most, but as with a lot of stuff in this style, after you’ve circled round the rhythm for the hundredth time, it begins to feel like an endurance test—though admittedly that makes the riotous finale a welcome slap back to reality. Meanwhile, everything on Bad Bad Hats’ Walkman sounds like the soundtrack to an establishing shot in 10 Things I Hate About You.
Wet Leg: Wet Leg (Grade: A)
ROSALÍA: MOTOMAMI (Grade: A)
Gonora Sounds: Hard Times Never Kill (Grade: A)
billy woods: Aethiopes (Grade: A minus)
Hailey Whitters: Raised (Grade: A minus)
Etran de K'air: Agadez (Grade: B plus)
Aldous Harding: Warm Chris (Grade: B plus)
Honourable mentions
Bad Bad Hats: Walkman
Sarah Shook & The Disarmers: Nightroamer
Nas: Magic
Moneybagg Yo: A Gangsta's Pain
Nilüfer Yanya: PAINLESS
Mike Kuster: Better Late Than Never
Juice WRLD: Fighting Demons