Toto La Momposina

La Bodega

(Astar Artes; US: 10 Nov 2009; UK: 10 Nov 2009)

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Listening to “Tembanddumba”, a song in which Totó la Momposina lets her voice stoop thrillingly and then snatches it up again like a dropped hankie, reminds that Mercedes Sosa died not long ago. Sosa was an Argentine, and Momposina is Colombian, but both have championed the folk music of their respective countries and have possessed strong voices. Their voices are not brutal but provide the steady power that could pierce a wall. If you wanted a boil-it-down nickname for the Afro-Indian music Momposina likes to sing, you could call it drum ‘n’ flute. The flute ( kuisi) is husky. The drumming is vivid stuff: rapid, rumbling, and stormy. She loves cumbia and mixes things around a little, keeping the flavor local. The violins are perhaps a step too far in the direction of cosmopolitan smoothness, contrasting uneasily with the indigenous instruments. Though it lacks the the rougher style 2002’s Pacantó, La Bodega proves la Momposina is one of those rare musicians who would have to work at being anything less than good.

—Deanne Sole

Shelley Short

A Cave, A Canoo

(Hush; US: 13 Oct 2009; UK: 13 Oct 2009)

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In a lot of ways, Shelley Short fits into the female singer-songwriter mold pretty well. She plays a quiet acoustic guitar, and her voice is sweet, hushed, and seemingly confessional. But hold on before you paint her into that corner because A Cave, A Canoo has some subtle surprises and noise play that distinguishes it from the pack. During the verses in “Familiar”, guitars buzz, notes drop in off-key and off-time, and strings squeak in complaint, but the chorus is all shimmering haze. Pedal steel, soaking in reverb, creates a wide space about the sinister, playful hiss of Short’s vocals. “Hard to Tell” rests on the laid-bare buzz of accordion. On “Tap the Old Bell,” a huge space exists between Short’s far-off guitar and her up-front vocals, making for a haunting lullaby. At their core, these may all be contained folk songs, but Short, never quiet, comes at them from the same angle, moving away from a simple guitar/vocals construction and, in the process, creating an album that seeps into the skin, that refuses—despite all its quiet—to let you dismiss it as something you’ve heard before.

—Matthew Fiander

Boys Named Sue

Greatest Hits Volume Sue

(Phantom Sound & Vision; US: 15 Sep 2009; UK: 15 Sep 2009)

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How’s this for a gimmick: Four Dallas yahoos call themselves Boys Named Sue and play roadhouse crowd-pleasers in beer-soaked classic-country mode. They are: Sue-ah on “lead vocalizin’ and pickin’”, Snakebite Sue on “bangin’ and harmoneez”, Bobby Sue on “sawin’ and lady killin”, and Dub Sue on “slappin’ and drinkin’”. These guys are renowned for facilitating bar bashes in Texas to loyal crowds of hooters and hollerers, and now the band has committed its reverent but goofy blend of outlaw archetypes and alt-country songwriting to a new studio record, The Hits Volume Sue.  Thankfully, these guys can write and play well enough to transcend their wisecracking personas, and they aren’t faking their love of ‘70s country, as on “Lost My Mind”, the most Waylon-y song in years.  Sue-ah can’t sing well enough to hold his own with his honky-tonk heroes, but that’s hardly the point on songs like “Light Beers Away” and “Whiskey Talkin’”, both catchy and fun sing-alongs that sound better the more you take the band’s advice. The album is front-loaded with the Sues’ best songs and eventually runs out of good ideas, and while a studio release from a party band can’t compete with its shows, this record ought to satisfy folks who still dust off their BR5-49 albums once in a while.

—Steve Leftridge

Groupshow

The Martyrdom of Groupshow

(~scape; US: 28 Apr 2009; UK: 27 Apr 2009)

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Is this a joke? It certainly sounds like a joke (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing). Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann, and Andrew Pekler—all names with individual pedigrees in experimenting with electronics—get together and record that most wanky conceit of rock ‘n’ roll: a jam session. The Martyrdom of Groupshow consistently betrays its jam origins; tracks live or die by the quality of the loose riff that emerges from the opening timbral salad. Do this for two to three minutes, rinse and repeat 12 times, and there’s the record. It’s not an ethos for recording that has to end badly, but for Groupshow, more often than not the result teeters on the precipice of gelling into a compelling idea.

Maybe the length is the issue here. Some of the greatest psychedelic jam bands found riff nirvana through tireless repetition—see Can’s “Halleluwah”. Groupshow sounds too impatient to fully see these through. When it does work, as on the decayed surf twang of “The Future Looks Bright… Super Bright” or the lo-fi grit of “Physical Therapist”, it becomes clear why this collaboration was such an interesting idea to begin with. It’s possible that Groupshow is a sight to behold when the band goes at it live, and that the abrupt sequencing nonsequiturs of Martyrdom would be rectified in such a setting. As a recorded document, however, the album is frustratingly good at being almost there.

—David Abravanel

Mario Adnet & Philippe Baden Powell

Afrosambajazz

(Adventure Music; US: 15 Sep 2009; UK: 15 Sep 2009)

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The “Afro Sambas” refer to the work of the legendary Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell, who released a number of solo and collaborative works under this title from the mid-1960s through to the 1980s. Notable among these releases was his partnership with songwriter Vinicius de Moraes, which resulted in the album Os Afro Sambas in 1966. Baden Powell was influenced as much by jazz and classical composition as he was by the sounds of samba, bossa nova, choro, and the Afro-Brazilian candomblé and umbanda, so it makes perfect sense to hear jazz arrangements of pieces such as “Canto de Xangô”, “Lamento de Exú”, and “Pai”. Guitarist Mario Adnet has previously released jazz versions of other Brazilian giants such as António Carlos Jobim and Moacir Santos.

On this release, he collaborates with Baden Powell’s son Philippe, an accomplished pianist. Their instruments are complemented by brass, woodwind, strings, a variety of percussion, and occasional vocals. The result is a triumph, as the two musicians produce large group arrangements that do justice to the original songs while also adding new layers of richness and complexity. As well as covering the original “Afro Sambas”, some of Baden Powell’s unreleased work is aired for the first time, including the beautiful “Canto de Yansan”. This is a wonderfully paced and orchestrated release with broad appeal.

—Richard Elliott

Apathy

Wanna Snuggle?

(Traffic Ent.; US: 6 Oct 2009; UK: 5 Oct 2009)

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First and foremost, let’s get any discussion of this album’s artwork out of the way. Sure, it’s kind of ugly, but let’s not judge an album by its cover. Wanna Snuggle is the kind of album that just deserves more than some snarky remarks about its cover. For the most part, this is one hell of a record, as half of its tracks are some of the best you will probably hear this year. Of course, that depends on your taste—meaning if you have a penchant for more superficial hip-hop, you should probably move along. Truthfully, anyone interested remotely in hip-hop needs to hear at least some of Wanna Snuggle?.

Apathy hails from the underdog hip-hop state of Connecticut and is a rapper and producer who has built a healthy following for a damn good reason: He’s a talented artist. Armed with a great flow full of clever wordplay and equally strong abilities behind the boards, Apathy offers Wanna Snuggle?, a showcase for said skills in spades. Perfect examples include “Money Orientated” and “True Love”, two of 2009’s best tracks. The former features a slick loop of AZ’s famous verse on Nas’ “Life’s a Bitch” and a fresh look at the evils of money, and the latter pairs up Renaissance man Phonte with Apathy for a cut full of old-school vibes and loads of quotables. Other hits include eerie joints “Victim” and “Slave” along with the oddly fun “Shoot First”, which hosts a great guest verse from B-Real.

But the pacing of this record is extremely detrimental to its success. You more or less have a mixture of fantastic and dreadful songs with nothing in between. What’s frustrating about this is Apathy made this album unreasonably long at 21 tracks that clock in at nearly 70 minutes. Take the editor’s scissors to the tracklist, get rid of seven to eight tracks (like “Mind Ya Business”, “Anyday”, and “Run, Run Away”), and you would have what is close to a perfect album.

—Andrew Martin

The Moritz von Oswald Trio

Vertical Ascent

(Honest Jon’s; US: 21 Jul 2009; UK: 22 Jun 2009)

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Moritz von Oswald’s collaboration with Carl Craig titled its resected classical pieces “Movements”. On Vertical Ascent, von Oswald’s collective troika with NSI’s Max Lodbauer and Sasu Rippatti (Luomo/ Vladislav Delay), the four tracks are “patterns”, though they certainly exhibit their fair share of movement as well. Von Oswald’s minimalist work, under the vast esoteric network of Basic Channel and its sister labels, imagined the song as a single vector, bent and subject to gravitational resistance but ultimately cyclical and single-minded. Vertical Ascent in contrast is wildly divergent, scattering its patterns about, but contained within the authoritative kingdom of the beat. That’s not to say it’s organized chaos but rather chaotic organization. The disjointed stratosphere of free-formed contours resemble the indeterminate avant-garde at first, but it’s the persistence of the pulse which makes these shapes most unsettling (and perhaps disqualifies them from the electroacoustic ranks), not unlike the rhythms in Ricardo Villalobos’ Vasco or Wolf Eyes’ Dead Hills EP, which are unrelenting despite what happens around them. 

The gorgeous junglistic beats of “Pattern 3” come perhaps closest to containing its world of sounds in a way that a dancefloor could understand, instigating a beautiful paring of misty and sparse Konigsförst of melody with a Schwarzwald of tribal stick batterings. On the other “Patterns”, the melody is peripheral, at best parallel, like a ghost shadowing the bounce and refraction of the incidental SFX, a presence but painfully distantiated. This is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to Basic Channel fans, but the synergistic quality of von Oswald’s talent, combined with three classically trained players, makes for an altogether different quality—like the rhythmic remixes Chain Reaction releases deserved and never received.

—Timothy Gabriele

Caethua

The Long Afternoon of Earth

(Preservation; US: 25 Jul 2009; UK: 13 Jul 2009)

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On The Long Afternoon of Earth, Clare Adrienne Cameron Hubbard sings in a deliberately naïve soprano against a trickle of guitar and simple effects, sounding a little like Joanna Newsom, though without Newsom’s elfin tweet and with less compact poetry in the lyrics.

Buildings burn
To never return
Again!

Nothing after “burn” is completely necessary. Hubbard’s childlike delivery leaves the ends and middles of words plucked upwards, as if we’re listening to a person still learning to sing, which makes the singer sound young and plaintive and therefore sincere. The listener is invited to anticipate surprises—what will this sincere person say next, and what stories will she tell? This style is often referred to as “folk”, but this attenuate delicacy is folk in the way Marie Antoinette wearing a milkmaid dress was a farm worker. It’s an idea of folk simplicity, rather than the root of it. A thoughtful, wistful, and likeable album.

—Deanne Sole