Utopia centres on Serena Ryder’s vocals
SERENA RYDER “UTOPIA” (ATLANTIC)
Serena Ryder’s unadorned voice can and will stop you cold if you ever have the good fortune to hear it — which you won’t on one of her records. She may well be the greatest female voice in pop music since k.d. lang. She knows, however, that in the age of AutoTune, that matters not a whit, which is probably why “Utopia” arrives a year after her last single, “Got Your Number” (included here), and five years after her breakthrough album “Harmony,” which featured the hits “Stompa” and “What I Wouldn’t Do.” Ryder makes sure she throws all her cards on the table: every track here is aimed at the top of the pops, jammed with hooks and production that sounds like a million bucks. Serena Ryder is capable of many subtle charms, but there’s no time for that here.
It works. Ryder is far better as a pop artist than a rock artist, which she realized on “Harmony”; when her voice has to compete with loud guitars, nobody wins. Here, everything is centred on her vocals, and the songwriting gives her plenty of expansive melodies to work with. “Got Your Number” is almost formulaic in its approach to hitmaking, throwing every numeric cliché in existence (and shamelessly riding the coattails of Elle King’s “Exes and Ohs”). Much better is the title track, a disco stomper that demands to be remixed in time for Pride weekends across the country this summer. And the ballad “Rollercoaster” is sure to be a show-stopper in her live set.
Stream: “Wild and Free,” “Utopia,” “Rollercoaster”
BENJAMIN BOOKER “WITNESS” (ATO)
Three years ago, when we first heard this New Orleans-based performer, Benjamin Booker said he wanted to sound like Otis Redding playing guitar in a punk band. Gimmicky, sure, but it worked. He still tries that out on tracks here, like “Off the Ground,” and it still sounds great. But now he’s older, wise and in the midst of volatile times in his native country, and so this album aspires to be, according to Booker himself, a James Baldwin-like reaction to reawakened racial strife. (One title: “Truth is Heavy.”) That’s most obvious on the title track, which enlists Mavis Staples — a voice that is a direct connection, both aesthetically and historically, to civil rights struggles of the past. Not all of Booker’s lyrics hit direct targets: an actually astute political protest album would surely not contain a lyric like, “I just want to believe in something / I don’t care if it’s right or wrong.” Because just about any Donald Trump voter could have been heard saying the same thing last summer.
Musically speaking, the concept here means less rock ’n’ roll, more R&B — some of which would fit in with retro throwback acts like Leon Bridges, but with the assistance of Danger Mouse associate Sam Cohen and Alabama Shakes engineer Shawn Everett, “Witness” is content to reference the past without emulating it.
Stream: “Witness,” “The Slow Drag Under,” “Believe”
DJ SHUB “POWWOWSTEP” (INDEPENDENT)
The waves of acclaim for A Tribe Called Red’s “Halluci Nation” album keep pouring in: they took home some Junos last month, including one for producer of the year, and they’re more than likely to be shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize this summer (many are betting they’ll win in September). It’s an important album for many reasons; it’s also, arguably, the best by a band that keeps getting better.
And yet: it was made after the departure of DJ Shub, who reappears here with his own album. It’s more than obvious, listening to “Halluci Nation” and “PowWowStep” one after the other, what exactly it was that Shub brought to Tribe: the funk. “PowWowStep,” a term Tribe adopted to describe their sound when they first emerged more than five years ago, owes more debts to the warm vibes of classic house music than the more abrasive EDM that pops up on much of “Halluci Nation.” Both acts, of course, employ powwow singing — the Saskatchewan group Northern Cree appears on both recordings.
Shub left ATCR for family reasons, as that group’s tour schedule kept him away from his young kids. The musical differences appear to be minimal. But as ATCR get more heady and expansive, it’s Shub’s music that works better on a dance floor.
Stream: “Big Crow” (featuring Black Lodge Singers), “Come On Over” (featuring Northern Cree), “Smoke Dance One” (featuring Frazer Sundown)