Weekly Music Roundup: Penguin Cafe Premiere & HAIM

This week’s roundup is brought to you by the letter P:  a poppy, postclassical premiere, and a pile of political pieces. 

PREMIERE: Penguin Café Releases New Single and Live Video Performance

First there was the Penguin Café Orchestra, founded in the mid-70s in London by composer Simon Jeffes. Simon did the most avant-garde thing a classically-trained composer could do in the mid-70s: he started making music that sounded like the folk music of a forgotten land. Using piano and strings but also the Venezuelan cuatro (a ukulele-like instrument), a harmonium found on the street (and later lost on the street again), a telephone and rubber band, and anything else that caught his ear, he created instrumental works that sounded eerily familiar to listeners in Japan, Europe, and the States. Simon died in 1997, but his son Arthur has started his own band, called simply Penguin Café. Arthur writes pop-inflected but poignant music like his dad, but without slavishly imitating him. Penguin Café’s new album, The Imperfect Sea, comes out Friday – Arthur describes it as an acoustic tribute to electronic dance music, and the album includes covers of Kraftwerk, Simian Mobile Disco, and, yes, Simon Jeffes. Today we premiere the song “Ricercar,” a title taken from Baroque music but which fits the work’s cycling/recycling motifs. Also, we premiere a video of a live performance from London’s Barbican Hall, featuring the noted German pianist/composer/electronic producer Nils Frahm.  (He’s the guy at the smaller keyboard with his back to you the whole time.)

Penguin Cafe - Ricercar (Live at Barbican Hall) feat. Nils Frahm from Erased Tapes on Vimeo.

Arthur Jeffes will be my guest on “New Sounds” at 11pm on Wednesday evening, May 3, and Penguin Cafe will be playing live at Le Poisson Rouge this Friday night, May 5. 

HAIM’s Long Awaited Return Is Near

The trio HAIM burst on the scene in 2013 with their debut album, Days Are Gone, which drew comparisons to classic rocks acts like Fleetwood Mac and early 90s R&B.  The three sisters, Este, Danielle and Alana Haim, are going to finally release their second album, Something To Tell You, on July 7; but you won’t have to wait that long to hear at least some of it.  They’re playing Saturday Night Live on May 13, and have just released a live studio recording of the song “Right Now” in a video directed by noted film maker Paul Thomas Anderson.  Unlike much of the first album, which was bright and glossy and pretty unabashedly pop, this song has a sense of mystery, of anticipation – as if the song is waiting for something to happen.  Which it eventually does.

Juliana Hatfield Asks: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Boston’s Juliana Hatfield didn’t expect to be making a record this winter, but songs began coming to her after the election in November. The result is an often biting, totally rocking album called Pussycat, which came out on Friday. Some of the songs offer an elliptical take on the national mood; the single “Short-Fingered Man,” on the other hand, is a snarling, sarcastic tune aimed at a certain leader of the free world who is thought by some to have short fingers. But Hatfield takes a moment in the single “Impossible Song” to re-state Rodney King’s plaintive “can’t we all just get along?”  “I don’t like what I’ve become,” Hatfield sings; she says these contentious times bring out the worst in her, and us. But she offers an alternative – yes, it’s almost hopelessly optimistic, but it’s also improbably catchy: “what if we tried to get along?  Sing an impossible song?”

A Time Traveling Song From UK Band Ride

Ride was one of the essential English rock bands of the early 90s. But they haven’t made a record in over twenty years, which made the announcement of a new Ride album, called Weather Diaries, a welcome surprise. The band seems to have done its own version of time travel – bringing its shoegazing blend of guitar distortion, floating keyboards, and pummelling drums intact from a quarter century ago. But their new single, “All I Want,” is about a different kind of time travel.  “All I want,” sings Andy Bell, “is to leave this time.” Writing on the day when UK Prime Minister Theresa May made the chilling announcement that companies there would have to make lists of their foreign workers, Bell apparently felt that he had traveled back in time: “it’s not a pretty picture; this is 1932,” he sings, a pointed reference to the year that saw Hitler begin to consolidate power in Germany. (The foreign worker list was shelved in the face of protests, by the way.) The song has that great dreamy pop sound of classic Ride, but check out the drumming, which is simply volcanic. 

Algiers Shows The Underside Of Power

The band Algiers will release its sophomore album, called The Underside Of Power, on June 23; but the title track is out now, along with a resistance-themed video. Like Ride, this multiracial quartet, originally from Atlanta but largely based in London, is responding to the rise of nationalist and exclusionary language in our politics. Unlike Ride, though, this is pretty much Algiers' bread and butter. They came out swinging with their 2015 self-titled debut. That album drew on gospel and blues-inflected vocals, ominous post-punk guitars and drums, and the kind of spacious darkness you get in some of Nick Cave’s music. Their songs took on racism, nationalism, and consumerism. The new album is, if anything, even more incendiary. The song “The Underside of Power” is almost dangerously catchy – you may find yourself thinking of the Temptations, or Nina Simone, or Interpol (the band or the international police, your choice). This is music that asks you to clench your fists, but to keep your feet moving.  And then come out swinging.

The band plays in Brooklyn at Baby’s All Right on July 22.

Colter Wall’s Modern Murder Ballad

I’ve always been a sucker for the murder ballad tradition – the ancient Scottish poem “Edward,” or the Appalachian folk song “Pretty Polly,” for example. So, apparently, is the Canadian singer and songwriter Colter Wall. Wall released an EP in 2015 called Imaginary Appalachia that had Steve Earle proclaiming him the “best young singer-songwriter I’ve seen in twenty years,” and famed producer Rick Rubin promptly signed him to a publishing deal. Colter Wall is about to release his debut LP on May 12, and it will include the song “Kate McCannon,” a shivery slice of dark folk music that sounds like it could have been written 200 years ago. Wall’s voice also sounds like an echo from centuries ago; the vocals and guitar occupy center stage for the most part, but the murder, when it arrives, is a pounding cry of alarm from the slide guitar.