Weekly Music Roundup: Interpol, Beth Orton, and Monte

This week, Interpol lightens up (a little); Monte celebrates an Afro-Colombian tradition; and Beth Orton returns after six years. Plus, dreamy funk from JayWood and composer Simon Goff and singer Katie Melua team up. 

A Break In Interpol’s Gloom

Leonard Cohen’s famous line “there is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in” can apply to the latest album by Interpol. Little shoots of sunlight, hope, possibly even something approaching joy, can be found peeking up from the dark and gloomy streets that the New York indie rockers have been mapping for something like twenty years. The new record is The Other Side of Make-Believe, and while Daniel Kessler’s guitars can still be anxious, ominous, or unsettling, Paul Banks’s vocals often sound like those of a man who’s made his peace with a world that consists of shades of gray. “Gran Hotel” is a good example: full of longing and possibly nostalgia. The streets of Cozumel are the setting, and at one point he sings “I'll do anything to know you're here again.” When the ending comes, with a descending guitar riff that is classic Interpol, Banks repeatedly sings “I see you in everything,” and it’s unclear whether he’s desperately heartbroken or quietly ecstatic.   

Celebrating Colombia’s Pacific Coast Culture With Monte

Monte is the side project of Simon Mejia, from the popular Colombian electro-folk-pop band Bomba Estereo. His first album as Monte was Mirla, a celebration of Colombia’s wildlife and Indigenous cultures, set to a thumping dance beat. Now he’s announced a follow-up effort called El Duende, which is a short Bomba-produced film about the wooden marimbas made on Colombia’s Pacific Coast and the Afro-Colombian family that has kept that tradition alive. The first bit of the film and music to be released is “Mamita,” which incorporates the sounds of the marimba and voices of the people in the film. As with the first Monte project, Mejia’s blend of the folkloric/traditional and contemporary/electronic is organic and seamless. 
The full film comes out on July 22, and Simon will screen the film and offer a DJ set that evening here in NY at Nublu.  

Beth Orton Returns With “Forever Young”

English singer/songwriter Beth Orton rose to stardom in the late 90s with her singular blend of alt-folk and electronica, a style inevitably termed folktronica. Over the years she’s sometimes skewed closer to the acoustic or the electronic, but she’s also taken her time between albums. This September, she’ll release Weather Alive, her first record in six years, and she’s just given us our first taste of what’s to come. “Forever Young” is a simmering, moody song with lots of atmospheric touches – the repeating piano figure, the vintage synthesizers (played by Dustin O’Halloran, the noted film composer who’s also half of the band A Winged Victory For The Sullen), and of course Orton’s vocals, which manage to sound both distant and sensuous at once.   

Planet Drum: As Contagious As Omicron But Way More Fun

Planet Drum is the long-running but occasional collaborative project led by Mickey Hart, formerly of the Grateful Dead, Zakir Hussain, the reigning king of the South Asian tabla (a pair of tuned hand drums), and Giovanni Hidalgo, the Puerto Rican percussionist. Over the years Planet Drum has indeed included drummers from all over the planet; the current lineup also features Sikiru Adepoju of Nigeria and over 50 other drummers, dancers, and singers. The group’s new album In The Groove comes out on August 5, but for a preview, watch the video for the single, “King Clavé.” Clavé is the basic rhythm figure at the heart of Cuban music, but it’s also heard in most of the African diaspora’s music around the world, including in several varieties of jazz. In the span of three minutes, “King Clavé” takes you to all the different places on Earth where the musicians recorded their parts, during the pandemic, and presents an absolutely infectious strain of rhythmic exuberance. A personal favorite is the large tabla class in Mumbai (led by one of Zakir Hussain’s brothers), but you’ll find lots to groove to here. 

Genre-blurred Songs from Katie Melua and Simon Goff

English violinist and composer Simon Goff has teamed up with platinum-selling singer and songwriter Katie Melua on a collaborative album called Aerial Objects. Melua, born in the Republic of Georgia but raised in Britain from the age of eight, has shown a willingness in the past to travel pretty far from the usual roads traveled by pop stars, for example covering Rachmaninoff choral music. Goff has made a number of albums of indefinable but evocative music that explores the combination of violin and electronics. Together, they’ve made six songs that feature Melua’s soothing vocals and Goff’s often soaring, sometimes propulsive string arrangements. This track, “Tbilisi Airport,” named after the Georgian capital, has a steadily building, cinematic sound. 

Dreamy Funk From Winnipeg’s JayWood 

JayWood is the stage name of Jeremy Haywood-Smith, whose new album Slingshot is a tangle of funk, dream pop, rock, and rap. The song “God Is A Reptile” is a standout track: it introduces itself with a loose-limbed funk-rock rhythm and JayWood’s easygoing vocals, only to be interrupted by a short psychedelic freakout. The song then seems to regain its equilibrium, but a later guitar solo leads into a remarkable confluence of different sounds and rhythms. Things finally get sorted out, just in time for the song to end – and you’re left with the sense that a lot has happened in the space of just over four minutes.