Shy Boys "Talk Loud (Polyvinyl)"
From Polyvinyl:
Do you think you know what Shy Boys sound like?
Each album feels different, and the audience gets the pleasure of listening in while Shy Boys experiment with and master new sounds. On their new album, Talk Loud, our Shy Boys are clearly so in sync with each other that they are able to explore getting out of sync in a way that feels right. The album is fun and scary at the same time. Right when you start to feel comfortable you turn a corner into a different dimension. They pan vocals, take audible breaths. The backing vocals are pure feeling. There’s a comfort to feeling surrounded by the five distinct voices that make up Shy Boys, but once in a while it starts to feel foreboding, too.Touring can be a grind, and it can also feel like summer camp. Bands develop shorthand for communication, get used to tight quarters. You talk to each other and you sit in silence. It magnifies and affects your relationships with your bandmates, with yourself, and what home means to you. With Bell House, the tight-knit Shy Boys spent about a “year-and-a-half cheek-to-cheek in a conversion van touring the country,” recalls lead singer, Collin Rausch. They became friends with artists they’d been fans of… tripped in northern California under the redwoods… played for a couple thousand people and… played for two people. Arriving home from this intense journey together and separating from each other physically aligned with some personal and musical perspective changes. The outcome is an album that grapples with attachment.
“Fraid I Might Die” and “Trash” reference the universal passage of time. On “Fraid I Might Die” the synth sounds are airy and sharp. The accompaniment builds, and then cuts to just keys, the lyrics repeating all throughout, like a chant. “Fraid I might die / With every beat I get older / Fraid I might die / With every beat I get closer.” The more you exist, the closer you are to ceasing to exist; living is dying. The lyrics of “Trash” seem at first to be about daily life: cleaning the house knowing you will just have to clean it “over and again” – the monotony of daily life. But upon a closer listen, it stretches beyond the narrator’s house and into the whole world and the painful overwhelming endless cycle of consumerism. Another standout moment on the album, “View From The Sky,” is undeniable proof that bands can still write hits organically. The song has glossy elements while remaining endearingly human. There’s doo-wop backing vocals paired with laser-show shredding. Every sound is imbued with emotion, every flick of the wrist is meaningful. There’s just no way to listen to this album without tuning into their spiritual well of connectedness. It embeds itself in your body.
Shy Boys are like musical astronauts, with instrumentation from the beyond. Talk Loud has the heart-string-yanking ability of music concocted in a laboratory, but it still feels heavily human. It’s complicated, it’s swirly, it surrounds you and extends itself deep into your brain. There are noticeably more synths (and less guitar) than previous Shy Boys albums. There is a lot of hand percussion sprinkled throughout the record: shaker, wood block, finger cymbal. Drums and bass do a secret handshake. Lyrics about malaise are juxtaposed with joyful sounds. The record is cinematic, sparkly, jumpy, and spooky. At times Talk Loud connotes a children’s TV program or puppet show: haunting and funny become one. In their own words, “Shy Boys is a bubble…to the point that we might just be making music for ourselves.” Their musical perspective and context is limited and insular, which translates into music that feels limitless, experimental, and unlike anything.
Geof Bradfield / Ben Goldberg / Dana Hall Trio "General Semantics (Delmark)"
The collaborative trio of Ben Goldberg (clarinet, contra alto clarinet), Geof Bradfield (soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet), and Dana Hall (percussion) explores new directions on General Semantics. Their Delmark Records debut features original music by the trio as well as unique interpretations of Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, and Hermeto Pascoal. The unusual instrumentation-especially the lack of a bassist- enables the musicians to transcend traditional instrument roles of accompaniment, improvisation, and interaction and create music that embraces form and harmony alongside freedom and spontaneous improvisation.
Sidi Touré "Afrik Toun Mé (Thrill Jockey)"
Sidi Touré is one of Mali’s most enduring and buoyant artists. As a master of Songhaï Music, Touré has been lauded for his dynamic and emotive voice both as the leader of the Songhaï Stars and on his own. Following the boisterous full band of arrangements of 2018’s Toubalbero, Afrik Toun Mé is an album of intimate comforts and subtle beauties. Touré, joined by virtuoso guitarist Mamadou Kelly and calabash player Boubou Diallo, blends parables and tales of inspiration that honor courage and resilience in the face of trial and tragedy. The spare and arresting songs of Afrik Toun Mé (in English, Africa Must Unite) captures the familiarity and personal touch of life’s small communions with the sincerity and poise that are indelible to Sidi Touré.
The lean recordings throughout Afrik Toun Mé retain the innate beauty and hopefulness of Touré’s music. Trading melodic guitar phrases and polyrhythmic gestures ripple around Touré’s dulcet singing like the swing and slosh of gentle brooks. Album centerpiece “Tchaw Yan” (roughly “Knowledge”) emphasizes how paramount Touré sees the pursuit of science is to the advancement and improvement of Africa. Touré says: “Science is the driver of progress. Today everything we see is thanks to scientific progress and to arrive at scientific progress people must go get an education. If Europeans were able to colonize Africa, it was because of technology. If China has become a world power, it is also because of technology and education. They started by agricultural auto-sufficiency, then healthcare and finally scientific progress – airplanes, computers, mobile phones, etc. And so he who is not educated, is in total obscurantism.” Touré highlights individual growth as well as communal with stories of virtue like “Bortchin” (A Noble Man) and sacrifice like “Guara Tcha Jina” (The Rooster’s First Crow). For Touré, this progress is critical to the unification of Africa: “Look at the buzzing of this beautiful Africa, which slept before like a fish in water, slept like a doe wandering in the bush. Now troubled by fishers, threatened by hunters, she has woken up. Africa must unite as so many luminaries have already said: Bob Marley, Alpha Blondy, Tiken Jah Fakoly… Doctor Kwame Nkrumah said Africa must unite or it will perish. We need African unity, at whatever the cost.”
Touré has been faced with the many challenges that come with limitations on communal and social gatherings during the 2020 pandemic. As one of countless artists around the world severely impacted by these limitations, his nearly daily performances have been restricted for months on end. The modest acoustic trio on Afrik Toun Mé captures the essence of his passionate performances, Touré delivering his encouraging and urgent messages as if plain spoken to friends gathered around a fire or over a cup of tea. In the face of turmoil both local and global, Sidi Touré’s Afrik Toun Mé is a work of pure radiance.
Polyvinyl Records "Exquisite Corpse (Polyvinyl)"
From Polyvinyl:
2020 has been an intense year by any standard, with the first weeks of the global pandemic giving most of us feelings unlike anything we’d experienced before. Quarantine lockdowns and hovering dread shifted the fabric of time in a way that’s ongoing, but was at its most vivid in those early days when a new reality was sinking in. Before people eventually adapted and started using the newly mandatory downtime to learn new languages and bake bread, hours lurched by as the world sat restlessly indoors. All the shows were slowly cancelled one by one, the tours and recording sessions were scrapped, hangs and practices just stopped happening. Everything was on hold indefinitely, time lost meaning, every day felt unreal.
During the first days of lockdown, Rainer Maria’s Kaia Fischer came up with the concept of Exquisite Corpse by meditating on their perspective of the newly unfolding weirdness they and so many of their creative friends were going through. Obviously a deadly pandemic was wrought with negatives, and those in particular to independent music scenes were especially devastating. But could there be another side to what felt so all-consumingly terrible? “We know what the pandemic isn’t good for,” Fischer said, “but let’s find out what it is good for.”
Searching for silver linings in the earliest days of lockdown wasn’t easy, but one idea led to another. It began with the realization that every Polyvinyl artist now had a completely clear schedule at the same time. They were also mostly sitting around waiting for the storm to pass, in different states of boredom, anxiety, worry and malaise. Logistically speaking, there might not be another time when pretty much everyone was available for a collaborative project and needed something to occupy their frazzled minds. A round of emails went out explaining the project and inviting members of the Polyvinyl roster to participate. Eleven teams of four or five musicians were assembled more or less at random, bringing together artists that had in many cases never met, much less worked on music together. Remotely, each team worked from scratch to create an original song, a reworked sonic adaptation of the game where each player adds to a collaborative drawing.
The scope alone is exciting, with these eleven songs combining the talents of 47 musicians from all corners of the world and all ends of the Polyvinyl family tree. Even the artwork was assembled through remote collaboration, with visual artists from Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle collaborating on the design in true Exquisite Corpse fashion. Musically, the results are every bit as exciting and unpredictable as the concept envisioned. New creative chemistries between the different artists and a complete absence of expectations or precedent sounds made for fearless choices in production, genre experimentation and stylistic curveballs. Artists known for sparkling pop worked with more ragged rockers or folks from acoustic-leaning emo bands, and the end results almost always defied the expected sum of their parts. Even though Exquisite Corpse is timestamped with traces of the overwhelming uncertainty that colored the pandemic’s onset, the music is by-and-large joyful, daring, and fun. More than reflecting the hanging gloom of the non-stop news cycle and spiking graphs, artists tapped into expressions of hope and exploration. This moment of universal upheaval cast a shadow on the entire world, but also allowed for a meeting of minds that was truly unprecedented.