Mendes, Shawn

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    Shawn Mendes and Tainy’s Summer Breeze, and 12 More New Songs

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    Hear tracks by Circuit des Yeux, Cimafunk and George Clinton, Alice Longyu Gao 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.Shawn Mendes and Tainy, ‘Summer of Love’It’s amazing that more English-speaking pop songwriters haven’t latched on to Tainy, the Puerto Rican producer behind globe-spanning hits by Bad Bunny, Selena Gomez, J Balvin and many others. Tainy puts a reggaeton beat, bachata-tinged guitar syncopations and deep sustained bass lines behind Shawn Mendes as he croons short, breathy, calculated phrases about a remembered season of sensual delights. The title has completely freed itself from the 1960s. JON PARELESThe Rolling Stones, ‘Living in the Heart of Love’Sure, it’s a leftover, and it’s obvious why it was shelved. “Living in the Heart of Love” is a vault track to be released on an expanded 40th-anniversary reissue of “Tattoo You,” something to promote when the Stones tour this fall (with Steve Jordan substituting for Charlie Watts on drums). The song is an obvious “Brown Sugar” knockoff, with Mick Jagger striking an uncommonly conciliatory pose as he woos someone: “I’ll play dirty, I’ll play clean/But I’ll be damned if I’ll be mean,” he contends. (Really?) It’s second- or third-tier Stones, and it nearly falls apart halfway through, but the way the band keeps charging ahead is more than enough fun. PARELESParquet Courts, ‘Walking at a Downtown Pace’Parquet Courts are back with a vibrant ode to New York City — and a chronicle of a busy mind traversing its streets. “Treasure the crowds that once made me act so annoyed,” Andrew Savage sings on the first single from the band’s forthcoming album, “Sympathy for Life,” “Sometimes I wonder how long till I’m a face in one.” As ever, his observations are peppered with the robotic banalities of modern existence (“pick out a movie, a sandwich from a screen”), but the song’s snaking groove, persistent beat and shout-along chorus are all teeming with life. LINDSAY ZOLADZLily Konigsberg, ‘That’s The Way I Like It’Lily Konigsberg is a member of the freewheeling art-rock trio Palberta, but over the past few years she’s also been releasing a steady stream of eclectic-yet-infectious solo material on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. (A compilation of that work, titled “The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now,” arrived earlier this year.) “That’s the Way I Like It,” from her forthcoming solo debut “Lily We Need to Talk Now,” is smoother around the edges than Palberta’s spiky grooves, but it’s still got ample personality to spare. “That’s the way I like it, you can’t do anything about it,” Konigsberg intones with a sugary defiance, addressing someone who’s been disrespecting her boundaries. As far as assertions of selfhood go, this one’s particularly catchy. ZOLADZCircuit des Yeux, ‘Dogma’Haley Fohr’s voice has an entrancing power. As Circuit des Yeux, she composes haunting atmospheres that augment its force. “Dogma,” the first offering from her sixth album, “-io” pulls the listener along with a steady, hypnotic beat, overtop of which her shape-shifting vocals move from a low drone to a keening croon with remarkable ease. “Tell me how to see the light,” she sings, as if yearning for salvation, but at other moments in the song she sounds like an eerily commanding cult leader. ZOLADZCimafunk and George Clinton, ‘Funk Aspirin’Cimafunk puts a heavy dash of classic Afro-Cuban rhythm into his throbbing dance music, but he’s also been a longtime fan of American funk, and he recently sought out George Clinton, an idol of his since childhood, for a hang and a recording session. The result is “Funk Aspirin,” a bilingual paean to the healing powers of rhythm, taken at a coolly grooving medium tempo and recorded at Clinton’s Tallahassee, Fla., home studio, where the music video was also shot. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLONaujawanan Baidar, ‘Shola-e Jawed’Thinking about Afghanistan this week? Here’s a traditional Afghan melody in modern guise: distorted, multitracked and surrounded in effects, yet still speaking from its home. PARELESPieri, ‘Quien Paga’Born in Mexico and now based in New York City, Pieri chant-rap-sings over a cranked-up, swooping synthesizer bass line with ratcheting drum machines at its peaks in “Quien Paga” (“Who Pays”). It’s a brash, assaultive kiss-off with electronic muscle as she multitracks her voice to announce, rightly, “They tell me that I’m pretty, and I also have a flow that kills.” PARELESAlice Longyu Gao, ‘Kanpai’For the uninitiated: Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Alice Longyu Gao, a glitchy hyperpop paradise full of killer hooks and knowing, oddball humor. A D.J. and producer who was born in China and later moved to New York, then Los Angeles, Gao has recently worked with such similarly brash kindred spirits as Alice Glass and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady (who produced her deliriously fun 2020 single “Rich Bitch Juice”). “Kanpai” — “cheers” in Chinese, Japanese and Korean — is a total sugar rush, blending the pop excess of Rina Sawayama with the electro-freneticism of Sophie. “My name on your lips like liquor lipstick, everybody’s talking about me,” Gao intones, a semi-absurd but self-evident declaration from someone who’s clearly already a global superstar in her own mind. ZOLADZTopdown Dialectic, ‘B1’The taciturn electronic musician who records as Topdown Dialectic previews “Vol. 3,” an album due in October, with “B1,” a rhythm-forward track that surrounds a roboticized samba beat with sporadic cross-rhythms and chords that bubble up from below, then vanish before leading anywhere. It’s simultaneously propulsive and evasive. PARELESMaggie Rose, ‘For Your Consideration’On her third album, “Have a Seat,” the Nashville-based songwriter Maggie Rose seeks reconciliation and balance: between friends, between lovers, between ideologies. She recorded, like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., with session musicians rooted in soul. The slow-rolling “For Your Consideration” chides a judgmental companion — “Doesn’t mean it’s all my fault ’cause you say it’s so,” she observes — but also, in a swelling chorus, announces, “I wish that I could borrow your eyes/Maybe that would open my mind.” She’s only calling for fairness, not domination. PARELESOrla Gartland, ‘Things That I’ve Learned’The meter, mostly, is a syncopated and eccentric 5/4, though it shifts at whim; the attitude is terse and businesslike, but sisterly. The Irish-born, England-based songwriter Orla Gartland, 26, an online presence for more than a decade, dispenses advice in “Things That I’ve Learned” on her long-burgeoning debut album, “Woman on the Internet.” She warns against consumerism, comparisons and artificial peer pressure; she gradually stacks up electric guitar riffs and then breaks them down to a little percussion and a lone, undaunted voice. PARELESLee Morgan, ‘Absolutions (July 10, 1970; Set 2)’Starting on the night of his 32nd birthday, not long before his flare-like career would come to an abrupt end, the trumpeter Lee Morgan played a three-day engagement at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, Calif. A live album drawn from these performances became the last LP released during Morgan’s life; its four lengthy tracks are part of the jazz canon. But there was plenty more where those came from, and on Friday Blue Note Records released a mammoth box containing the full recordings: a dozen separate live sets, performed over the course of three nights. It’s dizzying to hear how little the quintet flags, knowing it was playing four sets a night; the unrepentant tension and synced-up control that made “Live at the Lighthouse” a classic is maintained basically throughout the boxed set. A nearly 20-minute version of “Absolutions,” a perilously seesawing, skittering tune written by the group’s bassist, Jymie Merritt, opened the original album. This newly released take, from Set 2 of Night 1, lasts even longer. As Morgan, the tenor saxophonist Bennie Maupin and the pianist Harold Mabern each take lengthy solos, Mickey Roker’s cross-stitched drumming keeps the friction high. RUSSONELLO More

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      Taylor, Billie, Demi, Blackpink: The Pop Star Documentary Boom

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      It used to be that stars had to be reliably famous for a long time before documentary cameras chased them around. But everything is filmed now, anyhow, and pop stars are embracing this sort of serious treatment at earlier phases in their careers.In recent years, that’s meant entries from Taylor Swift, who used it to reset her public politics; Billie Eilish, who reinforced her relentless chill; Shawn Mendes and Ariana Grande, who mostly preened; and Blackpink, which took the chance to reveal more than the usual K-pop group.Perhaps the most extreme example is the current YouTube docu-series “Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil,” a stark and sometimes harrowing retelling of the pop star’s trials with addiction and sexual assault.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the documentary boom parallels the rise in social media self-documentation, how art is deployed in service of purported authenticity, and what happens when the person being documented is more in charge than the director.Guests:Simran Hans, a film critic at The ObserverCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editor More

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      Shawn Mendes Hits No. 1 for the Fourth Time

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ChartsShawn Mendes Hits No. 1 for the Fourth TimeThe pop-rock singer and songwriter’s latest album, “Wonder,” debuted at the top a week before Taylor Swift’s surprise “Evermore” arrives on the chart.Credit…David Livingston/Getty ImagesDec. 14, 2020, 12:27 p.m. ETFive years ago, Shawn Mendes was a fresh-faced 11th-grader from Pickering, Ontario, who had ridden a wave of six-second videos on the defunct app Vine — the proto-TikTok — into a surprise No. 1 debut album.Now, at 22, he is a veteran hitmaker whose four studio LPs have all gone to the top of Billboard’s album chart. His latest, “Wonder,” opened with the equivalent of 89,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen Music, including 47 million streams and 54,000 copies sold as a complete package.Mendes reached No. 1 just in time before Taylor Swift’s “Evermore,” her second quarantine album, which came out on Friday with less than a day’s notice and is expected to have a huge opening on next week’s chart.The rest of this week’s Top 10 is dominated by recurring hits and holiday albums.Bad Bunny’s “El Último Tour del Mundo,” last week’s No. 1, fell to second place in its second week out, while Ariana Grande’s “Positions,” another recent chart topper, is No. 3.Michael Bublé’s “Christmas,” a steady seasonal hit since 2011, is No. 4, and Carrie Underwood’s Christmas album “My Gift,” which had peaked at No. 8 when released in September, rose to No. 5. Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” is No. 7, Pentatonix’s “The Best of Pentatonix Christmas” is No. 8 and Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas” is No. 10.According to Billboard, it is the first time in seven years that five holiday-themed albums were in the Top 10.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Shawn Mendes's 'Wonder': Album Review

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAlbum ReviewShawn Mendes, the Lonely, Uncertain Pop HeartthrobOn “Wonder,” an album of largely bland pop-rock, the 22-year-old sings about the solitude of stardom.Shawn Mendes focuses on the painful parts of fame on his new album, “Wonder.”Credit…Glen LuchfordDec. 8, 2020Perhaps the most time-tested, shopworn but reliable pop star subject matter is “How did I get here?” followed by “Will they let me stay?” Megafame is lonely, leaving sensitive souls to ponder whether they’re worthy of all the attention showered upon them. And megafame is distorting, making it hard to assert your identity when the public-facing nature of your work defines you long before you can define yourself.From that resulting existential uncertainty, Shawn Mendes has made hay. His search — for himself, for love, for approbation, for confidence — has become the most vivid subject of his music. That was true on his self-titled 2018 album — his third full-length, which pulsed with theatrical dolor — and is even more so on his new album, “Wonder,” a maze of occasionally catchy songs about self-doubt and moroseness interspersed with breathless pleas of love.For Mendes, 22, who doesn’t have a firm musical ideology beyond up-tempo pop-rock, threading his album through with anxiety about the fan-star dynamic and the emptiness it masks becomes an aesthetic position. Lyrics like that are desolate, a little tragic; they necessitate a singing style that’s not overly effusive. “You have a million different faces/But they’ll never understand,” he sings at the beginning of the sweetly ponderous “Intro,” the album opener, rendered with torch-song sorrow. That’s followed by the stomping, stirring title track, the song with the most vigor here. He sounds most alive when in agony: “If I’m being real/do I speak my truth or do I filter how I feel?”[embedded content]That sort of loneliness recurs throughout this album: “Call My Friends” is about what happens when there’s no room for a partner on fame’s ride, and “Song for No One” is a blurry photocopy of the angsty songs Mendes leaned into on his last album: “I’m all alone/10 missed calls, a couple texts/None of them are who I’m looking for.”“Wonder” is, overall, much less polished than Mendes’s last album or the one prior, “Illuminate,” released in 2016 and still his best work, which featured oodles of tightly zipped and anxious teen pop-rock. (Though he works with some of the same collaborators, including Kid Harpoon, Nate Mercereau and Scott Harris, notably absent is Teddy Geiger, the songwriter and producer who gave those albums ballast and nerve.) Harry Styles might get the glamorous magazine covers and the thirsty memes, but Mendes in general has been a far more convincing avatar of this approach. Styles’s music suggests a perpetual ambient sonic vision quest, while Mendes at his best has tossed off a series of crisp hits with flourish.On this album, though, his lyrics meander and stop short of true sentiment, and his rhythmic deliveries feel less cohesive. He still has a way with swell, understanding how to inflate his voice from whimper to peal. But on this inconsistent album, rarely does his singing convey depth of feeling. The handful of dippy love songs — “24 Hours,” which chirps like Christmas music, or the sock-hop-ready “305” — don’t match the mood. The only exception is “Look Up at the Stars,” an ambivalent love song about the relationship between idol and idolizers. “The universe is ours/And I’m not gonna let you down,” Mendes sings tepidly, like someone who understands — and is resigned to — how much of that dynamic is beyond his control.The most famous male pop star of the last decade is burdened by a similar ambivalence about success. That would be Justin Bieber, who duets with Mendes on “Monster,” a smoky, smooth mope-off, with the two singers performing a kind of gut check for their fans. “You put me on a pedestal and tell me I’m the best,” Mendes sings, without a flicker of joy.Four years and a couple of lifetimes older than Mendes, Bieber has long been a performer for whom superstardom itself is the raison d’être, with music a distant second (or fifth, or ninth, at least up until this year’s “Changes”). His verse is more tart, more nostril-flare: “Lifting me up, lifting me up, and tearing me down, tearing me down.” He sounds exasperated, over it. An older brother letting his little brother know just how cruel the world can be. He understands he got here, and he’s looking for an exit.Shawn Mendes“Wonder”(Island)AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More