Turn It Up - Catching Up Edition, 1/8/2024

David and Charles with some recent earworms, obsessions, and recommendations

It’s a new year, but we’re still catching up with the old one. Here are a few tracks that we either missed when they came out or were released at the end of 2023 - and, as always, we’ve got some reading recommendations at the bottom.

Lilli Lewis – “All Is Forgiven” (from All Is Forgiven, 2023)

New Orleans-based “folk rock diva” Lilli Lewis has been making great music for a while – her cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” is another recent knockout – but her debut album for Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records is the fullest demonstration yet of her many gifts. With tracks ranging from the gentle “Ciel Eternal” to the funky “Sin Eater,” All Is Forgiven shows the depth and range of Lewis’ talents as singer, composer, and pianist. The title track may be my favorite, a driving catharsis propelled by a circling keyboard riff and Lewis’ insistent vocals. Its sonic resonances include everyone from Carole King to Joan Armatrading to Bruce Hornsby to Stew & The Negro Problem, and yet it remains distinctively Lewis in its layered power. This is a great track from a great album, one that I know I’ll be talking about all year long. - CH

Scarface - NPR Tiny Desk Concert

It’s not a record (at least not yet), but this is one of the best and most nourishing pieces of music that I’ve heard in some time. Beyond being one of hip-hop’s great storytellers and teachers, Scarface proves himself an expert bandleader, leading this not-so-tiny ensemble (including super-producer Mike Dean on keys) through several of his most famous and enduring songs. The warm authority and gentle humor of his baritone glides alongside the horns and keys, riding through rhythms, interlocking sonic traditions, and focusing the poignancy of classics like the Donny Hathaway/Roberta Flack-sampling “On My Block” and “I Seen a Man Die.” And then he turns the closing “My Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me” into a call-and-response celebration (and tribute to the departed Bushwick Bill), a fitting end to a stunning and beautiful thirty minutes. - CH

Big K.R.I.T. – “Man on the Moon” (from Regardless It’s Still Timeless, 2023)

One of Scarface’s heirs and students, Mississippi’s Big K.R.I.T. has been among rap’s most consistent bright lights since his emergence fifteen years ago. “Man on The Moon,” from a fine new E.P., is K.R.I.T.’s addition to the lineage of Black artists calling out white-controlled governments for exploring space while ignoring the hardships facing (Black) people back home. Like his artistic forebears Gil Scott-Heron or Prince, he suffuses this critique with pointed detail and an undercurrent of sadness. The bouncing musicality of his flow, with its signature mix of triplets and twang, is in particularly fine form here as it dances across the percolating beat. And then, in its final minute, the track breaks down into furious house, as K.R.I.T. repeatedly urges us to “take me to your leader,” a promise to “save the world” that is as urgent and ambivalent as the world feels as we all enter 2024. - CH

Lana Del Rey – “A&W” (from Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, 2023)

I have long appreciated Lana Del Rey – she’s clearly among the most interesting and iconoclastic pop artists of this era – but I’m still searching for tracks that connect with me on a level beyond admiration. “A&W” does the trick. A friend put it on a year-end playlist, and its echoing piano, cascading vocals, and bluntly cryptic lyrics stopped me in my tracks. Divided in two, with the first shining a harsh light on an unsettled sexual experience and the second building a smoldering incantation around “Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Bop,” “A&W” is Mulholland Drive as scored by Fiona Apple, or maybe Lost Highway meets “Lost Highway,” or whatever other mash-up I devise to try (and fail) to explain the song’s mysterious magic. Regardless, it’s the kind of compelling, intoxicating track that will help me find a way into her catalog. And for that I’m grateful. - CH

Adeem the Artist – “Fast Cars” (single, 2023)

Adeem the Artist released one of my favorite albums of 2022, with one song (“Books and Records”) that instantly joined my big-country canon. Released near the end of 2023, “Fast Cars” is a roaring reminder of what makes this singer-songwriter so vital and exciting. It’s literally alternative gospel, with Adeem offering a biography of Jesus Christ that finds the son of God rocking down the highway. Their eye for clever detail – from Judas Priest on the radio to “streets of Marlboro Gold” – and their ear for melody lend this hopped-up complement to John Prine’s “Jesus: The Missing Years” both levity and gravity. Jesus here seems both more holy and more human, as Adeem and their band bring a new level of poignancy to some well-known sacred and secular signifiers. And it rocks like hell, or maybe it’s like heaven, which is appropriate. Because saviors like Jesus, baby, they were born to run. - CH

Arlen Roth – “Sweet Little Sixteen” (from Toolin around Woodstock with Levon Helm, 2008)

Some algorithm or other kicked this up for me several months back: Arlen Roth, a veteran roots-rock guitarist, backing Levon Helm, one of the great singers in roots rock history, on a song by maybe roots-rock’s finest songwriter. A grown-ass Chuck Berry saluting a teen fan and also, from the leering sound of things, desiring her, should’ve always been worrisome even before we learned about what genius/creep Berry was up to in his spare time. On the other hand, unexpectedly encountering Levon Helm this past year, singing the song to me with such joy from beyond the grave and minus the back story, gave my heart a throb to the bottom of my feet. –DC

Nikki Lane – “When My Morning Comes Around” (Single, 2023)

I’ve been high on Nikki Lane’s country-flavored pop-rocks since I first heard “Right Time,” off her second album All or Nothin’ in 2014: She knows her way around a singalong hook, doesn’t skimp on highway-speed beats, and has a brilliantly brassy voice that sometimes puts me in mind of a good-and-pissed-off Donna Fargo. But Lane’s found herself another gear on this piano-and-pedal-steel-only Iris DeMent cover. Her voice feels less coolly charming, spikier, scratchier, and those new textures add new complexities. “For once I won’t be thinkin’ there’s somethin’ wrong with me,” Lane vows hopefully—which is not to say she sounds optimistic. “In this current time of crisis,” Lane writes about the performance on her YouTube page, “I hope [this recording] brings you hope, and I hope you may consider a donation to support the right to abortion access.” –DC

Ashley Cooke – “Your Place” (from Shot in the Dark, 2023)

Like so many albums these days, Cooke’s second would perhaps garner fewer streams at half the length but would hit harder emotionally, whatever that’s worth. Even at a swollen 24 tracks, though, Shot in the Dark is varied, thematically and sonically both, to avoid my typical reaction while stuck in the middle of some Zach Wallen behemoth: “Wait, haven’t I already heard this one?” Lots of keepers throughout, but “Your Place,” which the trades report is only just now beginning to make at least a little headway at radio, is a good place to dive in. About ending a relationship with a toxic ex by reminding him that he already ended it when he cheated on her, it’s one of the better kiss-offs I’ve heard in years, and includes one line—“You made your bed, and I ain’t sleeping in it”—that every other songwriter in Nashville is cursing themselves for not getting to first. –DC

Jeffrey Martin – “I Didn’t Know” (from Thank God We Left the Garden, 2023)

My favorite song on Jeffrey Martin’s postlapsarian-themed fourth album is “I Didn’t Know.” It’s an absolute singer-songwriting stunner, albeit probably one too idiosyncratic and particular, in its telling details and in its tip-toed pacing and stark arrangement, to inspire the covers it deserves. It’s about finally realizing as an adult that your parents were just making it up as they went along, the same way you are. –DC

The Zombies – “Love You While I Can” (from Different Game, 2023)

This new Zombies’ track landed like a lifetime-later answer to “This Will Be Our Year,” the hopeful, heavy number from the band’s 1969 Odyssey and Oracle. Colin Bluntstone’s voice is deeper now, breathier, and the hopefulness of the song is heavier, too. Bluntstone has hung around long enough now to know what “This Will Be Our Year” was perhaps still too young to have learned: They are all our years, and they fly away so fast. “I will love you while I can.” –DC

Reading recommendations:

-Andrea Williams on Nashville and country music’s race problem, for The Tennessean

-Will Hermes talks to Andrew Holter about Lou Reed, for Los Angeles Review of Books

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