Toujours, by Sabina
Sabina Sciubba, the lead singer for Brazilian Girls, sets aside her last name and switches production style, but not persona, on her solo debut album, Toujours. She’s still the nonchalant, elusive, sophisticated and resolutely hedonistic figure she plays in Brazilian Girls songs. And Sabina, who was born in Rome to a German mother and an Italian father, still switches among the multiple languages of her upbringing — Italian, German, French, English — in not quite simultaneous translations.
But on Toujours, she often trades Brazilian Girls’ international party beats, electronics and retro lounge orchestrations for music that looks toward garage rock and new wave, keeping the sound leaner.
Sabina produced the album with Frederik Rubens, who is also Brazilian Girls’ producer (and the bassist on most of the new songs). But now her own electric guitar is at the center of the arrangements, often with just a simple picked arpeggio or a few succinct chords. “I will let you have me,” she offers in I Won’t Let You Break Me, a peppy three-chord rocker that connects the Velvet Underground and Talking Heads, “‘Cause you’re the luckiest man in Europe/ And I’m your undisputed queen.”
She’s charming when she shows her wry bravado, as she does in Viva L’Amour, a cowbell-thumping rocker that begins, “Asked a man for a light and he caught on fire,” or the album’s title song, in which she jabs at an electric organ over a Latin beat and distorted guitars as she insists “We might as well be happy.”
But some of Sabina’s songs have a more enigmatic side, an undercurrent of restlessness and displacement. Mystery River sets up a breezy, hand-clapping 7/4 beat and mariachi trumpets, but Sabina oscillates between I’ve got to get going back to my love and Nothing can stop me. In Non Mi Aspettare, amid glimmering loops of guitars and woodwinds, Sabina urges someone not to wait up because she may not return. She closes the album with Going Home, an eerie waltz that’s not as certain as its title might seem; it ends as she wonders, “Ooh, where are you now?/ Ooh, where am I now?” Behind the peregrinations, there’s longing.
— Jon Pareles, NY Times News Service
Voices in a Rented Room, by New Bums
New Bums are two singer-guitarists: Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance and Donovan Quinn of the Skygreen Leopards, both of whom understand a continuum between rough dissonance and pastoral, fingerpicked, clear-minded mellowness. They know a lot, and each is used to making music that sounds like private recordings from the early 1970s unearthed from a dead man’s storage unit. But as a pair there is something very now about them, and that is a kind of perverse, end-of-the-road floppiness. They want to show you how tired they are.
You may need provisions and a mind-body regimen to endure Voices in a Rented Room, their first collaborative album — caffeine at the very least, fresh fruit, exercise, math problems. Their aesthetic, their whole deal, is textured and untidy: That’s what comes naturally to them. But the record keeps feeling as if it might fall apart from lack of scaffolding.
Sometimes these are acoustic folk songs, no more, no less. Pigeon Town, with harmonica at the end, could be blurry acoustic Springsteen, and Burned coheres around a good old drone in D. Here and there you get more: a spare drum beat, an amplifier rumble, a burst of electric guitar. (Chasny can be a thrilling guitarist, at times; his sliding, smoky electric-guitar solo, in a T. rex-like song with an unprintable title — the tautest four minutes on the album, even as the tempo slackens and warps — isn’t his best, but it still feels like rain during a drought.) They both put tender wheeze and murmur in their voices but sing in unison or octaves as a default mode, which grows dull almost instantly. The acoustic guitars have been recorded closely and well, but Chasny’s single-note soloing, up on the neck, wilts from lack of forethought: You want to run a red pencil through half of it.
Worst of all, they rustle together a good song concept only to waste it. Your Girlfriend Might Be a Cop: The eye falls on that title and doesn’t want to leave. The lyrics make it halfway there. (“She looks at me like a thief/ Like she knows all my crimes and can bust me any time.”) But the song needs more form than the five minutes it seems to have taken to make it. No, four.
— Ben Ratliff, 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
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist