Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Frankie Cosmos: Next Thing

Frankie Cosmos: Next Thing

Most of the time, lyric sheets to albums are utilitarian; you turn to them to make sure what you're hearing is right. But the lyric sheet to Frankie Cosmos' Next Thing reads like book of poems on its own. It runs seven pages long, comprising 15 stanzas (1 for each of its songs) and it totals 1570 words, all of which are slyly idiosyncratic, bordering on perfectly arranged. As I listened, I felt compelled to print them out, staple the pages together, and read along, fearful I would miss something important. As I did, I became thoroughly convinced that Greta Kline is quietly writing herself into a vaunted place, one where she will eventually deserve mention alongside poets like Lydia Davis, Wayne Koestenbaum, or Maggie Nelson—anyone who can puncture your heart in the span of a sentence. 

The sound on her sophomore album is mature, fully-fleshed, but never loses the unique immediacy of her Bandcamp work. Like those albums, the music on Next Thing is mostly built on unvarnished synths and sweet, understated guitars. The difference is in the clarity of her vision: Two years ago when Lindsay Zoladz named Zentropy the year's number one pop album in New York Magazine, she concluded that Kline penned a "melodic reminder that the wisest, wittiest person in the room is rarely the loudest one but instead that unassuming girl in the corner, grinning contentedly at her untied shoes." In Next Thing, she's looked up from her laces, meeting your eyes and delivering observations that are by turns strange, self-possessed, and dizzyingly multitudinous. 

On these songs, those observational powers are at their height. Her greatest talent remains her ability to transform minute-long songs into experiences that resemble hours of intimate and impressionistic conversation. In the first minute of album opener "Floated In," Kline sings: "Now it would be bedtime if/I could close off my mind/It just flops onto you/Wet and soppy glue...You know I'd love to/Rummage through your silky pink space cap." It's an uncanny description of two drowsy minds splattering thoughts on each other, hoping something sticks, but the words gently pass by before you've even internalized how weird and salient they are. Even when she paints scenes that ostensibly are filled with private meaning, something universal resonates. In "Fool" for example, when she sings "Your name is a triangle, your heart is a square," the funky cubist formulation gets closer to the uncomfortable feeling of naming the one you love than straight description ever would. 

As a singer, she's perfected an inimitable vocal delivery that is willfully off-center, out-of-focus, and matter-of-fact. She uses enjambment in her writing and in the long pauses of her singing so well that it reminds me of an idea from Maggie Nelson, that some people who tend bonsai trees plant them askew or aslant to leave space for God. The gaps in Sappho's poetry have been called "a free space of imaginal adventure," and it is an apt description for Kline's music: In the momentary disjunctions of Kline's singing, the hiccup between words, a whole life passes by. On "Outside with the Cuties," she savors the nanoseconds that come between words, asking ordinary-seeming questions ("I haven't written this part yet/will you help me write it?") that invite radical participation from a listener. Even though the song may end after two and a half minutes, it never really ends.

Her work has a continuity to it that invites deep diving, as if she is formulating and reformulating the same few thoughts, waiting for their perfect expressions. Many of the songs ("Embody," "On the Lips," "Too Dark" and "Sleep Song") on the album have appeared in acoustic permutations in past work, and they make the leap seamlessly. Each are marvelously well-wrought trains of thought, cramming existential questions into the banality of everyday moments and finding something beatific even in the plainest of things. "Embody" finds Kline singing about a day where friendship is everything holy in the world, "It's Sunday night/and my friends are friends with my friends/it shows me they embody all the grace and lightness." It's a feeling that helps her move past her self-perceived inability to access this feeling herself ("someday in bravery/I'll embody all the grace and lightness). In Catholicism, past the fog of guilt, there's an incredible idea that light, love, and all that's holy can be transferable from one person to the next. It usually happens in ritual, the eating of a wafer of bread and a sip of wine. In Greta Kline's pocket universe, all you need to get closer to heaven is a night with friends.

April 01, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Kamaiyah: A Good Night in the Ghetto

Kamaiyah: A Good Night in the Ghetto

Kamaiyah's debut mixtape Good Night in the Ghetto initially comes across carefree and effortless, which might seduce you into thinking it was easy to make. The songs are simple, unfussy, and full of space, with a low-key mood meant less for a raucous house party and more for a casual basement hangout. Kamaiyah's calling-card song, "How Does It Feel," is here, and it's as wistful and sunny as it was when it came out last year. But now it's joined by 15 other tracks that hit on the same energy: It feels good to be young, but it's even better to be smart enough to appreciate how fleeting that feeling is.

Good Night in the Ghetto's production is the aural equivalent of watching Too $hort and TLC videos half-asleep through one of Hype Williams' custom '90s fish-eye lenses—a blur of reference points from across hip-hop's glitziest decade. Kamaiyah is 20, which means her earliest impressions of that decade's music would have come around the time the industry was locked into a death spiral and rap was vanishing from the charts. Seen through this filter, it's easy to see how a video like, say, "Ladies' Night" would seem like the peak of some lost civilization. But while she carries a brick phone around as a prop for her throwback image, she otherwise she treats the whole back-in-the-day thing lightly, a personal quirk rather than a defining mission.

Besides, Bay Area rap has been celebrating the power of silky Anita Baker and Sade keyboard patches for years. These sounds have been recreated so lovingly for so long that they've become a thread snaking through a wide range of music. Kamaiyah is part of a tradition that extends back to early-'90s hits like Conscious Daughters' "Something to Ride to (Fonky Expedition)" (she told Pitchfork that Conscious Daughter's Karryl "Special One" Smith gave her the mixtape title) and continues today: the Trackademicks-produced "Come Back" could easily have been given to fellow East Bay artist J. Stalin, whose music often has the same plush retro-funk feel.

Kamaiyah stands out from her peers, though, with her appealingly natural presence. Her voice sounds as unaffected and assured singing as it does rapping, and she writes big hooks: The chorus to "Swing My Way" is full-bodied enough to picture a shirtless male guest star belting it, but she handles it herself, her small voice giving off its own heat. The little interjection "woopty woopty woo" on "Out the Bottle" is fearsomely catchy, "I hope I don't yelp this involuntarily in a roomful of strangers" catchy. But it's a detail, a grace note on an album that never oversells anything. Restraint is a slippery virtue to enthusiastically trumpet, but it usually marks the separation between an artist who can hold down a single and one who can comfortably occupy an album.

This poise is what makes Kamaiyah someone worth spending time with. There's a great song on here in the Too $hort tradition ("Niggas") about loving sex, and severe disinterest in being obligated to have it with one person. But it's not a sexual tall-tale meant to make Kamaiyah sound superhuman: "Hit the back room come back, my dress undid/ He gon' zip it back before they notice we be fucking," she sings playfully. On "Freaky Freaks," she falls asleep in her Jeep because she's too high to drive. This is: a) not something it's easy to imagine Nicki Minaj rapping about, and b) something an affable-everyman like Devin the Dude has probably done in real life. Approachability is a cornerstone of Kamaiyah's style.

And then, of course, there's her good-life ode "How Does It Feel." Despite some stiff competition, it remains her best song, something she implicitly acknowledges by reprising it for the introductory track "I'm On." It sounds even better on Good Night without eclipsing anything around it. The emotions on the tape—joy, yearning—are never better expressed than in the two questions she poses in the chorus: "How does it feel to be rich" and "How does it  feel to just live?" The underlying subtext—that these might be two versions of the same question—is present, without insisting on itself. Just like everything else on Good Night, the essential substance is just there, a cocked eyebrow and a meaningful pause from someone who's confident enough to put it all out there in her own way and allow you a minute to catch up.

March 24, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Wadada Leo Smith / Vijay Iyer: A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke

Wadada Leo Smith / Vijay Iyer: A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke

After John Coltrane's death in 1967, the improvisational avant-garde found itself asking: Now what? Wadada Leo Smith's discography stretches back to this critical moment in American experimentalism. As an early member of a Chicago collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM), the trumpeter worked in a trio that included saxophonist Anthony Braxton and violinist Leroy Jenkins—a group documented on the landmark 1968 release 3 Compositions of New Jazz.

On that album and other recordings from the period, Smith's performance aesthetic signaled the arrival of a confident and original voice. He could craft mournful melodic lines that suggested the folk music of his Mississippi Delta youth, before quickly steering into rough-sounding yet controlled smears of notes. Then, in the midst of an improvisation, he would allow stretches of silence to enter his phrasing. In contrast to New York's consistently in-the-red style of free-jazz, Smith and other AACM figures also experimented with world music instrumentation and modernist chamber composition in between passages of fiery blast.

In this scene, there was nothing strange about being a blues musician, a composer of classical music, and a free-improviser with a recognizable attack. And this example has proved a durable influence on younger jazz innovators like Vijay Iyer, a pianist who spent time in Smith's early-21st century quartet (before his own career as a bandleader took off). In interviews, Iyer is often eager to credit the AACM as an inspiration behind his own mobility as a composer and soloist.

Since signing to ECM, the storied jazz-and-classical label, Iyer has continued to vary his creative practice. The album Mutations found him composing for a string quartet, while Break Stuff—the most recent set from Iyer's celebrated jazz trio—included an acoustic tribute to Detroit techno innovator Robert Hood. On A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, Iyer reconnects with Smith in a studio for the first time since appearing as a sideman on the trumpeter's 2009 album Spiritual Dimensions. Their meeting here results in a frequently gorgeous, sometimes roiling set that stands out in each artist's catalog.

The opener, "Passage," was composed by Iyer, and works well as a platform for Smith's range of instrumental techniques—with wisps of balladry leading to harsh and piercing moments. Some of Smith's more surprising exclamations may initially seem like unmusical provocations, just before he wrings a demonstration of magic from his trumpet—as when he keeps a seemingly unstable drone alive for seconds, or when he creates a winning melody from an unlikely opening intonation. Iyer's performance on piano lends dramatic shape to the track, though he's just getting started.

The set's centerpiece is a seven-part suite that also provides the album's title. Inspired by the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi—her drawing graces the cover—this nearly hour-long stretch of music often finds Iyer switching seamlessly between acoustic piano and an electronic setup. "All Becomes Alive" begins with simmering traces of digital sound behind Smith's high-register, incantatory playing. Near the track's conclusion, Smith contributes tart, pointillistic figures as Iyer uses a laptop to produce a bass-heavy pulse (while keeping both hands on his piano). In the middle section, Smith responds to Iyer's flowing, legato progressions with a mellow soulfulness.

The players occasionally push each other into less familiar zones. The first three minutes of "A Cold Fire" reveals Iyer playing more "out" than on his past ECM recordings, while on "Labyrinths," his joint interest in Indian classical composition and American minimalism guides Smith into fixed-tempo riffing of a kind that is unusual in the trumpeter's catalog. And when Iyer switches to Fender Rhodes for "Notes on Water," the musicians mine the mood of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, while still sounding like themselves.

In conceiving such far-ranging explorations of texture, the risk for musicians is that the end result might wind up seeming like a catalog of possible approaches—a look-book to be skipped through by sound designers searching for film-music cues. But the rapport between Iyer and Smith ensures that this music always feels compositionally sure-footed, even when parts of the suite are being discovered as they play.  No matter its track-to-track variance, Cosmic always sounds harmonious as an album-length statement. In doing this, it also recalls Smith's early-career desire to integrate "all forms of music," as stated in a 1969 interview with the French magazine Jazz Hot.

Appropriately, the closing track here is a Smith composition titled "Marian Anderson"—a dedication to the African-American contralto who broke the color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955. After the meditative theme, Smith's conjuring of a historic opera singer's legacy seemingly gives him license to reveal some of his most songful, pure-tone playing. "Everything and anything is valuable," Smith told the European magazine in 1969, as the first wave of AACM players was capturing the imagination of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. More than four decades later, Smith is still demonstrating the wisdom of this approach—reaching back into American art-music history for inspiration while keeping himself open to the new sounds being proposed by the next generation.

March 23, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Sheer Mag: III EP

Sheer Mag: III EP

"Jar of whiskey, Skinny Lizzy, that's all I need," sang Christina Halladay on "Sit and Cry," the second song off Sheer Mag's debut 2014 EP. Many rock bands swear allegiance to Lizzy-inspired, booze-fueled riff rock, but Sheer Mag make the formula sound uniquely vital, which makes them uncommon amongst most rock bands in 2016. Their music stuffs hip-shaking hooks and burly riffs within impeccably structured pop songs, wrapped in lyrics both open-hearted and openly political. They're the Jackson 5 raised to play punk rock, with an F-5 tornado for a singer.

Earlier this month they released III, their third EP in the last three years. It upholds the band's gold standard as they continue to refine their formula: kick drums like rifle shots, earworm guitar riffs played with electric glee, no-frills solos no less punk rock for their existence. Halladay still sounds like she's coming through a crackling speaker, as does the rest of the band, but her soulful, gale-force voice is more legible than ever. It's thirteen-and-a-half minutes of pure pleasure.

III is evenly split between love songs and political songs. "Can't Stop Fighting" addresses the chronic violence against women in Ciudad Juarez and in the world at large, with Halladay howling for collective action. "Night Isn't Bright" accomplishes the astonishing task of delivering lines like "It's plain to see these days that there's an agitation / We live and we die by a politics of simplification" without coming off as joyless. Sheer Mag will trick you into dancing while singing about overthrowing the system. You will have fun as you debate whether voting for Bernie over Hillary represents true change, or just a rearranging of the Titanic deck chairs. The songs are imbued with the tangible, bleeding passion that often accompanies political awareness, lest you think wokeness to be the sole province of the dour. They remind me of the MC5, another working-class garage band who used swaggering rock as a vehicle for righteousness.

The love songs find Halladay sounding more vulnerable than usual. She sings about men who've wronged her through their apathy, despite her fearlessness in seeking clarity. "At least I tried," she sings on "Worth the Tears," "and the time we had was worth the tears that you made me cry." The highlight might be "Nobody's Baby," which is built around a clipped riff and a refrain both defiant and depressed. "I'm nobody's baby, I'm nobody's girl," she sings, with the resignation of someone attempting to stay strong despite the pain they feel. The fearlessness of Sheer Mag's politics makes them stick out, but they're also unafraid to get bruised—a contrast of tough and tender that makes their music all the more potent.  

It bears mentioning that Sheer Mag are strident anti-capitalists. III was released with no head's up and no PR, all for the price of a latte. (You can stream the EP in its entirety without paying a dime.) The lyrics are printed on their Bandcamp, lest anyone mistake their pointed intentions. They've reportedly turned down offers from plenty of labels. Their upcoming Coachella set seems hilariously out-of-place, though one imagines them concluding a furious set by burning their cash fee on stage ala the KLF. The string of EPs would naturally point toward an upcoming LP, though we can't be sure. For now, they're more than welcome in these limited bursts. They're totally locked into the sound, for all it'll give them. Pour another drink and turn it up.

March 14, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Kendrick Lamar: untitled unmastered.

Kendrick Lamar: untitled unmastered.

"I made To Pimp a Butterfly for you," raps Kendrick Lamar on the opening cut from untitled unmastered. It's tempting to read a lot into those words; in fact, it's tempting to delve deeply into everything about his latest release. Because when the promotionally frugal, preeminent thinking-person's rapper of a generation lets forth a largely unexpected collection of demos into a click economy of hot takes and broadcasted enthusiasm, the friction of opposites is enough to spark the kind of hopes that see meaning in everything.

No other rapper has taken up so much real estate in the past 12 months while releasing so little music and sharing as little about themselves as Kendrick. TPAB—a Grammy-winning ride of densely knotted rhymes, tangled ideas, and deep sounds—positioned Kendrick Lamar as a reluctant messiah figure, and its dialogues with self and manifestations of God resisted quick-and-easy unpacking. Now, he's released a handful-and-a-half of song sketches in a project that's neither album nor mixtape (or even EP or LP), and seem to have even less a chance of radio play than TPAB did upon its arrival. But it feels like an extension of that album's world—an asterisk, perhaps, or an extended coda. 

There's little doubt that just about all of these songs are from TPAB sessions—"untitled 03," subtitled with a date of "05.28.2013," had already been performed four months before Butterfly's release, during the the long goodbye of "The Colbert Report" with help from Terrace Martin, Thundercat, Bilal, and Sonnymoon's Anna Wise. It's classic Kendrick—a reductive-yet-sprawling fever-chill of observations on race and the music industry that mixes stereotype with history and wisdom. It's insightful and uncomfortable, if not outright offensive: Asians are linked to Eastern philosophy, Native Americans to the land, Blacks to lust, whites to greed. It's also the collection's most fully-formed song; perhaps the only one that emerges as a finished thought here.

One of the most enchanting things about this project is hearing how Kendrick manipulates his own voice before the studio modulations kick in. His vocal tics and morphs have long been technologically-aided affairs, but on "untitled 02" he's full of elastic long tails—partially gleeful Lil Wayne, wholly sanctifying choir sinner. He's crying for his bosses—both Top Dawg and God—while lamenting urban addiction and dysfunction, and contemplating mortality. "World is going brazy/ Where did we go wrong?/ It's a tidal wave/ It's a thunderdome," he sing-raps, sounding half-possessed, half-saved. For the second half of the song, he includes the firestarter verse he performed in January on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." But the scorching iteration of that live performance is nowhere here—he's laid-back and matter-of-fact, but his threat just as heavy: "I can put a rapper on life support/ Guarantee that's something none of you want."

At times Kendrick is joined by other voices—TDE's Jay Rock and Punch, and Wise (again) on "untitled 05," which sounds like a long jazz-groove session made just to find the best parts; Cee-Lo Green shows up over the bossa nova breeziness of Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammed's "untitled 06"—but, much like TPAB, untitled unmastered. is unmistakably about Kendrick Lamar. The song he's jokingly creating on the back end of "untitled 07" shows up earlier as "untitled 04," and its refrain is "head is the answer/head is the future"—which may or may not be a multiple-entendre about sex, life and spirituality. Because Kendrick is so share-averse, goofy moments like these that would be filler on other projects have the revelatory power of a posthumous recording here. It's the kind of stuff you'd find out from other artists via their social media detritus—at the end of "untitled 02" he asks who's doing drums, sounding like a bona fide jazz cat complimenting Max Roach's stick work—but Kendrick has a verve for taking giant steps backwards into an era where masters let the music speak for itself. It all feels like a jazz project, but not just because he's using jazz music.

These numbers are packed with more information and moods than the 35-minute running time suggests. On "untitled 01" he dons his robes as God's servant, talking to the Supreme Being: "[You] told me to use my vocals to save mankind for you/ [Don't] say I didn't try for you, say I didn't ride for you, or tithe for you, or push the club to the side for you." (If the song's subtitles are indeed dates of conception, this one—"8.19.2014."—suggests that Kendrick was having conversations with God about the course of his album a full seven months before TPAB actually arrived.) In execution, untitled unmastered. is everything reverse of Kanye West's recent The Life of Pablo—it's a small and quiet statement from an artist with little to prove at this moment. Its author tempts deeper reading, but his choices and the lack of entry points—no directional song titles, no grand proclamations, no promotion—leaving nothing to deal with but the music. As with TPAB, untitled unmastered. demands to be approached on its own terms, even when you don't know what those terms are. You can't say he didn't try for you, ride for you, or push the club to the side for you.

March 08, 2016 at 01:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Anna Meredith: Varmints

Anna Meredith: Varmints

On her debut single "Nautilus," Anna Meredith sounded drunk on power and spoiling for a fight. The 2012 cut was the acclaimed Scottish composer's first mainstream release after nearly two decades in the classical world, where her adventurous work often met with sedentary audiences who were polite at best, and openly contemptuous at worst. The track's imperious brass fanfares, artillery-fire percussion, and earth-quaking bass seemed designed to pummel and intimidate listeners. The song was so monstrous in scale that the EP it helmed, Black Prince Fury, and 2013's follow-up Jet Black Raider, trembled a bit in its wake, like going from a Jeff Koons or Louise Bourgeois sculpture to a roomful of sketches.

The track won Meredith the response she was after, but her prospective debut album kept getting put on the back-burner in favor of paid commissions. Almost four years later, Varmints also opens with "Nautilus," and actually lives up to its huge opening gambit. Meredith's electronic work has often drawn from the soundtracks and sci-fi iconography of classic arcade games, and her EPs often stuck within their characteristic limited polyphony. Here, blending synthesizers with acoustic instrumentation, she makes those 8-bit quests and battles feel completely visceral and real, as if you're strapped in her spaceship's sidecar as she goes rampaging around the universe. 

Although Meredith wanted to escape the concert hall's stuffier conventions, Varmints still exploits every inch of these rooms' dynamic range, from womping bass and juddering low-end to piercing, starry heights. (It's important to point out that she's not abandoning her day job as a composer.) Her trademark as an arranger is intensely detailed maximalism, but with a keen sense of pop phrasing that keeps things limber, like Max Tundra before her, or Battles circa Mirrored. Matching "Nautilus" for pure muscle is "R-Type," a mass of screaming arpeggios that evokes the do-or-die auto-fire moments of a classic intergalactic shoot'em-up's final level. "The Vapours" is equally bonkers, and sounds like a roomful of overheated machines on the precipice of exploding, while "Shill" thrashes like a herd of angry bull elephants romping in a lake.

Meredith knows the pleasure that can come from pushing a little bit too hard, and the record's few low-key, borderline-ambient instrumentals ("Honeyed Words," the lovely closer "Blackfriars") serve as welcome respites from the madness. Meredith is equally capable of subtler assaults, which she wages with miraculous and exhilarating builds: "Scrimshaw" starts out sounding melancholy and graceful eventually bursts into an unrelenting cosmic endorphin rush. On "Last Rose," Her plaintive, piercing vocals intensify the song's sense of loss. Her crescendos don't always lead to a drop, but she makes you feel the hunger in every one.

All of these skills feel like they could serve as key ingredients of great pop songs, and, wouldn't you know it, Meredith can write those, too. The three here seem to deal with the various stages of a break-up: "Taken" feels like "R-Type"'s more muted sibling, driven not by brute force but Meredith and collaborator Jack Ross' confident  "yeah-eh-eh-eh-eh" chorus and a skittish bass line. With different production, "Something Helpful" could be a massive rave-up; as it is, Meredith strips out most of the low end and spins it into a sweet and unguarded ultimatum. "Dowager" starts as a spinster's lament, its queered vocals and crystalline guitars aligning it with Wild Beasts circa Smother, but eventually finds strength in the idea of a widower who "plays by herself."

Meredith's diverse array of classical commissions has included making music inspired by MRI scanners, performing body percussion pieces at the BBC Proms, and conducting five disparate ensembles connected by satellite hook-up. Perhaps fairly, she worried about becoming the "novelty movement girl," but then, those were all works written for commissions. Her first wholly indepedent project reveals her to be one of the most innovative minds in modern British music: She wears her obvious theoretical grounding lightly and never lets it obstruct her ecstatic quest for new ideas and deranged stimuli. And Varmints is a knockout, the kind that makes you see cartoon stars.

March 07, 2016 at 01:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Esperanza Spalding: Emily's D+Evolution

Esperanza Spalding: Emily's D+Evolution

In 2011, Esperanza Spalding ruined what was expected to be a grand coronation for Justin Bieber. The teen star was supposed to waltz into the Grammys, collect his "Best New Artist" trophy and dance triumphantly into the sunset. But instead, that award went to Spalding, the affable bassist with a bright smile and big Afro. In response, her Wikipedia page was vandalized, and the Recording Academy soon changed its rules, making it tougher for indie acts like Spalding to reach Grammy-level recognition. 

The irony of this little episode is that Spalding never seemed to crave mainstream validation in the first place. She has established herself as an understated force in contemporary jazz and soul, skillfully walking the line between genres—just her and a trusty upright bass—crafting art that resonates with the older guard while maintaining a youthful exuberance. She's performed for the Obamas at the White House and, in the summer of 2011, I saw her perform at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia, Pa. There, she put fluid spins on Michael Jackson's "I Can't Help It" and the Weather Report's "Predator," playing electric bass with ?uestlove on drums. No matter where she plays, she projects the sort of self-contained ease that suggests she'd be equally content to play the local open mic. Following the release of 2012's Radio Music Society, Spalding retreated to her native Portland, Ore., to de-stress from music industry pressures. She took two years off to reconnect with her creative voice and regain some form of sanity. 

On Emily's D+Evolution, she's reemerged emboldened. "See this pretty girl, watch this pretty girl flow," Spalding asserts boldly at the top of "Good Lava," the first track and mission statement. Using a dissonant guitar riff, thumping drums, and lurching time signature, it almost feels like a dare to stick around. The album has the feel of a nervy gauntlet throw, seething with the sort of ferocity that only comes from time spent alone, far away from the limelight. These are exuberant, confrontational songs, amplified in the same sort of rock/funk hybrid style that brings Prince and Janelle Monae to mind. Gone is the Afro, replaced with long braids, wide-rimmed glasses, and ornate outfits.

Like other hugely popular musicians before her who felt commercial pressures beginning to stunt their growth, Spalding has found an alter ego to speak to her more extroverted, creative side. Spalding sings through a muse named Emily, her middle name, though her reasons for doing so aren't clear-cut. As a character, Emily wants you to buck the system, to fight for peace and tranquility. She wants you to reconnect with your spiritual center, to avoid facades. Emily "is a spirit, or a being, or an aspect who I met, or became aware of," Spalding recently told NPR. "I recognize that my job … is to be her arms and ears and voice and body." As a child, Spalding was curious about acting and created scenarios using movement and dance. So "in a sense," the musician recalled, "I see it as a flashlight into the future." 

The theatrical D+Evolution plays like the culmination of those childhood performances. Spalding's voice retains its warmth and nuance, but she's thrown herself into these songs with a new gusto. Each song has its own identity, from the unbroken spoken-word flow preceding "Ebony and Ivy," the fist-pumping call-and-response of "Funk the Fear," and the opera-infused histrionics of "I Want It Now." Recorded in front of a small studio audience in Los Angeles, you can almost see Spalding act out these songs as the band—comprised of guitarist and Christian Scott collaborator Matthew Stevens, producer/drummer Karriem Riggins, and others—create thick textures that provide plenty of space for her.

People will likely call this art-rock or performance art, but D+Evolution advocates an almost indescribable ethos. There are cues from Thundercat and Flying Lotus here, as well as nods to folk-rock, funk, and prog. Listening to "Judas" or "Rest In Pleasure," you could imagine an alternate universe where the Dirty Projectors explored jazz fusion without too much effort, and the exuberant vocal whoops and dense arrangements won't faze tUnE-yArDs listeners. The harmonic language remains rooted in jazz, but like Emily herself, the music doesn't seem to be "from" anywhere: It seems most concerned with establishing space, creating room for possibility. Even the more conventional songs like "One," "Noble Nobles" and "Unconditional Love" feel expansive and rich.

This aesthetic, which doesn't have a zip code, dovetails with the album's overarching theme of personal freedom. On these songs, Spalding shrugs at societal constraints, urging you to "live your life" on the chorus of "Funk the Fear" and shed preconceived notions of who we're supposed to be. On "One," she embraces emotion with brave uncertainty: "I'm not lacking in love," she sings, "not haunted by its pain … of romance, life's given me enough, I can't complain." The lyrics are elusive at first, darting behind fast-moving songs and delivered in impressionistic, conversational bursts that recall the delivery of Joni Mitchell. But the fearless generosity behind them communicates itself loud and clear, and it's a spirit that animates the entire album. With it, Spalding has once again redefined an already singular career, dictating a vision entirely on her own terms. 

March 04, 2016 at 01:00PM
via Best New Albums - Pitchfork http://ift.tt/1RMpZFo

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