Weekly Music Roundup: The Black Keys, Kelly Hunt, and Lagartijeando

Week of May 20: This week, The Black Keys return, eerie folk from Kelly Hunt, and South American folktronica by Lagartijeando.

Who Will Save The Black Keys?  Their Therapist?  Old Hippies?  Young Hippies? 

The Black Keys make good old-fashioned blues-stomping rock, with electric guitar (Dan Auerbach) and drums (Patrick Carney). Or at least, that’s what they do when they get together. But it’s been 5 years since the last Black Keys sighting, as the two musicians have done solo projects, TV scores, and produced scores of other albums. On June 28, The Black Keys will release their new album, called Let’s Rock, which, let’s face it, could just as well be the title of all their other albums. And their latest single is “Go,” a typically fun, straightahead bit of rock that comes with a hilarious video, in which Dan and Pat haven’t spoken in five years and are forced into progressively more therapeutic-slash-sketchy situations to rectify the situation. Watch what ultimately gets the band back together (signified by a simple fist bump) to see their trenchant take on the current state of the music biz. 

Australia’s RVBY MY DEAR Is Now Brooklyn’s – And It Matters

RVBY MY DEAR is almost the name of a great song by jazz legend Thelonius Monk (his was “Ruby My Dear”), and is actually the name of a band fronted by Gabbi Coenen. She’s originally from Perth, in Western Australia, but moved to New York in 2012 to study at the New School’s jazz voice program. However, her own songs owe much more to moody British trip hop and the jangly guitars of turn-of-the-century indie rock. Her debut full-length, Waiting, came out on Friday, and as Coenen writes, “a lot of the lyrics reference circles, cycles, mazes, repetition.” The reason? She wrote many of those lyrics in 2015 during an agonizing, extended wait for a visa renewal. Obviously that all worked out in the end, since she’s still here in Brooklyn, but that experience was fodder for an album full of songs about being stuck, and not knowing the way forward. “Cycles” starts with some lo-fi keyboard sounds (and lyrics that refer to spinning aimlessly) but quickly gains rhythmic momentum and then, nearly halfway through the song, blooms into a headlong rush of guitars, with Coenen’s voice implacably floating over the top.

RVBY MY DEAR plays at Bowery Electric on Thursday, May 23. 

Argentine Producer Lagartijeando Goes To Bolivia and Goes Acoustic (Mostly)

Lagartijeando (real name Mati Zundel) is one of a handful of South American producers weaving traditional Andean instrumental sounds into their electronic dance music. He’s not as well known as the scene’s godfather, his Argentine colleague Chancha Via Circuito, or Ecuador’s Nicola Cruz, but his new album Jallalla may earn him some new followers. Made after a series of trips to Bolivia, it features the charango, the small mandolin-like instrument traditionally made from an armadillo shell. On this song, called “La Frontera,” Lagartijeando also uses an Andean flute and percussion, all over a fairly subtle bit of programmed beat-making. The singer Minük (aka Alejandra Ortiz) offers a melody that evokes the Bolivian altiplano, or highlands, by repeatedly climbing up and down. The album becomes more clearly electronic as it goes along, and Chancha Via Circuito makes a guest appearance on one track, but Lagartijeando’s folk-tronic style is good company throughout. 

Jallalla comes out on June 7.

 A Lost Electronic Music Work By The Pioneering Suzanne Ciani

The early history of electronic music is full of Pierres and Bobs and Johns, but women played a vital role in the development of the form too. Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, and Laurie Spiegel are just a few of the women who made early, important contributions to electronic music. Suzanne Ciani belongs on that list as well. In the 1970's, she created the sounds of a Coke bottle cap popping off and the soda fizzing out – an iconic bit of sound design and just one of a number of behind the scenes projects in her long career. In the 80's she released a bunch of albums of New Age electronic music that saw her nominated for five Grammys. But now she is preparing to release a previously unheard collection of early works, from 1969, played on the Buchla synthesizer. Unlike Robert Moog’s synthesizers, Don Buchla’s did not use a piano-style keyboard; but composers who used it, including the trailblazing Morton Subotnick, loved it. Ciani used the Buchla in a setting of the “Elevation” poem from the Baudelaire collection “Flowers of Evil,” a 14 minute epic that features an unidentified French student reading the titular text and then a long electronic journey that predates and presages the type of sound made popular in the mid-70's by bands like Tangerine Dream.   

Haunted Folk Music From Kelly Hunt

With her minimalist, almost woody-sounding banjo, and her clear, almost operatic voice, Kelly Hunt has a striking and original sound. On Friday she released her album Even The Sparrow, and while the songs all seem to be her own, some of them – especially the title track – seem to draw from that deep well of what the critic and author Greil Marcus famously called the Old Weird America: a term he originally coined in talking about Bob Dylan’s basement tapes but which has come to signify the eerie or surreal side of American folk music. The song “Even The Sparrow” is lovely in a plaintive way; Steve Martin once joked that you can’t play a sad song on the banjo – Kelly Hunt begs to differ. Neither bright nor sprightly, her Depression-era instrument plows doggedly ahead, while a mournful fiddle provides sparse accompaniment. Her voice is certain and effortless, so that you actually have to pay attention to be impressed by it. Until the ending, when she floats a long, high note that might make you want to replay the song immediately.