Lazaretto, Jack White, Third Man/XL Recordings/Columbia
There are a lot of words on Lazaretto, Jack White’s new solo album, about needing control or needing to relinquish it. They’re tightly wound and threaten to wrest your attention from the music. This is not a bad thing, as his music seems to be going through an uncomfortable relationship with respectability. Sometimes it’s tightly argumentative, weirdly superstructured, assertive in not wanting to be understood too easily. Sometimes it relaxes into pre-existing Americana hyphenates — blues-rock, country-rock, energies closer to what certain adult listeners hold up as “real music.” The less real White is, the better he sounds.
His narrators want to control the outcomes of their actions, until they don’t. In Just One Drink, “Well I love you, honey/but honey, why don’t you love me?” Then, in That Black Bat Licorice, “Don’t you want to lose the part of the brain that has opinions?” They can endorse both impulses in the same line: There is an image of “screaming without sound,” an assertion that “when I say nothing I say everything.” A man wants to express his will, but sometimes his will is to disappear. “I’m getting better at becoming a ghost,” White cries, in Would You Fight for My Love?
For 15 years, through his time in the White Stripes and after, White has trained us to hear him in restricted spaces, with restricted tools: a distorted hook, a stomp, a charged but imperfect vocal take, a lyric slogan working in the service of sound, a hectic and splattered guitar solo. He still does all that here — especially in the title song, which compresses a strong riff, a pause, a rhythm change and two 16-bar solos into three-and-a-half minutes; and the instrumental High Ball Stepper, which gathers all the best of him minus his impatient singing voice.
But there is an increasing sense — continued from his previous album, Blunderbuss — that he has a wary interest in loosening those restrictions. His sound, rendered by a changeable circle of musicians, is expanding and reconfiguring. From loudest to quietest, you can now hear electric-guitar explosions, thundered piano chords, fiddles, pedal steel, harmonica, mandolin and harp. And at the same time, perhaps to compensate, the focus of his lyrics is narrowing. They’re becoming studies in loneliness, anxiety, disaffiliation and self-erasure.
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
New Throned King, Yosvany Terry, 5Passion
There is, fundamentally, no way to follow Let Her Go, the whispered folk ballad that catapulted Passenger, the British singer-songwriter Mike Rosenberg, from mild renown and a yen for busking to a global phenom who still thinks busking is pretty cool.
That’s the tension, such as is — pop’s vital demand for can-do nature and folk’s natural reluctance — on Whispers, Rosenberg’s first album since Let Her Go. Like its predecessor, the deceptively elegant All the Little Lights, this album — a blend of Greenwich Village folk, soft-rock and Celtic music undertones — is almost comically plain-spoken and direct, like folk caricature. Yes, Riding to New York, about a wise stranger Rosenberg met on tour, begins, “Well, I met him in Minnesota/He was dark and overcast.”
Rosenberg has a reedy, scratched voice that makes him sound forever jittery and unsettled, as if he’s just been in a rainstorm wearing only a T-shirt. Unadorned, it can be striking, even if its arsenal is limited, like during the spare first half of the moving Heart’s on Fire, or even on the pastoral Coins in a Fountain.
But while Rosenberg can be affecting, the narrowness of his vision can be suffocating. Most of the time his lyrics are like teenager’s scribbled poems: “I’m just rust to a handle/I’m breeze to a candle.” And his natural reserve can bleed into listlessness, as on Start a Fire.
Rosenberg’s intense rush of success is a victory that’s at least partly connected to the rise of Ed Sheeran, the much more pop-minded folkie whom he has opened for, and also, paradoxically, to the success of Mumford & Sons, who proved that music built from few parts can fill huge spaces.
Mumford appears to be on Rosenberg’s mind on the album closer, Scare Away the Dark, which, like 27, captures the agita of his new life, and is something like what passes for protest folk in the digital age.
“We want something real, not just hashtags and Twitter,” he sings, as if social media had played no role in his sudden ascent. He continues, “It’s the meaning of life and it’s streamed live on YouTube/But I bet Gangnam Style would still get more views,” as if Let Her Go, in its modesty and unlikeliness, weren’t its own form of novelty hit.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
Whispers,Passenger, Nettwerk
The call of ancestry, and its expression through folklore, has always been a potent preoccupation for Afro-Caribbean jazz musicians in the US. Yosvany Terry, a saxophonist, percussionist and composer from an influential musical family in Camaguey, Cuba, is a leader among the current generation, which keeps finding ways of deepening its inquiry.
His latest album, New Throned King, amounts to an act of scholarship as well as musical syncretism, and some of his most arresting work since he moved to New York 15 years ago. Featuring his band Ye-De-Gbe, it’s a celebration of Arara culture, especially as found in the Matanzas province of Cuba. The Arara originated in the former West African kingdom of Dahomey, spreading through the slave trade; Terry’s study of their tradition dates to 2007, when he traveled to Matanzas and commissioned a set of Arara drums.
Terry, a skilled percussionist, plays one of those drums on Ojun Degara, the track that strikes the most equitable balance of ceremonial chant and modern-jazz inflection. Percussive duties are otherwise entrusted to Roman Diaz, Pedrito Martinez and Sandy Perez, with Justin Brown on a standard drum kit. Martinez leads most of the robust call-and-response chants on the album, including a few, like Thunderous Passage and Laroko, that hew to ancient form with scant deviation (like Terry’s silvery interjections on soprano saxophone).
Nearly every track pays homage to an Arara deity. Walking Over Wave, a sinuous number, hails Afrekete, an oceanic, maternal figure. Dance Transformation, with its rhythmic churn, is for Gebioso, a god of thunder. The title track refers to Asojano, known in the Yoruban orisha system as Babalu-Aye; Mase Nadodo celebrates Mase, whose affinity with the orisha Oshun is implied in a spoken-word interlude by Ishmael Reed.
The closer, Ilere, composed by Dean Badarou, presents a more general spirit offering, in rolling Afrobeat rhythm. Like “Ye-De-Gbe,” a phrase in the Fon language meaning “with the approval of the spirits,” it suggests a bold claim traveling under cover of supplication.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
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