New CDs From Shabazz Palaces, Foster the People and WU LYF (original) (raw)

Playlist

Industrial Hip-Hop And Bouncy Sociopathy

July 1, 2011

Shabazz Palaces

“Clear some space out so we could space out,” Palaceer Lazaro raps on Shabazz Palaces’ debut album, “Black Up” (Sub Pop), summing up the group’s aesthetic. Ishmael Butler, a k a Palaceer Lazaro, called himself Butterfly when he was a leader of the jazz-loving, Grammy-winning New York hip-hop group Digable Planets in the 1990s. Shabazz Palaces, based in Seattle, is far sparser and stranger, and darkly innovative. Mr. Butler and his collaborators build tracks out of glitches and crackles, deep industrial throbs and analog synthesizer chirps, thumb-piano plinks and ghostly voices. The beats aim only for the most distant corners of the dance floor, or elsewhere entirely. The calm rhymes juggle thoughts of black identity, paranoia, lust and possibility. Yes, hip-hop still has an audacious progressive fringe.

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Cubbie Fink, left, Mark Foster and Mark Pontius of Foster the People.Credit...Williams & Hirakawa

Amina Alaoui

On her album “Arco Iris” (ECM), which is Spanish for “rainbow,” the Moroccan singer and songwriter Amina Alaoui, who now lives in Spain, imagines her own Iberian Peninsula: a latter-day Andalusia where the Middle East and Europe meet with expressive arabesques and tragic, romantic, mystical poetry. It’s a fusion without a glimmer of modern impatience, closely contemplating every phrase. A handful of string instruments, usually just one or two at a time, accompany her settings of poems by a 16th-century Christian mystic (St. Teresa of Ávila) and an 11th-century king of Seville (al-Mutamid, among others). The album touches on Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco and Persian and Arab-Andalusian classical music. But these hushed, gorgeous songs are profoundly personal reflections on where those traditions could lead.

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Seun Anikulapo KutiCredit...Kelechi Amadiobi

Seun Anikulapo Kuti

Nigerian Afrobeat, the brusque politicized funk that reached Broadway in “Fela!,” survives in Fela Kuti’s son Seun Anikulapo Kuti, who not only inherited his father’s middle name but also has the allegiance of his band, Egypt 80. “From Africa With Fury: Rise” (Kalakuta Sunrise/Knitting Factory) takes up Fela’s longtime grievances — against corruption, exploitation and marijuana bans — with revved-up tempos and current targets. As the Afrobeat funk cross-hatches its syncopations and sets brasses against saxophones, the production captures the antiphonal clarity without sacrificing brawn; Brian Eno, one of the producers, overdubbed a few British musicians, but they don’t stick out. The last three tracks — “Slave Masters,” “For Dem Eye” and “The Good Leaf” — accelerate as they grow angrier and angrier.

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Amina AlaouiCredit...John Hughes

Foster the People

In the “Hit Singles About Shooting Sprees” category, Foster the People has followed through on the Boomtown Rats’ 1979 “I Don’t Like Mondays” with “Pumped Up Kicks,” a pop ditty with dazed, dweeby vocals and a handclapping chorus that warns, “You better run, better run, outrun my gun.” That’s the sociopathic extreme on the band’s debut album, “Torches” (Startime/Columbia), though it also has songs narrated by an addict (“Life on the Nickel”) and a fugitive (“Warrant,” with the superficially cheerful chorus “Got to get away!”). Along with intense mental states, the band’s songwriter, Mark Foster, savors the construction details of his perky pop songs: the clockwork counterpoint of terse, staccato motifs played with carefully selected and individually skewed tones. Behind the neat surfaces, oddities thrive.

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Palaceer Lazaro of Shabazz Palaces.Credit...David Belisle

‘Red Hot + Rio 2: Nova Tropicália’

It’s mix-and-match again — Brazilians meeting indie-rockers, electronica programmers and R&B singers from the United States and England — on this sequel to the 1996 “Red Hot + Rio”; both albums benefit the AIDS-awareness work of the Red Hot Organization. The 1996 album reworked bossa nova; the two-CD “Red Hot + Rio 2: Nova Tropicália” (eOne/Red Hot) moves into tropicália, the rebelliously eclectic and downright nutty Brazilian spin on psychedelia. Original tropicálistas like Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso collaborate with admirers like Of Montreal, David Byrne and Prefuse 73; younger Brazilians like Seu Jorge, Marisa Monte and Joyce Moreno have tracks with Beck, Devendra Banhart and Madlib. Some of the lyrics are sung in English, giving American listeners a glimpse of tropicália’s literary dimension. Every collaboration sounds downright elated, and the cross-cultural derangement of tropicália easily shines through these 21st-century revamps.

WU LYF

Britain’s current indie-rock sensation is WU LYF, whose debut album is “Go Tell Fire to the Mountain” (L Y F Recordings). A shrewdly self-marketing, purposefully confusing gaggle of musicians and visual artists, WU LYF — which stands for World Unite/Lucifer Youth Foundation — plays music that’s an exhilarating blur, swathed in echo and cymbal sizzle. The songs are tremolo-strummed anthems that suddenly bound ahead with African-style guitar filigrees and drum syncopations; then they often settle back into rich chords from the organ at the church where the band made the album. Tucked amid the surging major chords are lyrics full of mayhem and desperation. “All of our children will run blind and free/Across concrete fields of broken glass,” Ellery Roberts sings in “Spitting Blood.” At least that’s what the online lyrics say. Mr. Roberts’s voice is such a rough rasp, and he sings in such an unmodulated (and usually unmelodic) bellow, that the songs might well need subtitles for American listeners.

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