Chronicle 2022: The Highlights #2
"Wanted to see me! What you gonna do?" Still here with the hot new albums of January, February and March of this year!
Don’t we love our music! At least, we want to, we’d love to. When we’re allowed to do so, we get the sense, the need, to devour it. That can come in many different ways: listening to it over and over, making TikToks with it as background music, getting lyrics or chords tattooed on your arm or ankle. This is my way of doing so. The world may already have gone on to bigger, more ‘present’ releases (some of which are indeed worth covering), but I still hold on to those early releases of the year. Let them not go by unnoticed, but be dissected with grace (hopefully; not up to me to decide that!). We like to take our time, and that’s what we’re bound to do over here. 7 releases from Q1. Maybe you’ll find something fun along the way.
Ado - 狂言 (Kyougen) (j-pop)
Bolt of lightning! Black in white! Screens are cut off! All that you can see is what you feel. What do you feel? Ado shall be the judge of that. An 18 year old newcomer into Japanese pop music, after many hits, an album comes to fruition (mostly a compilation of old songs, but they’re well sequenced, so no one really cares). It’s meant for you to take a step back. A coming-of-age story told through menacing hits (and by ‘hit’, I mean hitting you in the face), strong confessionals, and a gleeful sense of knowing you can rule the entire world without needing to compromise, even if the compromises are there.
Ado’s got one of the most powerful and dynamic voices in pop music right now, out of the gate with a personality meant to upset you, or at least make you question why she’s upset, so that you can share the sentiment. The aching and the hunger to conquer what’s beyond her steer her through the entire album, and with every bump in the road, she becomes only stronger and angrier. Her screeches, her belting, her high notes, her menacing low notes, all explore the urgency of youth needing to occur at that very moment. She doesn’t have her shit together, but she’ll fake it until she makes it, and she doesn’t plan on stopping.
She treats this album like a way of hitting as many popular Japanese sounds as popular, and every song is treated in a different manner - no 2 songs here have the same producer, in fact, the mixing and mastering of this album is quite sloppy and you can tell there wasn’t one overlooking hand on deck to sort things out. For those who seek a full, hitting experience, this likely won’t be it in that sense; but, for those of us who can understand the inner makings of an album and are mainly interested in good songs, we’ll be satisfied in spades.
Part of the beauty of 狂言 is that there seems to be a song for every occasion: swaggering bravado that undercuts itself at every corner, wanting to reach out and shut someone off with attitude, thinking wistfully about one’s self-worth in a way that’s perhaps too intense for one’s own good, wanting to dance something out, feeling like you’re an anime character in a chase scene, and more! Ado gives and gives, and it’s almost overwhelming how well presented everything here is. She’s understood the genre tropes, and while her songwriting credits on here are few, she dives into it all.
Sometimes, she’s the song’s only salvation. “ラッキー・ブルート” (“Lucky Bruto”) has an ace composition, sort of moving in all directions and skipping rocks with a tinge of dread, but I can make that out because of how well she’s singing the melody, because Hiiragi Kirai’s production is muddy and garish; empty drums, buried pianos, noise effects that seem to be on top of everything else in the mixing. “花火” (“Fireworks”), in an entirely different direction, aims for the post-Chainsmokers tropical EDM sound with the most basic, royalty-free instrumental, but Ado plumbs into whatever little melody is there and comes out with diamonds; it’s a brief moment of reflection that still feels somewhat doomed.
However, we hear a dedicated performer through and through, and when she gets people who are up to her talent, magic happens. She can take the grandiose end-credits instrumental of “会いたくて” (“Aitakute”) (“I want to see you”) and it feels as though she’s seeing stars, floating around even if the mix seems to fail her; her voice is simply that powerful and nuanced that it pierces through technical inadequacies. It’s a promise of constant, eternal, ride-in-the-night kind of love that feels true and something you can root for. A real surprise when a supposed house beat turns into a sorrowful (yet fast tempo) rock song on “マザーランド” (“Motherland”), a cry for forgiveness of her own circumstances that weren’t up to her, yet she still feels responsible for. Even if you can’t understand it lyrically, you can still realize there’s someone with a terrifying train of thought that won’t stop at any minute, and eventually brings the track to a morbid key change.
The biggest hit, her breakthrough “うっせぇわ” (“USSEEWA”), is sort of the middle ground between this album’s victories and failures. The instrumental is mixed in a mushy way, where few elements stand out and Ado’s voice is far too removed from the rest of the sounds, but from what you can hear, the song takes out elements of j-rock and passes them through digital filters, and Ado’s voice is the element that’s going to bring said elements to a closing finale. An expression of rebellion paired through her continuous anger at all the systems of labor, Ado’s performance through the uneasy verses to the anxious pre-chorus, her screeches in the chorus, slowly stepping into a cleaner voice by the end of it, and then powering through a truly awkward key change, it feels like something cancerous is being cut through at a fast pace with the sharpest knives. It’s a sadistic song by design, since all the amo she has could fire back at her if she’s not careful. But then again, that’s the idealization of youth. We’re invincible in our own ways.
The rock-leaning track “FREEDOM” demonstrates that fearlessness. Heading towards the ideal of a revolution with a steady groove, elongating as many words as possible (in Japanese and English), and a hook strong enough to belong in contemporary musical theater, and it would blow many wannabe’s out of the water at that - even this song’s also awkward key change manages to work because of Ado’s fierce character. She keeps that intense death-stare in album highlight “阿修羅ちゃん” (“Ashura-chan”), where producer Neru (familiar with this kind of sound) evokes the Yoko Kanno-Seatbelts upbeat jazz rhythms meant for a chase scene, and you’re never quite sure if you’re the one chasing or the one being chased. A threat of violence, a call out of hypocrisy, and chock-full of runaway horns and swing-for-the-fences melodies, it’s a dazzling execution of a challenging musical concept. “Even the Devil can be devoured.”
Even if part of it is projecting confidence instead of actually having it, there is an arc found throughout these songs, especially the ones that deal more openly with Ado’s teenage years full of neglect and self-hatred. “ギラギラ” (“Gira Gira”) is a shining example, a regular midtempo pop piece with a funk-like bass (and kinda stiff drums, but we’ll move past those), with lyrics that describe teenage angst in a way that Western pop music is absolutely not used to. Thoughts of being so ugly that “God must have drawn my face with his left hand”, how not a single love song in the world has been written for her, so much love she has with no vessel to place it on, all sung with a yearning melody and a deep affection, vulnerability at its most persistent. But when the chorus rolls around, even as anxiety strikes, something breaks through: exploding in blazes of glory, embracing those feelings and using them to her own advantage, singing a tune so patient and persistent you barely realize where it’s going until it gets there. The outro where she proclaims, “I will shine on!” leaves in an open chord, an open door. What could happen next?
With all this said, it’s a shame to say the album peaks in its first 2 tracks, but the 1-2 punch of this album is simply unstoppable. “レディメイド” (“READYMADE”) is a mission statement without feeling like one, an electronic-tinged swing song with real, proper texture to the horns - they sway and hit with stunning accuracy - and Ado goes through a long-winded melody to try to come to terms with that coming-of-age in ways she may not want to accept, so instead will tear through. All stereotypes be damned, she’ll try to have the last laugh, and her reading of the lyrics (which, if it hasn’t been clear in this review already, is heavily suggested) is one of having gone through that many stages of mind. On the other hand, “踊” (“Odo”), produced by Giga, REOL’s producer, is by far the best-sounding song on the album, the most professional one and the one with the clearest musical edges. Obscure horns on top of a house beat that hide amidst the sound effects covering Ado’s voice, distorted and multi-layered like never before, that eventually leads into her best sing-along chorus, and it feels like a crowded house at the last party. “Sanitize loneliness”, she sings, and the party has turned upside down, and that’s before the magnificent drops, where you can feel hands on top of digital percussion; the primal meets the coded. Ado roars and pours, she’s the magnet who’ll melt everyone’s pain into one collective feeling, and it’s liberating. If she didn’t have so much ahead of her already, she’d already be 10 steps ahead of just about everyone else. Angst melted and molded into reaffirmation. No supporting characters here.
Tanya Tagaq - Tongues (post-industrial, inuit music, poetry)
Hearing Tanya Tagaq’s music feels very much like a visual performance, strapped in the middle of the night, long gone from the city, lost with no direction, and suddenly there’s fire burning somehow somewhere. By all means, this is not only visual, but deeply, intensely graphic music. Tanya is a prodigy who’s channeled the generational trauma experienced by those that came before her, those who will come after her, and her own self, as Inuit, Indigenous peoples mostly residing in Canada, get erased from history both now and then. She takes the culture’s rasp, tenuous throat singing and, with her last offerings, has matched it with industrial-leaning rock soundscapes that felt apocalyptic, beasts rising up. Her voice is one of dangerous power, her lyricism is concise but it lacks no power as it points the right fingers at the right powers, and her musical determination is one that’s aiming to leave real bloodshed on all those who’ve hurt her and her history. And she’s been more than successful at that.
In fact, I’d say, as good as this new album, Tongues, is, it’s not exactly the best gateway entry into her music. Tongues is mostly based on literary passages that she wrote for her semi-autobiographical book, Split Tooth, and it doesn’t contain the sprawling nature of tones one might be more familiar with, like on her 2016 album, Retribution, a brilliant project. Here, the stakes are as high as ever, but the musical scope is more intimate; less howls at the invisible powers, more groaning at the ones enabling said powers. It’s a rewarding listen once you familiarize yourself with her (and this style of music making), but that comes with preparation and background context, which this album refuses to offer. Not that it should, art as confronting as this will only go so far, but never hand everything out on a plate. The digging must occur manually.
Getting Saul Williams to produce this album is quite a feat, and a good match, since his instincts of cavernous, obscure mixes mean a voice like Tanya’s will rise quite easily, and so it does. The industrial screeches rise and feel like they’re scraping onto something empty and rotten, the percussion work digs through dirt to find useless coffins, whatever synth work is present only serves to bring forward confusion and fear. Meanwhile, Tanya’s occupied with the art of interpretation, poetry that comes from sheer survival. She’s standing at the front of the line, lurking around, waiting for the enemy to attack, because that’s what she’s been used to her whole life. “Touch my children and my teeth welcome your windpipe”; “I will hunch my shoulders and wait / Claws sharpened, teeth agape” - these are already loaded words and imagery, but her staring and her diction, the patience with which she warns the rest of the world is arresting. Confounding and twisting words, she feels primal, if only to survive.
The deep-rooted anxiety in Tanya’s music remains, and her lashing out at the way Indigenous women’s bodies have been used and violated, how the Inuit language has been taken away from them to the point where even she’s still putting back the pieces of her own cultural heritage (“They took our tongues / They tried to take our tongues” is a powerful couplet, and one that signals hope for some, and dread for others), is backed up by her vocal abilities that can seem to shatter worlds.
It’s as clear as in the hasty opener “In Me”, a desecration of pseudo-woke vegan culture that chastises those cultures it doesn’t understand for hunting and having a more nomad way of living, with no empathy for other cultures. “Eat your morals” is uttered over and over, and it feels like witnessing shapeshifting, as the minimal synth barely makes room for anything else; it’s a ritual. But when the instrumental decides to be more melodic, like on the suspenseful “I Forgive Me”, Tanya deals with the aftermath of child abuse, and how it ties into the history of those she’s speaking on behalf of; she says “Take care of your children / They can't protect themselves” with real fear, shivering and quavering, as if it all felt there was no hope left. And the instrumental feels stuck on a loop.
The real winner is probably ”Colonizer”. It’s the song that takes the most advantage of the dirty synth grooves it can create, and how Tanya’s panting can adapt to such rhythms. Here, the scope becomes bigger, her voice becomes larger in the mix, the drums collide into sizzly hi-hats. The song doesn’t use more than 2 phrases total (“(You) colonizer”, “Oh, you’re guilty”), but each time, they’re uttered differently. In between Tanya’s grunting, there are also moans of an innocent girl being led astray, before the real monster comes in to protect her. Tanya’s throat mocks, beats around, gets lost in the haze of the production, comes back and screams sometimes without even saying words; it’s instinctive music all throughout, and it’s deathly. Props to the “Tundra Mix” of it at the end of the album, which adds more instruments, but they only serve to bring Tanya to deeper ends within her throat singing; the distortion is more blunt, but just as effective. It’s now in color negative.
By all accounts, for a lot of people, this is music recounting the collective traumas that we may not be familiar with, and encountering the ways to connect with that is difficult. The Indigenous experience is never collective - as easy as it could be to straighten history, not every culture has gone through the same type of abuse led by colonization - but Tongues, and Tanya Tagaq in general, is such a reminder of why digging into those cultures is essential, not only to understand what happened to them in the past, but also what’s happening to them right now. Tanya’s urgency is for a reason: there’s no time to think of an ‘aftermath’ because that would imply the ostracization is over, where it’s far from that. She can’t show us what they’ve been through, but she can make us feel it, endure it, even if it’s through the eyes of a performance. It’s as close as many of us are ever going to get.
yeule - Glitch Princess (glitch pop, ambient pop)
The world on your back, your own sense of self both in the rearview mirror and right in front of you, and it’s all 1’s and 0’s. Glitch Princess often feels like it’s in the worst situation possible, and its lingerings on gender, and every aspect about or surrounding it, are rough takes on the real bearings of body dysmorphia. A goal for yeule is to separate themself from their own body; hence, they turn to technology, because dealing with their body in real time, in the real world, has already caused them enough harm. Many aspects of the glitchier side of pop music are touched, but there’s never a steady beat, or something danceable. Glitch Princess constantly finds itself on a loop of preoccupations and demon-chasing.
Produced mostly by yeule themself, they also get help from Danny L Harle, Mura Masa and Kin Leonn, and they fit into yeule’s vision with enough accuracy that yeule feels comfortable taking out as much as they do throughout the album. Despite its glam-like title, Glitch Princess feels like the process, not of psychological and physical dissociation, but of trying to dissociate; a plug half-disconnected, but energy’s still flowing through, so it’s not all gone yet. It’s a tricky sonic sound to tread on, but yeule’s music feels more than emotionally knowledgeable enough to get that shaky ground through. yeule goes through many musings, yet can’t find themself completely within them. So, they disintegrate, but a core remains. They explode in the panoramic “Electric” (not before robotically adlibbing some gorgeous melodies), they sink to the non-existing floor in “Fragments” as they float through the night, they convey a numbness in the repetition of “I <3 You”.
The album’s sense of confusion when it comes to reacting to the outside world, since it’s all too bleak, comes to shine in a song like “Too Dead Inside”. yeule hushes, “Take me somewhere pretty / Pretty enough to fill this empty”, as if that half-alive way of feeling had to be justified by how one looks from the outside, and maybe, with beauty, things align, even if they don’t get fulfilled. The constant carnal imagery that pervades throughout this album remains constant here, and the song finds a rhythm to dance to, but it’s a quiet dance; shaking through. Isolated heartbreak to try to break away from. On a similar note, the dreamiest piece of this album, “Perfect Blue”, with a pulsing synth and drum bass like a Chromatics beat from far away, deals with yeule’s body dysmorphia like something to be treated with the right amount of care and notice, right before Tohji comes in with a phased-out verse repeating his love for cocaine over and over. It’s an uncanny piece, as the narrators feel faded, but the flesh still touches them both.
The toll on mental illness on this album is one that gets explored through moments of sonic insecurity, where yeule either hushes or screams, or both all at once. “Friendly Machine” presents the poor ideal of the dire need for technology to get them to realize whatever’s going on in their mind, from their eating disorders, to their sexuality, to their isolation. It does it all with such a soft-spoken way to it all; no buoyancy or anger. They try not to resign to their own condition, but, when the music sounds so well like beeps in a hospital bed, there’s the thought that they could already be there - and the song thinks, “so what?”. This is the numbness brought on by such a brought down state of mind, where gender identity can barely be identified, and when it’s treated with such stigma from the outside world, everything can feel discouraging.
There is the constant dichotomy that yeule fights with, the so-called “purity” to be found within the collected and the secure, but they keep running into places that are broken. The centerpiece of the album, saturated folk ballad “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty”, plays out like a slurry of words, barely stopping for a melody, or a change in diction. As it keeps going, the desperation finds itself in the shining synths that get as dizzy as the acoustic guitars will let them. It all gets to the point where yeule ends up alone, isolated, unconscious and crying. The fight seems to be constant. The decay becomes even more present in the most telling track on the album, “Bites on My Neck”, where yeule, after some developing, enters a bitpop-inspired breakdown to denote love not only as sickness, but as something sick. After being so detached from reality for so long, they had to “had to walk into the fire to know how to feel”; extreme measures to remember those old feelings. The body and the mind try to escape, and they only partially get to do so. All the while, the beats keep going and breaking apart, over and over.
By all accounts, this feels like a weird spot; the physical remains, but there’s an attempt to reach a higher plane. This staying in between, and the harm that causes both mentally and physically, is what propels Glitch Princess and yeule themself to the finish line. They’re a contradictory person, and they don’t mask that or hide that. This all comes with the search for a better conclusion, a brighter ending. And there isn’t really one. Even discounting the 4-hour ambient track “The Things They Did to Me Out of Love”, the ending to this album is the destructured “Mandy”, an ode to MDMA. Noisy, dangerous, a pitch-black conversation to a drug personified, they scream and holler to leave it all behind, but they can’t. The goal is to ascend to a higher plane, and that might just help for a while. Who (or what) else can they trust, beside themselves and how they feel? And when that is put into question, what are we left with? This is bleak, and dangerous, and binding. The story can only continue. The story should continue. In the meantime, sink to the floor. Then rise.
Jay Wheeler - El Amor y Yo (latin pop)
Back in the days of 2020, Jay Wheeler & DJ Nelson’s “La Curiosidad” (featuring Myke Towers) stood out as one of the single finest pieces of music that quarantine could give us. A reggaeton song that marked that horrifying distance, that prolonged yearning, that crushing, seemingly never-ending wondering of “what if”s that couldn’t be realized because reality wouldn’t let us. It was downbeat, curious but heartbroken without having taken even the first step, resigned to spending its nights aching for that fleeting glimpse of intimacy it couldn’t hold. Its harmony was warbled, its lyrics were proud yet eager to hide away, and Jay Wheeler displayed a sad reality of loneliness and numbness, one that those empty city streets would mirror. It dared touch no one, not only because it couldn’t, but because it didn’t know how to. And it somehow got played on the radio.
Nowadays, Jay Wheeler has made a name for himself, and can be found as a feature on many reggaeton posse cuts, and he’s quite good at it. But his features are quite different from his own music. He uses the dembow beat quite often, so he could technically be classified as ‘reggaeton’, but more and more, it feels like a formality to establish some sort of rhythmic pattern. Here, in El Amor y Yo, released right before Valentine’s Day, unlike his previous albums, there’s not a single feature on sight, and in fact, there’s a good amount of songs without a shred of drumming percussion whatsoever. We’re dealing with, at their core, ballads, mainly of heartbreak, isolation and frustration. Jay Wheeler’s not subtle about this at all, either. You look at the song titles (translated here for your Anglo Saxon needs) and they give most of these away: “Sad Face”, “Song For My Ex”, “The Saddest Song”, “Thinking of You”, “She’s Alone”, and so forth.
It’s all produced by his usual crew comprised of reggaeton legend DJ Nelson (not sure how well he accommodates to this mellow sound, or if he’s credited with an executive producer role and didn’t actually produce anything; it’s all quite unclear), Siru, Yeziell and Los Hitmen, who all decide to continue with the harmonic defiance of “La Curiosidad”, and provide intriguing, saddened chord progressions that need to be good, since most of the songs don’t have that many instruments to them. They serve to put Jay Wheeler into the role of a sad loner who keeps singing about how his former flames have certainly not forgotten him, and keep looking at his pictures, and think of him when they’re with someone else… to my ears, he doesn’t sell it all. But that’s because he himself doesn’t buy it. They’re bland, petty reassurances that end up hurting him, and reveal his own thoughts more than anyone else’s.
Part of this album expresses how he’s clearly moved past it all, but she clings on. “Canción Para Mi Ex” is a dire piano ballad (with percussion added on for crossover appeal) that puts it very bluntly in the chorus: “I know it hurts you / It doesn’t hurt me”. Bullshit, I say! Jay Wheeler drags on his vocals in the slower parts, and when he gets to the one verse, he tries to speed it all up as fast as he can. It’s very easy to recognize self-delusion when you hear it. No one this cold and uncaring would feel so uncomfortable expressing what they feel. He gives his game away in “¿Quién Carajo?”, where he swears off the girl he used to care for, and claims she’s the one missing him deeply, but the chorus is a tattle tale: “Who the fuck told you that I still love you? / Who the fuck told you that I wasn’t gonna make it without you?”. If only he could hear his own words, sung with no anger, not even glee, but dare I say humiliation, betrayal that a deep secret of his has come out.
And it doesn’t take long before the truth reveals itself. Tracks 3-4 are some of the best back-to-back keepers of the year. “Antes” is a piano ballad with no percussion or anything added, and it’s desolate. It’s a plea to get back to something that’s been long gone, but he needs to hold out hope, just in case. “Before the world ends, I wanna start again / I know you cried, but this time it’ll be different”, he sings without stretching out his vocals; it’s a plain, singable melody that aims to recuperate, not to further destroy what little is left, so not a lot of space to move. He wants to claim the feeling is mutual, but it’s not a guarantee, and the harmonies accompanied by hidden pitched-up vocals give away that sentiment of despair. But “La Canción Más Triste”, an even slower piano ballad, is pure resignation. The facade comes out, Jay Wheeler is forced to accept it all. She’s with someone else, happy and fulfilled, but he remains stuck, to blame, and keeping the pictures. There’s barely any melody, it’s just an unregistered sigh. Looking down at the ground.
After that, things stabilize a lot more. The songs surrounding these 2 that boast about how, actually, the situation’s exactly the other way around, feel a lot more hollow, and maybe less replayable on their own, but serve as a very good backdrop for the rest of the album. Songs like “Soñando Despierto” and “Pensando En Tí” very much take rougher percussion sounds to encompass something more danceable, yet tragic. Main heartbreak that doesn’t even take place on the dancefloor, its main ambitions are sad, pitiful WhatsApp dedications to a contact that’s blocked you already. Jay’s lyrics are melodramatic and rough, but the delivery always remains collected, never histrionic. It’s all already out in the open, so what’s the point in making such a big show out of it?
There are some deviations from the formula, and the main theme. Many songs here, especially in the album’s second half, go for the vague, girl-power attitude a lot of modern reggaetón has; some for the better, others not so much. The one misstep on the album, “Te Quiero Así”, is trite lyricism about loving a potential partner without all that makeup and those filters and Photoshop and you’ve heard it a dozen times, but it also sounds hysterically bad. Whooshing effects for no reason, thin synth tones, and a horrible wannabe-sing-along chorus where the producers’ usual of trick of layering Jay’s vocals by pitching them up backfires terribly, as one high voice sounds like a tortured piece of string. I will admit, it is a great song for a good laugh, and I have laughed at it (certainly not with it!) many times, but it’s concerningly bad.
But the other 2 are far better, and quite different from each other. “Anda Sola” is a small, skippy song that thinks of a girl trying to bounce back after being dumped, and it’s the closest to a ‘party’ track on here. This is territory better marred by Sech, or Bad Bunny, especially since while those artists get to display at least some sense of liberation to go with the melancholy, here it’s all melancholy. Jay Wheeler doesn’t really know how to sell unabashed joy, there’s always got to be a black spot somewhere. That’s why the other song, “Canción Para Ellas”, fares way better. It plays with a tropical-inspired chord progression, wistful and quiet, and musically it’s gentle, delicate, like it was holding the girl in the story’s hand. Jay says “she got tired of suffering”, and this song grasps onto that: being fed up is the first step, but that doesn’t lead to immediate happiness. This song displays that gray middle ground; full of people, including people you know, but still feeling alone; longing to live again, but not knowing how. When it gets to the “Noches de rola! De las que baila sola” section, a certain “Callaíta” comes to mind in its solitude, without the euphoria.
Also, it’s hard to skirt around the major exception “Eazt”, the one single for this album, dedicated to his current girlfriend (the song’s titled that way because they met at the East Hotel in Miami, and her name starts with a Z, so that’s that). It’s right in the middle of the album, and thematically it doesn’t fit at all - would have served as a great closer, especially since it’s so peaceful and at ease with the world. Synthetic strings, a keyboard instead of a piano to make things lighter, and tapping percussion way in the background, Jay Wheeler chants his way through how difficult it was to fall in love again, but how easy it all became once he allowed himself to. It’s a touching song, and it serves to give the rest of the album more credibility; not everything can be this dour all the time.
El Amor y Yo lives up to its title. It’s a broken tale that sees liberation, heartbreak and bliss all in the same league of emotions, and it paints love as the sole reason why this entire world keeps on going. It’s a risk for an artist of his stature to release something this spare and barebones, but it doesn’t have to be that way. This album is merely the ramification of the ever-growing emotional weight and awareness present in mainstream reggaeton, maximized to such extents that no artist has so far. So, if it was meant to happen, I’m quite glad Jay Wheeler was the one to do it. He’s surrounded himself with a good team, and, if he can learn to express contentment more often and with more pride in his voice, embracing it as much as he’s so eager to express yearning or heartache, the tales can only grow.
Benny the Butcher - Tana Talk 4 (gangsta rap)
By far, the most I’ve enjoyed a Griselda project since they started focusing on making proper albums. Out of the 3 main members, Benny the Butcher was the one who always caught my eye the most: he was wittier than Conway the Machine, and certainly didn’t have the voice of Westside Gunn which continues to be a turn-off for me. A flawed artist, for sure. He can’t help but be derivative, as he takes the style of gangsta rap from the mid-to-late 90s and doesn’t exactly do much with the formula. Like Conway, his ability to create interesting hooks or choruses is null, and lately, he barely makes an effort to do so (whereas Westside is far more reliable for that). And the main key with all these elements up in the air is that, more often than not, listening to an album by a Griselda member often felt like a chore, something to get through and not actually feel alright listening to, since it all always felt too rehearsed, too rutinary, too interchangeable. It was all too prolific to ever call it ‘bad’, but having an emotional connection to it was always a challenge.
In a way, that challenge remains in Tana Talk 4, since not much is changed from previous projects. Benny’s still working heavily with the same old producers (the Alchemist and Daringer), most of the same old features (38 Spesh, Boldy James, the Griselda crew), and not much seems to have changed within the lyrical framing of what he’s talking about. But the way to connect with Tana Talk 4 becomes a lot easier here for a number of reasons, most of which take those familiarities and make the best use of them. For one, Benny’s always been the member of Griselda with the least interest in enlarging his releases for no reason - and this album’s no exception! 12 tracks, 40 minutes. It all feels skippier when he puts together an album. Add to that, while neither the Alchemist or Daringer switch up their style, the musical foundations just sound way better, and more intriguing; the beats are economical, laid back, but also middling through. And just about all the features bring in good material that adds to Griselda’s conversational, monologue-meets-monologue way of song building.
The main changing factor, though, is Benny himself. To put it bluntly, there’s a lot more humor to be found here! His inflections are more interesting, his bars are less immediately aggressive and more casual, his typical intensity is fed by a more witty vocabulary, his disses and aims go so past the point of ‘routine’ that they become punchlines in and of themselves. It’s like watching a sitcom character on their 7th or 8th season, where the status quo must remain and therefore, the writers have to come up with wackier ways to keep the character intact. While Conway plunged deeper into his demons on the very commendable God Don’t Make Mistakes, Benny is far more comfortable still discussing the trade, but to such extents that it feels like it’s more than mere routine. His “butcher comin’!” catchphrase feels very much more used as a proper catchphrase than ever before.
Not to say this is a ‘comical’ or ‘absurd’ listen than ever before, that’s not what’s going on. Instead, Benny just feels more aware of what he’s doing and not being afraid of staying in character. The best example of this is “10 More Commandments”, his follow-up to Biggie’s classic “Ten Crack Commandments”, aided by Diddy himself, an update of the trapping life that sees Benny owning up to his previous mistakes by shrugging them off, and then passing the responsibility on to the listener. Doing that, he’s led by twinkling piano keys, as if they were shining a light on what Benny’s communicating. Behind that beat is Daringer, also behind “Uncle Bun” featuring 38 Spesh, one of the most tense tracks on the album, but that still contains a line like “I make sure everybody eat, yeah, I think like a socialist”, as a little breather. He knows he can’t easily shrug off his conscience having sold drugs to a pregnant woman, but he conducts himself to moments approaching melody that can feel like saving graces (“I remember vividly!”).
He does remember vividly. He feels he’s going to try to make the best of it. He chops it all up to “I really trapped all night, stamina!” on “Thowy’s Revenge”, like a culmination of his decades’ worth of hustling, and it’s basically a throwaway line. He revels in the conventions of what he, his crew and his influences have built so thoroughly, he comes out with a victorious air. Good thing he has The Alchemist on his side for that, so rich with melody and (indeed) stamina in his beats, like the muted drums and horns on the aforementioned “Thowy’s Revenge”; or the murky piano of “Super Plug”, where Benny presents a world of recklessness since that’s all he knows with character and vibrancy; a highlight, the fuzzy “Bust A Brick Nick”, with a particularly excellent, brown-haze bass tone, and Benny going off for almost 4 minutes, very much aware of what he can and can’t do (“And next time you sneak diss me, just pay me / I'll write the hook”, he can’t write a hook to save his life; again, humor!).
As always, though, he can’t help getting along with the people he works with incredibly well. The Griselda collabs were bound to be good, and this time, they’re even revealing! I could do without “Guerrero” - not a particularly interesting beat, and whatever subtlety the track had is left astray by Westside - but “Tyson vs. Ali” is something to witness. It’s Benny and Conway acknowledging their history, loving how so many folks would love to compare their work, only to dismiss them without a warning. The entire track, they’re seeing each other rap, nodding their head and even responding with words of encouragement to one another. Considering how Conway’s been doing on his latest output, this is a well-earned, proper dedication to each other. But the biggest name on the album, J. Cole, shows up on the eased-up “Johnny P’s Caddy” and, for an opening statement of the album, goes toe-to-toe with Benny in such a fun way (Benny: “It's like they put out a smash thеn they gone in a flash, admit it / And then thеy make tracks and diss us like that's gon' add up the digits”. Cole: “N***a want me on a song, he gon' see the wrath of the reaper / I'm prolly gon' go to Hell if Jesus ask for a feature”, just to pick one). It’s great when mutual respect oozes out of a track like this.
These are the kinds of things one looks for when listening to an album like this, and we are getting an artist who’s not as expansive lyrically or musically as he’d like to be. His imagery isn’t that evocative, and his beats only set a couple of scenes, and they’ve been repeated for a good amount of projects by this point. But that’s all the more reason to, after all this time, give some levity to the procedure. Not trying to surpass limitations, but embracing them and going after what can be said in a way that’s economical, but concise. We get good storytelling matched with good sonics, and we even get to chuckle on our way through some tough patches. That’s enough a reason to celebrate.
Aldous Harding - Warm Chris (contemporary folk)
Little by little, Aldous Harding seems to have found her sense of humor. Produced by John Parish, the man behind PJ Harvey’s albums, Aldous has been exploring the moral grays, alongside the sonic and musical grays, with her output, mostly through folk-based instrumentation and aesthetic. Thing is, along the way, she kept discovering her voice. She could very well hush along and quietly whisper to the night, like many uninspired/uninspiring artists in the scene do nowadays, but she kept finding new ways to express different emotions. The roads started to become a bit more tarnished, more excessive, more theatrical - not Broadway or West-End theatrical, but off-every major place on the planet theatrical; the independent, the outcast, the indie. Her songs more and more played like monologues, and she was inside the character, and you can’t be the same character all the time.
By far, Warm Chris is her most uptempo work, and her funniest by a landslide, even if it is quite serious at heart (and in spirit). She displays an incredible voice that goes all around the spectrum, from menacing to inviting, from squeaky to deeply low. She leans on psychedelic-esque tones and compositions, where Parish’s production helps her out immensely well. At times, she seems to evoke a mocking tone, like on “Tick Tock”, a song that sees an encounter with someone else, and she’s eagerly awaiting for it to end. The hook has her expand her voice, but when she gets to the title, she gets defiant, shrugs it off and waits for a reply; meanwhile, the verses see her with a bass-like voice, never losing her cool with an instrumental so correct yet colorful. It’s waiting for someone else’s response, being unfazed. Lead singer “Fever” remains as collected, this time even more tossed-off than “Tick Tock”, and Aldous loudly proclaims how little time she has for everyone else’s drama. She once suffered from it, now she’s letting the winter horns sway her away - the instrumental bridge is wonderfully stagnant; feels as though there’s nothing left to say.
It’s not all disaffection, though. An artist with such an emotional core can’t leave it all behind. She marvels through what should be navel-gazing words, but instead are very blunt statements of reality, like “Well you know I'm married / And I was bored out of my mind!” on “Passion Babe”, where the cycling piano feels like the song, looping back towards many desires to step out of a romantic comfort zone, find something else in between. Her “passion”, if we were to call it that way, comes in different ways than before, now more relaxed, more taken for granted. The key line of the song, “Passion must play or passion won't stay”, is sung within the context of a sinking relationship, and she doesn’t feel like mustering up that many intense emotions, so passion did not, in fact, stay. Couple that with the acoustic hushing of “Staring at the Henry Moore”, which showcases these beautiful guitars behind Harding’s confused tone; does she want company, or would she rather be left alone?
Here’s where Warm Chris as a whole starts to take form. Aldous Harding is someone who’s been bruised quite enough times to say, enough. She still aches for and seeks company, but the red flags are more obvious than before, she’s more aware of what should and shouldn’t happen in a relationship (be it platonic or romantic), she looks at things in a macro way. There’s no idealizing anything here. She deals with her perception of reality. The title track sees her addressing the potential ‘Chris’ from the album, a certain Crystal, a former flame where she realizes how incapable she was of loving before, seeing things as a child, and noticing now how she’s able to offer that love. She’s responded with a shimmering rock guitar riff; total disruption, but also conclusive. The door is closed, and now, she deals with everything, and everyone, else.
Hence, the piano pieces that continue to reveal Aldous’ way of looking at the world, through musical entendres. Opener “Ennui” feels like the softest hammer, never rallying with intensity, but always feeling like a reminder to do something you’ve been leaving on the side for too long. “Come back, come back and leave it in the right place.” It’s distilling information, and the more those pianos and soft drums leave their mark, something might break. Smack in the middle of the album, “Lawn” goes for her kookiest voice (not too dissimilar from Adrianne Lenker’s, but with not as many dynamics) and builds a score for an unwritten play, a conversation where it feels like both parties are saying the exact same words (and props to the electric guitar at the end; emotional without breaking the habit). “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” is the one song where the musical arrangements take over Aldous’ performance, who delivers a pretty dull melody, but the horns ornaments alongside the tense piano really build up to a piece filled with intrigue.
The best aspects of this album come to full fruition on the final track, “Leathery Whip”. An organ that sounds out of the Zombies serving as the base to the song’s musicality, Aldous sounds as dismissive as always, concluding her seeking other things in life, things that those who’d want to get involved with her don’t, until she delves into her deepest register for the chorus, a mantra for the inflicted-yet-wise: “Here come life with his leathery whip”. She’s accompanied by John Parish himself, and also that same, high-pitched mocking aspect to her voice in the background, to simulate that ever-growing perspective. She teases life’s misgivings, as much as she suffers because of them (and why shouldn’t she?). She feels she may be able to love again, but that love comes with conditions, and skepticism. Not a speck of drama on this album, but she doesn’t naturalize heartbreak or disappointment; that’d be giving in, that’d be accepting things fully and completely. That would be sacrilege.
Sally Shapiro - Sad Cities (italo disco)
Haven’t you heard? What died didn’t stay dead. At least, not all the time. Let’s take a journey.
We need to establish a game, and 2 players, in order for this to work. Let’s briefly (and I’ll try to make it brief) discuss italo disco. Based after Giorgio Moroder’s advances towards electronic, synthesized pop music in the late 70s, italo disco was a genre mostly - though not exclusively - based in Italy throughout the 80s: it was an institution of faceless producers and vocalists making pop music that simulated the boom of synth funk in the US and the UK, but without the resources. In its essence, italo disco was sung by singers who couldn’t hit that many notes and were really bad at speaking in English, produced with cheap and garish synths that never came close to sounding like the real thing, and composed by exploiting pop tropes to such an extent they became unrecognizable and grotesque. It’s one of my favorite genres and movements in the history of pop music. It shows me the kind of pop I love, seen through such an archaic point of view, so malfunctioning it became unintentionally revealing of high romanticism (not romance; romanticism), lifestyles so far removed from our own they become alien-esque, and showing the lack of security in the middle of a society not built for the queer-driving niche of the genre. Italo disco was a genre done by losers, who would remain losers, and was listened to by losers; but they would never dare think of themselves like that. Going against the tides, that was the only way to go, to express what was within.
Didn’t last long. But, like everything, especially everything 80s-related, someone was bound to pick up on the forgotten waves. Sally Shapiro, a Swedish duo that took off in the mid-2000s, made italo disco sound professional and sustainable, hence losing the amateur vibe of the original product, but managed to keep its melancholic emotional core intact, and explored it for their own good. One-trick ponies, they focused on the more overtly sad aspects of italo disco, but at times, they nailed it. “I’ll Be By Your Side” in particular might be one of the finest songs in the genre; truly unresolved longing that aspired to that relenting tragedy. Sad Cities is their comeback after almost a full decade, and it’s mixed by occasional-genius, occasional-hack Johnny Jewel, a man behind the music for 2011’s Drive (negative) and sections of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return (positive). After burning through his main band, Chromatics, he decided to focus on other acts who understood his love for the sound, and would be more willing to jump right into it, instead of merely taking atmospheric cues from it. So, here we are.
Once again, there is a key element of italo disco that is, in part, absent, which is the lack of coordination, the clumsiness. Here, everything is much more professional and more refined. But the emotions are there, as present as ever before, just stylized in a more convenient way for contemporary listeners. The calls to old summer love flames, melodies sung in such crystalline ways, the holding on, the capturing, the remembering, the failed romance of italo disco as a way of looking at the world. Synths drop, fragile voices sing to the floor, sleep is not lost even if everything is on the ground. And the night falls so spectacularly. The absence remains, but the hunt is what made italo disco so emotional; look for and seek after the effusive.
It’s incredibly easy (and I’d even say, encouraging!) to fall for Sad Cities’s dreamy landscapes of a rainy town at night, and everything seems to pass by, but nothing that really matters. Songs like “Down This Road” and “Falling Clouds” suggest a kind of blissful ache that can only be resolved through swooning and searching for some sign in the middle of those forgotten streets. Some of it is romantic, but it’s not all about that, it never is. “‘Cause every time I say, “I don’t mind” / Then there’s something breaking inside / And every time I look at the sky / Then I am wondering where, and why I’m going down this road” is a key lyrical passage on the album, the noticing of a lost desire, undetermined to keep going, but still trudging through. In the same way that Sally Shapiro looks towards a lost stage of art, and follows it, to them, looking forward means looking back.
Sally Shapiro make the aspects of italo disco’s idealization of eternal love (and eternal salvation) something worth rescuing. There’s “Dulcinea”, dedicated to Don Quixote's love, the love invented in his own head. It imagines how that impossible quest can take on a life of its own, and dream, and love. Wanting to move past being the creation of a dream. Define how it passes from all those doors and without realizing or thinking that, in reality, that Dulcinea is a dream - or worse, someone else's dream. Sally Shapiro treat their characters with so much empathy, so willing to understand those dreams that they are willing to humanize them, in order to try to see how those conclusions are reached. Why do you need to feel love? And why should that love be imaginary? Idealized? Where do you get to if you don't let yourself shine?
And all the lingering in the air, that’s something to be kept in mind. They brood (a word I don’t like to use often, but it’s appropriate here) on the still “Tell Me How”, a tale of inadequacy in the middle of a world built to make the sensitive stronger, and those who don’t abide will be left behind; those Badalamenti synths stay in place. But there’s also the semblance of total buoyancy in “Believe In Me”, the kind that feels like a call being responded to, and suddenly the world is full of pinks and purples; what could be is now a reality. Sally, whoever she may be, sings the words with such gentle intentions and ideas, so humble in her approach to her lover: when her final statement is “You gotta believe in me”, she doesn't take a word of what that means for granted.
The Johnny Jewel co-sign is very much not something to get the Italians Do It Better nerds hyped up. His main work here comes through the mix, and just about every element is tainted with his trademark, neon sound of fluorescent lighting; it’s just that what’s going on inside those frames is different. No more sensuous drives, or rough talks about love. Now, everything is deeper and more subsided. Opening track “Forget About You” is a gem of the year, a collision of slow-burning atmosphere, with escalating synths all the way from 1985 (right before it all started rotting for good), artificial backing vocals that denote the false, putting-on-a-show element of this music, and hurt melodies that don’t want to be forgotten. Sally herself sings about that fear, of being let go of, and how that’s something she could never do: “To leave you behind has never crossed my mind”. They see honor in remembering, because that’s all they have.
Far be it from simply, solely, being about the moment of recollection of the 80s. Sally Shapiro (and Johnny) have polished their sound enough to take from that era of flashy synths and make them sound, at times, better than the original product. But they’re still stuck in the 80s. So, when they decide to look ahead, they literally mean what would happen after: the 90s. “Million Ways” dives into the house movement that Italian music would also be a part of, but this isn’t Eurobeat. This is the driving, syncopated piano schemes that, instead of being matched with a present voice and campy writing, is supported by Sally’s unquestionable yearning, even directly on the dancefloor. The chorus is wonderfully wimpy and scared, like it didn’t know what moves to make - eventually, Sally gets surpassed by vocoders singing the exact melody with more precision and confidence. Machines that seem to know what to do more than humans.
But of course, they can’t be there for too long. It’s all a deviation. That’s why, neither in the 2000s nor in 2022, can Sally Shapiro’s presence call for an ‘italo disco revival’ of sorts. A genre as adolescent as italo disco, cut short so abruptly with no heirs, can’t be taken this seriously unless it’s done by extreme fetishists, which is what we have here. Melancholy must have a purpose; if not, you can revive something all you want, but eventually it ends up leaving again. Maybe that's why Sally Shapiro's Sad Cities ends up being an isolated plant in the middle of today's new music jungle. The final track, “Fading Away”, takes a while to get going, but then it bursts into the highway one last time. One final ride into the neon sunset before it all dissipates, and it’s both heartwarming and utterly bittersweet. Pulsing beats can only take you so long, if you’re tainting them like this.
One final note: the title track of this album, “Sad City”, is a highlight for many things: its down-to-earth, insecure lyrics; Sally’s performatic delivery of the spoken-word bridge; the surge of string keys in the chorus. But it’s notable for something very interesting: it has the one moment on the album where the band slips up. An artistic mistake, a noticeable lack of judgment, something that is far from as correct and clean as this music is. After said spoken word bridge, the final chorus goes into a, frankly, horrendous key change. Out of place, off key, the tune of the melody is lost, the high keyboards suddenly sound wrong, it's… to be kind, questionable. But that’s what italo disco was like. Disastrous choices all around, capricious instincts that led to shitty passages. But here, 40 years later, after understanding and reinforcing the genre’s strengths, Sally Shapiro and Johnny Jewel fall for the same mistakes their predecessors did. It’s the most revealing moment of the album: they are right in tune. Their mission has been accomplished. Suddenly, a different kind of humanity comes out of it. The humanity of the break, and the break without happiness or glory. Refreshing for this colorful vintage.
so incredibly on point with the kyougen review