Kelsey Lu - "Blood"
(Columbia / Sony, since April 19)
We are dealing with nothing less than a miracle, and I do not write that because it was Easter. But because it should actually be impossible, a humorous song like "I'm Not In Love", 1975 of 10cc into the world, to elicit something new, not to mention beauty. However, North Carolina's 28-year-old cellist and singer Kelsey Lu manages to do just that on her amazing debut album.
At first, she leads the way, leaving the old shame in her tracks, but then she dissolves the song structure in glittering stardust, whispering mystery into these particles - and then she takes the whole thing out of the quiet little room with polyphonic vocal layering to the church. Which does not stand somewhere in the country, but hovers as a space cathedral above all earthly: "Ooh, you'll wait a long time for me". Yes, we already have. And it was worth it.
In 2016, Kelsey McJunkins released her debut EP "Church," six little hymns, actually recorded live in a take in a church. Already at that time, she had the gift of captivating a concert audience in the opening act, so that the performance of the main act did not seem so important. R & B vocalist Sampha took her on tour, most recently with Blood Orange, both on her recent albums using the cello and vocal services of Lus, and she also worked for Lady Gaga, Kelela and Father John Misty, and she belongs to the illustrious circle of musicians who, together with Solange Knowles, is allowed to make funky, conservative jazz. With "Blood" she shows now impressively that the years as a protégé and session crack have shown their effect: It is the embodiment of a very own musical world.
This world has to be seen as airy and open. It is filled with artifacts from Afro-American culture as well as AM radio jukeboxes and Far Eastern mysticism. It smells of flowers and a bit of moss as Kelsey Lu prances through her globalized space in the wide, colorful robes she plays in her video clips - American pop music is not that, it transcends such attributions. "Pushing Against The Wind" contains elements of Celtic folk music, in "Too Much" a pedal steel guitar suddenly slides into an R & B ballad, "Poor Fake" proves that you can also go to the disco with cello and Enya vocals ,
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 17
MIRROR ONLINE
Playlist on Spotify
1. Sunn O))): Troubled Air
2. Traffic: Dear Mr. Fantasy
3. Kelsey Lu: Poor fake
4. Lizzo: Juice
5. K. Flay: Bad Vibes
6. Minimal Violence: InDreams
7. Caterina Barbieri: Fantas
8. Robag Wruhme: Venq Tolep
9. Playing Savage: Whispers
10. Arlo Day: Bad timing
Jamie xx's signature synthetic Steeldrum ringing accompanies "Why Knock For You", an eerie tale of foxes and bloodhounds about whose hunting and war games Lu watches as a divisive earth goddess in the trenches. "Atlantic" in turn is a touching siren and chant that acts like a suicidal narrative, but can then read as a slave ship drama. Again and again follow such ambivalent pieces shorter sketches. "Down2ride", for example, simply dabs sounds into the room, letting it float or fall. In them one can pause, reverberate, or let the heards echo. For fleeting, fragmented playlist listening to Spotify or other platforms, this almost no-basing album release is not made. Maybe that's the only thing that's a little old school about it.
Otherwise, in this audiovisual work of art, which also includes Kelsey Lus public persona as a fashion and style icon (the cover artwork is by star photographer Tyler Mitchell), everything is very zeitgeist: Spiritual and mythical, cool and artful, sexy and self-determined into the smallest production details. And a surprising sense of humor is also not too short, if Lu in "Foreign Car" an Ode to her - probably Asian - car to an empowerment gospel about men and technology can be: "Wanna drive you / hard, hard, hard, hard , hard, hard, hard ". The heart beats, the blood boils. (9.2) Andreas Borcholte
Price query time:
24.04.2019, 07:50
No guarantee
DISPLAY
Blood
label:
Columbia
Price:
EUR 10.99
Buy at Amazon
Product discussions are purely editorial and independent. The so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when buying. More information here.
oSunn O))) - "Life Metal"
(Southern Lord, from 26th April)
If you listen to Sunn O))'s home-made music and by the way, she seems boringly boring. Her beauty shows up in layers. If you listen carefully, the static hum and roar of the two guitars structure and variety unfolds. It's metal without drums, reduced to stubborn drones . The last album "Kannon" 2015 brought the improvised, brittle endless noise of the initial phase of the duo back into the center. "Life Metal", the first Sunn-O)) album since four years, now comes comparatively accessible and melodiously rolled around the corner.
The opening "Between Sleipnir's Breaths" begins with a depressing drone, repeatedly dissolved in a drastic reef, which eventually comes like a kind of refrain. The guest vocalist Hildur Guðnadóttir was mixed into the harsh guitar wall so precisely that her voice prevailed in this inferno despite ASMR-like permeability.
Behind the concert performance, the four long tracks - like any other Sunn-O)) album so far - inevitably stay behind (though producer Steve Albini is closer to the live sound of "Life Metal" than before) - simply because it does is largely impossible to hear this music beyond the concert halls as loud as it is intended, without the police coming. Even with headphones, the loss of intensity is still immense. This music needs room for development. Then the intestines vibrate, the pulse slows down, the head becomes empty. However, Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson are not concerned about ear bleeding. The listener body is the actual addressee. Under the impression of this music, he does not become a tank, but liquid, as it were. One capitulates, leaves Sunn O)) - concerts in a peculiar inner peace and stands around for a time differently in the world than otherwise.
In the footsteps, studio pieces such as "Troubled Air" and the 25-minute "Novae" also make it. "Life Metal" suggests, as well as it is possible by means of sound carrier, that the music of Sunn O))) is seriously spiritual in all humor. It will not be any closer to a transcendental experience as an average diagnostician during his lifetime. (8.5) Benjamin Moldenhauer
Price query time:
24.04.2019, 07:30 clock
No guarantee
DISPLAY
Life Metal
label:
Southern Lord (Soulfood)
Price:
EUR 18.99
Buy at Amazon
Product discussions are purely editorial and independent. The so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when buying. More information here.
Kevin Morby - "Oh My God"
(Dead Oceans / Cargo, from 26th April)
Using a 3D printer, Israeli researchers have just printed the first human heart. "Very nice," Kevin Morby would say. After all, you can imagine the 31-year-old songwriter (a native of Texas, living in Missouri, at home on the stages of the world) as a scientific project of a very different dimension. Morby has been making music for five albums, as if someone had printed the Wikipedia entry for the keyword "folk-rock". Songbook, backing band and throbbing heart included. He even wears hats and jackets reminiscent of Bob Dylan's bespoke elevator from "Desire" days.
The debut of Miley's new album "Oh My God" will feature saxophone, clarinet and flute. The piano settles between saloon and bar jazz, Rhodes piano, hand claps, congas and harmony singing ensnare the usual band occupation. Later, the artist hides some songs in the waltz beat and combines for the song "OMG Rock N Roll" a copy of the Velvet Underground rumble standard "I'm waiting for the man" with Sufjan Stevens choirs. Mary Lattimore plays harp, Meg Duffy a spectacular guitar solo - and all that happens before vinyl purists have to play the second record of the double album. To put it in Morbie's own language: Holy cow!
What may be read on screen like the biggest folk rock gluttony of recent years, however, is a Morby LP in contemplative mode. For nearly ten years, the musician, who is largely untouched by religious feelings, writes songs full of religious images and messages. On "Oh My God" he asks: why? The album compensates for Morbys mundane lifestyle between tour bus, stage and hotel bed with the sacred language that he has previously understood as a useful tool. Is his seemingly untidy self-made spirituality perhaps based on a belief system of whatever kind?
A songwriter searches for the meaning of words and melodies that come to him. He puzzles about their compatibility with their own music, which is still considered in some places as a devil's stuff. But what he finds, of course, are not satisfying answers, but more songs that spell out the dichotomy in wonderful, well-known forms. This is also folk-rock history through and through - but Morby is not deterred. "Sorry for poisoning you with my song", he sings in "Nothing Sacred / All Things Wild". "I'm sorry now / But I will not be sorry long." (8.1) Daniel Gerhardt
Price query time:
24.04.2019, 07:20 clock
No guarantee
DISPLAY
Oh My God
label:
Dead Oceans / Cargo
Price:
EUR 14,99
Buy at Amazon
Product discussions are purely editorial and independent. The so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when buying. More information here.
Lizzo - "Cuz I Love You"
(Nice Life / Atlantic / Warner, since April 19)
If even a news portal like CNN, which is less interested in pop, thinks that Lizzo is "the musical artist you need to hear right now", then something is going on. When their debut album was released on the major label Warner last Friday, it looked as if the 30-year-old from Detroit Beyoncé could challenge the throne in the US charts, of course. No question: Melissa Viviane Jefferson, who has been appearing as pop personality Lizzo since 2013, has just a moment. It was not until January when she released her funky, joyous single "Juice," a retro track in the Kurtis Blow style that celebrates the voluptuous African-American style: "No, I'm not a snack at all / I'm the whole damn meal. " The hook "Gotta blame it on my juice" could easily become a confident replica on body-shaming, he has pop potential for eternity.
Body Positivism, a liberated, embracing treatment of fat and fullness, is Lizzo's original theme.
Already in 2014 she became a small YouTube phenomenon with a self-acceptance video, part of which she used later for the delicately ragged self-love ballad "My Skin" from her debut album "Big Grrl Small World". In the meantime, the rapper, singer and flutist appears on talk shows and shows astonished moderators and guests how to play flute and connect Twerking gracefully. But the nude recording on the cover of her new album is a defiant, proud announcement: Proud to be black, proud to be fat.
All of that is great, and the disarming entertainer qualities that Lizzo has developed on her journey to become an ambassador for body positivity are great: you want to see her on her own show as soon as possible. Let them moderate the Grammys, dammit. Let them moderate everything! You have to listen to Lizzo in any case. She has something to say, and she says it with force and wit. Whether it also needs music to transport their message is another question. Or better: Does it need just the largely character-free music on "Cuz I Love You"?
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM a listening-mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
The whole album is so full of alarm that you can only breathe in the last song, the lascivious sex track "Lingerie". The rest, a good half hour of music, produced pop mainstream star Ricky Reed (including Meghan Trainor, Kesha, Jason Darulo) so consistently on light consumption and radio bangers that one of the forward-mixed hooks, choruses, rapids and beats swiftly the ears hurt.
Everything screams "here", but nothing really matters on this party record, which the Gravitas of Lizzo's personality never really do justice to: The tracks could, with a few exceptions (including "Juice" and the beautiful blues "Jerome") also by every other current pop artist with their respective content: a bit of rap, a bit of soul, a bit of prince and a lot of nostalgia and revue sound from the Bruno-Mars School. One suspects why Lizzo has agreed to this deal, because he prepares her the simplest and most direct way to a mass audience. Fair enough. Her claim was, she says, to find out how a rap album by her great role model Aretha Franklin would have belonged in 2019. Good for Lizzo, that we listeners will not find out anymore. (5.0) Andreas Borcholte
Price query time:
24.04.2019, 08:00 clock
No guarantee
DISPLAY
Cuz I Love You
label:
Atlantic (Warner)
Price:
EUR 18.99
Buy at Amazon
Product discussions are purely editorial and independent. The so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when buying. More information here.
Rating: From "0" (absolute disaster) to "10" (absolute classic)