Interventions, Horse Lords, Northern Spy, Cash Money Records
The music of Horse Lords can partly be explained as a result of musical information leveling itself out over the last 20 years, through scholarship and Internet power, so that nothing is much less accessible than anything else.
In a certain light, on Interventions, the Baltimore quartet’s invigorating third album, this is an instrumental dance band — guitar, bass, drums, alto saxophone — with a lining of post-punk energy. But it’s also borrowing sounds and techniques from Mauritanian guitar music, free jazz, classical minimalism and other places. On a track called Intervention I, there’s a passage of electronic beeps that sound like pure tones from audiology tests.
Horse Lords is also way into hocketing, where the individual notes of a continuous melody are played in quick sequence by different instruments. (Historically, it’s either a widespread or a specialized interest. You hear it in medieval music, in various sub-Saharan African traditions, in some of Wynton Marsalis’ ambitious jazz compositions and in Dirty Projectors records.) In general, musicians are individually playing only part of a rhythmic cycle or a melodic line. On Interventions, fast, repeated riffs become collaborative acts, over drones and strong skeletal grooves that stress the upbeat, and the whole thing is held together by concentration, timing and willpower.
It’s that tensile feeling of daring — can they pull this off? — that lifts Interventions above what it might look like on paper, a hypothetical combination of traditions or styles.
This music feels very live, shivering with energy. Its best tracks run from five to nine minutes — long enough to feel gradual developments — and are full of imprecisions. Sometimes tempos speed up or slow down slightly. Owen Gardner, the guitarist, has altered the frets on his guitar (and on Max Eilbacher’s bass) to accommodate the ancient just-intonation tuning system; the result is some warp and dissonance in his hammered, fast-picking patterns. Andrew Bernstein, the saxophonist, uses circular breathing to create continuous tones and patterns; in Encounter II/Intervention II, recorded in a deep-echo space with the microphone far away from the horn, he works harmonics, key-clicking and weird timbres into a sustained improvisation, which leads without pause into the guitar tone that begins “Time Slip.”
Underneath all this is a kind of dance guarantee: Eilbacher and the drummer Sam Haberman holding it down, playing, for lack of a better word, funk.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Adam O’Farrill, Stranger Days, Sunnyside
Expectations can weigh heavily on any emerging musician in jazz, where influence and lineage are often cast in defining terms. Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill is 21 and probably well acquainted with this pressure as a son of Arturo O’Farrill, the Cuban pianist, composer-arranger and torch-bearing bandleader of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra.
One striking thing about Stranger Days, the younger O’Farrill’s debut as a leader, is how self-secure and disencumbered it sounds. Marshaling a sharp band of his peers — Chad Lefkowitz-Brown on tenor saxophone; Walter Stinson on bass; and Zack O’Farrill, his older brother, on drums — O’Farrill establishes both a firm identity and a willful urge to stretch and adapt.
If you’ve been keeping tabs on the jazz vanguard in recent years, there’s a good chance you saw this coming. You might have noted a couple of new-breed Latin-jazz albums by the O’Farrill Brothers Band, or taken heed of O’Farrill’s strong finish at the 2014 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Trumpet Competition. You could have heard him backing the alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa on Bird Calls (Act), one of the most acclaimed jazz releases last year.
Stranger Days operates in a contemporary post-bop mode, elastic and alert. More than a showcase for impressively fluent and focused trumpet playing, it’s a proper band album, with each member sworn to the cause. O’Farrill’s compositions cover a range of moods, from swinging pugnacity (Lower Brooklyn Botanical Union) to prowling elegy (Survival Instincts). A track called Why She Loves opens with a saxophone prologue in free tempo, slips into a melody played as if on tiptoe and opens up to a trumpet solo with no visible horizon.
O’Farrill has drawn some inspiration here from literature and film: The Stranger, a 10-minute track full of creeping intrigue, is his nod to Camus. But the music doesn’t feel pedantic or high-concept. At times it can evoke the recent precedent of bands led by trumpeters Dave Douglas or Ambrose Akinmusire, but in a way that feels natural and untroubled.
Along similar lines, O’Farrill produced the album with his father, which implies something other than an act of rebellion. The track with the most insubordinate title, Forget Everything You’ve Learned at School, is one of two by Stinson. Still, this is a potent declaration of independence, as much as it is a glowing indication of promise.
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Drake, Views, Young Money Entertainment
Drake’s career has been built on collapsing walls, and One Dance, one of the early singles from his new album, Views, is a vivacious fulfillment of his promise as hip-hop’s great syncretic hope.
Rapped and sung, sprinkled with patois, made in collaboration with the Nigerian Afrobeats star Wizkid, and sampling from Kyla’s Do You Mind (a smash on Britain’s funky dance music scene in the late 2000s), One Dance is a transnational dance-floor lullaby, one of Drake’s breeziest and most accessible songs, and also one of his savviest.
But One Dance, gentle as it is, is also about fear. “Streets not safe/but I never run away,” he sings, in a dulcet voice.
“I pray to make it back in one piece/I pray, I pray/that’s why I need one dance,” he continues, connecting his urge to live with his urge to move.
It is perhaps the purest distillation of the current state of Drake: globally ambitious, ruthlessly effective, skeptical and wary. A pop star with rap star anxieties. An emperor wondering about the state of his clothes.
Views — Drake’s fourth solo album, not counting umpteen mixtapes and other ephemera — finds him a conqueror between territories: fending off attacks from below, maintaining his grip on turf he controls and wondering what might be next.
Crucially, it’s not the acidic Drake that’s taken center stage in the last year and a half, on the mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and his collaborative album with Future What a Time to Be Alive. Those releases showed Drake at his most indignant, a left-field turn from the emotional music he’d built his reputation on.
Views shows how Drake’s original sound has become a genre unto itself — not just as a template for others but also for Drake himself. The framework pioneered by him and his right-hand producer, 40 — tender, lush, soothing melodies about romantic vulnerability — can be used for songs about heartbreak, but also for songs about competitive stress, mistrust and fear.
Not that he’s abandoned one-sided relationship talks. The most vivid one here is the fretful and class-concerned Childs Play:
You wildin’, you super childish, you go to CVS forKotex in my Bugatti, I took the key and tried to hide it so you can’t drive it, and put on mileage Then you find it, awkward silence
On U With Me?, which recalls his excellent Paris Morton Music 2, Drake looks for love on his phone: “I group DM my exes/I tell ‘em they belong to me, that goes on for forever”; “three dots, you thinking of a reaction still.”
But love is, increasingly, about money, too. “Sell my secrets and get top dollar/Sell my secrets for a Range Rover,” he says on Redemption, then continues: “Who’s gonna save me when I need saving?/Since Take Care, I’ve been caretaking.”
— JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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