Wilder Mind,
Mumford & Sons,
Glassnote
The hoedown is over while the sorrows remain on Mumford & Sons’ decisively transformed third album, Wilder Mind. Led by singer and drummer Marcus Mumford, the band ascended to the arena circuit with foot-stomping songs topped by jaunty banjo picking; it set off a wave of revitalized folk-rock. But with Wilder Mind, Mumford & Sons implies that all the old-timey touches were nothing more than decoration. Behind them were the martial beats and inexorable buildups of arena rock, and those have surfaced fully on Wilder Mind. It’s an album of mostly despairing love songs that have found an unexpected but fitting outlet: a mope-rock resurgence.
The banjo is gone and electric guitars reign, as announced in the album’s first moments with the keening, distorted solo that opens Tompkins Square Park. It’s a move from a half-remembered 1960s to a carefully reconstructed 1980s: goodbye, New Christy Minstrels; hello, U2.
Wilder Mind is full of echoing guitars and reverberant space; U2 prevails, while songs also recall Dire Straits, Big Country, Coldplay, Snow Patrol and, more than once, Don Henley’s Boys of Summer. Although the album was recorded primarily in London, some songs started as demos at the Brooklyn studio owned by Aaron Dessner of the National. Mumford & Sons and the album’s producer, James Ford, have soaked up the patiently unfolding dynamics and hazy orchestral backdrops of the National’s albums and applied them to a Mumford trademark: the haggard verse heading into the against-all-odds triumphal harmony chorus.
The change of style turns out to be anything but awkward; Mumford & Sons are just as strategic with tiers of electric guitars as they were with their acoustic instruments. The music reaches for the skyboxes, but the songs go one-on-one. They’re dispatches from the throes of one breakup or many: arguments, pleas, accusations, declarations of loyalty and bitter renunciations, often addressed to a “you” that the singer can’t trust and can’t get over. “I don’t even know if I want to believe anything you’re trying to say to me,” goes the chorus of Believe, above a phalanx of guitars and drums.
Heard one song at a time, Wilder Mind builds convincing dramas. But Mumford & Sons’ greatest skill — their strategic crescendos — starts to feel like a formula over the course of the album; sure, the singer is bereft, but reinforcements are definitely on the way. That formula is briefly interrupted by one song, Cold Arms, with Mumford accompanied only by a lone strummed guitar. Wilder Mind sticks to the band’s post-folkie makeover; that guitar is electric.
— Jon Pareles, NY Times News Service
The Waterfall,
My Morning Jacket,
ATO/Capitol
The hum of an everyday mysticism has always been part of the deal for My Morning Jacket, but it resonates louder than usual on The Waterfall. Don’t mistake it for a problem. All those lyrics about openness, about flow, about mind-body dualism — they suit this band perfectly, along with cavernous reverb and heavy-foot midrange tempos.
That much becomes clear on the album’s curtain-raiser, Believe (Nobody Knows), whose title effectively spoils the plot. “Believe,” Jim James urges four times in the chorus, ascending halfway up a major scale. Then, with feeling, “Nobody knows!” Is that an admission? A reassurance? It doesn’t matter; James is saying, as succinctly as he can, that the absence of proof lays the bedrock for belief.
The Waterfall is My Morning Jacket’s seventh studio album, and a consolidation of its strengths, a hunk of substantiation for a believing fan base. Like the band’s 2011 album, Circuital, which was a self-conscious return to form after some clanky experiments, this one was produced by James with engineer Tucker Martine.
The band — James and Carl Broemel on guitars, Tom Blankenship on bass, Bo Koster on keyboards and Patrick Hallahan on drums — long ago set the hazy but four-square dimensions of its style. Some of these tracks, like Compound Fracture, evoke 1970s commercial rock, complete with blended “oohs.” (Among the backup singers are Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes and Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards.) Other tracks, like Spring (Among the Living), which gravely hails the changing of the seasons, feel designed for maximum liftoff on big stages.
Given that James is the principal source of earnest wonderment in the band, it’s startling to come across Get the Point, a polite-but-firm breakup song, and Big Decisions, in which he exasperatedly sings, “I don’t quite feel like faking it again tonight.” A deceptively easygoing tune called Thin Line hinges on a refrain sung in a buttery falsetto: “Well, it’s a thin line/ Between lovin’ and wasting my time.”
And the album closes with Only Memories Remain, a bittersweet ballad in the style of George Harrison, one of James’ acknowledged models. It’s a relationship elegy, but also a fond remembrance, and a reminder that love, too, should be a leap of faith.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
Triangles and Circles,
Dafnis Prieto Sextet,
Dafnison Music
In and of himself, the Cuban-born drummer Dafnis Prieto has been one of the most impressive musicians in New York jazz over the past 15 years. Whatever band he’s playing in, at some point the rigor of his playing commands you to focus directly on him. Each stroke of each different rhythm, from each different limb, feels exact, efficient, full of intent. A lot of bands, many of them Cuban ones, can show you how polyrhythm works with great clarity, as if demonstrating the intersection of gears. Prieto routinely does that all alone, with grace notes, even when he’s playing behind someone else’s solo.
But his style of composition explicitly puts the ensemble first. He writes pieces of music with great balance, in which one whirling ensemble section flows into the next, each containing a new melodic strain and just enough space for a soloist to make a mark over a vamp, then stop before indirection sets in. His sextet is full of fluid improvisers — saxophonists Peter Apfelbaum and Felipe Lamoglia, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, pianist Manuel Valera, bassist Johannes Weidenmueller — but they’re tightly managed.
Two particular qualities arise in the ambitious and organized Triangles and Circles, his sixth album and the second by his sextet. One is external: its breadth of style. It represents a formally complex sort of Latin jazz incubated in New York over the past decade and a half, a movement in which Prieto has been crucial. But it also can put you in mind of music made by Wynton Marsalis (especially Blah Blah Blah, a piece in which Prieto interprets New Orleans rhythm — which is something to hear if you’re interested in rhythm) and some of Henry Threadgill’s work from the 1980s (The Evil in You, with its intricately stuttering, dot-dash written parts and clarion ensemble moments).
And it can also make you think purely of music as an organized colloquy, built of questions and answers: Wherever something emphatic is expressed, a riposte and a resolution will shortly arrive. All that’s missing is a true, front-and-center, climactic drum solo from Prieto, which finally comes in the last minute of the last song.
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
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