Weekly Music Roundup: Ghostpoet & Bokanté
Week of May 22: This week, a new song from The National, and musical responses to immigration and mind control.
The National Offer First Track From New LP
Most of them no longer live in Brooklyn, but it’s still hard to think of The National as anything but a defining Brooklyn indie-rock band. And any time they release a new album, it’s an Event. Well, the next Event will be September 8, when the band drops the new album Sleep Well Beast. In the meantime, though, we have a lower-case event as The National has released a single, called “The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness.” The title sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel (and is almost as long), but the song finds Matt Berninger’s vocals in his lighter, higher register; and Aaron Dessner has a repeating guitar riff (and a solo!) that sounds like it’s right out of the classic rock playbook. Despite the high accessibility factor, though, this is a National song, so you’d expect a full quotient of darkness and anxiety. And you’d be correct.
Ghostpoet’s Unnerving Take On The Immigrant Crisis
The English songwriter known as Ghostpoet – born Obaro Ejimiwe – is a terrifically talented lyricist making music at the intersection of rock, rap, and spoken word. He has just released a new video, for a song called “Immigrant Boogie,” featuring some ominous post-punk guitar playing by Leo Abrahams, the longtime Brian Eno collaborator. At a time when stories of refugees may be causing fatigue in even the most open-minded folks, Ghostpoet asks you to not think of some nameless person in a far-off land, but to put yourself in the place of his first-person narrator. The video ups the ante, as a lone man – tellingly, an apparently Western, white man – desperately treks across a wasteland with factories looming on the horizon. It suggests a post-climate-change apocalypse in which everyone is potentially a refugee.
Casey Dienel Imitates a Woman In Love
Singer and songwriter Casey Dienel has been recording for almost a decade under the name White Hinterland. She is probably best known for her song “Ring the Bell” – and the lawsuit it provoked when Justin Bieber and Skrillex apparently sampled it without her permission. But now she’s released an album under her own name – an album that simultaneously sounds like a woman who’s had enough of a man’s world and is out to have a good time on her own terms. The album is called Imitation Of A Woman In Love, and in the single “High Times,” what sounds like a sample of oddly-processed strings eventually gives way to a woozy bridge (remember the song title), until rousing itself for a buoyant conclusion in which Dienel plays on the old “looking for Mr. Right” cliché: “I’m looking for Mr. Right Here Now.”
A Trippy, Twisty Single from Guerilla Toss
When James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem helped start DFA Records back in 2001, he was probably hoping that a band like Guerilla Toss would come along. The NY-based band is about to release its second album on the label; it’ll be called GT Ultra, a call-back to the notorious US government program called MK Ultra, which tried to see if LSD and other drugs could be employed for mind control and espionage. They’ve just released the single, “The String Game,” and it’s full of clever, off-kilter art-pop that might remind you of vintage Talking Heads or early-80s King Crimson. Skittering drums and pointillist guitars back up singer Kassie Carlson’s vocals, which swing through a gray area between speech and song.
The Guerilla Toss album comes out on June 22.
Snarky Puppy’s World Music Spinoff Releases New Single
Michael League, the bassist and leader of the Grammy-winning band jazz/R&B/rock band Snarky Puppy, has re-imagined the blues band for a global audience – and a global ensemble. The group Bokanté, which includes several of League’s Snarky Puppy colleagues, finds the common ground between Western and West African music. The line from the Mississippi Delta to Mali is not a straight one – it wends through the Caribbean, where lead singer Malika Tirolien is from. On her island of Guadalupe, the word “bokanté” means “exchange,” and the band’s new single, “O La,” is an exchange of musical and cultural ideas that seems effortlessly catchy.
