Weekly Music Roundup: Warp Trio, Lorde, Leon Bridges
Week of July 26: This week, a classical/pop premiere from Warp Trio, more classical pop from Scarypoolparty, and Lorde is thinking big thoughts.
PREMIERE: Warp Trio Welcomes You To The Pandemic Disco!
“Welcome to the Pandemic Disco” sounds like a movie you won’t like the ending to. But in fact it’s a three-minute joyride from the classical/pop ensemble Warp Trio, and both rapper Likwuid and indie rock singer Mirah decided to jump aboard. Warp Trio is part of the new breed of classical musicians: diverse, musically omnivorous, and apparently mathematically challenged (there are four of them). “Welcome to the Pandemic Disco” is the new single from their album Warp Trio’s Pandemic Disco Fantasy, and in both the song and its delightfully campy video they balance big ideas with the desire of pent-up people to get out there and bust a move. But spare a moment to notice the serious fiddling going on as the song builds.
Lorde Is Getting Older (She Was Already Wise)
New Zealand singer Lorde is not a teenager anymore. She spent so much of her teenage years in the limelight that it seems weird to say that. Now a veteran at 24, she is still writing songs that belie her age. The latest is “Stoned At The Nail Salon,” the newest single from her forthcoming third album, Solar Power, which comes out on August 20. The song is a meditation on the passage of time, and aging, and the inevitable losses (of people, of beauty as we’ve come to define it, of things we love) that come with it. Star producer Jack Antonoff once again collaborates with Lorde here, but instead of a big, bangin’ pop sound they’ve gone in a much more introspective, plaintive direction. The spare arrangement features acoustic guitars and some emotive slide guitar, and Lorde invited Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo – two more old souls in young songwriters’ bodies – to sing on the chorus. Perhaps most impressive is how this melancholy song hides a layer of dry humor: her character’s response to getting stoned, instead of “hey man, did you ever really look at your hand?,” is to drill into life’s existential questions. Like, is she really wise beyond her years, or just stoned out of her gourd?
Leon Bridges Releases New Album Of Southern Soul
From the beginning, with his 2015 debut Coming Home, Texas singer/songwriter Leon Bridges has mined the classic sounds of R&B and soul. Now a Grammy-winner, Bridges has just put out his third album, Gold-Diggers Sound, which still has a largely retro attitude despite occasional touches of modern, hip hop-inflected production. Deep into the album is the standout duet “Don’t Worry,” featuring the Georgia singer Ink. Between the two of them, they sketch the arc of a love affair that’s gone through a rough patch in an extended song that includes a whole arsenal of sounds – including, eventually, a choir, a horn section, and even a brief wisp of sitar (or more likely, the so-called sitar guitar), all sparingly and tellingly deployed.
Scarypoolparty Releases Haunting Single “The Darkness”
Like the Warp Trio song above, this is an example of classical musicians working in the pop world; the Orchid String Quartet joins songwriter Alejandro Aranda, who records as Scarypoolparty, on his new single “The Darkness.” It’s the latest offering from the upcoming Scarypoolparty album called The Act of Forgiveness (out on August 27), and each single has had its own sound world. This one reveals Aranda to be what we classical music fans call a pretty bitchin’ guitarist – with no rhythm section here, it’s his tapping and percussive playing on acoustic guitar that drives the song. Meanwhile, the strings swoop and glide, evoking both Beatles-era psychedelia and a suspense/horror film soundtrack.
Mac McCaughan Emerges From Isolation, Records With Yo La Tengo
Mac McCaughan is a musician with a day job. The longtime frontman of the bands Superchunk and Portastatic is also the co-founder of Merge Records, a heavyweight in the indie rock world for the last couple of decades. So he doesn’t release as much music himself as his fans might like. But on September 24, he will put out The Sound of Yourself, only the second LP under his own name in his long career. The first single is “Dawn Bends,” a collaboration with Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster and the veteran band Yo La Tengo. McCaughan says it’s “a cautionary tale about getting a little too into the isolation,” and includes some wry, at times bittersweet lyrics. YLT’s Georgia Hubley provides the soft harmony vocals and the band as a whole is on its best behavior, until Ira Kaplan unleashes an unruly guitar solo in the last minute or so.
Mandolin Orange Reinvents Itself As Watchhouse, Releases New Single
For just over a decade, the North Carolina duo called Mandolin Orange built up a sizable following with their blend of folk and bluegrass, often tinged with indie rock. Now, they’re about to release their first LP under their new name, Watchhouse. They’re still playing roots music with rock attitude, but the new single, the wistful “Upside Down,” also has a suggestion of prog rock in the way it goes through several changes of form and sound during its five minute length. Their album will also be called Watchhouse, and while it seems to have been inspired by the theme of new parenthood, the video takes a slightly different tack – although it does hew to singer Emily Frantz’s idea of “having missed someone before you meet them.”
