New albums we listened to this week
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Spoon | Taylor McFerrin | Jenny Lewis | Shabazz Palaces
Spoon | B+
They Want My Soul (Loma Vista) kicks off with Stonesy strut, which is refreshing and anomalous since the remaining 35 minutes are as inimitably, unrelentingly Spoony as Spoon can be. They tick all the band’s paradoxical boxes — tidy grit, substantial stylishness, effortless propulsion, layered minimalism, dispassionate rocking-out (in spots, the hardest they have in ages) — all of which is a thrill following a four-year hiatus. It breaks approximately zero new ground.Spoon doesn’t have to bend; the universe bends to Spoon.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Taylor McFerrin | B+
His music is subtler and less playful than his father’s, but it’s just as colorful, idiosyncratic and inventive, casually blurring the lines between jazz, R&B, hip-hop and electronica. On his long-gestating debut, Early Riser (Brainfeeder), he handles almost every instrument, and coordinates a diverse but simpatico cast of collaborators, but its most impressive feat is how impossibly warm, fluid and organic it feels despite all that legwork.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Jenny Lewis | B+
Polished and pristine as a SoCal sunset, The Voyager (Warner) does double duty as one of the summer’s breeziest, most easy-pleasing pop records and one of its subtlest, wryest heartbreakers. Lewis passes over roots and country (to say nothing of “indie”) in favor of a luxuriously crafted ’70s L.A. soft-rock throwback (hey there, Haim) — that’s all achingly sunny melody and smarting narratives of romantic regret and nagging displacement.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Shabazz Palaces | A-
Lese Majesty (Sub Pop) achieves its sense of foreboding by muddling the vocals and dismembering the rhythms. It’s strange, but subdued as it takes aim — from a phantasmagoria of mothership motherboard sound and ambient texture — at the selfie kids and the powers that be. Says Ishmael Butler of his intentions: “Utter relaxation and tension, confusion and certainty, joy and also feeling close to the timbres of anguish and pain; history, futurism; but everything is an attempt to expand the now.” You decide where between profundity and puffery that lies.
—Dotun Akintoye
