Weekly Music Roundup: Ela Minus, Margo Price, and mary in the junkyard

This week, a well-timed protest LP by Margo Price; mary in the junkyard’s buzzed-about debut; Ela Minus & Nick Leon’s collaboration; plus new releases from Akusmi and Kalia Vandever.

Ela Minus Announces New LP with DJ Nick Leon

The Colombian-American electronic artist Ela Minus has announced a new album with Miami-based DJ Nick León. qué les pasó a mis amigos? (“what happened to my friends?”) comes out on August 7, but the first single is just out. “espiral” is a woozy bit of electronic pop – although maybe “pop” is not the right word for a song with wavery microtonal synths and Minus’s lighter-than-air vocals. Leon’s dance beat does keep the whole thing grounded, but Minus’s experimental leanings are very much in evidence here.

Margo Price Releases Protest Music LP

Country music is not a monolith, so while it may skew more conservative than other musical genres, there are still people like Margo Price who champion progressive ideas. Today she released Days of Unrest, a collection of protest songs that Price has chosen to highlight the struggles of immigrants, farmers, the prison system and more. Some of these songs have stood the test of time – and sadly, so have the issues they address. Perhaps there’s no better example than Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” a song he wrote in 1948 after a plane crash killed a large group of Mexican migrant workers who were being deported from California. Newspaper coverage made sure to name the white crew members who died, and referred to the rest simply as “deportees.” Margo Price enlists Joan Baez – who knows a thing or two about protest songs – to help out with the vocals, and the whole arrangement is given a lift by the mournful horns of Memphis Mariachi. 

mary in the junkyard’s Hotly Anticipated Debut Is Out Today

London trio mary in the junkyard makes a singular brand of art rock. Founded on the ruins of a string quartet, the group uses slinky bass, steady drumming, and subtly virtuosic guitar, but also adds cellos and violas as the mood strikes (and it seems to strike fairly regularly). After a set of EPs built up a buzz around the group, they finally released their debut LP today. It’s called Role Model Hermit, and while many of singer/guitarist/cellist Clari Freeman-Taylor’s lyrics are elliptical and unsettling, this song, “Thou Shalt Sprout,” is more in the vein of an old folk ballad – direct, and, yes, unsettling. The vocal harmonies, the restive percussion, the distant drones – it all adds up to a new song with an old, or perhaps timeless, sound. 

 Global Dance Music From London’s Akusmi

French-born, London-based Pascal Bideau records under the name Akusmi. His primary instruments (though by no means the only ones) are sax and keyboards, and his music is generally based on a fusion of electronic minimalism, echoes of spiritual jazz, and the sounds of non-Western instruments and rhythms. His new album, Terra Incognita, includes the Indian tabla, West African ngoni (a type of string instrument), and various kinds of flute. As with his past work, there are moments of quiet and repose, alternating with tracks that pulse with the rhythmic impetus of the American minimalists and/or the groove of electronic dance music. “Rain Dance” is one of the latter, or at least, that’s where it ends. The beginning is a gradually building sonic meditation that echoes South Asian classical music before Bideau’s sax leads things into a more steady, danceable rhythm.  

Kalia Vandever’s Otherworldly Soundscapes

Kalia Vandever has played trombone with pop stars like Harry Styles and with some of New York’s improvising underground. In recent years, Vandever has also been exploring their Hawaiian heritage in solo works built around layers of trombone and electronics, and Vandever’s new album, Mana, takes its name from the Hawaiian term for a kind of essential or foundational divine power. As with their 2023 solo album We Fell In Turn, there are richly textured electroacoustic soundscapes created out of the looping and layering of the trombone. But Vandever adds a new element to several tracks: their voice, as an expression of their own mana. This track, “Waiting,” uses electronic production to sculpt the sound in such a way that both the voice and the trombone appear in ways that are obvious, and in ways that are decidedly not.