After several albums as half of the Irish Americana duo the Lost Brothers – each recorded in a different US city – Oisín Leech has brought it all back home with a solo effort recorded in an old schoolhouse on the wild coast of County Donegal. It’s a striking contrast to his work with “the Losties”, as he calls them, shorn of the duo’s distinctive vocal harmonies and the cross-play of their guitar picking. Instead, he and producer Steve Gunn have conjured up a record rich in atmosphere, whose songs have a wintry simplicity in the spirit of Leech’s favourite poet, Seamus Heaney. “Rolling home, adrift and alone/ Late for the day like a skimming stone”, as opener October Sun has it.
Instrumentally, it’s essentially just Leech, his guitar and some vintage recording gear, though Gunn adds washes of synth, and favours have been called in from former Dylan sidekick Tony Garnier on bass, and bouzouki player Dónal Lunny. The songs are allusive and lonesome, supplemented by a pair of instrumentals, including the title track and a piece, Maritime Radio, in which an imaginary weather forecast is just discernible beneath waves of shimmering guitars. You can almost taste the salt on the wind.
Pop vocals, then, routinely run up against the physical limits of the human body. Yet what makes a song difficult to sing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with having to hit a particularly tricky note. – The Atlantic
The best theatrical songwriting barely requires a theater. Which is a good thing when so many shows close so quickly.
Of the 16 musicals that opened on Broadway in 2023, only four are still running. That’s live theater, perpetually dying.
Yet not entirely. Like loved ones who leave behind scrapbooks or tchotchkes, many shows leave souvenirs of themselves in the form of cast albums. And sometimes, shorn of annoying context, they’re better than what was once seen onstage.
Below, my highly subjective ranking of the nine 2023 musicals that released cast albums. (One more — “Gutenberg! The Musical!” — is expected, this spring.) And because no year is complete without a bunch of Stephen Sondheim marginalia, I’ve added a few bonus tracks, including a snippet of a surprise, in his honor.
All the recordings are good, and some are sublime, as you can let your ears decide. But close your eyes if possible. Let the theater be inside you.
1. ‘Sweeney Todd’
The glorious score is largely unchanged. The orchestrations are only slightly tweaked. So what’s the added value of this nth recording of the Sondheim masterwork? As you might expect from a cast headed by Josh Groban as the vengeful barber, the answer is the beautiful singing. Groban’s slight stiffness and somewhat meek interpretation, which worked against the role’s terror in the huge stage production, are utterly absent on the album, turning numbers like Sweeney’s “Epiphany” into murderous arias as big as any in opera. Under Alex Lacamoire’s musical supervision, the performances — not just Groban’s but the ensemble’s — go for the throat, over and over.
The original cast album of this 1998 musical is rightly a classic. Can a fairly faithful revival recording be one too? Yes, especially when the story of the 1915 Leo Frank lynching features principals giving similarly excellent but notably different performances. As Frank, Ben Platt is a vibrating wreck of inchoate anger in Jason Robert Brown’s tight-lipped songs. It’s left to Micaela Diamond, as his wife, Lucille, to express what he can’t, as she does with perfectly contained disdain in “You Don’t Know This Man,” sung to a reporter looking for dirt. Carolee Carmello’s stentorian version from 1998 is still definitive, but it turns out that more than one version can be.
This difficult musical from 1981, with its reversed timeline, tangled love triangles and amazing but tricky Sondheim score, has proved especially confusing when recorded. But now that Maria Friedman, in her lucid Broadway production, has found a way to make it pay off onstage, the cast album does too. You can hear that best in “Not a Day Goes By,” a song that disguises its complicated dramaturgy with pure beauty. First sung by a wife (Katie Rose Clarke) to the husband (Jonathan Groff) she’s divorcing, it is reprised, years earlier, by the couple at their wedding. But who is that third voice? She’s the heartbroken woman (Lindsay Mendez) left out of the equation. Sometimes the drama isn’t in how a song is sung but by whom.
4. ‘New York, New York’
Of course you can listen to a great rendition of the title tune from this magpie musical based on the 1977 movie. Or you can enjoy some of the other knockout numbers — “Let’s Hear It for Me,” “But the World Goes ’Round” — that the songwriters, John Kander and Fred Ebb, called screamers. (All three are solidly sung by Anna Uzele.) But if you want to hear the songs that Kander likes best, you’ll go for those that whisper, including a new one, with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, that’s actually set in the Whispering Gallery at Grand Central Station. Sung in the show by Colton Ryan, it’s called “Can You Hear Me?” Better yet, thanks to the kind of bonus only a cast album allows, listen to the demo, with Miranda singing and Kander at the keyboard.
5. ‘Harmony’
With more than 30 studio albums, it’s no surprise that Barry Manilow has made another. But this one, written with the lyricist Bruce Sussman for their musical about a six-man German singing group in the 1920s, is different. To start with, it’s not just a collection of songs but also a fully theatrical score, filtering elements of jazz, operetta, barbershop and cabaret through Manilow’s prodigious pop sensibility. The numbers — especially the gorgeous “And What Do You See?,” sung by Sierra Boggess as a Jewish man’s gentile fiancée — are tightly tied to the story, their melodies and harmonies often seeming to twist and writhe to accommodate the characters’ hope and horror.
6. ‘Camelot’
The 1960 Lerner and Loewe musical about the magical land where “the rain may never fall till after sundown” has a great cast album already. And the forced and formal 2023 Lincoln Center Theater revival did not seem likely to produce a version that eclipsed it. But the recording is lovely, highlighting the pure sonic beauty of the 30-piece orchestra and the vocal prowess of its Guenevere (Phillipa Soo) and Lancelot (Jordan Donica). Especially in Donica’s trio of showpieces — “C’est Moi” near the beginning, “I Loved You Once in Silence” near the end and, in between, a ravishing “If Ever I Would Leave You” — he demonstrates that a great voice can be a great actor.
7. ‘How to Dance in Ohio’
No one goes to musicals for their morals, and shows that are too assertively instructive can lack narrative interest. That was sometimes the case with this one, in which autistic performers played autistic characters working on their life skills at a Columbus mental health center. Though a wonderful breakthrough in many ways, the show too often hewed to familiar storytelling tropes — yet the cast album, stripped of story, shines. The songs, by Jacob Yandura (music) and Rebekah Greer Melocik (lyrics), often take unconventional approaches, as is evident right from the opening number, “Today Is.” Its busy, anxious but upbeat accompaniment, reminiscent of piano exercises, underlines the busy, anxious but upbeat lives of the characters preparing for their day’s challenges and opportunities.
A show needs a showstopper. Or at least an audience does. But because I didn’t expect to find one in this musical built on a steady stream of middling corn puns, I was blown away when it suddenly appeared, unconventionally, in the middle of Act One. Until then, the songs, by the country music team of Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, were genial and apt. But then Alex Newell, as Lulu, a whiskey distiller with a side hustle in sass, stepped forward with a feminist barnburner declaring that she, her business and her body were “Independently Owned.” The fog of geniality instantly dispersed in a hail of clever rhymes, real show music and a diva’s bountiful belt.
When the star of your show is a car — even if it’s a great one — you may run into trouble with the songs. That’s how I felt about the Broadway version of the 1985 movie: It didn’t need to be a musical at all. But if its score, by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, couldn’t do much for the DeLorean DMC — or even the human leads, Doc Brown and Marty McFly — the cast album demonstrates surprising skill in characterizing the secondary characters. “My Myopia,” sung by Marty’s father as a teenager, gives us creepy insight into his later failures. And “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a big gospel rave, fills in the outlines of an otherwise barely-there character with ambition — at the same time letting the irrepressible Jelani Remy, who sings it, realize his.
Plus: Never Enough Sondheim
Broadway has no exclusive on new Sondheim albums. From London comes a live two-disc recording of “Old Friends,” a concert celebration featuring greatest hits sung by Bernadette Peters, Judi Dench, Michael Ball and other familiars. It’s a rich meal, and with 41 courses, a huge one, heavy on the honey. (Watch a video of Ball singing “Loving You,” from “Passion,” here.)
“Sondheim in the City,” Melissa Errico’s tribute to Sondheim’s urbanity, feels like a New York house tour of thrill and heartbreak. In songs like the jangly “Another Hundred People,” the exuberant “What More Do I Need?” and the dry, disappointed “It Wasn’t Meant to Happen,” Errico, one of Sondheim’s deepest-hearted yet lightest-touch interpreters, evokes both the city and cabaret style at its best. (She’ll be singing the program at 54 Below in May.) On the pristine recording you can almost hear the martini glasses clink — and shatter.
And if you didn’t get to see Sondheim’s final musical, “Here We Are,” Off Broadway at the Shed, or if you did and want to hold onto it, as I do, the cast album is scheduled to be released in May. The producers promise “a full representation of the show and score,” which means that the songs (of which I must admit there’s not an awful lot) will be interspersed with the playwright David Ives’s dialogue scenes, some of which are songlike in themselves. The samples I’ve heard — an instrumental underscoring and a snippet of “The Bishop’s Song,” performed by David Hyde Pierce — are enough to leave me (like the show’s characters) hungry for more.
Time Machine is the racy title of Sinfonia Cymru’s latest concert series, a collaboration with the brilliant and versatile guitarist Sean Shibe, assembled by him and putting the electric guitar centre stage. This substantial programme embraced both American and British scores whose fabric involves technology, whether specifically making the connection with audio or film or simply engaging with styles where pulse and rhythm condition thrusting propulsion.
Within the sequence were deliberate progressions from smaller, gentler works to more dynamically sweeping affairs for the full ensemble of 15 players. Of the former, guitarist-composer Laura Snowden’s Into the Light, ostensibly about bird migration was quietly engaging, with Freya Waley-Cohen’s Amulet for solo classical guitar later invoking a graceful calm. Julia Wolfe’s Reeling, using the time-weathered voice of a French-Canadian folk singer as its starting-point, had a wholly infectious spirit, while, in Pamela Z’s zany Ethel Dreams of Temporal Disturbances, fitful slumber suggested by string quartet is interrupted by audio-tape interpolations of random television snippets.
Judd Greenstein’s Change was conceived to accompany Joshua Frankel’s mixed-media film in which a quintet playing out and about in New York is incorporated into animated footage, with fantasy meeting Nasa footage, the notion of machines and propulsion given a surreal element. The moments when Shibe and the excellent Sinfonia Cymru’s live rendering coincided with those on screen had a not-quite-exact synchrony which was plain fun.
David John Roche’s arrangement of a short suite of Philip Glass’s music for The Truman Show showed his sensibilities, but his new concerto for electric guitar, Chorus in Alto, written for Sean Shibe and jointly commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia, was the main focus. Roche unselfconsciously indulged his own background to include metal and rock with a more classical approach, while at the same time indulging Shibe’s remarkable virtuosity. One of two cadenzas was for classical guitar, offering an expressive interlude but the final movement’s play on the exchanges between ensemble and soloist – where rhythmic patterns always defied expectation - made for a vibrantly energetic conclusion.
The poise of Shibe’s Mompou encore set the seal on a fascinating evening. And, yes, this is one electric performer.
What is country music? Who is allowed to play it? Whenever a Black artist puts out a country song the judgment, comments, and opinions come thick and fast. “That’s not real country!” “That’s cultural appropriation.” “She needs to stay in her lane.” Or, as Dukes of Hazzard actor John Schneider so charmingly stated in a discussion earlier this month: “You know, every dog has to mark every tree, right?”
All of these comments, which range from simply ignorant to downright misogynoir, presuppose that commercial country music – a music of guitars, banjos, and fiddles; of pick-up trucks, heartbreak and that down-home lonesome sound – is a legacy that belongs only to white, rural southerners. And that supposition is just plain wrong.
Real history is messy and complicated. To get to the truth we need to rewind back to centuries before Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash – to the music created by enslaved people and a recording industry set upon segregation. Enslaved people of the African diaspora created the banjo in the Caribbean in the 1600s. This is historical fact. They also played other stringed instruments (such as the violin) and, whether enslaved or free, Black string bands became the de facto entertainment and dance bands of European societies from Barbados to Monticello to Rhode Island; from balls to banquets to political rallies. These musicians mixed with poor people of all colours and ethnicities who brought their own musical traditions into the mix over generations to create a truly American folk music.
Rhiannon Giddens. Photograph: Ebru Yildiz
By the 19th century, this folk music became the foundation of blackface minstrelsy, America’s most commercialised and racialised form of entertainment, that influenced every form of popular music that followed. From one century to the next, Black folk were in the thick of it, playing fiddles, banjos, and eventually the guitar and harmonica. They creatively mixed, matched and played for themselves and their local traditions, while also navigating popular demand within a wider musical and professional context.
Then came the creation of the recording industry in the 1920s, and everything changed.
We have been led to think that genre is an inevitable and immutable category of musical expression, but we should not confuse genre with tradition. Tradition is shaped according to the inner logic of specific communities through long processes of creative engagement, as we can see in the work of Gaelic-speaking bagpipers from the Highlands, ngoni-playing djelis from Mali, fiddling ballad singers in the Ozarks, and countless other musical traditions from around the world. Tradition has a cultural function for the people in a community. Tradition is story songs; dance songs; spiritual songs; work songs; played and sung in immeasurably different ways, according to the understanding of the community.
Genre, on the other hand, is a product of capitalism, and people with access to power create it, control it, and maintain it in order to commoditise art. In the 1920s, recording industry executives quickly realised that in order to maximise record sales, they needed to market them. In order to market them, they needed to create categories where they could reduce the totality of the American experience to a few buzzwords, and because this is the US, our cultural lenses are conditioned to project racial categories on to everything. The result was the Great Segregation of American Music.
Before the 20s, American musical sounds were remarkably fluid, with regional styles carrying more importance than race; but once there became an industry with a lot of money at stake, everything changed. Musicians naturally kept gravitating towards making mixes and blends, and the industry continued to separate. Race and hillbilly gave way to country and R&B in the 60s, which led to rock and hip-hop records in the 80s, ad nauseam.
In this moment, after 100 years of erasure, false narratives, and racism built into the country industry, it’s important to shine a light on the Black co-creation of country music – and creation is the correct word, not influence. Black musicians, along with their working-class white counterparts, were active participants and creators, not empty vessels with good rhythm. We would not have any of what we call country without the history of the black string band musicians, who helped form the nexus of American music for 100 years or more before record players.
Nobody owns an art form. Everyone is allowed to enjoy and make country music, especially when done with respect, understanding and integrity. But let’s stop pretending that the outrage surrounding this latest single is about anything other than people trying to protect their nostalgia for a pure ethnically white tradition that never was. The fact is, we’ve all been lied to; poor people of all backgrounds came together to make the music that the industry named country, and its birthright is one of the best things about being American.
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The musicians’ union calls it “a major win” and “a watershed moment.” Next up: The “below the line” workers – that is to say, the Hollywood crew members in IATSE and the Teamsters – start to bargain. – MSN (Los Angeles Times)
As a pop star, Olivia Rodrigo wields a rather unusual arsenal of weapons. She is an acute writer and an un-self-conscious singer. She largely abhors artifice. She is modest, not salacious. In just three years, she has achieved something approaching stratospheric fame — a four-times platinum debut album and a Grammy for best new artist — while somehow remaining an underdog.
But the weapon she returns to again and again is a very pointed and versatile curse word, one that she used to vivid effect on both her 2020 breakout hit, “Drivers License,” the first single from her debut album, “Sour,” and also on “Vampire,” the Grammy-nominated single from her second album, “Guts,” released last year. It’s in plenty of other places, too, giving her anguished entreaties an extra splash of zest. She wants to make it clear that underneath her composed exterior, she’s boiling over.
On Friday night at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, Calif., during the opening performance of the Guts World Tour, Rodrigo couldn’t get enough of that word. She used it for emphasis, to connote dismissiveness and to demonstrate exasperation. But mostly she used it casually, in between-song banter, not because she needed to, but because using it felt like getting away with something.
Much of Rodrigo’s music — especially “Guts,” with its detailed and delirious ruminations about new fame and its discontents — is about how it feels to act bad after being told how important it is to be good. It’s situated at the juncture where freedom is just about to give way to misbehavior.
This was true of her performance as well, which brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano balladry that her songs toggle between. Over an hour and a half, Rodrigo alternately roared and pleaded, stomped and collapsed. She led a reverent 11,000-person crowd — a sizable leap from the theaters she played on her first tour — in singalongs that were churchlike and raucous, but never rowdy.
Throughout the concert, Rodrigo made gestural nods to abandon — singing the first verse of “Get Him Back!” through a megaphone, knocking the mic stand down at the end of “All-American Bitch,” performing spicily for a camera peering up from beneath a clear section of the stage on “Obsessed.”
While she has an exuberant stage presence, she is not a full-service pop star, and is better for avoiding that trap. Rodrigo is on her surest footing when performing faithful, unflashy recitations of her songs. She opened the night with a boundlessly energetic “Bad Idea Right?” followed by “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” perhaps the truest statement of purpose from her last album, and let the dry, groaning ’90s guitars telegraph anxiety and gloom.
Those songs emphasize Rodrigo’s yen to rock, which is earnest and studied and bolstered by an impressively roaring band that lent her a soupçon of grit. But she followed with an even more powerful troika of howling repudiations: “Vampire” into “Traitor” into “Drivers License,” a string of slow ballads that are among her most invigorating songs. (Almost as moving was hearing three young girls, maybe 8 years old, screaming their brains out to “Traitor” while watching its music video in the back of a tricked-out Mercedes Sprinter van in the parking lot before the show.)
But making her songs feel big didn’t require much besides the songs themselves. At the end of “The Grudge,” Rodrigo stood pointedly alone at the foot of the stage, a flash of self-sufficiency and defiance. (Dancers joined her for several songs, and for some, she danced along with them awkwardly.) Late in the performance, she sang a gasping “Happier” and the casually sinister “Favorite Crime” while seated at the edge of one of the stage’s tentacles. And although she was floating over the crowd on a crescent moon for “Logical” and “Enough for You,” two of her most heartbreaking songs, it was the firm quiver in her voice that thrilled the most, not the spectacle up in the air.
In her outfits, Rodrigo leans into a combination of demure and tough. Her fans have been taking note. In the crowd, there was near sartorial unanimity — young girls, mostly teenagers, in midthigh skirts and either black boots or Chuck Taylors. Almost everyone had at least one item that sparkled. It recalled early Taylor Swift tours, where young fans arrived in sundresses and cowboy boots by the thousands. At one point, Rodrigo asked the crowd if anyone had come with their father (many), then if anyone had come with a boyfriend or girlfriend (not many). Then she asked if anyone had dressed up for the show, and the crowd roared almost in unison. (Women outnumbered men so significantly, most of the men’s restrooms were converted to all-gender for the night.)
At the merchandise booths, vendors were selling the accouterments of girlhood: lavender butterfly-shaped tote bags, star-shaped stickers that adhere to your face (to emulate the “Sour” album cover) and Band-Aids with Rodrigo catchphrases. And onstage, the performers were advertising the power of girlhood: the members of Rodrigo’s band and dance troupe were all female, nonbinary or transgender.
Rodrigo has made supporting young women part of the tour, too: Proceeds from each ticket go to her charitable organization, Fund 4 Good, and will support “community-based nonprofits that champion girls’ education, support reproductive rights and prevent gender-based violence.”
That’s in keeping with Rodrigo’s enduring and persuasive narrative that girlhood is fraught. Her rendition of “Teenage Dream,” a ballad about wondering whether the best years of her life are already past, was particularly revelatory, especially with the backing visuals of Rodrigo as a young child toying around with performing, unaware of the realities of stardom.
The opener was Chappell Roan, a sexually frank singer whose big voice was obliterated by her arrangements. She offered a contrast to Rodrigo, who sings about sex in glancing references and punchlines, often hidden in the middle of a verse. (Beginning in April, the openers will be Remi Wolf, PinkPantheress and, very promisingly for the cross-generationally curious, the Breeders.)
That subject matter is still too raw for Rodrigo, who never places herself too far away from her youngest fans, or her younger self. But that might change soon. Rodrigo turned 21 a few days before this show, perhaps the final publicly acknowledged demarcation line between youth and adulthood. She did not let it pass without comment.
“I went to the gas station the other day and bought a pack of cigarettes,” she said, sitting at the piano after “Drivers License,” in what threatened to be the night’s sole moment of genuine misbehavior.
But then she confessed, “I promise I didn’t consume it, but I just bought it just because I could.” Did she add a curse word for emphasis? She fudging did.
Composing Pulcinella was, said Igor Stravinsky: “My discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible.” Begun in 1919 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who first performed it the following year, it proved to be a pivotal work in 20th-century music, and the portal to the new world of neoclassicism through which many other composers would follow, too. But Diaghilev had originally offered the Pulcinella commission to Manuel de Falla, who had been too busy to take on the task, and who later that year began work on a chamber opera, El Retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show), based upon an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
The artwork for Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite – Falla: El Retablo de Maese Pedro. Photograph: Harmonia Mundi
Heard one after the other in these fine, if slightly dry, performances from Pablo Heras-Casado and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the comparison between the two almost contemporary works is fascinating, not only in their sound worlds, but in their use of existing musics – from Pergolesi in Pulcinella and from a whole range of Spanish folk sources in El Retablo. Whether Falla was influenced at all by Stravinsky’s score (which was first performed three years earlier than the opera) isn’t clear, but the similarities between them are sometimes remarkable.
But the real gem on this disc is a suitably intense account of Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto, with Benjamin Alard as the soloist. It was his final large-scale work, completed in 1926, and with an accompanying ensemble of just five instruments, it’s perhaps more chamber music than concerto. But with its Spanish source material thoroughly integrated into its severe neoclassicism, it’s one of the neglected masterpieces of 1920s modernism.
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In 2021, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published a report on extremist activity on TikTok. It made for thoroughly depressing reading, spiked with moments of incredulity. Chief among the latter was the apparent popularity of the title track of MGMT’s fourth album, 2018’s Little Dark Age, with neo-Nazis: it was “by far the most popular sound among extremist creators on TikTok”, soundtracking videos about the late American white supremacist George Lincoln Rockwell and “esoteric nazism”. The report’s authors seemed baffled as to why. Certainly, its adoption doesn’t say much for your average neo-Nazi’s ability to understand English. Little Dark Age’s lyrics are, fairly obviously, an excoriation of Trump-era America and racist police violence. You could even suggest they weirdly presage the Black Lives Matter protests: “Just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away,” they warn, before suggesting listeners “get out of bed … bring a stone, all the rage”.
The artwork for Loss of Life
In truth, the improbable co-option of the song was probably just an extension of its general surge in popularity on TikTok. A single that had failed to make the charts, from an album that barely scraped the US Top 40, by a band who reached their commercial peak nearly 15 years ago, Little Dark Age suddenly became ubiquitous on the video-sharing platform during the pandemic. And it still is, providing the musical accompaniment to everything from girls in kitten ears dancing, to footage of the war in Ukraine, to – yes – videos complaining about Little Dark Age’s ubiquity on TikTok. Now, 5.5m TikTok videos and nearly 600m Spotify streams later, MGMT’s profile is higher than at any point since their 2007 debut album Oracular Spectacular went from critical cause célèbre to mainstream commercial success, selling more than a million copies in the process.
Listening to Loss of Life, a band who once seemed intent on alienating the fans who had bought their debut album have seized the opportunity presented to them by the whole TikTok thing. It’s just as tuneful as the Little Dark Age album, and they’re now a world away from 2010’s Congratulations or 2013’s dense, claustrophobic MGMT. While Congratulations was an album under the influence of Television Personalities and the Cleaners from Venus’ brand of lo-fi early 80s psychedelia – seldom a foolproof recipe for mass appeal – chunks of Loss of Life deal in precisely the kind of widescreen glossy pop that Television Personalities and the Cleaners from Venus were reacting against, albeit viewed through a distorting lens.
A duet with Christine and the Queens, Dancing in Babylon, could slot on to the soundtrack of an 80s blockbuster, wereit not liberally decorated with keyboards that twist and bend off-key and crackling noise; on People in the Streets, lyrics which return fretfully to the insurrectionary theme of Little Dark Age (“I’d go and join them, but I’m so scared”) are threaded around the sound of that none-more-80s signifier, a fretless bass. Elsewhere, the duo have acknowledged the influence of Oasis on Mother Nature, although diehard Gallagher fans probably shouldn’t get too excited. As vocalist Andrew VanWyngarden has pointed out, it sounds like them “for 10 seconds”, before its Wonderwall strum is submerged beneath wigged-out distorted guitar, and layers of synth, some of them fed through a shimmering tremolo effect that was once a trademark of Spacemen 3.
In fact, Loss of Life covers a surprising amount of musical ground in 45 minutes: everything from Ziggy-era Bowie on Bubblegum Dog to Nothing to Declare’s flirtation with Simon and Garfunkel-esque folk. You get the reference points, but it never sounds like explicit homage, partly because everything gets fed through MGMT’s psychedelic filter – thickly smeared with edge of chaos electronics and sudden, disorientating explosions of echo – and partly because the songs beneath the arrangements are sturdy enough to support the teeming arrangements and stand apart from their influences. Phradie’s Song might possess the sweetest melody MGMT have written to date, its feather-soft, chanson-inspired tune butting against the dramatic swell of its synth coda; I Wish I Was Joking glides gracefully along, spiked with funny lines: “Nobody calls me the gangster of love,” it protests, a self-deprecating retort to the smug boasts of Steve Miller’s old hit The Joker.
It’s possible to overstate how straightforward an album Loss of Life is: this is an album that opens with someone reciting a 13th-century Welsh poem and ends with the title track dissolving into a protracted cacophony. Rather, it strikes a balance between weirdness and pop more impressively than any MGMT album since their debut. Whether it can capitalise on their improbable TikTok fame is questionable – that kind of success rarely extends beyond the track that’s gone viral – as is what happens if it does: MGMT seemed deeply nonplussed by the celebrity Oracular Spectacular conferred on them. But while you wait and see, Loss of Life is a delightful thing to immerse yourself in.
This week Alexis listened to
Brittany Howard – Prove It to You Howard’s latest solo album, What Now, seems to have been overlooked: an error, as demonstrated by Prove It to You, which unexpectedly sets her voice against joyful disco-house.
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The Verbier Festival has named Hervé Boissière, the founder and CEO of Medici TV, as its co-CEO alongside the Festival’s founder Martin T:Son Engstroem. Boissière, who is also Executive Director of the Mezzo television channel, and before that an A&R executive with Erato and Naïve, takes up the new position in April.
Medici has a long history of working with Engstroem and the Swiss Verbier Festival. ‘Through his work of filming, broadcasting, and promoting hundreds of concerts, Hervé Boissière has played an active role with the Verbier Festival since 2007,' remarked Martin Engstroem. 'Together we have created an opportunity for artists performing in Verbier to be seen by millions of viewers all over the world. Welcoming Hervé as Co-CEO within our organisation will mean both continuity and growth for the future. We are both up for the challenges ahead and are inspired by the Verbier Festival’s incredible potential.'
Hervé Boissière commented: 'What the Verbier Festival has achieved over the last 30 years is truly exceptional. Thanks to Martin's boundless vision, this Festival is an international reference, a symbol of artistic and educative excellence, generosity, and responsibility in the face of the challenges of our time. Its values are my own, and I'm very honoured to be joining Peter [Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of the Foundation Board], Martin and the wonderful team I have known since 2007 when I founded medici.tv in Verbier. We have some great opportunities for development ahead of us. I look forward to joining all our artists, colleagues, partners, friends and public in beautiful Valais to continue writing the magical story of the Verbier Festival.'
A year and a half ago, the career of Ye — the rapper, producer and controversy generator formerly known as Kanye West — seemed all but dead. After a series of antisemitic remarks in late 2022, Ye lost his major-label record deal and booking agent, along with lucrative fashion partnerships with Adidas, Balenciaga and other brands.
But he was never quite abandoned by many of his fans. And now Ye has the 11th No. 1 album of his career with “Vultures 1,” a joint LP with the singer Ty Dolla Sign that Ye released on his own, after previewing it this month with arena events in Chicago and Long Island where tickets went for $140 and up. Ye and Ty Dolla Sign’s new LP beats “Coming Home,” the comeback release by Usher, who had perhaps the greatest platform available to any performer: the Super Bowl halftime show.
Ye had been teasing “Vultures 1” since late last year, and, fitting a pattern that long preceded his recent industry-pariah status, the album’s rollout was stumbling and chaotic. After its release to digital services following a listening event on Feb. 9, the LP’s availability briefly flickered, and Ye was quickly accused of borrowing music by Black Sabbath and Donna Summer without permission.
Last week, “Vultures 1” again disappeared for a short time from Apple Music and was made unavailable as a download, while behind the scenes there was a switch in the distribution platform that Ye’s brand YZY used to supply the album to digital services. The song “Good (Don’t Die),” which appears to borrow a melody from Summer’s hit “I Feel Love,” was also removed from online versions of the album.
“Vultures 1” ended its first week with the equivalent of 148,000 sales in the United States, which includes 168 million streams and 18,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. It is Ye’s first No. 1 album since “Donda” in 2021.
Usher scores his highest-charting album in 12 years, with “Coming Home” arriving at No. 2 after the R&B veteran’s performance at the Super Bowl on Feb. 11, with guests including Alicia Keys, Lil Jon and Ludacris. “Coming Home,” also released independently, had the equivalent of 91,000 sales, including 46 million streams and 53,000 traditional sales. Usher’s last studio album, “Hard II Love,” went to No. 5 in 2016, and “Looking 4 Myself” reached No. 1 in 2012.
Also this week, Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 3, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 and SZA’s “SOS” is No. 5.
