Strange Little Birds, Garbage, Stunvolume
What is the point of aging if you never grow up? Two decades ago, Garbage released its first album full of jagged, mottled, searing pop-rock, a refreshing post-grunge wake-up. For a while, it continued apace with its tense approach but faded over time, as anger inevitably does.
After a hiatus, Garbage is back to releasing albums semiregularly — the new Strange Little Birds is the band’s second album since 2012 — and admirably, it has stuck by its vision. The production has the old, familiar roar, full of Duke Erikson and Steve Marker’s streaking guitars, Butch Vig’s trash-can drums and background thunderstorm rustles. And then there’s Shirley Manson, swaggering and staggering as usual, singing songs full of anxiety about whether she’s enough, like the morbid If I Lost You, where she exhales deeply, “You tell me I’ve got nothing to worry about/ they’ve got nothing on me.”
Manson has long been a sweet-voiced miserablist, and mostly remains so here, like on Magnetized, where she sings, “You bring your light, I’ll bring the pain/ You bring your joy, I’ll bring my shame” (perhaps a nod to Wicked Games by the Weeknd, an artist who delivers modern-day tender macabre).
But even though structurally Strange Little Birds evokes the band’s early work, it is clear there’s mellowness afoot. Manson now lives in California. “I spent 40 years of my life in a high-stress state,” she recently told Entertainment Weekly. “That vanished once I came to LA.”
And so what was once a slash-and-burn approach has become more pragmatic, whether it is the search for fulfillment on Empty, or how Manson confronts reality on If I Lost You, on which she seems to admonish herself for her own deep-seated doubt: “Not every man is made the same/ so unevolved to think that way.” But so evolved to sing about it.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
American Tunes, Allen Toussaint, Nonesuch
Allen Toussaint sings just once on his final album, American Tunes, but it is a moment worth savoring. The song is Paul Simon’s American Tune, a secular hymn of perseverance, and he starts out solemn, backed only by an acoustic guitar. He waits a full two minutes before tolling a chord at the piano, as punctuation for the first line of the bridge: “And I dreamed I was dying.” He plays it on the offbeat, naturally.
Toussaint, who died last year at 77 after performing a concert in Madrid, was a soft-spoken yet statesmanlike eminence of New Orleans music: a pianist, singer-songwriter, producer and arranger whose influence ran deep through soul and rhythm and blues.
He also loved jazz, and made a recent album loosely in that lineage — The Bright Mississippi on Nonesuch in 2009 — with producer Joe Henry. American Tunes is a follow-up of sorts, in that it was also produced by Henry, with choice collaborators, including tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd and guitarist Bill Frisell, who help serve up a courtly version of the Billy Strayhorn ballad Lotus Blossom. They also join Rhiannon Giddens on a pair of vocal pieces by Duke Ellington: Come Sunday, imploring and formal, and Rocks in My Bed, stomping and sly.
But even with these reference points, the album’s jazz affinities feel less meaningful than its resonances with New Orleans. Several tracks feature Toussaint alone at the piano, and they are reminders of the regional traditions he elegantly upheld.
In particular they recall New Orleans piano legend Professor Longhair; Toussaint had a formative and special admiration for him, like Matisse’s relationship to Cezanne. Two of the solo pieces, Hey Little Girl and Mardi Gras in New Orleans, are Professor Longhair tunes; a third, Big Chief, was one of his calling cards, written by Earl King. The dignified calm with which Toussaint plays these rollicking tunes almost suggests a sleight-of-hand: he is not showing you how much work it takes to make this music sound so effortless.
Smooth elegance is more his style, as he demonstrates on a pair of tracks featuring Van Dyke Parks on a second piano: Danza, Op 33, by Creole composer Louis Gottschalk, and Southern Nights, which Toussaint wrote in a pastoral frame of mind. As for the valedictory title track by Simon, another longtime friend and collaborator, Toussaint takes care to keep it buoyant. “Oh, but it’s all right,” he sings persuasively. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Jackie Lynn, Jackie Lynn, Thrill Jockey
A lot of Haley Fohr’s musical life has happened under the name Circuit des Yeux. Since she was a teenager, Fohr, now 27, has been a kind of one-woman post-cabaret movement, using fingerpicked folk-guitar mesmerization, synthesizer ripples, aggressive drone chords and a severe, semi-operatic low voice. She is hard to contain, and does something that you cannot quite get anywhere else.
Her new record does not bear her real name anywhere; it is somewhere between EP and LP length, and credited to someone named Jackie Lynn. The cover shows, one assumes, Fohr as Jackie: She has blond-and-cherry red hair, a red cowboy hat and white Nudie-esque suit, and an industrial dust mask.
This is not a country record, though Fohr could probably make one, among many other kinds of records. It is a song cycle for acoustic guitar and electronics — made with members of Chicago band Bitchin Bajas — about a young woman’s ambition, success, dissatisfaction and aloneness.
The songs are more straightforward and sometimes lighthearted, and certainly more narrative, than on a Circuit des Yeux record. Its lyrics contain fragments of a story: Jackie flees her hometown, Franklin, Tennessee — where “you don’t speak unless spoken at” — on a Greyhound bus to Chicago. She meets someone named Tom and sells drugs with him. Tom disappears. At the end, she seems to be on the verge of going to find him. (Fohr’s record label, Thrill Jockey, released a bio for Jackie Lynn including the details that her cocaine racket was a “multimillion dollar business,” that her whereabouts is unknown and that the police found this record while raiding her empty apartment.)
The record feels short, which might be a good thing: She leaves you guessing what she’s up to. It is not totally straight-faced — there is some wild humor in Smile, a fantasy of revenge against a man who suggests that Jackie could look happier — but neither is it a joke. Fohr writes a lot of oblique songs and avoids a lot of traditions, but as she has proved before, she is better at writing about emotions — burning hopes in particular — than a lot of musicians who deal in them exclusively.
The first track, Bright Lights, aims directly at the tradition of urban-dreamer songs; it is one of the best. Once off the Greyhound bus, the newcomer sings to the lights, wondering if they can show her “how to be queen of this city.” And then she delivers these lines, which are approximately 20 times better than they need to be:
“I’m gonna take to the streets, and find strength in all that’s weak/ And like a white city dove, I’ll know skyscraper love.”
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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