EGN NEWS DESK
Alice Coltrane’s live performance at Carnegie Hall, recorded in 1971 however solely launched in full this month, gathered power like a storm, and is effectively value experiencing as an entire. Its serene opening was “Journey in Satchidananda,” a modal meditation with the flute and saxophones of Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp enfolded in her cascading harp arpeggios. Later within the live performance, she switched to piano and led her group — which additionally included two drummers and two bassists — in a squall of free jazz that “Journey in Satchidananda” doesn’t start to foreshadow. JON PARELES
Ani DiFranco’s subsequent album, due in May, was produced by BJ Burton, who has provide you with studio abstractions for Bon Iver and Low. Two songs launched prematurely, “The Thing at Hand” and “New Bible,” are starkly unadorned musical close-ups. In “The Thing at Hand,” DiFranco embraces dwelling utterly within the second, past id or premeditation. The melody is bluesy; the minimal accompaniment is from frayed-edged keyboards, distant bell tones and close to the top, when DiFranco insists, “I defy being outlined,” only a uncooked, barely tuned guitar, proclaiming a bare-bones intimacy. PARELES
St. Vincent, ‘Flea’
In “Flea,” St. Vincent — Annie Clark — wrings all the things from her insect simile. “When you begin to itch and scratch and scream/Once I’m in you may’t do away with me.” With her guitar abetted by Dave Grohl on drums and Justin Meldal-Johnsen on bass, she revels in a parasite’s standpoint — “All I see is meat” — as she bears down on a fuzzed-out stoner-rock riff and permits a number of psychedelic tangents, with out ever relinquishing her prey. PARELES
Camila Cabello embraces the surreal, compressed aesthetic of hyperpop on “I Luv It.” She sings with breathy eagerness in regards to the delusional, hormonal, reality-defying facets of early infatuation; typically her phrases are digitally chopped up and looped. She’s backed by a hurrying digital pulse and a stop-start syncopated thump. Near the top of a quick monitor, her mating name is answered by a semi-intelligible rap from the professionally blurry Playboi Carti. PARELES
Jordan Hamilton, ‘Roses’
Disorientation suffuses “Roses” by the singer, cellist and producer Jordan Hamilton. “I executed been by the entire rattling city attempting to maintain up with my ideas/Still I’m operating,” he sings with bemused nonchalance. The music units up staggered, minimalistic layers of cellos, keyboards, percussion and vocals, and it ends with him nonetheless suspended in his self-constructed limbo. PARELES
Vampire Weekend, ‘Mary Boone’
Less verbose bands could also be content material to pair “moon” with “June,” however on the newest single from “Only God Was Above Us,” Ezra Koenig gives a quintessentially Vampire Weekend tackle a well-recognized rhyme scheme, pairing a semi-obscure cultural reference with crooned romanticism. “Mary Boone, Mary Boone, I hope you are feeling like loving somebody quickly,” he sings, name-checking a once-powerful artwork supplier who just lately served a jail sentence for tax fraud. The music itself is a form of musical mosaic, combining floating atmospherics that recall the band’s “Modern Vampires of the City” with breakbeats and a lush, heavenly choir. Boone, for her half, has reacted to the music with confusion (“Why did they try this? Does this imply I’m a vampire?”) that finally gave solution to shrugging acceptance: “Why not?” LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Grateful Dead, ‘Wave That Flag’
Which comes first, the lyrics or the music? For the Grateful Dead’s “U.S. Blues,” which opened the band’s 1974 album “From the Mars Hotel,” the reply to that previous songwriter question was clearly the music. An expanded Fiftieth-anniversary reissue of the album will embody this demo model of “Wave That Flag.” It’s Jerry Garcia alone — multitracked on lead and rhythm guitars, vocal and maracas — but he simulates the Dead’s improvisational give-and-take. “Wave That Flag” has the recognizable tune and the refrain of “U.S. Blues,” however solely a handful of the verse lyrics. The relaxation are rhyming three-word phrases: “Ride the prepare, rely your change/Sit up straight, bewail your destiny.” By the time the music become “U.S. Blues,” clearly Garcia and the lyricist Robert Hunter had began pondering tougher in regards to the political implications of the three phrases, “Wave that flag.” PARELES
Marina Allen, ‘Red Cloud’
In “Red Cloud,” Marina Allen imagines a primordial, free-associative Nebraska, the state the place her grandparents lived. “I’m warped, I’m wrapped, as I warble my music/As I wobble my gait to the sting of the Great Plain in Red Cloud,” she sings over two chords that sway like a porch swing, at occasions topped by twin violins. Her voice sounds simply barely awake, equally prepared for hardship and wonderment. PARELES
