boygenius – the record
Recording songs with these colleagues/friends has resulted in fresh emotional resources to match the imaginative ones. “Emily I’m Sorry” may have fit on Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher, but she brings a fresh crushed-flower intensity to this lament for a relationship whose nights end with being called “a fucking liar.” The rocker “$20” begins with Julien Baker crunching away until, joined by Bridges and Lucy Dacus, the track goes in fascinating vocal directions: harmonies and howled interjections interweave without strain. On “True Blue” Baker and Dacus, over drums and electric chords, take up the story, following the woman to Chicago where she fucks around, the cold freezing the water in her eyes, and they learn they “can’t hide from you like I hide from myself.” Note the quiet assonance in (emphasis mine) “deadly heat.” A major song. I drum my fingers on the desk waiting for an album.
Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy
Just because the world is a shithole doesn’t mean we can’t dance our way out of our constrictions. Kayus Bankole and Alloysious Massaquoi treat their fourth album as a thirty-two minute exercise in tribal electronic permutation, long on groove and Godardian agitprop and devoted to things as they are so long as the chance of communal release exists. “I want your shield, I want your weapon, gimme that bulletproof vest,” Bankole rasps over keyboard bass in “I Saw.” Producer Graham “G” Hastings loops what is presumably a cop giving a contradictory order (“Take a few steps/BACK OFF!”) in “Shoot Me Down.” The most celebratory track, “Ululation,” boasts shriek-guitar and an ominously quiet polyrhythm like a cross between a Side Two Remain in Light cut and Umahlathini Nabo. “Be Your Lady” mumbles and murmurs until a tempo change at the halfway mark. “No sound is dissonant which tells of Life,” the very male and white Coleridge wrote more than two centuries ago.
Robert Forster – The Candle & The Flame
Collecting songs in his leisurely manner, Robert Forster got a jolt when wife Karin Bäumler was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. COVID lockdowns hastened decisions. His eighth album gets an assist from son and Goon Saxer Louis, his daughter Loretta, and sundry Go-Betweeners. The result, as I note in my Pitchfork review of The Candle & the Flame is his freshest, crispest album: a realization of that striped sunlight sound for which he has pined since he and the late Grant McLennan dreamed of writing songs as good as Tom Verlaine’s.
Humanizing The Vacuum 