FRAGRANT WORLD
Yeasayer
Secretly Canadian
Beyond human voices, natural sounds are scarce on Yeasayer’s third album, Fragrant World. Synthesizers and programmed beats define every song, using tones that flaunt their artificial attacks and ricocheting stereo placements. Even the vocals often arrive haloed in effects or surrounded by computer-tuned harmonies. It’s hermetically sealed pop, very deliberately keeping its distance from everyday physicality, and it suggests not an artificial paradise but a well-guarded isolation chamber.
On a first listen, the music sounds aloof and arty — and it is, full of conceptual wiles. But the next time around, pop hooks sink in; more often than not, Fragrant World is a snappy synth-pop album.
The songs are suffused with misgivings about humanity. Yeasayer has always had them. Back on its 2007 debut album, All Hour Cymbals, the band sang, “I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into,” though the music willed itself toward optimism. Not this time.
“Wish I could tell you that we’re all all right, but in truth we’re doomed,” the album concludes in Glass of the Microscope, a dire song about environmental pollution. The music places disembodied, altered voices within a sparse, throbbing track that sounds like it has been bounced off a distant satellite.
Science is a recurring topic in the lyrics, in songs like the reggae-tinged Henrietta, with its seemingly hopeful chorus, “We can live on forever.” It’s not a love song; a verse refers to HeLas, a so-called immortal cell line used by researchers that was derived from the cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks.
Of course, science also provided the computers and synthesizers that generate the sounds on Fragrant World. Ours is hardly the first era in which pop has considered the interaction of man and machine; there was a lot of that going around in the 1980s, when bands were fascinated by synthesizers far more primitive than what’s available now. Yeasayer at times risks joining the glut of bands recycling ‘80s electropop, and surely knows it. That must be why one of the most retro songs on the album, with an ‘80s club beat, is called Reagan’s Skeleton; its lyrics sketch a horror-movie plot about Ronald Reagan, zombies and the return of trickle-down economics. It’s probably no coincidence that the album appears in this election year.
Near the end of the album, one song fitfully breaks out of the electronic seclusion. It’s Folk Hero Shtick, a snide put-down of a rock star: “Prance around amphitheaters in your swelled head.” The music starts in a synthetic, echoey blur. But identifiable tones soon emerge, with a distorted bass and, at one point, an oh-so-sincere ‘60s sound — an electric 12-string guitar and a psychedelic glimmer of flute (or is it a Mellotron sample of flute?) — before the synthesizers start pumping again. It’s a measure of Yeasayer’s deep gamesmanship that by then, the realistic, natural instruments sound like the intruders.
— JON PARELES, NY Times News Service
BEAUTIFUL SURPRISE
Tamia
Plus 1
As R&B continues to give itself over to hip-hop and, lately, to dance music, it’s left generations of singers in the lurch: where to go when aging, graceful or otherwise, isn’t much of an option?
At 37, Tamia is by no means old, but even in her younger years, she stood apart as a singer with purpose and fervor, and one with an appealingly flexible voice: booming on Stranger in My House, frail on Officially Missing You. Nevertheless, despite consistently strong albums, Tamia has been operating at the edge of the R&B mainstream for more than a decade, never settling close to the middle.
A decade ago, that was a liability, maybe, but now it’s something of a relief. Beautiful Surprise is her first album of new material in six years, and it’s wisely out of step with her surroundings, even if not always successfully so. There are club tracks, largely produced by the Runners (like Lose My Mind, Believe in Love), that nod at the dance floor while never really stepping out onto it. Of these, the title track, produced by Salaam Remi, hits hardest, juxtaposing restrained boom-bap against Tamia’s pretty fluttering.
Too often on this album she undermines herself and pulls back from her biggest notes, though not on Still Love You, a limp number that she trumps with power. It features vocal arrangement, writing and background vocals from the rising soul powerhouse Jazmine Sullivan, who undoubtedly set a high bar.
But these largely pro forma R&B songs turn out to be concessions — to genre, to age, to expectations. The true highlights of this album are the left turns. Still is a country update of her 2004 hit, recorded in Nashville under the guidance of the well-regarded songwriter Luke Laird. It trumps the original, with a mature, soothing arrangement that matches the song’s celebration of a love that goes on and on. The same producer and session musicians also worked on Tamia’s elegant, though ultimately too-restrained cover of Is It Over Yet, which was a hit for Wynonna Judd in 1993.
The most striking song on this album is also the most modest. Because of You is a praise song through and through: not of a lover, but of a higher power. Tamia does her crispest, most straightforward singing here. Religious music has become a safe space for aging secular artists, who are no longer turned to for their take on young love. But this kind of exuberance has value too, especially for a singer savvy and gifted enough to never be boxed in.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY Times News Service
HERITAGE
Lionel Loueke
Blue Note
Up to this point, Lionel Loueke’s recording career has suggested a disarming marriage of the expansive and the insular. A guitarist and vocalist from Benin, Loueke has a style born of synthesis: He came into his own by absorbing multiple strains of West African and Brazilian music, along with decades of modern jazz. So openness and curiosity have nourished him, but his track record as an artist suggests a firm, unaffected identity, something already well honed and largely self-contained.
His potent new album, Heritage, underscores that impression even as it changes the context around him. Unlike Loueke’s first three albums as a leader — each of which, to one degree or another, featured the deft and fluttery rapport of an acoustic trio also known, collectively, as Gilfema — this one revels in the heavy influence that funk and Afrobeat have had on him. It has a punchy drum sound, woozy electric bass and guitar work that toggles between sharp and slithery. Loueke has switched from nylon to steel strings, and he leans more on his effects pedals, while subtly toning down the vocalizing that gives his music some of its folkloric suppleness.
Heritage was mainly produced by Robert Glasper, who plays piano on more than half the album, and composed two of its tracks. The rhythm team throughout consists of the alert and soulful bassist Derrick Hodge and the agile, emphatic drummer Mark Guiliana. Occasionally there’s an unassuming guest contribution from the singer Gretchen Parlato. Altogether it’s a lineup made for mutual admiration, with a lot of overlapping history.
What sharpens the picture is the writing, which skews refreshingly songlike, girded with sophisticated but intuitive harmony. The first three tracks, Ife, Ouidah and Tribal Dance, offer a familiar but engaging tour through Loueke’s Wayne Shorter-esque jazz ideal, full of drifting chord movement and worldly inflections. Hardier approaches to rhythm arrive with Freedom Dance, an airtight Afrobeat jam; Farafina, a tangle of stuttering funk; and Goree, a breakbeat showcase for Guiliana.
It’s a variable feast, light-handed about its cultural implications — several song titles, including Ouidah and Goree, refer to the Atlantic slave trade, a close historical reality in Benin — but invested in emotional connection. Loueke has never had a problem conveying warmth, but his expressive gifts have rarely been marshaled as smartly as they are here, on an album that upholds groove as the ultimate truth.
— NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service
A THING CALLED DIVINE FITS
Divine Fits
Merge
Divine Fits is a patchwork of other patchworks, three indie-rock musicians who sometimes seem like rock fans above all else: Britt Daniel from Spoon, Dan Boeckner from Wolf Parade, and Sam Brown from the New Bomb Turks.
Which is to say that if their own bands are kind of meta-rock, this band is kind of meta-meta-rock. Depending on the track, Divine Fits sounds like a new-wave guitar band, a synth-pop act, a garage band or an early 70s drone-rock experiment. (Brown drums neutrally, like a stylish metronome, or a convincing sample of a style; it’s the others who carry the music.) This could, and maybe should, be a band that hedges its bets. But A Thing Called Divine Fits, the threesome’s first record together, produced with Nick Launay, feels taut and right. It’s concentrated on the thing itself — a collection of shared songs, not the pile of individual wills. You can tell that what’s been taken out is as important as what stayed in.
Having two singers doesn’t split the record in half; there seems to be an almost brotherly relationship here. Boeckner was born in 1978. His voice is broad and calm and comes from the chest, a little like Bono’s, a little like Ian McCulloch’s, seemingly oriented toward the playlists of rock radio from around the time he was five. Daniel was born in 1971, and his voice is thinner and slouchier and stranger. It comes from the head and the nose, gets pinched and flat as it rises and turns to a half-rasp.
Each sings his own songs, and occasionally each other’s. (The exception is a version of Rowland Howard’s Shivers, sung by Daniel: a post-punk record-collector’s idea of a great ballad.) But there’s a funny continuity between Boeckner and Daniel, like Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. Each can sound like a modified version of the other. Somehow, on deeper levels, they overlap.
Launay, who worked on Public Image Ltd.’s Flowers of Romance as well as many other 1980s records that Divine Fits probably knows well, must have something to do with why the album works. Sprays of guitar emerge briefly, like thumbs in your eye; analog keyboards, run through various filters, shimmer and vibrate; delay loops synchronize with drum beats.
The group has gone the extra half-mile. It’s a record full of poses and acts, but there’s a secret work ethic under all this; the bandmates seem to believe in indie-rock maybe a little more than they need to.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY Times News Service
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