With all the off-days to start the year, I'm breaking camp with a four-album rotation.
From Mali to Memphis
Concept compilations can be scary. This Putumayo collection isn't quite full of great songs, but it arranges them not just to draw the obvious historical connections between the music of West Africa and the American Delta, but also to make more subtle points. For example, when Amadou and Miriam's fabulous "Mon Amour, Ma Cherie" leads into John Lee Hooker's "I'm in the Mood," that familiar juke-joint guitar suddenly rings with overtones of the West African chime.
The album also highlights differences, the biggest being the flatted fifth, the note that gives our music the blues, the melancholy, the menace. Without it, the rhythm is more trance-like, more buoyant, which is always how Afro-pop strikes my ears. Listening to electrified African music also reminds me of The Velvet Underground, a world apart, but who also used minimal chord changes, shouted call and response ("It's all right, baby it's all right") and let the rhythm guitar run and run and run.
Joe Henry, Shuffletown
Three Dollars at a Sidewalk Sale: That's what I paid, but it could also pass for an album title from Henry's forbears: Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, all great pop storytellers who hover between rock, jazz, folk and experimental worlds, with a knack for fleeting images that open into deep reflective pools. I guess that's called poetry. Henry's just as famous for producing other people's music (Irma Thomas, Solomon Burke, Allen Toussaint/Elvis Costello) and being married to Madonna's sister. In his wildest dreams, he'd like to produce Prince or the Roots, as he told the indomitable Elbo in this interview.
If you don't know him, Shuffletown, his third album, is a good place to start.
Low, Drums and Guns
I am notoriously slow to warm to new music. What I hate upon the first few listens will often filter its way back into my rotation a year later as if it were a completely different work. Knowing this about myself, I figured the first spin of Drums and Guns -- in the kitchen, making dinner, Malita Monkeypants interrupting with requests to read Dr. Seuss, Mrs. Malo asking "Could you turn this down, please?" -- was blatantly unfair, so the next night I put it on the headphones after everyone went to sleep. Seeing how other Low albums are fixtures in my general rotation, I wasn't going to let this one slip to the bottom of the pile.
This is not beach music or dinner party background. But if you know Low, you already knew that. What makes it different is the playful use of tape loops, electronic and doctored beats, and guitar effects. "Playful" being a relative term for an album whose first lyric is "All the soldiers are all gonna die/And all the little babies they're all gonna die." The layers of percussion on "Always Fade" actually got me head-nodding, but don't expect the hard-rock shapes and soaring harmonies of The Great Destroyer, their previous album, on this one.
Radiohead, In Rainbows
I won't add much to the reams of criticism that flow forth anytime Radiohead sneezes, but has anyone ever wondered what the big difference is between Radiohead and U2? Both have singers who are lucky to get away with what they do, both are comfortable in the worlds of arena guitar rock and blippy electronic stuff, and both take themselves quite seriously. I haven't bought a U2 album since Achtung Baby and probably never will again, whereas I'm happy to shell out a few quid for Radiohead's latest, but really, what's the difference? Radiohead is smarter, more experimental? Johnny Greenwood wrote a movie soundtrack? I like In Rainbows, by the way. It's one of the more delicate rock albums I've heard in a while with small quiet songs like "Reckoner," "Nude," "Faust Arp" and "House of Cards."
