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      Mary McCaslin, Folk Singer Who Lamented the Lost Old West, Dies at 75

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      A songwriter in her own right, she was known for renditions of pop and rock songs, “Pinball Wizard” among them, that made them sound like mountain ballads.Mary McCaslin, a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar, died on Oct. 2 at her home in Hemet, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles. She was 75.The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s, said her husband, Greg Arrufat.Ms. McCaslin got her start in the mid-60s at the Troubadour, the fabled West Hollywood music incubator, performing at its Monday Night Hoots, as the club’s open-mic nights were known, often hosted by Michael Nesmith, who later found fame as a TV Monkee.John McEuen, a founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Penny Nichols, who was then his girlfriend, were frequent stage mates.“We thought for a moment we might be the next big something or other trio,” Mr. McEuen said in a phone interview. “It was a lot of fun for no money. Mary was a unique singer who always sounded like someone on an old country record. Like Iris DeMent before Iris DeMent, or Ginny Hawker. She had a really natural mountain voice for someone who grew up in Southern California — an authentic and very traditional Americana sound.”Ms. McCaslin was strait-laced and focused on her music, Mr. McEuen added. “She was unusual, even at that time in the ’60s, and all she cared about was getting the music as right as possible,” he said.She would become a hard-working folk festival and coffee house favorite, if not a household name. On her first album, “Way Out West,” in 1974, she wrote of gamblers, rounders and outlaws and, in the title song, of heartbreak and disillusionment:My family left home when I was a childTo head out West, all open and wildI couldn’t wait to ride the prairie on a ponyBut we passed over the plains and on downInto the great suburban stucco forestThe people there all held my dreams in jestSomehow I grew to spite themWay out WestThe album cover shows a serious-looking young woman, her face framed by a curtain of long hair and bangs in the style of the day. In its review, Rolling Stone noted her “clear, delicately affecting vocals,” and how her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.”Ms. McCaslin, who also played banjo and ukulele, was self-taught, and her open tuning — tuning the strings to sound like a specific chord, as Joni Mitchell did — distinguished her guitar playing.“While Joni’s tunings were more jazz-inflected,” said Mitch Greenhill, president of Folklore Productions/Fli Artists, who managed Ms. McCaslin and her first husband, the folk singer Jim Ringer, starting in the mid-70s, “Mary’s went the opposite way. They were more angular, more Celtic sounding. And she always put the tunings on her albums, which aspiring musicians always appreciated.”She recorded her albums mostly on Philo, a small independent New England label. One newspaper called her an “L.A. cowgirl who records in Vermont.” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that she was known as “the prairie songstress.”Along with her own songs, Ms. McCaslin sang western standards and pop and rock classics, like the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You” and the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” transforming that classic power rocker into an Appalachian ballad with her clawhammer-style banjo playing.Her “pure, narrow soprano,” as John Rockwell of The Times described her vocal style, recalled that of Kate Wolf or Nanci Griffith. Her songs have been recorded by Tom Russell, David Bromberg and Ms. Wolf, among others.It was in 1972 that Ms. McCaslin met Mr. Ringer, a gruffly charming, rumpled folk singer 11 years her senior with a honky-tonk style and a colorful biography — from freight hopping to logging to a bit of jail time in his youth — and they began performing and touring together. They were a study in contrasts — her unadorned soprano and demure stage presence and his outlaw persona — and when they recorded an album of duets, they called it “The Bramble and the Rose.” They married in 1978.“The tug between Miss McCaslin’s childhood dream of the Old West and the reality of the New West is what gives her music much of its mythic resonance,” Mr. Holden wrote 1981, when Mr. Ringer and Ms. McCaslin played the Bottom Line in Manhattan. “Her point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.”Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” he said, “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”In her own songs, Ms. McCaslin rued the increasing urbanization of the American West.“I’ve always been attracted by the desert and the beautiful mesas in Arizona and Utah,” she told Mr. Holden. “I get upset that more and more of the land is being developed. Soon there will be no room to graze cattle for food. It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse.”Ms. McCaslin in a 1992 album cover photo. “It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse,” she said.Stuart Brinin, via FLi ArtistsMary Noel McCaslin was born on Dec. 22, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Indianapolis and was adopted by Russell McCaslin, a factory worker, and Lorraine (Taylor) McCaslin, a homemaker. Mary grew up in Redondo Beach, Calif., listening to early rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass and country music; her father often took her to concerts.She counted among her influences the ballads of Marty Robbins, the country and western singer popular at midcentury, and the songs of Petula Clark, the English crooner. She bought her first guitar when was 15 with her babysitting money and performed for the first time at 18 at the Paradox, a club in Orange County.In addition to her husband, Ms. McCaslin is survived by her sister, Rose Brass, and a brother, Eric Mauser. She and Mr. Ringer divorced in 1989.On her 1994 album, “Broken Promises,” Ms. McCaslin writes of heartaches and breakups, her wariness and surprise at a new love (that would be Mr. Arrufat, who worked in music production and had been a friend for years) and, on the song “Someone Who Looks Like Me,” her yearning to know her biological parents:’Cause I would almost give it allTo see my family treeIn my life I’ve never seenSomeone who looks like meIn 2013, she did meet her birth mother, Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear, a member of the Kiowa Apache tribe, and her brother, Eric. Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear gave her daughter a Native American necklace, Mr. Arrufat said, and he asked if it might be appropriate to give his wife a Native American name.Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear approved his choice, he said, which was Mary Noel Singing Bear. Mr. Greenhill, her former manager, marveled that Ms. McCaslin, who had made a career singing of Western imagery and themes, turned out to be, as he said, “a true Native American artist.” More

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      Cavetown’s Heartfelt Bedroom Pop Brings Kindness to a Cruel World

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      The 23-year-old British singer-songwriter Robin Skinner has a listenership devoted to his sensitive (but not despairing) music.If you want to get Robin Skinner to open up, ask about his cat. In conversation, the musician who records and performs as Cavetown is soft-spoken and cautious. But he excitedly recounted Juno’s growth from a timid kitten who hid for a week when she arrived at his London apartment to his affectionate companion who presides over the windowsills of his current house in Cambridge. Then he apologized for rambling.Juno makes frequent appearances on Cavetown’s social media channels. She also shows up a few times on his new album, “Worm Food,” due Nov. 4, most notably on the song that chronicles their bond in its devastating chorus: “I do it for Juno/Pretend her life is on the line/Manipulate myself into staying alive.”For almost a decade, Skinner, 23, ​has amassed a following with his melding of the whimsical and the weepy, revealing his vulnerabilities over melodious alt-rock. Though he’s a sensitive soul, he doesn’t wallow in misery. As a result, he’s found a natural audience in teenagers and some even younger children who are drawn to his kindness in an often cruel world.“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” he said during a video interview, his usually red hair dyed black and thin-framed glasses dominating his face. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesSkinner sometimes takes his own struggles with depression and anxiety and turns them into characters in his songs. For “Lemon Boy,” from his 2018 album, he transformed his bitterness into a persistent garden creature in need of a friend. More recently, he’s returned to the bully who lives in his head as a representation of debilitating self-criticism. “It’s helped me to personify that as a separate thing, because often I forget that I’m more than that,” he said.Skinner was born in Oxford to two classical musicians. When he was 8, the family moved after his father got a job at the University of Cambridge, where he still leads a choir and teaches early music history. His mother gives flute and recorder lessons privately and in schools. The couple divorced when Skinner was 14, but he wasn’t upset by their split. On “Devil Town” from 2015, which remains one of Cavetown’s most popular songs, he nonchalantly sings, “Mom and daddy aren’t in love/That’s fine, I’ll settle for two birthdays.”But on “1994,” the crunchy and tuneful lead single from “Worm Food,” Skinner sounds wistful for a period in their lives that he never witnessed. “From pictures and from memories that they’ve shared with me, that sounds like a happy time for them when they were really in love with each other,” he said. “Part of me is curious about what that could have been like and I feel like I missed out a little bit.”Many Cavetown songs reflect a pervasive nostalgia for childhood and the feelings associated with it, but not Skinner’s childhood in particular. “I grew up pretty fast, for various reasons,” he said. “I missed out on the childhood that I would want to have. Then there’s also missing the freedom that I had then to be a kid. I didn’t realize that I had that freedom at that time.”When he was younger, Skinner’s parents encouraged his interest in music as he tried out instruments like the trumpet and violin. He resisted his mother’s attempts to teach him theory, and remains largely self-taught and self-sufficient, producing all his songs and playing most of the instruments himself.He didn’t have many friends at school during his early adolescence, but found a community online through Twitter, using the platform as a diary for his thoughts. He started a YouTube channel in late 2012 and eventually began uploading ukulele covers of songs by artists like Twenty One Pilots and the Libertines. As Skinner grew as a musician, the ukulele was replaced with guitars, the covers turned into original compositions, and the sparse arrangements were filled in with drums and shimmering electronic textures. His YouTube channel grew to over two million subscribers.In 2018, the musician Chloe Moriondo became one of the many teenagers who found the online Cavetown community, and when she posted a cover of “Lemon Boy,” Skinner left a supportive comment. They eventually became frequent tourmates and collaborators, and Moriondo, now an amped-up pop singer, contributes guest vocals to “Grey Space” on Cavetown’s latest album.“A lot of Robin’s writing is incredibly honest and relatable in a strange and a universal way,” she said. “He really puts himself out there completely and shares his heart with people. That is a really beautiful thing.”After several self-released albums, sold mostly through the digital distributor Bandcamp, Cavetown signed to Sire, and his major label debut, “Sleepyhead,” arrived at the end of March 2020. Skinner has mixed feelings about the LP, which was completed on the road and under stress.“The function of music for me is therapeutic,” Skinner said. “Most of my songs come from something sad because it’s my way of making it into something better, or something that I can control when it’s a feeling that I’m finding confusing.”Guy Bolongaro for The New York TimesBut “Worm Food” was made at his own pace and in cozier spaces. The process included a pivotal songwriting trip to San Diego, where he connected with Vic Fuentes, the lead singer of the post-hardcore band Pierce the Veil, Skinner’s favorite group when he was a teenager. They recorded the dynamic and serrated “A Kind Thing to Do” in Skinner’s rental house on the beach, with Skinner in a chair and Fuentes seated on the bed. “You can just tell he is just one of those natural talents waiting to explode,” Fuentes said in an interview.In October, Skinner, who is transgender, also created the This Is Home Project, which aims to give more than a million dollars to the L.G.B.T.Q. community over the next three years. It’s named for a Cavetown song that many fans interpret as being about Skinner reconciling his own identity. For years he has received GoFundMe links from people looking for help, but with This Is Home he hopes to formalize his contributions to foundations that can fund top surgeries, safe housing or other needs.It’s become an unofficial tradition at Cavetown shows for someone in the crowd to pass Skinner a trans flag, which he ties around his neck and wears like a cape. The first time it happened, it just felt like the natural thing to do. “I am part of the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and it’s not something that I necessarily talk explicitly about very often,” he said. “I find it hard to find the right words to use and so just holding a flag or having it around me onstage is a silent way of being like, ‘I love you, I understand, and this is a space for us.’ It helps me feel like we’re part of the same world together.”Self-examination remains a major part of “Worm Food,” but Skinner’s also working toward self-forgiveness. On the anxiously peppy “Heart Attack,” he sings, “I’m measuring up against the wall again/It’s always the same, but maybe this time I’ve changed.”In the months leading up to the release of “Worm Food,” Cavetown has been performing the new song “Frog” live. With its blatantly romantic endearments (“I feel wrong/My head’s gone funny, princess/But I’m your frog/Kiss mе better all night long”) it’s already become a favorite, and young fans have thrown stuffed frogs onstage or come wearing frog hats. Skinner thinks a large part of the song’s appeal is just that kids like frogs, but maybe there’s something bigger happening too: “It’s the only happy song on the album that’s genuinely written about a happy thing.” More

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      K-Pop’s Stray Kids Land Second No. 1 Album This Year

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      “Maxident” is the latest release to top Billboard’s album chart on the strength of CD or vinyl sales, rather than streams.Week after week, the Billboard album chart is a tale of two formats.Most of the time, the titles that reach No. 1 are the ones that are most popular on streaming services. So far in 2022, that has included Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack, various rap records (by Drake, Lil Durk, Future) and this year’s biggest hit, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which has held the top spot for 13 weeks.The rest of the time, the top position belongs to the records that make a splash with physical versions, like vinyl LPs, CDs and collectible boxed sets packed with goodies like posters and T-shirts. Some of the most skilled marketers of physical media these days have been K-pop groups, like BTS and Blackpink.This week, the eight-member Stray Kids, from South Korea, opens at No. 1 for a second time this year with “Maxident,” which had the equivalent of 117,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. As with its last release, “Oddinary,” which topped the chart back in March, most of the sales of “Maxident” were on CD, with the band releasing the album in as many as 10 different packages, including exclusive versions for retailers like Target and Barnes & Noble.Of its total, 107,000 were for CDs. “Maxident,” like “Oddinary” before it, is officially a “mini album,” with just under 27 minutes of play time on its standard versions. The eight tracks on “Maxident” — by comparison, “Un Verano” has 23 — collected a little less than 10 million streams in the United States, or about 6 percent of the total consumption of the release in its opening week.The success of “Maxident” bumps “Un Verano” to No. 2 with the equivalent of 76,000 sales. Now in its 23rd week out, “Un Verano” still has never dipped lower than second place, and it has racked up about 3.7 billion U.S. streams alone.Bad Bunny’s reign at the top may soon be coming to an end, however, with the arrival of two new albums: Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me,” which came out on Friday and is already a major streaming hit, and Taylor Swift’s “Midnights.”Swift, whose ingenuity as a marketer may be unsurpassed in the industry, has been paying close attention to physical media in recent years, and for “Midnights,” which comes out this Friday, she has a clever offering. The four variant vinyl editions, when turned around and placed in a grid, contain numbers that form the hours of a clock.“It’s a clock,” she said when showing it off on Instagram. “It can help you tell time.”The popularity of physical media can be surprising, since streaming now accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States. But vinyl has been growing at double digits for years, and in 2021 had just over $1 billion in sales, for the first time since 1986, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.For artists, CDs and LPs can be especially appealing when it comes to climbing the charts — according to the formulas used by Billboard and Luminate to determine chart positions, it takes as many 1,250 track streams on paid services, or 3,750 on free ones, to count as much as a single album sale.Also on this week’s album chart, Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” rises two spots to No. 3, after its vinyl version became widely available. (Perhaps you caught Beyoncé’s retail takeover on TikTok, featuring the queen gamely signing LPs in jeans, cowboy boots and a Rolling Stones T-shirt?)Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a hits compilation by the Weeknd, is in fifth place. More

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      BTS to Enlist in South Korea’s Military

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      Ending months of debate, the band’s label said that the seven members would serve their military conscriptions. They plan to reunite in a couple of years.The biggest question about the biggest K-pop band has been answered.The members of BTS will enlist in South Korea’s military as required by law, the band’s label said on Monday, ending months of public debate about whether the group qualified for an exemption to mandatory conscription.The announcement of the band’s decision — which came less than two days after it had performed its first concert in months — effectively confirms the hiatus that the members had first mentioned this summer. The seven members will reconvene “as a group again around 2025” after completing their service, the label, Big Hit Music, said in a statement posted on Twitter.Millions of dejected fans, who call themselves the Army, took to social media to express their support, grief and disbelief. The move is also likely to have wider ramifications, deprivingSouth Korea of the billions of dollars the band’s followers pump into its economy.South Korea requires all able-bodied men to enlist by the time they turn 30 and to serve for about two years. Exceptions can be granted, for example to athletes who win medals at international competitions like the Olympics and to some high-level classical musicians, but pop music artists do not qualify. The first member of BTS to enlist will be Kim Seok-jin, known as just Jin, who turns 30 in December.After the announcement, the stock price of Big Hit’s parent company, HYBE, fell 2.5 percent on Monday. The company has lost about half its market value since June, when BTS talked about a hiatus as the members pursued solo projects.Jin announced a solo project at the BTS concert on Saturday in Busan, South Korea, an event that was free of charge and drew about 50,000 fans. On Monday, the label had a message that seemed targeted to both fans and investors.“‘Yet to Come (The Most Beautiful Moment)’ is more than a track from their latest album, it is a promise,” the label said. “There’s much more yet to come in the years ahead from BTS.” More

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      ‘My Window’ Review: An Out-and-Proud Trailblazer Finds Her Way

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      Melissa Etheridge’s limited run at New World Stages is a celebration of its smoky-voiced 61-year-old star, and contains some confessions, along with her hits.Not long into the second act of Melissa Etheridge’s new Off Broadway show, she tells a funny, sexy, completely charming tale of falling in love with a married woman in the late 1980s, and pairs it, playfully, with a gorgeous version of her 1995 song “I Want to Come Over.”Discreetly — no names — she recalls what a blast she and that partner and their showbiz friends used to have together in 1990s Los Angeles, in the heady early days of Etheridge’s rock fame. Then she mentions cannabis, which she didn’t enjoy at the time.“It always made me feel like everyone knew I was hiding something, you know?” she said on Friday, the second night of a 12-performance run at New World Stages. “Like they could all see this sadness that I was hiding.”In an almost solo show that wants very much to be a good time for the audience, and a kind of celebration of its smoky-voiced 61-year-old star, suddenly here is a confession of personal vulnerability — spoken, not sung. It turns out to be valuable foreshadowing, because there is some deep, dark sadness in “Melissa Etheridge Off Broadway: My Window — A Journey Through Life.” And mostly, amid some staggeringly beautiful renditions of songs, that sadness is well camouflaged.Written by Etheridge with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed by Amy Tinkham, the show recounts the story of Etheridge’s life in strict chronological order, from the day she was born in 1961 in Leavenworth, Kan. It’s a journey from midcentury, Midwestern conformity to a career as a Grammy Award-winning, out-and-proud trailblazer.Starting with darling black-and-white baby pictures shown huge on the upstage wall, the smart projections (by Olivia Sebesky) become increasingly intricate and eye-popping throughout the evening, particularly when Etheridge’s memories turn psychedelic. (The minimal set is by Bruce Rodgers, the luscious lighting by Abigail Rosen Holmes.)Some Etheridge hits are, of course, among the two dozen or so songs and song fragments strung through the performance, including a fiery version of “Bring Me Some Water,” from her 1988 debut album, and a buoying, sing-along “Come to My Window,” the 1993 hit that gives the show its name. She also plays endearing obscurities, like the first songs she wrote as a child.For all its musical polish, though, the show is verbally shaggy; Etheridge isn’t reciting memorized text but rather improvising, storyteller-style, from an outline of the piece’s main points, which scroll by on her monitor. (You will notice the monitor only if it’s behind you and you cheat like I did and turn around and look for it.) The upside to that looseness is a sense of thoughts articulated in the moment. The downside is a certain lack of eloquence.The instant Etheridge gets a guitar to strap across her chest, her whole body relaxes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesClocking in at three hours, including an intermission, the performance is surprisingly light on songs for about the first 30 minutes, and pushes a little too hard with the comedy of a roadie character (Kate Owens), who comes on to swap out Etheridge’s many jackets and guitars. (Costumes are by Andrea Lauer.)Initially, Etheridge doesn’t even have the armor of an instrument as she roams the stage. The instant she gets a guitar to strap across her chest, her whole body relaxes. Similarly, she is most expressive when she has the rhythm and structure of music to hold onto. So the show’s chatter works best when it’s threaded around and through a song, as happens gracefully with “Juliet,” the companion to Etheridge’s reminiscence of her brief time at Berklee College of Music, and of finding lesbian community in Boston.A life is a delicate thing to parade onstage, even or maybe especially in front of an adoring audience — lots of women, many apparent baby boomers and more straight couples than you might expect. A theatrical autobiography that’s honest can’t be neat, because some roughnesses refuse to be smoothed. So it goes here with the discussion of family, both the one Etheridge was born into and the ones she formed with the two women who are the other mothers of her four children.Personal details are skated around, presumably for the usual reasons — privacy, or to spare someone’s feelings, or because humans are complex and there simply isn’t time. Her father, who chaperoned her at the gigs she played when she was underage and responded with love when she came out to him as a young adult, emerges as a sympathetic figure. Others, in some ways including Etheridge, come off less than well. It’s here that you sense the sadness, hidden until it’s not.There comes a point, near the end of the show, when the stage plunges into inky blackness and Etheridge tells the story of the death of her 21-year-old son, Beckett, in 2020. It is spare and searing, the words uttered from a pit of grief.And as she speaks of the healing power that performance has for her, you realize that this is part of what she’s doing here — that music and memories and the embrace of an ardent crowd might help, just maybe, to assuage the pain.Melissa Etheridge Off Broadway: My Window — A Journey Through LifeThrough Oct. 29 at New World Stages, Manhattan; melissaetheridge.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Dry Cleaning: It’s Spoken Rock ’n’ Roll, but We Like It

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      The British rock band’s distinctive sound comes from the vocalist Florence Shaw’s carefully delivered observations that float somewhere between stand-up, poetry and comedy.LOS ANGELES — At the Primavera Sound festival at Los Angeles State Historic Park, the British band Dry Cleaning played under the bright sunlight of a September afternoon. Festooned with tattoos, the guitarist Tom Dowse rocked out, grimacing and jutting out an impudent tongue now and then. A breeze wrapped the bassist Lewis Maynard’s long hair across his face, making him look like a headbanging plushie. The drummer Nick Buxton pummeled away as if in AC/DC’s engine room. But the vocalist Florence Shaw didn’t fit the picture at all.Instead of snarling or roaring like the music would seem to demand, she delivered a jumbled sequence of alternately humdrum and surreal observations in conversational tones that shifted subtly between dismay, disapproval and daydream. Wearing a long black lace skirt and a sparkly gold camisole, she curled her fingers around the mic stand like the stem of a wineglass and pulled distractedly at the hair at the top of her head, as if having a knotty heart-to-heart with a close friend.To twist a lyric from Dry Cleaning’s new album, “Stumpwork,” out Oct. 21, it’s a weird premise for a band — but I like it. So do a growing numbers of others. The London group recently embarked on a world tour that will take it through 17 countries. Its 2021 debut, “New Long Leg,” entered the U.K. album chart at No. 4. That feat reflected both the record’s originality and Dry Cleaning’s position at the forefront of the “speak-sing” movement: a trend that encompasses groups like Yard Act, Wet Leg and Black Country, New Road who have little in common besides vocalists who incant barbed social commentary rather than sing.Sitting at a garden table in Primavera’s artists-only enclosure, Shaw admitted that fronting a cult band was not on her bucket list. “It’s a very surreal turn of events,” she said, widening her eyes as if still surprised. “Totally unexpected. I like bands, but I never planned to be in one at all.”Until a few years ago, the 33-year-old earned her living as a visiting lecturer, teaching fashion drawing and illustration at art colleges. Then her friend Dowse suggested she contribute to a new band he’d pulled together with Buxton and Maynard. The three men had a long history of playing in various hardcore punk and noisy groups, mostly as a sideline to their primary occupations. But when Shaw came along to add her spoken-word collages to their tough, clangorous sound, something clicked.On paper, the formula looks like it ought to be irritating — pretentious, or simply awkward — but ultimately, it makes a magical sort of sense. While her bandmates weave riffs and textures drawn from across alternative rock history, Shaw doesn’t raise her voice, but commands attention through timing and phrasing, along with the shuffle-mode flow of her perceptions. Lines that could be from a transcript of a tetchy interpersonal skirmish will be followed by a pensive fragment plucked from some regretful or aggrieved interior monologue. Shaw has invented a strikingly original mode of nonmelodic songwriting that floats somewhere between stand-up, poetry and the fourth-wall-breaking soliloquies of a female comic auteur like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.“I’m not hugely well-informed about politics, really,” Shaw said. “But I’m quite sensitive to how things feel and I know they don’t feel good!” Max Miechowski for The New York Times“She’s brilliant, she really reminds me of myself!” said Jason Williamson, the vocalist in Sleaford Mods, widely regarded as the progenitor of the current wave of British speak-sing groups. “There’s this mixture of extremely realistic observations with absurdism. Things that are just really bizarre. It doesn’t make a lot of sense — but then it does. She conveys meanings with just one word.”Expertly deploying pauses and stretching out syllables, Shaw is a virtuoso of intonation. “I am very interested in small differences,” she said. “I really enjoy that game where you put the emphasis on a different place in a sentence — and it means something completely different. The same words can sound scared instead of proud.”When Dry Cleaning was recording part of the new album in a Bristol studio, Shaw went out on foraging missions, trawling the streets for overheard remarks, shop signs and unusual sights, which she’d jot down in her phone’s notepad. Another expedition involved visiting a “car boot sale,” a flea market particular to the U.K. in which ordinary folk park their cars in a field and sell bric-a-brac from the trunk. Shaw also likes to collect words. “Stumpwork,” the title of a song as well as the new album, is something she’s been aching to use for ages.“I like the sound of it,” she said. “It’s a type of embroidery, like the braiding on military uniforms or American sportswear. Originally it was used to described the raised characters and padded people in tapestries.”Musically, “Stumpwork” is a conscious and concerted effort on the part of the band to show it’s more than post-punk. Leaving behind the first album’s gaunt sound and tense bass lines, the new LP shifts forward in time to the early ’90s and lo-fi “slacker” bands like Pavement. “I was thinking a lot about Stephen Malkmus when I was doing my guitar parts, that sort of wonkiness,” Dowse said, explaining that he played a Jazzmaster guitar because “it’s what all the ’90s groups like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. used.”Compared to “New Long Leg,” in some ways “Stumpwork” is an American album. The debut felt like a wet, wintry day, a mood mirrored lyrically in lines like “it was chucking it down” and “raincoat sweat.” In contrast, “Stumpwork” has the dazed, heat-hazy vibe of a drunken summer afternoon. Although Shaw still drops the odd glum line like “looks like strains and setbacks are on the way,” the ground-down despondency of “New Long Leg” has opened up to allow for moments of carefree joy and quiet contentment.If there’s gloom here, it stems less from personal life than from the political atmosphere. The track “Conservative Hell” expresses the outlook of the band and many of their generation. “Scandal after scandal, the levels of corruption and lying at the top of the government, and it feels like it’s almost completely unchallenged,” Dowse said. “I think it’s numbed everyone out.”While her bandmates weave riffs and textures drawn from across alternative rock history, Shaw commands attention through timing and phrasing.Max Miechowski for The New York TimesOn “Stumpwork,” Shaw gets explicitly polemical now and then. She’ll talk about seeing “male violence everywhere” or distill the U.K.’s dire deadlock into the three-line panorama “Nothing works/everything’s expensive/And opaque and privatized.” But her true forte is the micro-politics of ordinary life: petty humiliations and hassles, the way that advertising and media implant desires and anxieties in your head. “I’m not hugely well-informed about politics, really,” she said. “But I’m quite sensitive to how things feel and I know they don’t feel good!”That remark ended with a burst of laughter. Smiles and merriment are a constant in her conversation, in marked contrast with how Shaw comes across on record and onstage. The blanket description “deadpan” annoys her because it misses the subtle shades of gray she works with. Referencing a review that described her as sounding like “a bored fashion model reading from the pages of Grazia magazine,” Shaw noted that another time, “Someone said our gig was great but we spoiled it by smiling between the songs. Like we were breaking character. You can’t win!” Cue another burst of laughter.Williamson placed Dry Cleaning in a British lineage of groups who combined observational humor, gritty social realism and the vividness of everyday vernacular: “They’re a classic English band in the vein of the Jam, the Specials, Ian Dury and the Blockheads.”One way that Englishness manifests in Dry Cleaning is the gap between the music’s dramatic intensity and the mildness of Shaw’s emotional palette and low-key delivery. “There can be something very tender about that,” Shaw said. “Because in a way it’s sort of a failure to express oneself at the right moment.”“Missing the moment that you should get really angry and instead feeling it later — that’s a real hallmark of my life,” she added. “I think I’d much rather be a person who could emote functionally, at the right time. But it takes me a long time to process things and a lot of my performance is about exorcising those residual feelings. Maybe that’s a bit British.” More

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      New Music From Blink-182, the 1975 and Queen’s Unheard Song With Freddie Mercury

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      Hear tracks by Blink-182, Lil Baby featuring EST Gee, Sevdaliza 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.Queen, ‘Face It Alone’Freddie Mercury packed drama into every syllable when he sang “Face It Alone,” a track Queen rediscovered in 1988 session archives while preparing a much-expanded reissue of its 1989 album, “The Miracle,” and has now rebuilt. It’s a dirge about inevitable, existential loneliness, set to slow, bare-bones arpeggios and funereal drum thuds, and Mercury’s voice expands it to arena scale as he moves between confidential croon and balcony-rattling rasp. JON PARELESThe 1975, ‘Oh Caroline’The 1975 regularly goes roving through rock and pop’s back catalog, trying on styles. “Oh Caroline” doesn’t go for the obvious musical reference — the incomparably vulnerable “Caroline, No” by the Beach Boys — but instead to the era when Michael McDonald led the Doobie Brothers, with electronic percussion, scrubbing guitars and burbling keyboard chords. “Caroline, I want to get it right this time,” Matty Healy sings, making abundant romantic promises, as he travels among eras with the freedom of the internet. PARELESNessa Barrett, ‘Tired of California’Nessa Barrett, 20, established herself on TikTok with songs about pain, self-doubt and thoughts of death. The comic relief on her new debut album, “Young Forever,” is “Tired of California,” a sweet-voiced summation of the attractions, superficiality and ennui of aspiring to stardom in Los Angeles. “I get sick of sunshine on my perfect skin,” she lilts, to a tune reminiscent of “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega; then she contemplates death as a career move that would leave her “young forever”: “You get more famous when you die.” The production riffles through Los Angeles specialties: crunching EDM, orchestral bombast, hair-metal guitars and confessional piano chords. It’s supremely self-conscious. PARELESLil Baby featuring EST Gee, ‘Back and Forth’As Lil Baby eases into rap superstardom, he tends to lean on his melodic side, a combination of savvy and conciliation. But “Back and Forth,” from his new album “It’s Only Me,” is something slightly more pure — just a pair of icy verses from Lil Baby and the Kentucky firebrand EST Gee about all the various sorts of conquest. JON CARAMANICABlink-182, ‘Edging’The pop-punk-reunion Mount Rushmore is finally complete — the essential (but not original) lineup of Blink-182 has reunited (again). Tom DeLonge is rejoining Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker for a tour next year; the announcement came with a new song, “Edging,” which marks the first time this lineup has been in the studio together in a decade. It’s familiar but uncanny, Botoxed tight but with none of the puerile joy that marked the group’s breakout hits. Part of Blink’s charm was the sense that it might unravel at any moment; this suggests it is content to remain contained. CARAMANICASevdaliza, ‘Woman Life Freedom’Sevdaliza, who was born in Iran and grew up in the Netherlands, confronts the repression of women in “Woman Life Freedom,” a song that begins with stark intimacy — just vocals — and builds into a somberly devastating orchestral march. Sevdaliza sings, “I was taught compliance in the name of the sword/That stabbed every dream I could be.” The title is taken from the watchwords of current women’s protests in Iran, and the track mixes in spoken words calling for an end to Iran’s dictatorship. But the music’s impact and ambition are not only topical. PARELESLucrecia Dalt, ‘Atemporal’“Atemporal” (“Timeless”) is from “Ay!,” the latest high-concept album by Lucrecia Dalt, a Colombian composer and songwriter who has lately moved into film (“The Seed”) and television (“The Baby”) scores. “Ay!” is about an alien entity, Preta, who first experiences linear time and physicality on a visit to Earth; for Dalt, it’s also about memories and warpages — sonic, spatial and durational — of the music she grew up on. “Atemporal” is more or less a bolero, disassembled and rebuilt in ways that can sound vintage or computer-tweaked, with plenty of clanky percussion; it’s wayward with a purpose. PARELES More

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      On ‘ForeverAndEverNoMore,’ Brian Eno Sings for the End of the World

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      The musician and producer’s new songs meditate on folly and annihilation, playing like a far more fatalistic sequel to “Another Day on Earth” from 2005.When you’re expecting extinction, it makes sense to record the threnody in advance. That’s what Brian Eno has done on “ForeverAndEverNoMore”: a mournful, contemplative album that stares down humanity’s self-immolation in what he calls “the climate emergency.”“These billion years will end/They end in me,” he intones in “Garden of Stars,” as electronic tones go whizzing by and distortion flickers and crests around him like a cosmic radiation storm. It’s a song that marvels at the mathematical improbability of human life — “How then could it be that we appear at all?/In all this rock and fire, in all this gas and dust,” he sings — while envisioning its cessation.Although much of Eno’s solo catalog is instrumental — soundtracks, ambient albums, video and multimedia projects — he is no stranger to songs. He embraced pop structures, and riddled them with noise, on his early solo albums after he left Roxy Music in 1973, tossing off flippantly highbrow lyrics like “If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics/You will find that their minds rarely move in a line” (“Backwater,” on the 1977 “Before and After Science”). Eno also produced hits, and sometimes sang, with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie and others, and he has extolled the individual and collective benefits of group harmony singing.“ForeverAndEverNoMore” is decades and decisions removed from Eno’s 1970s song albums. At 74, Eno has taken on the stoic reserve of a sage. The new album plays like a far more fatalistic sequel to Eno’s most recent song-centered album, “Another Day on Earth” back in 2005, when he was already concerned with the state of the planet.On “ForeverAndEverNoMore,” Eno has traded percussiveness for sustain. Long drones underlie most of the tracks, echoing ancient traditions of mystical music; most of the instrumental sounds seem to arrive from great echoey distances. Eno sings slow, chantlike phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions — with the guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as “post-producer” — open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he’s already staring into the void.The songs deliver indictments of human folly with measured calm. Slow, deep breathing sets the rhythm of “We Let It In,” as Eno sings, “We open to the blinding sky” to the soothing notes of a major chord; his daughter Darla Eno quietly repeats the words “deep sun.” In its reverberating solidity, the song makes global warming sound encompassing and inevitable.“There Were Bells” has bleaker lyrics, with birdsong and blue skies giving way to war and annihilation: “In the end they all went the same way,” it concludes. Singing a doleful melody over a tolling, inexorably descending bass line, Eno’s voice takes on a deepening melancholy as the music darkens, thickens and eventually thunders around him; all he can do is bear witness before going silent.There’s little comfort on “ForeverAndEverNoMore.” In “These Small Noises,” set to operatic keyboard arpeggios from Jon Hopkins, Eno imagines a useful afterlife by becoming compost — “Make us into land/Land of soil we owe our fathers” — but ends with a curse: “Go to hell/in hell to burn.” The album’s two instrumentals, “Making Gardens Out of Silence” (based on music from his sound installation at the Serpentine Galleries’ exhibition “Back to Earth”) and “Inclusion” return to Eno’s ambient side, placing elongated, breath-defying melodies in an electronic ether. On this album, they sound like they’re anticipating a post-human eternity.Perhaps the planet’s surviving species will appreciate the music.Brian Eno“ForeverAndEverNoMore”(Verve/UMC) More