Weekly Music Roundup: Sharon Van Etten and Ibibio Sound Machine

Week of Jan. 14: This week, Adia Victoria and Sharon Van Etten look back; we look ahead to Beat Circus and Ibibio Sound Machine.

Adia Victoria Travels Back To 1960s France In New Video

Adia Victoria’s songs often sound like they could have been made decades ago, but they also have a knowing quality that makes it clear she is a contemporary songwriter. She’ll release her new album, Silences, next month, but the single “Different Kind Of Love” has just come out, along with a simple but fun video. In it, Adia and her band are playing live on a French TV show that seems to be from the late 60s. There are lots of deft little touches here – the brief, banal interview before the song; the wooden performances of the backing band; the guitar solo that is clearly not being played by the guitarist; the two sax players, one a head taller than the other. (And come on, we all know that the big guy’s name must be Tiny.) And shot in one long take. 

Silences, produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner, comes out on February 22.

Sharon Van Etten Looks Back In New Song “Seventeen”

Singer, songwriter and guitarist Sharon Van Etten is having a moment. It’s a moment five years in the making, since that’s how long it’s been since we’ve had a new record from her. You may have seen the big article on her in the New York Times a week ago Sunday; you may have seen her on the TV series The OA; you may have watched her perform in the saloon where parts of David Lynch’s revived TV show Twin Peaks took place. And her new album, Remind Me Tomorrow, is imminent. We’ve already heard the eerie “Jupiter 4”; now she’s released “Seventeen,” an expansive anthem that asks, if you could go back, what would you tell the 17-year old version of yourself who’s still trying to figure it all out? The video adds another level of poignancy, as Van Etten (and her teenage doppelganger) visits some of her old haunts – including some of the clubs where she began performing. Some are still there; some are gone, victims of gentrification. 

As for the shots of her scaling a tall fence, or balancing on both sides of a ladder, well kids, don’t try that at home. Remind Me Tomorrow comes out this Friday.

Ibibio Sound Machine Offers Peek At Their New Album

The London-based group Ibibio Sound Machine blends the sounds of Western disco, funk, electronic music and West African pop. Their sophomore album, Doko Mien, comes out in March, but the title track is out now. “Doko Mien” means “tell me” in Ibibio, one of the languages of Nigeria, and one of the two languages that lead singer Eno Williams uses. )She sings mostly in English.) This song has a lean, groove-based sound that seems to recall minimal electronic music and the motoric rhythms of Giorgio Moroder (as heard in Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” etc.). Their first album, Uyai, was excellent; we’ll have to wait until March 22 to find out about this new one.  

Beat Circus Presents a “Weird American Gothic” Tango

Brian Carpenter is a Boston-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist; he is also the founder and only constant member of the band Beat Circus, which blends folk, bluegrass, rock, mariachi, experimental music, and the sounds of Italian western movie soundtracks. Taking a cue from critic Greil Marcus’s phrase “the old, weird America” – meaning the strange visions of America that appear in some of the darker old folk songs – Carpenter and his band started their “Weird American Gothic” trilogy back in 2008 with the album Dreamland. Now, they are finally ready to conclude the trilogy with These Wicked Things. Expect to hear surreal audio landscapes that are full of familiar sounds put together in strange and often unsettling ways. As an example, check out “Rosita (tango),” which has the sound of an Ennio Morricone film score but finds itself dancing across the Argentine pampas rather than the New Mexico desert. 

These Wicked Things comes out on March 22; the band comes to New York to play at National Sawdust on April 25. 

The Twilight Sad Debut New Song/Video

The Twilight Sad, the Glasgow-based purveyors of beautiful musical gloom, spent some time in recent years touring around opening for The Cure, and some of that English band’s emotive, almost romantic 80s sound seems to have seeped in to the Twilight Sad’s new single, called “VTr.” Of course, you wouldn’t mistake it for an actual Cure song because it sounds like it’s being sung in a foreign language, which, given lead singer James Graham’s thick Scottish burr, it might as well be. 

The Twilight Sad’s new album it called It Won/t Be Like This All the Time, and it comes out this Friday, January 18.