Pop and Rock Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Remi Wolf Turns Bedroom Pop Into Hypercolored Explosions

      by

      The 25-year-old Los Angeles musician’s debut album, “Juno,” is a collage of sounds, emotions and cultural detritus filtered through her own unique energy.LOS ANGELES — Remi Wolf rolled up to an indoor trampoline park in Van Nuys on an August afternoon feeling frazzled. She’d been busy all day, making bugged-out visuals for her songs and prepping for tour. Then the traffic coming from the Eastside of Los Angeles was bad. So, so bad.She’d be ready to sit and talk by the vending machines in a minute, but first she needed to bounce.Wolf took off her light-purple Crocs and pulled on the regulation orange grip socks, which managed to complement her mishmashed look: a recently resurrected Urban Outfitters top she got in high school and a promo cap for a record label she’s not even signed to over her pile of brown curls. At 25 years old, Wolf was at least a decade older than almost everyone else ricocheting across the field of trampolines. Then she hit two forward somersaults.On Friday, Wolf will release her debut album, “Juno.” It’s a collection of nerves, anxieties and self-recriminations set to ebullient melodies and unbound sonic collages. “Juno” was largely written and recorded during the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic. While many artists burrowed into the aesthetics of quiet during this era of isolation, Wolf turned the tumultuous emotions pent-up inside of her into hypercolored explosions.“It’s not mellow at all, but it is very introspective,” she said. “I have a lot of energy. As a person, I can just go and go and go until I crash. And then I’m, like, depressed, or whatever.”As the nebulously defined genre of bedroom pop breaks out beyond the barriers of the bedrooms it was once made in, Wolf has emerged as one of its most engaging talents, bolstered by an unconventional charisma and a powerful voice. “Remi is always pushing what it means to be pop and what it means to be a pop star — not even deprecating it, but just being able to laugh and think about pop music in a totally different way,” said Lizzy Szabo, a senior editor at Spotify who oversees Lorem, the influential, Gen Z-targeted playlist that has become part of Wolf’s dominion.A onetime competitive skier, Wolf took the dedication she once brought to the sport to her music.Emily Monforte for The New York TimesLike many people her age, Wolf has a keen ability to slurp up the often doofy flotsam of the recent past and make it seem far cooler than it was in the first place. That manifests itself in her love of hot-pink novelty trucker hats and candy-raver eye makeup, but it also applies to her taste in music. During a recent sold-out show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, Wolf covered MGMT’s “Electric Feel,” Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and a portion of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” all with a relatively straight face.She’s found unlikely inspiration in the Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, one of the most maligned (if possibly misunderstood) lyricists to make it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She calls him “my king” (with more emphatic language) and even named one of the best songs on “Juno” after him. Like Kiedis’s, many of Wolf’s lyrics seem entirely free associative as she references an orgy at Five Guys and a plane flight to Mars.“I just follow these little wormholes in my head,” she said. “I just like to go down whatever imagery I think is describing how I’m feeling.”Despite how nonsensical the lyrics may seem when isolated, to Wolf there is an internal logic behind all of them. Well, most of them. She knows exactly what she means in her song “Grumpy Old Man” when she says she’s got “feelings in my feelings” and “violets on my violence,” but admits that she came up with the line about having “boobies on my booty” just because those words are fun to sing.Earlier this year, Wolf released “We Love Dogs!,” a compilation of remixes of her earlier songs. It included interpretations from known genre twisters like Nile Rodgers and Panda Bear, but also a version of “Photo ID,” her most streamed song, featuring the ascendant star Dominic Fike, who’s become a friend. “A lot of people have their style figured out or maybe a general sound,” Fike said. “She has something special in how she puts together her songs. I feel like Remi is a real singer. Every once in a while they come around, and she’s one of those.”Despite being raised in the largely flat and snowless Bay Area city of Palo Alto, Wolf began training as a downhill ski racer at 8 years old. She spent weekends staying at a cheap hotel in Truckee, a town near Lake Tahoe. She went to the Junior Olympics twice. “I was bouncing between different friends all the time, so nothing ever felt safe,” she said. “I became very independent and very insular in my own being.”When she was 16, Wolf quit competing and threw herself into music with the same resolute mind-set that’s required of athletes. “Once I stopped skiing, I was like, ‘OK, I need something else to do just as intensely and just as hard,’” she said. She started a duo with her friend Chloe Zilliac called, naturally, Remi and Chloe. At 17, Wolf tried out for “American Idol” and got invited to Hollywood, but her experience there didn’t last long.While participating in an after-school music program, a teacher teamed her up with another one of his pupils, a young multi-instrumentalist named Jared Solomon. He had them play “Valerie” by Amy Winehouse, with her singing and him on guitar. “We were instantly like, ‘Whoa, you’re really good,’” Wolf said.Solomon joined Remi and Chloe’s backup band, and they’d rehearse in his garage twice a week before he left to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. When Wolf graduated from the U.S.C. Thornton School of Music a few years later, Solomon reached out to see if he could crash at her place while passing through Los Angeles as his friend’s tour D.J. The two hadn’t really talked in five years; he ended up staying for a week. They experimented on a few songs together in that span, including “Sauce,” a slinky jam that remains one of Wolf’s most popular tracks.“I knew obviously people were like, I’m growing, blah blah blah. Now I’m like, life is about growth,” Wolf said of life after getting sober. “Which never occurred to me. It’s so insane.”Emily Monforte for The New York TimesAt the time, she had been trying to break into the music industry as a songwriter. “I was on a bunch of Adderall and I was psychotic at that point,” Wolf recalled. “Then he came through, then we did our thing and then we were like, holy [expletive]!”Solomon became and remains Wolf’s closest musical collaborator. “We’re just so locked in to each other’s energy, especially musically,” Wolf said. “It’s hard for people to penetrate that.” Wolf produced most of the songs on “Juno” with him (he uses the name Solomonophonic), though more established figures including Kenny Beats and Ethan Gruska contributed to a few songs on the album, too. Solomon also plays in her live band, towering over Wolf in a Pantera T-shirt with cutoff sleeves.The earliest work that Wolf put out often leaned toward jazzy soul — which she attributes to her love of major and minor seventh chords — but with “Juno” she widened the scope. While Erykah Badu remains a constant influence, during the album’s making she listened to artists like Jack White, Beck, Sheryl Crow and Michelle Branch. “I’m kind of a rock singer,” Wolf said. “That’s what I started singing, and then I moved more into soulier stuff. But I’m a belter. I love screaming.”A significant moment in Wolf’s personal life also had a major impact on “Juno”: she entered rehab during the summer of 2020, a change that was at least three years in the making. Before, Wolf said, she frequently drank to the point of blacking out. While she said she was usually able to function in her daily life, she had started getting into huge fights with family, friends and collaborators.“I did it for myself obviously, but I did it for my career,” she said of her sobriety. “There was just something in me being like, ‘Don’t destroy this. Don’t destroy your life.’”Drinking left Wolf feeling awful all the time. Her sobriety revitalized her energy and excitement, but it also forced her to confront all kinds of emotional issues that she didn’t make space for with her goal-oriented approach. “So much came up that I didn’t even know existed,” she said. “I didn’t even know what growing as a human was. I knew obviously people were like, I’m growing, blah blah blah. Now I’m like, life is about growth. Which never occurred to me. It’s so insane.”When the interview was over, Wolf returned to the trampolines. She took a few flying leaps onto a gigantic inflatable pillow before deciding to grab a final ride on the zip line. She climbed the steps to the top of the platform, listened to a safety spiel from the attendant and then turned around to give a thumbs up to the security camera mounted on the wall. And then, she was off. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Adele Announces ‘30,’ Her First Album in Six Years

      by

      The singer’s long-awaited return will start this week, with the release of a single, “Easy on Me,” followed by a new album on Nov. 19, she announced on Wednesday.Almost six years to the day since the release of her previous blockbuster album, Adele will make her long-awaited return to the music industry with a new album on Nov. 19, she announced Wednesday on social media.Titled “30,” in line with her previous LPs “19,” “21” and “25” — for the ages Adele was while writing them — the singer, now 33, said in a statement that the album came out of “the most turbulent period of my life.”In 2019, Adele filed for divorce from her husband of two years, the charity executive Simon Konecki. The couple have a young son.“I’ve learned a lot of blistering home truths about myself along the way,” Adele wrote in her announcement.She compared the music to “that friend who, no matter what, checked in on me even though I’d stopped checking in with them because I’d become so consumed by my own grief,” adding: “I’ve painstakingly rebuilt my house and my heart since then and this album narrates it.”“30” will be preceded on Thursday night — midnight in the United Kingdom — by a single, “Easy on Me,” produced by Greg Kurstin, who collaborated with the singer on “Hello,” the chart-topping lead song from “25,” in 2015.Described in a recent Vogue cover story as a “a gut-wrenching plea of a piano ballad,” “Easy on Me” was previewed by Adele on Instagram on Saturday, and features the lyrics:“Go easy on me, babyI was still a childDidn’t get the chance toFeel the world around me.”Yet even as Adele’s new music is widely expected to be among the most commercially successful of the year, based on her track record of world-beating sales, the singer is also managing expectations as she re-enters a changed business.“There isn’t a bombastic ‘Hello,’” she told Vogue. “But I don’t want another song like that. That song catapulted me in fame to another level that I don’t want to happen again.”The track debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for 10 weeks. But streaming — which now accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — was still catching on. When “25” was released, on Nov. 20, 2015, it was not made available on services like Spotify and Apple Music until seven months later, instead relying on traditional sales.That resulted in a record-breaking 3.38 million albums sold in the United States during its first week — nearly a million more than the next-highest-selling release in the Nielsen/SoundScan era. (The company, now MRC Data, began tracking point-of-sale data in 1991.)The album “25” has since been certified 11-times platinum and won six Grammys in 2017, making Adele the first artist ever to sweep the top three categories — record of the year, song of the year and album of the year — on two separate occasions. (She did the same in 2012, with “21.”)Unlike Adele’s previous releases, “30” is expected to be available on streaming services upon release, although Vogue reported that the singer was “adamant that it come out in tangible form,” on CDs and vinyl, as well.According to reports, the new album will feature collaborations with the producers and songwriters Max Martin and Shellback, who worked on the previous Adele single “Send My Love (to Your New Lover)”; the singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr. (“When We Were Young,” from 2015); the producer Inflo; and the composer and producer Ludwig Goransson, known for his work with Childish Gambino and on films like “Black Panther.”“I was so fragile when I was writing it that I wanted to work only with a few people,” Adele said in her Vogue interview, citing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as a “very big reference.”And while the singer’s divorce helped to inspire the album, it is not the only subject, she said. “It was more me divorcing myself,” Adele explained, invoking “self-destruction,” “self-reflection” and “self-redemption.”In recent years, the singer has also taken to working out two or three times a day, leading to significant weight loss (“I realized that when I was working out, I didn’t have any anxiety”); hosted “Saturday Night Live” as a nonmusical guest; and entered into a relationship with LeBron James’s agent Rich Paul (“I know what I want”).“I’ve shed many layers but also wrapped myself in new ones,” Adele wrote in her statement on Wednesday, “discovered genuinely useful and wholesome mentalities to lead with, and I feel like I’ve finally found my feeling again. I’d go as far as to say I’ve never felt more peaceful in my life.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Paddy Moloney, Irish Piper Who Led the Chieftains, Dies at 83

      by

      The band he fronted for nearly 60 years toured the world, collaborated with rock stars and helped spark a renaissance for traditional Irish music.Paddy Moloney, the playful but disciplined frontman and bagpiper of the Chieftains, a band that was at the forefront of the worldwide revival of traditional Irish music played with traditional instruments, died on Monday in Dublin. He was 83.His daughter Aedin Moloney confirmed the death, at a hospital, but did not specify the cause.For nearly 60 years the Chieftains toured extensively, released more than two dozen albums and won six Grammy Awards. They were particularly known for their collaborations with artists like Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nanci Griffith and Luciano Pavarotti.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing,” Mr. Moloney told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage.” He added, “We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”In 2012, when he was vice president, President Biden told People magazine that his desire was to sing “Shenandoah” with the Chieftains “if I had any musical talent.” He invited them to perform at his inauguration this year, but Covid-related restrictions kept them from traveling.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.Mr. Moloney was a master of many instruments: He played the uileann pipes (the national bagpipes of Ireland), the tin whistle, the bodhran (a type of drum) and the button accordion. He was also the band’s lead composer and arranger.Asked in 2010 on the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” what he thought was the sexiest instrument, he chose the pipes.“I often call it the octopus,” he said, “and so, I mean, that’s something that gets every part of you moving.”The Chieftains performed at the Great Wall of China, in Nashville and in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, joining with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to play “The Wall.”Their best-known recordings included “Cotton Eyed Joe,” “O’Sullivan’s March,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Long Black Veil” (with Mr. Jagger). Their 1992 album “Another Country,” a collaboration with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins, won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album.Their other Grammys included one for best pop collaboration with vocals for “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?,” a collaboration with Mr. Morrison from their album “The Long Black Veil,” released in 1995, and one for best world album, for “Santiago” (1996), consisting of Spanish and Latin American music.Mr. Moloney had an affinity for country music.“I always considered Nashville like another part of Ireland, down to the south or something,” he said on the website of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in 2020. “When I’ve come over there and played with musical geniuses like Sam Bush or Jerry Douglas or Earl Scruggs, they pick everything up so easily. You don’t have to duck and dash.”The last track on “Another Country” — “Finale: Did You Ever Go A-Courtin’, Uncle Joe/Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — features Ms. Harris, Ricky Skaggs and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Rambles, a cultural arts magazine, described it as “the closest you will come to an Irish hooley on record,” a reference to an Irish party with music. The track, the magazine said, sounded like “a few pints were quaffed and the boxty bread was passed around before the assembled greats of music decided to have a musical free-for-all.”Mr. Moloney in 2012. That year, the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains embarked on a tour that ended on St. Patrick’s Day at Carnegie Hall.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesPatrick Moloney was born on Aug. 1, 1938, in Donnycarney, in northern Dublin. His father, John, worked in the accounting department of the Irish Glass Bottle Company. His mother, Catherine (Conroy) Moloney, was a homemaker.Paddy came from a musical family: One of his grandfathers played the flute, and his Uncle Stephen played in the Ballyfin Pipe Band. Paddy began playing a plastic tin whistle at 6 and began studying the uileann pipes shortly afterward, under the tutelage of man known as the “King of the Pipers.”He took to the pipes easily, gave his first public concert when he was 9 and performed on local streets.“There were five pipers around the Donnycarney area,” he told Ireland’s Own magazine in 2019. “I’d go around the cul-de-sac playing like the pied piper, and my pals would be following behind me.”After leaving school in the 1950s, he started working at Baxendale & Company, a building supplies company, where he met his future wife, Rita O’Reilly. He joined the traditional Irish band Ceoltóirí Chualann in 1960 and formed the Chieftains in 1962; the name came from the short story “Death of a Chieftain” by the Irish author John Montague.In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Moloney was an executive of Claddagh Records, of which he was a founder, and produced or oversaw 45 albums in folk, traditional, classical, poetry and spoken word.The Chieftains — who hit it big in the mid-1970s with sold-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London — were strictly an instrumentalist ensemble at first. But in the 1980s the band pivoted from their early purism, and Mr. Moloney emerged as a composer, writing new music steeped in Irish tradition.The Chieftains began to blend Irish music with styles from the Celtic diaspora in Spain and Canada as well as bluegrass and country from the United States. They collaborated with well-known rock and pop musicians and with an international assortment of musicians as far-flung as Norway, Bulgaria and China.On his own, Mr. Moloney branched into writing and arranging music for films, including “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998) and “Gangs of New York” (2002).In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by two sons, Aonghus and Padraig; four grandchildren; and a sister, Sheila.In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains teamed up with 12 folk, country, bluegrass, rockabilly and indie rock artists — including Bon Iver, the Decembrists, the Low Anthem and Imelda May — to record the album “Voice of Ages.” They also embarked on a tour that ended at Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day.“What’s happening here with these young groups,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times at the time, explaining the album’s concept, “is they’re coming back to the melody, back to the real stuff, the roots and the folk feeling of them all. I can hear any of them singing folk songs.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      How Xenia Rubinos Freed Herself on a New Album, ‘Una Rosa’

      by

      On her third LP, the singer-songwriter brings her brassy vocals to a surreal, electronic universe.Xenia Rubinos stuck her head inside a white, doughnut-shaped couch, trying to get a better feel for the furniture’s globular shape. Earlier, she had plastered her face on an oblong, clear sculpture made out of plastic, smushing her right cheek up against the material.Navigating a museum devoted to the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi on a cloudless late September afternoon, Rubinos, a New York singer-songwriter, approached each sculpture with the same free-spirited curiosity as she does her own music. (You’re allowed to touch some, and Rubinos wasn’t shy about going all in.) When we arrived, she suggested we tour the space in reverse order. “I just like coming in and taking the gas out of all of the things,” she said with a chuckle. “I don’t know anything about it, I don’t have to,” she said of Noguchi’s sculptures. The art “activates me.”Over the past eight years, Rubinos’s own art has activated her listeners with its imaginative dissection of punk, R&B, jazz and hip-hop. Her first two albums, “Magic Trix” (2013) and “Black Terry Cat” (2016), artfully collaged genres and braided incisive lyrics about identity and police brutality, among other themes. The Puerto Rican-Cuban artist possesses a smoky wisp of a voice, and it holds all the experimentation together. Both releases established her as a promising figure in Brooklyn’s independent music landscape.Rubinos’s third album, “Una Rosa,” out Friday, arrives as a rich statement about finding creative freedom. “It’s a thick listen,” Rubinos said. “It was thick even for me as I was making it.” The album touches on heavy topics at a heavy moment: mourning, heartbreak, the pressures of capitalist productivity, the killing of Breonna Taylor. One moment Rubinos nimbly intones melodies from a José Martí poem through a dense glaze of Auto-Tune, the next she growls through gritted teeth over a gauzy lattice of synths.The emphasis on synths marks a turning point for Rubinos, who has always focused on eclecticism but emerged from a more formal jazz background: She studied jazz composition at the Berklee School of Music, but felt deeply alienated by the sexism and elitism of that scene. “I got there and I hated the way that I was objectified,” she said. “That just made me shut down and completely hide myself. I would wear baggy clothes all the time. I didn’t want to be sexualized at all, and I wanted to be taken seriously.”On “Una Rosa,” she releases herself. The vocal performances on tracks like “What Is This Voice” and “Don’t Put Me in Red” are deliciously fragile and imperfect, which Rubinos found refreshing after years of striving for perfection. “It was like, ‘Nothing to prove to anybody here, and we’re just doing music.’ This is what this song calls for. This is what this idea sounds like,” she said.Electronic music has intrigued Rubinos since she was a child. When she was 12, she recorded herself on a Casio keyboard and a karaoke machine. “I would hold the microphone up to it and I would program a little beat on the keyboard that had drum instruments,” she said. “I thought I was Blu Cantrell,” she added with a cackle.For “Una Rosa,” she was inspired by the Dominican experimentalist Kelman Duran, the Afro-Caribbean spiritualists Ìfé and the spiky electronics of the producer Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, who is of Indigenous descent. All of these artists, she said, have a singular capacity to borrow elements of pop music and place them in a surreal, electronic palette — a gap she had long yearned to close in her own music.The melody of the title track, an electronic reimagining of a Puerto Rican danzón by José Enrique Pedreira, returned to Rubinos in the early hours of a melancholy morning during the spring of 2019. She remembered the tune was from a color-changing fiber optic flower lamp her great-grandmother once owned, but it took her two years to identify it as a composition by Pedreira. That lamp served as the inspiration for the album artwork of “Una Rosa.”During the recording process, Rubinos said she became “obsessed” with traditional Cuban rumbas. She was especially enthralled by a snippet in the documentary “Las Cuatro Joyas del Ballet Cubano” (“The Four Jewels of Cuban Ballet”). Eventually, she traveled to Havana in search of its origin, and she spent time visiting the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, where a family friend is a dancer.Electronic music has intrigued Rubinos since she was a child.Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times“I would go to write for the record, and I would play clave for five hours not knowing what I was doing,” she said. “Sacude,” one of the album’s standouts, came to her in a flurry during that period: the syncopated insistence of a clave pulsates under the brassiness of Rubinos’s voice, a wall of synths shape shifting in the chorus. “Cuanto quisiera salir de esto ya/Si sigo este rumbo/Pronto me sorprende la muerte,” she sings in Spanish. “Oh, how I wish I could escape from this already/If I stay on this course/Soon, death will sneak up on me.”This is one of the album’s greatest gifts: its sense of high drama. Many moments on “Una Rosa” recall the narrative tension of a tragic film, like “Did My Best,” a chronicle about the sorrow of sudden loss peppered with the sound of exploding fireworks, closing doors and clicking car turn signals; or “Ay Hombre,” a bleeding-heart torch song that evokes the anguish of classic bolero singers. Rubinos refracts these sounds through an electronic prism, reshaping them as soundtracks for imagined romances and deaths in the 21st century.The album’s narrative urgency was born out of a period of turmoil for Rubinos, who said she felt drained after a long span of nonstop touring and performing. “When I came back from that, I was on empty and I didn’t feel like writing songs. I didn’t feel like listening to songs,” she said. “In my personal life I felt like [expletive].”She sought guidance from a curandero, a healer, who did a spiritual cleanse and diagnosed her with “pérdida de espíritu,” or “loss of spirit.” She also began working with a choreographer friend, trying to reconnect to her body through the pleasure of dance and improvisational movement.While all of these experiences played a part in “Una Rosa,” Rubinos said the album isn’t about a journey of healing. “I struggle with talking about the context of what happened to me going into this record, because the music itself is not about depression or about mental health,” she said. “Es difícil, a veces.” It’s difficult, sometimes, she explained in Spanish. “There always has to be a message or there always has to be this takeaway from every song,” she added. “And it’s hard for me, because it’s not so linear.” More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      The Music Lost to Coronavirus, Part 3

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThis past summer, it briefly seemed as if the worst of the coronavirus might be behind us. But despite some encouraging signs — like the concert business amping up again — the pandemic’s landscape continued to shift; the Delta variant spread widely, and deaths rose again. Many musicians and people integral to the music business have been lost to Covid-19.On this week’s Popcast, the third in a recurring series, a handful of remembrances of musicians who died during the pandemic:Jacob Desvarieux, one of the founders and the core arranger of Kassav’, the band that pioneered zouk music, who died at 65.John Davis, one of the actual singing voices behind the façade-pop supernova act Milli Vanilli, who died at 66.Chucky Thompson, a hip-hop and R&B producer responsible for hits by Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G. and others, who died at 53.Guests:Doreen St. Felix, television critic at The New YorkerGil Kaufman, senior writer and editor at BillboardJeff Mao, longtime music journalist and D.J.Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Why ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ the Album Has Always Rocked

      by

      When I discovered the record, it felt like the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.I’m here to spread the good word of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the album.It’s a little odd that a record so rapturously received, at least in the United States in the early ’70s, is now mostly left off best album lists, and didn’t secure a lasting place in the rock music canon.Then again, perhaps it was inevitable that “Superstar” the album would end up eclipsed by “Superstar” the stage show, which followed a year later. It’s natural to think of the album as an artifact of the theatrical experience, rather than as a singular artistic vision in its own right, because that’s the way it usually works. It can be tough, for new listeners, to hear the music for the theater.Maybe it’s just that no serious rock connoisseur wants to admit to digging the guys who did “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Excuse me, for a moment, if I come off as weirdly defensive about the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The night my parents met, my mother, a former singer, was performing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” onstage. She has still never seen “Evita.”Revisiting the 1970 album via the recent release of the 50th anniversary edition, I’m as excited by it as I was when I was 15 and listened to it for the first time. My high school classmates were wallowing in their teenage angst listening to Limp Bizkit and Korn — this was around the turn of the millennium — and here I was, immersed in the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.But for me, tuning into a Judas-centered retelling of the Passion of the Christ felt like a kind of rebellion too. I was obsessed with the song “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say),” which epitomized emo before that musical term existed, and the electric-shock scream of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, in the role of Jesus, railing at an unresponsive God. (“Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain!”) While “Superstar” isn’t overtly anti-religious, the impertinence of it gave a young, questioning Catholic a lot to think about.Like a lot of music I loved, and still love from that era, it was kind of preposterous. The “Superstar” overture alone — surely one of the most unsettling rock record openers, let alone musical overtures — features harrowing electric guitar, synth, strings, boisterous brass, and a choir dropped in from a horror movie. The whole thing is more Roger Waters than Rodgers and Hammerstein. Indeed, those musical ingredients can be heard in Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” released in the United Kingdom the same month as “Superstar.”The musical tracks for “Superstar,” Rice explained during a podcast, were laid down in a haze of marijuana smoke — at the same London studios where the Rolling Stones recorded “Sympathy for the Devil” — with each day’s session beginning with a half-hour jam session. Most of the musicians had played Woodstock behind Joe Cocker. Gillan recorded his vocals in three hours and played a gig with Deep Purple that night.It’s no wonder “Superstar” rocks.From the get-go, there’s “Heaven on Their Minds,” whose guitar riff has an evocative directness right up there with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” It also has Murray Head as Judas screaming “Jesuuuus!” and sounding kind of blasphemous doing it. How often do you want to blast a showtune — the term seems inadequate here — as loudly as possible? How many classic musicals kick off with a sound and atmosphere worthy of heavy metal? (Not counting “Les Misérables,” whose opening number features the chain-gang clink of actual heavy metal.)On the other end of the spectrum is “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a moment of tuneful introspection not miles away from Carole King’s “Tapestry,” which was the second-highest-selling album of 1971 behind “Superstar.”If one thinks of “Superstar” as a concept album, it’s that rare one that tells a compelling, coherent story, more narrative driven than Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or The Who’s “Tommy,” with none of the vaporous verbiage of a lot of rock music at the time. The whole thing is built, as Lloyd Webber is fond of saying, “like a cast iron boat” — a rock radio play, or a stage show for the proscenium of the imagination. In music industry parlance, it’s all killer, no filler.Rice, the former aspiring pop star that he was, has always excelled in down-to-earth lyrics that make outsize characters thoroughly relatable. It’s partly why the lead vocal performances here hit you in the gut. When Yvonne Elliman’s Magdalene cries “He scares me so,” you believe her. When Murray Head’s Judas chokes out the same line, in his own anguished version of that song — Lloyd Webber, ever the skillful deployer of the poignant reprise — you believe him, too.When it comes to Lloyd Webber’s musical audacity, it can sometimes feel as if it’s not just rock snobs that underrate “Superstar,” but also self-professed musical theater lovers.Rice, left, and Lloyd Webber are now musical theater royalty. Yet some of their work remains underrated by musical fans.Again, it may seem strange to suggest that the composer of “The Phantom of the Opera,” sometimes considered to be one of the most successful pieces of entertainment, is underrated by musical fans. But it’s precisely because of that kind of commercial success that Lloyd Webber is taken for granted, dismissed as a populist composer of the kinds of hummable melodies that might, say, pacify a temperamental president.This is unfair to the composer who, on “Superstar,” was having his way with the kinds of time signatures that were dazzling fans of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Just listen to “The Temple,” its feverish 7/4 time signature is a nod to Prokofiev’s equally tumultuous seventh piano sonata, with nary a beat to take a breath. Even more impressive is “Everything’s Alright,” probably the catchiest tune ever written in 5/4. And I include Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” in that.That’s not to mention Lloyd Webber’s essential, monumental achievement here, of creating 90 minutes of music deftly combining orchestra, rock band and a small army of vocalists. Let’s just say that Stephen Sondheim, who happens to share a birthday with Lloyd Webber, doesn’t have a monopoly on musical complexity, psychological depth and conceptual ambition.Lloyd Webber and Rice became musical theater royalty. But before that, they were a couple of shaggy-haired youths who captured the disparate music of the era like few other musicals until “Hamilton.” There was nothing like it in 1970, and there’s not been a lot like it since. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift Returns to No. 1 With Autographed ‘Fearless’ CDs

      by

      The singer-songwriter’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the rerecorded edition of her breakthrough 2008 LP, surged to the top of Billboard’s album chart.Streaming is everything in music today. But a pile of CDs, a marker and some elbow grease can still take you to No. 1 (at least if your name is Taylor Swift).This week, Swift’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the rerecorded edition of her breakthrough 2008 LP, returned to No. 1 on Billboard’s chart — up from No. 157 last week — with the equivalent of 152,000 sales in the United States, thanks largely to a limited release of autographed CDs on Swift’s website and the availability of the album’s vinyl version.“Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” which opened at No. 1 in April, notched its second week at the top with just 8.7 million streams, the lowest streaming number for a No. 1 album since AC/DC’s “Power Up” last November. But Swift also moved 146,000 copies as a complete package, including 77,000 on CD, 67,000 on vinyl and about 1,000 each on cassette and digital download, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Altogether, that pushed “Fearless” over the top in its 25th week out.Last month, Swift tweeted that she had signed so many CDs, “I may never write the same again, as my hand is now frozen in the permanent shape of a claw.”It is a tactic Swift has used before. Last year, she sent signed copies of “Folklore” — the first of her two quarantine LPs — to indie record stores, and later sold more autographed CDs on her website. “Folklore” held the No. 1 spot a total of eight weeks, more than any other album in 2020.Also this week, Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” is No. 2; the rapper Meek Mill’s new “Expensive Pain” opens at No. 3; YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Sincerely, Kentrell,” last week’s chart-topper, falls three spots to No. 4 in its second week out; and Lil Nas X’s “Montero” is in fifth place.“Love for Sale,” the album of Cole Porter songs by Lady Gaga and the 95-year-old Tony Bennett, opens at No. 8. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Mitski’s Sharp Take on a Creative Life, and 12 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Arca featuring Sia, Kelis, Tambino 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.Mitski, ‘Working for the Knife’Mitski monumentalizes an artist’s self-doubts — the creative impulse versus the editorial knife — in “Working for the Knife.” The track begins as a trudging march with stark, droning synthesizer tones, but Patrick Hyland’s production expands into ever-wider spaces with lofty, reverberating guitars. Mitski sings about missteps and rejections at first, but her imagination perseveres: “I start the day lying and end with the truth.” JON PARELESArca featuring Sia, ‘Born Yesterday’This unexpected collaboration just had to happen. Sia has a memorably broken voice and a songwriting strategy of victim-to-victory that has brought her million-selling hits, both on her own and behind the scenes. Arca, who has made music with Björk and Kanye West, has an operatic voice and a mastery of disorienting electronics from eerie atmospherics to brutal beats. In “Born Yesterday,” Sia wails, “You took my heart and now it’s broken,” confronting a partner’s betrayal. Arca twists the electronic track all over the place, bringing in and warping and subtracting a four-on-the-floor beat, pumping up the drama as Sia decides whether she’ll be “your baby any more.” The twists never stop. PARELESTainy with Bad Bunny and Julieta Venegas, ‘Lo Siento BB:/’Cynics might see a Tainy-produced track featuring Bad Bunny and the beloved pop-rock icon Julieta Venegas as the type of collaboration engineered in major label conference rooms. But “Lo Siento BB:/” is a seamless matchup that leverages both artists’ capacities for pointed vocal drama. Venegas’s sky-high melodies and funereal piano transition into El Conejo Malo’s signature baritone. Sad boys, sad girls and sad people, consider this your new anthem. ISABELIA HERRERARobert Glasper featuring D Smoke & Tiffany Gouché, ‘Shine’The Black church has been close to the center or at the very root of many big changes in American popular music; and over in the jazz world recently, gospel has been reasserting its influence. The pianist and bandleader Robert Glasper is a main driver of the trend, and this week he released “Shine,” an early single from the forthcoming “Black Radio 3,” featuring the rising M.C. D Smoke and the vocalist Tiffany Gouché. Glasper gifts the session with a signature sparkly harmonic vamp, and D Smoke projects farsighted conviction on his verses; Gouché’s vocals are beatific. This is the trinity that made the first “Black Radio” a smash, and has fed Glasper’s star formula: a gospel core, backpack-generation rap wisdom and bravado performances from female singers. But the track’s low-key showstopper is the bassist Burniss Travis, who’s doing more here than you might at first realize, which is exactly the intent. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOglaive and ericdoa, ‘Mental Anguish’This is one of the standout tracks on “Then I’ll Be Happy,” the new collaborative EP from the rising hyperpop stars glaive and ericdoa. At the beginning, it has some of the parchedness of early emo, but then lightning-bolt squelchy synths arrive, and fraught vocals that sound like they’re being microwaved in real time. JON CARAMANICAJames Blake featuring SZA, ‘Coming Back’James Blake is smart to let SZA upstage him in “Coming Back.” It starts as one more slice of his usual keyboard-and-falsetto melancholy, but when SZA arrives she challenges both his morose narrative — “Don’t you have a clue about where my mind is right now?” — and his stolid music, as she bounces syllables around the beat and brings new zigzags to the melody. Blake rises to the competition, chopping up the production and pepping up his tune. Even so, the song may not convince her to come back. PARELESJustin Bieber featuring TroyBoi, ‘Red Eye’It has been clear for a long time, but just to spell it out: Justin Bieber is the world’s savviest beat-shopper. While the lyrics of “Red Eye” flaunt the prerogatives of glamorous bicoastal American living — “You should be hopping on a redeye”— the track, by the British producer TroyBoi, plays with electronics, reggaeton, Afrobeats, dubstep and dembow: so digital, so professional, so perky, so slick. PARELESC. Tangana and Nathy Peluso, ‘Ateo’Latin pop’s geographical borders are dissolving. C. Tangana, a rapper turned singer from Spain, and Nathy Peluso, an R&B-loving singer from Argentina, find a meeting place amid the light-fingered guitar syncopations of bachata, a style from the Dominican Republic. “Ateo” translates as “atheist,” but the song quickly makes clear that desire and bachata add up to “a miracle come down from heaven”; now they’re believers. PARELESKelis, ‘Midnight Snacks’Kelis’s first new song in seven years sneaks up on you. Full of whispered astral funk and understated steaminess, it’s a welcome return for one of R&B’s left-field luminaries. CARAMANICATambino, ‘Estos Días’Tambino lets genres slip through his fingers like fine grains of white sand. On “Estos Días,” a sliced-up baile funk rhythm blends into dance-punk verve, only to burst into the soaring drama of a pop ballad. The track is a meditation on the protests that spread across the world last year, and the police violence that continues to plague marginalized communities. “Nos mata la policía,” he intones. “The police kill us.” But in the trembling fragility of the Peruvian-born artist’s voice, there lies a kind of radical hope. “Yo voy hacer mejor/Dejar todo el dolor,” it quivers. “I’m going to do better/Leave behind all the pain.” HERRERASusana Baca, ‘Negra del Alma’Susana Baca, the Afro-Peruvian songwriter and folklorist who has also served as Peru’s Minister of Culture, marks the 50th year of her career with her new album “Palabras Urgentes” (“Urgent Words”), connecting age-old injustices to the present. “Negro del Alma” is a traditional Andean song commemorating a complicated past, when Andean natives met Afro-Peruvians and fell in love. Baca complicates it further, meshing disparate Peruvian traditions of marimbas, hand percussion and horns. But her voice carries through the song’s anguish and determination. PARELESSuzanne Ciani, ‘Morning Spring’Suzanne Ciani’s “Morning Spring” is the first taste of “@0,” a new charity compilation showcasing the works of ambient creators past and present. Here, orbs of synth bubbles float to the surface like a cool carbonated drink, while others wash beneath, ebbing and flowing like the low tide. Ciani — a synth pioneer recently celebrated in the documentary “Sisters With Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines” — renders an aquatic concerto, its symphonic movements receding and transforming at every turn, like the curling crests of ocean waves. HERRERAKenny Garrett, ‘Joe Hen’s Waltz’As his contribution to “Relief,” a forthcoming compilation benefiting the Jazz Foundation of America’s Musicians’ Emergency Fund, the esteemed alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett provided an unreleased outtake from the sessions for his standout 2012 album, “Seeds From the Underground.” With a teetering melody and a swaggering mid-tempo swing feel, “Joe Hen’s Waltz” pays homage to the saxophonist Joe Henderson, nodding to his knack for slippery melodies that seem to move through a house of mirrors. In Garrett’s quartet at the time, much of the energy was being generated by his partnership with the pianist Benito Gonzalez, whose playing is rooted in Afro-Latin clave and the influence of McCoy Tyner, but has an effervescent phrasing style of its own. RUSSONELLO More