Turn It Up - 4/8/2025

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

We hated having to write so many tributes to lost legends this time out but, as always, we loved the new music keeping us buoyed in a calamitous week. We also like our new logo.

Lola Kirke – “Zeppelin III” (from Trailblazer, 2025)

In just the last decade or so, Lola Kirke has acted in several films, written a memoir called Wild West Village, and released three albums and at least that many non-redundant EPs, the most recent being last year’s Country Curious, an excellent title in terms both of nailing her whole striving hipster, renaissance woman vibe—she embraces the genre but also keeps a clear distance in interesting ways—and of suggesting the catchy and danceable country pop music she specializes in: The title to her “Marlboro Lites and Madonna,” off her latest album Trailblazer, does the same sort of work. I’d liked almost everything I’ve heard by her without exactly loving it. But count me all in for “Zeppelin III.” If it’s a musical memoir, then the song is about her relationship with her dad, former Free and Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke, who left her and her mom the morning after her high school graduation. The song rolls gently along through the miles and the years as she recounts the lessons he taught her, both good and not. The chorus kicker splits the difference between generosity and venom: “I guess he tried his best, and I have to believe / He would've shown me how to love / But all he knew was how to leave.” –DC

Summer Dean – “Somebody’s Knockin’” (single, 2025)

I discovered Summer Dean just last week when music journalist and NFR friend Natalie Weiner played this cut on her all-genres-welcome radio show, “Nothin’ but North Texas,” on Dallas community station KNON. (Thursdays, 10 a.m. to noon CST; streams here.) Dean is described, if only in her own press materials, as “the reigning queen of Texas country music.” She’s 45 and a had a few albums already, so I assume I’d never heard of her before simply because of, well, Texas, where you can still sustain a career without crossing the state line. What I assume are Dean originals, such as “The Biggest Life Worth Living Is the Small” or “Clean Up Your Act (If You Want to Talk Dirty to Me),” looked intriguing on the page and sounded better, but her cover of Terri Gibbs’ career country hit from back in 1980 is special. The arrangement’s sticks near to Gibbs’ slinky recording, but I actually prefer Dean’s version of this submission to a blue-eyed and blue-jeaned devil: It dials down the 80s synths, and I prefer Summer’s voice, husky and sexy, like a cross between Tanya and Dottie. – DC

Superchunk – “Bruised Lung” (single, 2025)

Bands don’t last 35 plus years too often, but it’s almost never that they also just seem to get better and better in their rock ‘n roll dotage. I’ve been down with Superchunk since “Slack Motherfucker” in 1990, wore out 1991’s No Pocky No Kitty on disc, for Chrissake, yet these days it’s their What a Time to Be Alive and Wild Loneliness I turn to first, from 20-freaking ‘18 and ’22 respectively. “Bruised Lung” breaks no new ground even with North Carolina-transplant (and their Merge Records labelmate) Rosali joining in on guitar and backing vocals. But it is perfect, punky power pop. Then again, maybe it does break new ground: Did they really beat the entire rock universe to “I’ve got a bruised lung / It only hurts when I breathe”? – DC

Shriekback – “Lined Up” (Care, 1983)

Dave Allen died over the weekend, at 69. He will always be best known as the bassist and founding member of Gang of Four, the British post-punks who made some of the most searing and explicitly anti-capitalist music I know yet were also somehow irresistibly catchy and danceable (either a cultural contradiction, that, or logical as fuck). But I first encountered Allen’s music when he left the Gang and formed Shriekback with Barry Andrews, who had himself just left XTC. I was a big XTC fan, so Andrews was the reason I bought Care, their new project’s first full-length (with guitarist/drum machinist Carl Marsh now on board), but it was Allen’s bass work—sometimes melodic and sometimes metronomic, sometimes string-popping funky but always propulsive—that instantly dominated the album from track one onward. A sarcastic broadside against conformity that also moves the crowd, “Lined Up” was released in a variety of mixes—the single has Andrews’ vocal way out front instead of in the LP’s group unison vocals, there’s a slightly longer “disco” version out there, and for some reason I don’t understand every version available to link omits the album versions third and fourth verses entirely. So despite what I indicated up top, this is not the Care version below, I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s all to the good for our purposes because what replaces those missing lyrics (at the 1:56 mark) is a glorious minute-long bass breakdown from human perpetual motion machine Dave Allen. Indeed, his bass work here seems to embody the title of another great Care track, “My Spine Is the Bassline.” Just try to stay seated. – DC

Lucy Dacus – “Come Out” (from Forever Is a Feeling, 2025)

It’s hard to beat the opening line – “I missed your call because I was in a board room full of old men guessin’ what the kids are getting into” – but Lucy Dacus doesn’t let us down. “Come Out” is a highlight of Dacus’ lovely and layered new album, a circling bit of Joni Mitchell-recalling folk-rock that pairs these biting reminders of the world as it is with a soaring chorus that imagines the world as it should be, at least for Dacus and her lover. The double meaning of “Come Out” is hard to miss given that Forever Is a Feeling is Dacus’ first album of openly queer love songs. Nor should we miss it. But “Come Out” doesn’t need any specific context: The desperate love of Dacus’ lyric, delivered in her sweetly enveloping alto over a gentle and generous arrangement, is a knockout punch for anyone who’s ever been in love with anyone else. Forever Is a Feeling rewards multiple listens, but I keep getting caught up in this track and never ever wanting to move on. – CH

Olivia Ellen Lloyd – “You” (from Do It Myself, 2025)

Olivia Ellen Lloyd’s great new album opens with this soaring rocker, which marries Neil Young stomp and weeping steel around Lloyd’s meditation on the melancholy side of moving on. Lloyd possesses a notably powerful voice, which she uses to both proclaim and speak plainly as she lays out the after-effects of a love affair. Like all great songs about such feelings, Lloyd lays bare the reasons why while also ignoring none of the ambivalence, and – as precise and piercing as her lyrics are – there is no more affecting moment than the multi-note stretching of the title word, which wraps a full palette of emotion within Lloyd’s twangy trills. This is a great album from an artist who deserves the increased attention surrounding this new release. Here’s to many more in the future. – CH

Amadou et Mariam – “Mon Amour, Ma Cherié” (from Nou Ti Silé, 1999)

Amadou Bagayoko, singer, songwriter, and guitarist from the remarkable Malian duo Amadou & Mariam, died last week at the age of 70. After a series of 1980s recordings that featured only their voices and Bagayoko’s guitar, they signed to an international record deal and started releasing albums that paired their spare, striking songs with more and more diverse instrumentation. This new, expanded sound earned them a global following, especially in the 2000s when they released a series of acclaimed albums that sparkle and shine with the group’s particular mixture of local sound and global synthesis. I first heard the duo thanks to their inclusion on From Mali to Memphis, a 1999 Putumayo compilation charting the connections between West African styles and U.S. blues: Beyond the symbolic call and response across the diaspora, the swirling guitars and deep grooves reveal the ongoing musical conversation between Black artists from both sides of the Atlantic. “Mon Amour, Mon Cherié,” from the duo’s 1999 album Sou Ni Tilé, kicks off From Mali to Memphis, and it knocked me sideways from the first listen. Building from one of the duo’s older songs, here Bagayoko’s piercing voice and rolling guitar riff is filled out by a rich bed of percussion that fills out the empty spaces in the groove without overwhelming it. I’d love their subsequent albums – especially 2008’s polyrhythmic party Welcome to Mali – but nothing will top the moment I was introduced to these great musicians. When I heard the news of Bagayoko’s death, I knew exactly what I needed to turn up right away. I haven’t stopped since. – CH

Gang of Four – “Love Like Anthrax” (from Entertainment!, 1979)

Speaking of which, I knew exactly what I needed to play when I heard about the death of Dave Allen, bassist and co-founder of the great Gang of Four. The broken funk spasm of “Love Like Anthrax” is my favorite of their songs, and it’s in no small part due to the way that Allen’s bassline skitters and slurps between Andy Gill’s screaming guitar, Hugo Burnham’s rock-solid drumming, and the disorienting doubled voices of Gill and Jon King. (Allen also pops in on occasional background vocals.) Allen’s bass both grounded and fractured the group’s songs as they burst forward at the turn of the eighties, propelling the dance-dance-revolution of the group’s Marxist-Situationist debut masterpiece Entertainment! and the excellent follow-up Solid Gold. There are many classics contained therein, but for me it will always be the beetle-on-its-back palpitations of “Love Like Anthrax” that sits at the top of my GO4 hit parade. I hope you turn it up – way up – and that you feel the same excitement that still grabs me every time Dave Allen’s bass bursts forward out of the squall of guitar noise and sets the joint jumping. Rock on. – CH

Blondie - “Heart of Glass” (from Parallel Lines, 1978)

Clem Burke also died this week - one of the great rock drummers, whose smooth and subtly grooving drum tracks helped propel Blondie into stardom and acclaim. As writers Kembrew McLeod and Erin Osmon have noted in essential work on the band, Blondie’s greatest gift was in navigating the worlds of pop, rock, New Wave, and dance music with a flexibility and skill that revealed the congruences between those seemingly different genres. They were, at their best, the AM radio of your dreams. (At least mine.) And what a run of hits, capped perhaps most gloriously by “Heart of Glass,” which features Burke’s kit gliding alongside a drum machine in a perfect encapsulation of the band’s mixture of glossy glam and punk punch. Burke went on to work with a wide range of other great musicians, but his role as the “heartbeat” of this fantastic band earns him his justified esteem. Which will likely outlive all of us, just like great pop records. - CH

Recommended readings:

-Elizabeth Nelson spoke with Judy Collins, for Stereogum

-Kaleb Horton on George Harrison and Formula 1, for Rolling Stone

-Alex Traub on the late Amadou Bagayoko, for The New York Times

-Shana Redmond on the university in crisis and as crisis, for LitHub

-Grayson Curren on the late Michael Hurley, for NPR.org

-Will Hermes creates a 2-hour Michael Hurley tribute playlist, for his New Music + Old Music

-Annie Zaleski on Clem Burke, for her Annie’s Newsletter

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