Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Selena Gomez, Blackpink make sweet music
Pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on notable new songs and videos.
▪ Blackpink with Selena Gomez, “Ice Cream.” The sweet spot at the intersection of Selena Gomez and K-pop stars Blackpink involves singing that’s a little playful, a little taunting, a little distant. “Ice Cream” is all of those things, a relentlessly bouncy and chipper song about being the object of other people’s hunger.
— JON CARAMANICA
▪ Dumpstaphunk, “Where Do We Go From Here.” Ivan Neville’s commanding New Orleans funk band, Dumpstaphunk, marks the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with “Where Do We Go From Here,” only to have Hurricane Laura hit Louisiana last week; lately, Neville has also been livestreaming from his home while recovering from covid-19. The new song’s lyrics aren’t particularly pointed: “Let’s take it slow, no fear,” it counsels, adding, “It all comes down to love.” But the fullband groove — with horns, backup singers, Neville’s organ and Dumpstaphunk’s deep-inthe-pocket rhythm section, including two basses — infuses a slinky funk backbeat with gospel determination and the will to persevere for a steamy 8-minute jam.
— JON PARELES
▪ Chief Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, “X. Adjuah (I Own the Night).” New Orleanian trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah recently became chief of the Xodokan Nation, a group from the city’s Black masking tradition. (More widely known as Mardi Gras Indians, Black community leaders in the tradition
don ornate regalia for holiday marches, honoring the Indigenous people who often sheltered Black people escaping bondage in the 18th and 19th centuries.) Masking celebrations involve an explosion of color, music and movement. So the blazing, kaleidoscopic effect of the music on “Axiom” — the trumpeter’s new live album with his septet, recorded at the Blue Note in New York just before the coronavirus lockdown — makes a special kind of sense. On the first track, “X. Adjuah (I Own the Night),” Corey Fonville’s drumming blurs with Weedie Braimah’s djembe strokes, conjuring a hail of blows from a boxer, or perhaps simply the sound of energy being unloosed. Though slower and more measured, the glowing notes that Adjuah plays above them are no less packed with muscle and force.
— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
▪ Cam’ron, “… 50 bars …” Some al fresco rapping from Cam’ron — still a mercilessly precise rapper at 44 — filmed in a Harlem parking lot, prompted by a friend’s nudging and posted on Instagram. The rhymes are spry and wry: “Y’all know Harlem belong to me/I don’t want it, it’s too gentrified/I’m from the era of genocide, bodies are unidentified, alibis are memorized.”
— JON CARAMANICA ▪ Nao featuring Lianne La Havas, “Woman.” The victorious assurance of “Woman” comes through in its unhurried backbeat, in the shimmery tones that usher in the chorus and in the unpatterned, utterly cooperative way Lianne La Havas and the higher-voiced Nao share and trade bits of verses and choruses. “Take my mirror out the bag and fill it with confidence,” Nao sings; “A woman’s worth is everything without you, baby,” La Havas adds. There’s no need to be combative. They’ve won.
— JON PARELES
▪ Jyoti, “Ancestral Duckets.” Magnificently prolific songwriter, singer and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow calls herself Jyoti when she turns toward jazz, as she does on her new album, “Mama, You Can Bet!” Although the music sounds like it was made by jazz groups interacting live, Muldrow multitracked all the instruments and vocals herself as a one-woman studio band. “Ancestral Duckets” is a sly waltz that roams purposefully through chromatic chord
changes and sprouts a multitude of Muldrow’s vocals: harmonizing, scatting, riffing, taking over the melody and then playfully sailing above it.
— JON PARELES
▪ Kelly Lee Owens, “On.” On her album “Inner Song,” Welsh songwriter Kelly Lee Owens uses the chilly, artificial electronic vocabulary of techno for songs about love: strained, lost, possibly found anew. In “On,” she stacks up choir-like vocals as she moves on from a romance: “We can’t go forward,” she decides, as a double time club beat ticks quietly behind her. But three minutes into the song, the throbbing bass line suddenly cranks up, staggered against programmed hi-hats, a blooping synthesizer line and cascading, wordless vocals; she can dance her way free.
— JON PARELES
▪ Zhala, “Holes.” Kurdish-Swedish singer Zhala teamed up with producer Olof Dreijer of the Knife for her first song since her 2015 debut album. Summoning multiple voices — blithe, assertive, whooping, belting — Zhala sustains phrases like “I lose myself in time” amid a track of skittery, percussive plinks, clatters and hisses that keeps adding unexpected layers on the way to a galloping peak, as propulsive as it is inscrutable.
— JON PARELES
▪ Lil Tecca, “Royal Rumble.” Even better than the improved rapping from teen breakout Lil Tecca — richer in melody and density than before — is the luscious beat by Z3N and Sean Turk, with echoes of 1990s New York rap sprinkled atop its contemporary smeared production.
— JON CARAMANICA ▪ Billy Strings, “Watch It Fall.” The jaunty, old-fashioned bluegrass bounce and close-harmony choruses of “Watch It Fall” belie the bitter resignation of the lyrics, as flat-picking guitar virtuoso Billy Strings sings about converging catastrophes: inequality, corruption, global warming. “How long until there’s nothing left at all?” he wonders, and all the filigreed acoustic improvisation around him is no answer.
— JON PARELES
▪ Emily King, “See Me.” Fragile but tenacious, carried mostly by a lone strummed acoustic guitar, Emily King moves from isolation and selfdoubt — “If I cry out loud will you believe me?” — to conjuring a community of her own. With little more than ghostly vocal harmonies and a few notes from a distant piano, it’s both crystalline and eloquent.
— JON PARELES
▪ J.D. Allen, “Elegua (The Trickster).” There’s a sense of historical unity in the saxophone playing of J.D. Allen: The elegance of Coleman Hawkins and the spiraling power of John Coltrane come together. The ludic energy of, say, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the spry focus of Michael Brecker, too. On “Toys/ Die Dreaming,” Allen’s latest album, his still-newish trio shows how much it has grown together since last year’s “Barracoon.” On the closing track, the Allen original “Elegua (The Trickster),” young bassist Ian Kenselaar and drummer Nic Cacioppo make a briskly swinging bed for Allen’s forceful playing, as wily and powerful as the tune’s namesake.