Weekly Music Roundup: Bruce Springsteen, Anjimile, and Umut Adan
beabadobee Returns with a New Single and New Collaboration
The Philippines-born, London-based singer Beatrice Laus, who records as beabadobee, has just released a new song called “All I Did Was Dream Of You”; it’s a collaboration with The Marias, the bilingual pop band out of LA. The vocal harmonies are appropriately dreamy, but the lyrics mention nightmares at one point and the layered production includes the distant threat of a distorted electric guitar. The video is similarly full of alternating dreamlike and unsettling imagery. “Stay or just leave me be,” beabadobee repeatedly sings, as she walks the fine line between light and dark.
Anjimile Celebrates Identity on New LP
Although he’d released music before 2020, it was Anjimile’s pandemic album Giver Taker that first introduced us to his probing, finely-calibrated songs about his own experiences as a trans man. Growing up in a conservative Christian family with immigrant parents from Malawi, Anjimile’s journey has been a bumpy one, and his battles with addiction formed a thread in some of those earlier songs. With The King, in 2023, Anjimile offered a statement of defiance and release, with some of his heaviest, amps-to-11 productions. Now comes You’re Free To Go, a title that suggests Anjimile entering a new phase of being comfortable in his own skin. Sonically it seems to grow out of the Giver Taker realm, with arrangements that are a little more subtle, and the song “Waits For Me” continues to mine his own story, in a straightforward but not plainspoken way. “When I was a little girl,” he sings, “I wanted to be free”; in the next verse, he sings “When I was a little boy, I wanted to be real.”
Bruce Springsteen Covers “A Rainy Night In Soho”
Yesterday we got news of an upcoming tribute album featuring the songs of Shane MacGowan. 20th Century Paddy will feature versions of songs by the untamable front man of The Pogues by people like Tom Waits, Hozier, Johnny Depp, and lots more, and while the album won’t come out until November, the first single was released yesterday. Bruce Springsteen’s version of “A Rainy Night In Soho” sports a muted trumpet that gives the song more of a late-night jazz feel as opposed to The Pogues’ more string-laden ballad arrangement. Springsteen himself wrote of MacGowan that “his soul was filled with the transgressive and ecstatic properties of the saints,” and his heartfelt delivery of the song suggests that this was a case of, as they say, game recognizing game.
Mei Semones Brings Brazilian Warmth To A Brooklyn Winter
In guitar circles, Mei Semones has quickly become a rising star. The Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter was born in Japan, and is a big fan of Brazilian music (as many Japanese musicians are), and her new single, “Tooth Fairy,” features bilingual lyrics sung over an easygoing bossa nova/jazz beat. But don’t be fooled – “easygoing” does not mean “easy.” This is some effortlessly virtuosic guitar playing, although I don’t for a minute believe the video, which suggests she and guest musician John Roseboro actually played this during one of our recent blizzards. The part about Roseboro losing a tooth on the subway, though, is apparently true.
“Tooth Fairy” will be part of Mei Semones’s next EP, Kurage, out April 10.
Umut Adan Mixes Turkish Psych and Colombian Cumbia
The Turkish singer and guitarist Umut Adan revels in the sounds of 1970s Anatolian psychedelia – that reverb-drenched style that grew up when Turkish folk songs met UK prog rock and US surf guitars. His new album, Başka Bahar (“Another Spring”), done with his Italian-based band Zebânis, uses that vintage sound as a springboard for a very contemporary, often heavier record. Lead single “Bogota,” named after the capital of Colombia, employs a short, repeating guitar riff that’s right out of the Anatolian playbook, but the rhythm is like a heavily accented cumbia beat. Whatever, it’s still eminently danceable, and Adan’s vocals, delivered in a metal-adjacent growl, lean into the idea of dance as a form of resistance.
Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and Rajasthan Express Renew Their Collaboration
In 2015, the Israeli songwriter Shye Ben Tzur teamed up with Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and the voice-and-percussion troupe known as Rajasthan Express for an album called Junun. With its call-and-response vocals drawing from South Asian Sufi music, and its pulsating drums, the album was a cross-cultural winner. Now they’ve all reunited and will be releasing a new album in May; this week the single “Ranjha” was released, with drummer Tom Skinner (formerly of Sons Of Kemet and now a colleague of Greenwood’s in The Smile) joining the fun. After a traditional slow vocalise to begin, the song itself comes dancing in, with the vocals backed by Greenwood on bass, Ben Tzur on guitar, and some of Rajasthan Express’s horn players. At once spiritual and energetic, “Ranjha” eventually gives way to an eerie instrumental postlude, which features a traditional South Asian drone under the ghostly sounds of Greenwood’s early electronic instrument known as the ondes Martenot.
