WHAT’S NEW IN MUSIC
This week’s column looks back at this year’s best music.
Seu Jorge & Rogé, “Night Dreamer Directto-disc Sessions” (Night Dreamer): After growing up in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Seu Jorge rose to prominence with roles in the films “City of God” and “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (notably releasing an album of David Bowie covers in Portuguese for the latter.) Now he and fellow Rio native Rogé live in Los Angeles and have captured the beauty and essence of being Brazilian on this seven-track EP that leaves a lasting mark.
Recorded in one take with both on guitar and vocals, and backed by distinctly Brazilian percussion, the album teems with samba rhythms and a joyful expression of MPB (Brazilian popular music). This is a love letter to their motherland and to their decades-long friendship that’ll transport you to Ipanema’s beach boardwalks, Lapa’s bustling bars and Santa Teresa’s winding and sloped streets.
Sault, “Untitled (Black Is)”: In many ways, this was truly the best album of the year, but when Sault released “Untitled (Black Is)” in June, the third of four albums released in less than 18 months, the identities of the people behind the music were still largely unknown. Touching on powerful elements of R&B and soul (“Wildfires”), spoken word (“Us”), dancehall (“Don’t Shoot, Guns Down”), gospel (“Sorry Ain’t Enough”) and trip-hop (“Monsters”), the album is the result of a trans-atlantic collaboration among British producer Inflo, singer Cleo Sol and Chicago rapper Kid Sister — though they still may not want us to know that.
Throughout its 20 stunning tracks, Sault make pointed statements on police brutality against Black people and on the global force that is Black music, with bold and beautiful Afrocentricity. In a year when nothing mattered more than racial justice and equality, the group gave an impassioned treatise on the Black Lives Matter movement from a worldwide angle.
Róisín Murphy, “Róisín Machine” (Skint/ BMG): While the Irish pop singer shares a similar elegant style to Britain’s Jessie Ware — who also put out a standout pop album this year — Murphy’s songs insist that you allow yourself to lose your mind for a
blissful moment and take it to the dance floor. She comes across as if she’s leading the party with quintessential disco diva indulgence.
Produced by longtime collaborator Crooked Man (a.k.a. DJ Parrot), “Róisín Machine” is filled with one impeccably produced empowerment anthem after another. On “Incapable,” she grapples with and ultimately accepts that the hedonistic life is a foregone conclusion and album closer “Jealousy” bursts with disco funk panache.
Considering it’ll be a while before we can dance off our emotions on a
dance floor again, at least we can count on Murphy to help us through the lull with bells on.
Fiona Apple, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” (Epic): Apple has further established herself as one of the finest lyricists in modern pop music with what is easily the most critically acclaimed album of the year.
The noted hermit bided her time once again, delivering fans her first album since 2012, by developing this painstakingly thoughtout collection of articulate reflections on the world outside her door — or worst of all, on the internet. She besmirches the
patriarchal norms that place certain expectations on women through her own experiences and observations, delivering steady vocals with an animal-like instinct over an avalanche of keys. “I grew up in shoes I was told to fill, shoes that were not meant for running up that hill,” she says on the title track (a subtle nod to singer Kate Bush).
She vividly paints her way through the nuances of interpersonal relationships, like on the varying intonations of “Cosmonauts”: “Cause you and I will be like a couple of cosmonauts, except with more gravity than when we started off, started off!”
She’s mastered the art of controllably losing her mind as a track crescendos, only to come back to Earth with a gentle hum once her story is told. There are few experiences in music quite like it.
Moses Boyd, “Dark Matter” (Exodus): Amid London’s surging jazz movement, drummer Moses Boyd has stood out as one of its brightest innovators.
“Dark Matter,” his proper debut LP, was nominated for Britain’s most distinguished music award, the Mercury Prize, and it sees the bandleader and composer dexterously navigating new and traditional permutations of jazz drumming. “Shades of You” fuses ethereal vocals from Poppy Ajudha with electronic production techniques, all to the rhythm of Boyd’s beat. “Y.O.Y.O.” explores the percussion of his Caribbean descent alongside a stacked arrangement of strings and horns from a cast of London’s finest. Of the many notable releases by London’s new cast of future jazz stars, none showcased them all together in finer fashion this year than this one.
Woods, “Strange to Explain” (Woodsist): Recorded at Stinson Beach’s Panoramic House Studios, the 11th album from the Brooklyn band Woods is folk-rock at its finest. Songs like “Where Do You Go When You Dream” and “Strange to Explain” feel like they’re rolling comfortably down green Mount Tamalpais hillsides. Each song on the gorgeously constructed album builds its own escapist mood. Whether it’s a hypnotic xylophone here, a tambourine there, a throwback guitar groove or singer Jeremy Earl’s perfectly high-pitched coo, the album is an imaginative journey through the idyllic landscapes of the one place we can still feel comfortable in 2020, the great outdoors.