4 Columns
Hot heat, hotter tunes: four capsule reviews of recent releases.
For this week’s summer missive, we’re trying something new: the 4Columns editors have invited critics to pick their top albums of the summer, so that we may craft an idyllic playlist for the dog days of August before we all head back to school. And so, without further ado, we present here a concise bouquet of four mini-reviews to jam to.
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Rhizome 061524, by Water Damage
Reviewed by Sasha Frere-Jones
Do you think the twenty-nine unbroken minutes of Water Damage’s Rhizome 061524, released at the end of June, is the sound of one gesture or a gesture that repeats? Is this music one long foundational figure or a segment from some longer motif? Is the music of this Austin band summoning what once existed or a reaction to other music that should not exist? Should you follow the branches of the bleed or the curves of the reflection? Why are they so loud? Why is it so distorted? Why would anyone notate music? Do you notate your swim? Do you sketch your sleep? How can you say a Water Damage song consists of one note or a single drum pattern? What is a drum? Is any given pattern the hits and the notes or the sustain between notes and the time between hits? What is kept in the air and what falls? Is Water Damage using pure residue or impure matter? How do you know that this piece goes on for almost thirty minutes? How do you know it’s not twenty smaller songs elapsing over thirty minutes? What is different about the show they played on the fifteenth of June in 2024? It was recorded indoors, in a room, not in a venue with a stage. Eight people played and it looks like they were in an office building. Did you know you can download it for whatever you feel like paying? Do you think they can stop once they start? Wouldn’t you like to play with them? Ask your doctor—you may be in Water Damage already.
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No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, by Meshell Ndegeocello
Reviewed by Andrew Chan
For Meshell Ndegeocello—one of the most vital queer iconoclasts American popular music has ever produced—there is no contradiction between forging an independent path and inhabiting the visions of one’s forebears. On her latest project, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (August 2, 2024), she discovers new shades of passion and insight by submitting herself to the larger-than-life subject of her tribute. Like a jazz bandleader, she unifies a group of talented collaborators (including Jebin Bruni, Julius Rodriguez, and Jake Sherman on keyboards, Abe Rounds on drums, and Paul Thompson on trumpet) with an ecstatic sound consistent with her genre-promiscuous discography, often pushing her own vocal and instrumental contributions deep into the background.
It is no easy feat to make music with James Baldwin’s words: not least because so many of the writer’s pronouncements on love, racism, trauma, and art have become material for bumper stickers and lawn signs. Though not everything on this emphatically polyphonic record works (some of the spoken-word elements fall particularly flat), Ndegeocello shows off her compositional chops by taking some of Baldwin’s most overused aphorisms and reanimating them with dense soundscapes, frantically funky grooves, and melodies as unforgettable as nursery rhymes. Knowing that her soothing but limited contralto isn’t enough to summon the divine rapture invoked in the album’s subtitle, she wisely cedes much of the spotlight to the powerhouse singer Justin Hicks, whose moody baritone lows and rafter-shaking tenor cries lend the album its sanctified fervor. As Ndegeocello and her bandmates draw inspiration from jazz, gospel, folk, soul, rock, and hip-hop, they guide us across a wide spectrum of politically charged emotions in much the same way Baldwin did, moving back and forth between disappointment and hope, righteousness and doubt, tenderness and rage.
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Sun Glories, by Chuck Johnson
Reviewed by Geeta Dayal
Chuck Johnson is known for his ornate guitar and atmospheric pedal-steel compositions that coalesce American folk, ambient, and experimental music into a unique whole. His new album, Sun Glories (August 16, 2024), is named for the hazy halo effect caused by rays of sunlight. It connects to the longing for summer, he told me in a recent interview, but also to the pangs of nostalgia that can be associated with the season.
The record blends guitar with pedal steel, synthesizers, organs, strings, saxophone, and drums. The experimental musician and composer Rachika Nayar inspired Johnson’s renewed embrace of the electric guitar, which he had abandoned for several years in favor of other instruments. “Her technique breaks the guitar apart and reassembles it,” he said. Her creative approach had a deep impact on Sun Glories, especially the single “Sylvanshine.”
“Sylvanshine” features Johnson’s guitar paired with saxophone by the experimental musician Cole Pulice, who uses glissando to make the instrument resemble a human voice. On “Ground Wave,” Johnson layers poignant pedal-steel melodies with melancholy string parts played by the cellist Clarice Jensen and the violinist Emily Packard.
The album closes with the energetic “Broken Spectre.” Johnson’s misty, ambient pedal steel is intensified by Ryan Jewell’s propulsive drumming and hypnotic pitch bending, reminiscent of a My Bloody Valentine song from the early ’90s. “I think the thread that runs through the entire album is a desire to express a sense of ecstasy that isn’t exclusively joyful,” Johnson told me. There are moments of cheerful exuberance, but an aching sense of longing permeates throughout.
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marked, by Klein
Reviewed by Harmony Holiday
You’re in danger girl is the phrase positioned in gutted neon atop the heap at the pop-cultural junkyard, depicting with perfect pitch the flippant and recursive derangement of our times. Klein’s marked (July 24, 2024) invents a sonic landscape dense and defiant enough to transmute that crown of omens atop the ruins with intensity so committed it becomes optimism, utopian vision. We observe precarity so frequently it’s a coil of casual asides, a circuit and constant drone we integrate into the static of the modern nervous system. Here’s the arrhythmia with a slant so lush we climb it, an album as metal-noir mirror of a slope of sound bound up in the awestruck and stricken affect we acquire when we attempt to regulate existential dread by delighting in it.
We begin at the denouement, with “winner’s clause,” a delicate sonata smudged and blurred, then entirely uprooted by the guitars that dominate the song cycle. War is declared as if it’s armistice. We amble backward, facing the vicarious battlefield with a smirk. I think of Hendrix’s intentionally catastrophic national anthem, the cavalcade here is as warm and inviting; like good propaganda, it doubles as protest music. “(breaking news)” breaking news, breaking news, broken news, alludes to ruptures in the daily cycle of data theft. The phrase repeats until it shatters and becomes meaningless and too emphatic to bear. I think of Bisan and other journalists in Gaza checking in every morning to announce “I’m still alive.” Marked. Crowned in a territory beyond martyr and immortal. And this music is their distant, half-dejected, half-intrepid vigilante.
Vocals throughout the album are sparse and distorted as if filtered through a confrontational intercom, and sometimes isolated to highlight a disarming lyrical intimacy, as with “frontin,” a vocal-fried semi-satirical ballad on the erotic austerity of modern romance. “exclusive,” the final track, brings brag-rapping interrupted by a looping and distressed moan that undercuts any hubris. The loop puts me in the mind of those carousels at children’s fairs. No matter how many times they circle the territory, the child, once yourself, keeps waving to the familiars in the crowd. As she grows up, still spinning on the dead horse, the wave might flail with urgency, she recognizes more and more of her former chaperones in herself, accumulates guides and ancestors, waves to them each encounter in the round until she has to sing to differentiate between the love and its phantoms. There’s a burlesque austerity to the path to true self-recognition, and marked reveals its sonic talismans. Klein harnesses the ominousness of real interior voices, to lure the inner child at the center of us to speak up, adventurous, steadfast, and refusing to let up. We’re tuned to the spirit that knows how to both remain playful and rigorous, yet camouflage itself as jaded and oblivious when the enemy tries to punish its resilience. I feel seen.