Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz , Miley Cyrus, Smiley Miley
As long as we are actually listening to it, rather than considering its intentions, this post-pop-machine, experimental Miley Cyrus record, which has been streaming on SoundCloud since the end of Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards, is not too good.
Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is long and slack, stretching many of its 23 songs out of meager ideas, and puts raw faith in the weird or the nonvarnished, as if she had just recently discovered those concepts. (Maybe it’s best to hear it as another extension of her Instagram feed.) It’s cheap, clashing, blunt, a kind of psychedelic outsider-cabaret act full of non sequiturs. At its worst — and its worst takes up a lot of space — it uses rudimentary digital beats, knowingly corny synthesizer sounds, out-of-tune acoustic guitar, a lot of reverb, and terrible lyrics about rainbows and the moon and missing people and weird dreams.
A handful of these songs have some poise: I Forgive Yiew, and Bang Me Box, with Mike WiLL Made-It and his comparatively lean funk productions. And as long as she’s singing something resembling a love song or a ballad — Space Boots, Karen Don’t Be Sad, The Floyd Song (Sunrise) and I Get So Scared she’s on solid ground, creating blurry, sentimental atmospheres, letting you into the songs. Beyond those and a few more, she can almost push you away, informing you with numbing frequency that she likes to get high and doesn’t care about this or that.
As for its intentions: The album is a show of power. It is the next stage of autonomy from a pop star who has been intensely managed and packaged back to her childhood. It declares specifics of desire, sexual and otherwise, even if they are as inconsequential as BB Talk, in which she yammers at a guy, talking in circles, to stop baby-talking to her.
The project seems to come out of isolation, despite the fact that members of the Flaming Lips were involved in songwriting and production for most of the record, and Big Sean, Ariel Pink and the singer Sarah Barthel from the band Phantogram appear as guests on individual tracks. The album sounds as if it derives from a single willful source. This is impressive.
And let’s not forget that Cyrus is a resourceful singer when she wants to be. The album’s closer, Twinkle Song, yet another song about a weird dream, builds upward from an original, controlled country-ballad voice, both tense and spacey, into powerful yelling: “What does it mean? What does it all mean?”
That is a good question, even if it’s phrased in a dull way. She doesn’t give an answer.
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
Thunderbitch, Thunderbitch, Thunderbitch
“I’m a wild child!” Brittany Howard shouts on the debut album by Thunderbitch, and she leaves no doubt about it. Thunderbitch is where Howard, who leads Alabama Shakes, gets to blow off steam playing rock ‘n’ roll, whooping and hollering with no pressure to innovate or make big statements. It has self-explanatory song titles like I Just Wanna Rock n Roll, Leather Jacket and Eastside Party, and the music reaches back to Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, charged with late-1960s adrenaline. It’s a joy to hear.
Thunderbitch unites Howard with three members of Clear Plastic Masks and two from Fly Golden Eagle, both Nashville-based bands with literary ideas backed by rootsy drive.
It’s a side project, but the songs aren’t throwaways even if they just use three or four chords. They have well-defined structures and arrangements, dropping to half-time or swerving into a bridge, and they have been thoroughly lived in. Thunderbitch plays them with the fluctuating, headlong momentum and dynamic ups and downs of a band performing together live, egging one another on, watching for signals.
Guitars and keyboards mesh but also grapple in the fast rockers, always making sloppy sense. And slower songs like Closer and Heavenly Feeling heave into motion, silence themselves and surge again, loose and tight like Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Howard and Matt Menold (from Clear Plastic Masks) trade off the lead guitar spot, going bluesy or country or psychedelic; sometimes the lead guitar plays alongside Howard’s voice, shadowing her and teasing her. And Howard, who doesn’t exactly hold back with Alabama Shakes, is just as volcanic with Thunderbitch: rasping, preaching, laughing, swooping way up high and yowling down low.
Sure, it’s impossible to make this kind of music without self-consciousness in 2015. Thunderbitch hasn’t just heard the Rolling Stones; it’s heard the E Street Band, AC/DC, the New York Dolls. Many of the lyrics are about rock ‘n’ roll itself as a goal, a release and a great joke.
In My Baby Is My Guitar, Howard sings, “I remember the first time I turned you on,” and the band hits a stop-time chord to set her up: “Unh! You zapped me.” It’s old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll that is never studied or antiquarian; Thunderbitch still feels the zap
— Jon Pareles, NY Times News Service
Freedom & Surrender, Lizz Wright, Concord
The luxurious dimensions of Lizz Wright’s voice — a smooth, dark alto possessed of qualities you might associate with barrel-aged bourbon or butter-soft leather — have typically come with a counterweight of righteous uplift. Her first four albums, informed by gospel-folk, chamber-jazz and Southern soul, framed her singing plainly, with muted drums and twangy acoustic guitars. Her poise, it seemed, came with a higher purpose.
So one fair assumption to bring to her new album, Freedom & Surrender, is that Wright has gone back to the well. As it happens, Freedom (which opens the album) and Surrender (which closes it) aren’t spirituals but rather songs of romantic entreaty, one pledging action and other teasing submission. The message is clear: Wright has found a new sensual register as an artist. “Ain’t no shame/Shifting gears,” she declares in The New Game, a bayou stomp that could become her theme song.
Freedom & Surrender was produced by Larry Klein, a seasoned hand in the singer-songwriter field. Its sound runs slicker and punchier than Wright’s previous standard, with an ace studio band featuring Dean Parks on electric guitar and Vinnie Colaiuta on drums. Most of the songs are originals, composed by Wright with one or more partners, including David Batteau, Jesse Harris and Toshi Reagon.
The most evocative of these songs — both Freedom and Surrender; Here and Now, a heartsick ballad; Real Life Painting, an ethereal waltz — give Wright room to sprawl within a phrase. Right Where You Are is a his-and-hers R&B duet with Gregory Porter, set at a languorous tempo; Lean In finds Wright in come-hither mode, stripping the song’s title of any workplace-gender-equality connotations.
Wright has said that she set out with the intention of making a covers album, so it’s worth noting that her version of Nick Drake’s River Man verges on soothing schmaltz. But To Love Somebody, the Bee Gees tune, presents her with a perfect vehicle: an expression of physical yearning at once despairing and profoundly self-possessed.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
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