Weekly Music Roundup: Balkan Taksim, Pharoahe Monch and th1rt3en, The Staves
Week of Jan. 25: This week, a premiere from Balkan Taksim, Billie Eilish & Rosalia’s brooding superstar duet, and hard-rockin’ music for the end times by Pharoahe Monch and th1rt3en.
PREMIERE: A Haunted Mix of Balkan Folk and Electronica From Balkan Taksim
Balkan Taksim is a duo from Romania that seamlessly marries the instruments and in some cases the folk songs of the Balkans with often psychedelic electronics. The band is preparing to release its debut LP this spring, but over the past two years they’ve been releasing singles and an EP, and today we premiere the new video for their single “Anadolka,” or “Anatolian girl.” Singer Sașa-Liviu Stoianovici plays traditional lutes like the tanbur and the saz (which is from Turkey, or Anatolia), and he stars in this eerie tale of memory and love; the band describes it as “a visual poem, in which the layers of time melt. In the end, the observer is the one who is observed.” The song itself is part of the Bosnian folk tradition known as sevdalinka – you’ll hear Stoianovici sing the word “sevdalinke” (“love songs”) a couple of times. His vocals, though, sound more like an incantation; meanwhile producer Alin Zăbrăuțeanu provides a trippy, almost ritualistic, groove. And what sounds at first like short gasps from a distorted guitar turn out in fact to be one of the traditional lutes, adding to the song’s floating, timeless quality.
Billie Eilish and Rosalía Collaborate On New Song
Singer Billie Eilish (motto: “just give me all the Grammys”) has joined forces with the Spanish superstar Rosalía on a brooding collaborative track called “Lo Vas A Olvidar” (“you will forget it”). Interestingly, it upends the expectations you’d have when two reliable pop hitmakers join forces: Eilish sings a bit in English, especially at the end, but most of the song is in Spanish and features the two pop phenoms weaving their breathy, husky vocals together over a twilit electronic soundscape. It sounds like a song that’s just waiting to explode into a dance rhythm, but it never does. Apparently the two began writing the track together almost two years ago, and Eilish has reported that it went through several changes along the way. This final version is part of the soundtrack for the new season of the HBO TV series Euphoria.
The Staves Release New Single, Announce Live London Stream
The Staves, the folk-rock trio of Emily, Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor, is about to release its first new album in six years on February 5. Good Woman sees the sisters musing on loss (their mother died since their previous album) and birth (Emily became a mom herself), and on the new single “Devotion,” the idea of being trapped by one’s own devotion to another. The song quickly establishes a steady beat, and supports the trio’s typically thrilling vocal harmonies with bits of piano and pedal steel guitar; but the song accumulates soaring layers of electronic keyboards that give it an almost anthemic sound by the end.
The Staves will be playing a career retrospective show on release day, February 5, streaming live from the London venue Lafayette.
th1rt3en Presents Music For The End Times
The group called th1rt3en features the Queens rapper Pharoahe Monch collaborating with drummer Daru Jones and guitarist Marcus Machado. Their album A Magnificent Day For An Exorcism is a dark, explosive response to troubled times, pairing Monch’s unflinching lyrics with a heavy, distorted rock sound world. (Black Sabbath is quoted at length in one track.) The veteran LA hip hop group Cypress Hill and UK’s Rag N Bone Man make cameo appearances, but the trio does most of the work itself, with Monch occasionally singing as well. Unlucky imagery abounds – thirteen and triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number thirteen) are invoked – but there are streaks of bone-dry wit and at the very end, in the track called “Kill Kill Kill,” we get an unexpected bit of relief. After Monch tells us, over a breakneck rhythm, that it’s “the end of days” and he’s “losing my mind,” the band subsides and is replaced by gentle waves of keyboards while the singer named Smithsonian, who provides the female voices in the chorus, takes over with a plaintive call for understanding.
A Buoyant New Single From serpentwithfeet
Brooklyn-based Josiah Wise records under the name serpentwithfeet, making experimental soul and R&B that has garnered a fair amount of critical acclaim. He’ll be releasing a new album, Deacon, on March 26, but today he dropped the lead single from the LP; it’s called “Fellowship,” and it pieces its intriguing rhythm together from lots of little bits of percussion and small, sampled sounds. The rest of the arrangement is fairly minimal for much of the song; serpentwithfeet lets his voice – layered to good effect in the chorus – do most of the heavy lifting. He sings about the simple but important pleasures of having, or being, a good friend, and in the end, some of those friends seem to join the fun, as the final minute builds to a rousing finale.
