Weekly Music Roundup: Antibalas, Moses Sumney, and Jackson Browne
Week of Jan. 13: This week, new songs from Antibalas and Jackson Browne, old songs made new by Rafiq Bhatia and Bonny Light Horseman, and a new song from Moses Sumney.
PREMIERE: New Afrobeat Funkiness From Antibalas
For the past 20 years, the Brooklyn band Antibalas has taken the Afrobeat sounds associated with the legendary and controversial Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, and brought those sounds from 1970s Lagos to 21st century New York. (Much of the band for the Broadway hit musical Fela! consisted of Antibalas members.) The band is about to release its latest album, a mix of funk and soul and Nigerian roots music called Fu Chronicles. Today, we premiere the track called “Amenawon,” a title that honors the mother of the band’s Nigerian-born lead singer Duke Amayo. His mom’s middle name was Amenawon, and near the end of the song we hear Amayo sing “may the water you will drink/not pass you by,” a literal translation of the name. It turns out, water is the theme of this track, which invokes the Yoruba deity of rivers, Yomoja, and invites the rain waters to wash away the corruption and pollution below. Of course, in the best Afrobeat tradition, all this seriousness of purpose is carried along by a relentless groove and a thicket of interlocking horns.
Antibalas releases Fu Chronicles on February 7 and plays Brooklyn Bowl on March 20 and 21.
Another Song Out Of Time By Bonny Light Horseman
The new trio called Bonny Light Horseman consists of Anais Mitchell (composer of Hadestown), Eric D. Johnson (of the band Fruit Bats), and Josh Kaufman (sideman to the stars, including The National and Josh Ritter). Their self-titled debut album will be a collection of old folk songs that they’ve found new approaches to, and original songs that act as a kind of extension of that folk tradition. I’ve already raved about their version of “Jane Jane,” though I tried mighty hard not to make it too obvious that I’d already found one of my top 10 LPs of 2020 while it was still 2019. But this new single, “The Roving,” is the group’s fourth and they’ve all been winners. This one is, I guess, an original song, but it borrows heavily from some very old folk lyrics. The key line, “I knew her love was changing, by the roving of her eye,” comes from the old British ballad tradition, and can be heard in the song “Loving Hannah,” and in a couple of other English and Irish folk songs. Now centuries old, it remains a heartbreaking refrain, because of course humans haven’t changed much – we can still get a shiver of apprehension from a tiny but telltale flicker in a loved one’s eye. The band’s setting, somewhat reminiscent of the Rolling Stone’s ballad “Wild Horses,” is appropriately simple and poignant.
Rafiq Bhatia Offers A Stunning Cover of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
First off, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is not what you think it is. Thanks to Roberta Flack’s early career-defining hit version, it’s come down to us as a soul ballad. But Ewan MacColl, the British folk musician and activist, wrote it in 1957 for Peggy Seeger, the American folk singer with whom he scandalously fell in love. (He was 20 years older than she was, and, inconveniently, already married.) MacColl wrote it as a folk song - and apparently hated all the many covers that came after. I can only wonder what he would make of the new version by Rafiq Bhatia, who came on the scene as a virtuosic jazz guitarist but who has become a kind of sculptor in sound. Bhatia is about to release an EP called Standards, Vol. 1, in which he reinvents familiar tunes by Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman. And with the remarkable vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant, he recasts “The First Time” as a surreal electronic dreamscape. McLorin Salvant’s singing is brilliant and startling: briefly sticking to the familiar tune, then drifting over the ominous clouds provided by Bhatia’s electronics, occasionally playing up the melody’s folky turns, and at one point (at 1:58, the phrase “of a captive bird”) departing briefly from standard tuning and entering Bhatia’s alternate sonic universe.
Standards Vol. 1 comes out on January 31, and Rafiq Bhatia plays at National Sawdust on February 5.
Big News! A New Record From Guided By Voices!
Like those people who circle the globe chasing after a solar eclipse, the music world waits with bated breath for its own rare and special event: a new song from Robert Pollard’s band Guided By Voices.
Hah hah hah hah… god, sometimes I just crack myself up. Pollard is among the most prolific songwriters in the history of the universe; last year alone, the band released three full-length albums, and closed the year with a 100-song concert in LA. Yes, 100 songs, which represents, believe it or not, less than 5% of Pollard’s songwriting output. Okay, so it’s not a big deal when the band announces a new LP, but it’s still welcome news, because the band’s idiosyncratic blend of punk, psychedelia, lo-fi indie rock, and pop melodicism can often lead to unpredictable places. The band’s (first?) album of 2020 is called Surrender Your Poppy Field, and comes out on February 20. But the single, “Volcano,” is out now, and it is aptly named. A steady walking beat lulls you through the verses, but the choruses explode with increasingly volcanic guitar noise.
Jackson Browne Leads A Haitian-American Benefit Project
A new album coming late this month features the veteran American songwriter and activist Jackson Browne in collaboration with musicians from Haiti, Mali, and beyond; titled Let The Rhythm Lead: Haiti Song Summit Vol. 1, the LP is a benefit for the organization called Artists for Peace and Justice. The first single has just been released. It’s called “Love Is Love” and features both Browne, still sounding much like his ubiquitous hit-making self of the 1970s, and the gifted and versatile Haitian musician Paul Beaubrun, whose parents were part of the foundational Haitian pop band Boukman Eksperyans, which he now leads. (A second single came out immediately after, featuring Jenny Lewis and Malian musician Habib Koite.) “Love Is Love” rides along on a languid Caribbean rhythm. Browne sings (mostly) in English and is joined by Beaubrun in the recurring sections sung in Haitian Kreyòl. The song is a simple plea for understanding; the video shows people in Haiti going about their business much like anyone else, and suggests that ideas like love, hope, and family are at least as important as food, clothing, and shelter in creating and sustaining a community.
Moses Sumney Has A Message For His Future Self
“Me In 20 Years” is the name of the new single by Moses Sumney, who has displayed his stunning falsetto in his baroque-rock debut LP Aromanticism and in a more politically-charged EP called Black in Deep Red. Now he’s working on a double LP called græ that is coming in stages – part one in February, and the whole thing in May. The album title suggests grayness – something that is neither black nor white but exists in between. This is a fine metaphor for Sumney’s music, which is fluid when it comes to genre, and perhaps for Sumney himself. (He’s lived in both America and Ghana, and the photos of him that accompany his latest singles suggest a gray area gender-wise as well – an ambiguity that of course colors those high, falsetto vocals too.) “Me In 20 Years” is built on an unquiet bed of electronics courtesy of co-producer Daniel Lopatin, who records under the name Oneohtrix Point Never, and presents a character who is wrestling with a decision, whether to move on from a failed relationship or to chase after it.
