Little Simz, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert Hearty soul jazz, Joni-esque vocal excellence, and technically impressive progressive-rock moments make for a release that’s both a little indebted to music history and a little unlike anything else that’s come out so far in 2021. Slip into the inviting repose of “Formwela 4,” the lilting piano and vocal lines of “Formwela 5,” or the hypnotic bass notes enveloping “Formwela 6,” and Spalding’s varied and formidable talents jump out. Conceptualized in collaboration with therapists, neuroscientists, and a team of musicians including Chicago-based hip-hop producer Phoelix and jazz-saxophone titan Wayne Shorter, Lab is never bogged down by the loftiness of its goals. The high-flying, disquieting vocal routines during “Formwela 2” diffuse tension the slow-building jazz-rock exercise “Formwela 3” restores peace after “2”’s upheaval.
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The culmination of years of musings on the healing properties of music, Lab offers a dozen shiftless, restless compositions, each with its own unique holistic objective. Songwrights Apothecary Lab - the eighth album from vocalist, bassist, and producer Esperanza Spalding - is the rare release whose title lays out its purpose. On Glow On, Turnstile stretches out but never softens up. None of these excursions undercuts the power and intensity of the record, though. “Don’t Play” outfits hard-core punk with South American rhythms “Alien Love Call” cribs a drum pattern from the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark” and serves guest vocals from Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, in a first for Turnstile. “Underwater Boi” submerges a sweet shoegaze tune in cartoonish atmospherics. “Mystery” is a catchy rocker whose grooves hit harder thanks to the hip-hop syncopation on the drums. The breakdowns remain powerfully heavy they just come with intriguing production flourishes and stylistic detours now. Glow On is slower and more experimental than 2015’s Nonstop Feeling and 2018’s Time and Space, but the riffs still destroy. Good show.īaltimore hardcore quintet Turnstile balances tradition and careful innovation on this year’s Glow On, the band’s third studio album and its first collaboration with hip-hop producer Mike Elizondo, best known for work with Dr. (She says it’s also kind of a Greek tragedy.) She’s working through the fallout from the end of a marriage while nudging her music and image toward a looser and more relaxed place, while also comforting fans who might be going through the same monumental life changes. Star-Crossed is a careful recalibration of Musgraves’s work that is also a divorce record and a visual album.
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The sedate, sad “Good Wife” is psychedelic enough to slide into a Flaming Lips record and soulful enough for Sade but still very much a folk-rock tune of a sort. For all its synth-pop aesthetics, “Cherry Blossom” still moves like the tastefully slick country music of Musgraves’s Pageant Material. When Kacey Musgraves started playing around with disco and hip-hop production aesthetics on 2018’s Golden Hour, there was a sense that she was preparing to follow the Taylor Swift path, taking incremental steps away from the pure country of her early work, which was exemplified by the small-town exhaustion of “Merry Go Round” and the encouraging allyship of “Follow Your Arrow.” On Star-Crossed, her fifth album, she’s still enamored with the power of a roots-rock groove. “Sad to Say” covers both the pain and the glory: “Had a hard life, hard life / Sad to say I know some glad to hear it / But what I pieced together and made from it / Build me strong enough to reach the most rarest summit.” They don’t make ’em like him anymore. On A Martyr’s Reward, his sixth solo album, the 48-year-old polymath makes peace with the past and reminds himself to enjoy the present. But they’re wise master classes in the craft. Of all the hip-hop acts making pared-down boom-bap out of New York lately - Griselda, Marciano - Ka is the most elusive and challenging. Like the early Wu-Tang classics, this music pulls from way beyond hip-hop and maintains an almost experimental starkness. The Brooklyn rapper and producer (and firefighter by day) makes minimalist beats and writes raps that deal in pained street histories and grizzled war analogies.
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Listening to Ka will make you want to journey to a clandestine mountain yurt, live off the land, and study martial arts.