Best New Records I Heard in September 2023
Between catching Covid and shenanigans at KDHX radio, I barely made a dent in the huge batch of enticing new releases this month. We'll get there.
Hiss Golden Messenger – Jump For Joy. Apparently, this is a concept album filled with letters between the adult Mr. Messenger and his teen-age alter ego. I know that only because I read it, though. As far as I can tell, these songs are much more about intriguing melodies, some fascinating contemporary rock mid-tempo grooves, a little bit of horns, at least one very odd stretchy synthesizer hook, earnest but not over-the-top vocals, and a strong flow to the album. Every time I tell myself to concentrate hard on the lyrics – he’s got a song called “Jesus is Bored” for Chrissakes, which has to be at least interesting – I get distracted by some fascinating arrangement touch or simply lost in the overall feeling. I’ve only been on board with this guy for a few years now, but this is the best I’ve heard from him.
Tianna Esperanza – Terror. No problem paying attention to most of these words. This young woman starts her debut album pondering ways she can make men she sees on the streets bleed, and then tells us what has happened in her life to make her deal with terror. After that song, she shifts gears to discussing sexual experiences with women and discussing the nature of power and knowledge. There’s a song in Spanish that could be about anything as far as I know. Esperanza is a mercurial but emphatic vocalist, and she puts her lyrics into powerful melodies over strong r&b-based arrangements with Spanish tinges here and there. It turns out her grandmother is Paloma of the Slits. She ends the album with three guest vocalists taking turns helping her out – I don’t know Mick Flannery, but Rachael Yamagata and Valerie June are familiar. The song with June, “Lone Child” is short but ridiculously infectious with a chant I can’t get out of my head.
Ivo Perelman & Elliott Sharp – Artificial Intelligence. I had a few Sharp records back in the 80s that I liked quite a bit, but I’d lost track of him for a long time. Perelman’s name has come up in things I’ve read, but I don’t think I’ve heard them. He’s from Brazil originally, but both artists are best known as stalwarts in the New York avant-garde scene. This collaboration is a thrill ride of tenor sax and eight-string electric guitar. Perelman and Sharp engage in elaborate conversations across four cuts, the first of which is half of the nearly hour-long album. Perelman seemingly knows every sound a tenor saxophone can make, and he reacts immediately to every crazy quilt twist and turn Sharp’s guitar takes. This album is not for everybody, but if you have any interest in extended free improvisation between two brilliant practitioners of same, this is exceptionally pleasing.
RAYE – My 21st Century Blues. There is not a hint of blues form on this record, but there is blues purpose. RAYE is a 25-year-old English woman who tackles subjects ranging from undeserving men to drugs she used to love, from environmental disaster to contemporary standards of beauty. It’s all about bringing the bad things to light and dancing out of her constrictions. She raps occasionally, but mostly sings in an enthusiastic and slightly gospel-drenched manner over sharply focused, dynamically challenging contemporary r&b beats. The album has the always welcome property of sounding better and better every time I spin it. I can’t say why it took me eight months to find this debut album, but I’m expecting I won’t sleep on any future releases from her.
Jaime Branch – Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (World War). Branch passed away just over a year ago, but she had recorded this final album a few months earlier. I was not familiar with her older work, which I might want to rectify since this record is a pure delight. Branch played jazz trumpet, but with her own infectious enthusiasm and melodic approach. Her songs here fly around in Caribbean rhythms, punk energy, a little reggae dub, and other influences. There’s even a folky take on a classic Meat Puppets song which sounds like something that has been around for two hundred years. The music is uplifting, danceable, heartfelt, and just plain good. I almost forgot to mention that she sang, too, with a clarity and intensity which rivaled her trumpet playing.
Noname – Sundial. Start with the sheer indulgent pleasures of her sound. Cool beats, keyboard tinkling, luscious choral backdrops, and the many flows of Nonames rapping (and occasional singing) styles. She has a tendency to sound comfortable before double timing with a harder edge, and then on the next song comes off almost conversational. Her rhymes sneak into the brain piece by piece, not all at once. Then there are the guest stars. Ayoni sings on a couple tracks, $ilk Money and Billy Woods practically take over on another, and Common gets the last verse on the whole record. (Interesting that he says he’s “on some Silo shit,” as his character on the Apple TV Plus show The Silo is so nasty that I had a residual repulsion when I first heard his voice.) And, uh, Jay Electronica is here. A talented rapper with some evil anti-semitic thoughts which are hinted at on his verses. Hard to balance Noname’s calling out of capitalism and war machinery at the Super Bowl with that. But, man, I keep wanting to listen to the record, so I guess I’m as complicit as she was when she wound up playing Coachella.
Dan Tyminski – God Fearing Heathen. Tyminski is a cut above the average bluegrass performer simply by virtue of songwriting skills. With a firm grounding in country history, he can address heartbreak and existential concerns with memorable melodies and clever wordplay. He also sings with as much force as anybody in the genre – you all know his voice as the guy who sang “Man of Constant Sorrow” in O Brother, Where Art Thou? back in the day. This album starts with a bang-up tale of constant sorrow as the singer slowly realizes his partner is “Never Coming Home.” It ends with a rip-roaring tribute to the great guitarist Jimmy Martin, who “never changed a guitar string.” In between, it’s impeccable picking and fiddling from Tyminski and his band. A perfect batch of bluegrass.
Steep Canyon Rangers – Morning Shift. Here’s a band best known for bluegrass that’s moving to a more thumping direction with a lot more emphasis on drums than they had back when Steve Martin was making records with them. But no matter what sound they use, these guys are worth checking out for the songwriting, which pulls from country and bluegrass traditions but with their own idiosyncratic touches. Lyrically, they like to write from darker points of view. “Second In Line (Junior)” is the tale of the second son of a captain of industry who revels in his undeserved wealth. “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals” is a tale of getting out of a small town after treating the girls less than well. I count three different lead vocalists, and lots of rich harmony singing to make every song fresh and distinctive from the last.
Olivia Rodrigo – Guts. Her tales of teenage insecurity, of boys who aren’t good people, of worries and woes and general malaise are some of the most exhilarating things you can hear. Rodrigo is perhaps the first person to really make pop/punk formulas sound fresh in this century. She manages to sound effortless, as if she’s just sharing her thoughts set to immediately created upbeat melodies alternating with downbeat but still enticing tunes. I don’t know how she does it, since her incredible success at such a young age should give her an entirely different set of subjects in her experience, but she always sounds like an average person going through average problems. My favorite song is the one where she stops worrying about what could go wrong and makes a choice that is probably wrong on a lot of levels, but still she says, “Fuck it, it’s fine.”
Ashley McBryde – The Devil I Know. Much whiskey is consumed in the songs on this record, mostly in cool little bars where the regulars don’t judge you at all. This is popular contemporary country music at its best – McBryde sings of ordinary experience, which country singers have been doing for 100 years now. Women need places to talk, they have old male friends who could have been lovers but for timing, they were raised in tough circumstances and never learned to love as well as they learned to lie. The thundering guitars, the swelling hooks, the tricks of the modern trade do nothing to take away from the solid songwriting and McBryde’s experienced, rounded vocals. Last year she went outside the comfort zone with sort of a country music Winesburg, Ohio called Lindeville. This time, she’s going for the charts. I love that she has both skills in her repertoire.
The Coral – Sea of Mirrors. This is the Coral’s 12th album in 22 years, and one of two released this year alone. They’ve never been a band that likes to stand still, reaching back to 60s pop/rock, 70s harder rock, 90s minimalism, and a wide variety of other influences throughout the years. This time, they conjure up an approach that makes me imagine Lee Hazlewood producing the Zombies Odessey and Oracle album. There is a lot of open space here, much more acoustic guitar and strings, a more muted approach to drums much of the time. The songs are as strong as ever, though, and that’s the important thing. The Coral have always been a melody-first band, and they have a bunch of striking tunes on offer here.
Tyler Childers – Rustin’ In the Rain. Childers doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve – he slathers the blood from that thing all over his body and makes sure that his emotional connections are blatantly obvious from miles away. Following up the wild but effective idea of a three album set with three different versions of all the same songs, he offers up just seven numbers this time around. Smack dab in the middle is a version of “Help Me Make It Through the Night” invested with all the desperate desire the lyrics treated as sub-text. Before that, there’s a song from the point of view of the shepherds who were approached by an angel the night Jesus was born that emphasizes the fear and wonder that experience would naturally instill. After the middle, there’s an incredible country groove song about raising big mules on a farm to do things this city boy doesn’t understand, but between Childers’ enthusiasm, the old-fashioned quartet backing vocal responses, and lines like “Anything more small than that,” I’m on board.
Bark – Loud. Tim and Susan Lee have been married for more than 40 years. For a couple decades, Tim was a recording and touring machine, in his band the Windbreakers, with Let’s Active and other groups, and under his own name. Susan surprised him one day by learning to play the bass, and she was one third of the Tim Lee Three for a long time. Then, a few years back, she took up the drums, and the husband and wife team were now a two-person guitar/drums band. The new album sounds roughly akin to what Tim has been doing forever, and the lack of a bass player is not a problem. There are some light overdubs of keyboards, but mostly it’s guitar and drums with two vocalists, and a rock solid commitment to rocking out. Songs about still living the rock’n’roll lifestyle and seeing fame from the lowest point are standouts. But my favorite is the very strange “James Robertson Must Turn Right,” with its sing-song melody, fun groove, and mysterious lyrics.
James Brandon Lewis – For Mahalia, With Love. Five supremely talented musicians offer to the heavens nine spirituals associated at one time or another with the brilliant gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Lewis arranged all these tunes and plays tenor saxophone. Kirk Knuffke is on cornet, William Parker on bass, Chris Hoffman on cello, and Chad Taylor on drums. I know more than half of the tunes, and there are frequent manifestations of the original melodies, but the players run all around the familiar bits. Lewis and Knuffke make a formidable tag team up top; Parker and Hoffman bring elegance, swing, mournfulness, and tension down below. Taylor puts on a clinic as to what can be done with a trap drum set beyond just the standard usage, though he does that from time to time, too. It’s all deeply spiritual, elegantly joyful, and incandescent music.
Blind Boys of Alabama – Echoes of the South. The last of the great gospel groups that formed back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the Blind Boys bring us their first recording in seven years. As it has been in the decades since long-time leader (and one of the greatest singers who never went pop) Clarence Fountain left, lead vocal duties are passed around like an offering plate in church. But every single man who sings in this group has enough chops, heart, and desire to be the front-person of a great vocal group. Songs include a version of “Friendship,” best known by Pops Staples; a stunning “The Last Time” (from the Rolling Stones) made even more poignant by the fact that two members passed away in the last year and a half; a somber but hopeful “Keep on Pushing” (you know it by the Impressions); and a beautiful take on “Wide River to Cross” by Buddy Miller. These men have an agenda – they want to sing of their belief in God – but the music is beautiful and emotional whether you agree with their position or not.
Graham Parker & the Goldtops – Last Chance to Learn the Twist. Some musicians start off in one place and meander around through different approaches to their craft over a period of time, resulting in what us music critics like to call “career arcs.” Others, like Graham Parker, learn what they can do well, and then proceed to do it over and over for more than 47 years. Parker’s mix of pub rock, soul music, Van Morrison, reggae, and passion (an extraordinary word), has carried him through countless albums, none of which remotely let me down. I’m not saying he’s kept up to the quality level that made three of his first four studio records worthy of consideration among the best albums of all time. But he consistently comes up with irresistible hooks and well-crafted melodies, not to mention some of the best rhymes outside of hip hop. The new record is more of the same, and that’s as strong a compliment as I can give it. (Kudos, also, to the idea on the reggae track, “Them Bugs,” to nod his hat at Lee Perry’s slowed down baby sound.)
Irreversible Entanglements – Protect Your Light. Camae Ayewa turns up frequently in British jazz circles. She’s better known as Moor Mother, and her poetry works brilliantly with jazz improvisation and inventive composition because she is an equal part of the bands with which she performs. This particular crew – Aquiles Navarro on trumpet, Keir Neuringer on saxophone, Luke Stewart on bass, and Tcheser Holmes on drums – is fond of catchy riffs alternating with frantic or solemn group playing. The poems slowly work their way into the experience – Moor Mother’s voice is noticed right away but it takes a couple listens to start to feel it. When it hits, the effect can sometimes be overwhelming, and sometimes merely provocative.
The Arcadian Wild – Welcome. I was never a big fan of the RIYL notes that used to show up on promo copies of new releases, but boy, oh, boy, this one deserves a big splatter of “RIYL Nickel Creek.” The acoustic guitar / mandolin / fiddle line-up with three strong singers who like to create intriguing harmonies and whose songs can take surprising melodic and harmonic leaps is something we’ve heard before. And loved, at least in my case. This trio has been around for less than ten years, and they’ve developed their own take on the progressive roots approach of their forbears. These songs insinuate themselves into the brain after only a couple of listens – then you begin to really notice the intricate arrangement of the three instruments (along with a bass) and the vocals.
Mike Clark – Kosen Rufu. Clark was the drummer with Herbie Hancock on several projects in the 70s, and trumpeter Eddie Henderson, the other star attraction here, played with Hancock before Clark did. Percussionist Bill Summers was with Clark and Hancock during the Headhunters period. Pianist Wayne Horvitz is one of those guys I haven’t paid close attention to, but I know I have some records with him on them. Saxophonist Skerik has tons of credits, some with Horvitz. Bassist Henry Franklin has been around the block, too – he’s on Hugh Masekela’s “Grazing in the Grass.” So, these veteran jazz players take on ten Clark compositions and an old Eric Dolphy number. Whether it’s funky or outside or nodding to fusion or staying firmly in mainstream jazz mode, this record does nothing but kick butt. The tunes are uniformly strong, even hummable; the playing goes all over the place, with lots of collective improvisations. I’d recommend this to anybody wondering if there’s new jazz that can fit with what people like about a wide variety of old jazz.
Allison Russell – The Returner. I remember almost 5 years back when Our Native Daughters released an impressive record. I was already a big fan of Rhiannon Giddens – little did I know that Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and especially Allison Russell would be at least as artistically powerful as she is. This is Russell’s second solo release, and it’s full of beautiful songs of hope, pain, accusation, and peace. You know, life. She comes from that same folkie world as Giddens, but has a pretty big foot in pop music song structure as well. She also likes to slip into French lyrics, as befits a Montreal native. Russell’s singing is elegant, measured, and inviting. Several songs here feel like all-timers – “Demons,” “Eve Was Black,” and “Requiem” especially. (The latter also earns bonus points for a quote from “My Darling Clementine,” the song, not the movie.)
Willie Nelson – Bluegrass. I have no idea how many albums Willie Nelson has released in his career – it’s got to be north of 100. I think I’ve heard at least 40 or 50 of them, and all of them, except that weird reggae record, have been first rate. His streak does not stop here. While it was at first jarring to hear songs as familiar as “On the Road Again” and “A Good Hearted Woman” performed with bluegrass accompaniment (and a noticeable lack of Trigger action), it took only a couple spins to get so acquainted with these new takes that I might find the originals a little weird next time I hear them. Nelson is an embodiment of American music at its best – full of swing, heart, vernacular expressions, and just plain old enthusiasm, even on the sad songs. I think I’d follow this guy anywhere he wants to go.