Here are my thoughts on the latest from Everything Everything, Hollow Coves, BrhyM, Young Oceans, Norah Jones, RAYE, Kele, Kacey Musgraves, Elbow, Wye Oak, and Jason Wade.
Everything Everything – Mountainhead
The concept behind Everything Everything’s seventh album is that it takes place in a society obsessed with building an absurdly high mountain, even at the cost of driving its poorest members deeper and deeper into the holes dug in the ground to create this mountain. Seems like a pretty obvious metaphor for wealth disparity, sort of like a vertical rather than horizontal take on the world built by The Dear Hunter in Antimai, but I’m not complaining. I love it when these guys go high-concept – it fits their electronic rock sound well, since their music has always hinted at possible near future dystopias in one way or another. They’ve scaled back the artificial dance-pop aspects of 2020’s Raw Data Feel (which were entirely appropriate on that AI-assisted album) in favor of more live instrumentation – this makes the music no less melodic or catchy, though perhaps it’s a bit less in your face about wanting to be so. A few of the singles were among the first tracks to get me hooked here – particularly the swaggery “End of the Contender” with its weird flex that “My battery’s 100%” and the chirpy female backing vocal that acts as a percussive element in the electropop gem “Cold Reactor”. Things get more sinister in the back half of the album (when do they ever not with these guys?) with the chilling “Canary”, the furiously upbeat “Don’t Ask Me to Beg”, and the haunting groove of “Enter the Mirror” – a triple threat leading into what might be a tad long of a wind-down over the last few of this album’s fourteen tracks. Like Raw Data Feel, I’m not convinced that the record needed to be this long in order to hit the necessary points of its narrative, but also like that album, I enjoy it quite a bit more than 2020’s REANIMATOR. These guys have been incredibly busy – and remarkably consistent – throughout the 2020s so far, and here’s hoping they keep up the unnervingly good work.
Hollow Coves – Nothing to Lose
This Australian indie folk/pop act continues to be unfortunately aptly named on their second LP, which I can say is at least a bit more upbeat and immediate than their bland debut Moments from back in 2019, but which still doesn’t have a ton to offer in terms of interesting instrumentation, chord progressions, songwriting that goes beyond the generic “Hey, isn’t life grand and isn’t nature scenic?” type observations that I can imagine would sound great as bumper music in some travel vlogger’s latest YouTube upload, but that don’t really hold a lot of meaningful insights or evoke a lot of emotions when you really get down to it. The opening title track, the marginally quirky “Photographs”, and the upbeat closer “See You Soon” are marginally catchy, I guess, but there’s a swath of largely mid-tempo material in between that utterly fails to captivate. Every now and then I notice a bit of acoustic finger-picking or a soothing harmony vocal, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you after glancing at the tracklisting which songs they came from. At the end of it all, I feel like I’ve been brought to a shoreline that used to have glorious sea caves, but centuries of being beaten down by wave after wave of relentless repetition have left the site ruined and hollow. And I’m like, “OK, it’s another beach. You guys got anything more interesting to show me?”
BrhyM – Deep Sea Vents
Speaking of the ocean, here’s a record that picks a natural theme and goes to some surprisingly strange and deep places with it. The somewhat annoyingly named “BrhyM” is a collaboration between Bruce Horsnby and yMusic, artists who have worked together on numerous occasions before and who are no strangers to the avant-garde. yMusic might be best known for helping to orchestrate some of Bon Iver’s trippier flights of fancy, while Hornsby has done everything from jazz and country-influenced adult contemporary rock to bewilderingly obscure chamber pop over the years, and even for him, this is a strange one. Booming upright bass and blurting woodwind instruments hit you right away in the oddball groove of the opening track “The Wild Whaling Life”, which seems to draw an analogy between the long and risky voyages of a whaler and the mutual fascination that both of these artists have with exploring far beyond the boundaries of conventional pop music. And that’s one of the more accessible tracks, believe it or not. Whatever sorts of weird modal things these guys are doing on the bizarro compositions “Platypus Wow”, “The Wake of St. Brendan”, and the amusingly titled “Barber Booty”, you’d need someone with a much deeper grasp of music theory than I have to really explain it to you – there’s a certain cantankerous charm to all of these tracks, but they seem to spit on the fact of conventional melodic expectations. “Deep Blue”, with its bumping rhythm section, might be the closest thing to a single that this album can muster, but I figure the target audience for this sort of thing is probably more into nerding out over Hornsby’s weird and wonderful character portraits of different people (and other life forms) for whom the sea is their livelihood, be it fishermen, explorers, oceanographers, or even the denizens of the darkest underwater zones that no light can penetrate. Heck, I think a water itself might be the narrator of “Phase Change”, which describes the agonizing transformation between different states of matter as it evaporates and condenses and freezes and thaws. I suppose I deserved a curveball after Hornsby’s last record ‘Flicted proved to be surprisingly easy for me to get into – this one definitely won’t appeal to the nostalgic boomers still clamoring to hear the old hits at Hornsby’s concerts, but I bet there’s a Venn diagram where eccentric band geeks and obsessive science geeks meet that ought to appreciate what these guys are doing.
Young Oceans – Somehow I Know It’s Love
Yes, I know, another ocean-themed album. I swear I don’t put these all in a row on purpose – it’s just a confluence of early March release dates in this case. It’s been almost ten years now since I first turned the lights off and tried, slowly and patiently, to take in a Young Oceans album with no other hurried and cluttered thoughts crowding my mind. I feel like all of the albums put out by this diligently experimental and also deeply reverent Christian indie artist deserve that sort of a listen before I decide whether or not it’s for me. Unfortunately I usually walk away feeling like I respect what Young Oceans is doing but it isn’t really my thing. But I feel like I’m starting to warm up to their sound on this album, which isn’t a radical reinvention or anything, but some of the drum loops have a bit more crackle to them, some of the guitar and piano melodies that gently repeat over the course of a song feel like they have more of an emotional pull, and perhaps most crucially, none of this is dragged out to long climaxes like it sometimes could be on their older records. This is a tight 43 minutes of music with songs all hovering around the four-minute mark, each its own subtle blend of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, sometimes layering these elements rather hypnotically (the single and title track “Somehow” has been slowly winning me over with each spin) and sometimes stripping things back for more of a simple, natural atmosphere (see the meditative standout “Fields of Green”). The language here is very devotional, and if you’re an open-minded Christian music fan, I guess this could fall into the category of “worship music” since it’s intended to put you in that frame of mind without necessarily providing simplistic songs for a congregation to sing. I hear echoes of The Violet Burning here, sometimes Future of Forestry as well, and that’s pretty good company to be in.
Norah Jones – Visions
The joke back when Norah Jones started putting out extremely mellow, singer/songwriter-oriented jazz-pop in the early 2000s was that she was making music for an audience twice her age; she’s now been doing this for roughly half her life with zero apologies to jazz purists or to people who wish her music had a bit more edge to it. I’ll admit to being in the latter category – she’s got some ballads that make me swoon and some darker, more exploratory material that makes me glad she remembered her piano can play a wider range of chords than just the simple ones pop ballads are made of, but most of her albums past her first two have really only held my attention for a track or two, and this one’s no exception. “Staring at the Wall”, with its surprising emphasis on a gentle electric guitar riff and a steady drum beat that her piano slots into nicely, is about as upbeat as she’s ever gonna get’ it’s got a slightly nervous energy to it, and I love how she croons her way through it. The sparse title track seems to have been an inspired by a haunting, wake-up-from-a-dream vision of the world ending, and a few of the other tracks surrounding it also seem to hint at a general theme of appreciating what you’ve got and not taking for granted that it’ll stay the same way forever, which adds a touch of melancholy to the otherwise rather slow, safe, and procedural feeling that this album settles into during its midsection. There are a few moments where Norah hints at being more of a soul-influenced pop artist than a jazz-influenced one, which I wouldn’t mind if the melodies were richer – she finally delivers on that potential with the marginally upbeat and incredibly soothing closer “That’s Life”, hinting at a direction I can’t help but wish she’d explore a little more boldly. Who am I kidding, though – I’ve never been the target audience for Norah’s music, and it seems like a bit of a fluke now that Come Away with Me ever grabbed my attention in the first place, leading to admittedly unrealistic expectations of everything she’s put out since then.
RAYE – My 21st Century Blues
This London-based singer/songwriter who pulls together elements of hip-hop, R&B, electropop, and soul, sometimes reminds me of a grittier Alicia Keys, though that’s my no means an exhaustive description of her sound. She’s apparently been putting out independent recordings and making a name for herself as a songwriter since her teenage years, though this is her full-length debut, released last year to quite a bit of acclaim. I can see why – she constantly changes up the pacing and energy of her sound to keep things entertaining, while also pulling zero punches about exactly how much weight the world has put on the younger generation’s shoulders. Whether it’s the responsibility to call out unfair treatment of women and minorities in the music industry (“Ice Cream Man” in particular is a harrowing depiction of her being smooth-talked by a sleazy record producer), or just the speed at which evolving technology, climate change, and changing cultural mores are hurtling forward and making it impossible to keep up (the thrillingly motor-mouthed “Environmental Anxiety”), she’s got a lot more on her mind her than I feel like anyone still in their 20s should ever have to deal with. Trying to navigate the minefield that is modern dating also gets a fair amount of play here, and there are songs of genuine heartbreak (“The Thrill Is Gone” being an especially soulful and borderline showtune-y highlight here) along with songs that are determined to go hit the club and find a rebound to get your mind off of how badly you were treated before. There’s so much on this record that I, as a 40-something white male, have never and will never have to deal with, but a lot of the ways she speaks to the inequality in modern society should give the rest of us pause – what are we leaving behind for the generations who will be around after we are gone to deal with? RAYE has good reason to sing the blues, in all of its colorful and confrontational forms. While it might be hard to listen at times, I hope the message behind it all won’t fall on deaf ears.
Kele – The Flames Pt. 2
Just when I finally started to wrap my head around Bloc Party – a band I’d never really listened to until just last year – I had to go and find out that their frontman, Kele Okereke, had his own solo career going that was six albums deep. His latest installment, The Flames Pt. 2, is actually a companion project to The Waves Pt. 1, apparently a much mellower, dreamier project compared to this more in-your-face, beats-and-sampling-driven project, which in some ways is very minimal and repetitive, even though it presents itself as very lively and abrasive. Sometimes, the clash between gloomy alt-rock, funk and R&B-influenced bass lines, and DIY electronic beats that sound like something off of Radiohead’s The King of Limbs ends up working wonders. The single “Vandal” certainly hypnotizes me with its fluid bass and scratchy, atonal guitars, building up momentum thanks to Kele’s fiery, sassy lyrical delivery. “Someone to Make Me Laugh” is a surprisingly bouyant, borderline poppy moment on an otherwise very experimental record that only hints at being melodic here and there, and the whistled hook of the otherwise very dark and scandalous “I’m in Love with an Outline” is straight fire. “Never Have I Ever” is a darn good lead in, with its thick, distorted guitar haze over a bed of programmed elements, but once you get several tracks in and you start to realize you’re mostly getting variants of stark, looping rhythms with lyrics that are kind of half-sung and half-spoken, and not a whole lot to ground these songs in terms of memorable hooks or climaxes, it can get rather alienating. This tendency reaches its nadir on “No Risk No Reward”, a robotic an overly long interlude that seems to forget what sort of point it intended to make. And the closing instrumental “The Colour of Dying Flame”, while I’m grateful for the more melodic guitar chords it brings in, also disappoints by not developing much beyond the seed of an idea that it presents. There’s probably some context I’m missing by not having heard the first half of the project, but still, my overall reaction to this one is that Kele’s unique sound has a lot of curb appeal, but the substance of most of these songs (even when he’s talking about something heart-wrenchingly personal like an affair he regrets having) kind of ends up taking a back seat to the experimentation that often feels like it’s not really going anywhere.
Kacey Musgraves – Deeper Well
This breezy, low key folk-pop effort from Kacey seems to be getting heralded as a companion piece to Golden Hour, the breakthrough album that established her as a singer/songwriter worth noticing outside of the country music niche. Occasionally her phrasing or the twang in her voice reminds me of her country roots, but it’s really been several albums since she was strongly committed to that style. I like her as a singer/songwriter enough to not mind this, though I’m a bit disappointed that this album seems to be a retreat from the more brazen pop experimentation of Star-Crossed, which I seem to be in the minority for liking. Even against the brisk finger-picking of an acoustic guitar (as heard on the self care-encouraging title track) or a less production-heavy folk/rock ensemble (the opener “Cardinal”, which might just have the most compelling hook on the entire record), it’s easy to fall in love with her soothing, crystal clear vocals and her all-around likeable personality. She’s backed off a bit from the feisty lyrical protests against conservative country music stereotypes that were more common on her early records, though occasionally you can still hear hints of it (see the quip in “Dinner with Friends” about all the things she loves in her home state of Texas, “but none of their laws”), and the kinder, gentler Kacey heard here suggests that she’s in love with someone new, or at least has rediscovered a love for life, which is probably where all of the Golden Hour comparisons are most apt (especially coming after Star-Crossed, which is viewed my many as her “divorce album”). The pacing is the main issue for me here – backing off on the pop influences means there isn’t even a “High Horse” to break up the mostly gentle flow of this record – I guess “Jade Green” kind of fills that role when it shows up in the back half, but both that one and “Anime Eyes” kind of give me the same “superficial Asiaphile” vibe that “Cherry Blossom” did. Still, when the songwriting’s good, none of these complaints matter – see “The Architect”, a request to have a word with the maker of the universe about its flawed design that has a similar musical vibe to the similarly clever “Camera Roll” from her last album. There’s some good stuff here if you’re willing to sit through track after track of more or less the same instrumentation and mellow tempo – and perhaps for some, that’s exactly the consistency they’re looking for in a Kacey Musgraves record. Putting the emphasis on songwriting substance over production style ain’t necessarily a bad thing.
Elbow – Audio Vertigo
I’ve said for quite a while that Elbow is one of my favorite bands, though I had kind of fallen off with them a bit after their last two albums, the gritty and downbeat Giants of All Sizes and the extremely mellow collection of love letters Flying Dream 1. Those albums had their moments, but at times they felt like hollow caricatures of a band that had made me swoon repeatedly throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s. Album #10 marks a startling change that I certainly wouldn’t have seen coming from them – suddenly they’re up-tempo, immediate, edgy, and even a bit cheeky. Not that occasional songs of theirs hasn’t shown these qualities in the past – but wow, they really decided to go pedal to the medal with this one. I think it works. I may miss the slower numbers with Guy Garvey’s velvety crooning describing someone he’s over the moon for in the most unorthodox poetry, but his voice carries some real weight when the guitars and the rhythm section supporting him get really fired up. “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years” is a darkly humorous bit of self-deprecation right at the beginning of the album, dismantling a man’s lofty notions of what he can achieve in the increasingly shorter number of years he has left to make a mark on this world, which segues nicely into the sassy horns and shuffling beat of the first single “Lovers’ Leap”, which almost seems to make fun of Elbow’s tendency to romanticize everything as they tell a tragic story of a desperate couple determined to make a name for themselves in local folklore in the worst way possible. The bounding keyboards of “Balu” and the relentlessly loud guitars and bass of “Good Blood Mexico City” make them immediate standouts, rather quickly dispelling any notions that Elbow is only good at the art of the slow burn. At times I do start to miss the band’s softer side, which does come out here and there in more reflective tracks like the weary “Her to the World”, and the cathartically beautiful closing anthem “From the River” – which hits all the right cadences for an Elbow ballad, except that it, too, is defiantly up-tempo. If you’re looking for the next “Scattered Black and Whites” or “Mirrorball” or “Real Life (Angel)” to make your heart go all pitter-patter, then you might feel like Elbow sold themselves a bit short with this one, but if you’re the kind of Elbow fan who got startled awake in the middle of mellower albums by tracks like “Grounds for Divorce”, “Mexican Standoff” or “Neat Little Rows” and you found yourself wishing for more of that, then I think Elbow’s got your number this time around.
Wye Oak – Shriek: Variations
Shriek was a turning point for Wye Oak that the duo still seems to be a tad self-conscious about, with one of their social media posts announcing its re-release quipping that it was an album “nobody liked”. I got into them many years after this point, and actually had a hard time getting into Citizen and everything before it, when they were less of an electronic/keyboard-based band and more electric guitar-heavy. Shriek was definitely an oddity in that it found Jenn Wasner trading the guitar for bass while drummer Andy Stack also took on the keyboards; it’s got some strikingly weird grooves that take time to sink in, but I think it’s a richer experience because of the radical change. The re-release adds five newly recorded “variations” with the Metropolis Ensemble on strings, and these versions are commendable for finding a middle ground between the expected “just remix the original audio with classical instruments thrown in” and the more radical “rewrite all the guitar, bass, and drum parts for classical instruments” that you sometimes get when modern bands have their work reinterpreted as an orchestral score. Instead, the musicians worked together to come up with new arrangements of each song, many with extended intros/outros stretching the runtime to 5 or 6 minutes, but all eventually settling into the familiar verse/chorus structures and usually keeping the core rhythms and basslines intact. You might not realize from the opening strains of the new versions of “Before” or “Sick Talk” how they’re eventually going to melt into the soothingly quirky melodies that Wasner so lovingly wraps her unique voice around; something like “The Tower” might be more immediately recognizable due to how the various instruments play off of its ping-ponging keyboard riff, but it’s still quite an expansion of the original. The title track, with its heavenly, gliding verse butting up against its deliberately stilted chorus, might have the most familiar elements intact, while the closer “Logic of Color” gets a stripped-down acoustic makeover, bringing it more in line with the band’s more recent singles as heard on last year’s Every Day Like the Last collection. I think it’s all quite fascinating, though my main complaint is that I felt misled into believing they’d be reworking the entire album, not just the 5 new versions that we get here, tacked onto a re-release of the original 10 tracks (presumably a remaster, though with anything this recent, I generally can’t tell the difference quality-wise). Not having a new version of “Glory” is particularly devastating – it might be my favorite Wye Oak song, and I was eager to hear how they might reinterpret that one. Still, what they gave us here is quite good, and I’d highly recommend giving the new versions a shot, whether you’re a fellow latter-day Wye Oak fan who values the change that Shriek brought to their creative process, or whether you’re one of those old Citizen diehards still in need of convincing that these songs are worth your time.
Jason Wade – Stanley Climbfall (Live)
Lifehouse’s second album, Stanley Climbfall, was either a bold creative step forward or a commercial disappointment following their early breakout success, depending on who you talk to. I’ve gone for over 20 years thinking I was one of that album’s rare defenders, but it must have a healthy enough fanbase if the band’s lead singer decided to do an acoustic livestream covering the entire thing back at the end of 2023. (A bit late for its 20th anniversary, but I don’t remember No Name Face getting this treatment at all, so whatever.) There’s a certain charm in watching an artist go back to an old album, most of which they probably haven’t played live or maybe even listened to in ages, and perform all of its songs from front to back, even when the setting is as bare-bones as just Jason Wade and an acoustic guitar. If you’re expecting the vocal aggression to match Wade at the peak of his post-grunge existential angst, or the guitar work to be in any way textured or inventive, you’re definitely barking up the tree here – this is a pretty simple strum-through of the basic structures of these 13 songs (yeah, he even threw in the bonus track “How Long”) that often excludes the intros, outros, bridges, and/or instrumental breaks that made the originals feel larger than life. It’s a nice little nostalgic hit if you’ve been a fan of these songs for all these years and want to be reminded that there are some intriguingly abstract lyrics and intriguing melodic twists and turns underneath several of them – but if you were a fan of that album for how it pushed Lifehouse into slightly noisier and more experimental territory, obviously that’s going to be lost in translation here, with this live set coming across as more of a warm hug from an old friend who is reprising in whispers what was once expressed in cathartic shouts. Some of it holds up well – particularly the sauntering “Just Another Name” and some of the moodier tracks from the back half of the album like “My Precious” and “Empty Space” that were originally around the point where I started to feel a little tempted to tune out. The opening duo of “Spin” and “Wash”, while I still think they’re incredibly well-written alt-pop tunes, kind of suffers by comparison, without the slamming outro section of the former and the quirky long intro of the latter. “Anchor” is another song that needs some musical weight to really drive its point home – it’s a lot of ruminating on the same chords without its original heaviness. But what I’m reminded of most here is how Wade and company were probably always uncomfortable with being groomed to be rock starts – they may have sounded amazing in aggressive mode, but their music has always been very introspective, with Wade seeming more comfortable to come across as bewildered and bemused at his fleeting attempts to interpret his encounters with the divine than to boast of anything that would draw attention to his persona as the frontman of one of the turn of the millennium’s biggest buzz bands. The stark comparison between 2002 Lifehouse and 2023 Jason Wade only serves to remind me that Lifehouse apparently is still alive and kicking in some form, having put out a surprisingly good EP in 2021 but thus far failing to follow it up with a new record – we’re going on ten years since their last LP at this point. I assume Wade will continue to juggle the band and his solo career however he sees fit – “Don’t worry your time, don’t hurry your mind” seems like good advice to the fanbase here.
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