Tree-lined with pristine views over the Hudson towards Greenwich Village and the gleaming skyline of New York, the scenic waterfront boulevard of Sinatra Drive is in need of an upgrade according to the city itself, with potted roads and critical gaps in pedestrian and bicycle facilities, but on the opening track to their seventeenth studio album This Stupid World, the indie veterans Yo La Tengo ride roughshod over the withered terrain, as the steely guitar of Ira Kaplan and driving rhythms of Georgia Hubley and James McNew culminate in an existential paean to the rising of the moon and the setting of the sun, their hometown of Hoboken bathed in an ashy afterglow of white silence.
Taking their record’s title from what3words, whose terse conjunctions gesture suggestively towards the bench in North Inch Park where the musicians met to jam while Perth like the rest of Scotland laboured under coronavirus restrictions, on poet / shuts / clock the bassist Roberto Cassani and saxophonist Fraser A. Campbell blend chipper urbanity with a winsome pastoralism, as on ‘moo’ where Cassani contemplates the paradoxical nature of language, suggesting that we behave more ‘like the coos’ before wondering whether even cattle lows might cause too much trouble. Finally hunkering down at the Tpot Studio outside of Perth, the duo were able to experiment with spontaneous lyrics, scored instrumentation, and tape effects, inspired by Paul Motian and Paul Klee and bossa nova and the blues while tramping the cosy confines of improvised jazz and local folk idioms.
Between supple takes on classic songs by Frank Loesser, Vernon Duke, and Cole Porter, the Australian vocalist Jo Lawry tumbles headlong on ‘Acrobats’, a demonstration of alacrity and support composed by her close friend Gian Slater. On the album of the same name, the musician’s singer is joined by the bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Allison Miller, with Lawry describing a trio record as ‘the hardest thing I could do’ while depicting her function therein as more akin to horn player.
Mat Muntz wields the primorski meh on his first album as a leader, an obscure bagpipe from the Kvarner Bay and Istrian peninsula of Croatia which the composer plays in a bid to further his exploration of alternate tuning systems. Anchored by microtonal orchestrations for winds, guitar, and percussion, Muntz is joined by Yuma Uesaka on clarinet, Xavier Del Castillo on tenor saxophone, Pablo O’Connell on oboe, Alec Goldfarb on guitar, and Michael Larocca on drums, with the title Phantom Islands conjuring the invented landscapes of old nautical maps as Muntz seeks to fill in the blanks while rendering ‘a folk music from nowhere’.
A member of Poko Poko alongside the Congolese techno producer Rey Sapienz, who together combine bristling electronics with rousing texts in Swahili, Lingala, French, and English, with Cociage the French-Ghanaian vocalist PÖ vents her scabrous solo debut, while the Malian producer Babsy Konate, brother of the lauded guitarist Oumar, bears the baton for Gao rap, a genre of contemporary autotuned Sanghoi music over takamba beats from the edge of the Saharan desert.
On her most vulnerable effort to date, Yaya Bay turns from themes of misogynoir to the easy embrace of free love and desire, where every blessing or gratification is no more than a just desert. Laying down a melody which had haunted her through sleepless nights and the first throbs of summer, the London raver Sherelle shares a split side with I. Jordan. Félicia Atkinson and Ana Quiroga feature ahead of the latest compilation by Modern Obscure Music, which carries nine carefully curated responses to architectural space. The drummer Kendrick Scott pares down to a trio alongside Walter Smith III on sax and Reuben Rogers on bass, Talib Kweli turns liberation into a family affair with production by Madlib, while for Superpang the duo of Daniel Kordik and N.O. Moore dabble in myth equation between axioms of pairing and replacement.
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Yo La Tengo – ‘Sinatra Drive Breakdown’
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Daniel Kordik & N.O. Moore – ‘Axiom of pairing’
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Yaya Bey – ‘exodus the north star’
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Kendrick Scott – ‘One Door Closes, Another Opens’
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Talib Kweli & Madlib – ‘After These Messages’ (feat. Amani)
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Roberto Cassani & Fraser A. Campbell – ‘Moo’
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