Weekly Music Roundup: Missy, Bowie, St. Germain & SVIIB

Rescue your Tuesdays with our weekly roundup of music news, videos, and songs that just might help you get through the rest of the week. This week, music before and after tragedy; an unexpected name-check as Missy Elliott returns; and David Bowie is still keeping secrets. 

At Paris’ Bataclan, The Last Night Before All Hell Broke Loose

The terrorist attacks of Friday night have given the Parisian concert hall known as Bataclan unwanted fame. But the night before the attacks, the Bataclan was the venue where producer/songwriter St Germain made his long-awaited reappearance. The Parisian producer, born Ludovic Navarre, released his first album in 15 years last month. His previous album, Tourist, sold 3 million copies in 2000, and was a kind of jazz/electronic music crossover. His new album, simply called St. Germain, is still centered on the beat, on deep and danceable grooves, but it comes with a major surprise: St. Germain spent a good portion of that 15 year hiatus studying the music of Mali, and most of the voices and instrumentation on this record are from that West African country. At a time when France is likely to experience a surge of anti-immigrant sentiment, this reminder of the cultural richness of France’s sizable West African community could be important in ways St Germain could not have expected. He has just released a video for the song “Sittin’ Here”; the song is a great example of what makes the record special, but the video also features some stunning “sand art,” created live on camera by the Spanish artist Didi Rodan (usually just referred to as Didi).  

After A Death, A Celebration of A Life In Music

Yesterday, the duo known as School of Seven Bells released the first track from what will be, in all likelihood, its last album.  SVIIB is due on February 12, but only the band’s Guatemalan-born singer, Alejandra Deheza, will be around to mark the occasion.  Her creative and one-time romantic partner Benjamin Curtis died of a rare form of lymphoma at the end of 2013.  The two had worked through 2012 on the music that would eventually form the basis for this record. After Curtis’ death, Deheza moved from Brooklyn to LA to finish the record.  Far from being a mournful lament, SVIIB is a celebration of a collaboration that lasted a decade, and the single, “Open Your Eyes,” has a classic Seven Bells sound.        

David Bowie Offers A Teeny Bit More Of His New Song

We recently mentioned the upcoming release of David Bowie’s album, Blackstar – which will apparently be spelled “★“ just to make everyone crazy. Somehow, in an age where everything leaks onto the internet, Bowie has done it again: no leaks, no loose lips from collaborators, just a tiny drip of music to prime the pump before the title track’s release this Thursday and the album release on his birthday, January 8. Bowie’s last album, The Last Day, was a huge surprise when it was released on his birthday in 2013; and the New York Times this weekend did an amusing article wherein many of the folks working on his off-Broadway musical Lazarus — a sequel of sorts to The Man Who Fell To Earth — talked about his work without actually saying anything. Well, for those of us eager to get a glimpse of what’s to come, Bowie has released a very short teaser of the single and the short moody film that accompanies it.               

Missy Elliott Is Back! And Possibly Someone Else…

Missy Elliott’s return began with her performance at last year’s Super Bowl, but it has just ramped way up with the release of her new single and video, “WTF (Where They From).”  The video features some insane dancing, as you might expect; but you might not expect the midpoint rap by Pharrell, here played by a puppet Pharrell.  (Who also dances really well.)  People will probably focus on his use of the N-word, simply because we’ve come to expect (recently at least) more family-friendly stuff from him.  But those people will miss what I am fairly certain is the first time the name Hermes Trismegistus has appeared in a rap.  The name refers to a possibly fictional character who wrote, almost 2000 years ago, some important texts on astrology, magic, and esoteric rituals.  His name has cropped up at various times in history – in the Renaissance, and again in the context of 20^th century occult and New Age spirituality.  It is not a name you expect to hear in the middle of a saucy Missy Elliott song, but there it is. 

The Danger Mouse Empire Expands Again

Brian Burton, better known as super-producer Danger Mouse, burst on the scene with The Grey Album – his brilliant mashup of the Beatles’ “White Album” with Jay Z’s Black Album back in 2004. You may know him as half of Gnarls Barkley, whose hit “Crazy” was a phenomenon of almost Adele-like proportions. He has also produced chart-topping records for The Black Keys, Beck, Norah Jones and many others. Now, he’s starting his own record label. 30^th Century Records will be distributed by Sony, and his first release will be 30^th Century Records Compilation, Vol. 1. It’s due on December 18, but you can hear this track now from the Berkeley, CA-based duo called Nine Pound Shadow. Their song “Melody” seems to contain echoes of everything from the Flamingos to the Zombies to Fleet Foxes and Sufjan Stevens.