Jessica Simpson’s fifth album finds its groove in the second song, Remember That.
“Remember,” she sings, “how he told you you were stupid.” For a moment it seems as if she might be referring to her public image as a lip-biting, aw-shucksing simple girl who rose to fame on the heels of marrying young and consenting to have the accompanying foibles televised. But then the song shows its hand, morphing into an angry rumination on domestic violence, sung with vigor. And something unexpected becomes clear: Simpson, the erstwhile pop singer and failed actress, has found a backbone.
Here’s hoping it remains stiff when faced with those who would dismiss her foray into country music out of hand. (Simpson is not alone. Many stars of other genres, including Jewel, Kid Rock and Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish, have recently attempted to make inroads to the country crowd.) Ignore that this album was made by Simpson, and it’s still utterly competent. Acknowledge that — especially given her history of making unmemorable pop songs — and it almost qualifies as an accomplishment.
Almost. On Remember That she’s believably incensed, and on the impressive, brassy ballad Might as Well Be Making Love, she sounds certain as she tells a lover not to let a fight come between them. Simpson has a strong voice, but it has little nuance, rendering her exercises in self-empowerment (Pray Out Loud, Still Don’t Stop Me) particularly banal. And inevitably she falls victim to familiar Nashville traps: hackneyed lyrics about the tireless love of Johnny and June Carter Cash (Sipping on History) and several references, veiled and not, to faith and God, which seems less like pandering in light of Simpson’s days as a youth Christian singer, but not by much.
But she avoids references to anything rural: shockingly there isn’t one mention of her Texas roots here. Rather this is an album that assiduously avoids specificity. For a pop singer seeking refuge in country music it’s a smart move. It doesn’t seem as if she’s trying too hard, when of course she totally is.
Every song is a short story for Will Sheff, the songwriter and singer of the Austin, Texas, band Okkervil River. Usually his stories are first-person monologues, their drama stoked by Sheff’s fearlessly disheveled voice: crooning like Morrissey, quavering like David Byrne, cracking, aching. The band matches his mood swings and eggs him on, harking back to the 1960s and 1970s with folk-rock, new wave, country and an occasional stately ballad, sometimes sprinkled with mariachi horns or sleigh bells or banjo.
Over a decade of prolific recording and steady touring, Sheff has been thinking more and more about the life of a performer. That theme runs through Okkervil River’s 2005 album, Black Sheep Boy, The Stage Names from 2007 and its new album, The Stand Ins, which was recorded at the same sessions as The Stage Names but easily stands on its own.
On The Stand Ins Sheff contemplates all sorts of entertainers and hangers-on: singer-songwriters (there’s a song called Singer Songwriter), a movie star, a supermodel, a faded movie star, an actor’s fan, a backstage fling and an imagined interview with the 1970s glam-rocker Jobriath (whose albums, coincidentally, have just been reissued). There’s a sailor too, who sings (in Lost Coastlines), “Every night finds us rocking and rolling on waves wild and white.”
Sheff is fascinated by the permeability of truth and deception and by the way people willingly let themselves be deceived by art’s fantasies. At the center of the album is Pop Lie, a frenetically catchy new wave song about “the man who dreamed up the dream that they wrecked their hearts upon, the liar who lied in his pop song.” Self-conscious as the lyrics are, the music is uninhibited: lurching into motion like a bar band, picking up speed, piling up instruments and letting them fall away. Okkervil River builds each flimsy illusion as if, for the moment, it’s all that matters.
On her enchanting 2005 album Fisherman’s Woman, the singer-songwriter Emiliana Torrini sang small, ruminative songs in an intimate hush. She seemed watchful and a bit careful, with the stir of stringed instruments framing her voice like a cushion beneath a gem. So it’s no surprise that Torrini begins a song on Me and Armini with an airy suggestion — “Let’s stay awake/And listen to the dark” — against a fingerpicked acoustic guitar. The sound, like the image, feels right.
But that’s just one moment on this new album, which presents Torrini as a bold eclectic, musically and emotionally. Produced by her longtime collaborator Dan Carey, Me and Armini includes electronic textures and jostling grooves, along with spacious reverb. Its title track is a portrait of obsessive infatuation, set over a deceptively breezy reggae lilt. Another hymn to dislocated affection, Ha Ha, pairs its spiteful lyrics with a brooding guitar part traceable to the Velvet Underground. A song called Big Jumps literally urges risk taking, before yielding to a chorus of multitracked nonsense syllables.
A native of Iceland, Torrini must endure her share of Bjork comparisons, especially since she has dabbled in trip-hop and electronica. Here, on Ha Ha and the archly seductive track Gun, she suggests another steely chanteuse, Keren Ann. And Me and Armini, with its palatably diverse array of moods, has a parallel in The Reminder, which propelled a certain Canadian named Feist into the pop mainstream.
What sets Torrini apart, if ever so slightly, is her incisive way with romance. She captures the bloom and decay of love with equal vigor. Smack in the center of the album are two songs in which she observes a thrashing in her ribcage. “My heart is beating like a jungle drum,” she cries, giddily, in one. Then, at the outset of the next: “Hold heart, don’t beat so loud/For me keep your calm/As he walks out on you.”
This record, by the Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson, embodies two qualities that usually don’t go together: extreme breadth and extreme humility. Often when a jazz bandleader serves up a program as mixed as Cantando — folk song, an Ornette Coleman jazz tune, lieder, tango, free improvisation — he wants to show you that he has a battling spirit: he can’t be classified; he hasn’t bought into any particular aesthetic. An assertiveness of touch tends to go along with that.
But Stenson makes fairly sublime piano-trio records without overarranging, overplaying or over-bandleading. In his mid-60s now, he’s the repository of half a century of the development of free jazz, in particular the European post-1960s kind, with its folk and classical leanings. Yet he wears it all lightly. In his recent records you don’t hear strategies or contentions, but a natural working flow.
On Cantando he’s comfortable sharing equal space with his long-time bassist, Anders Jormin, and his new drummer, Jon Falt. It’s a thoughtful, moderate performance, using bass and drums more for coordinated melodic counterpoint and color than for groove or swing. And this moderation continues for nearly 80 minutes: Song of Ruth, a beautiful melody by the Czech composer Petr Eben (so beautiful it appears in two versions here) has the same quiet confidence as Pages, a long track made up of several different free trio improvisations fused together. It’s all relatively quiet music, and not too stylized. It’s pulsating, lumpy with long improvised phrases; it’s alive.
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