This week, a posthumous song from Jill Sobule, a dark album for dark times by billy woods, and Moses Sumney’s unexpected duet with Hayley Williams. Also, Quinquis and Kara-Lis Coverdale.
A Posthumous Release from Jill Sobule
Last week, singer/songwriter Jill Sobule died in a house fire at the age of 66. Best known for her good-natured hit “I Kissed A Girl” (done years before Katy Perry’s megahit song with the same title), Sobule wrote songs not just for the LGBTQ community but for anyone who felt like an outsider. That was at the heart of her Off-Broadway musical F*ck 7th Grade, which Sobule was planning to release a recording of on June 6. Today she was supposed to drop the first single, “Underdog Victorious,” and so her team has indeed put the song out, although what was intended to be a celebration (just listen to the song’s anthemic chorus), is now a memorial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg0RVt6npUs
billy woods Releases Dark, Engrossing “Golliwog”
NY-based rapper billy woods takes a dim view of proceedings on his new album Golliwog. The production is full of eerie sounds and ominous beats, and the lyrics offer a trenchant response to corporate greed, government malfeasance, and (as the album title indicates) the indelible stains of racism. But sometimes the darkness is more personal, as in the striking track “Lead Paint Test,” one of several to feature Elucid, billy woods’ longtime partner in the duo Armand Hammer. “Nuclear family/nuclear fallout” Elucid raps in the first verse. By the time woods gets on mic, in the third verse, things have really fallen apart: “If these walls could talk they might not,” he spits; “after all, we don't.” A couple of melodic, even heartwarming samples dot the landscape, but they serve only to highlight just how bleak things really seem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bFGwpJ3KYk
Moses Sumney Joins Hayley Williams, And Likes It. Maybe Too Much.
Not sure anyone saw this collaboration coming, but Moses Sumney, the extraordinary singer and songwriter whose music encompasses a kind of futurist soul and art rock, has just put out a song with Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the arena rockers Paramore. And it works, perhaps because the song, “I Like It I Like It,” is a droll take on love and obsession. “It’s not that I don’t like it baby,” Sumney offers at the start of the track, “It’s just that I like it/A little too much.” The arrangement is spare, especially by the standards of both of these artists, giving the whole thing a sultry, nocturnal atmosphere. Sumney, always attuned to how things look, directed the video which also shares the song’s wry, spare approach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5OB461GCD8
Kara-Lis Coverdale’s Electronic Netherworld
It’s been eight years since the electronic music composer Kara-Lis Coverdate’s album Grafts, but she’s now released a new album called From Where You Came. Although the sounds of cello and trombone (played by Kalia Vandever) feature, alongside occasional other acoustically-derived bits, the dominant sound here is the modular synthesizer and software that Coverdale uses. The textures are lush, ranging from the spacey to the motoric, and while Coverdale’s voice is clearly heard in the opening track, other parts of the record seem to blur the distinction between voice and other instruments. This piece, “The Placid Illusion,” offers a gently burbling rhythm with wisps of indefinable sounds woven throughout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqM9YZWiH4c
Quinquis Releases An Album Inspired by Mermaids
Quinquis – full name Emilie Quinquis – lives on the island of Ushant, off the coast of Brittany in northwestern France. (Her husband, the keyboardist and composer Yann Tiersen, lives there too and has made an album incorporating the sounds of the island.) Apparently, after learning to sail, she was inspired by the tales of mermaids and other fabulous creatures living beneath the waves of the Irish Sea and the North Atlantic, and her new album, eor, is the result. Some of the songs are soft and mysterious; others have electronic beats urging them along. “Dec’h” is one of the latter, and speaking of fabulous creatures, has a fun video in which a plain Emilie is transformed by a bunch of drag queens.