Turn It Up - 6/3/2024

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

It’s another week, so we’re back with some things we’ve been listening to. Charles goes first this week, then David, and we’ve listed a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Gaby Moreno – “Cheek to Cheek” and Joachim Cooder – “Cold, Cold, Cold” (from Long Distance Love: A Sweet Relief Tribute to Lowell George, 2024)

The new Lowell George tribute album is one of the better such sets that I’ve heard in quite a while. It’s a vibrant celebration of the great artist and songwriter that manages to avoid the traditional pitfalls that led Greil Marcus to famously (and somewhat unfairly) declare: “Aren’t tribute albums terrible?” (Now, if you’re looking for some evidence to support Marcus’ conclusion, the new and pointless re-do of Stop Making Sense is a whole lot closer. But that’s another story.) Some of the artists offer loving re-creations of Little Feat classics and cuts from George’s lone solo album: Gaby Moreno unfurls the playfully lovelorn “Cheek to Cheek” over twin fiddles and swooning harmonies from David Garza. Others – like Joachim Cooder – reinvent the source material into something very different. Sounding a bit like his dad Ry, and a bit more like J.J. Cale, Joachim Cooder turns the icepick blues-rock of “Cold, Cold, Cold” into spooky atmospherics, singing George’s lyrics of bad love and bad luck like they were misty drops of condensation. These are two highlights of many on an album that – as a friend and fellow Feat fan told me – manages to sound great while also making you want to go listen to the originals again. There are times when those originals are pretty much the only music I want to hear, and Long Distance Love has inaugurated another such period. For that I am grateful. Feats won’t fail me now. – CH

Kaia Kater – “The Internet” (from Strange Medicine, 2024)

A quiet centerpiece of Kater’s masterful new album, “The Internet” builds from her trancy fingerpicking into a swirling ode of ambivalence to the title subject. She notes, with an intimate hushed vocal, her (over)reliance on the virtual world and its ability to keep her from making connections or even “to feel any rush out beyond the pull of the Internet” and its endorphin rush of clicks and engagements. But this isn’t a simplified paean to unplugging: instead, and especially because of the warm sadness with which Kater and her collaborators envelop the listener, it sounds as much like a love letter as a cautionary tale. She uses the word “longing” several times in the song, but its beautiful yearn is unmistakable even without it. – CH

Brownyn Keith-Hynes – “Up for Losing Sleep” (from I Built a World, 2024)

The award-winning fiddle player for Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes proves herself a singer and songwriter of great effectiveness on I Built a World, a sparkling collection of big-tent bluegrass. My current favorite is the bouncing ode to misbehavior “Up for Losing Sleep.” Keith-Hynes, whose resonant soprano finds each of the album’s variety of emotional registers, skips and jumps over the backing of an all-star team featuring Jerry Douglas, Bryan Sutton, and her boss Tuttle, who contributes close-harmony background vocals. A delightful and delighted highlight of a very fine album, “Up for Losing Sleep” is perfect for turning up when you don’t wanna turn in just yet. – CH

Jay Som – “If I Could” (from I Saw the TV Glow (Original Soundtrack), 2024)

The deeply entertaining soundtrack to I Saw the TV Glow somehow works as both a nostalgia trip and a near-future glimpse into what pop music will sound like for the next few years. Jay Som’s jangling “If I Could” is the kind of crash-bang rocker that any fan of the tuneful side of the Buzz Bin will instantly recognize. More than just a retro exercise, though, “If I Could” aches with the choked longing of its subject. Som’s muted syllables poke through the waves of guitars; “I’d take it back if I could” on the chorus and the assured desperation of repeated “I’ll see you again” on the bridge are just two snatches of hook that you won’t forget after just one listen. It all adds up to a stirring, intoxicating reminder that sometimes – in the hands of an artist as talented as Jay Som – the old tricks still hold new magic. – CH

Will Kimbrough – “I Don’t Want to Start a War” (from For the Life of Me, 2024)

Roots-rock journeyman Will Kimbrough delivers appropriately disdainful references to MAGA flags, “zip-tie guy,” and “the QAnon Shaman in his buffalo hat” (“I swear we tripped with him… Palo Alto ’86…”). It rocks a real nice moody groove, and each time you begin to worry he’s content to preach to the choir, Kimbrough’s better angels push him to reach out, encouraging old friends, now new enemies, to sing together the way we used to do “before peace and love fell out of style.” “I don’t want to start a war,” he keeps insisting to himself, “not another Civil War.” Other voices join in, but they sound like they’re way, way off and are probably just the choir anyway. –DC

Rachel Chinouriri – “Garden of Eden” (from What a Devastating Turn of Events, 2024)

The 25-year-old Brit singer-songwriter finds herself feeling still “too young but too old for this,” trapped in an Eden empty of real friends but full of vomiting party kids, caught between “No matter what, your youth is gonna end” and “Well, maybe I'm just tryna stay young,” between “There’s no point in anything” and “At least I cared.” Her voice breathy and cautious, Chinouriri shares no way out of these dilemmas, at least not here on her album’s scene-setting lead track. We’re left just hanging there with her, all nervous talking drums and itchy guitar squall and “I’ve lost my appetite.” So now what? — DC

Superchunk – “Everybody Dies” (single, 2024)

I’d never have predicted, thirty years on from “Slack Mother Fucker” and (previous high-water mark) No Pocky for Kitty, that North Carolina indie stars Superchunk would now be making the best records of their lives. But, after 2018’s What a Time to Be Alive and (new best, says me) 2022’s Wild Loneliness, here we are. “Everybody Dies” continues this late-career run. The joke to that title’s downer statement of just-the-facts is the way its preceded by a wry “But I’m beginning to think…” The joy is in the majestic shredding, jagged hooks, and shrill energy. Not dead yet. – DC

The Freedom Affair – “If You Don’t Want Me” (single, 2024)

I’ve written here before about Kansas City’s soul collective The Freedom Affair, recommending their 2020 debut, Freedom Is Love, and last year’s grooves-only follow-up, Freedom Is Love (Instrumental). The Affair specializes in forward-looking soul music, the better to nurture the beloved community, and they build their originals from inviting retro-soul inspirations, the better to expand that community. “If You Don’t Want Me” finds them channeling the life-affirming bounce of the J5’s “I Want You Back” as vocalists Seyko Groves, Paula Sanders, and Shon Ruffin (The Freedom Threedom!) trade verses about realizing the one you love doesn’t love you. A horn-chart break adds some heaviness to the mix, but then the women are back, almost screaming on their way out the door. If freedom is love, it’s time to go find it. – DC

Nate Hofer – “Hotel-10 Walker” (from Decommissioned, 2024)

Kansas City’s Nate Hofer is a pedal-steel guitarist with an impressive local resume. He’s a former or current member of such first-rate country bands as Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys, Mike Ireland and Holler, and Starhaven Rounders. Hofer is also a photographer. “One and a Half Acres,” his series of aerial shots of abandoned nuclear missile silos spread around the American heartland, works both as abstract photography and as concrete reminders that war is never inevitable. (The project, which you can view here, was recently awarded the Global Peace Photo Award.) Now Hofer has combined his artistic sides on a new seven-song EP, Decommissioned. Recorded 150 feet below ground in an old Atlas missile base near Wilson, Kansas, and using his pedal steel in duets with the empty silo’s impressively haunting echo, Hofer creates nuclear Armageddon’s aural opposite. “Hotel-10 Walker,” for example, is a quiet, strangely relaxing musical portrait that feels like the setting loose of a breath held too long. – DC

Reading recommendations:

-Dave Laing (who passed away in 2019) on British country-pop star Frank Ifield (who died last month), for The Guardian

-Kyshona on the fiftieth anniversary of Rufus and Chaka Khan’s Rags to Rufus, for The Bluegrass Situation

-Jack Hamilton on Soulsville, U.S.A., a new Stax Records documentary, for Slate

-Betsy Phillips on Morgan Wallen and Nashville tourism, for The Nashville Scene

-Robbie Fulks on Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, for Talkhouse

-Chris O’Leary on the restored version of Let It Be, for his Patreon

-Stephen Thomas Erlewine on that Apple 100 best albums list, for So It Goes

-Carl Wilson on that Apple 100 best albums list, for Crrrtic!

-Justin Davis on Memphis’ Frances Thompson, for MLK50

-Cheyenne Roundtree and Nancy Dillon on Sean Combs’s history of violence, for Rolling Stone

-Annie Zaleski on Anita Pallenberg, Yoko Ono, and the “rock star girlfriend,” for The Guardian

-Natalie Weiner on country music’s “family first” mentality, for Don’t Rock The Inbox

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