Mellencamp, John

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares109 Views

    A Knockout Country-Rap Crossover, and 13 More New Songs

    by

    Hear tracks by Nilüfer Yanya, Gayle, John Mellencamp 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.Kidd G featuring YNW BSlime, ‘Left Me’There’s been an increasing amount of crossover between country and hip-hop in recent years, though often the relationship between the two influences can feel strained. But here’s a collaboration between two sing-rappers, both teenagers, that sounds utterly unforced: Kidd G, who’s making the kind of naturally syncretic music Nashville should be inching toward, and YNW BSlime, the younger brother of the incarcerated star YNW Melly. Kidd G taps into his Juice WRLD influences, with pitter-patter syllables and scraped-up singing, and YNW BSlime’s guest verse is chilling, and sung with disarming innocence: “Two years my brother’s been gone/And I’ve never/felt so alone.” It sounds like the No. 1 song of 2030. JON CARAMANICACharlie Puth, ‘Light Switch’A peppy song about romantic dyspepsia, “Light Switch” is a lightly manqué version of the sort of electric funk-pop that made Charlie Puth’s 2018 album “Voicenotes” so appealing. The singing is slightly less committed, and the lyric construction not buttoned quite as tight, and there’s a light hyperpop-esque treatment on the vocals that makes Puth sound like hes lamenting from the inside of the synthesizer. But the anxiety of the words is pointed, and the sugar-rush production scans as breathlessness. CARAMANICANilüfer Yanya, ‘Midnight Sun’Escalation suggests obsession in “Midnight Sun” from a new Nilüfer Yanya album, “Painless,” that’s due in March. “Maybe I can’t care too much/I can’t clean this up,” she sings. “Get me off this spinning wheel.” Both the acoustic guitar chords and the drumbeat feel looped, with more than a hint of Radiohead, but other sounds arrive — acoustic and electric guitars — sounding hand-played and offering possibilities of escape. It’s not clear whether she’ll use them. JON PARELESGayle, ‘Ur Just Horny’The quantum guitar-chord crescendo of grunge — quiet-loud-MUCH LOUDER — gets a full, furious workout in Gayle’s “Ur Just Horny,” the teenage songwriter’s follow-up to “Abcdefu.” As the stop-start guitars stack up, she spells things out: “You don’t wanna be my friend/You just wanna see me naked/Again.” PARELESEcco2K and Bladee, ‘Amygdala’Ecco2K and Bladee are members of the Drain Gang, a Swedish pop collective that has a sideline in fashion modeling. Their latest collaboration, produced by the German musician Mechatok, is a slice of pointillist hyperpop that treats voices and synthesizer tones alike as bits of blipping staccato counterpoint and computer-compressed nuggets of cosmic ambition: “Destroy and create, dreaming in the dream,” Bladee croons at the end, before the machines shut off. PARELESSofia Kourtesis featuring Manu Chao, ‘Estación Esperanza’Sofia Kourtesis makes songs that pulsate with the hope of a new day. “Estación Esperanza” is a master class in culling citations, opening with the chants of a Peruvian protest against homophobia before vocal samples of Manu Chao’s “Me Gustas Tu” glitch into focus, interspersed with vibrant bird calls and a steady horn. When Kourtesis’ own humming comes into focus, a single moment opens to infinity. ISABELIA HERRERAINVT, ‘Anaconda’The Miami duo INVT lets genres slip through their fingers on its latest track. A fever pitch dembow riddim lifted from Jamaican dancehall thumps to life. A vaporous echo and fleshy moan whisper under the production. There is the steady clang of a cowbell, the shake of a maraca. Is it reggaeton? Minimal techno? Does it even matter? HERRERAKey Glock, ‘Proud’Young Dolph, who was shot and killed in his Memphis hometown in November, had mentored and collaborated with his cousin, Key Glock. Key Glock’s tribute song, “Proud,” is the first single from the compilation “Paper Route Empire Presents: Long Live Dolph,” and it’s burly in presentation but the lyrics ache: “I can get it back in blood but still I can’t get back the time.” In the video, Key Glock raps his regrets at the site of the killing, a stark choice. CARAMANICAJohn Mellencamp, ‘I Am a Man That Worries’John Mellencamp stays grim and grizzled throughout his new album, “Strictly a One-Eyed Jack.” In “I Am a Man That Worries,” he’s worried about everything and belligerent about it: “You better get out of my way,” he growls. It’s a vintage-style blues stop with slide guitar and fiddle flanking his voice, and though he proclaims his bitter solitude, he has a crowd shouting alongside him by the end. PARELESDaniel Rossen, ‘Shadow in the Frame’Nervous energy courses through “Shadow in the Frame,” the first single from the solo album due in April from Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear. Rossen played every instrument except drums (by Grizzly Bear’s Christopher Bear) in the intricate arrangement, including strings and woodwinds. The song is a meditation on ephemerality and catastrophe — “You will watch us flash and fade and get torn apart,” he sings — carried by a restless, circling phrase that migrates among guitars and vocals, changing contour but never resolving, hinting at hope that keeps moving out of reach. PARELESUwade, ‘Do You See the Light Around Me?’The songwriter Uwade explores infatuation in “Do You See the Light Around Me?” It’s a single on Sylvan Esso’s label, Psychic Hotline, and as it cycles through four chords with voices and instruments arriving and disappearing, it echoes that group’s mixture of sparse electronic beats and human warmth. But Uwade brings her own personality, at once uncertain and embracing. PARELESJana Horn, ‘Jordan’The Austin-based songwriter Jana Horn keeps her voice small and whispery throughout “Optimism,” the debut album she releases this week. “Jordan” is the album’s eeriest, most exploratory, most determined song: a steady-pulsing march with electronics at the fringes, an enigmatic biblical narrative about a quest, an ordeal, a dilemma, a revelation. PARELESGui Duvignau, featuring Bill Frisell, ‘Tristeza e Solidão’The bassist Gui Duvignau begins his take on “Tristeza e Solidão” — a torch song by the Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell and the poet Vinícius de Moraes — unaccompanied, sounding plangent and contemplative as he lets low notes resound. The guitarist Bill Frisell, featured as a special guest, enters with the drummer Jeff Hirschfield, and trades the song’s somber melody back and forth with Duvignau. The track is overcast and melancholy and slow, lacking the quiet, motor-like samba groove of Powell’s and de Moraes’s original version but sounding just as haunted. This performance comes from Duvignau’s latest album, “Baden,” a tribute to the influential guitarist, who died in 2000. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKiko Villamizar, ‘Sembrá El Maíz’Cumbia rhythms, carried on drums stroked by hands and mallets, lift up a reverb-shaken guitar and the sleepy-eyed voice of Kiko Villamizar. “Sembrá El Maíz” (“Plant the Corn”) is an original urging hard work and patience, even in the face of climate catastrophe. By the end he’s full-throated, trading call-and-response vocals with the band. A musician, educator and organizer now based in Austin, Villamizar grew up primarily on a coffee farm in Colombia and later traveled the country collecting songs. When Los Destellos and Los Wemblers de Iquitos started making Peruvian jungle-surf like this in the 1960s, it rang cosmopolitan; today, writing similar songs, a younger musician from the Colombian side is building on what’s become a tradition of its own. RUSSONELLO More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Kane Brown and H.E.R.’s Genre-Melting Duet, and 11 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen, Ashnikko, Susana Baca 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.Kane Brown and H.E.R., ‘Blessed & Free’Listen to the genres crumbling. Is this country? Rock? Trap? R&B? “I don’t hurt nobody, so just let me be,” Kane Brown sings with H.E.R., over slow electric-guitar arpeggios and programmed beats. In a metronomic, electronic grid, human voices still insist, “As long as I’m alive, I’m free.” JON PARELESJohn Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen, ‘Wasted Days’John Mellencamp, 69, got Bruce Springsteen, 72, to share his song “Wasted Days,” a weary, resolute, guitar-strumming acknowledgment of age. “Who’s counting now, these last remaining years?/How many minutes do we have here?” Mellencamp rasps; “The end is coming, it’s almost here,” adds an even huskier Springsteen. A twangy, broad-stroke guitar solo from Springsteen can’t dispel the looming mortality. Meanwhile Bob Dylan, 80, has tour plans next month. PARELESAshnikko, ‘Panic Attacks in Paradise’“They call me Polly Pessimism, I’m a macabre Barbie”: The more contemplative side of the clangorous pop futurist Ashnikko is jagged, too. Her beautiful new single is warmly paced and driven by soft guitar, a contrast to her best known songs, which tend toward shriek and squeak. But here she’s revealing the hurt beneath the excess, a life spent “hyperventilating under candy skies.” JON CARAMANICATotally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, ‘The Distance’A dreamy but viscous slab of moody house music from the British D.J.-producer Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, brimming with 1980s futurism and 1990s reluctance. CARAMANICALimp Bizkit, ‘Dad Vibes’Just seemed important to let you know that a Limp Bizkit song called “Dad Vibes” exists. It’s fine but as ambivalent as you might expect — can you really vibe-check dads when the dad is you? CARAMANICASusana Baca, ‘Negra Del Alma’Susana Baca, 77, is a national treasure in Peru, where she’s long worked to preserve and revive elements of Afro-Peruvian folklore. Her take on “Negra Del Alma,” a traditional Andean song from the Ayacucho region, comes from Baca’s forthcoming album, “Palabras Urgentes.” She delivers the lyrics — which speak plaintively of the prejudice often directed at Black Peruvians — in her unwaveringly elegant alto; a marimba mixes with hand drums, bass, flutes and a corps of Peruvian saxophones, letting the rhythm amble ahead. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSega Bodega, ‘Angel on My Shoulder’Sega Bodega — the Irish electronic musician Salvador Navarrete — jump-cuts amid heaving, mourning and jitters in “Angel on My Shoulder.” The track opens with brusque, distorted bass tones, then switches to an electronic elegy, with an androgynous, filtered voice that considers “children growing older, friends you never knew.” It moves on to double-time percussion, warped choral harmonies, a low-fi piano, a transposition upward: multiple mutations that don’t diminish the sense of loss. PARELESHyd, ‘Skin 2 Skin’Hyd is Hayden Dunham, who first appeared in the hyperpop PC Music collective as QT, the android-like face of a fictitious energy drink. In “Skin 2 Skin,” produced by Caroline Polachek, she toggles between literally whispered verses with sharp rhymes — “acid rain/hurricane” and big, chiming, major-chord choruses, playing with every pop-song reflex. PARELESMonica Martin, ‘Go Easy Kid’Monica Martin, who sang with the group Phox and went on to collaborate with James Blake in “Show Me,” croons like an older sister over a retro, orchestral arrangement in “Go Easy Kid.” There are electronic echoes, just to prove she’s contemporary. But there’s earned wisdom in her voice and words as she offers self-recriminations followed by wide-open encouragement: “Just accept we’ll never know.” PARELESMatthew Stevens, ‘Can Am’The guitarist Matthew Stevens has been a first-call jazz accompanist for the past 10 years, and he’s worked closely with Esperanza Spalding for at least half that time. Embedded in “Pittsburgh,” Stevens’s new album of cozy, solo-acoustic tunes — written and recorded during the coronavirus shutdown — is a reminder of his close working relationship with Spalding. “Can Am” will ring familiar to those who’ve listened to her latest release, “Songwrights Apothecary Lab”: It is the underlying composition on “Formwela 11,” from that album. With a melody almost entirely consisting of ticker-tape eighth-notes, spiraling between harmonic modes, “Can Am” might feel like an athletic workout if not for the gentle control of Stevens’s playing, as graceful and understated as the guitar great Ralph Towner’s. RUSSONELLOCorrina Repp, ‘Count the Tear Drops’It’s a simple guitar waltz; it’s also a mulitracked choral edifice. The songwriter Corrina Repp, working on her own during the pandemic, constructed a meditation that acknowledges how fleeting it might be, but also how moving. PARELESHoly Other, ‘Lieve’Holy Other’s music possesses a universe of haunting drama. On “Lieve,” the cult British producer collages spectral whispers, deep sighs and ghostly stutters. Skin-prickling, cavernous synths expand and echo into nothingness. A lonely sax flutters to the surface. It may have been nine years since he last released music, but Holy Other’s world remains as arresting and impenetrable as ever. ISABELIA HERRERA More