Weekly Music Roundup: iLe, Danny Elfman, and Suuns
Week of Nov. 2: This week, calls to action from iLe, and from Alicia Keys & Brandi Carlile, and a Halloween creepfest from Danny Elfman.
A Pointed New Single from iLe
The singer iLe (real name, Ileana Cabra Joglar) gained fame as the female singer in her brothers’ band, the legendary Calle 13. But she’s now a Grammy-winning artist in her own right. In her past LPs, iLe has shown remarkable range – from revisiting the classic sounds of mid-20th-century Latin popular song to contemporary works rooted in hip hop and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Her new single, “Donde Nadie Mas Respira,” takes yet another tack, building itself around sampled breathing and soft vocal percussion sounds, and combining a strong drum pulse with elegant strings. The timing of the release is no coincidence: the song is about urging people, both in Puerto Rico and the US mainland, to get involved in the election and, as she says, to “confront those in power and face the issues, so that we can make real progress.”
Alicia Keys and Brandi Carlile Premiere New Duet on CBS Election Special
Two of pop’s most successful singer/songwriters came together on Thursday night, on the TV special Every Vote Counts, a nonpartisan show that urged Americans to vote in tomorrow’s election. There Alicia Keys and Brandi Carlile presented a new duet called “A Beautiful Noise,” playing live on two pianos with no other accompaniment. Keys has already shown she can do pretty much anything; Carlile was equally impressive, poised and in fine voice, and both were part of the team of women who wrote the song. The message is simple: you have a voice – namely, your vote – and it’s time to use it. The two singers used a black and white scheme, with Keys, dressed in black, at a white piano, and Carlile presenting a mirror image but also providing the one bit of color with her rainbow pin (LGBTQ rights are an ongoing theme in her career). I’m guessing a finely produced, pitch-perfect version of the song will eventually be available, but watching two fine musicians do it old-school, live with no net, is tough to beat.
Bomba Estereo’s Simon Mejia Celebrates Colombia’s Indigenous People In Music And Film
In September, Simon Mejia, from the popular Colombian band Bomba Estereo, unveiled his solo project under the name Monte, releasing an album called Mirla that combined the sounds of the Colombian Amazon with his interest in ambient electronics, all set to a thumping dance beat. Voices, when they appeared, tended to be either indigenous people chanting or native birds singing. While making the album, Mejia also documented his journeys on film, and this week he released the latest video, for the album track “Kaka Hyka,” or “grandmother stones.” The song features the voice of Candil Chauta of the Mhuysqa people, as well as the traditional charango (a mandolin-like instrument). Like the song, the video is a striking marriage of the traditional and the new, with a psychedelic feeling that could be common to both. All of this is leading up to the release of Mejia’s documentary film Sonic Forest later this month. Using stunning footage of his trips, from the Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast to the indigenous inhabitants of the mountains, it will be presented by Joaquin Phoenix and Stand For Trees, a group dedicated to preserving tropical forests, on Youtube on November 18.
Are you in a good mood? Danny Elfman will take care of that.
Saturday was Halloween. A genuinely weird and scary Halloween, you might think. But just in case it wasn’t weird or scary enough for you, Danny Elfman has emerged from his dungeon with a song and video that in just over four minutes becomes a multi-movement anti-pop creepfest. Elfman, as you probably know, did the friendly-sounding theme for The Simpsons. But he also did the Baroque oratorio score for Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, and sang the lead role of Jack Skellington himself. His many well-known soundtracks include the Batman films, Beetlejuice, and the Men In Black series. So this is a guy who knows how to give you the heebie-jeebies. His new song is called “Happy,” and begins with the kind of gleefully twisted singing that makes you fear to ask, “what is he happy about?” A digital avatar of Elfman’s face, with his familiar red hair, just adds to the unnerving quality. Soon any pretense of family-oriented fun disappears in a storm of guitars and drums and bad language; at the end, Elfman returns to his earlier insistence that he’s happy, and by that point it’s downright chilling.
Montreal’s Suuns Release Kaleidoscopic New EP
The Montreal trio Suuns have just released a new EP called Fiction, offering an unlikely blend of industrial and noise rock, ambient electronics, downtempo dance music and, in one track, Near Eastern music. The latter song, called “Breathe,” is a collaboration with the Lebanese-Canadian producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, who records as Jerusalem In My Heart, and is the track I initially thought I’d point out here. But it segues directly into this song, “Pray,” which might be a better example of the Suuns sound. Or sounds. “Pray” has woozy vocals over an almost Giorgio Moroder-sounding electronic track; the whole thing threatens to drift off into a narcotic haze until the drums come in to ground the song; and towards the end, a heavily distorted guitar solo wreaks havoc with the single-minded moodiness of the singing. The band put out the EP on Friday, and all proceeds from the first 48 hours went to support relief and rebuilding efforts in Beirut in the wake of the August explosion there.
