Week of May 29: This week, songs for bird watchers, Brad Pitt watchers, and Van Morrison fans
Swet Shop Boys Celebrate Cultural Pride, Partying, and, uh, Birdwatching
Riz MC and Heems are both of South Asian descent – Riz Ahmed, the British actor and rapper, is from a Pakistani family, and Himanshu Suri, from Queens, comes from a Punjabi-Indian family. We first met Heems when he was part of the group Das Racist, who had a kind of novelty hit with their song “Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell” back in 2009. Now, he and Riz MC and the producer Redinho have been working as the Swet Shop Boys, and they’ve just released an EP called Sufi La, which includes a song called “Birding” that is, I kid you not, about birdwatching. It’s fun and funny and manages to be a little salacious at one point, and if you’re not careful you just might learn something as the song devolves into a clever take on the old “list song” tradition. But for me, the standout track is “Need Moor,” driven by beats built up from classical Arab instrument sounds. It references Egypt but its consumer anxiety (“gotta little money but I think I need more”) is clearly universal.
The Latest Score from Nick Cave & Warren Ellis: War Machine
With the Brad Pitt feature War Machine now open in theaters, we’re getting a chance to hear the latest film score by Nick Cave and his longtime musical partner Warren Ellis. Cave’s own dark-hued songwriting and storytelling abilities have been chronicled here and elsewhere for years, and the soundtracks that he and Ellis have done bend towards the darkness as well. In War Machine, “we made a score that was both light and dark,” they insist in a press release. Not sure I’ve ever head Nick Cave do “light” but okay. It would certainly seem to fit the movie, which is a – well, dark comedy. The score also includes a few pieces by Roedelius, who was half of the important German minimalist/krautrock group Cluster, and one work by the wonderful Louisville chamber-rock band Rachel’s. Of the Cave/Ellis music, so far only the title track has been made available online; it begins as an ambient electronic wash of sound, but a martial drumbeat tries insistently but unsuccessfully to hijack the tune.
Dark and Chilly Pop From NRVS LVRS
First, the San Francisco band NRVS LVRS wants you to pronounce their name “nervous lovers” – though I stupidly guessed “nervous levers” first, before hitting on the even more ridiculous “nervous livers,” which I am here to tell you is a hard name to un-think. Anyway, the husband and wife team of Andrew Gomez (guitar) and Bevin Fernandez (vocals) have made no secret of their love of Massive Attack and Kate Bush (nor of their hatred of vowels), and their new single, “I Am Almost Perfectly Awake,” evokes both of those artists while still inhabiting their own sonic landscape. I’m particularly partial to the unexpected baritone sax at the end of the song, but there are lots of layers of sound to parse in this first track from the band’s next album. Electric Dread is due on June 30.
Too Sad For The Public – New Project Remakes Old Songs
For many years, the producer, composer, and arranger Dick Connette has been creating music built on a wide variety of American traditions, from Cajun to blues to children’s rhymes. Working with the singer Sonya Cohen – daughter of John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers and niece of Pete Seeger – he released several albums of these songs under the name Last Forever. But Sonya passed away at age 50 in 2015. Since then, Connette has been working with a varied group of singers and musicians (including Suzzy Roche, Gabriel Kahane and others) on a project called Too Sad For The Public. The first album, called Vol. 1, Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade, is out on June 16. Here, he casts an even wider musical net; many of the songs are still based on traditional music, but one is built on the sounds of Washington DC Go Go music (more on that next week). This track, called “Young Loves To Love,” will immediately be familiar to fans of Van Morrison. With lead vocals by Ana Egge, it’s a medley of Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Sweet Thing,” featuring Jay Berliner on guitar (who played on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks album). More than a cover, though, it’s a typically personal take on these familiar songs, making them into something new and strange.
Too Sad For The Public will spread the joy in a live setting this Friday, June 2, at Roulette.
Psymon Spine’s New Single Puts The Psych Back In Psych-Pop
Brooklyn-based psych-pop band Psymon Spine and has just released a new single, called “Lines and Lines and Lines End.” The opening seconds prove to be a bit of a fake-out, as it sounds like we’re being set up for some kind of Latin-tinged electro-cumbia thing, but instead we get a rush of electric guitars and a song that wouldn’t have been out of place on the first Strokes album. There is a brief interlude that calls back to the opening, but by song’s end we’ve moved into a trippy, enigmatic place where the band sounds like it’s ready to raise the roof, despite repeating the line “don’t let me die/under these electric lights.” Psymon Spine will release its full length debut, called You Are Coming To My Birthday, on June 9; and is playing at Baby’s All Right on June 10, and the Knitting Factory on June 30.