Weekly Music Roundup: Algiers, Myrkur, and Eminem

Week of Jan. 20: This week, new songs from Eminem and Algiers tackle modern problems; a new song from Lankum looks back at an old one.

Eminem’s Surprise LP Has A Lot On Its Mind

Music fans woke up on Friday to find that Eminem had dropped a new album overnight. Music To Be Murdered By, released without warning, borrows its title and the idea for the cover art from the famed film director Alfred Hitchcock, who made a tongue-in-cheek album of mysterious, murderous tales in the 1950s, and who is sampled on the new release. Almost as soon as the album came out, listeners and critics began wondering if Eminem too was being ironic or darkly funny – or whether he had something serious to say. The album opens with what sounds like a scene from Hitchcock - a woman being killed and then buried; and the second song, “Unaccommodating,” has a moment where the rapper says “I'm contemplating yelling 'Bombs away' on the game like I'm outside of an Ariana Grande concert” – a line that some interpreted as making light of the bombing at Grande’s Manchester, England concert in 2017, since it comes in a verse where Eminem is in full-on boast mode about his impact on the music scene. This is of course par for the course for Eminem – pushing right up to the borders of good taste and then blowing right by. But the single and video he released, called “Darkness,” has a sting in the tail: for the first couple of minutes it seems to be Eminem doing what he’s done for so long, picking at the scabs of insecurity, substance abuse, and the need for (and possibly hatred of) the spotlight. The music is subdued and melancholy; a line from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” is sung (“Hello darkness my old friend…”). Musicians often talk about “killing” onstage, and that seems to be what he’s talking about, but as the song nears its end, it becomes obvious that this is no troubled musician waiting to go onstage, but something altogether darker and more horrifying. The video makes it clear that the song is about gun control, and asks as the song fades, “When will this end?” It then answers, “When enough people care.”

Drive-By Truckers Also Tackle Gun Violence On New Single

It’s not just Eminem who has gun control on his mind or in his music this past week. The Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers – who hit some high notes on their 2016 album American Band, a volatile, emotionally honest, often withering look at the state of race and politics in America - are about to release their followup record, The Unraveling. As the band’s co-leader Patterson Hood notes in their press release, “If the last one was a warning shot hinting at a coming storm, this one was written in the wreckage and aftermath.” The new single they’ve released is called “Thoughts And Prayers,” a phrase that has come to symbolize the platitudes and empty rhetoric of our leaders that inevitably follows mass shootings. The song’s video has shots of rallies to stop gun violence and one placard reads “if thoughts and prayers worked, you wouldn’t be in office.” (Donald Trump’s visage also appears, in case that wasn’t clear enough.) That almost reads like one of Hood’s better lyrics; in “Thoughts And Prayers” his writing may sometimes be a little too plainspoken or on the nose. But the song has the rolling country-rock beat that has driven many of the band’s best songs, and it’s definitely worth acknowledging a band that is not afraid to call out what’s wrong – especially when it’s a band that plays in a style not known for its progressivism. 

The Unraveling comes out on January 31. Drive-By Truckers play Webster Hall on February 21.

Algiers Isn’t Speaking Truth To Power; They’re Shouting It, Gospel-style

The London/Atlanta band called Algiers makes churning, electrifying gospel-inflected rock, with singer Franklin James Fisher leading his congregation in songs that take on social injustice, racism, and government corruption. The band’s new album is called There Is No Year, and among the hard-hitting tracks is this one, called “Dispossession.” Fisher’s lyrics have an almost apocalyptic ring to them (“run away from your America/While it burns in the streets”), and at one point, seem to reference Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “I have been to the mountaintop” speech. (“I been here, standing on top of the mountain…”) But the view is clouded – freedom is coming, Fisher promises, but later he sings that “dispossession is coming for you” too. 

Algiers plays a Soundcheck session in our studio on Wednesday, January 22, and then a full set at Rough Trade that night.  

Ireland’s Lankum Releases Live Version of “Hunting The Wren”

Lankum was, for me, the discovery of 2019. This Irish quartet plays up all that is droney and dark in the old folk music, and they add a few original songs that sound like they’ve been around for centuries. Treating these songs like some kind of post-rock or ambient music gives them a haunting quality, and the band has just released a live video version of “Hunting The Wren” from their recent sold-out show at Vicar St in Dublin, where you can see the audience watching as if spellbound. The song is a Lankum original, but its roots are deep and old: the wren is the subject of many legends (most of them unflattering) in European folk tales, and in the British Isles especially the birds have traditionally been hunted on St. Stephen’s Day (December 26). On this song, Radie Peat takes the lead, singing in a weathered voice while playing the Indian harmonium, but the lads all sing too (listen to their chilling version of “The Old Main Drag” by The Pogues, sadly not on any of their records). Three guest musicians, including songwriter/keyboardist Adrian Crowley, help maintain the doom-laden trudge and the sense of mystery that makes the song so compelling. As for the video, there’s an unfortunate intrusion of a ticket-taker’s voice about two minutes in, but the sight of the half-drunk pints of Guinness on the stage floor almost makes up for it. And of course there’s always the studio version, from the band’s brilliant 2019 album The Livelong Day.

Lankum plays at the Mercury Lounge on March 4, and will play a Soundcheck session in our studio that afternoon. 

Myrkur Digs Into Danish Folk Music For Her New LP

Since 2014, the Danish singer Amalie Bruun has been pursuing an unlikely combination of interests: using the name Myrkur (Icelandic for “darkness”) she combined the sounds of black metal with echoes of classical choral music and Scandinavian folk. Now a mother for the first time, Bruun has – for the moment at least – set aside the tremolo electric guitars and blast-beat drumming, which would definitely wake the baby, and has taken a deep dive into the world of traditional folk song. Her forthcoming album, called Folkesange (you don’t need me to translate that, do you?), includes arrangements of old songs from both Scandinavia and the British Isles (she does a version of “House Carpenter,” also known as “The Demon Lover,” which is quite lovely). But the first single she’s released, “Ella,” is an original song written as a new entry to the folk canon. The use of only acoustic instruments (including the Swedish keyed fiddle or nyckelharpa, the mandola, lyre, piano and drums) has not blunted Bruun’s sense of drama: “Ella” has the steady, almost ominous tread of her earlier, darker works, and her layers of voice have an almost eerie resonance. The song swells and subsides (she refers to it as “a rebirth-ritual in the sea”) before building to an almost orchestral-sounding finale. 

Thundercat Gets Funky in New Song “Black Qualls”

Thundercat (born Stephen Lee Bruner) first made his reputation as a virtuoso bass player, and began releasing albums that blended the sounds of funk, jazz, and R&B in the last decade. His work on Kendrick Lamar’s hip hop classic To Pimp A Butterfly made him into an unexpected star, and he and his close friend and collaborator Flying Lotus have been doing a fair amount of soundtrack music lately. Thundercat is preparing to release his fourth solo album, called It Is What It Is, in the spring, and he’s just issued the first single. “Black Qualls” is a cross-generational collaboration, with Steve Arrington from the 1970s funk band Slave, and Steve Lacy of the recent neo-soul/R&B group The Internet. And when the album comes out, Childish Gambino will have made a contribution to this track as well. For now, the song is, unsurprisingly, anchored by a funky bass groove, while the voices and keyboards seem to wander freely. In the chorus, though, those voices settle into some silky harmonies that eventually bring the song to a soulful conclusion. 

The Melancholy Magic of Sqürl’s New Single

Sqürl is the duo of Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan – both far better known in the world of independent cinema, Jarmusch of course as an iconic director and Logan as a producer who’s worked on the last several Jarmusch films. But both are musicians, and as Sqürl they’ve scored not only much of Jarmusch’s recent work but also four of the early silent films of Man Ray. (That was done specifically for our annual New Sounds Live/Silent Film series at Brookfield Place. This year’s series runs from Wednesday to Friday, Jan. 22-24.) Now they’re about to release an album called Some Music for Robby Müller, dedicated to the late Dutch cinematographer who gave Wim Wenders’ movie Paris, Texas its memorable look and also worked with Jarmusch on five of his movies, including Down By Law. The new single, “Magic Hour,” is named for those brief moments at the very beginning or end of the day when the light is mysterious and fragile – moments that Müller apparently loved to film in. The music features some poignant guitar playing by Jarmusch over Logan’s hovering electronics; the tone of the guitar evokes 60s surf-rock, but the mood of the song suggests a lonely evening on the dunes after all the surfers and party people have left. 

Some Music for Robby Müller comes out on January 31.