Weekly Music Roundup: Neneh Cherry, IDLES, and Stefon Harris
Week of September 3: This week, political punk and pop from IDLES and Neneh Cherry, and a musical remembrance of Paul Taylor
IDLES Offers Punk For The Brexit/Trump Era
IDLES is a punk band from Bristol, England, whose new album has a title that doubles as a statement of intent: Joy As An Act Of Resistance. Their songs address issues like nationalism, populism, and the general mean-spiritedness they see around them – but what could easily devolve into screed is instead leavened with a sense of fun and wry humor. Take the song “Great,” for example. Looking at the barely-disguised racism and Islamophobia behind the Brexit vote in the UK, singer Joe Talbot sings “Islam didn’t eat your hamster/Change isn’t a crime.” I’m not sure what that literally means, but it’s funny and pointed all at once. The video of the band in its native environment (a small club, a cheap restaurant) is similarly homespun, and while you may not be in the mood to join in when Talbot invites us to sing along (“G!” “R!” “E!” “A!” “T!”), that’s actually a time when the joy is in not resisting.
Neneh Cherry Offers an Avant-Pop Take On Gun Culture
The singer Neneh Cherry is about to release a new album, called Broken Politics. That title will not surprise anyone who’s followed Cherry’s career as a cool but forceful protest singer; but the tone of this collection, she says, is different from her last record, 2014’s Blank Project. This despite working with the same producer, the redoubtable Four Tet (Kieran Hebden). The last record was angry and forceful, while she describes the new effort as “quieter and more reflective.” The new single is “Shotgun Shack,” a term familiar to many Americans but which Cherry apparently didn’t know until she came to New York for the funeral of the legendary jazz sax player/composer Ornette Coleman in 2015 and heard someone use the phrase. (Cherry’s father was the great trumpeter Don Cherry, who’d played with Ornette’s groundbreaking ensemble early in his long career; but Neneh grew up in Sweden and later moved to England.) The song is stark and spare – or at least, it gives that impression. Four Tet does a marvelous job of weaving several strands of percussion into a steadily-churning pulse and adding wisps and fragments of synth bass and other bits of keyboard in a way that suggests something obsessive. Meanwhile, Cherry sketches a bleak narrative: “pick up the gun/you know you’re gonna use it,” she sings in the kind of voice that another singer might use for a seduction.
The Twilight Sad Release Unsettling New Video
With a name like The Twilight Sad no one was ever going to expect sunny pop from the Glasgow-based band. Like their compatriots We Were Promised Jetpacks, The Twilight Sad traffics in dark, even sinister songs about alienation, betrayal, lost love, and all that good stuff. At least, I think that’s what they’re about; the first time I played some of their music at home my teenage daughter asked “what language is he singing in?” and was shocked when I answered, “English.” Behind James Graham’s often impenetrable Scots accent, the band draws at times on the wall-of-distortion of the so-called shoegaze movement, and at times on the cinematic soundscapes of post-rock. They’ve just released a new single and video, directed by keyboardist Brendan Smith, called “I/m Not Here [missing face]” – whose strange title matches the mood of a song that’s apparently about a man who wants to get away from someone. Namely himself. The video is built on found camcorder footage, edited in a way that suggests the unreliable nature of memory.
The Twilight Sad play in New York at Elsewhere on November 1.
Good Vibes In Stefon Harris’s Michael Jackson Tribute
Last Wednesday would have been Michael Jackson’s 60th birthday, and vibraphonist, composer, and bandleader Stefon Harris chose to mark the occasion by releasing his version of “Gone Too Soon.” The King Of Pop didn’t write the tune, but he recorded it on his 1991 album Dangerous, and since his death it’s become a particularly resonant song for many MJ fans. Count Harris among them. The virtuoso vibes player is about to release his new album Sonic Creed on September 28 – his first in nine years. (Harris has an active second career as an award-winning music educator.) And while his stellar band, Blackout, reunites with him on this album, for “Gone Too Soon” he pares things down to just vibes and marimba, the latter played by Joseph Doubleday. The resulting track is reflective, unhurried, and seems to skirt melancholy to land somewhere near peaceful.
Stefon Harris and Blackout play at the BRIC Jazz Festival on October 18.
Paul Taylor: Dancer, Choreographer, Music Fan
The death last week of Paul Taylor was a huge story in the dance world (and in the wider world – his obituary was page one of the NY Times), but he had an interesting relationship with music too. For a choreographer who was so central to our idea of what “modern dance” would be, he often used much older music: his best-known works were choreographed to the music of Bach and Handel, and when he went to the world of pop music, he’d use things like the Andrews Sisters. But one of his darkest, most disturbing, and brilliantly narrative works, 1988’s Speaking In Tongues, which was broadcast on PBS and won an Emmy in 1992, was different.
It was inspired by an unsolicited cassette sent to him out of the blue by an unknown young Canadian composer named Matthew Patton. Patton’s score, which he originally called St. Joan Within, uses the found sounds of a famous and later disgraced TV evangelist (Jimmy Swaggart, but he is a stand-in for any powerful, corrupt figure using religion as a tool). Taylor, remarkably, actually listened to the cassette, and was moved by the creepy use of the preacher’s voice to create a whole tale of a community that falls under the sway of A Man Of The Cloth who is both more and less than he appears. Patton’s music is alternately lyrical and ominous, and this excerpt, from just before the end of the piece, weaves together several elements heard earlier – a drone, a lyrical keyboard figure, and at the end, the preacher’s repeated motif: “their blood will I require at your hands.”
Matthew Patton, by the way, has continued to make dark and unsettling music, has worked with film maker Guy Maddin and helps run the surprisingly wonderful Winnipeg New Music Festival each winter.
