Your August playlist with these fresh tracks
Angel Olsen — “Shut Up Kiss Me” Whitney — “Golden Days”
After a dour, visceral and great second album in 2014’s “Burn Your Fire for No Witness,” Angel Olsen changed gears hard, trading out slow tempos and the gravitas of dirge for sassy, hair-flinging, can’t-tell-me-nothin’ attitude. That’s what we get on Olsen’s latest tune, the very pouty and funny “Shut Up Kiss Me,” which works like a pop tune played in the garage, all sharp, repeated melodies and cheapo instruments.
De La Soul — “Action!”
Our gradual enslavement to our own mobile technologies sped up a few tics this year with the universal embrace of the immensely popular gaming app “Pokemon Go.” But the also-very-popular app “Angry Birds” announced an update this month, one with implications for music lovers: It came with the release of an exclusive De La Soul song.
Perhaps not surprisingly, “Action!” isn’t the best De La Soul song I’ve ever heard, but it’s lively and fun and definitely in their fashion, and if industry vets can get paid for their studio scraps and drum up a little publicity for their next record, then I’m all for it. “And the Anonymous Nobody” is out after the trio raised more than $600,000 via Kickstarter to record it. Read any of those previous sentences out loud to a radio deejay in 1989, when De La’s debut “3 Feet High and Rising” came out, and none of them would make any sense.
Moon Hooch — “Red Sky”
When you hear somebody say “jazz trio,” maybe the classical notion of a drummer, stand-up bassist and a trumpeter or saxophonist comes to mind, perhaps playing a smallish stage in a richly decorated club, smoke from those fancy, long cigarettes lingering in the air. That’s probably not what you’ll get with New York’s Moon Hooch, who play as two saxophonists and a drummer, not in smooth, relaxed improvisation, but aggressively rehearsed, fast-blurting chunks. Fans of the muscular, avant-garde work of Colin Stetson will probably hear something they like in here, which occasionally borders on the apocalyptic.
Too quirky for country, not enough oomph for rock. Chicago band Whitney happily fits somewhere in between, laid-back dudes whose omnivorous musicianship evokes The Band while singer Julien Ehrlich’s pitch suggests that he’s perpetually standing on the tips of his toes, projecting upward. Both Ehrlich and bandmate Max Kakacek played in the now-defunct rock band Smith Westerns, and you can hear some of that once-promising band’s hooky guitar fills in this song, “Golden Days.” Throw in some bendy slide work, a grand piano and a trumpet solo, and you’ve got yourself a wistful summertime tune.
Cass McCombs — “Opposite House”
Spookiness, I think, is an underrated quality in music, and when he sets his mind to the task, California’s Cass McCombs can cast it over a song as well as anybody. Part of it’s in his character. He’s an enigmatic guy, who rarely gives interviews and writes about subjects as esoteric as the imprisoned Wikileaker Chelsea Manning and Western outlaw-types. But most of all, he’s just odd, unafraid to stop a song to wonder out loud about say, how, magnetism works. He does exactly that here on this new cut of R&B “Opposite House,” which has me really excited for his next album, “Mangy Love,” out Friday.
Todd Terje — “Firecracker”
Norwegian songwriter, DJ and producer Todd Terje’s 2014 debut record “It’s Album Time” put vibrant, kitschy spins on house and disco, but it also demonstrated an impressive capacity for working with ballads: establishing moods, building tension, ratcheting up the drama. (There’s a great one on there, a cover, sung by Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry called “Johnny and Mary.”) But for the most part, “It’s Album Time” was all strutting beats and outer-space synthesizers, an hourlong disco workout.
If that’s your thing, then Terje’s back with a new EP that’s got this bonkers new single “Firecracker” that bottles up all the fun of “It’s Album Time” into a compact 3 ½ minutes: hyperactive bass lines, out-of-nowhere drum fills, and notes played at frequencies that only seem possible in children’s cartoons.