Week of Oct. 5: This week, Billie Eilish’s James Bond song, Emel’s Nirvana cover, and King Creosote’s Toy Camel. Plus, new music by Las Palabras and Bartees Strange.
Billie Eilish Releases Her James Bond Theme Song
No Time To Die, the 25th James Bond film, won’t be out in theaters until April 2021, but the hotly-anticipated theme song by Billie Eilish is out now. “No Time To Die” has all the signifiers of a Bond theme – the twangy electric guitar (played here by Johnny Marr of The Smiths), the steadily-growing orchestration (by Hollywood favorite Hans Zimmer), and, just for a moment at the end, the big “money note” sung by a pop star of the first order. But this is still a Billie EIlish song, somehow. Produced as usual by her brother FINNEAS, her Bond song mostly stays true to the husky, intimate vocal style that she has made her own. That might not have played so well back in the Sean Connery days, when Bond was essentially a superhero who didn’t wear tights. But the subtlety and restraint of Eilish’s music seems to suit Daniel Craig’s Bond, who is more complex and brooding.
The video offers the usual improbable chases and stunts from the forthcoming film, plus a surprisingly styled Eilish herself at a great old vintage microphone.
Tunisian Singer Emel Covers Nirvana
Although she only uses her first name professionally these days, Emel Mathlouthi gained international fame when her song “Kelmti Horra (My Word Is Free)” became the anthem of the Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa in 2011. She is now based here in NY, but this spring she was visiting her family in Tunis when the pandemic struck, leaving her in lockdown there. Armed only with a guitar, a laptop, and a mic, she decided to make not one, but two albums: The Tunis Diaries begins with “Day,” a stripped down reworking of songs from her past records, and concludes with “Night,” a collection of covers. The whole set comes out on October 23, but she’s just released an eerie, haunted version of Nirvana’s “Something In The Way.” Even without the electric and electronic sounds that made her last album, Everywhere We Looked Was Burning, so dark and edgy and compelling, Emel finds a way to probe Kurt Cobain’s gloomy lyrics – mostly in the original English but with some Arabic towards the end. She uses plaintive harmony vocals and recorded bird songs to great effect as well.
An Egyptian Toy Camel Inspires King Creosote’s New Song
King Creosote is the work of the Scottish singer/songwriter Kenny Anderson, whose career has been an estimable journey in making music that is both independent and community-facing. (One of his many albums is a performance-only collection, not for recording.) But we haven’t heard anything from him since 2016 – until today. This morning KC released two singles: a lovely, and reasonably typical, ballad called “Walter de la Nightmare,” and this headlong rush of energetic and possibly nonsensical pop called “Susie Mullen.” To me it sounds like a sonic cousin to Brian Eno’s song “King’s Lead Hat,” a rapid-fire patter song set to a relentless electronic beat. But Anderson himself reveals that the inspiration was a toy camel he bought in Egypt many years ago, which, when you press its belly, plays an Arabic nursery rhyme. And that explains the catchy sample that opens the song and recurs several times thereafter.
Emmy The Great Dips Into Chinese Mythology for “Chang-E”
In 2018 singer/songwriter Emma-Lee Moss, who records as Emmy The Great, moved from New York, where she had lived for several years, back to her birth city of Hong Kong. The last thing she did in Brooklyn before leaving was to record her next album, called April / 月音.
In Hong Kong, she became a mother, and watched as Hong Kong’s special status in China was steadily eroded. Now she is finally releasing that record, and it includes this new single, “Chang-E.” Chang-E is a figure out of Chinese legend: the wife of a tyrant who sacrifices herself to spare the people from an eternity ruled by her husband and who ascends to the moon. The lyrics use lunar imagery and repeatedly yearn for the moment “when we achiece weightlessness.” It’s a slow-burning ballad that adds… well, weight, as the arrangement steadily builds. video mixes an animated telling of the tale of Chang-E with Emmy’s own personal footage.
A Song About The “Williamsburg of Mexico City” From Las Palabras
Despite the plural title, Las Palabras (“words”) is really a solo project. Rafael Cohen is part of the dance-punk band !!! (usually pronounced chk-chk-chk), who have been a reliable source of infectious electronically-enhanced pop for most of this century. His music as Las Palabras is much more acoustic than !!!’s work, and much of it owes a sonic debt to the music of his native Mexico, or of Brazil in the 1970s. But as the current single “Condesa” shows, he still has a knack for catchy tunes and danceable rhythms. Condesa is the name of the hipster-infested neighborhood of Mexico City – sometimes compared to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where Cohen now lives. The song has a definite Brazilian feel, especially in the guitar part; as it goes along it picks up steam in the form of handclaps and increasingly layered vocals.
The album, otherwise untitled, by Las Palabras comes out on October 23.
Bartees Strange Releases Striking Debut LP
Singer Bartees Strange was the last musician to play live in our studio before we had to close up shop and move into our home studios/pillow forts. The reason we invited him was ostensibly because of his EP of covers of songs by The National, but in reality, I was taken by one of his own songs that came late in the EP, a tune called “Going Going.” Now, the environmental-activist-turned-songwriter has released his debut LP, called Live Forever, which is full of dark rock guitars, bright soulful vocals, and reflective acoustic moments. The song “Mustang” is about Strange’s hometown of Mustang, Oklahoma, a white suburban place where the Black son of an opera singer stood out, whether he wanted to or not. Some of the singing and much of the lyrics owe an obvious debt to hip hop, but the roaring guitars and the soaring synthesizers bring to mind indie rockers like TV On The Radio.