Turn It Up - 2/26/24

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.

Dire Straits (feat. Phil Lynott) – “Keep On Knocking” (live) (from Live 1978-1992, 2024)

Part of a new and massive Dire Straits live collection, the great leader of Thin Lizzy joins the band for a few rock ‘n’ roll covers to close out a 1979 show in London. The most delightful is their set-closing take on the Little Richard classic – Lynott, Knopfler, and the band groove for over 5 minutes, tossing off verses, locking into a stinging guitar-bass motorvation, and inviting the crowd to join them in a rare moment of fourth-wall-breaking for the normally reserved Straits. It’s a genial and propulsive reminder of both bands’ connection to the ‘50s roots and their later British/Irish remixes, as well as a fitting curtain call. “It’s a shame they can’t be here tomorrow night,” Lynott says of Dire Straits at the finish. All I’d add is that it’s a shame Phil couldn’t have been with them – or us – more often. - CH

Jalen Ngonda – “Illusions” (single, 2024)

Here’s a throwback that you won’t want to throw back. Jalen Ngonda makes sweet-soul records with a precision that recalls the heydays of Philadelphia or Detroit and a vitality that keeps them from just being admirable retro exercises. After a great debut album last year, he’s returned with the pulsing single “Illusions,” where he looked for love and found a Smokey Robinson-style mirage instead. Speaking of Smokey, Ngonda’s remarkable falsetto places him in a key R&B tradition, and he uses it here in a range of tonal and emotional registers. The chorus – with Ngonda’s voice climbing even higher – is both climax and intrusive thought, piercing the windswept soundscape of horns, strings, and percussion that gets to breathe a little on a welcome instrumental break. He saves his best note for the end, with a devastating “oooooh!” that feels like both benediction and resignation. A bittersweet symphony, if ever there was one. - CH

Lainey Wilson – “Country’s Cool Again” (single, 2024)

There are no surer signs of country’s new mainstream moment than the return of songs about the people who were here first. Anthems of country authenticity are always risky – especially given how such claims often run alongside racialized and gendered anxieties both in the music and around it – but Lainey Wilson’s contribution makes one very smart decision. It sounds like fun. Rather than recreating a Mandrell-ian ballad or strummy post-Jackson satire, Wilson pokes fun at the newcomers while also suggesting that everyone can join the party. And the track just rips, a cracking two-step with one foot in the rooted past and one foot in the pop present. Wilson doesn’t totally avoid the ways that real-country rhetoric can be limiting, but her good-spiritedness feels like a breath of fresh air against other, more obviously exclusionary anthems of the recent past. “Ain’t that some shit?” she exclaims, and it sounds like we’re all laughing with her this time. - CH

Talibah Safiya (feat. Deener and Yella P) – “Jack and Jill” (from Black Magic, 2024)

I hyped her single “Papa Please!” last year, and now the great young Memphis artist Talibah Safiya has released the full E.P. for which it served as a preview. Safiya was inspired not only by the interlocking musical traditions of Memphis and the Black South (an early lyric is “we come from a Black-ass city”), but specifically by the work of ethnomusicologist David Evans and his High Water Records. You hear those legacies in the smoky and smoking scorned-lover blues “Jack and Jill,” with its slithering guitar, stomping percussion, harmonica ache, and punches of Hammond organ. Safiya’s voice is alternately, or maybe simultaneously, seductive and foreboding, with a hellhound on her trail as she pursues her man right into a house of God. The testimonial and fantastic traditions of the blues dance with each other here, as Safiya summons spirits with a variety of intentions. - CH

Hurray for the Riff Raff – “Dynamo” (from The Past Is Still Alive, 2024)

I’ve already talked about one of the tracks on the astounding new album from Alynda Segarra and company, and I’m sure that I’ll say more about the album in the future. Right now, “Dynamo” is the song that I can’t stop repeating. Segarra’s voice is at its tenderest here, as they celebrate a lover – with knockout descriptors like “modern bandit’ and “regular dynamo” – over close harmonies, Latin rhythms, and subtle interplay of acoustic and electric instruments that makes “Dynamo” sound like a lost classic from the late-‘50s or early ‘60s. (At just over three minutes, it’s the perfect AM-radio length, too.) I could hear everyone from Sam Cooke to the Everly Brothers doing a great version, but “Dynamo” is also unmistakably Hurray for the Riff Raff, particularly on an album in which its sweet somethings feel like a moment of refuge. Save the last dance for Alynda Segarra. - CH

James Brown – “We Got to Change” (from We’ve Got to Change EP, 2024)

This previously unreleased track is out now to promote a new A&E documentary, James Brown: Say It Loud. Of course, the only reason anyone would ever need to check out “We Got to Change” is… James Brown himself, especially since he’s backed by guitarist Bootsy Collins, bassist brother Catfish Collins, and funky drummer Clyde Stubblefield, each of them a primary if still insufficiently heralded architect of our musical world. Bobby Byrd’s here too, responding to Brown’s calls, a la contemporaneous hits like “Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved” and “Soul Power,” and there’s a strictly-the-melody sax solo of “Down by the Riverside”—and a Little Jimmy Dickens reference, to boot. Oh, and could that title refrain possibly be more perfectly suited to our moment? Skip the shorter edit and go deep. This is the definition of a “Turn It Up.” – DC

Kacey Musgraves – “Deeper Well” (single, 2024)

“I tuned a song into a scent again,” Musgraves shared on her socials, describing the aroma of a Deeper Well candle which you can purchase, for $56, at her website, as “an earthy ode to your inner world” that will “make your space smell like the bottom of a forest in the clouds” and like a “wet stone but also a breeze carrying a subtle hint of dried flowers.” I can’t vouch for the aromatic accuracy of that description, but I do suspect lifestyle catalog copy is hard to write well without coming off a little silly. What I know for certain is that Musgraves writes great lyrics routinely. Her new “Deeper Well” finds her turning hippy trippy, getting back to nature and basics and, since she brought it up, I’m going to say it sounds like a bucolic bubble bath. She’s older and wiser here, freshly grounded, weeding the toxic people out of her life and determined to roll up a joint, or not, at least a little less often than before. It’s all very fetching, very calming, and those bass notes at the end of each chorus are my kind of wild side. – DC

The Singing, Swinging Stoneman Family – “Turn Me Loose” (from White Lightning, 1966)

Roni Stoneman first grabbed my attention when, as a boy, I’d see her every week on Hee Haw. She cracked me up as Ida Lee Nagger, forever ironing and inevitably cracking the skull of her no ‘count husband Lavern with a rolling pin. She entertained the hell out of me, too, as a member of the show’s Banjo Quartet, inevitably showing up showmen’s showmen like Grandpa Jones and Roy Clark. She never really had much of a solo recording career, so back then, I had no way of knowing that Roni, as the youngest daughter of genre patriarch Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, had already been a pioneering woman of bluegrass for decades or that she and her siblings had a longstanding bluegrass family band, The Singing, Swinging Stonemans as they billed themselves for a time in the sixties. They were fantastic, and “Turn Me Loose” is a red-hot example of what they were up to. Roni kicks it off by shouting down her guitarist brother Scotty, then harmonizes with mandolinist sister Donna before ending with a banjo roll that feels like a slap in the face. R.I.P., Veronica Loretta “Roni” Stoneman. – DC

Reading recommendations:

-Niko Stratis on Jackass, masculinity and transness, for Anxiety Shark

-JJ Skolnik on underground music and capitalism, for Flaming Hydra

-Amanda Marie Martinez on Beyoncé and country music’s Black women, for NPR

-Julianne Escobedo Shepherd on Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi, for Pitchfork

-Chris Willman on Roni Stoneman, for Variety

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