Platinum
Miranda Lambert
RCA Nashville
In the past, the country superstar Miranda Lambert has been ferocious but not light, a renegade but not urbane. She took the genre by force and by fire, not quite knowing how to massage it to her ends.
On Platinum, her vivacious, clever and slickly rowdy new album, though, Lambert is finally becoming a sophisticated radical, a wry country feminist and an artist learning to experiment widely but also with less abrasion.
Her characters in these songs — which feature some of the most incisive songwriting in any genre — are complex, self-confident and self-lacerating all at once, and most crucially, completely knowing and in on the joke. On the title track it’s a striver with a manipulative streak and a bottle of bleach: “Don’t need to be a fighter/Honey, just go one shade lighter.” On Priscilla, she jokingly likens her relationship with the country star Blake Shelton to the Presleys, and seeks counsel: “Woman to woman I’m starting to see/What happened to you is happening to me/Priscilla, Priscilla, how’d you get him to yourself?”
On Two Rings Shy, she’s at the point where exasperation turns to action. “I ain’t gonna get dressed up just to be your clown/Ain’t gonna paint this pretty face like you paint the town/I ain’t wasting good mascara just to watch it running down.”
Here, as with several songs on this album, Lambert sings plainly about the gap between image and reality, about how people — women, especially — lie on the outside just to keep the inside whole. Take Bathroom Sink, about fragile facades:
It’s amazing the amount of rejection that I see in my reflection
and I can’t get out of the way
I’m looking forward to the girl I want to be
but regret has got a way of staring me right in the face
So I try not to waste too much time at the bathroom sink
Thanks to frisky production by Frank Liddell, Chuck Ainley and Glenn Worf, touching on rockabilly, 1950s rock, Western swing, arena rock and more, Lambert sounds more vocally alive and nimble than ever.
For a long time, Lambert was the only rebel going in country, but perhaps she’s feeling pressure from below, in the form of Kacey Musgraves and others writing pop-country with teeth but not relying on aggression.
Whatever the case, it’s made Lambert savvier, which makes it even more inexplicable that this album’s lead single was the dismal nostalgia trip Automatic, the sort of song more likely to be sung by one of the genre’s more regressive stars. In a post-Musgraves world, wistfully singing “Staying married was the only way to work your problems out” seems positively farcical.
Lambert has been kicking down the front door for a decade. Maybe now she’s knocking sweetly, only to tear things up once inside.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY Times News Service
Comet, Come to Me
Meshell Ndegeocello
Naive
“Beware of certainty and doubt,” Meshell Ndegeocello sings a few tracks into her deep-groove, emotionally insinuative new album, Comet, Come to Me. It’s an impossible admonition, almost a koan, but its essential condition of wariness is true to form. That the lyric comes in the course of a dub-reggae track titled Forget My Name merely highlights the album’s play of smoothness and turmoil, tension and release.
Ndegeocello has been a high priestess of ambiguous feeling throughout her career, which encompasses 10 previous albums — the most recent of which, in 2012, was an ingeniously hazy tribute to Nina Simone. Comet, Come to Me picks up the thread with a dozen tunes that bask in the mystery of human relationships.
Friends, the opening track, is a cover of the early rap hit by Whodini, rebuilt with a scaffolding of fingerpicked acoustic guitar and glaring synthesizers. It segues easily into Tom, an earthy soul ballad featuring graceful embellishment by the blues guitarist Doyle Bramhall II, along with a desolate opening couplet: “There’s nothing between us/Except the feeling of nothing.” Later, on the album’s beguiling, immersive title track, Ndegeocello and the guest singer Shara Worden make a point of renouncing an effortful approach to love, their voices blending gorgeously over sinuous dub rhythm.
It’s not insignificant that Ndegeocello plays a lot of electric bass on this album, deftly anchoring a core band made up of regular partners like the guitarist Chris Bruce. Pulse is always a priority in her music, but on Comet, Come to Me it’s paramount, whether the songs lean toward reggae, funk, Tropicalia or a cool, brooding variation of post-punk.
Convictionhas the feel of an early 1980s album cut by Prince. “I think I’m always right,” Ndegeocello sings, not long before making an about-face concession: “Truth is, you were right/I was wrong.” And yet this is still a song of judgment rather than contrition; even when things turn decisively toward an outcome, Ndegeocello seems to savor the unknowing.
Which lends an even more devastating touch to the line “I just don’t love you no more,” offered like a slug of cyanide on Folie a Deux. But as always, there’s a flip side: Choices, the following track, is a rippling reflection on the overabundance of options in this world, slowly building to a modest but definitive conclusion: “So many colors/I choose you.”
— NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service
Early Riser
Taylor McFerrin
Brainfeeder
The latest referendum on highly chilled, semi-improvised, post-Stevie Wonder, electroacoustic, lotus-eating R&B Afro-futurism is an album by Taylor McFerrin. McFerrin is a musician and a singer, although Early Riser, his first full-length record, does not make a big fuss about his singing. He is the son of Bobby McFerrin, the human larynx; it’s not surprising why he would seek out a different way to use his voice in his work.
Instead, he puts himself forward as something more integrated and vague: an evenhanded manager of grooves, vamps, collective improvisations, pulsating or twinkling atmospheres; a collaborator as much as producer; a part of a circle. The album is on Brainfeeder, the Los Angeles label run by the producer Flying Lotus, and a few musicians who contribute to the tracks are also part of that label’s cohort — the bassist Thundercat and the singer Christina Ryat of the group RYAT. Ryat channels a kind of intense, squeaky, flexible wonder in her voice, not unlike Nai Palm of the Australian group Hiatus Kaiyote, who also sings on the album. Another singer here, Emily King, is a more straightforward presence, who does on Decisions the job more or less of a vocalist in a deep-house track: a soulful performance that never distracts you from the groove.
McFerrin himself sings Florasia, a ballad with slow electric-piano chords and choppy, beat-dragging rhythm. His father appears, singing wordlessly, on Invisible/Visible, along with the Brazilian pianist Cesar Camargo Mariano and a backing track of birdsong.
Nor is it surprising that McFerrin has been talking about Early Riser for at least three years. It feels like well-loved sketches built out of inspired and unplanned bits from pleasant recording sessions, either alone or with friends; both ways seem to produce equal results.
The songs are piled with details but stay conceptually skinny. The way you feel about the record depends on how much you want something to hold on to: a song, a narrative, a kind of musical thesis.
These songs don’t have a great dynamic range, or produce very surprising events. They float past you, often made of three or four chords and a trickling, curious beat.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY Times News Serv
ice
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