Turn It Up - 1/22/2024
Earworms, obsessions, recommendations
We’re back again to start the week with some things we’ve been listening to. Charles goes first this week, then David, and we’ve also included some reading recommendations at the bottom.
Lizzie No – “Lagunita” (from Halfsies, 2024)
I’m loving the hell out of the new album from Lizzie No, an indie folk artist based in Tennessee. Much of Halfsies beautifully explores slow-burn atmospheres and semi-acoustic textures, but “Lagunita” is one of its thrilling rockers. Over crunchy guitars and slapping snare, No tracks a search for the rest, joy, and liberation that comes from “thieving and dying in the arms of love.” She envisioned Halfsies as a kind of video-game narrative that follows a main character named Miss Freedomland as she finds her way through multiple challenges. The rushing sonics of “Lagunita” fit this story and sensibility perfectly, but it works just as well as a cathartic anthem outside of narrative contexts. By the end of the song, and the wonderful album it comes from, we’ve all leveled up. - CH
Waxahatchee (feat. MJ Lenderman) – “Right Back to It” (from Tigers Blood, 2024)
Waxahatchee has returned and she’s keeping it country. Here, teaming with MJ Lenderman, Katie Crutchfield and company settle into a friendly Neil Young lope over which she describes a loving partnership that can withstand, or even grow from, the restless thoughts that may cross one’s mind. A tender banjo affirms throughout, and the song heads into the clouds when Crutchfield and Lenderman join together for a warm Gram-and-Emmylou-style chorus that befits its description of love that’s like “a song with no end.” I sure didn’t want this song to end, and I bet you won’t either. - CH
Brittney Spencer – “I Got Time” (from My Stupid Life, 2024)
The debut album from Brittney Spencer is both a statement of purpose and the emphatic arrival of a major talent. Of course, anyone who’s paid attention to Spencer as she’s released great music and performed great shows already knows who she is, but it’s still wondrous to experience the many combined pleasures of My Stupid Life. (David talked about another last week.) “I Got Time,” one of six or seven songs on here that should have no trouble reaching the Country charts (except we know why they probably won’t, now don’t we?), is a windows-down celebration of reclaiming one’s time. With popping rhythms and plucked guitars recalling sun-splashed anthems from across genres, Spencer delivers the message with a fitting mix of playfulness and insistence. She’s serious about having fun, and who can blame her? “I Got Time” is the kind of masterful performance that makes even the dead of winter feel like hot fun in the summertime.
The Hypos – “Heartbroke Town” (from The Hypos, 2024)
A collaboration between Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken and rock ‘n’ roll stalwart Greg Cartwright, The Hypos bring together a crack crew of musicians from Asheville and Memphis for a splendid collection of loose-limbed grooves and fluid melodies. “Heartbroke Town,” led by Cartwright, is a minor-key standout. Propelled by moaning violin from Krista Wroten, skanking rhythm, and brooding vocals from Cartwright and Wroten (who co-wrote the song with Cartwright), this striking song sounds like what might’ve happened if Rolling Thunder-era Bob Dylan was backed by The Specials. Cartwright often soars and shouts to memorable effect, but here he stays muted as he discusses the pain of what’s happening to his home in a world of empty shells and loaded guns. He may well be talking about his hometown of Memphis (the invocation of “river towns” suggests as much), but he could be talking about so many other places in our troubled time. Even though he’s “got a heart [that] weighs two tons,” he still makes room for both prayers and curses. As we all should.
Mary Weiss – “Don’t Come Back” (from Dangerous Game, 2007)
Mary Weiss died last week. Most celebrated as a lead singer of the great, great Shangri-Las, she returned in 2007 for a solo album with a perfect collaborator in the aforementioned Greg Cartwright. Cartwright produced, wrote 2/3 of the songs, and brought along his mighty Reigning Sound to back up Weiss on a vivid showcase of her talents, where the extra years added both additional assurance and new vulnerability to her concrete-rose alto. The whole album’s worth hearing, but my favorite is this rave-up, where the vroom-vroom rhythm and Weiss’ celebratory kiss-off make it a wonderful complement and counterpoint to the epic tragedy of “Leader of the Pack” or the l-u-v thrill of “Give Him A Great Big Kiss.” At the center, in full command as always, is Mary Weiss, a rock ‘n’ roll star if ever there was one.
The Shangri-Las – “I Can Never Go Home Anymore” (single, 1965)
My favorite of the Shangri-Las’ teen operas because it flips the tough-girl script from rebellion to reconciliation and because it plays to the group’s strength: Mary Weiss, recitation artist. On “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” Weiss hardly sings at all. Instead, in a series of spoken vignettes that move from “glad” girl to “bad” girl to “sad,” and that rival the recitative best of Porter Wagoner, she steers her Shangri-sisters away from running off with some boy and encourages them to consider the possibility that mother may know best after all. Once upon a time, Mary didn’t—and though she “forgot that boy right away,” she can’t forget the mom who finally died of a broken heart before her estranged daughter ever had the chance to “kiss and hug her” again. “And that’s called… sad” is how Weiss concludes her morality tale, which is way melodramatic of course but also, I’d note, wisely understated. She’s a grownup now. –DC
Benson Boone – “Beautiful Things” (single, 2024)
Sometimes a record delivers what you want. Other times a record surprises you. Not often does a record do both at once. On “Beautiful Things,” Benson Boone, a young TikTok-to-Warner-Records singer-songwriter, lays out how things have finally been breaking his way, and then some. What I read as his depression is finally under control, plus he’s found a girl that he and (nice touch) his parents all love. The music is quiet electric guitar as a quivery-voiced Benson thanks God for these beautiful things he’s been given. What I wanted at that point, but what I most definitely wasn’t expecting to get, was at least some recognition that what God kindly giveth He can cruelly taketh away. But that’s exactly the anxious, angry place where the song goes, with Boone pleading with his God not to take back these beautiful gifts. And not just pleading but suddenly screaming at Him, raging with don’t-You-dare fury via a stop-start “Heart-Shaped Box” chorus. Of course, Boone reverts to polite, prayerful pleading at the close. What else you gonna do? –DC
Adrianne Lenker – “Sadness as a Gift” (from Bright Future, 2024)
Big Thief frontperson Adrianne Lenker in her hushed-and-spare folkie singer-songwriter mode. The vibe is jamming in the kitchen, the left-in creak of a chair at the kickoff signifies informality and the less-is-more arrangements—a fiddle solos the melody, a guitar strum echoes Lenker’s pulse—underline intimacy and loss. A relationship Lenker had tricked herself into thinking was going to last has ended. It’s time to let go, but “we could see the sadness as a gift and still feel too heavy to hold.” Lenker’s images evoke hard lessons learned and ambiguities embraced, but it’s the unexpected turns of her tunes and the careful generosity of her voice, I think, that ensures her decidedly personal mysteries land as universals. To paraphrase one of her lines here, she lets us hear the music in her mind. –DC
The Babys – “Isn’t It Time” (from Live at the Bottom Line 1979, 2024)
Mostly due, I’m guessing, to their mascara and British passports, The Babys were sometimes dubbed a glam band. Listening again to late-seventies hits like “Back on My Feet Again” and “Every Time I Think of You,” I’d lump their power balladry in with contemporaries Foreigner, Journey, or even Styx at their AOR-poppiest. (No shade: I rocked the hell out of all those bands’ catalogs in real time.) The Babys called it quits in 1981, but front-Baby John Waites topped the charts in 1982 with the totally Babys-ish “Missing You,” and did it again in 1989, in the band Bad English, with Diane Warren’s “When I See You Smile.” All of that music is studio pristine, for better and worse, so I wasn’t really prepared to hear how much more sweaty fun and bar-band sloppy they come off on this small-room concert date. Halfway through the set, the Babys toss off a brief piano boogie bit before diving into their power-ballad best, “Isn’t It Time.” Waites struggles with the high notes and his breath control almost as much as I used to singing along. The women vocalists behind him are going flat, the drummer sounds like his kit may be inching across the stage with each thwack, the guitar solo is totally hammer-headed–and you can just tell everyone is having the time of their life. Slick, hit-minded stars revealed as true-believing rock-and-roll troopers. Did my heart good. –DC
Charles Lloyd – “Defiant, Tender Warrior” (from The Sky Will Be There Tomorrow, 2024)
Just noting that saxophonist Charles Lloyd, now 85, has new music out should be recommendation enough. “Defiant, Tender Warrior,” where Lloyd collaborates with pianist Jason Moran, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Brian Blade, feels like its title: gentle but persistent, brooding but inspired, generous but giving no ground, more a way of being than a song. –DC
Reading recommendations:
-Natalie Weiner talks to Randall King, for Texas Monthly
-Marissa Moss talks to Sierra Farrell, for Rolling Stone
-Chris O’Leary with part one of a Four Tops deep dive, for 64 Quartets
-Laura Snapes on the fall of Pitchfork, for The Guardian
-Marc Hogan on the fall of Pitchfork, for Rolling Stone
-Alfred Soto on the fall of Pitchfork, for Humanizing the Vacuum
-Jenn Pelly on Sleater-Kinney’s Little Rope, for Pitchfork
-Jonathan Bernstein on Brittney Spencer, for Rolling Stone
-Barry Mazor on Brittney Spencer’s My Stupid Life, for Wall Street Journal
-KC Hoard on Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, for The Walrus
-Stephen Thomas Erlewine on the late Mary Weiss, for Los Angeles Times
-Rachel Cholst talks to the co-founders of Black Opry Records, for Nashville Scene
-Brittney McKenna on Brothers Osborne, for Nashville Scene
-Clara Wang talks to Abby Anderson, for Nashville Scene
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