As Santigold rip-offs go, Boom, the debut single by Anjulie, is among the cleverest. Apart from the drums, all the other instruments — the flatulent junkyard brass, the bone-dry Morricone guitars — are obfuscated, floating through haze. On top Anjulie coos coyly about giving in when really she should know better. And the faintly Caribbean chorus — “Boom, sha-la-ka” — echoes a skipping heartbeat, a theme woven into the song’s lyrics. (On Aug. 4, Boom received a 2009 MTV Video Music Award nomination for breakthrough video.)
But unlike Santigold, who occasionally forgets to ground her excursions in song craft, Anjulie isn’t eccentric in the least. Of Guyanese descent by way of Toronto, Anjulie has an unapologetic pop ear, an intuitive gift for melody and a voice that, while not rich or deep, eases into long sighs, syllables melting into each other so that entire lines, or verses, can seem like one long, fluctuating note.
All together it makes for an often-sumptuous debut album of lithe, modern coffeehouse soul (in senses musical and literal: Hear Music is a joint venture between Starbucks and Concord Music Group) that smartly avoids the bohemian. The Lisa Stansfieldesque Some Dumb Girl splits the difference between Muscle Shoals and acid jazz. The Heat and Same Damn Thing are lightly drizzled with calypso and reggae. And Love Songs could have been a Neil Diamond number, and it knows it: “I fall so easy for the cheesy things in life,” Anjulie sings.
Crazy That Way has the most conventional beginning of the songs here, with just a woman, a piano and a confession: “Sometimes I lock myself inside your closet, breathing the scent of your clothes/Take home a T-shirt and pretend I lost it, hide it under my pillow.” But then come the strings, marching a quick step beneath her, and after that the multitracked vocals. Soon the mood is acoustic Michael Jackson as filtered through the lens of Ne-Yo, a hint of how the next generation of singer-songwriters is coming of age.
Long before he was animated and immortalized as 2D, the lead singer of the virtual band Gorillaz, Damon Albarn was the leading bloke in the English band Blur.
For many, Blur is a needle in the haystack of mid-1990s alternative rock one-hit wonders. Song 2, forever linked with a teen slasher film and often played at sporting events, is pretty much the only Blur song you’ll find on anyone’s iPod. Luckily, we have this double-disc “beginner’s guide” to lead us through more than 10 years of some of the best Brit-pop ever created.
Disc 1 offers Beetlebum, Girls and Boys and the aforementioned Song 2. Disc 2 presents warm, fuzzed-out guitars, punchy synths and Albarn’s charming accent on tracks like Stereotypes and Chemical World.
Every couple of years in hip-hop the party relocates. From Atlanta it went to Houston, then the Bay Area, then Miami, and then back to Atlanta. (New York? Not in ages.) During the last year and a half it’s landed in Dallas, which has become an unexpected hotbed of post-snap-music dance-craze rap, thanks to Lil Wil’s My Dougie, B-Hamp’s Do the Ricky Bobby and the GS Boyz’s Stanky Legg.
All those synchronized moves? Dorrough will have none of it. A Dallas rapper with a pair of hits, Ice Cream Paint Job and Walk That Walk, that require no predetermined dance steps, Dorrough has more in common with the city’s rougher voices, like Big Tuck, Tum Tum or Fat Pimp.
Dorrough is an unmemorable rapper, though; dismal rhymes abound on his debut album, Dorrough Music. Nevertheless he’s got a gift for the sticky concept. Walk That Walk is an addictive ode to catcalling. With its bouncy, high-pitched synth stabs, Flashout captures the nervous energy of conspicuous consumption. And occasionally Dorrough’s overreliance on the simple results in cleverness. On What’s My Ringtone, he wonders what song plays when he calls his girl: “Is it Love by Keyshia Cole?/Or Playa Cardz by Keyshia Cole?/All I know is it better not be that I Should’ve Cheated by Keyshia Cole.”
Last year Dorrough had a hit in the southern US (alongside SupaStarr) with Halle Berry, a celebration of women whose beauty recalls that Oscar-winning actress. But between then and now the rights to that bawdy song were sold to the Louisiana rapper Hurricane Chris, whose slightly more genial Halle Berry (She’s Fine) has become a huge success in the US, bigger than either of Dorrough’s hits.
To add insult to injury, Hurricane Chris’ version comes with its own dance (largely repurposed from My Dougie). Even Berry tried it out on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
The trombonist Luis Bonilla hears jazz as playful, rough, cathartic, chaotic, tender, swinging, funky and inherently, demonstrably Latin. At any point in I Talking Now! his quintet usually satisfies at least three of those descriptions at once.
Bonilla, who wrote all the music here and plays in strong percussive blasts and fully articulated bebop phrases, has for nearly 20 years been a soloing trombonist in several New York repertory big bands. For this record, his fourth, he’s drawn his quintet from colleagues in those bands. (There’s Arturo O’Farrill, the pianist, and Ivan Renta, the tenor saxophonist, both from the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra; the bassist Andy McKee from the Mingus Big Band; and the drummer John Riley from the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.) These are all players used to projecting. Nobody here is shy or academic-sounding.
So the album — whose title comes from Bonilla’s Costa Rican father, shouting to silence a noisy dinner table — suggests live jazz in New York from about 20 years ago, when jazz often sounded a little more vernacular than it does now, with more loose aggression, and a common will to play loud and let it rip.
Letting it rip can be dull in limited circumstances, with too much repetition and formulaic writing or arrangements. But this is a varied record, as a whole and within its parts. Some pieces, like Uh, Uh, Uh and No Looking Back, keep shifting into dramatically new rhythmic sections: Latin, free, four-four swing and much else.
Each section establishes its own mood and character. If that sounds schematic or dispassionate — variety for its own sake, the dreaded eclecticism — it isn’t. The band plays with rough gusto, even the sentimental ballad Closer Still, echoing Bob Brookmeyer’s big-band writing, in which the powerful flow of written music threatens to undermine the solos.
Given a limited budget, Bonilla has even used the properties of the studio a bit. In Triumph, toward the end of the record, with a slow, polyrhythmic Coltrane-quartet groove, the track gets spacey with echo and scraping-string noises. By that point he has established the right context for this to happen, and it works perfectly.
The video for Psychic City (Voodoo City), from the new album by the experimental dance-rock duo Yacht, begins with a disclaimer: “Due to our strong personal convictions, we wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.”
It’s a funny statement, coming from a group so invested in ritual and enigma. See Mystery Lights was named after an unexplained phenomenon in Marfa, Texas, where parts of the album were recorded. Its cover, designed by Boyd Elder, involves an arrangement of mystic triangles, encased in holographic foil. Among the album’s catchier refrains is this one, from Ring the Bell, a slow-throbbing opening track: “Will we go to heaven, or will we go to hell?/It’s my understanding that neither are real.”
Jona Bechtolt is the chief heretic behind Yacht and a remix specialist with a canny knack for concept. (The band’s name originated as an acronym for Young Americans Challenging High Technology.) His previous albums were solo projects, but here he teams up with Claire L. Evans, an artist and writer from his hometown, Portland, Ore. Their partnership works easily: On a starkly funky track called I’m in Love With a Ripper Bechtolt sings the verse and Evans sings the chorus, along with a mock-confessional coda. (“I got told to marry a doctor,” it begins.) On Summer Song, which rides a disco beat, their voices blend into an echoing, androgynous whole.
Instrumentally the album hews to the house aesthetic of the DFA label, which signed Yacht on the merit of Summer Song. So the drums sound live and present, the bass is full and clear, and myriad textural elements fade in and out of the mix. It’s indie-rock party music, and its spare-parts feeling comes honestly: at teamyacht.com Bechtolt dissects the influences behind Psychic City (Voodoo City)”in granular detail.
All of which makes the occult disclaimer feel like a smirking jape. Does a band like Yacht even have “strong personal convictions”? Maybe, if you count the message of The Afterlife, which is that whatever lies beyond, it’s going to have a groove.
It is jarring how differently Taiwan’s politics is portrayed in the international press compared to the local Chinese-language press. Viewed from abroad, Taiwan is seen as a geopolitical hotspot, or “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” as the Economist once blazoned across their cover. Meanwhile, tasked with facing down those existential threats, Taiwan’s leaders are dying their hair pink. These include former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), among others. They are demonstrating what big fans they are of South Korean K-pop sensations Blackpink ahead of their concerts this weekend in Kaohsiung.
Taiwan is one of the world’s greatest per-capita consumers of seafood. Whereas the average human is thought to eat around 20kg of seafood per year, each Taiwanese gets through 27kg to 35kg of ocean delicacies annually, depending on which source you find most credible. Given the ubiquity of dishes like oyster omelet (蚵仔煎) and milkfish soup (虱目魚湯), the higher estimate may well be correct. By global standards, let alone local consumption patterns, I’m not much of a seafood fan. It’s not just a matter of taste, although that’s part of it. What I’ve read about the environmental impact of the
Oct 20 to Oct 26 After a day of fighting, the Japanese Army’s Second Division was resting when a curious delegation of two Scotsmen and 19 Taiwanese approached their camp. It was Oct. 20, 1895, and the troops had reached Taiye Village (太爺庄) in today’s Hunei District (湖內), Kaohsiung, just 10km away from their final target of Tainan. Led by Presbyterian missionaries Thomas Barclay and Duncan Ferguson, the group informed the Japanese that resistance leader Liu Yung-fu (劉永福) had fled to China the previous night, leaving his Black Flag Army fighters behind and the city in chaos. On behalf of the
The Taipei Times last week reported that the rising share of seniors in the population is reshaping the nation’s housing markets. According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, about 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident. H&B Realty chief researcher Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨), quoted in the article, said that there is rising demand for elderly-friendly housing, including units with elevators, barrier-free layouts and proximity to healthcare services. Hsu and others cited in the article highlighted the changing family residential dynamics, as children no longer live with parents,
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