Hero, Maren Morris, Columbia Nashville
Maren Morris curses. Which shouldn’t be remarkable, but is.
Profanities — well, really just one — are sprinkled throughout Hero, this 26-year-old singer and songwriter’s outstanding major label debut album, and perhaps the canniest country record in recent memory.
Think of all the ways dissenters have tried to upend country in recent years: by sneaking in rhythmic vocal tics learned from rappers, by thinning out the genre’s musical baggage, by pledging inclusive values. Morris, an astute synthesizer, has studied and perfected them all. Hero, as a result, is both utterly of its moment and also savvy enough to indicate how the future might sound.
The innovation is clear right from the breakthrough bait-and-switch single My Church It’s a roots-minded song about religiosity but not religion, in which the radio is the church — a move both pious and defiant, in the manner of Kacey Musgraves, without the awww-shucks shrug.
The winks continue — a few songs, like Sugar and Drunk Girls Don’t Cry, suggest Kelsea Ballerini’s light-spirited boys-are-trash anthems, albeit with a few years of men-are-trash experience. And the hilarious Rich spins if-I-had-a-dollar heartbreak over a do-nothing man into hip-hop-minded comedy:
Boy, I’d be rich, head-to-toe PradaBenz in the driveway, yacht in the waterVegas at the Mandarin, high-roller gamblin’Me and Diddy drippin’ diamonds like Marilyn
She’s sing-rapping here, but also blending hip-hop bravado and country modesty (think Chris Janson’s Buy Me a Boat), tweaking more literal genre cut-and-pasters like Florida Georgia Line or Sam Hunt by smoothing down the seams.
Morris has a songwriting credit on every song on Hero, which she produced with Mike Busbee (known as busbee), a songwriter-producer with a wide resume across styles. The back half of this album is slightly less ambitious than the first, though even when Morris is playing it straight, she’s strong, be it on the slow ticktock R&B country of How It’s Done, the centrist pop of Just Another Thing or Once, with gospel and rock flourishes. And I Could Use a Love Song, her most conventional country number, is phenomenal, a meditative plaint with clear passion.
And then there’s that four-letter word, which comes up time and again: on Sugar, on Rich, on Drunk Girls Don’t Cry. Morris uses it fluently, casually and effectively, which is to say, you hardly notice at all as she’s breaking what may be country’s last remaining taboo.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
iLevitable, iLe, Sony Music Latin
Ileana Cabra’s older brothers are Eduardo Cabra, known as Visitante, and Rene Perez Joglar, known as Residente, of Calle 13, a perpetually innovative Puerto Rican hip-hop duo, and she has sung and rapped with them since her teens. Now, calling herself iLe, her solo debut album, iLevitable, ventures in an entirely different direction: a knowingly retro survey of Latin music’s past, full of romance and a longing that can turn despondent. She sings richly orchestrated boleros, delicate ballads and percussive boogaloo and mambo, without a hint of either irony or naivete.
The easy way to make an album like iLevitable would be to revive old Latin hits. Instead, iLe wrote her own material, often with members of her family or Calle 13. The exceptions are two songs by her grandmother, Flor Amelia de Gracia. One is Dolor, a luxuriantly mournful bolero from 1955; she shares it with the revered Puerto Rican salsa singer Cheo Feliciano, in one of his last recordings before his death in 2014.
Her voice molds itself to each song, always sounding natural rather than stylized. She rides a Latin big band with assertive bite in Te Quiero con Bugalu (“I Want You With Boogaloo”) and Rescatarme (“To Rescue Me”); she’s openhearted and tearful in pop ballads including Maldito Sea el Amor (“Cursed Be the Love”) and Caníbal (“Cannibal”); she’s breathy and innocent in the delicate acoustic Triangulo (“Triangle”) and Que Mal Que Estoy (“How Bad I Feel”).
Her vocal finesse and the production hark back to vintage Latin pop. An elegantly melancholy song like Danza Para No Llorar (“A Dance for Not Crying”), accompanied only by piano, bass and percussion, could have been released decades ago. But many of the lyrics insist that iLe’s songs aren’t period pieces. She doesn’t just sing about love and desire; songs like Canibal and Triangulo examine deep, almost self-immolating depression. The imagery often turns surreal; in Te Quiero con Bugalu, as she warns herself against giving in to a dance-floor infatuation, she sings, “you touch me all over in arpeggios.” And iLe isn’t pretending to live in the past; Extrana de Querer (“Stranger to Love”), about an odd flirtation, starts with a verse about being photo-bombed.
Yet the songs flaunt their gracefulness, not their peculiarities. From Latin pop’s history, iLe has absorbed the trickiest lesson of all: the subtlety that hides magnificent craftsmanship behind immediate emotion.
— JON PARELES, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Motown Gospel Presents 1 Mic 1 Take, Various Artists, Motown Gospel
About five years ago, Capitol Music Group started shooting black-and-white videos of musicians on its various labels, recording at Capitol Music Studios in Los Angeles with minimal fuss. The name of the series is 1 Mic 1 Take, and it started out just as the name promised, with artists from Capitol’s pop and jazz rosters performing alone. (More recent videos, with extra musicians, seem to be using at least one extra microphone.) All the videos are amiable and useful and are ultimately to be filed alongside NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts and the MTV Unplugged series. What’s being sold is the idea of simplicity as an absolute virtue, an idea that isn’t always true; nor is it always true that these musicians would be forbidden anymore from putting stripped-down tracks on their own albums.
Motown Gospel, one of Capitol’s labels, has compiled an album from these sessions with five of its artists: Bryan Courtney Wilson, Tasha Cobbs, Myron Butler and Levi, Royce Lovett and Smokie Norful. Many of them brought reflective songs or spiritual ballads for the occasion, and because of that the record grows drowsy. Wilson puts vocal grit and moods shaded by many piano chords into the Stevie Wonder-like ballad Worth Fighting For. Whereas the young and mellow Lovett’s acoustic-reggae Say Something feels floppy in its lack of polish; you might want to hear a slicker version of him.
A few performers tear it up within reduced circumstances. Cobbs, especially: Her ballad Jesus Saves, with piano and three chorus singers, transcends most conventions. Toward the middle of the track, she’s slightly off the ground, her voice ripping; she is playing for an invisible audience. Still, you can hear a dramatic solo performance on a regular gospel record.
What’s more unusual is a great singer with a small band, as in Myron Butler and Levi’s Nobody Like Our God — Butler singing with only a drummer, two backup singers and a pianist playing sophisticated harmony. There’s a highly produced, hard-funk, synth-heavy, full-band arrangement of that song on Butler’s forthcoming album, On Purpose. (And there is a live version of it with Butler singing in front of the International AME Church Mass Choir that can be seen online.) But here the microphones are dry, the groove is intricate, the tempo is wakeful, and Butler drives its long crescendo.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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