Weekly Music Roundup: Jon Batiste, Troye Sivan, and The Womack Sisters

Troye Sivan Celebrates Women In New Single

The Australian singer and actor Troye Sivan has often featured gay themes in his songs and videos, but his new single, “She’s The Best,” is an ode to a woman.  The song’s verses are more spoken than sung, and might be reminiscent of Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side”; the chorus is just Sivan singing “that girl, that girl/she’s the best,”  as the music picks up a dancey pop-rock groove.  That sound returns at the end as “She’s The Best” concludes with chiming guitars and a chanted version of the song title that gives the song a celebratory, communal feel.  As usual with Sivan, you should watch the video to get the full story:  it becomes clear that, despite the presence of a radiant Nicole Kidman throughout, Sivan is celebrating not just a single woman but all women – gay, straight, cis or trans. 

The Womack Sisters Are Soul Music Royalty

The three Womack Sisters were practically born to sing. Their parents were a successful songwriting team and recorded their own albums as Womack & Womack. Their uncle is the late soul/R&B star Bobby Womack, and their grandfather was the legendary Sam Cooke. That’s some serious American music royalty, but the sisters, BG, Kucha, and Zeimani, had a peripatetic childhood, growing up almost everywhere but the USA. After moving here, they had to take work as Uber drivers to pay the rent, and that informs their single “Chauffeur,” a convincing piece of vintage soul with a glossy orchestral sheen. It’s from their new album, out today, simply called The Womack Sisters, produced by the same folks at Daptone Records who brought us the classic soul of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and so many other artists whose sound looks back to the pop music of a half century ago. That sound continues to find fans today: The Womack Sisters’ concerts at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right on September 30 and October 1 are already sold out.  

Jon Batiste Returns To The Classics, Sort Of

In his 2024 album Beethoven Blues, pianist Jon Batiste reinterpreted works by Beethoven through the lens of Black American music, especially jazz and blues. Now he does something similar with Black Mozart, an album that takes some of Mozart’s most familiar works – and to budding piano students and their long-suffering parents, too familiar works – and remakes them using varying amounts of blues, gospel and jazz. The whole album was essentially improvised in a day, and as with the Beethoven record, some of the most interesting music occurs when Batiste revisits a piece more than once. Beethoven’s “Für Elise” was a great example on the earlier LP; here it’s Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca,” also known as the Turkish March. Officially part of Mozart’s Piano Sonata #11, this work has become a favorite on its own and Batiste gives us an uptempo performance not so far away from Mozart’s original, but he also offers this track called “Alla Blue,” which slows the piece down and transforms it into a closing-time reverie at a New Orleans blues bar.  

But Wait, There’s More…

Batiste’s Mozart album was originally due to be released in June – the fact that it’s out today aligns it with TWO other tribute albums that the pluralistic pianist has put out: Monk Meditations and Monk Movements are two records that take the music of Thelonius Monk as a starting point. In some cases, Batiste does his own version of recognizable Monk originals – these simply have Monk’s titles (“Crepuscule with Nellie,” “In Walked Bud,” etc.). But many of these tracks, like the Mozart album, have Batiste’s own titles because they are essentially original works built on Monk’s memorable and often memorably weird melodies. Perhaps his most famous tune, “Round Midnight,” forms the basis of “Midnight Movement,” a kind of Minimalist-influenced, almost obsessive piece with a rippling pattern of high notes on the keyboard and Monk’s melody almost hidden at times in the piano’s lower register.  

 L’Rain Releases New LP, Fata Morgana

Brooklyn’s Taja Cheek has been recording as L’Rain for almost a decade now, and has a well-earned reputation for making a shapeshifting brand of experimental pop. Several of the singles from her new album, Fata Morgana, suggest a surreal blend of neo-soul, bedroom pop, and hip hop production. But in the live performances I’ve seen, her band, also called L’Rain, has shown a notable tendency to rock, and the song “soulless cycle” soon lands in that arena. It begins with an oscillating pattern and ethereal vocals, but then the drums kick (and pound and bash) their way in, and the electric guitar takes up the pattern, and suddenly we’re in a sonic terrain reminiscent of 90s shoegaze in its combination of softly sung vocals and bruising electric rock.