American Football – American Football (LP4) (Polyvinyl)
Mike Kinsella still knows how to twist the knife, and that knife is most often lodged in his gut. It can be a lot if you are a lyrics person, but there is so much pretty melancholy in each of the four American Football records that you could also just get lost in the feelings that way.
He is always good for several new indelible lines that are equal parts clever and gut-wrenching in their matter-of-factness. LP4 is no exception. The first half of the record’s highlights are “The story of my life is a murder mystery / Too many bodies to hide”, one of the final lines of “Blood of My Blood”. That track features a memorable guest vocal from Cathlin De Marrias of Rainer Maria. “Bad Moons” leads with “Surprise, I’m just two little boys in a trenchcoat / Plastic knives / I’m scared, and I don’t want to grow up.” – Brian Stout
Anitta – EQUILIBRIVM (Republic)
At a moment when Brazil’s popular and ancestral traditions are increasingly shaping Brazilian pop, and religions of African origin have entered the cultural vocabulary to the point where expressions like “living orixá” now describe pop stars with a certain aura, EQUILIBRIVM feels so in synch with its time that one could wonder how organic it is.
In many ways, EQUILIBRIVM is Anitta’s Ray of Light: introspective, yet built for movement; shaped by a woman who has seen the world and found its limits; and who now channels that clarity into something at once spiritual, rhythmic, and fully attuned to the pulse of contemporary pop. Much like George Harrison’s incorporation of Indian music into the sonic vocabulary of the Beatles, or Madonna’s engagement with Kabbalah during her late 1990s reinvention, EQUILIBRIVM places Anitta in the lineage of pop artists who occupy such a cerebral position in shaping the popular culture of their scenes that their spiritual shifts cannot help but represent something greater about pop music as well. “As inside, as outside.” – Ana Clara Ribeiro
Willow Avalon – Pink Pocket Pistol (Atlantic Outpost)
The title of Willow Avalon’s new album, Pink Pocket Pistol, suggests she wants to have it both ways. She has a soft, feminine side as indicated by the color and small size of her gun. However, the fact that she has a weapon reveals she’s tough and dangerous. The album cover features her pointing a chromium grey revolver at the beholder. The pink is gone, which indicates the significance of her steely power. The outward femininity is just a pretty disguise.
Avalon’s country vibes are rooted in humor, sincerity and a feminist sensibility. Her lyrics are full of puns, double entendres and wordplay. Seemingly silly lyrics such as “You’re so full of shit that your britches don’t fit”, “If his name is Will, then he won’t, if his name is Rich then he’s broke”, are more than clever quips or fillers, but essential to the meanings of her story songs. She may exaggerate, but the album’s contents tell stories of abusive lovers killed without remorse, “Goodbye Earl”-style and other men who do not fare very well. – Steve Horowitz
Nana Osei Twum Barima – Journey to the Unknown (Zephyrus)
As I listen to multi-instrumentalist and tradition-bearer Nana Osei Twum Barima’s debut album Journey into the Unknown, I have the distinct impression that I am not just an audience for his music, but a witness to him. His performance here is intimate. He sounds nearby. His voice and instrument—the seperewa, an Akan instrument resembling a lute and a harp that Nana Osei learned growing up in a musical lineage in Ghana—are often naked before us, except when layered to suggest a crowd.
Each song comes from Nana Osei’s deeply personal experience as he tells stories of ancestry, growing up, moving to his current home in Belgium, and what he remembers of home. This is the artist, without artifice, on full display and welcoming onlookers to engage with his story. – Adriane Pontecorvo
Courtney Barnett – Creature of Habit (Mom+Pop)
From the grizzly opener “Stay in Your Lane”, Creature of Habit makes it plain for all to hear: Courtney Barnett is here to rock. No frills, no fuss; just rock. In some ways, it’s the perfect throwback to grunge and indie, earmarking a no-nonsense, heartfelt barrel of songs. “I don’t know how to trust you,” Barnett sings on “Wonder”, a gentle ballad lit up by Kurt Cobain-esque hooks.
The vulnerability and guitar-soaked chorus marry under “Same”, cloaked as a protagonist searching for redemption in an ever-shifting landscape. In time-honored tradition, the track takes time until the singer makes their appearance, adding a frisson to the piece as an audio drama par excellence. If Courtney Barnett’s Creature of Habit can claim a masterpiece, then “Same” is definitely a contender, not the Marlon Brando-esque kind. She shifts keys during the musical bridge, setting a new standard in jumps and octaves. Such is the jump; it would be interesting to see if the follow-up features no guitar at all! – Eoghan Lyng
Barry Can’t Swim – Late Night Tales (Late Night Tales)
On the first new Late Night Tales in five years, Barry Can’t Swim ditches the bannister to deliver 20 tracks of light, atmospheric, ambient piano, Moroccan jazz, IDM, and ethereal new wave that is as singular as it is full of surprises. It’s more than a chance for Mainnie to show off his great taste, although it does that in shovelfuls. It’s a chance for him to show off cuts other than what his big-name/big-room clout might demand.
Barry Can’t Swim’s late-night reverie begins on a tender note with the chamber piano and warm, breathy saxophone of Jackson Mico Milas’ “Sea, Interior” before settling into the Gnawa-by-way-of-Twin-Peaks of Majid Bekkas & Magic Spirit Quartet’s “Annabi”, an early highlight of the mix. It doesn’t take long for some momentum to build, though, with Loket’s “Afternoon at Barenquell” dispelling any worry that the latest Late Night Tales is just going to be some non-descript yoga playlist. –
J. Simpson
Brown Horse – Total Dive (Loose Music / Fluff and Gravy)
After their country-rock debut Reservoir, Brown Horse metaphorically walked out of saloon doors like Belle Starr to the frontier, where they established a new sound: fuzz-soaked guitars that echoed R.E.M., bolstered by sinuous Crazy Horse-esque riffs. Now, Brown Horse have released their loudest and bleakest record to date, in which muscular guitars, walloping drums, and thumping pedal steels converge and erupt like a volcano.
Brown Horse have carved out an inimitable aesthetic: Americana with a sci-fi subtext—think Kurt Vonnegut stuck in a prairie and looking for Godot, or something like that. In any case, Brown Horse are in conversation with the past or the past is in conversation with them: history blows through Turner’s mouth and Emma Tovell’s blistering pedal steel, as if their tale is someone else’s and that someone else’s is theirs. History moves backwards and forwards, anywhere and everywhere. – Jack Walters
Kiki Cavazos – Goodbye Blues (Jalopy)
Kiki Cavazos’ songs are made of dust. Anyone with half an ear will hear an earthy voice that makes you feel as if Cavazos has kicked dirt into your face and shown you a country you never knew or wished existed, which is to say she is like a 1930s troubadour with her eyes fixed on a dusty road, where a spiritual truth is hard-earned and where hope often feels only to be found in the last town you’ve left. Born in Montana, Cavazos ran away at 16 to Alaska before heading south to Mexico. Yet this has nothing to do with how she sings of a fate wherein facts have no face and pathos is all there is.
We’re believing Cavazos’ role as a troubadour due to her performance—not her story. Granted, Cavazos has traveled the country like a Willie Guthrie protégé and thus is “authentic”. Yet authenticity is not verisimilitude; this is to say Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a middle-class New Yorker born to Lithuanian Jewish parents, who made you fall for his cowpoke drawl and accoutrements. Put differently, it is through Cavazos’ performances that her past is illuminated. – Jack Walters
Cocanha – Flame Folclòre (Bongo Joe)
Cocanha transmit an energy more befitting a choir than two singers. Such is their energy that vocalists Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse dot Flame Folclòre with a multitude of harmonic jumps and counter-melodies, mostly through articulated energy alone. “Diurê Tremblar” is one hugely impressive collage, an audio sample making way for bustles of chorale singing. Could it be a hymn or a prayer? Performed in Occitan, the message may not be entirely clear to the listener, although there’s no denying the impact every syllable makes on the ear.
As a rule, Flame Folclòre seems to defy genres: only time will tell, but Cocanha’s third record could be a harbinger of other minority-language rock albums to come. The record arrives following the news of Moya Brennan’s death. While it would be spurious to say that this duo could pick up where Clannad left off—it is a different language, for one thing—Cocanha have nonetheless shouldered a similar crusade, enchanting audiences with the sounds associated with this particular dialect. – Eoghan Lyng
Alice Costelloe – Move on With the Year (Moshi Moshi)
The fact that the London-based singer-songwriter Alice Costelloe, the great-great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, is, on her debut album Move on With the Year, probing into her unconscious to conjure up memories of her estranged father might seem too on the nose or a send-up. Don’t worry, it isn’t either. Instead, it’s a gallant portrayal of a child of a parent battling substance abuse—in other words, it’s an indie pop record with a subject matter barely acknowledged, let alone expressed with such finesse and stoicism. Yet, despite the heaviness of its themes, you could be floating.
The post-war English poet Philip Larkin wrote, in his customary sardonic tone, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” In the next stanza of “This Be the Verse”, Larkin opens with a punchline to a joke that never existed: “But they were fucked up in their turn.” The specter of Move on With the Year is, of course, Costelloe’s absent father, who moves through the songs fucking her up, or, in her own words, “a vagabond haunting the night.” Yet, perhaps in realizing that he, in turn, was subjected to the errors of his parents, Costelloe doesn’t appear to be reproachful—if anything, compassionate. – Jack Walters