add 1037 Iris DeMent

Iris DeMent isn't a pop star, although she probably could have been had she been at all interested in playing that game. She's a careful, detailed songwriter with a confessional edge and a good sense of narrative, and her voice is a marvelous instrument that seems to rise out of the previous century. Her themes are universal -- love (both good and bad), loss, faith, memories -- and few singers or songwriters can convey the kind of passionate emotional distance she brings to all of this. Sing the Delta (the Arkansas delta, not the Mississippi one) is her first new album of original material in 16 years (her previous album, 2004's Lifeline, was a collection of her versions of the gospel hymns she sang as a child), and it fits right into the quilt of her earlier albums, full of searching, yearning songs that ache more than they bounce for joy, all set to sparse, piano-led arrangements that focus in and around her vocals without intrusion. Like all of her albums, it's down-key, wrenching passion out of things long lost, and one can't help but be amazed at the sincerity and desperation DeMent brings to every line she sings here. The songs are well written, detailed, poetic, and centered on her childhood, her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters, all those ties and bonds one carries all through life -- all well and good, at least as confessionals go. The problem here is that Sing the Delta sounds a bit like a great short story writer singing autobiographical stories rather than delivering songs. There's little that moves one to sing along here, unfortunately. The tempos are all slow, dramatic, and melancholy. The one song that actually features a little bounce in its rhythm, "The Night I Learned How Not to Pray," is a sad, harrowing account of a young brother's death, and while it's a great and emotionally effective song, it hardly feels redemptive. Everything here seems to fade into the same slow waltz, and while the lyrics shine, lyrics alone do not make for a good song. The best here, like "The Night I Learned How Not to Pray," the slow gospel burn of the opener "Go on Ahead and Go Home," "If That Ain't Love" (a portrait of DeMent's father), the spunky and wise "Mama Was Always Tellin' Her Truth" (a portrait of her mother), and the beautiful "There's a Whole Lotta Heaven," have choruses that rise out of their stories and connect -- one can actually sing along with them, which is the quickest way to bring a song into another's life. Too often Sing the Delta sounds like a poetry reading with great lines, wonderful metaphors, and a hard-earned wisdom on display -- a bit like Dolly Parton if she had gone to Harvard -- and there's no denying the talent, sincerity, and craft on display here. But a song is most a song when someone else can sing along to it, pull it into her or his own life, and make it speak inside that life, and there just isn't a whole lot of that on this album, impressive as it is.

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add 1036 Boubacar Traoré

A nice album from one of the original Malian bluesmen -- the great Boubacar Traoré (known originally on Radio Mali as Kar Kar). Originally, hits like "Mali Twist" made him famous in his homeland, though he disappeared for some time from the limelight, emerging after his wife's death to record albums like this one. The style is vaguely similar to other Malian bluesers such as Ali Farka Touré: a relatively stripped-down format with little to no accompaniment. The accompaniment on the album comes from a calabash (gourd used as percussion). The combination of his voice and tender picking style leads to a rather sentimental mood for a few of the works, and the faster ones have more of that reminiscent John Lee Hooker/Ali Farka Touré style. The main difference is in the vocal abilities -- Boubacar is actually singing, much more than the others; melody is important to the vocal section of the songs. For fans of African blues, this would be a definite pick. For newcomers, it might not be a bad introduction at all, though more of an easing in could perhaps be found in Taj Mahal's efforts with Toumani Diabate.


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add 1065 Iris DeMent

A remarkable debut, Infamous Angel established Iris DeMent as one of the greatest artists of her generation. With her gift for poignant, confessional songwriting and a voice that makes raw beauty seem like a brand new thing, she invokes the elemental magic of the Carter Family while sounding as fresh and modern as John Prine (who, not surprisingly, is one of her biggest champions). DeMent's concerns are largely family and tradition, and many of these songs deal with memories of life and love. Her Carter influence is revealed in a spirited cover of the classic "Fifty Miles of Elbow Room" as well as "Mama's Opry," a tribute to her mother, who also sings lead on "Higher Ground." These are wonderful, but DeMent's greater talent is the ballad, and she delivers an astonishing handful, including "When Love Was Young," "Sweet Forgiveness," and "After You're Gone," a tribute to her dying father that is so profoundly affecting that one is rendered nearly helpless listening to it. In the end, one finishes this record somber but refreshed by DeMent's charming, almost naïve, outlook on life. That naïveté isn't an act, either -- DeMent claims in her liner notes that she's never thought of herself as a great singer. She couldn't be more wrong, and listeners can thank heaven that she changed her mind, for this is an album to be cherished and played as long as one has life to listen.

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add 1034 Rez Abbasi

At some level, it's almost unbelievable that the musician who recorded 2006's Bazaar is the same one who helmsThings to Come. Rez Abbasi has grown exponentially, not only as a guitarist -- his style has been inherently recognizable ever since he started gracing sessions in the early part of the decade -- but as a composer and arranger as well. Abbasi has played on a couple of significant recordings in the past couple of years, not the least of which isRudresh Mahanthappa's Kinsmen (issued on the Pi Recordings imprint), which is at the very least spiritually related to this effort. Mahanthappa returns the favor here, appearing as part of a band that also includes Vijay Iyer on piano;Johannes Weidenmüller on bass; drummer Dan Weiss; Abbasi's wife, Kiran Ahluwalia, on vocals on half the tracks; and cellist Mike Block, who appears in a couple of places. The music on Things to Come is a beautiful meld of South Asian and vanguard jazz, some folk elements, and an intense meld of rhythmic and harmonic approaches that are utterly seamless. The set opens with "Dream State," with strings that approach the sound of a harp and are quickly subsumed by a contrapuntal engagement by Iyer and Abbasi's acoustic. The knotty piano line continues, but Abbasi's electric guitar soon replaces the acoustic and Weidenmüller and Weiss enter the fray, offering a rich blend of melodies and counterpoint, and the shifting time signatures pull the listener in a number of directions without once pulling apart the complex harmonic structure of the tune.

On "Air Traffic," as Abbasi's electric states a dreamy opening theme, caressed by Weiss' restrained cymbal work and some augmented, architecturally rich chords by Iyer, Ahluwalia enters with the lyric, offering a traditional South Asian folk melody. The bandmembers begin to engage with her up front and one another more subtly, until what is left is a beautifully elegant quilt of sound. Knotty solos by Mahanthappa and Iyer take the tune outside a bit, and the rhythm section floats with it, keeping it anchored. This tune in particular provides a glimpse of the rest of the magic to come everywhere (although favorites include the swinging "Hard Colors," the title cut, and the ballad "The Realities of Chromaticism"). Abbasi's complex lyric lines -- which were all composed on instruments other than guitar -- engage his sidemen to solo through them and arrive at a destination that creates yet another possibility. Iyer in particular pushes the melodic frame of each tune with his percussive, intricate approach to counterpoint, whereas Mahanthappatraverses along the outside of these edges and Abbasi changes his soloing style for each tune. But it's the rhythm section that astonishes most on this set. The variations on themes, on other rhythmic structures, and on striated time figures are all offered to the listener as a unified whole. Ultimately, Things to Come is, like Kinsmen and a few other recordings, more proof in the pudding that the integration of South Asian music into the jazz idiom and its tradition is complete, creating entirely new possibilities for both. This is not an album that sums up the past, but brilliantly and soulfully points to new futures

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add 1033 kitka

On the face of it, this could seem a real oddity -- an eight-piece American female vocal group singing Balkan music in a distinctly Eastern European style. But far from coming across as an appropriation of style and material, instead this sounds beautifully authentic and loving, an homage to the region that inspired it. Taking songs of winter as its starting point, Kitka delve back to find beauty, and succeed very well. A single listen to "Byla Cesta," for example, with only two verses, is enough to transport anyone to a chapel in Bulgaria, while the carol "Alilo" brings to mind those women's choirs who had an impact on world music in the late '80s. It's a reminder as top how powerful the human voice really is. "Betlehem, Betlehem," taking from the singing of the great Marta Sebestyen, works a single voice against violin to wonderfully spare effect. "Hubava Milka," a Christmas song, offers sublime harmonies to fend off the cold, and "Tsarsko Momche Kon Sedlae" is redolent of a crossroads with the Middle East in the work on tambura and dumbek drum. Throughout, it's the voices that captivate and enthrall. These women might not have been raised in the Balkans, but they feel it in their bones.

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add 0132 Emmylou Harris

In 1995, Emmylou Harris made a decisive break with her creative past, recording the album Wrecking Ball with producer Daniel Lanois and abandoning the traditional country purity of her best-known work for lovely but spectral musical landscapes and exploring her muse as a songwriter in a way she had never attempted before. After Wrecking Ball, Harris recorded three albums in which she made the most of her new creative freedom and honed her impressive gifts as a songwriter, but All I Intended to Be, her first new release in five years, finds her reaching back toward a sound and style that recall the country and folk influences of her earlier work. But All I Intended to Be is clearly the work of an artist who is looking to the past entirely on her own terms, and with the lessons learned since 1995 clearly audible at all times. All I Intended to Be was produced by Brian Ahern, who was behind the controls for most of her albums of the '70s and '80s, and it features a handful of session players who worked with Harris and Ahern in the past, while Harris' occasional partner in harmony Dolly Parton contributes backing vocals to "Gold" (as does Vince Gill). The album's largely acoustic textures manage to sound both homey and fresh; if the melodies and the arrangements nod politely to traditional country sounds (and hold hands on "Gold"), the space in the production and the unpretentious artfulness of the songs reflect an intelligence and restraint largely absent from country music in the new millennium. Harris wrote or co-wrote six of these 13 songs, leaving more room for covers than on Red Dirt Girl orStumble into Grace, but the tone of the album is consistent throughout, and she brings a streamlined passion to material by Patty Griffin, Billy Joe Shaver, and Merle Haggard that makes them her own. (Harris also writes and sings several tunes with Kate and Anna McGarrigle in what continues to be a truly inspired collaboration.) And as always, the most memorable thing about All I Intended to Be is Emmylou Harris' voice; there are few singers in any genre with a greater natural skill and better instincts, and as wonderful as these songs are and as fine a band as she and Ahernhave on hand, it's her glorious voice that turns these simple materials into gold, and she only improves with the passage of the years. The surfaces of this album may seem less bold than the albums that immediately preceded it, but All I Intended to Be is the work of a consummate artist who is still reaching out to new places even when she points to her creative history.

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add 01031 Autechre

"Unified" and "cohesive" would not be two of the first couple hundred words used to describe Quaristice, the firstAutechre album since 2005's Untilted. The only aspect that prevents Quaristice from seeming open-ended, as a bunch of tracks splayed arbitrarily across a disc, is that it begins and ends with ambient (as in entirely beat-less) pieces; an arc might gradually become apparent, but that would only be the result of increased familiarity with the sequence of tracks. It's disparate, to say the very least, but that is not at the listener's expense. Just by glancing at the length of the track list, it's apparent the album is not standard-operating Autechre; at 73 minutes in length, most of the 20 tracks are more like vignettes, yet the ideas arrive fully formed, never appearing to be dashed off or loosely sketched. The variety of ideas is nearly imposing, the best of which include the deadened chiming and clanging of "Simmm," the stealth jitter of "Tankakern," the Drexciya-worthy pitch-black neo-electro of "Rale," and the handful of stunning and duly swarthy ambient tracks -- especially the closing 12 minutes shared by the chilling "Notwo" and "Outh9x" tandem. A couple moments, unsurprisingly, border on the inscrutable, with "Fol3" sounding like a collage of car collisions and slammed doors smeared and backmasked for nearly four minutes, and "bnc Cstl" more like a hyper-speed gag of sound effects, its high hats and snares tucked deeply into the mix. While it can take some time to get a handle on its generous stream of components, Quaristice is far from just another Autechre album. Not sinceLP5 has being impressed been so obviously secondary to enjoyment.

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