February 2022: listening report
You're right, I should be more uncomfortable about championing RXKNephew.
A legendary rocker goes West End, indie bohos do the cabin in the woods thing, and two rappers—one guilt-ridden rapper and one transparently insane. Plus, Ian Brennan returns from Ghana’s “witch camps” with a sobering artifact.
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As the most theatrical of this month’s picks, I’ll raise the curtain on The Boy Named If. It shouldn’t be a surprise that pop polyglot Elvis Costello can turn his hand to something approaching musical theatre. It’s fertile ground for blending technical chops with crowd pleasing tunes, and the Impostors have more than a little oom-pah-pah in their step. It’s also where audiences go to not only marvel at spectacle, but at the mystery of how it’s accomplished. As a master of allusion and illusion, Costello is the perfect showman. “Disappeared with the dot of the decimal place”, “He wrote his name out in sugar on a Formica counter”, “If the judge comes to commute my sentence, dance a little jig on my repentance.” His phrases are so neat that for a long time I was waiting for them to reveal hidden meanings. But the joy of these puzzles is how the pieces feel rather than how they fit, how they look as they’re arranged and rearranged. When the yearning bridge in the title track implores you to “Taaake my haaand”, it’s only to tease a revelation, not to provide it.
On Trick Out The Truth, the penultimate song, he reels off a list of references grabbed from every corner of culture, high, low and middle. Its effortlessness is dizzying. Accompanied by a penny arcade of clicks and whirs, you can picture it as a set piece: Costello sauntering along a street, delivering his lines as exchanges with extras, reeling in the audience. Especially with a first line that seems to promise a reveal: “It’s a sin to tell a lie until we trick out the truth / That depends on what you do and don’t believe / What you have hidden up your sleeve”. But in the end, the set-up is the finale. And that’s how I like it. After all, who really wants to see what goes on in the wings?
Getting as far away from that razzmatazz as they can are Big Thief, whose Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (I’ll write that only once) is a retreat album that doesn’t get blown away by the giants of that sub-genre—meaning Exile on Main Street and the Basement Tapes—and how many albums of any sub-genre can you say that about? Or maybe it’s a retreats album, as it was recorded in four locations, with the intention of capturing a different sound in each one. Either way, the dirt under their nails and wood smoke in their hair gives it a cabin-in-the-woods feel. And it’s intensely insular. So much so that even though there are no politics I can identify, the insularity itself feels political—as if their rambling, organic songs, shot through with unblemished romanticism, couldn’t exist in the real world. Or maybe it’s political because every song is about purity and love, and who says those things can’t mix with politics? I don’t know, and that’s okay, because unknowability is at the heart of what makes these twenty songs so gorgeous.
From the already-famous potato knish line to the goofy exclamation of “That’s my grandma!” to the spectacular boings of a jaw harp to the computer-assisted trip-folk in the middle to the pots-and-pans clatter that resolves into Time Escaping, Dragon… is insatiably hungry and unquenchably thirsty. Not for answers. For the search for answers. In a passage that works the same ground as the Velvet’s Some Kinda Love, Lenker essentially describes the conditions the band has created to conduct their search: “What if all the time between / the words we say and what we mean / would roll as softly as a stream / that we could ride? / We'd ride the bend from source to mouth / I want a friend from north to south / to build that question as a house / where we'd reside.” Earlier on, she asks “What’s it gonna take to free the celestial body?” The answer has something to do with your elbows. They’re what rub up against the edges of experience, you see. (Do you?!)
That’s the nice, homely brand of authenticity out of the way. Now let’s get to RXKNephew.
In December, I had my brains blown out by his comic-horror masterpiece american tteroristt. If you want your song of the year to capture something of the public mood, look no further (it’s from 2020 but whatever). There’s no way to prepare for the nine minutes of delirious, conspiracy-fuelled nihilism. Imagine Murder Most Foul but shorter, more deranged, and not hiding a QAnon t-shirt under a jumper. After that, Frank Kogan teed me up for more by naming Slitherman Activated one of his six favourite albums of last year. It’s the weirdest rap I’ve heard since my first encounter with Young Thug, which was weirder than anything I’d heard since alien-era Lil Wayne, which makes Neph one of the three weirdest rappers of the last fifteen years.
On one hand, it's the music of rampant mistrust and hatred spilled over after a lifetime of bubbling disaffection and nothingness—the kind decent people have been appalled by for the last 6+ years. On the other hand, it’s hilarious. Over frantic, haphazard, and probably bad production (I’m in too deep to say for sure), he shouts, barks, threatens, and spews with frightening energy. The style is surely improvised, the sincerity impossible to pin down. Purportedly, he released over 300 songs last year and will rap over any beat for a nominal fee (which explains why the beat is often the subject of his ire), so it’s likely any line between performance and reality has been completely dissolved by now. In the long run, this sounds terrible for him. He eggs himself on with his own performed vituperation. Given how nakedly he reveals the size of his drug problem and appetite for violence, that can’t end well.
Early Age Death, one of two songs here on the same level as american tterroristt, makes plain that the pain and suffering he wishes on everybody else starts from within. Unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible to quote from, as its power lies in cumulative comedy-rage. But let’s see if I can squeeze one in anyway: “I hate Impalas and hate Ford Tauruses / I hate Nissan Altimas and Honda Accords / I hate most cars with two doors / I'm tall as fuck, I need my shit custom.” The other showstopper is Beam On Ya Toes. In it, Neph asks, “Who wanna fuck up they life?”, vows “I’ma make drugs cool again / Make a bitch snort coke like they in school again”, and repeats “Walk in that bitch like ‘fuck rehab’” five times. At 2:30, you think the worst is over, but he’s just waiting for a flash of inspiration abomination. It duly comes as he launches into his most irresponsible diatribe. “Whenever I perform this I’m giving out free cocaine!... Free coke!... Hurgh!... If you goin’ through withdrawal right now. You sweating. You can’t eat. You throwing up. You rolling around… you nah’m’sayin’… You ain’t got no appetite until you get high? Do. Some. Mo’. Drugs!” If you want art that shows the ugliest sides of humanity, you’re in business. If you want art as an instruction manual for life, move along. From the conscienceless…
…to the excessively conscientious. Following the dark and depressed Care For Me, Saba takes a small step forward on Few Good Things, mostly by lightening the tone, if not the weight of his load. The atmosphere is something like early Spring. Listen closely and you can hear chalk outlines being drawn on the pavement for the syncopated drums to hopscotch over. Strings flutter like a dawn chorus, and computer-generated sounds are convincingly, um, environmental. But Saba’s is a cautious optimism, with more strings attached than Tippi Hedren filming The Birds. What’s eating him is the burden of responsibility that comes with making loadsa money after having barely any. To hear him tell it, life was simpler when he was poor. Now he's rich, he’s taking care of at least ten buddies, and if he falls, there’s no one there to lend him rope. Not to make Few Good Things sound like a rich man’s jeremiad. He’s wise enough to count his blessings, he just recognises that some of them aren’t all they were cracked up to be (taxes! damn!)
What makes his “survivor’s guilt rhetoric” so exciting is how he maintain his singular focus even while making his job twice as hard by rapping around or against the beat (when there is one). “There’s food on the table, I’m grateful I don’t give a fuck about a label” is his thanksgiving blessing. “What good is the flight if you can’t fly your whole family out?” is aspirational wealth advice. “I'ma order pasta that I cannot properly pronounce / Keep my doors open in case a n- pop up on my couch” his CSR strapline.
You can find more beatific atmosphere on Anansy Cisse’s Anoura. He specialises in slippery guitar-work, liquid vocals, and rhythms that sound like droplets of water landing on rocks from a great height. That effect is at its most heavenly on Balkissa. Within his intricate framework, Cisse is nimble, supple, and above all modest. Staying in West Africa, but moving to something far sadder, ethnomusicologist Ian Brennan has recorded music made by women in Ghana’s “witch camps”—settlements where those accused of witchcraft have set up community. At times I've Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be is so visceral it sounds like the women are inside the recording equipment. And because Brennan trimmed six hours down to twenty songs in just thirty-five minutes, the changes in tone and pace can be shocking. The transition from the amateur blues of We Are No Different To You to the clamorous Love is a hammer-blow. Other song titles include Hatred Drove Me From My Home and Everywhere I Turn, There Is Pain.
Sticking with short and sparse, the sameyness of Onetwothree’s rhythms is by turns irritating, amusing and audacious. Same goes for Klaudia Schifferle’s voice. Guttural, cold, even unstable, she sounds like a hopeless children’s storyteller, projecting in a way devoid of animation. To put it another way: she’s Swiss. But rather than balance out the repetitiveness, the band double down on it. Pretty much everyone is playing bass, and in consecutive songs the lyrics go, “Fake sweets / Fake lips / Fake dreams / Fake hips / Fake fun / Fake sun / Fake idols / Fake fakes” and “Shake my bubble / Break my bubble / Free my bubble / Clean my bubble / Bounce my bubble / Playing my bubble / Dream my bubble / Clear of bubblers.” After that comes Things. Bet you can guess how it goes. At a stretch, Palberta5000 is Onetwothree’s Amer-indie counterpart, but minus the dadaism and more amateur. That may be a come-on, but it’s also a turn off. They’re tuneful and cutesy, which is good, but in a way that recalls novelty mugs with cartoons of talking cows on them, which is bad.
At the other end of the scale, LUMP (a collaboration between Mike Lindsay and Laura Marling) are, if anything, too professional. Or maybe I’m just disappointed by how comfortable they appear in these tasteful electronic trappings. Animal is so lapidary that I suspect they haven’t taken their own advice to Climb Every Wall. It’s too easy. But it’s also wittier than I expected (“Lately you’ve been thinking about leaving / Trying to wipe the heart from your sleeve” is punny, no?) so I look forward to next time, when they hopefully push themselves harder. It’ll also help if they remind me less of LaRoux. Laurel Hell has a similar polish, but more forced. Squeezing everything she can from cathedral dynamics and throwbacks to throwbacks to throwbacks, Mitski realises her version of the fashionable “80s but sad” aesthetic as well as she can with material this thin. Occasionally, her enervation is helpful. Everyone, for example, has a cracking start: “Everyone / All of them / Everyone said / "Don't go that way" / So, of course / To that I said / "I think I'll go that way." But then it peters out. Takeaway: don’t make albums when you’ve run out of ideas.
Finally, after enduring three dimensions of bog-standard R’n’B from Amber Marks, Kirby gets noticeably deeper by i) giving her hooks some TLC and ii) sticking to a single dimension (a pun!): the break-up. No song on Sis. He wasn’t the one (great title) falls flat, but they’re also too slight to give these 10 songs in 27 minutes staying power. She pulls off her Baduizms—singing “I don’t funk with him no more” one notch higher than her highest register—and has a knack for simply-put sentiments that don’t resort to boilerplate. “I wish I loved somebody that much” and “I blame the internet” are favourites. They’re from different songs, but are, I feel, not unrelated.
Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (Grade: A)
Saba: Few Good Things (Grade: A minus)
RXKNephew: Slitherman Activated (Grade: A minus)
Elvis Costello: The Boy Named If (Grade: A minus)
Anansy Cisse: Anoura (Grade: A minus)
Onetwothree: Onetwothree (Grade: B plus)
LUMP: Animal (Grade: B plus)
Honourable mentions
Mitski: Laurel Hell
Kirby: Sis. He wasn’t the one
Palberta: Palberta5000
Witch Camp (Ghana): I've Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be
Sublime description of Big Dragon New Warm Biscuit Champion. Couldn't agree more. Don't judge Laura too harshly on LUMP, her solo stuff is much better.