I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!
By Jensen McRae
Growing up black and Jewish in Los Angeles, singer-songwriter Jensen McRae looked to mature writers (Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Alicia Keys) as role models as she sought to sidestep expectations she’d be just another R’n’B artist.
Early singles such as White Boy (“White girl arrives, I turn invisible. I don’t like who I am to you”) and Wolves “(I was 15, still in the valley, walking in a parking garage first time I met a wolf in person … And though I got away I never walked the same”) put her close to a more bruised Janis Ian.
On this remarkable, confrontational album she writes and sings with an unequivocal assurance and rare directness.
On I Can Change Him she admits to despairing defeat (“I know I can’t win. It’s me against the man he’s always been”); Daffodils is a heartbreaking picture of a woman trapped with an abusive man who “cleaned my clock, bought me daffodils”, and Praying for Your Downfall is equally blunt: “I’m finished praying for your downfall, can’t go on thinking it was my fault.”
Mostly framed as alt-folk fronted by her soulful anxieties, this can be downbeat, raw, and numbing as she addresses the damage done, but finds resolution and bitter acceptance, as on Let Me Be Wrong: “Something twisted in my chest says I’m good but not the best. When I was young that knocked me out, but nothing really shakes me now.”
Songs that sound as necessary as they are cathartic and uncomfortable.
Iris Silver Mist
by Jenny Hval
If Norway’s Jenny Hval were American or British, she’d be considered in the same company as Laurie Anderson, Björk, Japanese Breakfast, FKA Twigs, and other innovative women pushing genre boundaries.
She has rolled through dark metal, edgy art music and exacting jazz improvisations (2016’s collaborative In the End His Voice Will Be the Sound of Paper), to alt-folk and experimental sounds.
Her focused and accessible The Practice of Love in 2019 should have been her international breakthrough for its winning blend of art pop and electronica.
At 44, and a novelist who studied at the University of Melbourne, Hval brings a lot of life and intellectual experiences to her music: one short piece here is about the late German poet and dramatist Heiner Müller. But there is also considerable emotional warmth and pop directness (the opener Lay Down).
Apparently inspired by the scents of perfumes discovered during Covid isolation, Iris Silver Mist can be quietly gripping experimental pop (the increasingly intense percussion and clattering of To Be A Rose), dramatic synth-pop (the landscape of sound designs on I Want to Start at the Beginning and I Want the End to Sound Like This), strident synth-rock on the miniature The Artist is Absent or as hazy as fog (A Ballad).
Jenny Hval hasn’t been an easy proposition but, if those previous references mean anything, there’s a career to be discovered starting with this sometimes lush, entrancing and gently provocative collection.
The Scholars
by Car Seat Headrest
Seattle-based Car Seat Headrest fronted by singer-writer Will Toledo, have remained loyally indie and alt-rock, but for this 13th album embrace one of music’s most demanding templates: the rock opera.
It’s an ambitious but solid record tracing the personalities and character-driven stories of a band called The Scholars – with member names like Beolco, Devereaux and Chanticleer – who struggle with existential issues and matters of family and faith as well as touring in a van, the backstage green room and worse: “‘We should start a band, lose all touch with the real world.’ ‘Good luck with that, man.’ And that was the start of a major catastrophe.”
This is sheeted home in a rawer version of Springsteen’s grandeur (the eight-minute opener CCF) and the heft of The Who’s explosive power chords (the terrific dynamics of The Catastrophe and in the 11-minute Gethsemane: “I can do whatever the fuck I want to when I want to, you’re only wearing my skin”).
Peppered with power pop (Devereaux) and quiet passages (the bookends of damaged weariness on another 11-minute epic, Reality), the lyrical depths, multiple perspectives, and songs with titles like Gethsemane and Planet Desperation demand almost academic attention. Have a notebook handy.
In that regard it’s more like the Genesis concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway than Bowie’s Ziggy or the Who’s Tommy.
And as with all those, don’t come expecting the joyously unhinged and escapist rock’n’roll spirit. As Reality acknowledges, “It just slipped away one morning and when they woke up, they found it was gone. They still sang the songs and made merry, but deep down, they knew something was wrong.”
It’s smart, referential, conceptual rock, with footnotes.
These albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl
