Infinite House
Ava Luna
Western Vinyl
The New York band Ava Luna is almost without fail compared with Dirty Projectors — a rock band using some critical distance on the conventions of rock bands, with a gifted, yelpy singer-guitarist, ambitious female singers who use the language of backup harmony but make it count more than that, and a tendency to get piercingly loud for effect.
Yeah, well. The differential between the two bands indicates many of the strengths of Ava Luna, especially in its third record, Infinite House.
Here’s what you get more of with Ava Luna and less of with the other group: a committed belief in dance grooves, a casual interest in harmonic development, an insularity and playfulness, an establishment of a single, real-time band sound.
Most of the members of Ava Luna grew up in New York City, as opposed to having arrived after the colonization of Brooklyn, and you can hear their proprietary connection with the new-wave funk of the early 80s, bands like Konk and Liquid Liquid and Dinosaur L and Tom Tom Club. The charm is in the open spaces: This is music that lets you in. Once you’re in, the singing of Carlos Hernandez may determine how long you’ll stay. He spends a lot of time singing in a falsetto, and he’s channeling soul phrasing — a line of seduction songs stretched between Al Green and Prince.
It’s dicey business. You get the sense that he knows it.
It’s welcoming, but it’s weird, this band. It’s got the sound of practice, especially in the rhythm section: It establishes strains with strong bass-lines and stirring chord movement that could open up and linger, and yet the greatest songs here — Tenderize, Roses and Cherries, and especially Billz, which is this band’s wonder of dynamics, its Darling Nikki — shut themselves down within three and a half minutes.
For its chance to go long, it chose Victoria — a good groove over which the band members mess around aimlessly with delay and distortion for seven and a half minutes. There’s some deliberate perversity there, and some trust in the flexibility, forgiveness and loyalty of its audience. Those are all New York things, too.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Coming of Age
Ben Williams
Concord Jazz
Ben Williams has a dark, righteous sound on an upright bass, and an almost liquid mobility through the fullness of his range. That much was established when he won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2009, at 24. His development since then has had more to do with composition, leadership and artistic vision. And while an album shouldn’t necessarily function as a progress report, Williams knew what he was doing when he named his new one Coming of Age.
It’s his second release as a solo artist. His first, State of Art, arrived in 2011, an admirable but slightly overdetermined declaration of intent. Over the last few years he has recorded and toured with guitarist Pat Metheny, a role model of consuming focus. And Williams has pushed toward a more natural, less insistent strain of jazz modernity, in his writing and in the metabolism of his own group, Sound Effect.
Coming of Age is a sturdy showcase for that band, with Marcus Strickland on tenor and soprano saxophones, Matthew Stevens on electric guitar, Christian Sands on piano and John Davis on drums.
Williams, who produced the album with Chris Dunn, frames its stylistic breadth within a larger unity of sound. Still, his compositions range from postbop wind sprints (Forecast) to the go-go of his native Washington (Half Steppin’). A cinematic ballad titled The Color of My Dreams becomes a concerto of sorts for vibraphonist Stefon Harris.
Among the album’s other special guests are Goapele, singing her own lyrics in the chilled-out soul tune Voice of Freedom (For Mandela), and Christian Scott, whose muted trumpet threads a breathy melodic line through Lost & Found, the Lianne La Havas song. The poet and actor W Ellington Felton turns up, more awkwardly, to rap some verses (and sing a chorus) on a track called Toy Soldiers.
That’s one of several small missteps, another being a solo bass interpretation of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, a song that jazz musicians should no longer be mining for new truths. But Williams has his compass set, and it’s encouraging to think of this album as a marker, another checkpoint on the forward path.
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
High on Tulsa Heat
John Moreland
Old Omens/Thirty Tigers
Oklahoma folk singer John Moreland has a beautifully abraded voice, full of potholes and gravel. Rarely does he wield it with power — instead, his soft hallow scrape is marked by flexibility and candor. At the beginning of Cherokee, one of the many fine songs on High on Tulsa Heat, his third full-length solo album, he sings, “I guess I’ve got a taste for poison/I’ve given up on ever being well,” and it sounds as if he’s singing from the sickbed somewhere, with no visitors on the horizon.
Before he was working the shadowy corners of folk-country, Moreland played in metalcore and hardcore bands. The lasting effect of that is perhaps in his music’s admirable lack of sentimentality. It’s not that he doesn’t feel deeply — he certainly does — but he’s no passive canvas.
At its best, High on Tulsa Heat is starkly elegant, addressing sadness with clarity and directness. Moreland writes with a world-weary air — on Hang Me in the Tulsa County Stars, he groans, “Babe I know this world will have the wolves outside your door/Make you leave all that you love to fight a war/And never tell you what you’re dying for.”
Since his 2013 album In the Throes, Moreland has chosen to let the light in, at least musically. That album was severe and isolated; here, he concedes ever so slightly to brighter arrangements peppered with dobro and pedal steel and female backup vocals. But they’re just honey smoothing the ride for the bitter pills. “I’m the kind of love it hurts to look at,” Moreland sings on “You Don’t Care for Me Enough to Cry.” And he keeps returning to speaking about love while using a metaphor of illness. On White Flag, the album’s prettiest song, he’s virtually an invalid:
“I wanna learn a new sickness
and dance around forgiveness
Darling, won’t you be my ache to please?
Or are you bundled up in bar light
clinging to a prettier disease?”
— JON CARAMANICA, 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