Weekly Music Roundup: Lee Fields, The Mountain Goats, Matthew E White & Lonnie Holley
Week of August 22: This week, Lee Fields gets sentimental; the Mountain Goats get vengeful; Matthew E White & Lonnie Holley get angry; and Heilung sings the oldest song in the world. Maybe.
Veteran Soul Singer Lee Fields Is Still Sentimental
“Sentimental Fool” is the new single from Lee Fields; it’s the title track of his forthcoming album, due in October. Fields has been at it since the late 60s, and it would be tempting to say he’s the last of a bygone era… except that the sounds of classic soul and funk that Fields has made for so long are now being taken up again by a much younger generation of musicians. “Sentimental Fool” is part of Field’s first album for the Daptone label, the former home of Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley, and therefore a prime mover in this renaissance of 70s soul. As for the song itself, it’s a slow burning ballad, with a vintage organ accompaniment and a great horn arrangement that makes the restrained emotions in Fields’ voice hit just that much harder.
Ondara Is Now A “Prophet Of Doom”
Grammy-nominated singer Ondara – formerly known as J. S. Ondara – has just released the newest single from his upcoming album Spanish Villager No. 3. The song is “A Prophet Of Doom,” and in it, the Kenyan-born Ondara laments the state of our democracy – mainly because he finds himself uncomfortably reminded of the contested elections of his East African homeland. “Democracy on the line,” he warns, though the message goes down easily thanks to the song’s rolling drumbeat, melancholy piano, and noir-ish sax break.
A New Recording Of The Oldest Song In The World
What is the oldest surviving piece of human music? There are several claimants to the throne, and much depends on whether marks made on a rock, a clay tablet, or a piece of papyrus can be read as musical notation. In the 1950s, a Babylonian clay tablet was discovered that contained fragments of song texts (in itself, not enough to wear the crown – there are even older texts out there, including at least one that seems to be complete), as well as markings that some scholars have identified as musical instructions. The hymns, sung in a language called Hurrian, were 3400 years old… but one of them, the sixth of the set, was complete. Now, the Nordic-Germanic trio Heilung, who previously have specialized in recreating the sounds of Northern Europe from Viking times, have recorded their own version of this Hurrian Hymn #6. They call it “Nikkal,” after the moon goddess who is the subject of the text; and using a 1980s treatise by a French scholar as a guide, they interpret the musical markings as two-part intervals, which allows them to offer up this haunting, hypnotic two-voice chant. They make no claims to authenticity, knowing that such a thing would be impossible. But they do what artists have always done: take a piece of our shared heritage and make it their own.
A New Recording Of The Oldest Techno Song in Detroit
It’s not 3400 years old, but “Sharevari” is also a musical artifact of the past. Originally released as a local single in 1981, “Sharevari” (named after the Charivari club in Detroit) is often referred to as the first example of Detroit techno. The original shows just how much the style, associated with Black teens dancing and DJing at house parties, drew on German bands like Kraftwerk and Italo disco. Now, Aidan Noell, who is half of the band Nation of Language, has done a version of the song, and she’s teamed up with LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang to create a version that’s true to techno’s roots while gently massaging the sound to make it feel less mechanistic than the Number Of Names original. As Noell writes, “At a time when everything around us is difficult and grating and extremely real, for these six minutes I indulge in a total fantasy - an alternate universe, both of the past and future, that’s mysterious and sexy and fun.”
The Mountain Goats Are Out For Revenge
John Darnielle is all about telling stories, in individual songs but also over the course of whole albums. Which is why none of his fans were surprised when he also turned out to be a fine novelist, whose latest book, Devil House, has received rapturous reviews. But for now, it’s back to his band, The Mountain Goats, and a new album called Bleed Out. It’s basically an action movie in music – the opening song finds a guy in his cell plotting revenge, and titles like “Extraction Point,” “Hostages,” and “Need More Bandages” deliver exactly the kind of heart-pumping, hard-rocking excitement they promise. But revenge turns out not to be such a great idea, as the final song, “Bleed Out,” makes clear with the kind of poignant charm that only a good storyteller could pull off. This track, “Guys On Every Corner,” is a wry, defiant scene that blends noir-ish elements with a touch of 70s funk (an echo of Blaxploitation flicks?), and, at the very end, a little nod to James Bond.
A Small But Epic Protest From Matthew E. White And Hampton Boyer
“Only In America” is both an EP and a short film, done by the shape-shifting songwriter Matthew E. White and the young Black visual artist Hampton Boyer, here making his directorial debut. Their topic is systemic racism and how it keeps the American dream out of reach for many. White is a serial collaborator – back in 2010 his earlier band Fight The Big Bull did a wonderful collaboration with singer David Karsten Daniels, and, though he knew nothing about it, the 19th century writer Henry David Thoreau. The mood of this project is obviously different, but here too there is a third collaborator – the outsider artist and musician Lonnie Holley, who adds his lyrics and voices to two parts of “Only In America.” The film is about 12 minutes long, with 5 more minutes of credits set to White’s cinematic, 70s-inflected soul and R&B. The main body of the work moves between brooding, atmospheric songs and more forceful, uptempo soul/funk. The song called “It Feels Like This” is the centerpiece of the work – the contrast between White’s vocals (reminiscent of Earth Wind & Fire), about putting “your hand on your heart for the American dream,” and Holley’s snarled lines (“whose damn dream is this?”), makes for a striking musical statement about the different realities facing white and Black Americans.
