Weekly Music Roundup: Dessa and El Perro Del Mar

Week of Oct. 28: This week, Kanye goes gospel; Dessa goes orchestral; and a 60s hit returns.

PREMIERE: Dessa Unveils Recording With Her New Band – The Minnesota Orchestra

The rapper, singer, and songwriter Dessa is part of the indie hip-hop collective known as Doomtree, all of whom are central players on the Twin Cities music scene. Her songs can be bleak portraits of life on the streets, or bittersweet reflections on romance – usually romance gone bad. But in either case, she has often used a rich tapestry of sound in her productions, so when the opportunity to work with the Minnesota Orchestra arose, Dessa leapt at it. On November 8, she’ll release Sound The Bells, a live recording with the orchestra made before what sounds like a rapturous audience. Bringing a few key collaborators of her own, Dessa recreates some of her best songs on a grand stage, and today, we premiere “The Chaconne,” which used classical music imagery in its original version and so works beautifully in this orchestral arrangement. The narrator is in love with a musician, who obsesses over his chaconne (a type of baroque dance, the most famous example of which was written by Bach) and allows it to consume his life – with their romance being one of the casualties. It’s an elegant, restrained tale – until the very end, when the bells toll in the lyrics and the orchestra blazes forth in all its brassy glory. 

Dessa will appear on our New Sounds program on Wednesday, November 13, to talk about Sound The Bells, and will perform with string quartet live in The Greene Space on Wednesday, November 20. Get tickets here. 

Kanye West Releases Jesus Is King – An LP and A Movie

Among all the other things Kanye West has done in a wild career, he has turned the act of releasing an album into a kind of performance art. Since the tortured release of Life Of Pablo in 2016, West has teased fans with release dates that have come and gone, and presented listening parties and live performance events tied to albums that were delayed and often quite different from what was promised. So Friday’s release of Jesus Is King was big news. It was about a month late, and even on Friday it wasn’t quite ready in the early morning hours when that day’s new albums are generally released to the public. But around noon, Kanye’s set of short gospel-inflected songs finally came out. He didn’t have much choice, because Friday was also the release date of his IMAX movie, also called Jesus Is King, that documents his Sunday Services events. In terms of the album itself, well, the headline seems to have been, “hey, there are no curse words on this album.” Give a man credit when he tries something new, but Kanye West made his reputation – his early reputation, the musical one – as a producer, and the new songs feature mostly very simple, straightforward textures. Those who don’t share his commitment to God and Christianity may find the lyrical content tiresome. There’s a song, “Closed On Sunday,” driven by acoustic guitar (but with a subtly interesting producton behind it), where West doesn’t rap at all, but sings, tentatively; and his repeated chorus “closed on Sunday/you’re my Chik Fil A” clangs on the ear. But the album does have moments. “On God” has lyrics that we’ll be parsing for a while; and I like the interplay between West’s voice and the sampled vocals in “Follow God.” It has a bit of an edge that is missing from much of the album, and it doesn’t conclude – it just ends with a scream of frustration. 

Oh, and Kanye says his next album, Jesus Is Born, will be out on Christmas Day. For what that’s worth… 

El Perro Del Mar Offers A Dark Take On Burt Bacharach’s “Please Stay”

The Swedish singer and songwriter Sarah Assbring records under the name El Perro Del Mar (literally, the dog of the sea).  Her early albums were a kind of bedroom pop, although even then, the arrangements hinted at something more expansive.  Her last LP, KoKoro, was full of sounds drawn from Asian and African traditions, even as her songs stayed pretty clearly in a Western, if experimental, pop vein.  Now she’s released a cover of Burt Bacharach’s “Please Stay,” a song he originally wrote for The Drifters but which became a mid-60s hit for the English group The Cryin’ Shames. Bacharach songs are generally full of bright colors and big emotional arrangements, and this version by El Perro Del Mar takes that sound and upends it to chilling effect. From the opening electronic drone and ominous drumbeat, to the wall of industrial sound that threatens to overwhelm Assbring’s fragile vocals at the end of the first chorus, to the eerie flanging effect on her voice in the bridge, you get the sense that there is more going on here than a broken heart. It sounds instead like someone trying to summon a ghost, or as Assbring herself puts it, “the pleadings of having someone not die or return from the dead.”

This cover and some new songs by El Perro Del Mar will be part of a dance theater work that she is premiering at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater in November and December. 

King Princess Releases Debut Album Cheap Queen

Brooklyn-born Mikaela Straus may only be 20, and just now releasing her first album, but she has already begun to make a name for herself, and that name is King Princess. An early single and a well-received EP, often touching on themes of queer love, have already made her a fixture on music festivals. Cheap Queen is a polished but multiform effort, with contributions from Father John Misty and the Dap-Kings, among others. Songs on it vary widely: the title track is a dance number; “Ain’t Together” has moments that sound like an early Lou Reed song; “Homegirl” is a lovely acoustic guitar ballad. The album’s opener, “Tough On Myself,” has a big neo-soul vocal arrangement but also a prominent electric guitar part that suggests that there is still a place for rock in today’s pop landscape. King Princess’s honeyed vocals keep the album from sounding like a playlist; Cheap Queen is more like the vision of a young artist who sees where she wants to go, and isn’t afraid to find that she wants to go several places at once.

Xylouris White’s “Ascension” Is Hypnotic Cretan Folk-Rock

The duo Xylouris White has just released a new song called “Ascension,” which continues the duo’s signature blend of avant-garde rock and traditional music from the Greek island of Crete. Drummer Jim White is one of the founders of the Australian instrumental rock band The Dirty Three, and has played with PJ Harvey, Cat Power, and Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile, among others. Giorgos Xylouris is the son of a famous Cretan musician and plays the laouto, a lute that looks like a bit like a mandolin on steroids. Their next album will be called The Sisypheans, and the song “Ascension” has just come out, with its hypnotic, repeating melodic and rhythmic patterns finding an echo in a video that celebrates repetition. Even an act like peeling potatoes, it seems to say, can become a pathway to a different level of consciousness when your mind dissociates from the repeating action and wanders freely. So perhaps the album views Sisyphus not as a figure of endless frustration, bound to push that boulder up the hill forever, but as a kind of Zen master, using the numbing repetition to find a kind of mental freedom. We’ll find out on November 8, when The Sisypheans comes out.  

Xylouris White plays at Le Poisson Rouge on December 3.