Just another morning in the Jaybee household where I'm listening to an opera while checking out a video on who invented Heavy Metal music. Who said multitasking was dead?
It’s probably too late to explain to people that I’ve not become a classical music snob. It’s just that there are some mountains – and LVB is one - worth climbing.
But I assure you I am still a pop music snob/t, meaning that I sort of stand by a remark I’ve made a few times that I love music, and I hate people who merely like it. They’re the ones who buy all the bland crap cluttering up the record bins and record charts, thus discouraging the recording of the weirder/ deeper stuff I prefer. But things are much better these days: a random glance at the Billboard top whatever is likely to elicit curiosity from me rather than vomit.
Which is to say that I have been listening to pop(pish) music while climbing the LVB mountain. It resulted in a Jazz avalanche that I'll have to dig out of at some point but whatever.
Don’t believe me? Okay, here goes:
Waxahatchee: St. Cloud (2020)
The young lady who made one of my favorite rock and roll albums of that last decade has gone country and produced something almost as good.
With her slightly gravelly voice, these simple tunes occasionally risk sounding repetitive. (Rock and roll covered that shit up good.) But the tunes, voice, and passion win out.
A-
Etran De L'air: No. 1 (2017)
They’re from Africa and have electric guitars. When they crank out are long, primitive but hypnotic call and response grooves. Guaranteed to drive anyone who insists on melody or pretty voices absolutely nuts. I like those things, too but I consider this to be my vacation from it.
It amounts to a so so quality live recording. Two guitars, rudimentary drums. I don't even hear a bass. And yet it does what rock and roll was always supposed to do: get people up and dancing. You can hear the audience doing just that, even though they never heard the band before. You can tell because at the end one of the band members has to tell them their name.
A raw, but - if you're open to it - vital record.
A-
Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (2020)
This one is just the opposite. Slow and ornate, it's just the kind of long, arty opus with overwrought vocals that should rightly sink most other records of the type. But this one damn near soars. Every time he starts to get precious he backs it up with a good melody or arrangement.
I hear dance, rock, electronic, and chamber music. And I've not yet gotten to the bottom of it.
A-
Jocelyn Pook: Flood (1999)
To call this vocal music "classical" might be misleading. The only reason I do is that its best track showed up on a Most Relaxing Classical Music collection (which by the way is really good). The other tracks are not quite at that level, but the overall weirdness itself draws me in.
Another serious, arty record that doesn't make me bust out laughing at all the wrong times. Quite an accomplishment.
B+
Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher (2020)
So when I come back from that vacation from melody and pretty vocals this is where I want to go. Her voice is usually a whisper, so she sounds fragile but then she'll come out with a line about starting a garden after a skinhead neighbor goes missing, or I won't forgive you, but don't hold me to it.
So the songwriting is sturdy, and the arrangements bring out the best in them, especially "Graceland Too". The title of which - along with her smashing her guitar of SNL - shows she has a healthy (dis)respect of her predecessors. David Crosby tweeted that her SNL stunt was "pathetic". She replied "little bitch".
How could you not love that?
A
You might notice that three of these records came out last year. Old LVB muscled out a lot of 2020. Somebody had to.
But I'm back, at least in the Jaybee sense of being at least a year behind current music, getting distracted by jazz, opera, and heavy metal. In other words, I'm all over the place.
Where I belong.
