Weekly Music Roundup: Bjork, 'Pretty Polly' & Perel

Week of Nov. 20: This week, a new Björk song and an old murder ballad in a video premiere. Plus, an alternate Stranger Things soundtrack.

PREMIERE: A Raw, Haunting Version Of An Old Murder Ballad

The indie film Barracuda is about a young English woman, played by newcomer Sophie Reid, who appears on the doorstep of her half-sister’s house in Austin, TX. Their father was a famous folk/country singer, now deceased, and his “real” daughter, in Texas, had no idea that she had a half-sister. Reid’s character is called Sinaloa, an improbable name for an English girl but one with a hint of danger (recalling the notorious Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico). This turns out to be appropriate, as Sinaloa’s behavior can be erratic; and this intimate, family-based story skates along on thin ice over a nagging river of dread. But Sinaloa has inherited her father’s musical gifts, and in a telling scene, at a party around a campfire, she joins some of the old-time players from Austin (Colin Gilmore, Butch Hancock, et. al., playing themselves) in singing one of the great dark murder ballads of the Appalachian tradition. Today, we premiere the full performance in which Reid, who sings and plays live in the film, offers a gripping version of “Pretty Polly.” 

The film Barracuda is available on demand. 

Attention Earthlings: A New Message from Björk

Björk’s new album, her ninth, comes out on November 24 and will be called Utopia. The theme is love, but you can count on Björk to take a distinctly personal, possibly alien approach to that commonplace subject. Her new single and video is “Blissing Me,” in which she appears to be singing a Romulan love song while dancing in a hole in the fabric of space-time. Or maybe it’s just Iceland. The single-take video follows a song that grows in the telling: the beginning is an almost child-like, sing-song affair; but as it progresses, her trademark sounds - the harp, off-kilter percussion, layered voices - give the song a rich but subtle texture. 

Meanwhile, Back on Planet Earth…

The big music news of the past week was the same big news we’ve been hearing all year: Luis Fonsi’s all-conquering “Despacito” is making headlines again. At the Latin Grammy Awards the song won all of the awards. ALL of them. At least that’s how it seemed. The video, now viewed a record-shattering 4 billion times, won the award for Best Video (Short Form); and the song itself won three more awards, including the two biggies: Song Of The Year and Record Of The Year. Fonsi is now taking advantage of the fact that most of humanity knows his song by releasing a new one, a collaboration with Demi Lovato, who sings mostly in Spanish; it’s called “Échame La Culpa” and its video had already topped the 3 million view mark when I saw it just 11 hours after its release. It’s got a catchy Latin rhythm, as you would expect, but I couldn’t help thinking I’d heard the tune before. It took a few minutes, but finally I realized the melody, at least at the start of each verse, strongly resembled the old Crosby Stills Nash & Young song, “Teach Your Children.” (Specifically the lines “don’t you ever ask them why/if they told you, you will cry/so just look at them and sigh.”) I don’t imagine it was intentional, but it does make the new song sound a little generic. Still, it’s built to be a hit, so check it out before it reaches a billion views.

From the Land of Tangerine Dream Comes A New Single By Perel

Perel is the nom de musique of Annegret Fiedler, a German producer and DJ whose music reminds me of early 80s Tangerine Dream – and therefore of the soundtrack for the recent Netflix series Stranger Things, which is what everyone who walked into my office this morning thought I was listening to. (Have you seen it yet? The show is good; the music is great.) Anyway, Perel is planning to release an album with the eminent dance music label DFA Records next year, but she’s just released a single called “Die Dimension” (that’s “die” as in the German word for “the,” pronounced “dee”), which features a softly spoken text over some classic krautrock textures. “From here,” she says/chants in German, “everything seems completely different.” The song is about escaping from the boundaries we’ve constructed, between our nations and ourselves. And in that respect, it specifically reminds me of Tangerine Dream’s 1981 song “Kiev Mission,” in which a female voice intoned the names of the continents, in Russian, along with a plea to avoid nuclear war. Although Perel’s song is a lot more danceable…

Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg and Duo Cross Record Unveil “Secret” New Band

Jonathan Meiburg has long been the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist at the heart of the band Shearwater. Cross Record is the duo of singer Emily Cross and instrumentalist/engineer Dan Duszynski.  Cross Record’s first tour saw them opening for Shearwater, and they eventually joined forces to record what Jonathan calls “a secret band.” They’re called Loma, and their debut LP, also called Loma, will come out in February. In an email, Jonathan referred to it as “a strange, beautiful, and very special record, made over a surreal year in rural Texas; it's also the first time I've written songs for someone else to sing.” Loma’s first single is called “Black Willow,” and it suggests that words like “strange,” “beautiful,” and “surreal” are right on the mark.