Consumer Guide: November, 2023

Sixteen unfaltering songs from a Navy vet; painful honesty from Indonesia; electronic textures and beats with occasional choruses; and songs of global warming and the rich getting richer.

Bombino: Sahel (Partisan) Internationalist Tuareg guitar adept Oumar Moctar has never sounded defter or brisker. Subtly yet declaratively, lyrically yet cogently, he's always making desert music one way or the other. But with one-man percussion cohort Corey Wilhelm buoying the boss's rhythms so brightly you could lose your bearings and claim he evokes a bubbling spring, you're grateful that the other West Africans featured here do more than simultaneously pour on the sand and fill out the ensemble. They make it an ensemble, all for one and one for all. A MINUS

Boygenius: The Rest (Interscope) Just as we humans are but motes destined to vanish into the eye of God, so these four leftovers are but outtakes stranded in music's unchartable sea of melody and groove ("Afraid of Heights," "Voyager") **

Zach Bryan: Summertime Blues (Warner) A mortal man walks among us on a nine-song EP (note: that's long for an "EP"), depositing tracks that are merely likable after establishing his bona fides with some sure shots ("Quittin' Time," "Summertime Blues") ***

Zach Bryan: Zach Bryan (Warner) Even before the Navy proffered an honorable discharge so this 25--year-old Okie veteran with eight years of service behind him so he could finally make music fulltime, he'd racked up 2019's solo acoustic DeAnn, 2020's solo acoustic Elisabeth, and the 2022 Warner debut American Heartbreak, which won him a CMA best "new" artist plaudit and is dwarfed by this follow-up, which never falters for 16 tracks. I mean it--not a duff track anywhere from a seaman who stakes his claim with spoken poesy reporting that "I've taken my motorbike down the Pacific 101 and I have stood atop of the Empire State Building with my father." After which it's distinct tune after distinct tune whether he's hitchhiking through clonopin failure, craving love that survives daylight, finding God in her Holy Roller eyes, reaching out to a gal whose father has had it with Long Island, offering an eastern Montana gal a tourniquet, reaching out from his '88 Ford to a third gal whose mama pawned her wedding ring. He never comes out on the other other side of a song without having marked it with a detail no one's ever thought of before. A

Zach Bryan: Boys of Faith (Warner) This being country music you'd guess the boys who populate this EP are Christians, and probably they were and in some crucial sense still are. But they're also sinners whether they're young Zach's dad betting on his nine-ball prowess or Zach himself selling his oldest Gibson to finance a flight to NYC, where he catches up with a homegirl who's migrated to the East Village and somehow gets to glom a billboard with--what??!!--his picture on it. A MINUS

DJ Shadow: Action Adventure (Mass Appeal/Liquid Amber) I have no idea how or indeed why the human born Josh Davis selects, refurbishes, juxtaposes, and sequences the mostly electronic textures, beats, scraps, notes, phrases, lines, and occasionally even choruses from which he constructs what undeniably ends up his music, although it's safe to presume that at the very least he thinks they "sound good" that way. Admittedly, my own first response to his first album in four years was something like "Nuh." But a few plays in I began to notice that just as individual pieces some of them sounded good to me as well and it was off to the party, then exhibition, then aesthetic experience. No Endtroducing because nothing is. Little if any of the sneak humanism of The Private Press either. Organic whole, not really--too many moving parts. So think of it as a sound collage, or if you prefer a playlist with feints and occasionally detours that never vacates your pleasure zone or loses its way. A MINUS

The Front Bottoms: You Are Who You Hang Out With (Fueled by Ramen) Spick-and-span hooks do battle with the emotional mess you'd think they'd have outgrown by now, but give them credit for trying ("Emotional," "Outlook") **

Grrrl Gang: Spunky! (Kill Rock Stars) Given the spelling of their sobriquet, the temptation to slot these Indonesian two-gals-and-a-guy as riot grrrl is irresistible even though their 10 songs in 25 minutes aren't especially catchy or cutting, hence punk only in the fast-short-hard sense. But for me sociological factors more than compensate, though you can call them psychological if you prefer--either way they provide a convincing glimpse of an exotic yet also generic club-kid culture, and either way what's interesting about guitarist-lyricist-vocalist Angeeta Santana is that she's not defiant or funny like good little punks should be. She's just painfully honest and dolefully insecure the way so many of the defiantly funny are down deep. "Don't know how I got here. I blinked and now I'm 23." "I lack direction. It hurts to sing." "I'm neurotic, manic, borderline psychotic." "When you hold my thigh, it's never a waste of my time." "I feel caged in my body. I've been flirting with death. Just to see what it has to offer." "I was born in the pit. I gave birth in the pit. I never shave my pits. Let me swallow your spit." "You're never gonna be this young again." A MINUS

Horse Lords: Live in Leipzig (Northern Spy) Rather than turning their LaMonte Young "just intonations" into an endurance contest, four Baltimore avant-rockers achieve bracing sonic novelty in four tracks that last not quite 22 minutes all told ("Bending to the Lash," "Mess Mend") ***

Lil Wayne: Tha Fix Before Tha VI (Young Money/Republic) Expecting not much of the annoying little Trumpsucker from the forthcoming The Carter VI itself much less its teasers, I was impressed to find that conceptually catch-as-catch-can suits him as he puts 40 behind him--freed of vague narrative obligations, the talented pardon-seeker had some good ones in his kit or maybe just his subconscious. So although I understand why rhyming "esophagus" with "misogynist" and suggesting that his pubic hair can double as dental floss aren't tropes likely to impress the few if any feminists who value his artistic gifts, in a grab bag like this they're evidence of his continuing if intermittent creative vitality. A MINUS

R. Ring: War Poems, We Rested (Don Giovanni) Impressionistic mood rock in which Kelley Deal and Mike Montgomery piece together the murmured and the strummed, with no battle cries to be heard ("Still Life," "Def Sup") **

A. Savage: Several Songs About Fire (Rough Trade) As with Parquet Courts frontman Savage's 2017 solo album, you may wish the second was as dynamic as his let's hope not permanently former band. But just as PCs' 2021 Sympathy for Life was as close as anybody worth namechecking came to a sane, calm pandemic album, Savage's dolor on solo album number two keeps returning to temperature fluctuations that sound like global warming and rich-get-richer double-talk that sounds like get out of town--like for instance to Paris, France, where I read he currently hangs his headgear. Eight-story dwellings that arise from not much meet "gods who don't exist or care," and although neither tunes nor tempos are what you'd call compelling, I keep checking them out again anyway, which is pretty much what compelling means, isn't it? A

Hemlocke Springs: Going . . . Going . . . Gone! (AWAL) Simultaneously eccentric and simplistic, original and formulaic, these seven electropop songs come from an African-born TikTok find who just completed a Dartmouth M.A. in medical research and for all we know could prove a genius, a flash in the pan, or both at once. Right now, I'll note that the two attention-getting openers do have more spritz than the three late entries that serve to bulk up this phase of her oeuvre into EP territory. This could be the start of something special. But if it isn't, then her ebullience is unlikely ever to sound like anything less than that, and in the right proportions enduring ebullience can be a wonderful thing. A MINUS

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers: I Love You (Domestic La La) Bratty name or no bratty name, punk affect or no punk affect, this Canberra femme foursome think like recognizable adults. Having debuted with an EP featuring songs about bedrooms by the thruway and roommates leaving dishes in the sink, ponder briefly what kind of audacity it takes to not only write a song baldly titled "I Love You" but name your first true album after it. Not that everything's roses and cream, not with lyrics like "I always want what I can't have until I get it," "I think I'll stay at mine tonight," and--most alarming, I say--"you hold me too tight." But love is the goal nonetheless, and they're not so bratty they don't try and figure out how to make it work. A MINUS

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