Jlin: Black Origami
In Northern Indiana, the music dances on you. This is more complex and for the most part more likable than her previous Dark Energy. It’s dominated by very digital-sounding percussion, swathed in liberally yet artfully deployed reverb, that refuses any hint of nostalgia. “Hatshepsut,” for instance, starts off with big though human-scale drums that give way to the machines, before the two coalesce into a Mensch-Maschine or maybe a Terminator. You can still recognize footwork as the endoskeleton that allows the samples to strutter, but the rhythmic regularities here function less as floor-fillers than as demonstrations of deep-learning prowess. This is music to write manifestos to; what the content of those manifestos might be will depend heavily on who one thinks just about the only comprehensible lyrics on the album, on a song called “1%,” are addressed to: “you’re all going to die down here.”
Grade: A (“Nandi”, “Carbon 7 (161)”, “Hatshepsut”)
Tove Lo: Blue Lips
Long a gifted melodist, this is her big step up in all-round craft. A repeated trick involves squeezing in a second verse melody denser than the first, which makes the release into the chorus seem like the heavens lifting. The subject matter is the same old returning-home-from-the-club-like-[screenshot from Bergman film] schtick she’s pedaled career-long, but with heightened self-awareness: “acting all cliche and facing my fears” seems a reasonable way to live one’s life. And her conviction is such that she nearly convinces me that having erect sweaty nipples at the disco would give me as much of a charge as it gives her.
Grade: A MINUS (“Shivering Gold”, “9th of October”, “Bitches”)
Taylor Swift: Reputation
It’s not that I think it’s fair that her least inspired album shades the best work of better human beings riding the country-to-pop merry-go-round. But thanks to talent and her too-big-to-fail industry position, the bad girl conceits she picked up from Twilight (Future and Ed Sheeran both want to play Jacob; one is much worse at it) are elevated to, if not art, then to something more consistently groovable than her previous records. For this the biz should send Jack Antonoff a nice thank-you note: despite his tics beginning to wear out their welcome (cut the one-chord piano percussion already), his productions suit the material better than Max Martin’s readymades, perhaps due to Jack having heard a rap album this century. For her part, SwiftCorp’s singing has never been better, somehow retaining naturalness of expression despite undergoing enough industrial processing to make American manufacturing great again. And while her writing is streaky, she tosses off a preternaturally beautiful melody on the closer just to show she still can, if that’s what you’ll make her do.
Grade: A MINUS (“Look What You Made Me Do”, “Getaway Car”, “New Year’s Day”)
Pink: Beautiful Trauma
A Funhouse mirror: fast start aided by expensive producers (Jack Antonoff bests Max Martin again in what is becoming a habit) followed by midtempoville. Her voice undiminished, she can sell the end-of-session affirmations her therapist mandates after sitting through a bunch of tales of romantic woe more convincingly than at any previous stage of her career, so that her declarative “I Am Here” is heartfelt and proper. Still, I miss the shit-against-wall indecorousness and/or meanness to Dubya of her best work, with the exception the incongruous cameo by large adult son Eminem, who plays the role of comic manchild quite effortlessly. Contra “Barbies”, it’s better to have grown up.
Grade: B PLUS (“Beautiful Trauma”, “Revenge”, “What About Us”)
LCD Soundsystem: American Dream
There’s nothing as mordant as “North American Scum” or as moving as “All My Friends” or as catchy as “Someone Great,” which proves little other than I should listen to Sound of Silver again. Instead, Murphy and co. bring a very grown-up work ethic to the hum-along-and-dance album: pick out any instrument (excluding Murphy’s voice, duh) and you can hear how carefully engineered its sound and its placement in the mix is. If you never liked ’90s U2 this might be net-negative, but Murphy has never played guitar so incisively and jack of several trades Al Doyle provides acoustic options as well as adding to the parade of Korgs and Rolands. Their most functional album since 45:33.
Grade: B PLUS (“Emotional Haircut”, “Oh Baby”, “How Do You Sleep?”)
ODDS & ENDS
Rina Sawayama: Rina
Cambridge grad explores unmarked trails amidst classic chord progressions, like Solange back when she had songs rather than gestures; “Ordinary Superstar” is a stretch on both counts, but a nice ideal (“Ordinary Superstar”, “Take Me as I Am”)
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Async
Ways of coming to terms with one’s mortality: creating narrow slices of synth prettiness, reading Paul Bowles, learning to play the triangle (“Stakra”, “Solari”)
Colleen: A Flame My Love, A Frequency
French expat’s electro-pastoral gets an expansive expressive range out of two synths that sometimes hop along Postal Service-worthy progressions and sometimes sound like they’re auditioning for “A Day in the Life”; best lyrics are “rain, rain, rain” (“Another World”, “A Flame My Love, A Frequency”)
Arca
Falsetto crooning that I guess is in Spanish (though if you told me it was in Elvish I’d believe you) accompanied by expert detuning of keybs, notes that reverb like he’s playing in St. Paul’s, and really subtle use of diminuendo, none of which is as fun as him cracking a whip for eighty-one seconds (“Whip”, “Saunter”)
Kenji Minogue: En Dermee
All you need to know about this is the first two sentences of their Wikipedia entry — “Kenji Minogue is een Belgische popgroep. De groep brengt een trashy mix van electropop met absurde West-Vlaamse hiphop” — and that this was Chuck Eddy’s #2 album of 2017 (“Jeneemodadde”, “Pipi Op Je Feest”)
