Amor Supremo, Carla Morrison, Cosmica
Prepare your head for the Mexican singer Carla Morrison’s new album, Amor Supremo, because it stays pretty close to one performed tempo (a bit below medium) and one portrayed state of consciousness (lucid dreaming). It’s an hour of reverbed-out ballads about intemperate love and the void.
Her music hasn’t always been this single-minded. Morrison’s last record, Dejenme Llorar, from 2012 — which won Latin Grammy Awards for both alternative album and alternative song — had some immediacy. Its sound and arrangements were more direct, varied and acoustic; it transmitted despair, but could do it in a sweet, genial, small-scale way. Here, with the producer Alejandro Jimenez, she’s gone oceanic.
The record is elegant and gauzy, done mostly with live drums and synthesizer, and dabs of guitar, piano and strings. An English-language point of comparison might be the last few records by Lana Del Rey, in the way both singers make words and phrases stretch and swoop, and how they perform romantic sadness as ritual. But Morrison’s voice is lighter and stronger, far more subtle, and she’s not playing with her public image nearly as much. These are reports from the inside of the head, love songs about the contents of one soul’s being decanted into another.
Her narrators absorb love in every way possible, through ears and mouth and skin and mind. There are rarely other people mentioned in these songs. “You are my secret,” she sings in Mi Secreto. “I tell nobody about you.” And in Un Beso: “I want to touch you and follow you everywhere.” Repeatedly, she uses metaphors to describe a kind of love in which there is no separation, no independent will. “You were living in me,” she sings at one point, “and I was so, so happy.”
There are songs of satisfaction and remorse, of love’s being born and dying, and they’re pretty much the same. The floating feeling pervading the music — the tolling chords, the long decays — suggests an absence of beginnings and ends. “It’s an addiction,” she sings about her love in Mi Secreto, in yet another metaphor. “It’s a process.”
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
Gaia, Lionel Loueke, Blue Note
The centerpiece of the guitarist Lionel Loueke’s new album, Gaia, is a captivating and deceptively simple ballad called Forgiveness. Built around a mere wisp of melody — seven notes drifting down a major scale, with a couple of adjustments — the song radiates springlike serenity with an effortless, gliding groove, up until the moment when the band drops out, and Loueke sets up a West African highlife beat for a punchy coda.
It’s all brilliantly in character for Loueke, who hails from Benin and has spent the last decade or so finding mainstream avenues for his sinuous, effervescent style. His previous album on Blue Note, Heritage, from 2012, found him hardening his attack, with partners like the keyboardist Robert Glasper. Gaia preserves that urgency while returning Loueke to the helm of a trio with Massimo Biolcati on bass and Ferenc Nemeth on drums.
Subtlety has always been a hallmark of this band, and, in some respects, Gaia — full of tripwire rhythmic intricacies that register as casual, even natural — underscores that strength. But the album, recorded live in the studio, also captures a sense of thrilling unrestraint, a willingness to push intuition past the point of comfort. Produced by Don Was, it has the rough spark of a bootleg, with better sound.
It also has a conceptual framework, involving humankind’s poor stewardship of the environment. You can invest as much or as little into this as you like; Loueke’s compositions don’t belabor the point.
His trio is adept at rounding corners and shifting gears, as it does on a brooding Afro-funk tune called Sleepless Night. Biolcati plays electric bass as well as acoustic on the album, and Loueke employs the odd delay or chorus effect (but none of his signature vocal percussion).
A couple of tracks, like Procession, prowl toward post-Hendrix territory, which is nothing new. But others, like Aziza Dance, attest to a searching originality: No other band has quite this sound, and it hasn’t stopped evolving.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
Buy Me a Boat, Chris Janson, Warner Bros/Warner Music Nashville
Chris Janson’s Buy Me a Boat is a working-class anthem, a bone-dry, heavily drawled shrug about the downside of wage labor. It’s also wry: “They call me redneck, white trash and blue collar/but I could change all that if I had a couple million dollars.”
In the modern country context — denuded accents, love songs, winks to pop and hip-hop — it feels practically heretical.
Janson was between labels when he released Buy Me a Boat; it first gained attention when the influential and disruptive radio DJ Bobby Bones played it on his show. And yet it went as high as No 2 on the Billboard country chart, a novelty that became something more. That means that Janson might be Nashville’s first viable post-bro. In the genre’s perpetual arm wrestle over values, Buy Me a Boat feels like the beginning of a comeback for rural-minded country.
Janson’s impressive full-length debut album, titled after his breakthrough hit, is an extension of that promise, from the rambunctious Power of Positive Drinkin’ to the tough flirtation Save a Little Sugar to the surprisingly affecting Yeah It Is, a pickup song with a moral center.
Even his more conventional, value-free material — the soft island country of Under the Sun, or the boy-becomes-man tale Holdin’ Her — is strong. That’s probably because, at 29, Janson is already something of a Nashville lifer. He released his debut single five years ago, and has been signed to at least four record labels. In the meanwhile, he’s written songs for several artists, from Justin Moore (Off the Beaten Path) to Tim McGraw (Truck Yeah). (McGraw returns the favor here, teaming up with Janson on the cheeky Messin’ With Jesus)
The album closes with the redemption tale White Trash. It’s a familiar class anxiety story — working folks versus the bourgeoisie, in a proxy fight for country music’s soul. Songs like this were anathema to the heartthrobs of recent years — they always get the girl. But for Janson, it’s not a given. “Their daddies didn’t want us hanging ‘round their girls,” he sings, with a splash of resentment. Does he get the girl? Of course he does. Post-bro, 1; bro, 0.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
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