With much-hyped releases from Kendrick Lamar, Gorillaz and Father John Misty on the horizon, the next month promises to be a big one for music. But as we wait with bated breath for whatever Kendrick has in store for us April 7, let’s take a look back at some of the records released in the last month that we at Recess haven’t gotten a chance to review.
Drake, “More Life”
Is it an album? A mixtape? A playlist? Or, as Wikipedia elegantly puts it, a “musical project”? We may never know what Drake expects us to make of his latest release, but it nevertheless garnered as much hype as any of his “official” outputs. “More Life” largely continues the vein of dancehall-inflected pop that has marked the rapper’s recent releases, inviting a host of guests to share the spotlight, including Sampha, Skepta, Kanye West and Young Thug. If anything, the lack of a weighty label for this project makes its overlong sprawl more enjoyable. Here, the stakes are low (unlike last year’s universally-panned “Views”) and the result is an engaging collection of cuts that prove Drake hasn’t lost his knack for curation just yet.
The Magnetic Fields, “50 Song Memoir”
Two weeks ago, Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields played their new record “50 Song Memoir” for an audience of about a thousand thirty-something-year-old Durhamite couples and me. From my nosebleed seats, I watched Merritt chronicle every year of his life over the course of the two-night spectacle. While it continues the series of gimmick-based albums Merritt has produced since 1999’s classic “69 Love Songs,” “50 Song Memoir” manages not to veer into the self-indulgence suggested by its title. Rather, Merritt takes a more impressionistic angle on each year, isolating anecdotes, historical context and universal messages that sometimes only loosely relate to his personal experiences. This strategy produces some relatable moments—and catchy to boot—but it leaves us wondering about the man beneath the brown flat cap. Despite being perhaps Merritt’s most ambitious concept to date, “50 Song Memoir” ultimately produces more questions than answers. Behind the dad jokes, the curmudgeonly facade and the precious arrangements, just who is Stephin Merritt?
Mount Eerie, “A Crow Looked at Me”
In the first line of his latest album as Mount Eerie, Phil Elverum calmly sings, “Death is real / Someone’s there and then they’re not / And it’s not for singing about / It’s not for making art.” Elverum, whose past projects include the Microphones, lost his wife to cancer in July 2016. If the precise dates scattered throughout the lyrics of “A Crow Looked at Me” are to be believed, Elverum began writing this material just eleven days after her death. In announcing the record, the songwriter said it was a “reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration.” Each track is his attempt to mine the devastation for that reminder, delivered with a frankness of expression that renders every concrete image and half-formed thought all the more devastating, from driving back and forth between hospital visits to throwing away old clothes. Spare, organic arrangements—recorded in his wife’s room, on her old instruments—fill the space around Elverum’s voice, punctuated by creeping distortion and static in songs like “My Chasm.” The hint of hope that grounds “A Crow Looked at Me” is Elverum’s young daughter, to whom he addresses the final song “Crow”: “It was all silent except the sound of one crow / Following us as we wove through the cedar grove / I walked and you bobbed and dozed.” Amid the despair, the scene depicts a brief moment of transcendence, bringing to a close one of the most emotionally wrenching albums of this year.
Pile, “A Hairshirt of Purpose”
The A.V. Club’s recent profile of Pile describes the Boston act as what would happen “if Waylon Jennings stumbled into a Jesus Lizard show, grabbed the mic out of David Yow’s hands, then went on to finish the set.” It’s not an inaccurate depiction of the band’s sound on their fourth album, “A Hairshirt of Purpose,” which finds frontman Rick Maguire’s slightly twangy croon driving a brand of rock that contracts and releases between noisy post-punk and haunting country. The album is a climactic affair that never loses momentum over its 13 tracks, managing to push the boundaries of what rock can sound like while maintaining its visceral core.
Vagabon, “Infinite Worlds”
With the release of her debut studio album as Vagabon, Laetitia Tamko has established herself as an up-and-coming star in the indie world. By all accounts, she seems to have merely stumbled upon this status—she didn’t seriously pursue music until after college, when she picked up a guitar once again (having put it down in favor of a “real job”) and got a break in Brooklyn’s DIY music community. As a black woman in a largely white scene, she actively pushes against its norms, hoping to break down the barriers for other people like her: “Black girls need to listen to me. Black girls need to see me. There aren’t enough of us, and in order for me to reach them, I need to spread wide,” she said in an interview with Stereogum last year. “Infinite Worlds” is a bold debut, expansive even in its 28 short minutes. Buoying it all is Tamko’s voice, a powerful tenor whose range of expression well exceeds most singers in her particular field of quirky indie pop.
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