This week, Billie Eilish gets quiet, Indie pop band of Montreal gets funky, and Canadian-Grenadian banjo songwriter Kaia Kater gets nostalgic. Plus, emerging punk rap artist Wu-Lu; saxophone innovator Colin Stetson; and Sicilian-Norwegian-South American minimalists La Comitiva.
Billie Eilish’s New LP Is Quietly – Very Quietly - Daring
Billie Eilish’s third record is called Hit Me Hard And Soft, and it continues her evolution from goth psychoanalyst to pop balladeer, something we’ve heard in recent singles like “What Was I Made For,” her award-hogging song from the film Barbie. Most of this new record is decidedly soft, with only a few nods to the uptempo dance music that dominates the singles charts – and that seems to be on purpose, as Eilish has asked her fans to listen to the whole, relatively restrained 10 track album as a single entity. Those that do will find when they get to “Blue,” the closing track, that it serves as both a summary – bringing back lyrics from earlier songs – and a statement of intent in the way it appears to offer a standard pop song format, only to break it halfway through.
of Montreal Returns With Lady On The Cusp
The band of Montreal (no capital “O” in “of,” thank you) has long been associated with the Athens, GA rock scene, although bandleader Kevin Barnes has given the impression of being an alien invader whose knowledge of Earth comes from looking at the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album cover. Psychedelic, funky, and surreal, of Montreal albums have bent and broken both gender and genre, and that continues with the new release, Lady On The Cusp. “Soporific Cell” is a typically unruly track: it begins with a 70s pop/R&B feel, takes a brief detour or two into outer space (Barnes’s lyrics mention a “replicant sacrifice”), and finally settles into a catchy funk groove reminiscent of Hot Chocolate’s hit “You Sexy Thing.”
Kaia Kater And Allison Russell’s Tribute To Their Home Town: Montreal
Kaia Kater grew up in Montreal in a Grenadian-Canadian family, but her earliest recordings were full of the sounds of folk music, and specifically the banjo tradition of Appalachian music, which she studied in West Virginia. Her music often touches on social issues, and her latest album, Strange Medicine, offers fascinating stories from history (the first Black woman to be burned as a witch in Salem, a failed uprising against British colonists in Grenada) and character studies of women freeing themselves from expectations or outright abuse. But this track, “In Montreal,” is simply a tribute to the city that brought us, as Kater says, “Leonard Cohen, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and all the other incredible songwriters of Montreal." The track was done with singer, clarinetist, and songwriter Allison Russell, whose own story of survival and joy feels like one of Kater’s new songs.
London’s Wu-Lu Offers An Alternative Prayer
“Daylight Song” is the lead single from Wu-Lu’s new EP, Learning To Swim On Empty. The South Londoner is hard to place, stylistically – the son of a reggae-playing father and a mother who danced for the Alvin Ailey company, he has grown up with rock, grime, jazz, and dub, and while you can hear echoes of those styles in his songs, the tracks themselves are more elusive. This one has an indie-rock vibe over a hip hop-inflected beat, but the most striking thing about it is the sketchy, unsettling storytelling – suggesting loss, but also building to a simple, paraphrased prayer (“Suffer me to come to thee”) that suggests light at the end of a long darkness. The song’s video definitely does not clarify the narrative – if anything, its inventive use of normal speed and slo-mo imagery adds a trippy, and perhaps slightly creepy touch.
Colin Stetson Continues To Redefine The Word “Solo”
About a dozen years ago, I was standing at the side of the stage at Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan, watching Colin Stetson do his thing. Colin had already appeared in our studio a couple of times, but it was still amazing to watch one guy with one sax create entire worlds of sound, without loops or backing tracks or anything other than a bunch of microphones affixed to various parts of his horn, and his throat. Suddenly I felt a grip on my elbow. “Who IS that?” asked Lou Reed. I told him, that’s Colin Stetson, used to play with Arcade Fire, now does these astonishing solo sets. “Can you introduce me,” he said. It wasn’t really a question – of course I was going to introduce him, and Colin would soon add Lou Reed to the long list of collaborators he’s had over the years. But if you have never seen or heard him solo, be prepared to not believe he is solo. This is no parlour trick – Stetson’s music is emotionally-charged, with the thunder of black metal and the vulnerability of New Age. His latest single is “The love it took to leave you,” which will also be the title of his next LP, due on September 13. Here he uses an alto rather than his usual bass sax, creating a celestial chorus sound and then adding an ominous drone, a pulsing rhythm, and skirls and filigrees of sound – again, without anything other than his horn and a bunch of mics, carefully placed to capture the hums, the key clicks and the other sounds that make up this genuine one man band.
South American Music, In English, From Norway and Italy
La Comitiva is a band from Sicily led by the Norwegian musician Erlend Øye and featuring what was essentially his backing band for a South American tour in 2018. (Comitiva is also a somewhat outdated Italian word for a group of friends, like a gang or a posse.) Øye sings in Italian or English, but the music clearly draws on Latin American rhythms and sounds. Øye’s own instrument is the ukulele, and his bandmates play the similarly small Portuguese instrument known as cavaquinho, and acoustic guitars. Together they evoke the traditional string instruments of the Andes or Brazil. This song, “For The Time Being,” may also have a hint of Minimalism in the repeating riffs that are the building blocks of the track.