Weekly Music Roundup: The Mountain Goats, Japanese Breakfast, Spellling

Week of June 7: This week, Japanese Breakfast and Joy Oladokun fight for happiness; the Mountain Goats fight for their lives; plus new releases from Prince, Spellling, and Public Service Broadcasting.

The Mountain Goats Go Dark On Their New Single

John Darnielle and the rest of the Mountain Goats have been busy, even without touring. Their recent album, Getting Into Knives, followed hard on the heels of what was essentially Darnielle’s stuck-at-home solo effort, Songs for Pierre Chuvin. Now the band is preparing to release another album, Dark In Here. Despite its alarming title, Getting Into Knives was very much an easily accessible group of songs, recorded in Memphis. For this new album, the band decamped to the famous studios of Muscle Shoals, and if the title track, “Dark In Here,” is any indication, this might be an album about catastrophe, real or imagined. Darnielle’s character isn’t into knives – he’s much more of a guns & ammo guy, waiting for “men whose ribs are showing” to come and get him. Is he a survivor of some Cormac McCarthy-type apocalypse? Or a paranoid survivalist? The song creeps until it runs; and spaghetti-western guitars suggest imminent gunplay – or a person who’s simply watched too many movies. A brief flute cameo at the end reminds me of early Traffic, but everything else here is pure Mountain Goats, showing Darnielle & Co. at the top of their game. Whatever that game may be.

The album Dark In Here comes out on June 25. 

Japanese Breakfast Releases Eagerly Awaited Album Jubilee

Japanese Breakfast is the work of singer/songwriter Michelle Zauner, who has been gaining acclaim for her memoir Crying in H Mart. After two albums and a book dealing with the death of her mother and wrestling with her own bifurcated identity as someone both American and Korean, Zauner has pivoted on the new Jubilee from fighting against grief to fighting for happiness. And as songs like “Posing in Bondage” show, that really can be a struggle. This moody track about trying to regain a lost connection has the dreamy electronic pop sounds of prior Japanese Breakfast albums, but Zauner’s sonic palette has expanded with Jubilee, and “Posing in Bondage” includes an almost gamelan-style metallic percussion track that helps propel the song into something close to dance music.  

Joy Oladokun: Poised for a Breakout Year

Singer and songwriter Joy Oladokun has just released her new album called in defense of my own happiness, a followup to last year’s similarly titled in defense of my own happiness (the beginnings). Like the Japanese Breakfast record, Oladokun’s new LP recognizes that happiness isn’t just gonna fall in your lap, and for a queer woman of color, who left the church she grew up in because she felt she was not entitled to be who she was, that struggle leads to empathy for the marginalized. We heard this in her wonderful single from last fall, “i see america,” which is now included on this record. Oladokun’s music easily mixes pop, r&B, rock, and blues; the new album’s leadoff track and current single, “Bigger Man,” has a taste of country too, with vocals by the platinum-selling Maren Morris. The lilting waltz rhythm underscores a song about how some people have to turn the other cheek more than others, and fight harder to defend their own happiness.  

Public Service Broadcasting Are Now Broadcasting From Berlin

The London-based mad professors of music known as Public Service Broadcasting have already given us electronic, dance-heavy albums about the space race, and the UK’s disappearing coal mining culture, built on archival vocal samples and studio savvy and the band’s own sense of fun. Now, we get our first look at their next album, which will be called Bright Magic. A celebration of the city of Berlin, it mines the past (using bits of a 1920s sound collage of Berlin, and recording in the famed Hansa Studio where David Bowie made “Heroes”) to examine the present. The first single is “People, Let’s Dance,” featuring vocals by Berlin singer/guitarist EERA and a guitar riff sampled from Depeche Mode. It’s sung in German, but it’s pretty basic German and the refrain “Komm, tanzen” sounds close enough to “come dance” that you’ll get the general idea. A video of synchronized roller bladers adds to the good time. 

Bright Magic comes out on September 24. 

Another New Track From Prince’s Vault

“Born 2 Die” is the second track from the previously unreleased album Welcome 2 America that Prince’s estate is releasing on July 30. (The title track came out first.) The music was recorded in 2010, when Prince was looking to make music that was relevant to a country that had just installed its first Black president but still wrestled with deep-seated social justice issues. So “Born 2 Die” has echoes of the slow-burning soul music of Curtis Mayfield, as it follows the struggle of a Black woman attempting to build a life for herself on the streets of Oakland, and by extension America at large.  

Try The Eccentric Theatricality of Spellling

Spellling is the clever stage name of the Bay Area’s Chrystia Cabral, whose voice will send a shock of almost-recognition down the spines of Kate Bush fans everywhere. Like that pathbreaking English singer, Cabral’s vocals will probably be a love-it-or-hate-it thing (and close enough to Bush’s variety of sounds that it probably can’t be a coincidence). And like the earlier English art-rocker, Cabral can be both ambitious and intimate – sometimes in the same song. A good example is the just-released title track from her upcoming album, The Turning Wheel. At heart, it’s a simple wish for nature – for the hill rather than the big city – but the song steadily grows into something that resembles one of the Beatles’ big music-hall arrangements. 

The full album is due on June 25.