THE REVIEWS
Devendra Banhart
Ma (NONESUCH)
Mother Earth, mother land, and our maternal relationships—freak folkster Devendra Banhart returns with Ma, deftly weaving through these various matrilineal permutations to reflect on current ills, with songs so effortless and pretty, they sooth and comfort. He sings three songs in his mother tongue, Spanish, out of helplessness, and to probably stand in solidarity with family in Venezuela, experiencing a humanitarian crisis. Banhart grew up in Caracas and moved to California as a teen.
“Is this nice?/Do you like it?/Oooo…” he coos mellifluously on opener “Is This Nice?” as plucked strings twinkle like a lullaby. It plays like a lover’s conversation until mid-song, when it reveals itself to be for a child bereft of their mother. The quirky “Kantori Ongaku,” translated from Japanese to mean “country music,” echoes the soft staccato of Aldous Harding’s “Zoo Eyes;” with less drama and more whimsy. Here pepped with boozy horns and sentiments that poke fun at our bandwidth for so much bad news. That inertia between endless outrage and ennui with lines such as “all the death in my house/makes it easy to shop online.”
South American inflections pepper everything from lyrics to rhythms—never static. Imagine kicking off the espadrilles and dancing to the gentle joropo rhythms on “Abre Las Manos.” “Love Song,” with its swaying bossa nova, is the equivalent of a summer breeze on a palm tree-dotted beach. “Memorial” touches on the death of someone close as he sorts through old letters looking for evidence of their laugh; his Donovan-like vibrato used to good effect.
He hasn’t lost his absurdist streak with the lyrical play on the pleasing “Taking a Page.” “Ami” offers restorative words of solace. What a coup when he then closes with “Will I See You Tonight,” a tender duet with folk legend Vashti Bunyan no less. Beautifully sweeping, unhurried strings are coupled with his whispered tones and gossamer Bunyan-Banhart harmonies—a standout in an album with no shortage of heartfelt, melodious, Latin-flecked folk. (www.devendrabanhart.com)
By Celine Teo-Blockey
Bat For Lashes
Lost Girls (AWAL)
Since Bat For Lashes’ magnificent debut, 2006’s Fur and Gold, Natasha Khan has explored a new direction with her band with each successive release, often with mixed results. The one constant being Khan’s hauntingly beautiful voice. Lost Girls, the fifth album in the Bat For Lashes annals, is no different. But the results are less mixed and more disappointing.
With the programmed drums, gentle rhythms, and soft synth melodies, it’s readily apparent the direction being explored on Lost Girls is ’80s New Wave pop. Big, airy keyboards proliferate and are mixed with swirling melancholic textures and pleasant choruses. Synth pop darlings Thompson Twins are an appropriate reference point.
Unfortunately this is a genre that’s been explored to death over the last 30 years so there’s not much left to discover or new ground to examine, so most tracks tend to wallow within the comfort zone of familiar and bright popular music without the innovation or smart pop style Bat For Lashes have been known to produce. Fortunately though, Khan’s dreamy lead vocals, and mystifying multi-tracked backing vocals, are so good the shortcomings of the music are almost forgiven.
However, no pardon is needed for the exceptional standout track “The Hunger.” It’s peppy, tuneful, and ornamented with layered instrumentation, euphonious keyboard melodies and a subtly shifting wallpaper of moody sonic textures. And of course Khan brings it all to life with her beautiful voice that shines with an echoing elegance.
“Feel For You” contains tribal beats and a hint of the mysterious and intriguing flow of past efforts but ultimately never shifts gears and so falls a bit flat for never going anywhere. “Vampires” is one of the more interesting songs on the album. Cinematic in scope with a slick bass line, echoing drums, and Cure-like guitar lines, it’s quite interesting but fails to impress since it’s lacking the singular best element of Bat For Lashes…vocals.
Over the course of the whole record, the overdone synth pop and uninspired songwriting becomes a bit tiring, so Lost Girls as a whole is a disappointment for a band with so much talent and past successes. But here’s hoping Ms. Khan keeps singing. (www.batforlashes.com)
By Matt the Raven
Alex Cameron
Miami Memory (SECRETLY CANADIAN)
Over the past few years, there hasn’t been an act, or more accurately, entertainer, such as Alex Cameron. He is a throwback to an older time where musicians or artists playing a persona was a familiar concept, an outlier in our current overly self-aware times. Musically, he exists as a more cynical Bruce Springsteen, brilliantly painting the worlds of these close-to-real-life characters and their awful excesses.
Over his previous two albums, Cameron has revealed himself as a master storyteller, with an extremely dark sense of humor, to explore themes of toxic masculinity in a subtle, performative way. Live or in his music videos, which tell an important part of Cameron’s down-and-out-loser character, he physically embodies the machismo displayed by men way out of their depth and times in the 21st century.
On his latest album, Miami Memory, however, Cameron has taken on a couple more voices to his repertoire, a direct result of his relationship with actress Jemima Kirke. Cameron’s third full-length sees him take on female perspectives to the toxic masculinity problem, such as on the brilliant “Far From Born Again,” his song celebrating empowered sex-workers. Alongside this, Cameron sings in the first-person for the first time, addressing Kirke’s children directly in opener “Stepdad” and then Kirke herself on the album’s sex-dripping title track.
Cameron still finds room to cover his more favored and comfortable subjects, however, through a new, specifically American lens. This is Cameron’s first album fully recorded in America, and as such he utilizes a range of sounds and genres reflecting that such as the brilliant “Bad For the Boys,” a bar-rock exposition on various awful men. Meanwhile closer “Too Far” sits just on the right side of cheese, because if there is a contemporary artist who can successfully balance cliche and thought-provoking pop music, it’s Cameron.(www.alkcm.bandcamp.com)
By Adam Turner-Heffer
Charli XCX
Charli (ATLANTIC)
No one would dare to call the music of Charlotte Aitchison minimalist. The artist better known as Charli XCX has spent the better part of the past decade gradually shifting the pop landscape, from adding to the radio canon (“I Love It,” “Boom Clap,” “Fancy”), to hyping up artists from around the globe (Tommy Cash, PC Music, Kim Petras, etc.). 2017’s mixtape Pop 2, Charli’s opus, was a 10 track blend of experimental pop maximalism that played like a DJ-Kicks dance mix for the end of the world. Charli has followed up this feat with her third proper studio album Charli, an album that is no less jam-packed than its predecessor but overstays its welcome a bit too long.
Charli is in many ways a musical continuation of Pop 2. Helmed by Charli and PC Music head A.G. Cook, beats dip and whir and drop out on a moment’s notice. Christine and the Queens-assisted single “Gone” ends with a glitch and drum deconstruction centered on the chorus “Why do we keep when the water runs?/Why do we love if we’re so mistaken?” Posse cut “Shake It,” featuring Big Freedia, CupcakKe, Brooke Candy, and Pabllo Vittar, draws heavily from the famed Busta Rhymes remix “Touch It.” The track takes its cue from its title, bouncing and shaking as each artist brings their own flavor to the party. Charli XCX is a master of melding unique voices into one cohesive track, and much of Charli is no exception.
But while Pop 2 was a rollercoaster that refused to relent, Charli at times tends to drag. The second half of the record doesn’t match the immediacy of the first, with tracks like “Official” and “February 2017” feeling out of place in the grand scheme of the record. Despite these brief lulls, Charli is another winning release from an artist who won’t be stopped in pushing pop music into the 22nd century. (www.charli-the-album.co.uk)
By Ryan Meaney
DIIV Deceiver
(CAPTURED TRACKS)
The story of DIIV may be littered with tabloid headlines and controversy, yet Zachary Cole Smith and his band of cohorts have been responsible for some of the finest music released this decade.
If 2012’s debut Oshin set the scene with its opulent mix of shoegaze, dream pop, and surf rock, 2016’S follow up Is the Is Are demonstrated Smith and co.’s resolve, battling adversity and then defeating every possible obstacle thrown its away. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that their third album Deceiver represents arguably DIIV’s finest body of work to date.
With a reshuffle in personnel and co-writer Colin Caulfield switching duties from guitar to bass in light of predecessor Devin Ruben Perez’s somewhat acrimonious departure, the songs that eventually became began life as rough sketches conceived between shows while on tour last year. Indeed, the majority of these songs formed the bulk of the band’s set during October 2018’s tour with Deafheaven and having snared esteemed producer Sonny Diperri to provide the finishing touches, their faith in said compositions
