Don’t Weigh Down the Light, Meg Baird, Drag City
What you’ve got with Meg Baird’s Don’t Weigh Down the Light is a true post-folk record, dyed in the acoustic sound of the English and Californian folk movements of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, but not particularly scholarly or eccentric. It isn’t waving its hands around to make itself distinct or to signal an act of reclamation or defiance. It has its own grace and discipline.
Baird sings in a light and controlled voice, frequently jumping up into her highest register for long tones that blend into the rest of the music. On this record, that music is made mostly by her acoustic guitar and Charlie Saufley’s electric guitar running through what sounds like a small amplifier, but sometimes you hear a few other elements — a little keyboard, a little hand-percussion. Her voice and multi-tracked vocal harmonies suggest a little bit of the Renaissance madrigal tradition as well as an airier version of Sandy Denny, from Fairport Convention.
But it has assumed more substance and body through the years. Maybe it’s from working with the psychedelic-folk band Espers, or from singing traditional Appalachian music with her sister Laura as part of the Baird Sisters, or recording her two previous solo records before she moved from Philadelphia to San Francisco. In any case, something has shifted in her sound. Her music is delicate and generous, as if she’s giving it away. But the gift keeps gaining authority.
The songs have both detail and blur. A few are ringing and strummy, but most are finger-picked, with stately patterns in open tunings under a stack of sung lines that recede into a vanishing point of reverb. (One short and startling track, Leaving Song, contains wordless vocals only.) There are solitary songs — the title track, most effectively — and songs that draw their power from an ensemble feeling, even when the ensemble is only two musicians, as is the case here. Each one finds its own center very quickly. You may well feel that you have heard music like this before. But you may still notice the steady, settled authenticity of its mood. This is music that knows no anxiety.
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
Northern Spy, Michael Bates, Stereoscopic
Michael Bates opens his new album, Northern Spy, with a bass solo, which usually isn’t the smartest move out of the gate, not even for a bassist with his deep-twang, broad-shouldered sound. But that solo, on an invocation called Theme for a Blind Man, grabs the ear from Note 1: trudging with a dirge-like deliberation, front and center in the mix, against a background hum that calls to mind the rural South.
The track bears no dedication, but in mood and substance it evokes Blind Willie Johnson, one of a handful of touchstones for Northern Spy. Bates — who has recently worked to intriguing effect with chamber-jazz dynamics, notably on an album of retooled Shostakovich — shifts his focus here toward a more direct and sanctified ideal, claiming affinities not only with Johnson but also with Curtis Mayfield and Otis Redding.
Because the album features a tenor saxophone trio, with Michael Blake on tenor and Jeremy Clemons, known as Bean, on drums, it’s also inevitably entangled with a jazz legacy stretching as far back as Sonny Rollins in 1957. Bates plays into this expectation a bit: Roxy borrows the 16-bar form of Rollins’ Doxy, giving Blake an open lane for his garrulous cogency as a soloist. A lone songbook standard, Days of Wine and Roses, builds on a similar frame of reference, with sparse elegance.
Where Northern Spy begins to feel more distinctive is on tracks like An Otis Theme on Curtis Changes, an imploring gospel ballad that sprawls more than nine minutes, with successive waves of crescendo; the title track, which cribs the vaulting sensation of a rock anthem; and Essex House, which suggests an old burlesque shuffle, with a touch of humor that never tips over into camp.
Blake has honed an old-fashioned but non-regressive style on tenor — for more in that vein, see his album Tiddy Boom, released on Sunnyside last fall — and he brings the full weight of his charisma. But there’s a compelling sense of equal stake in this trio. It’s no more a tenor showcase than it is a solo vehicle for Bates, who knows how to lead from behind.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
Feels Like, Bully ,StarTime International/Columbia
Trash, a glorious new song by Bully, is a mess of empowered exhaustion. “I wonder if you’ve ever felt this confused/It’s magic how/You make me feel like trash,” Alicia Bognanno sings, defeated but cool. Behind her, the bass is wobbly and dusty, the guitar pierces through lazily, the drums are confidently modest. Toward the end of the song, Bognanno shouts “feels like traaaaaaasssshhhhhh” over and again, like a raw scrape, followed by some bellows that seem anguished on the surface but as they drag on almost veer on boredom.
Remember the early 1990s? Bully does. And this band’s debut full length album, Feels Like, is an expert revisiting of that time period. It sounds like the best pop album of 1993, just after Nirvana yanked what was once deprecatingly called alt-rock into the mainstream, a flock of hook-savvy melancholics in its wake.
Bully’s approach is more taut, cut through with a little garage-rock crispness. Others have mined this territory well of late — take some of the work of Speedy Ortiz or Dum Dum Girls, or Yuck’s 2011 debut album — but Bully has in Bognanno a special weapon. She’s a bracing songwriter, full of quick jabs and mundane details that end up being full of import. As a singer, she’s evocative, especially when her vocals are double tracked, like on Too Tough. She also recorded, produced and mixed the album, which includes new material as well as reworked versions of songs from the band’s 2014 self-titled EP. (In addition to Bognanno, the band includes guitarist Clayton Parker, bassist Reece Lazarus and drummer Stewart Copeland.)
Bognanno’s fury is righteous and matter of fact. On Milkman, she gripes about how easy it is to slip into a one-sided relationship: “I could be a milkman/or I could get up and I could be/what I want to be.” On I Remember, she’s the aggressor: “I remember showing up at your house/I remember hurting you so bad/and I remember the way your sheets smelt.”
Disappointment cuts both ways on this album, with neither party willing to let go: A placid stalemate hides intense vibrations beneath the surface. At the end of I Remember, she’s screaming — maybe to tell someone off, maybe to get that someone’s attention: “I know everything that freaks you out/That! Makes! You! Mad!/That! Makes! You! Melt!”
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and