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Various Artists - Red Hot Organization / Transa: Selects
Transa:Selects reintroduces Sade Adu to the world with a song for her trans son, Izaak. The culture-shifting ballad “Young Lion” debuts with a side-length original by André 3000 and appearances by Sam Smith, L’Rain & more. These singles from the 46-track prismatic spiritual journey of Red Hot Org’s TRANSA glimpse the project’s full epic sonic palette and time travel. An essential line-in to a restored universe, Transa:Selects gives gender-expansive waymakers their pasts and futures. These are the tracks that drew the New York Times to announce the full project and outlets like Rolling Stone to show early interest with features. Wendy & Lisa from Prince’s band join standout newcomer Lauren Auder to reinterpret “I Would Die 4 U,” here a raw monument to the spirit’s resolve. Beverly Glenn-Copeland reprises his song “Ever New” with Sam Smith. Their voices together unroll a welcome to the new generation named in the lyrics. Glenn-Copeland’s rhapsodic composition flourishes for Sam Smith’s wide audience to mirror the trans elder’s experience of emerging from obscurity — and the younger artist’s own journey back to self.
Jessica Pratt--Here In The Pitch
Here In the Pitch, the fourth album from the beloved, beguiling songwriter Jessica Pratt, was written and recorded between her home of Los Angeles and Brooklyn over the course of three years. Pratt enlivens her timeless, placeless folk sensibilities with newfound instrumentation and an expanded ensemble, both under the influence of 60s spectral pop. Whereas Pratt's 2019 record Quiet Signs floated elegantly in the ether, Here In the Pitch is entrenched in more earthen characteristics, as the title suggests, and her craft is emboldened with a newfound gravitas. From allmusic.com. "...these songs find Pratt opening up her private sound world just enough to let a glimpse of its depth come through. Her songs are still wounded and far away, but the expanded instrumentation gives them a prismatic glow and makes for one of the most fascinating and repeatable sets from an artist who was already in a class by herself." Fred Thomas
Blood Incantation- Absolute Elsewhere
Blood Incantation's Absolute Elsewhere is unlike anything you've ever heard before. Few can claim a sonic watershed as readily as the Denver, Colorado quartet. At roughly 45 minutes, the two compositions that make up this album are as confounding as they are engaging in their scope, melding the 70's prog leanings of Tangerine Dream (whose Thorsten Quaesching appears on "The Stargate [Tablet II]") with the deathly intent of Morbid Angel. Blood Incantation has already proven themselves, perfecting progressive death metal with 2019's Hidden History of the Human Race while branching out into exclusively synth-driven soundtrack territory with 2022's Timewave Zero. Now, with Absolute Elsewhere, which takes its title from the mid-70's prog collective (best known as a celestial stopover for King Crimson drummer, Bill Bruford), Blood Incantation are leaving the notion of genre behind and writing a new language for extreme music itself.
Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings—Woodland
. Made in the wake of a tornado that nearly devastated their studio, its redemptive undertones are hard to miss. Musically, it is one of their densest releases, featuring an occasional rhythm section, pedal steel, fiddle, and full string arrangements on a handful of cuts. Despite this, Woodland has the same sense of restraint and tasteful nuance that characterizes all the music they've made together. On the bittersweet "What We Had," the two trade verses before coming together in the intertwined close harmonies that are their signature. Welch leads "The Bells and the Birds," a pensive and dark-toned track whose open-ended lyrics play like a pre-winter hymn. Another standout is "Hashtag," which comments on the death of a fellow artist: "You laughed and said the news would be bad if I ever saw your name with a hashtag, singers like you and I are only news when we die." Poignant and darkly comic, it's a reflection of the world they themselves inhabit. Welch and Rawlings are not household names, yet they are influential artists who command a great deal of respect and admiration in their field. Woodland continues their mastery of earthy country-folk songwriting that nods to tradition but is ultimately timeless and deeply human. ~Timothy Monger allmusic.com
The Hard Quartet - The Hard Quartet
Made up of the easily recognizable talents of music industry luminaries Matt Sweeney, Stephen Malkmus, Jim White, and Emmett Kelly, the Hard Quartet have no illusions about becoming more than the sum of their parts. Instead, the group combine the lackadaisical charm that Malkmus has been synonymous with for decades in Pavement, the Jicks, and other projects; Sweeney's tasteful guitar virtuosity; Kelly's warped take on traditional folk structures; and White's ramshackle kit-rocking and simply add substantially more guitars to the mix. While not exactly a Frankenstien'ed-together version of the individual players' established voices, it's hard not to hear traces of Wowee Zowee's blend of sophomoric weirdness and deep melancholy in the songs Malkmus sings lead on, or Sweeney's background of technical guitar excellence and songwriting subtlety on tracks like the Richard Thompson-indebted "Rio's Song" or the moody epic "North of the Border." The structure-averse abandon that White brings to his most earthless sessions as a studio drummer is a highlight on both the ragged rockers and the straightforward journeyman folk numbers. The Hard Quartet reject no idea on their debut, and the results are usually familiar, strange, and fun, and at its strongest, the album reframes the individualized sounds of all four powerhouses as something new. ~Fred Thomas, allmusic.com
Billy Strings -- Highway Prayers
Billy Strings' fourth album is an inventive, freewheeling ride that flaunts its increased budget not through studio gloss but a heightened sense of ambition and a strong dose of frivolity. At 74 minutes in length, its 20 tracks jump all over the place, hemmed in only by their adherence to string-band instrumentation and showstopping musicianship. The laid-back country-rocker "Gild the Lily" has an appealingly vintage West Coast feel, while the atmospheric ballad "Seven Weeks in County" makes great use of its spaghetti Western motif, with a Sergio Leone-inspired music video to match. The jaunty "Leadfoot" feels like a nod to '70s trucker culture and features audio from Strings' prized Chevy Chevelle, the muscle car that adorns the album's cover. He and his crack band touch on psychedelia ("Stratosphere Blues / I Believe in You") and warm Americana ("The Beginning of the End"), but also goof off with weed-joke toss-aways like "Catch and Release" and "MORBUD4ME," the latter of which is built around a percussion bed of bong hits. Although Strings has lived in Nashville for nearly a decade, his home state of Michigan still occupies much of his imagination and is referenced frequently both in his lyrics and instrumental odes to Upper Peninsula locales like "Escanaba" and the 25 miles of arrow-straight highway known as the "Seney Stretch." Highway Prayers is too long -- there is a fantastic 40-minute album in there -- but it's also a lot of fun, and it may take a young superstar like Strings to bend and stretch bluegrass enough to deliver it to the masses.
