Tag: Kali Uchis

Crawling back from a crazy couple of months of frenzied activity and trying to find a little more of a balance. Have a couple of plans to get next month’s out earlier; we’ll see how successful I am. The month off did remind me how much I enjoy doing these, not only compiling the songs but finding something to say about them, and made me recommit to doing it every month.

https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/d5351ad0-81d4-4716-89d1-74feacef26d6

• Willie Nelson, “Excuse Me (I Think I’ve Got a Heartache)” – Willie Nelson’s record-length dives into the catalog of specific songwriters are among my favorite items in his wide-ranging oeuvre – I still play his songs of Cindy Walker more than any other record he’s put out in the 20+ years since – and I Don’t Know a Thing About Love, his look at the songs of the great Harlan Howard, is another winner. I grew up with the original Buck Owens version of this but I had fewer loving associations than most of the songs Nelson does here, this one didn’t live in my blood the same way as “Busted” or “Life Turned Her That Way” do, and it let me sink into this arrangement, trading in sly barstool wisdom for the punchy churn of Owens and his Buckaroos, like getting into a bubble bath, especially the interweaving of Mike Johnson’s steel and Jim “Moose” Brown’s keys.
• Les Mamans du Congo & Rrobin, “Dia” – Mama Glad (Gladys Samba), Bantu singer/songwriter/rapper teams up again with beatmaker and label owner Rrobin for an infectious song that swirls like light as the the golden hour starts to fade. The call and response dancing over minimal keyboard bass and arrangements that are exactly the right kind of busy keep me coming back to this over and over.
• Kali Uchis, “Happy Now” – Kali Uchis’ Red Moon in Venus is my favorite R&B record so far this year, a kaleidoscope of moods, featuring songwriting that alternately dazzles me with its intricate, beautiful structures, and slaps me in the face at the right time. This final track, co-written with and produced by Sounwave, DJ Khalil, and Mndsgn, was an early contender for favorite song and while that feeling shifts almost daily – the sign of a record I love – it’s still high in the running. “Cosmic conditions conspired against us. ‘Cause you and me, we got chemistry, but what’s with our timing? Guess it’s better we never rushed; our spark turned to flames.”
• Ari Joshua, “Fresh” – Guitarist Ari Joshua convenes a fantastic Pacific Northwester soul-jazz/funk collective for this killing single, with Skerik (everybody from Mark Eitzel to Bobby Previte to Charlie Hunter to Wayne Horvitz) on tenor and 2/3 of the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, Lamarr on organ and Grant Schroff (Polyrhythmics). Not an ounce of fat here but all indications point to them taking it into outer space when they do it live.
• Daddy Long Legs, “Silver Satin” – I loved Daddy Long Legs from those first couple of singles – and I was already pre-disposed since I’d been a big fan of drummer Josh Styles’ DJ sets so knew how good his taste in grooves was – and they cemented that love the first time I saw them open for and back cracked-perspective R&B great T. Valentine at the (RIP) Lakeside Lounge. The last time I saw them, at Rumba right before the pandemic, they had turned up the ’60s Stones/Northern Soul colors in their palette, and that technicolor finger-snapping gets more vibrant and greasy on their front-to-back great Street Sermons. “At the bottom of a bottle of Jack o’ Diamonds, I lost my head and woke up in Coney Island.”
• Gina Birch, “I Play My Bass Loud” – The solo debut of Raincoats bassist Gina Birch was everything I wanted it to be, and this title track exemplifies everything I love about it. An oozing rhythm with a bass line I couldn’t shake if I wanted to and a vocal bulging with elastic declamations. “Turn up the volume. I raise my window high. I paint the sky red: it’s getting darker, it’s getting deeper. Red streaks across the sky. Are you ready for this?”
• Gee Tee, “Cell Damage” – Goner Records (and their live arm, Gonerfest) has always had a particularly good line on great new rock music from Australiza and New Zealand, and this NZ band followed a stunning Gonerfest set last year with one of my favorite noisy garage-punk records in a long time, Goodnight, Neanderthal. This under-two-minutes blast is representative of a record I don’t skip anything on, with vocals drowning in heat mirage lines, washes of fuzzed-out guitar and riding a wave of acid trip synth, steering around the cymbals.
• Tee Vee Repairman, “Drownin'” – Ishka Edmeades, Gee Tee member, steps out on his own with the soulful freakouts of stellar full-lenght What’s On TV?. Wearing his Devo influence on his sleeve, this struck me as a heartache-drenched sweet spot between Gentleman Jesse’s powerpop and Hunx and his Punx doo-wop stomps. “I’ve been waiting at the station, just don’t know what to do. I was drowning in you.”
• Yaeji, “Done (Let’s Get It)” – Brooklyn-based Yaeji’s With a Hammer is the first example in years of the kind of warm dance music I was so drawn to – but rarely admitted, openly embracing the harder-edged drum and bass and jungle – in my early 20s. Influenced by classic house, riding on waves of squelching bass and drums full of a writhing-on-the-floor clack but with subtly R&B-flavored vocals in both English and Korean.
• OkoNski, “Song For My Sister’s Son” – Steve Okonski, who started as a classically trained pianist then became known to the wider world through his affiliation with soul acts Durand Jones and the Indications and Aaron Frazer, stepped into his own with a gorgeous piano trio album (featuring Frazer on drums and Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery on bass) that feels to me like it occupies a similar warm, hazy sunrise sonic space as the Yaeji that immediately preceded it.
• Ingrid Laubrock, “Delusions” – A little more abrasive than the tracks but with a similar internal landscape writ large intensity. One of my favorite saxophone players, Ingrid Laubrock assembles a stunning sextet on her new record The Last Quiet Place of partner Tom Rainey on drums, Michael Formanek on bass, Brandon Seabrook on guitar, Tomeka Reid on cello, and Mazz Swift on violin.
• Liv.e, “RESET!” – Dallas’s Liv.e plays with moods in a similar way – to my ears – as the previous couple of tracks, digging into R&B history as much as it feels like she’s excavating her own past, her own history of victories and trauma. “Chop my head off, I wanna roll my eyes back. Don’t wanna see what time sent. Don’t wanna know what’s coming next.”
• Chlöe, “Make it Look Easy” – Chlöe, best known as part of Chloe x Halle, delivered a remarkable, stripped-down record with In Pieces, and while it’s still revealing itself to me, this is an early front runner for my favorite song from the album. From the opening invocation “No matter how many times I break, I pull myself together. Every damn time,” I’m enraptured, and the slow-drag groove with samples around the fingersnaps that feel like dancing ghosts being beckoned, never disappoints me.
• 6LACK, “Inwood HIll Park” – I got turned onto 6LACK from old friend and co-worker Cassie Schutt and I was immediately a sucker for his laid back, almost deceptively not-giving-a-fuck conversation cadence and low rumble. Since I Have a Lover is another peak, another refinement, a polishing of exactly what he does so well, the space he’s carved out in contemporary hip-hop. “Can’t you see that I’ve been hostile for weeks? Don’t you know you change the patterns of my sleep?”
• Superviolet, “Overrater” – I was a big fan of Columbus band Sidekicks, one of my favorite pop-punk bands finding new textures and voices in a genre I’d long since lost interest in. But it was a pleasant surprise to hear leader Steven Ciolek emerge with this project, sun-dappled bursting-at-the-seams folk rock produced by Saintseneca’s Zac Little. The similar sense of “Man, I’m just telling you a story ,” and the subtle but right arrangement felt like it created a commonality with the earlier two songs on the playlist. “Well, in a van in headphones is the last way I want to die; just because we’re losers doesn’t mean that we won’t try. So call up Felicia, call up Matt, tell them to craft the plan: surprise release the sixth album as the greatest rock and roll band.
• boygenius, “Not Strong Enough” – I like the work of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker, a great deal individually but the boygenius collaboration took until this full length, The Record, to hit me as strongly. The guitar stabs and swirling harmonies in this record send me into space and back into myself at the same time, balancing the intimate and high drama with assured hands. “The way I am not strong enough to be your man – I lied, I am just lowering your expectations.”
• Kendrick Scott, “A Voice Through the Door” – Drummer-composer Kendrick Scott strips down the approach of his last couple of records to a tight trio with saxophonist Walter Smith III and bassist Reuben Rogers for Corridors. This mesmerizing track opens with a solo smith improvisation before a wash of cymbals announces the rest of the trio. One of the great mood pieces being written today, played by musicians with a careful and rare empathy.
• Meshell Ndegeocello featuring Brandee Younger and Julius Rodriguez, “Virgo” – I’d been a fan of singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello since first hearing her work as a kid, but a breathtaking set at Manhattan’s Blue Note with a stacked cast of collaborators including Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and Rodriguez who also features on this track, brought that love back to the forefront of my brain. This first taste of The Omnichord Real Book has me hungry for more, with a cut-by-a-razor funk drum pattern and guitar riff dancing between the deep groove of moog bass and the exquisite tinsel-rain of Brandee Younger’s harp. “I’m ascending faster than the speed of light to sweet nothingness.”
• Connections, “Bird Has Flown” – Columbus’s supergroup of rock-and-roll lifers Connections came out of a few years of uncertainty with their strongest album yet, Cool Change, and this is among my favorite tracks from it, with an anthemic shouting call-and-response vocal and soaring guitar and keyboard solos over the kind of choppy groove they do better than any Columbus rock band in years – maybe since leader Andy Hempel and guitarist Kevin Elliott’s last band, 84 Nash.
• The New Pornographers, “Pontius Pilate’s Home Movies” – Canadian collective New Pornographers return with a rock-solid collection of their cracked songs and infectious melodies. AC Newman and Neko Case’s sly back and forth on this lovely admonition and the pulse of the band remind me exactly what I always loved about this band. “Now you’re clearing the room, like Pontius Pilate, when he showed all his home movies. All his friends yelling, ‘Pilate, too soon!'”
• The Necks, “Imprinting” – Australian piano trio The Necks have never made a bad album. Every time they come together, they dig deeper into their shared language, into the space they’ve carved at the intersection of post-minimalism chamber music and contemporary improvisation, and this is another winner.
• Missy Mazzoli, “Dark With Excessive Bright” – I’ve been a fan of Missy Mazzoli’s compositions since first hearing her ensemble Victoire, through a series of great new chamber records from people like Nadia Sirota, yMusic, Now Ensemble, where she almost always penned my favorite tracks, on through an excellent series of operas where she drags that form into the 21st century by the scruff of its neck. This new record of which this is the title track, is an ideal introduction to her work and this concerto for violin and string orchestra featuring soloist Peter Herresthal might be my favorite piece of hers yet.
• Josephine Foster, “Haunted House” – A new Josephine Foster record is always a cause for celebration in my corner of the world and her new coiled, mysterious Domestic Sphere is everything I could have hoped, with this devastating seismic read on the heartbeat of a character and the world, as one of many chilling salvos. “I am a haunted house. There is no light in me. Your candle is gone out; my windows, they are empty. There is nothing on earth that isn’t poison to me.”
• Dave Douglas and Elan Mehler, “We Saw You Off” – Trumpeter Dave Douglas’s ranging curiosity, lit by a love for the world, is a perpetual inspiration to me. This collaboration with pianist Elan Mehler sets haiku to new musical settings, sung by Dominique Eade. This setting of a Saigyō piece grabbed me early and hasn’t let go since. “We saw you off / And returning through the fields / I thought morning dew / Had wet my sleeves / But it was tears.”
• Mark Lomax II featuring Scott Woods, “Ho’oponopono” – I’ve raved about Lomax often enough I don’t think it’s a secret I think he’s Columbus’s finest composer. His collaboration with poet Scott Woods, Black Odes, was the single event I was sorriest to miss last year (I was out of town and sure I saw something great) and this first taste of the recording reminds me exactly why. It’s a return to black love – the first subject I saw Woods tackle more than 20 years ago, he even used to have a poem called “Why Do You Always Talk About Black Love,” I think – but with all the skills of the last 20 years of life, on both of their parts, with delicate and surging arrangements and Lomax’s quintessential taste for harmony given a remarkable showcase. “And so I love you / And so I am sorry / And so I beg forgiveness”
• Lucero, “Should’ve Learned By Now” – Lucero – who I think I originally heard within a year or two of first seeing Scott Woods read and hearing Lomax play with his group Blacklist – also find ways to apply all the life singer-songwriter Ben Nichols has had in decades leading the band as he and the band learn to relax a little more and open up the arrangements to find new colors to paint these feelings. This sinewy title track off their latest album finds them in fine form, the kind of raging, muscular melancholy they do as well as any band working and better than most – that piano line snaps my heart in two every time. “Well, half of what runs through my head is bullshit I sell to myself. And the other half ain’t well thought out; I really should’ve learned by now.”
• Kelela, “Missed Call” – The textures are different but this standout track from DC-based Kelela’s terrific album Raven struck a similar chord in me of resiliency and self-admonition, with a neon-splashed groove. “I’m in a dream. I wake up until the moment that we make up.”
• Gama Bomb, “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” – This metal (check that double-time drumming and the lacerating guitar solo) read on one of my favorite Pogues anthems to rising above and stumbling in the muck on a perpetual cycle, made me grin like an idiot. “Bury me at sea where no murdered ghost can haunt me if I rock upon the waves, and no corpse can lie upon me.”
• Burna Boy featuring J Balvin, “Rollercoaster” – A more easy-going groove animates this collaboration between these superstars, Nigerian Burna Boy and Colombian Latin trap/reggaeton king J Balvin, and their voices blend together beautifully. If songs of the summer are still a thing, this is high on my list of contenders. “I no wanna wait till it’s all over – this life is a gift from Most High, Jah.”
• Huntertones, “Biff” – Beloved Columbus expatriates now doing big things in New York and elsewhere, Huntertones use their nearly unquenchable thirst to take the world in and reflect it back with a heavy taste for a variety of rhythms but also a brilliantly strong taste for melody. This delirious pop-funk carnival ride makes exceptional use of the front line of Dan White on tenor, Jon Lampley on trumpet, and Chris Ott on trombone, while leaving space for their longtime rhythm section of guitarist Josh Hill, bassist Adam DeAscentis, and drummer John Hubbell to breathe. That repeated riff has been stuck in my head since I first heard it.
• MEM_MODS, “Midtown Miscommunication” – This killing instrumental funk-rock project from Steve Selvidge (Hold Steady, Big Ass Truck), Luther Dickinson (North Mississippi All Stars, Black Crowes), and Paul Taylor (New Memphis Colorways, Amy LaVere) more than lived up to my high expectations, with the added seasoning of Marc Franklin’s horn arrangements, played by Franklin and Art Edmaison.
• DJ Quik, “Class” – In what I realize is an unintentional theme of this month’s playlist, producer-rapper DJ Quik continues to dig into his language. His signature, the smoothed out, warm funk he’s been doing brilliantly for at least 30 years, still sounds like a summer night in the offing. “Sometimes rhyme, then I sing.”
• Dydy Yeman, “S’envolvement” – I couldn’t find much about this Ivorian Afrobeats artists but this song captured me immediately. The intermingling textures of voices and the scratchy beat put me in a space I wanted to come back to again and again.
• Tsa manyalo, “Petula patjana” – I got turned onto the South African genre  of Tsa manyalo this year – maybe through ILX? Maybe a blog? I should keep better notes – and this version of this Solly Selema song is like capturing sunlight in a bottle.
• Lucinda Chua, “You” – London-based cellist-singer Lucinda Chua blew my mind with her full-length debut YIAN. This is an excellent example of the way she builds an entire world for her listeners, the inside of a heart recast as a house of mirrors, and the way the sentences she builds in the lyrics resist resolution, hanging in a state of hazy suspension I found intoxicating. “I want you to know that all of your kindness is all of your kindness.”
• James & The Giants, “Hall of Mirrors” – One of my favorite American songwriters of the last 20 years, James Toth (I treasure every time I’ve gotten to see his Wooden Wand project) brings a more lush take, in tandem with long-time collaborator Jarvis Taveniere, to this new James & the Giants project. The emphasized hooks and glowing arrangement amplifies the mystery in these songs at the same time they bolster their accessibility. Maybe my favorite song so far this year. “We won’t let the tide or starlight rule us. We’ll toast the dark for the way it cools us. ‘Cause the night is a hall of mirrors.”
• Rudy Royston, “Morning” – I resisted the easy pairing of morning with night of this track and the one immediately before it, but the similar palette of colors in this perfect drummer-composer Rudy Royston track, glowing with a similar promise of light and life as the Toth right before, and with a marvelous band of John Ellis on bass clarinet, Hank Roberts on cello, Gary Versace on accordion, and Joe Martin on bass, kept calling to me. It’s a marvelous, catchy, piece and it just felt right here.
• Caroline Rose, “Stockholm Syndrome” – This early highlight of Caroline Rose’s new The Art of Forgetting is an abject lesson in restraint, in paring down, and a reminder of how much menace and heartbreak can live in less than two minutes. “I know that you need air, but I can’t let you out.”
• Muscadine Bloodline, “Life Itself” – This new-ish country duo lean into one of my favorite radio-ready singles to come out of the genre in quite a while. Burnished sunlight power and an easy, open-hearted appeal with a hook I can’t get enough of. “Can’t think of anyone else. Can’t get you out of my mind.”
• Cecile McLorin Salvant, “Le temps est assassin” – With Mélusine, our finest jazz singer of her generation continues to resist resting on the supple power of her voice and on what she’s done before. She digs into the French and Haitian heritage of her parents with dazzling results, there isn’t a bad track on this record, even for someone like me whose understanding of French is schoolboy at best.
• Nakhane, “You’ve Got Me (Living Again)” – A powerful, surging statement of purpose, a rising-up beautifully echoed by the melody, especially that keyboard line, and the lyrics, from this South African singer. “I’ve tried to change for you.”
• Wadada Leo Smith and the Orange Wave Ensemble, “Nzotake Shange” – Keeping with my usual stylistic marker of ending with something meditative, something like a prayer, this tribute to the poet and playwright Nzotake Shange from one of my favorite composers and trumpet players Wadada Leo Smith, takes on a serpentine groove with a band of astonishing players – guitarists Nels Cline, Lamar Smith, and Brandon Ross, bassists Melvin Gibbss and Bill Laswell, drummer Pheeroan akLaff, percussionist Mauro Refosco, and electronics artist Hardedge – an opening salvo and highlight of Fire Illuminations.