This week, a new song from Grammy-winning flamenco singer Rosalia, unsettling chamber-art-electronica from Katie Gately, new Mitski on 'The Turning' soundtrack, a Parsonsfield premiere, and new Pearl Jam.
On the Grammys
Between Billie Eilish’s sweep of the 4 big Grammy categories and Lizzo’s additional 3 awards, it seems like women ruled the Grammy Awards last night. (Also country outlaw Tanya Tucker won the first two awards of her career.) They dominate this week’s roundup as well. Of course, the boys didn’t get shut out. Tyler, The Creator gave the awards broadcast its most memorable live performance and left with the Best Rap Album award. Blues-rocker Gary Clark Jr won two awards and somehow Elvis Costello got lumped into the Best Traditional Pop Vocal category and walked off with that bit of hardware.
So before we get to this week’s roundup, a quick shout out to some of the Grammy winners who’ve come through our studio in the past year (as always, click on the links to hear their live performances/interviews in our studio): Gloria Gaynor, of “I Will Survive” fame, won the Grammy for Best Roots Gospel Album – her first Grammy win in 40 years. The Attacca Quartet won Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for their album of music by Caroline Shaw. The Mexican guitar duo of Rodrigo y Gabriela took home the trophy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. And Anais Mitchell, her bookcase already sagging under the weight of all those Tony Awards for her music/theater piece Hadestown, got a Grammy for the cast album. She and her new trio Bonny Light Horseman visit us on Feb 10 to play live.
Also joining us soon – tomorrow evening at Merkin Hall in fact – is Icelandic cellist/composer Hildur Gudnadottir, who won a Golden Globe for her music to the film Joker and is up for an Oscar as well; last night she won the Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media for her music to the HBO special Chernobyl. And frequent in-studio guest Angelique Kidjo continues to own the Best World Music Album category, winning that category for the fourth time.
Congrats to all. Now, here’s some of what else happened this week in music…
PREMIERE: Parsonsfield Return With A New Song And A New Sound
The band Parsonsfield has long combined the sounds of traditional American bluegrass and folk with a rock energy; but their new single, “Paper Floor,” represents a sort of Parsonsfield v2.0, as the New Englanders leave the banjo and mandolin in the barn and instead focus on swirling synthesizer, dance-rock drumming, and a keyboard-and-vocal flourish that echoes the sounds of 80s pop. It’s from the forthcoming album Happy Hour On The Floor, due on April 3, and it tells the story of two aspiring young professionals in the big city who fall in love, but then find themselves wanting different things in life. Financial success may buy the apartment, the song suggests, but without love, the floor is just paper, and won’t support anything. The video takes a slightly different tack, as we see the band performing on paper instruments – which are apparently not built for such smokin’ hot playing…
Parsonsfield will be playing in NY at the Mercury Lounge on May 6.
Rosalia Prepped For Her Grammy Performance By Releasing A New Song
Rosalia garnered two Grammy nominations before her live performance on last night’s broadcast: one was for Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album, which she duly won, and the other was for Best New Artist, which marked the first-ever nomination in that key category for a Spanish-only act. Rosalia’s music is a blend of Spanish flamenco with Western and Latin pop, but in the days before the Grammy Awards she released a new song that was light on the pop and heavy on the flamenco. “Juro Que” (“I Swear That”) is a torchy number that sees Rosalia singing with and without the aid of AutoTune. Unlike most classical flamenco singers, male or female, Rosalia doesn’t sing in the rasping, dramatic style known as “torn throat”; instead she uses a vocal style that would be (and is) a good fit on the pop charts. Here though, the big radio-friendly arrangements that have made her recent singles so successful give way to some impressive flamenco guitar and palmas (the traditional handclaps of flamenco). There are a couple of vocal runs that make me wish they’d left the AutoTune at home – she really doesn’t seem to need it, and the lyrics do a fine job of signaling that this is not a traditional flamenco song – but hey, if this gets her millions of YouTube viewers to start checking out more traditional flamenco stuff, then I imagine Rosalia herself would be pretty happy.
Meanwhile, Rosalia and Billie Eilish have been working on a song together; no word on when that might be finished…
Pearl Jam Return With “Dance Of The Clairvoyants”
It’s been over six years since the last record by Pearl Jam, one of the foundational bands of 90s rock. On March 27, they will release Gigaton, and to whet our appetites they’ve dropped the single “Dance Of The Clairvoyants.” The song’s sound is somewhat reminiscent of Talking Heads’ brand of funk-rock, with choppy guitars, brassy synths, and an insistent dance rhythm. Singer Eddie Vedder approaches an apocalyptic vision in his lyrics – “When the past is the present and the future’s no more,” and later “Numbers keep falling off the calendars floor/Stuck in our boxes, windows open no more” – but he pulls back, singing “That’s not a negative thought, I’m positive. Positive. Positive.” Meanwhile, the video the band released is full of imagery of the natural world, some of it quite unsettling (fire spreading across the water) and some of it (like the vaulting of the night sky over ancient ruins) suggesting that time and space will go on, whatever we end up doing to ourselves.
Katie Gately Offers an Eerie, Surreal “Waltz”
American electronic musician and producer Katie Gately knows that a genteel waltz rhythm can become something vaguely deranged or outright creepy – just hit the “one” hard enough and the following “two three” becomes a tiny exercise in anticipation of what might jump out of the shadows next. Her new song “Waltz” is from her forthcoming album Loom, written after the death of her mother – and, apparently, after a day spent listening repeatedly to “Take This Waltz” by her mother’s favorite singer, Leonard Cohen. Like the late Canadian songwriter/poet, Gately welcomes the darkness into her music; the album includes, among other sound sources, the rumble of an earthquake, howling wolves, and pill bottles being shaken. And yet her sense of melody never abandons her. “Waltz” may be unsettling, but it’s never uninviting.
Loom comes out on February 14; Katie Gately will play a live set in our studio on February 27 and a concert at the Knockdown Center on February 29.
A Deliciously Weird Moment From Okay Kaya’s New LP
Okay Kaya is a singer and songwriter based here in NY; her real name is Kaya Wilkins and if you are okay with songs about mediocre sex and Brita water filters and favorite pyjamas, then you will want to check out her new album, Watch This Liquid Pour Itself. (Although for the pyjama song, you’ll need to brush up on your Norwegian; Kaya was born in Norway and sings that one track in her native language.) The album is full of strange, demented bedroom pop, with touches of R&B balladry and indie rock navel-gazing. A good example is the song “Psych Ward,” which takes the form of a 60s pop tune and fills it with content that’s more like an episode of Bob’s Burgers (which she should totally write a song for). This drily sardonic tune contains such delightful couplets as “everybody argues an awful lot in the psych ward/crisis management on the Intercom in the psych ward.” And when she gets to the chorus, “Do the rounds/do the rounds/do the rounds,” it’s like a heavily medicated version of all those old songs that told us to “do the twist” or “do the locomotion.”
Okay Kaya plays at National Sawdust on February 13.
Soundtrack to The Turning Includes a Song by Mitski
On Friday, the film The Turning, a recasting of Henry James’s psychological/horror story The Turn Of The Screw, was released, and so was its soundtrack. I haven’t seen the film yet, but apparently the story has been moved up a century and now takes place in the 1990s, and the soundtrack is full of new or previously unreleased songs, mostly from women, that recall the guitar-heavy sound of bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Hole. In fact, Hole’s Courtney Love kicks things off, and the soundtrack concludes with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. In between we get songs from the younger generation – Soccer Mommy, girl in red, Cherry Glazerr, and this killer track by Mitski. “Cop Car” is a song that she’s played live occasionally, but this is its first recording, and if the film makers were looking for something to set an ominous mood, this song certainly fits the bill. Mitski’s vocals float eerily over a wall of distorted electric guitars that build in intensity, until she reaches the final lines – which should play well in a darkened movie theater – “I've preemptively blocked all the exits/So I will burn in this movie theater, hey.”