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    James Acaster’s ‘Party Gator Purgatory’ Was Decades in the Making

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    As a child, music was the British comedian’s first obsession. Decades later, his first record tells the story of a toy alligator.The British comedian James Acaster can remember the moment he fell in love with music at 6 years old. At a party held by a member of the congregation of the “hippie-ish” church his parents attended in Kettering, a town in central England, he heard a compilation album featuring songs like Men at Work’s “Down Under” and “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band.“I just couldn’t believe how good every single song was — it was blowing my mind,” Acaster said in a recent video interview. Music became “a pretty immediate obsession.”By the time he was a teenager, Acaster was playing in several bands. He left school at 17, without taking his final exams, and didn’t go to college, so he could focus on building a career in music.At 22, though, he didn’t have a record deal, and when his experimental jazz group split, Acaster started focusing on comedy instead. He had been dabbling in stand-up as a side project since he was 18, and it felt like a welcome break from the pressures of trying to make it in music.“It was nice to do it and not care about it,” he said. “Whereas every time I was onstage with a band, I really cared and wanted it to go well.”In one special in his Netflix series “James Acaster: Repertoire,” the comedian moves from the idea of him being an undercover cop to talking about a breakup. Silviu Nutu Vegan Joy/NetflixToday, Acaster, 38, is one of Britain’s most popular comedians, and he has finally released a debut album of sorts: “Party Gator Purgatory,” a 10-track experimental record featuring Acaster’s drumming and made with the 40-artist collective he founded called Temps.In comedy, Acaster has had critical and mainstream success. A fixture on British comedy panel shows, in recent years he’s also found success in podcasting with “Off Menu,” a show about dream meals he co-hosts with the comedian Ed Gamble.On the talent-filled British comedy circuit, Acaster has carved out a singular voice: a mixture of whimsy and vulnerability, surrealism and biting commentary, as seen in his stand-up special “Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999,” in which he explored a difficult period in his personal life with both candor and his signature frenetic performance style.This balance is what has connected with people, said Matthew Crosby, a British comedian and friend, who praised Acaster’s “genuine authenticity” in a recent phone interview.Acaster looms so large on the British comedy scene that others have begun to emulate him. “Anyone who’s got a really distinctive unique style, whether wittingly or unwittingly, gets aped by the circuit — Eddie Izzard and Harry Hill are the people who immediately spring to mind,” Crosby said. “And you see it now with lots of people doing James.”On the talent-filled British comedy circuit, Acaster has carved out a singular voice.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAs comedy, once his low-pressure creative pursuit, transformed into a fully-fledged career, Acaster disengaged from both listening to and making music. Then, in 2017 he had a mental-health crisis precipitated by breakups with his girlfriend and his agent, and he began collecting albums released in the previous year, ultimately purchasing 500 releases from 2016 alone, he said.“When things got a bit rough that was my most recent thing that had brought me a lot of comfort so I carried on doing that,” he said. “I just sort of reacquainted myself or renegotiated my relationship with music as a fan.”He codified the personal project in “Perfect Sound Whatever,” a 2019 book in which he claims that 2016 was the best ever year for music, and explains why.In 2020, he started making music again, and the result is “Party Gator Purgatory,” an experimental, hip-hop inflected and drum-heavy record, which follows the death, purgatory and resurrection of a life-size toy alligator Acaster won at a fair when he was 7.The album’s high concept is typical of Acaster’s creative process, and the way he works his way out from a single idea. “You’re just running with whatever hunch you’ve got that this might be fun,” he said. This approach is clear across Acaster’s books, podcasts and stand-up. On the album, the idea is the travails of a stuffed toy; in one special in his Netflix stand-up series “Repertoire,” Acaster began with the idea of his being an undercover cop, “and by the end you’ve got a show that is about a breakup you’ve had,” he said.“He’s not afraid of being incredibly niche,” Crosby said. “He doesn’t sort of sit down at the start of each day and go, ‘What can I do that’s going to make me a load of money?’ He goes, ‘What am I really interested in?’”This penchant for niche ideas is evident in an album that is dense and genre-defying. “Party Gator” is largely inspired by “What Now?,” a 2016 album from the experimental musician Jon Bap, in which the drums feel deliberately out of sync.“You’re just running with whatever hunch you’ve got that this might be fun,” Acaster said of his approach to the creative process.Tom Jamieson for The New York Times“He’s just a freak and he likes weird music and I think we both like a lot of weird stuff,” said NNAMDÏ, a Chicago-based musician who raps on the album, in a video interview.Making the album was a labor of love, an all-consuming project that stretched over two years. On the album Acaster plays drums, served as a producer and curated a 40-strong roster of collaborators, including the singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos and the rapper Open Mike Eagle. He would listen to a drum track he’d created, figure out who he wanted on it, and reach out. Acaster had interviewed some of the musicians he wanted to work with for his book, “Perfect Sound,” and around half of them he cold emailed. “I just got very very lucky that people would say yes,” he said.Taking place mostly during Britain’s pandemic lockdowns, the collaborations happened over email and Zoom, through which Acaster was able to foster an environment of experimentation. “For the majority of it, he just told me to do whatever I felt like doing,” NNAMDÏ said. “He kind of took what I did and manipulated it. It is still what I did, but he added his own little textures to it and chopped up some things and kind of freaked it, made it cool.”With an album that may not appeal to mainstream audiences, Acaster is levelheaded about what its reception could look like. “I really hope that it finds its audience, and the people who would like it discover it and get into it,” he said.In many ways, the making of the album is a mark of success for Acaster.“I love it all and I love it as much as any of my stand-up shows, anything I’ve done,” he said. More

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      Karol G and Romeo Santos’s Sensual Goodbye, and More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Morgan Wallen, Yves Tumor, Lankum and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Karol G and Romeo Santos, ‘X Si Volvemos’Two Latin pop songwriters who thrive on breakup drama — Karol G, from Colombia, and Romeo Santos, a stadium-scale headliner from the Bronx with Dominican and Puerto Rican roots — arrange a last tryst in “X Si Volvemos.” Karol G points out “No funcionamos” — “We don’t work” — and “We’re a disaster in love,” but she admits, “In bed we understand each other.” He tells her their relationship is toxic, but wonders if he’s addicted to their intimacy. The musical turf, a reggaeton beat, is hers, but the temptation is mutual. JON PARELESMorgan Wallen, ‘Last Night’The distance between acoustic-guitar sincerity and electronic artifice is nearing zero. Morgan Wallen, the canny country superstar, has what sounds like a loop of acoustic guitar — three chords — backing him as he sings about a whiskey-fueled reconciliation: “Baby, baby something’s telling this ain’t over yet,” he sings, sounding very smug. PARELESSunny War, ‘No Reason’Sunny War, a songwriter from Nashville born Sydney Lyndella Ward, sings about a flawed but striving character — maybe herself — in “No Reason,” from her new album, “Anarchist Gospel.” She observes, “You’re an angel, you’re a demon/Ain’t got no rhyme, ain’t go no reason,” as folk-rock fingerpicking, a jaunty backbeat and hoedown handclaps carry her through the contradictions. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘Echolalia’There’s a dreamlike quality about “Echolalia,” the breathy, percussive new single from Yves Tumor’s wildly titled upcoming record “Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds).” Basically a three-minute swoon, “Echolalia” finds the 21st-century glam rocker dazed with infatuation and, however briefly, cosplaying conventionality: “Just put me in a house with a dog and a shiny car,” Tumor sings breathlessly. “We can play the part.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJames Brandon Lewis, ‘Someday We’ll All Be Free’When Donny Hathaway sang his “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” it was determinedly encouraging. On his new album, “Eye of I,” the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis makes it both militant and questioning. Chris Hoffman’s electric cello snarls distorted drones and Max Jaffe’s drumming moves between marching-band crispness and rumbling eruptions, while Lewis and Kirk Knuffke, on cornet, share the melody, go very separate ways simultaneously and then reunite, contentious but comradely. PARELESUnknown Mortal Orchestra, ‘Layla’The New Zealander Ruban Nielson, leader of the tuneful lo-fi psych-rockers Unknown Mortal Orchestra, is known for being a prolific songwriter, so it makes sense that the band’s forthcoming “V,” its first release in five years, will be a double album. “Layla” is full of warmth, with a soulful vocal melody, Nielson’s nimble guitar playing and the band’s signature fuzzy tones all contributing to an enveloping atmosphere. “Layla, let’s get out of this broken place,” Nielson sings, conjuring an alluring elsewhere. ZOLADZTemps featuring Joana Gomila, Nnamdï, Shamir and Quelle Chris, ‘Bleedthemtoxins’“Do not fear mistakes,” floating voices advise for the first minute of “Bleedthemtoxins,” a bemused miscellany overseen by James Acaster, an English comedian, actor and podcaster turned musical auteur. His debut album as Temps, “Party Gator Purgatory,” is due in May. The studio-built track is loosely held together by a loping beat, but it rambles at will through Beach Boys-like harmonies, free-form raps and small-group jazz, all thoroughly and cleverly whimsical. PARELESDebby Friday featuring Uñas, ‘I Got It’“I Got It,” from the Toronto musician Debby Friday, is an explosive, pounding, relentlessly calisthenic dance-floor banger with attitude to spare. A pulsating beat flickers like a strobe light as Friday and Chris Vargas of the duo Pelada, appearing here as Uñas, trade braggadocious bilingual verses. “Let mama give you what you need,” Friday shrieks before calmly assuring, “I got it.” ZOLADZCaroline Polachek, ‘Blood and Butter’Sheer, euphoric infatuation courses through “Blood and Butter,” the latest single previewing the album Caroline Polachek is releasing on Valentine’s Day: “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.” Polachek and her co-producer, Danny L Harle, constructed a song that starts out in wonderment — “Where did you come from, you?” — on its way to declarations like “What I want is to walk beside you, needing nothing.” Springy hand percussion, a bagpipe solo and multilayered la-las sustain the bliss. PARELESRaye, ‘Environmental Anxiety.’Most of the songs on “My 21st Century Blues,” the impressive new album by the English songwriter Raye, are about personal struggles: with romance, with the music business, with drugs, with exploitation. But “Environmental Activity” views the generational big picture: a poisoned planet, a toxic online culture, a rigged economy. The song is elegant in its bitterness, opening with a sweetly sung indictment — “How did you ever think it wasn’t bound to happen?” — leading to a snappy dance beat, a matter-of-fact, half-rapped list of dire situations and a poised chorale sung over church bells and sirens: “We’re all gonna die/What do we do before it happens?” PARELESYuniverse, ‘L8 Nite Txts’Yuniverse, an Indonesian-Australian songwriter, collaborated with the producer Corin Roddick, of Purity Ring, to make a familiar situation shimmery and surreal: “You’re smiling through your lies again/You’re telling me she’s just a friend,” she sings. Her voice is high and breathy, with hyperpop computer tweaks; it floats amid harplike plinks and fragments of deep, twitchy, drill-like beats. Even in the synthetic soundscape, heartache comes through. PARELESJana Horn, ‘After All This Time’The Texas folk singer Jana Horn makes music of arresting delicacy; her songs take shape like intricately woven spider webs. “After All This Time,” from a new album due in April, is a hushed, gently off-kilter meditation full of Horn’s peculiar koans: “Looking out the window,” she sings in a wispy voice, “is not the same as opening the door.” ZOLADZLankum, ‘Go Dig My Grave’The Irish band Lankum amplifies the bleakest tidings of Celtic traditional songs, leaning into minor modes and unswerving drones, harnessing traditional instruments and studio technology. “Go Dig My Grave,” an old song that traveled from the British Isles to Appalachia, is death-haunted and implacable. It begins with Radie Peat singing a cappella, insisting “tell this world that I died for love.” The band joins her with somber vocal harmonies, tolling drone tones, clanking percussion and baleful fiddle slides, a crescendo of dread. PARELES More

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      in Television

      Best Comedy of 2021

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      The return of indoor shows brought comedy closer to normal, and there were plenty of specials from Bo Burnham, Tig Notaro, Roy Wood Jr. and others.From left, a scene from Tig Notaro’s HBO special “Drawn,” Susie Essman in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Tiffany Haddish in Netflix’s “Bad Trip.”From left: HBO; John P. Johnson/HBO; Dimitry Elyashkevich/NetflixComedy got dangerous in 2021. Not cancel-culture dangerous (though after creating one of the loudest controversies of the year with his Netflix special “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle might disagree). More like “I might contract Covid at this show” dangerous. After a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime shutdown of live performances, audiences returned to indoor shows, and comics picked up where they left off. These are some of the highlights.Best Punch Line Inside a Club to Defuse Covid AnxietyOne night at the Comedy Cellar, Dave Attell told a guy in the crowd: “I’m glad you’re wearing a mask because we need a survivor to tell the story.” But in the basement of the West Side Comedy Club, Bill Burr took down the elephant in the room even quicker: “I’m happy to be down here working on a new variant.”Best Experimental ComedyTig Notaro is not the first stand-up to turn herself into a cartoon, but her “Drawn” HBO special was the most ambitious attempt, using a different animated style for each bit — realistic one moment, whimsically fantastical the next, veering from the perspective of the audience to a cockroach. Imagine if Pixar did stand-up.A scene from “Drawn,” an animated HBO special from Tig Notaro, which uses a different animated style for each bit.HBOBest Musical ComedyThis was the year that visual humor caught up to the verbal kind in comedy specials. Bo Burnham invented a new comic vocabulary with his Netflix hit “Inside,” a filmic meditation on isolation, the internet and ironic distance itself. It was so tuneful and thematically well made that a blockbuster musical is surely in his future.Best Opening BitIn “Imperfect Messenger,” a Comedy Central special packed with refined comic gems, Roy Wood Jr. begins by discussing things that are not racist but feel racist. Things that have, as he puts it while rubbing his thumb and his fingers together as if he’s grasping at something, “the residue of racism” — like when white people use the word “forefathers,” or when you go somewhere and there’s “too many American flags,” which he calls “too much freedom.” He rubs his fingers and thumb again and asks: “How many American flags equal one Confederate flag?”Roy Wood Jr. in his Comedy Central special “Imperfect Messenger.”Sean Gallagher/Comedy CentralBest DirectingWith a jangling horror soundtrack, claustrophobic close-ups and the menacing humor of a Pinter play, the movie “Shiva Baby” offers a modern spin on the postgraduate angst of “The Graduate.” Its director, Emma Seligman, is the most promising cringe-comedy auteur to come along in years.Best MemoirIn the Audible original “May You Live in Interesting Times,” Laraine Newman describes studying with Marcel Marceau, dating Warren Zevon and farting in front of Prince. She gives you what you want in a “Saturday Night Live” memoir, but what makes her audiobook excel is her nimble voice, impersonating a collection of characters, none more charismatic than her own.Best Documentary“Mentally Al” catches up with the unsung comic Al Lubel when he’s near broke, disheveled and struggling with an impossibly dysfunctional relationship with his mother. Onstage, however, he’s consistently hilarious, even when the audience doesn’t think so. After countless documentaries about how a really funny person became a star, there’s finally a revelatory one exploring why one didn’t.Best Political ComedySometimes the most powerful punch is a jab. In “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion” — an understated, humane and deeply funny examination of the experience of having an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion — Alison Leiby uses observational comedy to reframe a political question at a critical moment for reproductive rights.The comedian Alison Leiby performing at Union Hall in Brooklyn in September.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBest Keystone Cops UpdateNot since Chaplin has running from the police been as funny as Tiffany Haddish in “Bad Trip,” a scripted movie on Netflix that includes unscripted scenes, such as Haddish emerging from under a prison bus dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forcing a male bystander into an uncomfortable decision.Best SpecialThere’s never been a better year for handsome comics making jokes about their fraying mental health. Along with Bo Burnham unraveling onscreen and John Mulaney describing the depths of his addiction in live shows, the British comic James Acaster delivered his masterwork, “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” on Vimeo. It’s a nearly three-hour show, wildly funny and deeply felt, that mocks how easily mental struggles can be turned into entertainment before doing just that.Best Arena SpectacleThere were prop missiles, shining diamonds and a massive sign that announced “World War III” in lights. I’m still not sure what the battle was about, but as soon as the born entertainer Katt Williams charged into the Barclays Center, yellow sneakers a blur, it was clear he had won.Best Netflix DebutNaomi Ekperigin is a natural — a comic that can make you laugh at just about anything: summing up Nancy Meyers movies, vaccines, clichés (why L.A. sucks), the way she says “OK.” In a half-hour set, as part of the collection “The Standups” that will be released on Netflix on Dec. 29, she even has two different jokes about the color beige that earn laughs. It’s a delight.Naomi Ekperigin performs in Season 3 of “The Standups,” coming to Netflix on Dec. 29.Clifton Prescod/NetflixBest Grand Unified TheoryIn describing how the porn industry pioneered everything on the internet, from user-generated content to diversity casting, Danny Jolles, in his endearing and far too overlooked Amazon Prime Video special, “Six Parts,” finds a new way to describe the fragmentation and filtering of the news: fetishes. All news, he argues, has become “kink news,” catering to our narrow, even perverse whims.Best Inside Comedy ParodyLast year ended with the release of “An Evening With Tim Heidecker,” a parody of edgy stand-up comedy that was a bit too vague to really resonate. Now, Heidecker hit the bull’s-eye with his recent YouTube spoof of The Joe Rogan Experience; its 12-hour running time (really one hour on a loop) is its first joke. So precise, so meticulously sensitive to the details, to the cadence and lingo of that podcast, his conversation with two sycophantic guests (played with pitch-perfect smarm by Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh) is a master class in sounding absolutely earth-shattering while saying precisely nothing.Best Argument for the Staying Power of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’No comedy that started in 2000 should still be this funny. Part of the reason for this feat is the consistently elite supporting performances, none more important than Susie Essman, who shined this year. Famous for her volcanic fury, she can do dry and understated just as well. I have not laughed louder at a television show this year than after hearing her say the word “caftan.”Susie Essman, left, plays Susie Greene in the long-running HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”John P. Johnson/ HBOMost Underrated Star ComicJim Gaffigan has put out so much material for so long that he’s easy to take for granted. The fact that he’s family friendly probably doesn’t help his press either. His dynamite new special, “Comedy Monster” (premiering Tuesday on Netflix), may be his best, showing Gaffigan at his most dyspeptic. It suits him. Who would have thought that he would so satisfyingly eviscerate marching bands and parades? Or have the most unexpected prop joke of the year (keep an eye out for a grand piano). More

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      Can You Love a Stand-Up Special About Loathing?

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      James Acaster’s “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999” is an outstanding show about the worst year in his life. (His girlfriend left him for Mr. Bean, and it went downhill from there.)In his superb new stand-up special, “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” James Acaster describes the worst year of his life: After a shattering breakup, suicidal thoughts and a mental breakdown, he started seeing a therapist for the first time. “Because I’m British and that’s what it takes,” he says. “My whole life had to fall apart before I’d talk about my feelings.”Acaster’s show, which toured New York several years ago but only became available for purchase on Vimeo recently, takes aim at England’s famously stiff upper lip. The theme that emerges after two sprawling, ticklishly funny hours of his new show is not just the challenge of talking about mental health but also the perils of stoicism.There’s nothing worse than sweeping generalizations about the difference between American and British comedy, which is my way of excusing myself for making one: There’s a narrative and thematic ambition that you find in British comics like Daniel Kitson, Josie Long and Acaster that is less common among comics here. Perhaps it’s because they cut their teeth putting on hourlong shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as opposed to doing short club sets. In any event, Acaster packs his jokes into a tricky structure in which ideas cohere through metaphors and digressions.In the first act — this is a special with an intermission — he tells of mentioning an emotional breakdown on his “Great British Bake Off” appearance that went viral. He mocks how quickly mental illness turns into entertainment in a way intended to make the audience laugh, and when they do, he gets angry at them. Then they laugh at that.There’s a self-awareness to the way Acaster needles the crowd, which he does repeatedly, mocking his fans and describing his relationship with them as demeaning. His irreverent comedy delights in insulting the audience. “Night after night, I’m the one in the room who knows the most about comedy and I’ve got to win your approval?” he says exasperatedly.There’s purpose to turning his British fans into part of the show. English icons are regular targets of his. He makes the sharpest comic attack on Brexit that I’ve seen and his agile skewering of the transphobia of Ricky Gervais has also gone viral. Acaster already has an almost stereotypically English brand of comedy: cerebral and word drunk, wrapped inside layers of irony and biting sarcasm. It’s rare to see a stand-up show filled with intimate stories that have the feel of a State of the Nation special.Until “Cold Lasagne,” Acaster was best known for four Netflix specials that he released on the same day in 2018. The first and best episode described a girlfriend leaving him after saying: “I love you but I don’t feel like I know you.” It’s the skeleton key to that show, and many of the rest of its jokes provide evidence for her claim. His playful observational comedy keeps the audience at a distance, even claiming at one point that he was actually a police officer in disguise as a comic, a line he stuck to throughout the show. Such commitment to ridiculous conceits is part of the fun of his work.His new special also finds laughs in personas, strutting onstage at the start in sunglasses and knocking cups off a table, swearing at the crowd before grabbing the microphone in a spoof of swagger: “Let’s start with the headlines: I curse now.” He describes another girlfriend’s explanation for a breakup, but this time, the reason is about his refusal to get help, how his sadness spreads. This show is far more confessional than the previous ones. Whereas his past work avoided his private life, this one digs uncomfortably deep.In the second act, Acaster tells three stories of unhappily severed relationships: with his agent, his therapist and his girlfriend. Each is a virtuosic set piece that leans on a certain anxiety over whether he is going to say too much.The highlight is the breakup, a tale that focuses on how his girlfriend went on to date Rowan Atkinson, the comedian best known for playing the English comic institution Mr. Bean, a specialist in bumbling physical pratfalls. In a sad-sack sulk, Acaster describes the peculiarly hilarious horror of being a young comic “left for Mr. Bean,” a phrase he says over and over again with the urgency of violins in a horror movie. It’s a masterwork of cringe comedy, one he consistently digresses from to anticipate the criticism that he is being bitter and petty.Acaster is no truth-telling comic who doesn’t care what people think. He seems concerned about coming off well, but uses his own sensitivity to add another layer of tension to his stories. In explaining the fallout with his agent, he makes a big show of being fair, so much so that he says he will only tell the story from his point of view. It begins: “The first thing you have to know is I ruined everything and I did it for a laugh.”It’s a familiar trick, making someone look ridiculous by imagining the terrible logic of their thinking, but few have committed to it so fully or for as long. Many of Acaster’s jokes have a theatrical quality, and he incorporates not just act-outs, but also elaborate pantomime with props. He even makes a short play out of ordering food at a restaurant to illustrate his opinion on Brexit.He acts out his fights with gusto, and in his dispute with his agent, he reminds you of his struggles with mental health that led him to the therapist, which results in the show’s most explosive fight. When he takes out his phone to read her private text messages to him, he smiles like someone enjoying the pleasure of playing dirty.This is a show that clearly has gone through many incarnations, which may be why with your purchase of “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” you also get another 40-minute performance on similar themes. Cold lasagne is actually never mentioned but even “hate myself” seems odd, since there’s so much other loathing going on here.Muffled anger is sometimes a setup, other times a punchline, but always essential to this show. At one point, Acaster says he has toured all over the country, adding, “Let me tell you: I hate Britain, absolutely hate it.”Then he pivots, apologetically, ever alert to the precise arrangement of words. “I phrased that wrong,” he says, pausing. “I hate British people.” More