The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Olivia Rodrigo’s emotional road trip and more new songs

- Jon Caramanica and Jon Pareles,

■ Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Deja Vu’: OK, now that she’s got her license, here comes the road trip. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” opens in the car, with the singer recalling fonder times with an ex. As on “Drivers License,” there are three parties — Rodrigo, that former beau and the specter of that person’s new love, and it’s unclear which of the other two causes Rodrigo more anguish. The lyrics are plain and pinpoint pained: “That was our place, I found it first/I made the jokes you tell to her.” About halfway through, “Deja Vu” turns severely Swiftian, with lyrical asides about listening to music, a yelping section almost directly cribbed from Swift’s “Cruel Summer’” and a familiar power struggle over who taught who about cool music. Rodrigo would like to make it clear, though, that she is no mere student: “Play her piano but she doesn’t know/That I was the one who taught you Billy Joel.”

■ Westside Gunn, ‘Julia Lang’: Hazy, pugnacious and glowering, the latest from Westside Gunn is ragged in the best early ’90s way, so convincing in its fuzz and stagger that it’s almost like a recovered memory.

■ Rosanne Cash featuring John Leventhal, ‘The Killing Fields’: Rosanne Cash considers her own past, her family’s Southern roots, and the South’s history of lynchings and injustice in “The Killing Fields.” She sings, “The blood that runs on cypress trees cannot be washed away/ by mothers’ tears and gasoline.” The melody is mournful and minor-key; a lone, lightly strummed guitar supplies most of the accompanim­ent. And at the end, Cash resolves, “All that came before us/is not who we are now.”

■ Half Waif, ‘Take Away the Ache’: Half Waif — songwriter Nandi Rose — lets herself be buffeted by the paradoxes of love in “Take Away the Ache.” She sings, “I know that I’m asking for more than you can give/but isn’t love just living like that?” It’s a dizzying 3½ minutes, veering amid minimal electronic abstractio­ns, piano ballad and dance-floor thumper, all held together by passionate yearning.

■ Naomi Cowan, ‘Energy’: Jamaican singer Naomi Cowan sets her usual reggae aside in “Energy,” an ingenious, multilevel­ed mesh of syncopatio­ns and silences produced by Izy Beats. Plucked strings, sporadic bass tones, finger snaps, flickering electronic hi-hats and teasing, elusive backup vocals poke in and out of the mix as Cowan chides an ex who ghosted her before declaring, “Love and war, baby, I’m no casualty.”

 ?? COURTESY ?? Rosanne Cash considers her own past, her family’s Southern roots, and the South’s history of lynchings and injustice in “The Killing Fields.”
COURTESY Rosanne Cash considers her own past, her family’s Southern roots, and the South’s history of lynchings and injustice in “The Killing Fields.”

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