Weekly Music Roundup: Taylor Swift, Ala.Ni, and Cinder Well
Week of July 27: This week, Taylor Swift’s surprising new album; Ala.Ni’s lament for Emmett Till; and doom-folk from Cinder Well.
Taylor Swift’s Double Surprise: A New Album, and A New Sound
On Friday, Taylor Swift released Folklore, a new album that comes less than a year after her last one, Lover, and which appeared with less than a day’s notice. This is surprising enough, given that Swift has been a master of the long-form album rollout which builds up excitement that can be let off only by a buying spree that catapults her to number one on the charts. (Don’t worry, she’ll still be number one – an extensive package of variations on the album will see to that.) Even more surprising, though, is the sound of Folklore. Neither technicolor pop nor a revisiting of her earlier country sound, this collection is small-scale, full of intimate scenes and character studies. And perhaps the biggest surprise is that the album was made largely in collaboration with Aaron Dessner of the brooding indie rock band The National. I’m sure I won’t be the only one reminded of that line in Swift’s hit song “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” where she tartly sings “you would hide away and find your peace of mind/With some indie record that's much cooler than mine.” Well, with Dessner bringing in many of his collaborators to contribute to the album’s subtly textured, almost fragile sound, Folklore is closer to one of those indie records than it is to Swift’s usual power pop. In some ways, the track “Seven” is the centerpiece of the album: it is, coincidentally, the seventh track, but apart from being centrally located, it also includes the line “passed down like folk songs/the love lasts so long” – and the idea that a love story can, like a folk song, outlive its origins is something that seems to animate this whole record.
Ala.Ni Offers A Lament For Emmett Till
This weekend marked what would have been the 79th birthday of Emmett Till, whose murder in 1955 was recently investigated, again, by the FBI. With the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation currently petitioning for the FBI to release those results, the Parisian-born, London-based singer Ala.Ni has released a gently haunting song called “Lament For Emmett Till.” It’s a setting of a poem written by the journalist and activist Claudia Jones shortly after Till’s lynching, and offers a simple but poignant melody, accompanied only by guitar. Ala.Ni has a voice that sounds like something out of the 1930s or 40s – a rich, velvety croon that turned heads when she released her debut album in 2016. That out-of-time quality is all too appropriate for this song about a 65-year old murder that is once again resonating today. Ala.Ni has also released a video with the song, but be warned: the images of the open casket, the trial, and the reactions to the killers’ acquittal are still disturbing, and the newspaper headline that trumpets “10,000 Weep With Till’s Mother” may make you wonder why that didn’t lead to the change we’re still seeking today.
Ben Harper And Rhiannon Giddens Cover Nick Drake’s Last Song
Multiple Grammy-winner Ben Harper and MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Rhiannon Giddens have both been visible reminders of the importance of Black musicians in American roots music for many years. But they’d never worked together before, and when they finally did, it was to record this version of “Black Eyed Dog,” believed to be the last song Nick Drake wrote before his untimely death in 1974. Drake’s original recording is only a demo, but it’s haunted by the depression, the “black eyed dog,” that pursued him throughout his life. In fleshing out the song with harmonized vocals and a small instrumental ensemble, Harper and Giddens risked gilding the proverbial lily, but these are two performers with good instincts. The guitar and banjo parts leave plenty of space, and the fiddle moans and scurries in an ominous way behind the two almost whispered vocal lines.
Drone-Folk Project Cinder Well Offers a Haunting “No Summer”
Cinder Well is essentially the work of Amelia Baker, an American singer and musician who now lives in County Clare, Ireland. Inspired by the deep wells of both Irish and Appalachian folk song, she has just dropped her first album, called No Summer. On it, she does several traditional songs but also a number of originals. The title track, “No Summer,” is a haunting ballad, full of timeless images of tolling bells and a ring on the wrong finger – but it is also a completely contemporary tale, and one that now seems eerily prescient in this year where our experience of the seasons has been totally transformed. Baker plays the guitar in a high, almost banjo-like register, and in a halting rhythm that only rarely betrays its folk roots. Her voice has an earthy, almost trance-y affect; and when she doubles her vocals in the song’s minimalist chorus, it seems to contain echoes of long centuries of songs about loneliness and desperation.
The evocative video was shot, in part by Baker herself, in and around her home in County Clare.
Jon Hassell Releases Second Volume in Pentimento Series
It’s not nearly on the same scale of surprise as the Taylor Swift record, but having a new album from veteran trumpeter Jon Hassell was both welcome and unexpected. Now 83, Hassell has been in poor health and in April, his longtime collaborator Brian Eno helped establish a GoFundMe page for Hassell to help cover his medical bills and a safe place to live, since he is in a very high risk group for COVID-19. Apparently, Hassell is now out of intensive care, and of course this album was probably made last year anyway. It’s called Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume 2), a followup to 2018’s Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume 1), which itself marked his first new music in many years. The term pentimento is from painting, where an initial drawing or sketch is painted over, but can be faintly seen or picked out with infrared light. Eno used an analogous technique in the studio when making his albums, where once he committed something to tape, he found a way to use it, no matter how faintly or how processed the sound. Much of this new album by Jon Hassell recalls his early 1980s collaborations with Eno and Talking Heads, and his fractured electronic works of the mid 1990s. This track, “Moons of Titan,” is spacey electronic excursion with multilayered percussion programming, reflecting his long interest in non-Western rhythms, and that trademark whispery trumpet sound he developed after studying Indian raga singing.
