Estelle, All of me, Home School/Atlantic
The series of skits that weave through All of Me, the third Estelle album, involve a loose, wide-ranging conversation among several friends about relationships, education, family, careers and more. Even with the light soul-jazz in the background (produced in part by Questlove of the Roots), they have the feeling of intimate home recordings, modest and almost accidental.
It’s an odd conceit on which to hang any album, much less one by a versatile and very polished singer and rapper. But it’s maybe the right move for this comfortable, small and sometimes vague album. If All of Me is about any one thing, it’s acceptance, though it takes some time to arrive at that conclusion. The album closes with a pair of uplift-themed songs that recall the neo-soul of a decade or so ago. “I’m nice in my skin,” Estelle sings on Speak Ya Mind. “I’ve got the body God gave me, don’t want another.” After that it’s Do My Thing, a duet with Janelle Monae about individuality.
And sure, these are unfashionable choices, ones that have very little to do with the rest of contemporary R ’n’ B. And if she stuck close to them it would be notable. Estelle recalls the young Lauryn Hill at times — the gentle, loping Thank You is clear homage, and on Speak Ya Mind, Estelle sings, “I just want them to pull out The Miseducation again,” referring to Hill’s debut. But the remainder of this album finds Estelle trying on familiar poses, or unfamiliar ones that vex.
The clunky, apocalyptic International (Serious) finds her dipping into patois while guests Chris Brown and Trey Songz get to dabble in rapping — it’s centerless. But soon after that comes Break My Heart, a slinky collaboration with Rick Ross that could have come from any of Ross’ recent albums. Neither shows Estelle to her true potential. The song that comes closest to doing so finds Estelle trying on another role, but one she happens to be extremely comfortable with. Cold Crush is a delicious slice of 1983-style R ’n’ B, all drum-machine snares and synthetic guitars. But it’s never cold. That’s because Estelle sighs all over it, her voice given full spread to be sultry and a bit naughty. It’s not the style she was born with, but it’ll have to do.
By Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
Lambchop, Mr. M, Merge
For 20 years, the Nashville band Lambchop has pleaded nolo contendere. It started out as indie-rock — something to do with keeping things small, textured, weird, backhanded, out-of-fashion — but never sounded as if it were competing in the usual way. Instead of figuring new ways to resist and challenge, Lambchop steadily made its music more beautiful.
At the middle of Lambchop’s sound is Kurt Wagner’s finger-picked guitar and light baritone voice, throwing out trembling, tidy words like pebbles in a lake, in phrases that cut on the line between bitter and hopeful, intimate and absurd. And around that, many variables.
In the past it might have been horns or woodwinds or steel guitar. On Mr. M, Lambchop’s 11th record, the surroundings are often strings, arranged by Mason Neely and Peter Stopschinski, in lurking backgrounds or articulate foregrounds.
Those foregrounds become interludes, or full-blown alternate routes, like the second half of Gone Tomorrow, in which string phrases rise and melt into other aspects of sound — echoed tones, tiny rising and falling analog buzzes, a rhythm-section vamp, small applications of piano.
A lot of the songs are about long-term love or regret, but Wagner’s lyrics will often throw you: In the song Mr. Met, a couplet like “Fear makes us critical/knowledge is difficult” is soon followed by “Sleep made you possible/‘Dude’ made this laughable,” whatever that means.
Slow and easeful, its songs built episodically, Mr. M — dedicated to Vic Chesnutt, the Georgia singer-songwriter who died in 2009, a friend of the band’s — depends on the studio. The producer is Mark Nevers, who’s worked on most Lambchop records, and on Mr. M is as much a part of the band as anyone. Among other things, he is an intuitive wizard of reverb: he makes all sorts of tones, identifiable to a particular instrument or not, resonate and burn away as if in a very different atmosphere — underwater, or in deep space.
Lambchop has a vestigial, almost metaphorical relationship with the sound and atmosphere of 1970s country music. Sometimes that comes closer to the surface; The Good Life (Is Wasted), one of this album’s best songs, couldn’t have grown out of any other tradition. Otherwise, when the strings take over, it can sound like Nelson Riddle through the looking glass, or in the case of the album’s two instrumentals, Gar and Betty’s Overture, incidental music for a 1970s film.
This isn’t a bellwether band, or one that starts controversy. It’s out there on its own, without anxiety, and it’s created its own space. The harder it works, the more it invests in that strange space, the better it becomes; of all its records, Mr. M sounds like its least mannered, most mysterious, and probably its best.
By Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
Matthew Shipp Trio, Elastic aspects, Thirsty Ear
Stubbornness comes easily to the pianist Matthew Shipp, who long ago established his base camp in the rough hinterland of jazz’s post-1960s avant-garde. But he isn’t an inflexible stylist, or the sort of artist who seems insulated from collaborative influence.
Last year, to commemorate his 50th birthday, he released an archetypal double album called The Art of the Improviser, half of which documented a performance by his working trio. (The other half was a solo recital.) He also released Cosmic Lieder, a scintillating duo album with the saxophonist Darius Jones; and Knives From Heaven, with the bassist William Parker and members of Antipop Consortium, the alternative hip-hop crew.
The diversity of those albums says as much about Shipp’s restlessness as it does about his relationship with Thirsty Ear Recordings, which put out all three (and for which he serves as part-time curator).
Elastic Aspects, his new release, once again features his trio with the bassist Michael Bisio and the drummer Whit Dickey. And once again it’s a study in turbulent flow, with small-scale compositions that break open to enable exploration. What sets the album apart is focus: Shipp conceived this music as a suite, and the band brings a dynamic flair to its execution. There’s also the effect of a recording studio, which yields a calmer, more cloistered feeling than the trio pursues in concert.
Shipp has his jazz-piano roots, and there are moments here — like most of Psychic Counterpart, early in the going — that suggest a prickly triangulation of Andrew Hill, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Explosive Aspects, an atonal exercise, suggests a more severe strain of free jazz, hammering and dense. More intriguingly, Stage 10 finds Shipp engaging with nonstandard piano techniques, plucking and damping its strings by hand, while his rhythm section swings four to the bar, in an obliquely cheerful cadence.
Whether it’s a matter of accumulated energies or merely an accident of design, the album perceptibly gathers steam. Stage 10 kicks off its strong final stretch, which culminates in the one-two punch of Elastic Aspects and Elastic Eye. Preceding that stretch, and maybe setting it on its course, is a solo interlude by Bisio, played with a bow. It’s one of the album’s few suggestions of imploring emotion, which lends it a ripe and exotic air.
By Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby