Thu, Dec 25, 2014 page11

• CD Reviews

  • NY Times News Service
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  Sucker

  Charli XCX

  Atlantic

  

  Sucker, by Charli XCX

  Charli XCX is a songwriter of few syllables and countless brute-force hooks on her second album, Sucker. Her debut album, True Romance, had arty trappings; it swathed songs in glimmering, sometimes distracting, electropop. Sucker is far more direct; it’s smart, loud, cheeky, gimmick-loving pop, intent on making every track go bang.

  “All the best pop songs are so dumb,” she says in the behind-the-scenes video for her new single, Break the Rules. “That’s why they’re clever.”

  For Charli XCX, who was born Charlotte Aitchison, what happened between albums were hits. There was the gleeful, shout-along I Love It, by Icona Pop featuring Charli XCX; there was Fancy, by Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX, which earned a Grammy nomination for record of the year. And there was her own Boom Clap, a million-selling love song on the soundtrack of The Fault in Our Stars film and also on Sucker. As the song begins, four blunt drumbeats accompany Charli XCX declaiming: “Boom! Boom! Boom! Clap!”

  

  Helleborus, by Jesse Stacken

  There’s plenty going on behind the album’s show of blatancy. The music is brash and glossy, but its attack is varied and full of clever moments. About half the album was produced by Patrik Berger, who worked on Icona Pop’s I Love It and who encourages Charli XCX’s bratty side. The rest of the songs enlist full-time hitmakers, indie-rock studio nerds and those, like Ariel Rechtshaid and Greg Kurstin, who straddle both camps. It’s a discriminating A-list.

  Charli XCX’s voice, which rises from throaty richness to cheerleader-style enthusiasm, gets all sorts of backdrops to go with her straightforward verse-chorus-verse. There’s lean, stereo-bouncing new-wave staccato in London Queen; synthetic pomp in Boom Clap; digitized girl-group memories in Need Ur Luv; a touch of Abba in the choruses of the title track, Sucker; Weezer’s fat drums and distorted yet crisp guitars in Hanging Around (produced by Rivers Cuomo of Weezer); and an improbable blend of grunge and trance in Break the Rules.

  The determination to be a pop hitmaker isn’t evident in just the sound and structure of the songs; it’s in the lyrics, too. When she’s not singing about hanging out with friends, being in love, holding on, breaking up or shrugging off a boyfriend in favor of pleasuring herself, Charli XCX fixates on fame and wealth. In London Queen, she moves to Hollywood and tells her mother she’s not coming back until she has “all gold plaques”; Gold Coins is a hyperbolic dream of wealth. Famous, which features whistling along with booming and clapping, could be Charli XCX’s corollary to Lorde’s Royals; she sings about a thrill-seeking Friday night of taking “your boyfriend’s car” and crashing parties “just like we’re famous.” She’s jokingly self-aware but also eager to achieve.

  

  Fornalha, by Norberto Lobo

  The ambition and calculation on Sucker are overt but not a deal breaker. It’s a brittle, professional album full of sonic treats. The question is, what will Charli XCX want to say once she gets the pop audience she craves?

  — JON PARELES, NY Times News Service

  Helleborus

  Jesse Stacken

  Fresh Sound New Talent

  Jazz holds up to every kind of methodology. Helleborus, the scintillating and often beautiful new album by pianist Jesse Stacken, involves more than one, with two distinct approaches in the intention and the execution.

  On its face, the album is a collection of nine original tunes, ranging from the interior to the expansive, gracefully illuminated by a smart acoustic quartet. Only upon a closer look does a procedural back story emerge: These pieces came about during a yearlong “weekly composition project” initiated by Stacken in May 2012. Working according to a strict schedule, he wrote a new piece every week, posting a home recording — along with the score and, often, a dash of contextual insight — on his Web site, jessestacken.com.

  Some of the earliest of those compositions — like Give, an ethereal ballad built around intervallic thirds, and Hidden Solitude, inspired by Olivier Messiaen’s diminished scale — found their way onto this album. Others came from later in the game, when Stacken had stopped thinking about etudes. Cork Soles is a postbop number with a sly, prowling bounce; the title track, one of the last in the series, proceeds almost as an elegy.

  It’s hard to say whether these nine tunes, out of a possible 52, represent the best of Stacken’s output. What’s clear is the quality of his cohesion with saxophonist Tony Malaby, bassist Sean Conly and drummer Tom Rainey. At every turn on Helleborus, the ensemble plays with gusto, coherence and license, heeding the framework without ever sounding hemmed in.

  — NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service

  Fornalha

  Norberto Lobo

  three:four

  The year’s final days, when the record-company mills shut down and new-release lists are eclipsed by digital surprises or piracy, it’s a good time for critics to run a dragnet for what they missed. Fornalha, a new record by Portuguese guitarist Norberto Lobo, released in November by small Swiss label three:four, is worth a late pass.

  Especially since the early 1960s, acoustic guitarists have been wielding their instruments like superpowers — not only as shortcuts to excitement or introspection but as keys to four millenniums of sound. The guitar — through what it can and can’t do, the variety of ways it can be played or altered, and its permutations among cultures — is a particularly good filter for the biggest release list of all: the history of musical expression. In the words of guitarist Jack Rose, who really understood the concept, “it’s a limited instrument and a limitless instrument at the same time.” With modes, slides, drones, bows, fingers, picks, a guitarist can tell a lot of the story of the world.

  Lobo, a guitarist in his early 30s who is full of talent and curiosity, seems ready to tell that story but not in any organized way. Fornalha (“furnace” in Portuguese) — available on CD, LP or as a digital download from wearethreefour.bandcamp.com — is not a pedantic record or a virtuosic one; Lobo is not here to teach you the virtues of cultural fusion or show you how clean and powerful a fingerpicker he is. (Anyway, sometimes it’s his fretting hand that’s more impressive than his picking one.) He’s following his instincts and is not afraid to lose you along the way. Some of his earlier records, like Fala Mansa and Mel Azul, have been clearer and easier to digest, more folky or straightforwardly beautiful; Mogul de Jade, with drummer Joao Lobo, declared its identity in another way, through scratchiness and free improvisation. Fornalha is somewhere in the murky middle.

  Norberto Lobo’s pieces, instrumental except for a bit of wordless singing, seem to move through country blues, Tin Pan Alley ballads, experimental drones and minimalism. More specifically, his music can suggest John Fahey, Steve Reich, Isaac Albeniz or the kinds of traditional pieces played on relatives of the lute — the ngoni from West Africa or the dombra from Central Asia. He uses digital echo and delay and looping in a rudimentary way, creating fraught clouds of sound rather than being clever. His technique does come through when he wants it to, but what’s more impressive is how he encourages you to get lost while experiencing this record.

  Fran is the album’s keeper, the song you might play for others in a blindfold test or to defeat a listener’s expectations. (It keeps defeating mine.) But the album is brave enough to open and close with long, patient pieces made for the most part by playing the guitar with a bow, scratchily, repeating chord cycles until a secondary idea emerges or a cumulative truth is squeezed out

  — BEN RATLIFF, NY Times News Service
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