Amplifying the music, books, movies and journalism that matter.
Life is complicated and busy. Did you notice? Keeping up with the music, movies and books that fed your youthful imagination and conversations is harder than ever, but even more important. Here's the good news: there's never been more great new stuff. The challenge is to find it.
So here are my highly opinionated views on sounds, sights and words that will help you keep it fresh and real, and links to the veins where the richest motherlodes can be found.
December. Can it be? Before the songs of Christmas both ancient and new start to fill your ears, here's one more dose of the Zeitgeist -- new sounds full of the confusion and promise of 2015. No Adele here folks; you get enough of that in your spin class.
Blood Orange, Sandra's Smile - Dev Hynes just keeps topping himself and "The Gloved One."
El Vy, Return to the Moon - C'mon, you always wondered what The National would sound like on anti-depressants.
Beirut, Gibraltar - Best handclaps of 2015.
Janet Jackson, No Sleep - She's back, all slinky and fly like it's 1999.
Ryan Adams, Bad Blood - Covering all of Taylor Swift's 1989 seemed like a stunt, but damn if he doesn't pull it off.
Son Little, Lay Down - Slow cooking on the back porch, with a dash of Bill Withers and Michael Kiwanuka.
Tame Impala first came my way with their 2011 single, "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards," a swirly ballad full of synthesizers that could have come straight off John Lennon's Mind Games in 1973. It was at once a big wet kiss to psychedelia and at the same time a brilliant re-imagination of the genre. The album was Lonerism. Critics swooned. Early '70's psychedelia was back from the dead.
Cut to 2015 and pivot: TI frontman Kevin Parker surprises us again with a fresh take on another old-school sound. The synth-y wash is still present, as is the moody obsessiveness. But this time it's R&B that gets a re-boot. Not the gritty, Stax soul that Elvis Costello repurposed so memorably on Get Happy. What Parker has in his mind is R&B as the lovechild of the Chi-lites and the Electric Light Orchestra. Todd Rundgren tried this kind of mash-up years ago but nobody paid much attention. But when you hear "Yes, I'm Changing," you will take some serious notice:
Then there's the finger-popping, blue-eyed soul of "The Less I Know the Better." Operator, get me Hall & Oates:
But the piece de resistance here is, "Cause I"m A Man," with Parker channeling Michael Jackson. Hoo-rah.
This post-millennial time warp can be so confusing, but so much fun.
In the classic 60's soul era, you could hear the sound of gospel music in most every R&B hit: the note-bending vocals, the call and response, and the longing for transcendent love: think Aretha, Wilson, Otis, Marvin, Sam, Solomon, Mavis.
But as the R&B form aged, the church influences waned and its own secular traditions -- first funk, then disco and later hip-hop -- exerted a more powerful gravitational pull.
Lizz Wright comes from that earlier church-y place but with a distinctive jazz style. On Freedom and Surrender, she brings a gospel foundation to a repertoire that runs from Nick Drake to the brothers Gibb to contemporary neo-soul. With a voice recalling Paula Cole, phrasing to rival Cassandra Wilson, and a glossy production matching Joni Mitchell's classic, Court and Spark, she has produced the year's best grownup album of vocal performance.
Here's her take on the Bee Gee's nearly forgotten, "To Love Somebody," which her aching longing rescues from cheesiness forever:
"The New Game," shows she can bring us out into the aisles, too.
