What 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.
Mega-funky art pop, rubbed-raw acoustic blues and more.
Cibo Matto | A-
Mega-funky art-pop superheroes Cibo Matto are back and they’ve found a new place to dwell. Love — and ghosts — are in the air at Hotel Valentine (Chimera), a swingin’ hotel-themed musical setting with a fully equipped super-relaxed lounge, quasi-tropical tiki bar and bangin’ hip-hop/electro-funk nightclub. The album is creeping with paranormal activity, but Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori are no mere specters of their former selves: They’re just as fruity, funny, jazzy and snazzy as ever.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Wild Beasts | B+
It takes time to reveal itself, but Wild Beasts’ fourth album ultimately emerges as the plumpest, ripest fruit yet from England’s preeminent surrealist romantics. A less dramatic evolutionary step than its predecessors, Present Tense (Domino) retains the decadent viscosity, swooningly sinuous grooves and immaculate precision of 2011’s dark, lustful Smother, but adopts a brighter outlook and an even lusher, more synth-swaddled palette.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Sun Kil Moon | A
Mark Kozelek’s music has always been poignant and personal, but he’s never cut a record as nakedly intimate or profoundly affecting as Sun Kil Moon’s Benji (Caldo Verde). A rambling cycle of plainspoken, minutely detailed recollections set atop spartan nylon-string fingerlings and rubbed-raw acoustic blues — touching on all varieties of death (of family members, acquaintances, celebrities; in freak accidents, mass murders, assisted suicides) — it stacks blithering mundanity alongside excruciating sentiment until the two become indistinguishable.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Tinariwen | B+
Ibrahim Ag Alhabib has plugged his guitars back in, he’s traded TV on the Radio for the goddamn Chili Peppers, and when the part of Mali he and his band often call home finally capitulated to sectarian ruin, they traded the Sahara for Joshua Tree. But Emmaar (Anti) still has all Tinariwen’s quiet desert-caravan rumble. Phrases become chants, Alhabib’s growl undulates, groove abounds and — have mercy — they still play the blues.
—Dotun Akintoye
