Weekly Music Roundup: Keb' Mo', Gemma Ray, and Lido Pimienta

Week of Dec. 2: This week, a seasonal complaint, a Motown hit reinvented, and a different type of Koffee from Jamaica.

Keb’ Mo’ Offers A Christmas Gift – For All The Scrooges

The 4-time Grammy-winning bluesman Keb’ Mo’ has just released a holiday video called “Christmas Is Annoying.” Clearly he is making a play for the legions of us who feel that Christmas has become an almost year-round exercise in marketing and the repetition of thrice-familiar carols. And I want to play along, I really do. But I’m sorry – I’m not buying it, Mr. Keb’ Mo’, if that is your real name. (It’s not.) For one thing, sir, you are having way too much fun in this simple little video, and I have the sneaking suspicion that you are SAYING that you’re an ally of us Scrooge-types while in reality you are FEELING something quite different. 

Oh, and you’ve released a holiday album called Moonlight, Mistletoe & You? I’m scratching you off my anti-Christmas list. 

Keb’ Mo’ is doing a holiday music tour; you can catch him at the Tarrytown Music Hall on December 8. Go if you want to - I don’t care. 

Gemma Ray Reinterprets A Motown Classic

British-born, Berlin-based singer, songwriter and guitarist Gemma Ray knows that there’s no point in doing a cover unless you’re going to do something different with it. Back in 2010, in her album It’s A Shame About Gemma Ray, she completely recast songs from an eccentric, eclectic mix of artists, from Sonic Youth to Shirley Bassey. Her own predilection for noir-ish, sometimes even goth-leaning arrangements made these new versions sound very much like Gemma Ray’s own songs. Today, she’s released a version of the 1965 Motown tune “My World Is Empty Without You,” a hit for The Supremes that featured a typically big, technicolor Motown productions. But Gemma Ray strips things down to the essentials – as she sees them. That means layers of feathery vocals and some heavily-reverbed guitar, plus a striking change of harmony just before the two-minute mark and a lonesome, shimmery guitar solo. 

An Imaginary Western Soundscape From Graham Reynolds

Graham Reynolds is a Texas-based composer who’s probably best known for his film scores for Richard Linklater. We’ve also heard him doing science-inspired music with his contemporary chamber music project Golden Hornet. But his new album, called Marfa – A Country and Western Big Band Suite, sounds like a trippy soundtrack to a fever dream set in the wide open spaces of west Texas. The album is also misleadingly named. Yes, there are genuinely country/western-flavored big band tracks (“Union Pacific,” for example), but there’s also ambient music, chamber music, tracks that have echoes of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks, and even touches of Spanish guitar. This track, “Highway 67,” is a stomping, midtempo rocker, with wailing pedal steel and synthesizer, but with telling touches of deep, twangy guitar that suggest Marfa might not be that far from Twin Peaks. 

Polaris Prize Winner Lido Pimienta Returns Three Years Later

Colombian-born, Toronto-based singer, producer, and visual artist Lido Pimienta won Canada’s most prestigious music award, the Polaris Prize, for her 2016 album La Papessa. It was the first time an album in neither English nor French had ever won the prize. That album was an artful blend of Afro-Colombian rhythms, Western pop, and electronic music. Now Pimienta has released her first new music since that album. It’s a single called “No Pude,” or “I could not,” and it refers to her love/hate relationship with her often troubled homeland. She holds the darker electronic sounds in check here, instead building the song around multiple layers of her live and sampled vocals, and a combination of traditional and programmed percussion. 

Jamaica’s Koffee Presents A Big Budget Video

Reggae/dancehall sensation Koffee (born Mikayla Simpson 19 years ago) has just released a new song and video called “W” – the title refers to living your best life and focusing on Wins, not Losses. The song features a verse by American rapper Gunna, a catchy chorus (sung in Jamaican patois), and a video that looks like it was shot with the budget of a decent-sized Hollywood movie. The storm that rolls over Jamaica looks apocalyptic, but turns out to be a “perfect storm” in a very different sense of that phrase.