Béla Fleck’s ‘Africa’ mixes new material with old
Béla Fleck, “Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions” (Craft Recordings)
Béla Fleck has built his unparalleled career expanding both what it means to be a banjo player and what banjo music can or should be.
That journey took him to Africa to explore the roots of the banjo, a trip documented on a pair of records that are being re-released, along with a third disc of new material, as “Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions.”
The set compiles music first released in 2009 and 2010 and offers a third disc, also being released separately as “The Ripple Effect,” featuring live collaborations with kora player Toumani Diabaté. There is also a DVD of the 2008 documentary about his trip to Africa.
The 10 new songs are a wonderful addition to the music previously released and showcase Fleck’s ability to weave in and out of musical genres, teasing classic American songs like “Oh! Susanna” on “Kauonding Sissoko” while trading licks with Diabaté and offering an unique take on the old favorite “Dueling Banjos.”
Fleck has never shied from genre-bending and bringing the banjo to new audiences. “Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions” shows him at his best.
Pearl Jam, “Gigaton” (Monkeywrench/Republic Records)
Trust Pearl Jam to still surprise us in 2020. The Seattle rock gods have made an album we didn’t know we needed.
“Gigaton” is a fascinating and ambitious 12-track collection with a cleaner, crisper sound that is studded with interesting textures, topped by Eddie Vedder’s still-indignant voice.
Many songs switch gears and morph into something else before they’re done, as if the group was restless to try something else. Bandmates have also switched instruments on this, their 11th studio album and their first in seven years.
“Gigaton” marks the band’s first co-production with Josh Evans, who previously worked with Soundgarden and Chris Cornell. He’s helped pull out more experimentation, certainly from the messy last studio offering, “Lightning Bolt.”
The first single, “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” is easily one of the most exciting Pearl Jam songs in decades, with guitarist Stone Gossard playing chunky bass lines, Mike McCready offering splintering, chopping guitar riffs and Vedder’s voice at its most mercurial, bursting out of the song’s outline.
“Alright” is a nifty, spacey, Peter Gabriel-ish tune and “Comes Then Goes” is an acoustic ballad for a lost friend. Gossard sings backup vocals on his terrifically unsettling lullaby “Buckle Up” and drummer Matt Cameron shines on the excellent “Take the Long Way,” attacking his kit like a thrash act.
Environmental fears are a frequent motif, with Vedder often singing about oceans rising and an uneasy Earth. “You can’t hide the lies/In the rings of a tree,” he sings on “Alright.” The album’s cover captures a Norwegian ice cap gushing and the title “Gigaton” is often used to measure human carbon dioxide emissions.
The band’s distaste for current politics is also easily apparent: Vedder sings in one song that the “government thrives on discontent” and on “Never Destination” he mentions “collusion hiding in plain sight.”
Donald Trump is directly mentioned once, in “Quick Escape,” a rocking ditty about looking for a place, anyplace — Morocco, Zanzibar, Mars even — that the president hasn’t destroyed yet. He later calls the sitting president an expletive on another track.
But despite the gloom, there’s great hope on “Gigaton,” too, with Vedder cheerleading the resistance. “Swim sideways from this undertow and do not be deterred,” he counsels on “Seven O’Clock” and adds, “This is no time for depression.” And on the straightforward rocker “Superblood Wolfmoon,” he says: “Don’t allow for hopelessness/Focus on your focusness/I’ve been hoping that our hope dies last.”
The album ends with the mournful “River Cross,” with the side that is right in a chokehold and outnumbered. Yet they will win: “Share the light/Won’t hold us down,” Vedder sings, virtually sobbing, like a prayer. As for us, we can thank God they’re back.
Jessie Reyez, “Before Love Came to Kill Us” (FMLY/Island Records)
Jessie Reyez might be petite, but she’s a monster. We didn’t say that. She did, on her official debut album. But she memorably adds a certain expletive before the word “monster.”
Reyez is definitely a monster when it comes to music. The Toronto-bred artist who once handed out mixtapes for free has created a stunning full-length calling card with “Before Love Came to Kill Us.”
Before the coronavirus disrupted all our lives, Reyez was showing off her music on tour with Billie Eilish and that combo of artists on the same bill is genius. Reyez is as unique and undeniable as her musical compatriot.
The 14-track “Before Love Came to Kill Us” shows off multiple sides to Reyez, who isn’t easy to categorize. There’s some hip-hop, downer R&B, arena ballads and pop. Whatever it sounds like, it’s intense.
“If I blow your brains out/I can guarantee that you’d forget her/If I blow your brains out/I can kiss it better,” Reyez sings on the first song, “Do You Love Her,” which casually mentions her Beretta.
She lets her fierce flag fly frequently on the album: “You make me wanna jump off the roof,” she sings in one song. “My love is ruthless,” she sings on another. “I ain’t a killa/I’ll let you breathe,” Reyez reassures on a third. She may rely on co-writers, but the lyrics are usually all hers and she shows her passion and her scars.
Reyez can modify her voice to be childlike or whispery and then zoom into pure gangsta menace. On the fantastic “Roof,” she raps with astonishing speed. She can pivot wonderfully from style to style, offering the spare, Spanish guitar-inflected “Intruders” one moment and then sing entirely in Spanish on “La Memoria.”
Not all of it works, including the Eminem collaboration “Coffin” that seems unbalanced. But the other featured artist, 6LACK, does better on the terrific R&B hit “Imported,” in which Reyez’s voice flutters and she cracks herself up.
“Same Side” rather meanders, without the bite of the other songs. And “Dope” simply grates. (Plus “Far Away,” a fantastic immigrant’s love song, is unfortunately not on the main album but on the one exclusive for Target.)
But there’s no denying this rising artist, who already has a Grammy nomination for her 2018 EP “Being Human in Public.” On the single “Ankles” from the new album, Reyez boasts that no rival can measure up to her ankles. She’s right.
Gordon Lightfoot, “Solo” (Rhino)
Gordon Lightfoot’s first studio album since 2004 finds him displaying the pillars of his songwriting on “Solo,” a brave and unvarnished work teeming with maps of roads taken and avoided.
Most of the songs on the album were written and first recorded — but then totally forgotten — not long before he suffered a debilitating abdominal aortic aneurysm in 2002.
Rediscovering them recently on a pair of CDs, Lightfoot’s decision to reinterpret the 10 songs on his own with just his guitar results in one of his most direct and intimate albums.
Putting himself and the tunes under a microscope could have been a risky move, but it pays off. The 81-year-old Canadian’s voice is reedier — especially for someone who also had to recover from a 2006 stroke and already a decade ago was falsely reported as having passed away — but it still carries his characteristic emotional charge.
Opener and first single “Oh So Sweet” and “Return Into Dust” are among the tunes with a view of the past that swings between pride, remorse and acceptance and even among the regrets there are things to be grateful for.
“Better Off” is a tonguein-cheek meditation from someone whose situation is not at all improved, while “Just a Little Bit” reflects the tediousness of everyday lives and chores. There is something in the mood and melody of “The Laughter We Seek” that’s very distantly reminiscent of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Closer “Why Not Give It a Try” presents a variety of choices with the response to some being “I just want to stay home,” a wise pick in this pandemic era.
Lightfoot says he wanted fans to hear “what songs sound like when first written.” The stark approach could have turned out to be reckless. Instead, it’s at the heart of what makes “Solo” such an endearing set.
Morrissey, “I Am Not a Dog on a Chain” (BMG)
Few musical artists would urge listeners to just go ahead and kill themselves already on the very first track of a new album. Morrissey is clearly not your regular artist.
The former frontman for The Smiths flies his misanthropy flag high on “Jim Jim Falls,” but it’s such a good song that you’ll happily bop along as he sings, “If you’re gonna kill yourself/then, to save face — get on with it.”
The 11-track album “I Am Not a Dog on a Chain” easily contains some of Morrissey’s best music in years, a guide into his oneof-a-kind controversial head, but also an album filled with electric and adventurous tracks that often shake his morose stereotype. He was happy to stay in bed for 2017’s “Low in High School,” bit here he is vibrant — welcoming even.
“Congratulations — you have survived,” he sings on the lush and shimmering “Knockabout World.” He later even offers the hearty endorsement “you’re OK by me” on the song. From a noted misanthrope, this is huge.
On his last album of original songs, he famously told us to stop watching the news. This time his weird relationship with the media continues, with the proud boast that he doesn’t read newspapers (“they are trouble makers”) but he still asks if we’d all see the day’s headlines in “Love Is on Its Way Out.”
Morrissey’s animal rights stance is all over the new album, too. “Did you see the sad rich/hunting down, shooting down elephants and lions?” he sings on “Love Is On its Way Out.” On the title track he sings, “Maybe I’ll be skinned alive by Canada Goose because of my views.”
He inserts a sly reference to President Donald Trump and his vice president on the synth-laden “Once I Saw the River Clean,” singing about “45 pence.” Or maybe we’re reading into it. He even seems to mock himself with the line “I see no point in being nice” on the title track.
The first single — the terrific “Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know?” — is layered with drug references and has backing vocals by R&B pioneer Thelma Houston. The wacky “Darling, I Hug a Pillow” has a Mexican feel and “The Truth About Ruth” has the Spanish guitar.
Morrissey gets proggy and spacey with the almost-8 minute “The Secret of Music,” which is a tour of instruments, from “fat bassoon” to “angelic flute.” It’s terrific, hypnotically weird.
He ends the album with the wistful “My Hurling Days Are Done,” in which he sings with a child’s choir: “Oh time, oh time — no friend of mine.” We disagree: Morrissey’s music is aging nicely.
Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, “Naked Garden” (Fantasy Records)
Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real offer 10 outtakes and five alternative versions of songs that appeared on last year’s “Turn Off the News (Build a Garden)” with their latest album, “Naked Garden.”
It’s not just a record for completists. The alternate versions and outtakes offered here stand on their own merits. But for fans of Nelson, it offers a glimpse into his artistic process.
An acoustic version “Civilized Hell,” slowed down here, packs a different kind of punch than the rocked-up version did that was released last year. There’s also another fullband version of the song on “Naked Garden,” for those who just can’t get enough.
One highlight, the previously unreleased “The Way You Say Goodbye,” features Nelson sounding more like Roy Orbison than his dad Willie Nelson. Hearing his take on the country waltz song is worth the price of admission alone.
There’s also some fun banter included in between tracks, making it feel like the listener is there with the band in the studio. Not everything’s perfectly presented here, but that’s by design.