Weekly Music Roundup: Flea, Xiu Xiu Sings Robyn, and Shabaka Returns

This week, Flea’s reinvention, Xiu Xiu’s remake, and Shabaka’s return. Also collaborations from Mary Lattimore with Julianna Barwick, and Sleaford Mods with Aldous Harding.

Flea Teams Up With Thom Yorke, And The Trumpet

Rock fans known Flea as the hyperactive bass player in The Red Hot Chili Peppers, but before he set out on his journey to rock stardom, Flea was a jazz fan who played trumpet.  This week he issued a single called “Traffic Lights” to herald his first-ever solo album, Honora, coming out on March 27.  On it Flea plays the trumpet, bass, and occasionally sings – the redoubtable Anna Butterss also plays bass when Flea is otherwise occupied.  Both Thom Yorke of Radiohead and Nick Cave make guest vocal appearances on the album, and “Traffic Lights” is a collaborative original song by Flea, Yorke, and sax player/producer Josh Johnson.  Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Deantoni Parks round out a stellar band.  This track has a slippery funk-jazz groove, with some of Yorke’s most relaxed singing and subtle synth playing.  

Shabaka Returns To The Sax With A New Album In Tow

In his work with the Afro-jazz band Sons of Kemet, the psych-electronic trio The Comet Is Coming, and his South African-based ensemble Shabaka & The Ancestors, sax/clarinet player Shabaka Hutchings established himself as one of the most important and influential British musicians of the past decade. But after the pandemic, Shabaka put down the horn (and his last name) and reinvented himself as a flutist – specifically, a performer on the Japanese shakuhachi and other traditional wood flutes from around the world. Like his fellow traveler and occasional collaborator Andre 3000, Shabaka set out to find a different way of making music. Having created two albums of time-bending, often contemplative records, he’s now reintegrating the sax and rhythm back into his music on a new album called Of The Earth.  It comes out on March 6 but this week Shabaka released two tracks: “Marwa The Mountain” is a playful mix of hand percussion and various traditional-sounding flutes and whistles. The LPs opener, “A Future Untold,” is a floating soundscape of melancholy sax lines unspooling over a web of electronics, sounding like a mix of Pharoah Sanders-style spiritual jazz with the nocturnal experiments of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. Between them, the two tracks suggest that Shabaka has still more surprises in store. 

Xiu Xiu Remakes A “Sad Dance” Anthem

For over twenty years, the band Xiu Xiu has been making off-kilter, often abrasive rock, as well as occasional, and often surprising, covers. Today they put out an album of covers called Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu, Vol. 1; some of these are songs they’ve been offering for a while to fans via their Bandcamp subscription service. The one that will undoubtedly attract the most attention is their version of “Dancing On My Own,” the massive 2010 hit by the Swedish singer Robyn which launched the whole “sad dance” music trend. Robyn’s original is a banger; Xiu Xiu’s cover is… different. Jamie Stewart’s vocals are brooding and at times weave wearily over the line between speech and song. An all-star lineup of musicians from the avant-garde jazz scene provide a backdrop that still has a steady beat but which also shifts between orchestral pop and industrial noise.  Like the best covers, this one seems to have something new to say about the emotional content of the original.    

An Timeless LP From Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick

Harpist Mary Lattimore and vocalist/synth player Julianna Barwick today released their duo album Tragic Magic. As we noted here back in September, when they put out the first single, “Perpetual Adoration,” this isn’t just the coming together of two friends with similar atmospheric styles. It was also a chance to play on historic instruments in the Musee de la Musique in Paris. Lattimore used harps from the 1700s and 1800s, and Barwick played what passes for “historic” electronic keyboards: analog synthesizers like the Prophet V. Both musicians are adept at electronic manipulation of the sound, so this music sounds neither like the Baroque period nor the 1970s. Instead, it’s a series of soundscapes, often beginning with one instrument – in “The Four Sleeping Princesses” it’s Lattimore’s (borrowed) harp – with a slowly building arrangement that climaxes with the celestial choral sound of wordless vocals that Barwick has become so well known for.  

Sleaford Mods And Aldous Harding Take A Dim View Of Social Media Influencers

The English post-punk duo Sleaford Mods released their new album today, called The Demise Of Planet X. If you don’t know Sleaford Mods, that title might suggest a work of science fiction. It is not. It’s more terse, minimalist-but-catchy productions with Jason Williamson delivering his profanity-laced rants about whatever stupidity we’ve gotten up to recently, in a voice that ranges from rap to something approaching singing. On the single “Elitist GOAT,” he takes aim at a culture that tells us that we are the stars of our own movie, so hit that Share button all the time so everyone else knows it too. Joining the duo is the wonderfully eccentric New Zealand singer Aldous Harding, who adds some actual melody to the whole thing. A droll video features images of herd mentality and vampires, just to drive the point home.