The Detectorist: new songs I'm playing on April 14
Hard to believe, but Beyoncé isn't the only new music out there. Don't miss new stuff from John Lurie, Adrienne Lenker, Anna Tivel, Pedro the Lion, Lizz Wright, and Chastity Belt.
Look, I’m enjoying Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter too. I just don’t think the world needs my opinion of it right now since the Internet has turned into a firehose of opinions and reviews.
And besides, a work this epic and complex requires time and attention. I don’t know how anybody arrives at a strong review of such a huge record overnight, or even in the first three weeks. I need to live with it for a while before I can say if it will be something that moves me and stays with me like Lemonade still does. (I mean, I’m still having students listen to Lemonade, watch part of the visual album, and then read criticism of it. I never anticipated that a member of Destiny’s Child would end up occupying so much real estate in my imagination, but here we are!)
I can tell you that it’s not the only thing I’m enjoying. Far from it. I’ve been playing John Lurie’s double-album release of music from his MAX show Painting With John, and that’s going to be hard to beat as my album of the year for 2024.
But here’s the problem…
If I choose Painting with John as my album of the year, how can I also give that honor to Adrienne Lenker’s Bright Future, which has so many songs on it that seem like perfection to me?
Here are three of them because I can’t choose just one: “Free Treasure,” “No Machine,” and “Ruined.”
Two new Anna Tivel tracks promise a bright new Living Thing in May
I became an Anna Tivel fan at the same time and place I became an Allison Russell fan — at the Nowhere Else festival on Over the Rhine’s Nowhere Fam in Ohio. It shouldn’t have taken me so long to discover her — she’s from Portland and so am I. Tivel’s album Outsiders became one of my favorites of that year, and ended up as Ann Powers’s pick for Album of the Year in 2022.
And now here comes a new one: Living Thing arrives on May 31, 2024. Two songs are already here, and they don’t disappoint. I’m particularly fond of “Bluebird.”
A new pin in Pedro the Lion’s expanding map
In 2019, David Bazan began singing once again under the moniker Pedro the Lion. The band name had been shelved for a while as he experimented with other projects and focused his songwriting largely on fighting various cultural curses and personal ghosts. Any sense that Pedro the Lion had been, or ever would be, by industry terms, “a Christian band” was now ancient history.
His solo album Curse Your Branches remains, in my opinion, an artistic peak for Bazan — but that’s not the say his other work is anything less than compelling and essential. It seemed a musical epiphany in which he made his most formal break with his evangelical past by insisting on a rejection of systemic corruption in what Sam Phillips once called “the political church” (Remember “I Need Love”?). From there, he began forging ahead with a prophetic zeal for truth and vision that seemed, well… positively Biblical in intensity.
Bazan’s characteristic drive for confession, truth, and revolution were blazing brighter than ever. It sounded like he was using his guitar as a machete to slash his way through an overgrown jungle of systemic abuses — that poisonous mix of toxic masculinity, distorted evangelical Christianity, and art-killing capitalism that is threatening to burn down what remains of any healthy American dream.
Then, with deeper wisdom and thus and even deeper sense of betrayal, heartbreak, and humility, he picked the band name up again in 2019, set up a new team of players, and went to work blazing new trails forward by singing with new perspective about the past.
Now, the Lion in the band’s name is no longer an image that could be confused with Narnia sentimentality. Now, Bazan himself is the beast ravenous for truth, his guitars louder than ever, his voice more powerful and pained. Embarking on a new series of albums, he went all the way back to the beginning of his life story, examining the evidence of a narrative he thought he knew and reclaiming what wisdom he could from the ruins.
I saw a “Pedro”-branded live show at Neumo’s last year that was as ferocious as anything I’ve seen Bazan do. He powered through two earlier Pedro albums — It’s Hard to Find a Friend and Control — in their entirety as if wrestling with a younger version of himself, footnoting the songs with the benefit of hindsight and new wisdom, even apologizing for the possibility that listeners might be offended by some of the naiveté in the outdated, outgrown lyrics.
Pedro the Lion stands stronger than ever, an act defined by searing honesty, struggles with faith, and even fiercer struggles with the hypocrisies and abuses that toxify organized religion—on the map of No-B.S. Rock’n’Roll. Thus, we got 2019’s Phoenix and 2022’s Havasu, both of them fiery, confident volumes of storytelling in an epic musical memoir.
And here comes Part III: Santa Cruz. The first track, “Modesto,” is some of the most exciting, live-sounding rock in the Pedro catalogue.
Lizz Wright is singing about sparrows again
With “Sparrow,” Lizz Wright has released another enthralling record of exquisite (and thankfully unmanipulated) vocal performance. I find something so wholesomely pure and soulful about Wright’s lyrics. It’s why I’ve been a fan since she sang “Wake Up Little Sparrow” on 2005’s breakout release Dreaming Wide Awake.
She’s done nothing but strong and deeply moving work ever since, even though she’s never become a household name. And her latest, Shadow, may be my favorite since that breakout 20 years ago. I think you’ll agree, it will stand as one of 2024’s most beautiful records.
Here’s the opening track from Shadow, “Sparrow,” featuring Angelique Kidjo, and the second track, “Your Love,” which features Meshell Ndegeocello and Brandee Younger.
The spirit of the early ‘90s is alive with Chastity Belt
On Thursday night this week, I’ll be seeing Chastity Belt live at The Crocodile here in their hometown of Seattle, and I suspect I’ll hear my favorite track from their oh-so-easy-to-drink new album: “I-90,” a song about bicycling across Seattle’s Lake Washington, connecting Seattle and Mercer Island.
This album has really grown on me with repeated listening. It reminds me so often of Elliott Smith (the melody on “Clumsy,” especially), of early Sonic Youth, and even of the band The Church (check out the vocals and melody of “Chemtrails”).
Check back soon and I may have some thoughts on their show at The Crocodile.