This week, catchy new songs from Orville Peck, Mary In The Junkyard, and Reyna Tropical; and spooky ones from Lankum and Anna Von Hausswolff.
Back From Broadway, Orville Peck Releases New Song
It’s been a busy year for Orville Peck. His music career has been built on questions of identity – never seen without his trademark fringed mask, singing soaring ballads of queer love in a Roy Orbison-like croon, keeping his real name hidden but his sexual identity open – until this summer, when he took over the role of the Emcee in the Broadway revival of Cabaret, and did so unmasked. Now, the singer born Daniel Pitout is back, in the studio and behind the mask, and about to release a new EP called Appaloosa. Today he put out the first single; “Drift Away” has a cinematic sound and a chorus that is a massive earworm. It’s also full of telling lyrical imagery: “singing songs that make us cry; we don’t know why” is a simple but spot-on acknowledgement of music’s power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3w7Ik-0g18&list=RDW3w7Ik-0g18&start_radio=1
A New Single From Mary In The Junkyard
There’s always so much going on in London that it’s hard for a young band to get noticed, but the trio called Mary In The Junkyard has been touring the States this year as the opening act for the breakout duo Wet Leg, which has given them some richly deserved exposure here. Perhaps seeking to strike while they have our attention, the band has released a new single called “Midori” – though whether that title refers to the drink, the defunct Japanese band, the anime series, or even the famed classical violinist (one of the women in the band is a violist, so not impossible) is unclear. And probably immaterial, as the song seems to be about wrestling with a relationship that’s become somewhat barbed. The vocals, often tremulous but occasionally aspiring to the ethereal, are a striking contrast to the track’s gusts of shoegaze-style guitar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUPl7ke87uQ&list=RDPUPl7ke87uQ&start_radio=1
A New Single From Reyna Tropical Looks South – and Further South
Reyna Tropical is the project of Fabiola Reyna, who has been a one-woman wrecking crew when it comes to the male-dominated music industry. She founded She Shreds, the groundbreaking magazine devoted to women guitarists and bassists. She also leads the avant-cumbia trio Savila, and has been a vocal proponent of gender equality and LGBTQ visibility in the music scene. Her new single is called “Tu Voz,” and it has the longing of Mexican rancheras, but with a guitar part that seems to have the languid sound of Brazilian samba. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg6jKxD05Zg
Just In Time for Halloween: Lankum Covers “Ghost Town” by The Specials
The Irish band Lankum is the leading group in the style that has come to be known as drone-folk, a brooding, gothic mix of traditional folk song and storytelling married to doom-metal-adjacent textures. Today they released their most unexpected track yet – a cover of The Specials’ 1981 hit song “Ghost Town.” That original tune dealt with Thatcher-era urban decay and joblessness in the UK, set to the band’s typical ska beat. Their video showed the band packed into a car driving through an empty City of London and East End. Lankum nod that video in the stunning Leonn Ward-directed video that accompanies their song, as we see Lankum in a car speeding through an empty landscape, towards a figure moving around what looks like an abandoned prison or asylum. Lankum’s version is eerie, and almost unbearably slow, the tension building as the harmonies grow, until finally it explodes in a burst of techno as the backing electronics take over and eventually fall apart. The song and the video are perfect for Samhain, the Irish precursor to Halloween, when the veil between worlds is supposed to be thinnest; the themes of connection with the past and being haunted by it in the present (with many of The Specials’ lyrics still landing hard 45 years later) make this a timely release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLLnF4vxaeY
The Gothic Glory of Sweden’s Anna Von Hausswolff
Most church organs are actually built into the church; they are part of its architecture, with pipes built into various walls. Whether it’s being used or not, it is always there, always part of the place. That’s not a bad metaphor for how Anna Von Hausswolff uses the instrument in her latest album, Iconoclasts. Even when you’re hearing a full rock band, eerie electronics, fiery sax solos, and Von Hausswolff’s keening vocals, the church organ is there – as a drone, as a part of the texture, or even when silent, since it sounds like this Swedish musician is singing in a cathedral. Von Hausswolff’s breakthrough album Ceremony in 2012 was the beginning of her love affair with the instrument, and this new LP is her most ambitious yet. Guests include the improbably tender Iggy Pop and the appropriately iconoclastic indie singer Ethel Cain, but this is very much Von Hausswolff’s show. Dark, and somehow sounding both anguished and ecstatic, it’s another example of a Halloween release that somehow feels just right. A good place to start might be “Stardust,” which at just under seven minutes is one of the album’s shorter tracks. It starts, not with a sepulchral drone, but a steady rock beat, and despite some fairly experimental production, is the closest thing the album has to a straightforward rock song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpMHH_W8G9s