Weekly Music Roundup: Frank Turner, Tanya Tucker, and Vanessa Wagner
Week of July 8: This week, a spooky summer soundtrack from Bobby Krlic aka The Haxan Cloak, a celebration of women in history by Frank Turner, and the return of country outlaw Tanya Tucker.
Frank Turner’s New Song Celebrates Sister Rosetta Tharpe
The English folk-rocker Frank Turner will release his eighth album next month, called No Man’s Land. The album title refers to the fact that all of the songs on it tell the stories of fascinating women who are perhaps not as well-known as they should be. (If they’d been men, Turner suggests, they probably would be.) No Man’s Land is produced by Grammy winner Catherine Marks and features an all-female band (except for Frank, naturally), but the album’s feminism is actually a by-product of Turner’s interest in history. In collecting interesting stories that were not widely known, he found that women figured in many of them. Some are indeed obscure – a 17th century landlady who was burned as a witch, or a Western vaudeville star shot by an outlaw. But some may be familiar to music fans, like the 9th century Byzantine abbess Kassiani (or Kassia), whose music has been recorded by the Kronos Quartet and others; or the great guitarist and singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose blend of gospel, blues, and R&B had a profound impact on the first generation of rock’n’rollers. Turner’s first single is called “Sister Rosetta,” and it tells her story through a series of vignettes, each followed by the triumphant chorus where he sings, “Rosetta rolled her eyes when she played/she knew that strange things happen every day/and that the white boy hype would eventually fade/but the way that she played would remain.”
Rosetta Tharpe was belatedly inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year. No Man’s Land comes out on August 16.
Country Badass Tanya Tucker Celebrates A Life Of “Hard Luck”
Tanya Tucker’s career began in 1972 – when she was all of 13 years old. That’s when she released the song “Delta Dawn,” which became a country music crossover hit and inspired a #1 pop version by Helen Reddy that used virtually the same arrangement. Unlike many young stars, Tanya Tucker’s career continued to hum along as she grew up, with a series of country hits alternating with periods of tabloid-fodder behavior. While we often think of “outlaw country” as a male domain (Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, etc.), Tucker has been as outlaw as any of them. Now, she’s about to release her first album in 10 years, called While I’m Livin’. The album was produced by Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s son) and Brandi Carlile, who co-wrote most of the songs. The album also includes a couple of covers, and the first single is “Hard Luck,” originally by the country rock band Josefus and retaining its rock edge in this new recording. Jennings and Carlile co-star with Tucker in the video, an unapologetic, defiant, and almost celebratory tale about making bad choices and taking responsibility for them.
While I’m Livin’ comes out on August 23 via Fantasy Records.
Bobby Krlic’s Unsettling Music Spawned The New Movie Midsommar
Director Ari Aster made a splash with his horror movie Hereditary last year. Last week, he unveiled his followup film, Midsommar, set in rural Sweden at the height of summer and yet somehow full of darkness and dread. At least some of that dread might be the work of composer Bobby Krlic, who has made several records of cinematic, often disturbing electroacoustic music under the name The Haxan Cloak. (Krlic has also produced parts of Björk’s Vulnicura album and worked with Atticus Ross on a couple of earlier film scores.) Aster apparently listened to The Haxan Cloak while coming up with the idea for Midsommar and invited Krlic to begin working on the music even before he had shot a single scene. The pairing seems a natural – Krlic has referred to Swedish folk music in at least one track in the past, and “häxan” is the Swedish word for witch. And while his new soundtrack is mostly acoustic, and driven by strings, it is pretty clearly the work of someone who has worked with electronics and drones and noise. The full soundtrack came out on Friday, and the final piece, “Fire Temple,” builds slowly to a finale that tries mightily to sound grand but which slides into chaos and madness instead.
A Stunning New Video Features Pianist Vanessa Wagner In A Paris Airport
Vanessa Wagner’s latest album, Inland, is a terrific collection of piano solos by composers working in a minimalist or post-minimalist style: Philip Glass, Bryce Dessner, Meredith Monk, etc. Now, she’s teamed up with the French film crew La Blogothèque, who make live music videos in unusual spaces. The resulting video finds Wagner playing a piano in a deserted Paris-Orly Airport building. At least, it seems deserted at first. But as she plays Michael Nyman’s famous theme music to the film The Piano (the song is called “The Heart Asks Pleasure First”), two members of Yann Bourgeois’s circus/dance theater company are revealed in a way that is both eerie and beautiful. I won’t say more about it, but Blogotheque director Elie Girard describes it as an “abstract musical poem,” which seems about right.
Alasdair Roberts Draws On Medieval Irish Mysticism In His New Song
The Scottish singer, songwriter, and guitarist Alasdair Roberts has long been one of the most distinctive voices on the British folk scene. I mean that both literally – his high, reedy vocals are immediately recognizable – and figuratively, as he’s become both a repository of older songs and a creator of modern extensions of the folk tradition. He has a new album coming out in September called The Fiery Margin, and he’s just released the track called “The Evernew Tongue.” That title comes from an anonymous 10th century Irish text that claims to reveal the mysteries of the universe and the divine plan; the tune itself is derived from an old dance melody. But the song is Roberts’ own: a cry in the wilderness against demagoguery, and a celebration of the act of singing. “Every song that’s never more sung/will sound again upon the Evernew Tongue.”
The Fiery Margin comes out on September 13.
