Weekly Music Roundup: James Blake, Resistance Revival Chorus, and Omar Apollo

Week of October 19: This week, dance music from James Blake, a classic protest song remade by the Resistance Revival Chorus, songwriter Omar Apollo dials in Mexican sounds from Indiana, and an aerial tour of southern Africa from Guy Buttery. 

James Blake Celebrates How Things Were “Before”

Grammy-winning, hit-making, but still underground-dwelling singer/songwriter/producer James Blake has just released an EP called Before, which is a kind of love letter to the Before Times. You know, the times when you could pack the dancefloor and listen to someone like Blake do a DJ set. Because even though Blake has contributed to some of the biggest records of the past decade (Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, etc.), he still likes to travel in circles well outside the mainstream. The song “Before” is a good example – groovy, soulful vocals layered over ambient swirls of electronics and a steady but restrained four-on-the-floor dance beat. It seems to be reaching out to Radiohead nerds as much as EDM fans: the former will appreciate the edgy electronic drone that threatens to take over towards the end; the latter will get whiplash when the beat really kicks in as the song heads for home. 

The video is a fun collection of dancers recorded in quarantine, with brief shots of Blake in his own home studio laying down the vocals.  

Resistance Revival Chorus Welcomes Guests, But Not Fascists

The Resistance Revival Chorus is a group of up to 70 women and non-binary singers who you may have seen backing up Kesha when she sang at the 2018 Grammy Awards. They were booked to play Bonnaroo this summer, which of course was put off by the pandemic, but no virus could stop them from working on and finishing their debut album this year. Made in New York during quarantine and in between Black Lives Matter marches, the album, This Joy, came out on Friday. The choir sings occasional original tunes (like “This Joy,” the title track, though it’s clearly built on “This Little Light Of Mine”), as well as a number of covers of older songs of protest and resistance. The first of them is Woody Guthrie’s defiant “All You Fascists Bound To Lose.” It’s a collaboration with two formidable women in the music world, singer/multi-instrumentalist/activist Rhiannon Giddens (that’s her voice you hear right at the top) and singer/songwriter/producer Ani DiFranco, whose record label, Righteous Babe, is a natural home for this album. While many of the songs are sung a cappella, “All You Fascists Bound To Lose” has a full-on electric band and urgent folk fiddling that supports the voices; the album, it turns out, is well named: the Chorus makes plain that they believe joy is an act of resistance.  

Omar Apollo Dials In Mexican Sounds From Indiana

The singer, songwriter, and guitarist Omar Apollo usually plays a soul/funk/rock blend with a hip-hop edge. But on his new EP called Apolonia (which happens to be his real middle name), he includes something different: the song “Dos Uno Nueve” (“219”) is mostly in Spanish. (There is one brief, not-radio-friendly bit of English.) 219 is the area code of his home state of Indiana, but the sound is pure corrido – the narrative songs that have been a feature of Mexican popular music for over a century. Here, the story is a proud tale of making it despite the roadblocks thrown in the way of this child of Mexican immigrants. “Before it was zero,” is the translation of one couplet, “but now there are plenty zeros that I earned/With the contract I signed (And now I shout it).” There’s some impressive, almost flamenco-tinged guitar playing here (left channel if you’re listening on headphones) as well as another guitar that echoes the sounds of the traditional requinto (a smaller guitar-like instrument, in the right channel). But that’s not the last word from area code 219: Apollo also recorded a version of this song with the LA Philharmonic last month. 

Omar Apollo and his band are doing a “concert documentary” live from Prince’s famed Paisley Park on October 28. 

Leave It To The Weather Station To Capture The Mood Of 2020

The Weather Station is the work of Canadian singer and songwriter Tamara Lindeman. In her early years as The Weather Station she was often compared to Joni Mitchell, which is certainly not a bad thing, but those comparisons have faded as Lindeman’s storytelling powers have gained recognition. Not that she writes narrative songs – although the brilliant “Thirty” from her last LP three years ago is pretty much a short story set to music; it’s more that her songs contain layers of meaning that unfold as the song builds. Her new single, “Robber,” begins with the line “I never believed in the robber.” What follows is an elusive (but never opaque) meditation on denial; as Lindeman herself writes, “there are real human people who are literally robbing us and all future generations of everything that matters, right now. But we literally can’t see that as a society, because we’ve been taught to glamourize and love the taker.” The song gently churns beneath her, driven by multiple layers of drums, cinematic strings, and a sax struggling to break away. Lindeman, who also works as an actor under the name Tamara Hope, took on the director’s role for the video, which effectively captures this year’s surreal mix of people caught up in events while others seem to just go about their lives. 

They’ve Had Enough: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Get Political

It’s been 15 years since singer/songwriter Alec Ounsworth and his band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah released their era-defining debut album. That record heralded the age of bands breaking online, not through the machinery of a record label. Since then CYHSY have released five widely spaced (socially distanced?) albums, and this week Ounsworth announced that a sixth, New Fragility, will come out on January 29. With that announcement he released two singles, including this one, called “Thousand Oaks.” It refers to the 2018 shooting of 13 people in Thousand Oaks, CA, and Ounsworth’s voice, which has always had a distinctive high, almost yelping quality, is beautifully suited to this keening lament that also rages against those who, instead of doing something about gun control, are “sending you their thoughts and prayers.” The song itself is a steady rocker, with chugging guitars and shimmering keyboards ably supporting Ounsworth’s fragile melody.  

Shabaka Hutchings Revisits a Jazz Classic for Blue Note Records

Blue Note Records is associated with several generations of leading American jazz musicians, but in the label’s new compilation, Blue Note Re:imagined, they offered tracks from their extensive catalog to some of the leading players on the British jazz scene, including Nubya Garcia, Ezra Collective, Jorja Smith, and many others. Sax player Shabaka Hutchings, one of the hubs around which that scene revolves, contributes a version of “Prints Tie,” originally by vibe/marimba master Bobby Hutcherson. The 1971 original is a startling thing: it features Harold Land on sax over a repeating vamp that echoes the so-called spiritual jazz of the time, but also features a marimba solo by Hutcherson that sounds like it was lifted from an atonal piece of modern classical music. Here, Hutchings takes on Land’s lead role, but also is the featured soloist. The groove is recognizably the same, but the original’s astral/cerebral leanings are replaced with something earthier, and street-wise. 

Stuck at home? Take five minutes to tour southern Africa by air.

South African guitarist Guy Buttery did an album last year with the sitarist and vocalist Kanada Narahari, who’s part of the large Indian community in the eastern city of Durban. One of their songs, “Sonokota,” which features Guy on mbira (thumb piano) instead of guitar, has now been reissued in a series of remixes, including one by the artist known as A Million Things, who is from nearby Mozambique. That remix forms the soundtrack to a stunning new video that offers an aerial view of much of the southern parts of the African continent. Shot in places like Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and as far north as The Congo, it is a documentary-worthy series of images of the many land- and sea-scapes of that part of the world. One personal favorite shot goes by really fast and looks like seeds in a fruit that’s been cut open. But really, it’s an aerial view of a herd of hippos in muddy water. Watch it and you may find other shots that stay with you.