Weekly Music Roundup: mary in the junkyard, Ruido Tovar, and The New Pornographers
mary in the junkyard Makes A Successful “Crash Landing”
mary in the junkyard is a buzzy art-rock trio from London. After a series of well-received singles and an EP, they’ll be releasing their debut LP on July 3, called Role Model Hermit. The group is essentially two singing string players (violin, viola, cello) with a drummer, although both singers also add “normal” rock instruments like guitar and bass. The lead single from the upcoming album is “Crash Landing,” a moody, almost dreamlike post-breakup song that uses rich string textures and a 90s-style trip-hop beat; Clari Freeman Taylor’s waif-like vocals – sort of like Björk without the Icelandic accent – are echoed by sighing electric guitar lines in a song that makes a strong first impression.
Ye (Kanye West) Finally Releases Bully
Ye, the rapper and producer formerly known as Kanye West, has made a sort of chaotic art out of simply releasing his records. Today’s new LP, Bully, was initially released as a bunch of demos, with the finished album’s release date being pushed back repeatedly over the last nine months or so. Aside from some sampling, the textures here tend to be surprisingly thin, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though some fans may be nonplussed by the lack of beats on certain tracks. And Ye has never been a uniter when dividing can be so much more… interesting. So here he wades into the whole AI thing, with limited rapping and lots of singing – much of it done, he’s said, by AI-generated deepfakes of his own voice. On the track “Last Breath,” done with the Mexican singer and rapper Peso Pluma, Ye (or “Ye”) sings in both English and Spanish, over a skeletal bass line that offsets the choir and sampled horns quite effectively.
Ruido Tovar: A Latin Dance Supergroup
A supergroup doesn’t have to be big. Ruido Tovar is the upcoming collaboration between Colombia’s Meridian Brothers and the Mexican Institute of Sound – which basically means it’s a duo. Eblis Alvarez is the producer behind the mostly mythical Meridian Brothers (though when he tours, he does in fact put a live band together), and Camilo Lara is the founder and sometimes the only member of the Mexican Institute of Sound. Ruido Tovar comes out on May 22, but this week the duo released the single “Cumbia de los estudiantes,” or “the cumbia of the students.” It rides along on a slightly trippy version of the popular cumbia rhythm, with a deadpan vocal delivery that suggests that education might not be the unalloyed benefit we expect, if that education is meant to reinforce certain beliefs and shut off others.
Surreal Folk From Chicago’s Em Spel
The singer and songwriter Emma Hospelhorn records as Em Spel, and she seems to have a knack for approaching songs from a slightly skewed angle. Take her new single, “The Tide.” Driven by an ominous, slow-moving electric guitar, Em Spel offers a direct contrast to the history of romantic/melancholy songs about people looking at the play of the tides and feeling all poetic. Her narrator seems to be the tide itself, implacably – but melodically – recounting how the tide will take everything in time. The arrangement becomes threatening, briefly, near the end, then abruptly subsides – as if Em Spel decided at the last second that a wave of sonic violence might be a little too on the nose.
The New Pornographers, At The Former Site Of….
The new album by the Canadian-American indie rock band The New Pornographers is called The Former Site Of. But on the album cover, the title comes before the band name, so it reads “The Former Site Of The New Pornographers.” (There is a slight difference in typeface to distinguish between the two.) This was intentional, according to A. C. (Carl) Newman, the lead singer and songwriter since the band’s inception in 2000. He wanted to suggest that the band has changed, that they were not the same band that made Mass Romantic 26 years ago. This album begins with a woman stuck aboard a cruise ship, and goes on to a series of character studies, of people in extremis or in despair or simply in a state of confusion. But one thing the band has consistently done over the years is to make big, expansive pop, with catchy hooks and lyrics as evocative as they are elliptical. And at the end of the album, the title track, “The Former Site Of,” sees a man of the cloth on a sinking ship (water is a recurring image), and while I didn’t notice this until Carl pointed it out in the band’s recent performance in our studio, as he’s drowning, he sees the woman from the first song, without knowing who she is, and other figures who’ve come in the songs beforehand. So another The New Pornographers tradition – ending their albums with a memorable song – continues here as well.
