Weekly Music Roundup: Vampire Weekend, Sinkane, José James
Week of April 8: This week, the New York connection in music by Vampire Weekend, Sinkane, Tipa Tipo, and José James. Plus percussionist Chris P. Thompson and Australian singer Grace Cummings.
Vampire Weekend’s Answer To “My Generation”
The three members of Vampire Weekend all live in LA these days, but the band will always be associated with New York, where they formed in 2007 and established themselves as an influential musical bridge between indie pop, indie rock, and world music. The pop sound has dominated in recent years, and their new album, Only God Was Above Us, does a lot of looking back at the generation that came of age around the turn of the century. In “Gen-X Cops,” singer Ezra Koenig offers the Millenial’s version of The Who’s “My Generation” - a song as disaffected and cynical as that 60s anthem in its portrayal of a generation that feels the world “wasn’t built for me.” The song’s arrangement amplifies the emotions of the lyrics with anxious, implacable drumming; a fuzzy, wayward electric guitar punctuates proceedings; and Koenig concludes that “Each generation makes its own apology.” As for the NY connection, you have only to look at the album cover or this song’s video to see how the city remains at the core of the band.
Sinkane Brings The Funk, And The Soul, And The Reggae, etc.
Sinkane is another band that burst on the New York scene in 2007. In their case, the band is the brainchild of Ahmed Gallab, a Sudanese-American musician whose musical diet included both West and East African pop, as well as funk, soul, even krautrock. The band’s new album is We Belong, a celebration of Black music and culture that might be the band’s strongest effort yet. The production recalls the great funk bands of the past – Sly & The Family Stone comes to mind in the chorus of the title track, but there’s also Curtis Mayfield-style soul in songs like “Everything Is Everything” and Bob Marley’s blend of message and music in “Rise Above.” The album features guest vocals, gleaming horns, and lush synthesizers, and it’s a tribute to Gallab’s vision and focus that the whole album comes off as a Sinkane record and not a grab bag of older sounds.
Spend “A Little Time” With Tipa Tipo
The band called Tipa Tipo comes from Brooklyn via Peru. The trio plays an unlikely but likeable mix of tropical Latin funk, cumbia, disco, and yacht rock. With their synthesizers, guitar, and tight vocal harmonies, they clearly take a page from the soft rock of the 70s, but their new record, Cintas de Embalar, updates that retro sound with a modern, feminist sensibility and lyrics sung mostly in Spanish. The track “Poco Tiempo,” “a little time,” rides along on a gentle funk beat, with perhaps a hint of reggaeton – in any event, a song that suggests you spend at least a little time dancing.
Chris P. Thompson’s “Selfie” Asks… Something. I Think.
Chris P. Thompson has spent 15 years playing percussion with the contemporary music band Alarm Will Sound here in New York. As a solo composer, though, he draws on electronic and microtonal music, a combination that can lead to somewhat abstract work but which Thompson cleverly employs on his new album Stay The Same to make pointed commentary about our lives in the digital age. Perhaps this is most evident in the buoyant, madcap opener, “Selfie.” Thompson employs text-to-speech voices, which he samples and processes to produce an uncanny, AI-type sound. The song is at once witty and unsettling, and Thompson also produced a video that heightens this unexpected dual effect.
Dramatic Vocals From Aussie Grace Cummings
Grace Cummings is an Australian singer with a classic torch-song voice. Somehow both velvety and bluesy, that instrument is beautifully suited to the emotional content of Cummings’ alternately pensive and dramatic songs. Her new album, Ramona, includes this standout track, “On and On,” with its galloping drumbeat and eerily sustained synthesizer. “Hey,” she sings, “is this happy?” Such a simple question, on the surface, but also one that provokes some of Cummings’ most powerful singing.
José James Pays Tribute To The Year Of His Birth
José James, billed as “the jazz singer for the hip hop generation,” has just released a new album called 1978, and it sees James looking back, past hip hop, to the soul music of the 70s. This is soul music with a message; songs like “For Trayvon” make that clear. But it’s also message-music with soul: closing track “38th & Chicago” has a jazzy bassline, an almost bossa nova guitar sound, and Cuban-American percussionist Pedrito Martinez adding a Caribbean lilt to the proceedings.
