Amos Lee Hello Again With Calexico Tucson Az 2011
Critics' Choice: New CDs
DESTROYER
"Kaputt" (Merge)
"Kaputt" is a strange tape, fifty-fifty by the standards of Destroyer, the band built effectually the Vancouver vocalizer-songwriter Dan Bejar. Information technology's deluxe on the surface and cheap underneath, its songs carefully planned in gesture only meager in structure and evolution, hip as hell simply determinedly uncool.
Basically it's Mr. Bejar's late-70s-and-early on-80s ambient and new-romantic tag-sale blowout, swathed in cheesy electronic drums with strokes of flute and trumpet and purely decorative tenor saxophone: all sales final, all items must become. Just be careful: he'south a trickster.
"I write poesy for myself," he sings, and repeats, at a critical point in "Blue Eyes." The line comes out of nowhere and pulls you up short. Information technology's a warning and an instruction, something useful.
Mr. Bejar, built-in in 1972, was young when this album's referents came out, and there are many. They include Bryan Ferry'south "Boys and Girls"; assorted bits of New Order, David Bowie, Sade, and Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark; and Brian Eno and Harold Budd's "Plateaux of Mirror." (Mr. Bejar'south voice here, with its whispery, embrace-the-mystery pompousness, near straight evokes Al Stewart, he of "Year of the Cat." Bold move.)
Epitome
He doesn't seem to exist pointing at whatever of this music out of dearest or fashion, or at to the lowest degree he doesn't desire us to call back then. He seems to be pulling different strands together to make a nice dressing for poems that suggest a comfortable blankness of spirit.
Mr. Bejar is convincingly a almost-obsessive listener to pop music of an earlier time; a lot of his work is strewn with specific references to songs and bands. On the other mitt, it's but hidden matter, stuff to smear into new color combinations. In this record'south title track, an echoey, repetitive piece of glam-funk anomie, he sings a list of four British music magazines, all simply one defunct: "Sounds, Nail Hits, Melody Maker, NME/All sound similar a dream to me."
That's the spirit of the record: not the specific musical sources just a kind of subconscious flow of suggestions from one-half-remembered record reviews.
Appropriately, the songs here are wickedly dispassionate. Sometimes they contain slap-up wasted promise: the guitar suspension in the bewitching "Savage Night at the Opera" really builds until the terminal bar, when information technology goes awry and loses runway of harmony. And sometimes, every bit in the eight-infinitesimal "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" — whose decontextualized political lyrics were written in collaboration with Ms. Walker, the visual artist — they just don't move or change enough.
And of grade that static quality forces you lot to pay attention to the words, which sound practiced and browse well but deny you lot the pleasure of a bespeak of view. The record as a whole tin seem to disappear or evaporate nearly every bit you're listening to it. But that'due south its amuse; that's why y'all might want to hear information technology again. BEN RATLIFF
AMOS LEE
"Mission Bell" (Blue Note)
Amos Lee has a honeyed singing vox — lite amber, mildly sweetness, a touch on of grain — and the tendency to feature it squarely, without much fuss or undue strain. His songs, rooted in a soothing style descended from 1970s folk stone and rustic soul, rarely nudge him from his comfort zone. If you can accept the limits of his emotional palette, which runs from a quiet rapture to a quieter desperation, yous tin can begin to notice the diligence behind his song arts and crafts and the deceptive ease of his delivery.
That'south a big "if," but "Mission Bell," his 4th anthology on Blue Note, sharpens the payoff. Produced by Joey Burns of the roots-rock band Calexico, and principally recorded in that band'southward hometown, Tucson, it plants Mr. Lee and his tunes in a stark mural, enveloped by rustling percussion and reverberant drones.
A few compatible peers, notably Sam Beam of Fe and Wine, contribute tactfully subtle groundwork vocals. A pair of magisterial elders, Lucinda Williams and Willie Nelson, take more of an honored seat at the tabular array, each bestowing a coincidental guest turn and an implicit blessing.
Epitome
The album opens with ii hymns of praise to the open up road: "El Camino" (named after the California Mission Trail, rather than the onetime coupe) and "Windows Are Rolled Down" (in which an old coupe may really be involved). Merely restlessness tin can only be a thing of lip service with Mr. Lee, whose truer moments on this anthology take the form of direct appeals ("Stay With Me"), plainspoken reflections ("Learned a Lot") and broken-down petitions ("Jesus").
The music often suggests old-time gospel or sanctified country music, faltering mainly when Mr. Lee likewise clearly evokes his heroes: Bill Withers or Bob Dylan or, on the otherwise intriguing "Hello Again," Stevie Wonder. Which is i reason the album peaks with "Violin," a beseeching ballad of the sort that Mr. Lee has made his signature. It'southward a song about frustrated inspiration — about songwriting, really — and Mr. Lee stamps it with singular dominance.
NATE CHINEN
GANG OF FOUR
"Content" (Yep Roc)
Iii decades after it got started, Gang of Four notwithstanding beard.
Remember the future
Information technology was skillful in the past
Information technology's an aligning
The pain doesn't final,
That'due south what John King sings in "2d Life," from "Content," the band's commencement album in xvi years.
Gang of Iv arrived in the late 1970s with harshly danceable songs that depicted human relationships turning into commodities. Its jagged, sometimes nearly atonal grooves still repeat through everything now called post-punk. And its lyrics, which at the fourth dimension sounded dourly materialistic, grew all too prophetic for an era when corporations tally up their Facebook "likes" online, and athletes, musicians and people writing personal ads all care for themselves every bit brand names with images to protect. "She Said," the opening vocal on "Content," frankly declares: "You lot fabricated a matter of me/And what I am is what you lot see."
Gang of 4 lost its initial momentum with a career that straggled into the 1990s every bit the band tried slicker, more than electronic pop and dance music. A 2004 reunion of the original 1970s lineup led to touring but no new finished songs. At present Gang of Four's songwriters — Mr. King, on lead vocals, and the guitarist Andy Gill — have a new rhythm section. And they have reclaimed, with a vengeance, their old assault.
Once once again, Gang of Four delivers a raw, syncopated wallop. The staggered impacts of Mark Heaney'southward drums, Thomas McNeice'southward bass and Mr. Gill's guitar — with its glassy rhythm chops and staccato, distorted pb lines — make Mr. King's terse vocal melodies bob and weave as if they were dodging bursts of flak. Punk, funk and reggae contribute to the audio — forth with hints of math-rock, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie — but to get caught up in the music's precise melee.
The product on "Content" isn't as stark equally information technology was on Gang of Four'due south 1979 masterpiece, "Entertainment"; at that place's more resonance and more than willingness to overdub. But the consequence is just equally brawny and combative.
The lyrics stay difficult-nosed. The punky "Never Pay for the Subcontract" obliquely blasts the bankers behind the financial meltdown — "You can't get back what you bet" — and "Do as I Say" considers dominance and interrogations, from the Inquisition to Guantánamo.
Other songs look at characters enmeshed in commerce or consoling themselves with digital-era flirtations — "You wait good with no apparel on/I'll take photos on my phone," Mr. King offers in "Y'all Don't Have to Be Mad." The album'due south one relative respite, "A Fruitfly in the Beehive" — a ballad melody over ticking drums and shards of guitar — wonders, "Where are we headed for?/For a distant shore or some brand-new war?" Gang of Four has girded itself for both possibilities.
JON PARELES
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/arts/music/25choice.html
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