Weekly Music Roundup: LADAMA, Billy Porter, and Jonsi of Sigur Ros

Week of April 27: This week, a PPP (Pan-American Party Premiere) from the band LADAMA, the return of Jonsi of Sigur Ros, and an old protest song for a new time from Billy Porter.

PREMIERE: A Pan-American Dance Party With LADAMA

The band LADAMA includes musicians from Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and the US. They’re about to release their second album, Oye Mujer, in June, and today we premiere the band’s lively first single, called “Nobreza,” or “nobility.” It’s sung in Portuguese by drummer Lara Klaus, who tells us “’Nobreza’ is a song about the strength of the Brazilian working class – that despite the hard work of their 'every day' they have faith in a better future. We want to celebrate the richness of Brazilian culture and its mix of races and colors.” The women of LADAMA play a range of string and percussion instruments from both North and South America, and the top-drawer Brazilian producer Kassin effectively mixes in horns as well. “It's like a dance,” Klaus says, “to which LADAMA invited guest musicians Spok (saxophone) and Lucas dos Prazeres (percussion) from my hometown of Recife, Brazil.” It’s a little reminiscent of David Byrne’s Latin project of the 1980s, Rei Momo, which I mean as high praise, and the Afro-Brazilian beat gives the whole song a sunny, unrushed but upbeat feel. 

Oye Mujer (“Hey Woman”) comes out on June 12.

Billy Porter Covers “For What It’s Worth”

Grammy, Emmy, and Tony-winning singer and actor Billy Porter has recorded a version of one of America’s enduring protest songs, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” Written by Stephen Stills in 1967 during the Civil Rights Era and the Vietnam War, the song still resonates with artists like Porter, whose lyric video for the song includes imagery from Black Lives Matter and, in the “paranoia runs deep” verse, the coronavirus. His cover starts with the iconic guitar harmonics of the original, but soon a hip hop beat is driving the chorus and Porter begins to sing out in full-on soul belter mode. Stills himself wrote that “for many years no one tried to ‘make it theirs’ as covers are supposed to do,” but he went on to call Porter’s version “pure genius.” 

Sigur Ros Singer Jonsi Returns With First Solo Song In A Decade

Fans of Sigur Ros, the atmospheric, sometimes orchestral rock band from Iceland, know that singer Jonsi has an eerie and beautiful falsetto, plus a penchant for singing in Hopelandic, a made up language, in addition to his native Icelandic. But on his new solo song, “Exhale,” Jonsi sings in English and deploys that falsetto only briefly, well into the song. “Exhale” begins as an ambient wash of sound, with Jonsi’s voice murmuring up close to the mic and trailing odd electronic effects behind it. But the arrangement steadily builds, and by the end, it has something like a sad-dance-pop vibe. It’s also Jonsi’s first solo music since his 2010 LP Go, although his duo Jonsi & Alex, with his partner Alex Somers, has continued to occasionally make music and visual art. Speaking of which, Jonsi co-directed the video for “Exhale,” with its striking image of a dancer emerging from and moving with a large sheet of black polytheylene.  

mxmtoon’s New EP Is A Reminder Of Light In Dark Times

Now all of 19 years old, the singer and songwriter known as mxmtoon has just released the first of two EPs, called dawn. Its companion, dusk, will come out later this year. Her project has two purposes: one, to remind us that there is cycle to life that will go on beyond our current surreal moment; and two, to double down on her recent embrace of the sound of a big studio production. mxmtoon began as a social media star, singing lo-fi bedroom pop while playing the ukulele. But she’s also studied cello, and her recent songs have a hi-gloss pop sheen and, sometimes, more than a hint of the club. That seems to be the case with “Fever Dream,” the opening track from dawn. It begins and ends with the pastoral sounds of nature, and there’s an acoustic guitar throughout, but the layered voices, electronics, and dance beat all show a still-young musician figuring out how far she can push things while still maintaining the intimate connection with her audience that launched her career. 

Ile Teams Up With Natalia Lafourcade For New Song

The Puerto Rican singer iLe, who started as the “girl singer” with her brothers’ hugely popular rap group Calle 13, has made a couple of solo releases that show off the range of her musical interests and the range of her voice. Her new song, “En Cantos,” is a collaboration with another of Latin pop’s most successful singers, Mexico’s Natalia Lafourcade. “En Cantos” means “in pieces,” iLe says, though it could also mean “in songs.” And if you combine it into one word, encantos, it means “enchantment.” The song is about how we often create in our minds an ideal person who can’t possibly exist but whom we keep hoping to meet. The video shows the two singers taking different “pieces” of a man and distilling them into a drink which has, shall we say, mixed results. But the song is a pulsating blend of reggaeton, Latin pop, and choral sounds that give things an almost unearthly cast.