Weekly Music Roundup: Jorge Drexler, Courtney Barnett, Attacca Quartet

Week of July 12: This week, Jorge Drexler’s Uruguayan gospel, Quantic’s cumbia-rock, classical electronica from Attacca Quartet, and Courtney Barnett’s eventual return.

Courtney Barnett Is Returning, But It Takes Time

Australian singer, guitarist, and songwriter Courtney Barnett will release her third full-length solo LP (there are also EPs and collaborations, hence all the modifiers there) on November 12. It’ll be called Things Take Time, Take Time. She’s also announced a North American tour that will bring her to Radio City Music Hall on February 5. Both of those things will are off in the future; for now, Barnett offers the first single from the album, called “Rae Street.” It is pure Courtney Barnett – that deadpan delivery, the wry observations of the minutiae of everyday life, and the feeling that somehow, all those boring details and routines are barely masking something moving and profound. The multiple Courtneys in the video do a good job of suggesting the hard work of getting through the day and “waiting for the day to become night.” 

Gospel En Espanol, From Jorge Drexler

American audiences know Uruguayan singer/songwriter Jorge Drexler mostly through his Academy Award-winning song "Al otro lado del río" (“ On the Other Side of the River”), featured in the 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries. But Drexler, who now lives in Spain, has had a long career, albeit one that got off to an unusual start as he juggled being an otolaryngologist in his 20s. Well, the good ex-doctor has just released a single that will cure what ails you: a joyful gospel song called “La Guerrilla de la Concordia,” featuring the Gospel Factory chorus of Madrid, and a simple piano/bass/drum ensemble. It’s an ode to reopening – of society and of minds – and a call to take the opportunity to reach out to others. Somehow, you don’t need to speak Spanish to get the message.

A Tropical Shot In The Dark from Dos Santos

Dos Santos is a Latinx quintet from Chicago, but their new single, “A Shot In The Dark,” features the sounds of central Mexican huapango music, with lead singer Alex Chavez using a falsetto that incorporates the traditional crying, or breaking, sound in the voice. (At first I thought it was a woman singing.) As more layers of vocals pile up behind him, it creates what sounds like a folkloric chorus oscillating mostly between two chords. Hand drums and a slinky guitar part complete the languorous, tropical feel. The song is about staring at the night sky and musing about an unrequited love, hence the English title.  

Classical Meets Electronica In Attacca Quartet’s New Album

Real Life is the new album by the Attacca Quartet, in which they team up with fellow Grammy winner Michael League of the band Snarky Puppy to do new versions of songs by electronic music acts like Flying Lotus, Squarepusher, and Daedelus. Actually, the latter two appear with the quartet, playing new works and showing just how happily a string quartet’s classical sound can fit in the electronic music world. This shouldn’t actually be a surprise – strings, whether sampled or real, have been part of the electronica sound from the get-go. Still, the album will be surprising to anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to Attacca, a group that refuses to confine itself to the music of mostly dead, mostly straight, entirely white composers. The opening seconds of Real Life announce that this is not that sort of string quartet. The pounding rhythms of “Electric Pow Wow Drum,” a track by the Canadian First Nations band now called The Halluci Nation (fka A Tribe Called Red), lead to some sawtooth-edged string playing that evokes the cries of Native American powwows.  

A Cumbia-Rock Confection from Quantic and Nidia Gongora

The Brooklyn-based, British producer Will Holland, better known as Quantic, is once again collaborating with the Colombian singer Nidia Gongora on an upcoming album called Almas Conectadas (Connected Souls). Their lead single for the new album has just come out; it’s called “Balada Borracha” (“Drunken Ballad”). Gongora’s singing is rooted in the Afro-Colombian community on that country’s Pacific coast, and Quantic’s music saunters along on the cumbia rhythm that is for all practical purposes the national dance rhythm of Colombia. The production has a glossy, mid-century sheen: strings and occasional keyboards evoke the sounds of classic Latin dance bands of the 50s, with maybe just a hint of 60s psychedelia. 

The album Almas Conectadas comes out on October 22. 

Onyx Collective Get Funky With “Hummingbird”

New York’s Onyx Collective is usually considered to be some kind of experimental jazz band, and they do play with some of New York’s jazz regulars (Roy Nathanson, for one, has recently worked with them). But they also have a track record of collaborating widely with pop and R&B singers, salsa and funk musicians, and even did a kind of “dance party” for the Guggenheim Museum’s Agathe Snow exhibit in 2015. Their new single, “Hummingbird,” is a collaboration with the funk duo Chromeo – part of a larger series of songs the two groups are working on – and originally grew out of that Guggenheim gig. The song has a deep funk sound and sports vocals by Onyx’s longtime collaborator Julian Soto; the vocal harmonies are occasionally surprising (listen to the end of the line “you’re so hard to find,” for example), but the whole thing, to borrow from the song’s imagery, goes down as sweet as sugar.