Weekly Music Roundup: Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) and elbow

Week of Oct. 14: This week, new music from London, Manchester, and wherever “In The Air Tonight” came from.

elbow’s Giants Of All Sizes Has A Big Sound

The UK band elbow have just released their eighth album, called Giants Of All Sizes, and it’s a record that lead singer Guy Garvey describes as “an angry, old blue lament which finds its salvation in family, friends, the band and new life.” I’ve always liked when elbow thinks big, which they do on the song “White Noise White Heat,” a title recalls the Velvet Underground’s “White Light, White Heat,” although the song has stronger echoes of David Bowie. It also has the big orchestral sound that elbow has used so effectively in the past. “White Noise White Heat” becomes an anthem of futility and regret, but it also offers the possibility of holding people to account. 

Afro B Brings The Next Wave of Afrobeats

Afro B was born in London to a family from Ivory Coast, and he makes music in the style known as Afrobeats. Don’t confuse Afrobeats – a recent blending of African pop, rap, and Caribbean music – with the earlier, funk-based Afrobeat style that came from Nigeria in the 70s and 80s. Afrobeats, especially in its UK form, is a rapidly rising sound and Afro B has just released his new album called Afrowave 3. A lot of the songs have the uptempo sound of Jamaican dancehall, but the track called “Melanin” is more of a ballad, riding atop a gently effervescent beat. Melanin is the pigment that causes skin to darken, and it’s an unusual word to form the basis of a chorus, but Afro B manages to make it work in this lyrical celebration of dark skin.    

Lucy Dacus Covers “In The Air Tonight” for Halloween

At various points this year, singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus has been releasing an idiosyncratic series of holiday songs. For Halloween, she’s decided to remake Phil Collins’ deathless classic “In The Air Tonight.” Actually, “remake” might be too strong a word – Dacus’s cover is very close to the original, and when she first starts singing, her vocals are strikingly similar to Collins’s. But the underlying beat is different, and she doubles down on the eerie wisps of sound and dark mood that made this one of the strangest pop hits ever. Handling the guitar chores, she conjures up distant thunder and ominous drones nesting way in the background; you may not even hear them unless you’re listening with headphones.  

Dacus is releasing all of her holiday songs on an EP called simply 2019.  It comes out on November 8.

Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange) Releases First Album of Classical Works

Working under the name Blood Orange (and before that as Lightspeed Champion), Devonté Hynes has had a successful career as a kind of arty R&B singer, songwriter, and producer. But he studied cello as a youngster, and never lost his love of classical music. Now, he’s teamed up with the Grammy-winning, Chicago-based group Third Coast Percussion, on a new album called Fields. Much of the music was written for a dance piece by choreographer Emma Portner. Some of it is ethereal and blurry (Third Coast are adept at making almost electronic sounds with their extensive arsenal of percussion), and some of it shows the influence of the so-called Minimalists. Dev Hynes himself has referred to Philip Glass as an inspiration but this piece, called “Perfectly Voiceless,” owes a clear debt to Steve Reich and his career-long obsession with mallet instruments (vibes, marimba). But this isn’t an imitation – about halfway through, you hear a melody that could’ve been (and may yet be) from one of Hynes’ own pop songs. 

I suspect you’ll be hearing this music in the background or in between segments of various NYPR shows – two different producers just stopped by my office while I was playing this track, wanting to know who it was. Which reminds me, look for this album under Third Coast Percussion’s name, not Blood Orange. 

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “In Good Faith” Celebrates An Old American Musical Tradition

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy is the name that singer/songwriter Will Oldham has mostly used since 1998. Earlier this year, he released a folk/classical collaboration with the Chicago new music ensemble Eighth Blackbird and the electric guitarist/composer Bryce Dessner. Now he’s preparing to release a new solo album called I Made A Place.  The single “In Good Faith” features some wistful, lulling vocals by Oldham and Joan Shelley, while Nathan Salsburg adds guitar. The song itself seems to be about the persistence of hope and belief in the face of obstacles, but the video is more explicitly about one old American tradition, namely, shape-note singing. Developed first in New England and then made popular in the South in the early 1800s, shape-note hymns have musical notes in different shapes (triangle, circle, square) to make it easy for anyone to learn to sing them. Sometimes known as Sacred Harp singing (after a famous collection of shape-note hymns), this style of open-throated, rough-hewn choral singing is distinctly American, and now exists in little pockets throughout the country. The video, taken from a forthcoming documentary on the revival of shape-note singing, suggests how this music brings community to people divided by age, geography, etc.