And I Never Wanna See You Again Chelsea Wolfe
New Music
Albums From Neko Case, Ariana Grande, Gorguts and Chelsea Wolfe
NEKO Instance
"The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You"
(Anti-)
The lucid and the cryptic mingle, unpredictably and strategically, in the songs on Neko Instance'south 6th solo studio album, "The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Dear You."
Commonly it'south the music that comes across as straightforward. The melodies are forthright, the arrangements are manus played, and Ms. Case'south vox is open and robust, with the richness of prime Linda Ronstadt and Patsy Cline. Meanwhile, the words can exist head scratchers, like the ones in the stately waltz "Night Withal Comes":
"I'g gonna go
where my urge leads no more,
swallowed, waist-deep
in the gore of the woods.
A boreal feast.
Let it terminate me, please."
The chorus, bolstered by hearty male harmonies, is instantly memorable — "You never held it at the right angle" — yet no less enigmatic.
Every so often, the balance switches. In "Nearly Midnight, Honolulu," she observes a mother berating her child at a autobus terminate; she sends her honey, "even if I don't see you again." It's a clear, empathetic slice of life. However while the music is sparse — just vocals, mostly Ms. Case a cappella — it's also nearly free-form, with ghost-choir harmonies arriving at unexpected moments. Other songs offer glimpses of family unit tensions, self-doubts and afar lovers: "Every dial tone, every truck cease, every heartbreak, I honey yous more than," she sings in "Calling Cards."
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In her imagistic tangles — and in a song on the anthology she didn't write, Nico's serenely inscrutable "Afraid" — Ms. Case often ponders shifting identities and transformations, while the music enacts them. Played past musicians from My Morning Jacket, Calexico and Los Lobos, among others, the songs are brief just mutable. They unfurl from twangy roots-rock or galloping new moving ridge into more surreal arrangements: girl-group backups in "Local Girl," pushy baritone saxophones in "Bracing for Dominicus," sonar beeps and mysterious rumbles in "Where Did I Leave That Fire." Ms. Case doesn't have to explain everything, just sing it similar she means information technology. And that'south one matter she always does. JON PARELES
ARIANA GRANDE
"Yours Truly"
(Democracy)
"Glee" volition begin its fifth season this month, and "American Idol" is busy trying to secure its lineup of judges for the coming 13th flavour. Together, even though they're perennially unfashionable, these Fox shows have been responsible for an intense surge of interest in music on boob tube, only they oasis't left much of a mark on the shape of pop.
That'southward considering both shows are fundamentally conservative institutions, privileging the familiar and the unchallenging. They're almost emulating, not innovating.
Largely by sticking to those codes, Ariana Grande has get the first identifiable post-"Glee"/"Idol" popular star, in that she takes the rules of those enterprises, uses them as a foundation, and innovates atop them. She relates to pop music in the means those shows do — treating it as a historical inspiration puddle and also a sacred text.
Merely Ms. Grande isn't a mere covers creative person. A onetime kid actress — she played Cat Valentine on the Nickelodeon's "Victorious" and now on the spinoff "Sam & Cat" — she uses the "Glee"/"Idol" template as a jumping-off indicate to make modern pop-R&B with a sturdy vintage backbone.
For Ms. Grande, the early on-mid 1990s are the holy grail. And then much of this surprisingly potent album is in debt to Mariah Carey's kickoff two albums, and several songs were written and produced in part by Babyface, that titan of slow-fire late-1980s R&B. A few songs are riddled with blatant Mariah-isms: See specially the terminal xx seconds of "Baby I," in which Ms. Grande approximates the super-high-pitched song trills Ms. Carey excelled at.
Ms. Grande is about at that place. She has a lithe vocalization and is capable of existent ability, though she doles it out carefully. Like that other child Boob tube star turned pop comer Miley Cyrus, Ms. Grande is xx, but her slide into maturity isn't moving at Ms. Cyrus's warp speed. Ms. Grande's version of adulthood is about expertise, not transgression.
She's non so innocent that the guest rappers on this album go along their libidos in check, though. "You lot a princess to the public just a freak when it'due south fourth dimension," Mac Miller exclaims on "The Way"; "A player so yous know I had some girls missionary/My black book of numbers thicker than a dictionary," Large Sean swears on "Right There."
They're expressing thoughts that Ms. Grande can't quite, both because of the squeakiness of her clean and because of the austerity of her sound. "Yours Truly" is largely sweatless. "I wanna say we're going steady/Similar it's 1954," she sings on "Tattooed Heart," which captures the tenor of this album well. But every bit the song structures are traditional, so is the sound.
A couple of songs wink to mid-'90s hip-hop: "Correct There" uses the same sample as Lil' Kim's 1996 hit "Crush on Yous," and "The Style" uses the same sample as Big Punisher's 1998 "Still Non a Player." But Ms. Grande's existent innovation is to restore the attitude and power to more traditional pop schemas. "Daydreamin' " is clean-cutting 1950s-mode piano pop, and the striking "Tattooed Heart" has a doo-wop heartbeat. I of the album'south loftier points is "Most Is Never Enough," a bracing torch song on which Ms. Grande sneaks in some gospel-singing enunciation for extra effect. Information technology'south practically Streisandian, startling in its utter rejection of the at present, and ripe for some young vocalist on "Glee" or "Idol" to butcher. JON CARAMANICA
GORGUTS
"Colored Sands"
(Season of Mist)
Fifty-fifty across the baseline unfriendliness, decease metal tin can, from a distance, seem restricted and uniform, and can desire information technology that way; it pushes a listener back. But Gorguts, from Quebec, a cult ring in a cult field, needs you to come in shut.
"Colored Sands" is Gorguts' commencement record in 12 years, and will, rightly if unfairly, be compared to "Obscura," from 1998, because there are few records that broke out of whatever aesthetic framework and then aggressively as that i did. Go back and listen to it, and feel no shame if you never heard of it. The strong rhythm section erased its tracks all the time, sorting among shifts in tempo and feel, routing through grooves and far less comfortable patterns; information technology used potent consonant riffs and bizarrely raw (though never haphazard) atonal harmonies.
What held this music together? It didn't take the consistent thrashing swing of the band's previous albums. It hadn't quite settled into its own manner, but even under the death-metal roar, information technology communicated a joy and risk and eagerness in all its weird features that can't really be explained by all its admirable composition and before-the-fact elements. Information technology remains a bumpy thrill and a modest miracle. It shouldn't have worked, but it did.
"Colored Sands," a concept record well-nigh sand mandalas in Tibetan Buddhist civilisation, doesn't have quite the same life force, and couldn't. From the "Obscura" lineup, only the singer and guitarist Luc Lemay remains. (The highly original guitarist Steeve Hurdle died concluding year, but not earlier forming another band with Mr. Lemay, Negativa, whose i EP, from 2006, is worth your fourth dimension.)
The new members are all excellent players known to listeners of this kind of hyper-detailed music: the drummer is John Longstreth, from Dim Mak; the bassist is Colin Marston, from Krallice and Dysrhythmia; the guitarist is Kevin Hufnagel, as well from Dysrhythmia and his own undefinable solo-guitar projects. And it'south a potent record, well played, with lots of varied ideas, ordered into a logical flow. Except for 1 nearly five-minute piece written for and played by string quartet, "The Battle of Chamdo" — this is that kind of ring — the anthology has stability, consistency.
But too much of it. If "Obscura" supplied virtually constant surprise, this music is frustratingly consequent in its overall dark, dense, misty color and atmosphere, fifty-fifty through its frequent changes in energy and tempo, its rhythmic breakdowns and dissonant harmonies between the ii guitarists. It goes all over the place according to the dictates of Gorguts' ain fashion, just remains rooted to the spot. BEN RATLIFF
CHELSEA WOLFE
"Pain Is Beauty"
(Sargent House)
A shudder of emotional torment, poised between a swoon and a sob, resides in the voice of Chelsea Wolfe, and the ambivalence feels custom fitted to the music. "Pain Is Beauty," her 4th album in three years, confirms her steadiness equally a singer-songwriter of gothic intention, drawn to romantic fatalism and beautiful ruin.
Ms. Wolfe, who originally hails from Sacramento, has fabricated her name in Los Angeles, and there's a sly connotation of noir in her whole enterprise. Her beginning two albums — "The Grime and the Glow" and "Apokalypsis," on Pendu Sound — put her along as a sepulchral wraith. Her third, "Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Audio-visual Songs" (Sargent House), exuded a spare and chilling composure, more intimate but hardly less opaque.
She produced "Pain Is Beauty" with Ben Chisholm, who plays bass and synthesizer on the album, aslope the guitarist Kevin Dockter and the drummer Dylan Fujioka. (The same personnel are currently on a tour that reaches the Bowery Ballroom on Sept. 13.) There's a slight push toward constructed texture, though the prevailing sound still involves her voice confronting a twangy guitar, both bathed in cavernous reverb. Mainly the electronics furnish details similar the rhythmic thrum in "Feral Love," which calls to mind the fleet of helicopters in the opening scene of "Curt Cuts," the Robert Altman motion picture.
You don't have to achieve to discover other cinematic elements on the anthology, from the horror-picture organ drone of "Kings" to the done-out retro-popular of "Destruction Makes the Earth Burn down Brighter," offered in tribute to David Lynch. Elsewhere the allusions experience more rooted in the realm of music, as when "Firm of Metal" coalesces around a dolorous, ho-hum-to-unfold arpeggio, evoking Portishead.
Ms. Wolfe has frequently said that she draws inspiration from Scandinavian blackness metal, but it'due south a fair question whether that claim has more to do with an image, or an thought, than information technology does with actual sound. On a few of these new songs, like "We Hitting a Wall," her singing is actually most reminiscent of Feist.
In any case, the attractive but suffocating atmosphere on "Pain Is Beauty" should be understood equally precise aesthetic adding. On "The Waves Have Come," Ms. Wolfe sings slowly and heartbreakingly from the vantage of a tsunami survivor. On "Sick," she basks in the toxic runoff of a relationship. And a doom-folkish tune called "They'll Handclapping When Y'all're Gone" includes the line "I comport a heaviness like a mountain" — a stoical complaint that sounds equally if information technology's sung inside a grain silo, in abject and perfect solitude. NATE CHINEN
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/arts/music/albums-from-neko-case-ariana-grande-gorguts-and-chelsea-wolfe.html
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