NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best albums out May 24

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

On our survey of the week's most exciting new albums, WRTI's Nate Chinen and NPR Music's Sheldon Pearce get all wrapped up in the amniotic embrace of a new album by a guru of the L.A. ambient-jazz scene.The new album by Carlos Niño & Friends is called Placenta. If you know anything about Niño, you'll probably be able to guess that the subject that title suggests — pregancy and childbirth — are taken very seriously. Those "Friends" are crucial too: Niño has become a central figure in a scene whose reverberations are starting to be felt well beyond the community itself, and are drawing more artists in. You can hear Niño on André 3000's flute album New Blue Sun, and André returns the favor here.Also this week: The fourth album by DIIV sees the indie rock group leaning into shoegaze-inspired sounds, and Andrew Bird creates an album in tribute to the "Golden Era" jazz tunes of the 1930s and '40s he heard on Sunday morning radio shows as a young adult in Chicago.Featured Albums:• Carlos Niño & Friends, Placenta• DIIV, Frog in Boiling Water• Andrew Bird Trio, Sunday Morning Put-On Other notable albums out May 24: • Tiny Habits, All For Something• Vince Staples, Dark Times• Alex Sipiagin, Horizons• Machinedrum, 3FOR82• Joshua Moshier, semipermanence• Nathy Peluso, GrasaSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Just a heads up that this podcast includes some explicit language. Hey, happy Friday, Sheldon. It is May 24th. And I don't know about you, but for me, all I can think about is the fact that tomorrow, one of my heroes, Marshall Allen, is turning 100 years old. Man. What a life. What a career.

I mean, it feels like he maximized every single one of those hundred. in all that he accomplished with his work with SunRah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So Marshall Allen is an alto saxophonist. He has been playing with the SunRah Orchestra since the 1950s. He took over leadership of the band when SunRah made his transition to the spaceways more than 30 years ago. And he has been wildly prolific in his late 90s.

And if you are listening to this on Friday, tonight he will be on stage at, Union transfer in Philadelphia with the SunRWA orchestra, making a big noise with what I dare say is undiminished energy. So, man, happy centennial to the great Marshall Allen, someone that we can all look up to. On the show today, we've got some more celestial music. I'm Nate Chenen from WRTI in Philadelphia. And I'm Sheldon Pierce, an editor at NPR Music. And this is New Music Friday for May 24. Today we're going to talk. about placenta by the percussionist Carlos Nino. We're also going to touch on new albums by the band Dive and the Andrew Bird Trio. Sheldon, do you have a whole lot of

perspective on like natural birthing? I have. Is this an area of expertise for you? This is all new to me. This is, it's sort of interesting. I'm a big fan of concept records where the concept in question is completely foreign to me. So, sort of diving into this one was really interesting. Can you talk through for those who aren't familiar Carlos' background? Because this seems like sort of right up his alley if you've spent any time with his music. It's hard for me to imagine anyone else making this album. That's exactly right.

This, you know, as we said, this is an album called Placenta. the opening track is Love to All Dulas Exclamation point There are other tracks on this album titled Placenta Nourishment New Home The Galaxy

That's all one title There's a track called Generous Pelvis And you know One important thing to say right up front is that there is nothing ironical or like snickery

about this Like the sincerity is deep, deep, deep. And that says a lot about the artist we're discussing. Carlos Nino is a percussionist and a real connector in the Los Angeles scene. I think he lives in the Santa Monica area. His name has been on a lot of lips this year because he really was the key catalyst in this current phase of the Andre 3,000 artistic journey. Yes. It was running into Andre in their...

local natural grocery store and introducing himself that led to this whole flute and electronics ambient exploration that most tangibly produced the album New Blue Sun. And I saw Carlos with Andre at the Big Ears Festival this year. I also saw him with Shabaka, and I've seen him with some other artists at the New York Winter Jazz Fest. And yeah, that's the first thing to know about him is that he's this like sort of mystic of sound. And when I say he's a percussionist, it almost is a misleading

description. Because when you think of a percussionist, you probably think about percussive rhythm and like noise and speed and all these things. And he's really the kind of percussionist who you think about like a membrane stretched over a wooden frame and like a hand like gently brushing against the grain of the drum head, you know,

or like the rustle of like cowrie shells and you know it's it's like that kind of vibe yeah it's interesting because on the list of things that he is responsible for on this record you have bells you have chimes collage symbol drums field recordings gongs kalimba but then you get into leaves and plants just like general rattles sound design as an idea he really does take percussion to mean just any kind of sort of percussive influence that you can have on a song. He's not like a drummer in the traditional sense. And it's funny, you mentioned the title connector.

He also puts like radical empath in his bio. And it feels like he cherishes those as much, if not more so, than the title of percussionist or producer. He produced, mixed, edited, and arranged this. whole record. And just to give you a sense of the artist at play here, there are performance credits for painting and dancing on here. And one on Carla's beads is just labeled as celestial instrument. So the vibes are strong with this record. The idea behind the project, which is Carlos Nino and Friends, is that the title is supposed to invoke, like, freedom in collaboration,

to be able to pursue his wildest creative impulses with the people that are closest to him. And it feels powerful that that is happening in service of this record that is literally about childbirth and the people who often make natural childbirth possible. It's funny, Andre 3,000, the newest entrant into his little cast of characters, told the New York Times that Carlos was the one who,

put the idea of being a part of a collective in front of him, and that was the birth of New Blue Sun, but also even more so he appreciated meeting someone that was crazier than he was, which I thought was very, very representative of the sounds that you hear on this record. This record goes to a lot of different places. I was wondering, what do you think it is about Carlos that seems to draw so many people to him?

I think really the, the, like, childlike purity of his creative intention is, like, it has to be at the top of the list, you know? Yeah. And it's funny, it is so complete his commitment that it really disarms the skepticism, which I think is crucial, because, like, on paper and maybe even beyond that, this is a project that probably should raise some eyebrows. Yeah. You know, it's kind of like a walking Fred Armisen skit. You know, here's this like bushy-haired, like woo-woo, Southern California percussion celestial guru who is like waxing rhapsodic about placentas and like the birth canal and contractions and what have you.

We should say like, and Sheldon, we're a couple of men having this discussion right now. Right. You know, this is a pretty like fraught time to talk about. women's bodily autonomy and, you know, the process of childbirth and like, especially like, presuming to tell that story. Yeah. As a man, you know, I don't know that he ever acknowledges that position. Yeah. You know, but I do think that he comes correct. He comes with a lot of, like, sincerity and like generosity and wonderment. But, I mean, you really do have to kind of, like, toggle off your cynicism

approaching this album because on its face it's kind of suspect. Yeah, yeah. I don't think he even that thought never even crossed his mind. I think he's so earnest

in his belief that this is like him channeling the very explicit and unique experience that he felt when his child was recently born Moss and then tying it to the experience

that you. he felt when his first child Azul was born, and really trying to wrap himself up in the feeling of that, in the experience of that, in being connected to the people who were a part of that, he so earnestly feels like he is connecting that individual moment that he can't see beyond it to the scope of, you know, motherhood and childbirth and where he figures into it,

It does create a sort of interesting record that seems to be like trying to strike a balance between calm and exertion when you're like on the outside of that process. The resulting music, it sort of almost feels like something out of a sci-fi score at times when you think about like Moonlight Watsu and Dub, which has like this really glitchy production or even you mentioned like just. generous pelvis, which has those like staggered drums and the chimes and little bursts of ambient noise. It's always restless. It's like never sitting still in any given pocket, which maybe like is representative of the fidgetiness of an expectant dad, like waiting for a child to come into the world. I could only appreciate this record as one that really seems to be like trying to under understand a process that it isn't really fully a part of, but is really trying to appreciate. I think that's a good way to put it. And I want to sort of underscore something you said about the all over the placeness of this album

stylistically. That's one reason that I would not slot this under like new age or easy listening. It's a pretty, I mean, you can certainly like just vibe out and kind of go on the journey. but if you like pay attention to what's happening musically here, it's pretty fascinating, you know, and it is like this amalgam of styles. You mentioned the dub track. You know, it's pretty like comfortable and just calmly authoritative in that groove. Yeah.

There's also a track that caught my eye because the title is, in appreciation of Chico Hamilton's vast influence on the West Coast sound. Yeah. You know, which is a really cool head nod toward a legendary drummer and composer bandleader from, you know, mid-century. Chico Hamilton is a really meaningful touchstone for someone like Carlos Nino. And the other person who comes to mind for me because of the scope of this project is Milford Graves, who was, you know, like Carlos, he was a percussionist plus, you know. And in Milford's case, he was a botanist and a martial artist and a sort of homeschooled cardio researcher. You know, like he was somebody who did all this work on the human heartbeat,

thinking about it as a rhythmic instrument, but also like expanding that out. And that kind of conceptual relationship to rhythm feels very pertinent here, you know. And so does that. the way, like, the use of metaphor. Yeah. Yeah. On that track that I mentioned, placenta, nourishment, new home, the galaxy, there's some spoken word that, you know, that makes the sort of wide-eyed observation that, you know, for a fetus, the placenta is the known universe.

The baby's whole universe. The placenta. The galaxy The galaxy By extension, there's kind of something to be said about that. We're all in the sort of placental substance of the actual universe. You know, there's this kind of connection being made there. Yeah, you know, I think that is why the record ends up working for me.

I haven't been shy about saying that New Blue Sun didn't really hit for me the way that it hit for many. I think the difference in this record is something you mentioned earlier. It's in intention. Like, even as scatterbrained as it can be, as many different directions as it is trying to move, it has very specific ideas about what it wants to do and where it wants to go. Like, whether or not it successfully pulls off every maneuver that it tries, that's up for debate. but it knows what it wants, and in pursuit of that,

it does some really, really interesting things that are worth exploring. And to your point, it's not the kind of record that you can just throw on and ignore. Like, throughout this, there are really interesting compositional moments that you are forced to hone in on

and really go, huh, oh, okay, and really wrestle with those. Yeah. So once again, this is Placenta by Carlos Nia. and friends. Some of those friends include the guitarist Nate Mercero and the saxophonist Sam Gandel. And someone you may know named Andre 3000 playing some of his flutes. Now we're going to take a short break and we'll talk about more albums, including new projects from Andrew Bird and Dive when we get back.

And we're back. I'm Nate Chenen from WRTI. I'm here with Sheldon Pierce. And we're talking about some of the best new albums out on Friday, May 24th. Our second album is by the Shugays Band Dive. That's D-I-I-V. The record is called Frog in Boiling Water. It's their first album since 2019's Deceiver, produced by Chris Cody, who worked on records for Beach House and mixed the slow dive return. This record found the band in sort of a chaotic place in an attempt to make the band Democratic for the first time. It nearly destroyed itself in the four-year process of recording this record. But the resulting album is quite breathtaking. It references the Boiling Frog from the Daniel Quinn novel, The Story of Bee, a metaphor here used for this

broad scale representation of our place in late stage capitalism. We are the frog capitalism, the boiling water. Fittingly, the music is dense and cataclysmic. From the jump, it lets you know where it is on the opener in Amber. Zachary Cole Smith sings, The rotating villains profit off suffering, a doomsday machine glitch is our new guy. God. So Nate, we know what we're getting into. How do you really feel, Zach? Not a lot of subtlety there,

but I think that is really the power of this record. It is so, so packed in, so, so heavy, and it sort of just washes over you in the way that a lot of the best Shugays records do. It's interesting to hear you state those lyrics. It feels so much. It feels so much. much more. It's like pulling them out of the viscous, you know, environment and plopping it on like a lab table, you know, right. Because the, the affect of the album, you know, as with so much shoegaze, right? It's like, it's a very, like, steady hum of both music and lyrics. And, and like, for me, because the sort of the roots of

like shoegays hit me right in my sort of teenage you know, development. Like for me this is actually like a very kind of comforting sound which is, you know, it's maybe at odds with the urgency of the message. Yeah. But I mean, I just, I love

like the enveloping character of this album sonically. You know, it's every every like little detail is so perfectly calibrated. To me, it's like, it's the same pleasure centers that I get from revisiting, you know, Kevin Shields. Yeah. Productions with My Bloody Valentine, you know, there are a couple of moments that remind me in a good way of, like, vintage smashing pumpkins, you know, like, you just feel like you are in the presence of a band that really

knows exactly what it's set out to do. Yeah. And just like, this is very obviously, not like a first or second record. Like this is a band that has lived with this music and lived with each other. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you listen to old dive records and then come into this one, it feels very much like they have

settled into something. It's interesting to hear the backstory of infighting in an attempt to sort of like democratize the sound creating this record because it does feel like they've settled into some kind of

of like uniform organism on this record. And to your point, I'm predisposed to liking this sort of thing. And I think there are only great dive records, but I think this might be their best one. Just how the music, it isn't necessarily at odds with the lyrics, but to your point, what unifies this record with a lot of the best Shugay's records is, Like, you don't have to be keyed into what is being said to, like, appreciate them texturally and sonically.

And I think you don't have to necessarily understand. There don't have to be lyrics at all in a lot of those cases for them to be able to express what they're trying to express to you. And I think this record does that as well, which is even more impressive considering the particular aims. I mean, on the title track, there's this big surge about a minute in, and it crests to, like, if you listen closely, like really opulent imagery, ivory towers and crosses, and then it all builds to this big gut punch of a lyric, My Lively Hood-Hodding in your hands, which is heavy. But then it, like, settles again into, it's like this foam, like, decompressing back into itself. And it becomes this really pleasant experience. It's an interesting thing to kind of have to make sense of. You have a song like Little Birds that sounds almost haunted and resigned to its fate.

But the guitars feel like they're just like a weighted blanket, like being draped over you in the best sense. Well, it's funny, this is probably like, this is probably the influence of our. Carlos Niño sidebar, but, you know, there is like the word that popped into my head as you were talking was amniotic. Yeah. You know? Like, the feeling of these guitars mixed to the way that they are with the slow, steady heave of the drums, like, it kind of has that feeling, you know?

Like, the sort of, it's like a little muffled, but it's very, like, sensory and immersive. And another song that, um, that captures that for me, with lyrics that I think are a little, a little more like relatable, like personally relatable is brown paper bag. Yeah.

You know, it's got that chug and, you know, the lyrics are really more about just this feeling of like a kind of resigned despondency, you know? And then like, and then the word again. Like, you know, like this, like I feel like this disposable

kind of garbage basically. Yeah. floating along again. Like, oh, I'm in this place, like, once more, and I'll probably be here again. I mean, who hasn't felt that? Yeah, I mean, to your point about the amniotic nature of it, the power is in the mixing, and you can hear it in a song like Brown Paper Bag.

The juxtaposition of the heavy guitarist as this sort of outer sack, but the airy vocals sort of like, just drifting in like this compartmentalized space, it feels like you can't quite access, but you can see. And I mean, to your point about Kevin Shields, at the risk of sounding blasphemous, it does have that same sort of textual richness

of My Bloody Valentine. Well, I like this album, I think, probably as much as you do, if that's possible. But yeah, it's really great. Yeah, yeah. That's the latest from Dive. called Frog in Boiling Water. Our next album is by the singer-songwriter and violinist, Andrew Bird.

It's called Sunday Morning Put On. Deep, fo. I've grown accustomed to your face. You always make my day begin. I've grown accustomed to the tune. You whistle. This is an album Your smiles

Your frowns You ups You're down This is an album of Reimagined and Reconfigured Songs from Mostly the Great American Songbook

Yeah It's It's a I hesitate to call it a jazz album But it is certainly In dialogue with the jazz tradition

In addition to his voice In violin He has a really capable rhythm section with Alan Hampton on bass and Ted Poor on drums. There's also a couple of guests, guitarist Jeff Parker and organist Larry Goldings. But really the focus is on the vocal interpretation of these songs. And it was really fascinating to me as somebody who hears these songs performed by jazz artists all the time, this crossing of the tracks that he does here, it really caused me

to sort of sit up and take notice. How did it hit you? Sheldon. Yeah, you know, I do think it's accurate. It'd be more accurate to think of it as like a standards album. It doesn't, I mean, it is clearly jazz touched, but it feels like he is coming at these more straight on. He has said that when he lived in Chicago in his 20s, he would stay up on Saturday nights listening to the WBZ radio show Blues Before Sunrise, which played... Shout out to WBEZ. Played rare blues, jazz, and gospel. records and then you know he'd wake up the next morning to a show where dick buckley played the jazz of the 30s and 40s and that sunday morning put on is his attempt to sort of like tap into the

version of himself who was appreciating all those things he felt like those traditions had informed a lot of the music that he was making but that now that he had some distance between that time he wanted to connect with it more explicitly and so there are takes here from Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Lerner and Lowe, Rogers in Hart. He does a take on the My Fair Lady's show tune.

I've grown accustomed to her face. There is a lot of substituting his violin in for other instruments and using his weapon of choice to sort of like bring these standards closer to the Andrew Bird like musical universe.

I do think it is successful in bringing something almost a little somber to some of these. Like a lot of these songs you think of them as sort of like schmaltzy classics. But, I mean, to take I've grown accustomed to her face as an example, which was performed by everybody from Nat King Cole to Dean Martin and is normally more of a sort of like uplifting song. his version kind of like strips the sort of like musical sheen from it and makes it something a bit more down to earth. It feels like that is the mode that he is generally trafficking in throughout this record.

I think stripped down and looking at these songs and saying, oh, these songs have good bones. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like let's cut to the heart of the record. Yeah, yeah. And I have a lot to say about kind of what has happened to standards, you know, You know, like all of the association that we have.

You remember the Rod Stewart American Songbook series, you know, where he sort of did his best impression of, like, a wedding singer with these kind of, like, as you say, schmaltzy cocktail backings. Yeah, yeah. We can talk about Michael Bublay. We can talk about Lady Gaga, you know, doing her thing with Tony Bennett. What all of those things have in common is this kind of like, we are going to class up the joint. You know, like, it's time to, like, put your grown-up clothes on. Right, right. You know, sashay in, you know, unfit to the ballroom.

Very serious dinner party energy. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, one thing that this reminds me of is I love Lyle Lovett's large band. You know, Lyle Lovett is a country singer-songwriter, really fabulous country artist. And he's got this big band, basically. And they do all kinds of stuff. And years and years ago, I saw him do some stand. with the large band.

And he's not, you know, when he does that, he's not trying to sound like a quote unquote jazz singer. He's singing the songs, you know. Another really huge touchstone here, of course, is Willie Nelson, you know, his Stardust album. And so this feels like a similar impulse to me, you know. It's like there is jazz in this, you know, like, and he is certainly a jazz literate performer.

Yeah. And he can improvise and all of that. He has the flexibility of phrase. and, you know, but there's a way in which he's kind of saying, like, let's just forget about genre for the moment. And let's just, like, look at the material. One really good example for me is, you'd be so nice to come home to. Yeah. Which is a song that a lot of people might know from Chet Baker's version, you know.

You'd be so nice to come home to. You'd be so nice by the fire As a breeze on high Sing a lullaby You'd be all that I could desire Under stars chilled by the moonlight And this song has lyrics that are very like Oh, you know, it's sort of picturing this domestic idol.

right? Like, you'd be so nice by the fire, you know. But it's really like the heart of the song is this kind of yearning because it is picturing this thing that is not a reality, you know? Yeah. Like this would be a really wonderful thing to have if only I had it. Yeah. And so I think he captures some of that, you know, just that tiny hint of like desolation in the lyrics. You know, it's, you know, it's, It's romantic, but it's also kind of a little bit desperate. To your point about not feeling beholden to the, like, jazz standards vision, there are no rules that he is following on this. So often it feels like in embracing standards, people feel like they are moving into a very specific wheelhouse, and they have to do a very specific kind of thing

in service of a very specific kind of audience. And this feels more like Andrew Bird saying, I like these songs. They mean something to me, but this is how I express them and what they mean to me. I think about Django, which is a take on John Lewis's tribute

to the great jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt. Bird uses his violin as a stand-in for the vibraphone on that song, which is like, such a dramatic textural shift, but it really does transform the song into an Andrew Bird's song. And he's not thinking at all about what that means in terms of this song's relationship to its original context. He's breaking from all of that completely.

I wonder if on some level, as he plays Django, he's thinking about Stefan Grapelli, who was, you know, Django Reinhart's, like, right-hand man. You know, he's such a strong voice on his... instrument that you never think that he's going into a bag. You know, he's not. But yeah, his fluidity and his sensitivity to the heart of the song. In each case, I think, is what really makes this such a winning effort. Yeah, the whole record just clearly twinkles with an admiration for a music of that time.

So that is the Sunday Morning Put On, excellent title, by the Andrew Bird Trio with Alan Hampton on bass and Ted Poor on drums. We've got several more albums to share in our lightning round. That's coming up right after this short break. It's time for a quick roundup of some other albums out today, May 24th. Nate, what do you have for us? The first album we have is called All For Something. It's by the folk pop group Tiny Habits, which originated in Boston out of a

some Berkeley College of Music students. I've been waiting with secrets I've been holding for a long time, spent time spent chasing. This is an album that has a low-key charisma, but it's very confident in itself. It's very tuneful. It has a lot of balanced texture and songs that reward some, some intimate close listening.

The Long Beach rapper Vince Staples is releasing a new album called Dark Times. His first album since 2022's Romano Park broke my heart, released on the heels of his Netflix tragic comedy, The Vince Staples show, was recorded over six months in North

Hollywood, and he describes the record as an attempt to master things that he's been doing throughout his career. Mission complete, out of the mud, label the leader, they follow him because, light on my feet, floating above, be creeping and keeping in touch. I'm on some halls that I pull up to give me some pussy before they come get me a hug.

Shit is disgusting, but then I don't eat that heaven is going to judge. Next up, Alex Sipiagin is a jazz trumpeter who's worked across the whole spectrum of modern jazz since he moved to the United States from Russia in 1990. And he has a deeply sure-footed new album called Horizons with a real dream team of collaborators. saxophonist Chris Potter, pianist John Eskreet, bassist Matt Brewer, and drummer Eric Harland. You can hear how this group gels on the song, Jumping Ahead. Travis Stewart's new album, as Machine Drum, 3 for 82, was inspired by a trip to Joshua Tree National Park, where Solitude led him to old hard drives full of Impulse Tracker-produced beats from the late 90s.

The resulting record taps into the old mode, and the creativity required to be. to navigate antiquated technology. And it includes collaborations with Aja Monet, Tenache, Mick Jenkins, Copaz Jones, Deem Spencer, Jesse Boykin's III, and more.

If you know the name Joshua Machier, it's probably because you've seen his credit as a composer for film and television, the FX series baskets or documentary now or the new iteration of lunitudes. Now with semi-permanence, he's making his move

as a chamber jazz band leader, writing drifty tunes that feature his piano and synths in dialogue with some folks from the LA scene, like the vocalist Sabina Skuba, saxophonist Caroline Davis, and on this track, canceled plans, the guitarist Jeff Parker. And last but not least, in the four years since Nathie Paluso released her debut album, The Argentine Spanish singer and rapper has collaborated with international hitmakers like Bizarrap, Carol G, Cangana, and Christina Aguilera. Her second album, Graza, balances salsa vocals with her cutting bars over the innovative wacky beats of a burgeoning Spanish scene.

And that's to learn You have to learn to marquette. And that wraps up this episode of New Music Friday for May 24th. If you have feedback for us, please reach out at all songs at NPR.org. If you like the show, tell your friends, and please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash music newsletter. Please remember, too, that if you want to listen to this show, sponsor-free, you can support our work by joining NPR Music Plus. Just go to plus.npr.org slash NPR Music or search for NPR Music in Apple Podcasts.

This podcast was produced by Joaquin Kotler. We had editorial support from Jacob Gans. I'm Nate Chen N from WRTI. I'm Sheldman Pierce for NPR Music. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.