Weekly Music Roundup: Lana Del Ray & Sampa the Great

Week of May 15: This Week, A Fun Festival’s Sad Song, Ben Folds’ New Orchestral Job, and A Eurovision Champion

Portugal Ends A 53-year Losing Streak At Eurovision Song Contest

First of all, there are many Americans who still don’t know what Eurovision is. It is a singing competition, where each country in Europe chooses an entrant, and where the winner is determined by a complex system of judges from each nation and viewer’s votes. So it’s kind of like American Idol meets the Super Bowl meets an enormous cheese factory. Singers and groups (both are eligible) vie not just for musical supremacy, but for the most garish or outlandish or provocative costumes, and for various inventive interpretations of the word “showmanship.” Former winners include dozens of names that I could list here and you’d never see again, and two that will ring a bell: ABBA and Celine Dion. 

Anyway, this weekend, Portugal ended its long losing streak in the contest when Salvador Sobral won for his song "Amar Pelos Dois."  It’s a simple, kind of schmaltzy, but for Eurovision incredibly restrained ballad, whose title translates as “Love For Two.” Portugal has been on a roll recently, with its men’s soccer team winning the Euros (the FIFA European Championship) last summer for the first time ever. Even Sobral’s scores made history – for a competition where national gripes often spill over into the judging, the voting was remarkably uniform. Now Sobral hopes to start his own winning streak – although he kept it from the public during the competition, he is in need of a heart transplant and was restricted in both his rehearsals and his ability to attend the post-award celebrations. 

Lana Del Ray’s Sober Festival Song

Singer Lana Del Ray released a new song yesterday called “Coachella – Woodstock In My Mind.” It has the quiet melancholy of a lot of Del Ray’s songs, but the rolling, off-kilter beats keeps it from devolving into, say, a Eurovision-style ballad. She’s at Coachella, and tellingly, she’s not the one onstage in the spotlight (“I was at Coachella, leaning on your shoulder, watching your husband swing and shine…”), although there are certainly references to her fame, fortune, and hair length. But Del Ray is wondering what all the good vibes from a night at a festival like Coachella can do in a world where the news the next day is so ominous. (The use of Woodstock in the title acknowledges that this is not a new idea.) She references a “stairway to heaven,” but it’s not a Led Zeppelin allusion; instead she joins the long list of songwriters (see XTC or Joan Osborne, for example) who would trade everything for a chance to climb that stairway and ask Him one question. In an age where answers are hard to come by, she sings, “maybe my contribution could be as small as hoping…”

Scottish Post-Rockers Mogwai Unveil New Song

For over twenty years, Mogwai has been creating enormous, mostly instrumental structures out of the materials of a rock band. Inexorably building drums, layers of chiming guitars, crescendos of distortion and noise, a kind of ecstatic climax – all the hallmarks of what has come to be known as “post-rock” can be found in Mogwai’s eight albums. Now, they’re preparing to release their ninth, called Every Country’s Sun, and the announcement of the album was accompanied by the release of the opening track, “Coolverine.”  You can sense Mogwai thinking long term here – the accumulating layers and increasing dynamics of the song only hint at the bigger explosions to come as the album draws to a close.  Fans have always said the band’s music has a cinematic cast, and in fact they have done actual film music (for The Fountain, with Kronos Quartet, for example; or Before The Flood, with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross); but they do occasionally break out into actual song – you know, with words and people singing – and there’s some of that coming on the new album too.  Every Country’s Sun will be out on August 10. 

Ben Folds’ New Gig: National Symphony Orchestra

The National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC has announced that singer/songwriter/pianist Ben Folds will be its first-ever Artistic Advisor. Folds made his name in the pop world with the Ben Folds Five and with his slightly odder side project Fear of Pop, which memorably included a collaboration with William Shatner.  But in recent years he has championed a cappella singing as a judge for the TV series The Sing Off, and toured with his own piano concerto. Now, the amiable and versatile Folds will spend the next three years working on the NSO’s Declassified series, which presents classical music in short, manageable bits, and which also offers artists from outside the classical music world the experience of working with an orchestra. As for Folds himself, he’s done the pop thing, he’s done the orchestral thing. And he’s done the in-between thing too. Listen to this song, “Capable of Anything,” done with the NY-based chamber music ensemble known as yMusic.

From Botswana to Australia to Paris: Sampa The Great’s Musical Journey

Red Bull Sound Select is a development program for emerging artists, and they’ve tapped the Sydney-based rapper Sampa the Great as someone headed for bigger and better things. Born in Zambia, raised in Botswana, and now based in Australia, she recorded her new EP in Paris with the producer Rahki and the singer Estelle. It’s called HERoes Act 2, and it features three tracks of chilled-out hip-hop with spare, elegant arrangements and quietly positive lyrics. Check out “Everybody’s Hero,” a promising start to Sampa’s (apparently) second act.

UK Duo The Breath Release New Track on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Label

In 2016, a new band came out of Manchester, England, called The Breath. Guitarist Stuart McCallum, from the Cinematic Orchestra, created a richly textured soundworld that supported the vocals of Rioghnach Connolly, an Irish singer and flutist. Their album, Carry Your Kin, was easier to like than to describe – critics resorted to terms like “folk hop” and “ambient folk.” Now, the band has released a new track, on Peter Gabriel’s Real World record label, which may be somewhat easier to slot into a recognizable rock category.  “Chilli Salt” hits hard, with McCallum’s guitar in classic rock mode and Connolly’s voice full of heat – as the title might suggest.