My Daughter My Sister My Son
By Ebony Lamb, her debut single on Slow Time Records
Some will already know Lamb’s name as an accomplished portrait photographer and the voice of Wellington alt-country outfit Eb & Sparrow. But now she’s venturing out alone, without the acoustic guitar, on a single released via Nadia Reid’s cottage label Slow Time Records and produced and backed by Bic Runga and Kody Nielson. And yes, it sounds like all of the above, only in a very small room with a vibraphone and a drum kit made of shoeboxes. Quite lovely and fitting into the chapter on a future history of NZ music that might be called “the post-Aldous era”.
What Was I Made For?
By Billie Eilish, from the Barbie Soundtrack
The most anticipated movie of the year had another secret marketing ploy up its hot-pink sleeves. It hired Billie Eilish and producer brother Finneas to create a song for Barbie, a side project that Eilish says got them out of a creative rut after second album Happier Than Ever. It’s a tiny dollhouse of a ballad, which, with emotional lyrics that psychoanalyse Barbie’s existential thoughts, are more than enough to make up for a lack of dynamic production. “Looked so alive, turns out I’m not real. Just something you paid for.” It’s a harsh but well-executed contrast to Barbie’s glitzy exterior, and one that Eilish says is exactly how she feels herself. So, she’s done a Barbie theme, and a Bond one, too. You might start worrying what other 1960s icon she’s going to drown in Gen Z angst.
Dirt
By Claud from their new album Supermodels
Claud is known as a bedroom pop singer-songwriter hailing from suburban Chicago. But the grungy electric guitar opening of their new song Dirt shows the singer heading toward something rockier, all the while keeping catchy hooks on the roster. As one of the quicker-paced tracks on the album, Dirt seems to mark a turning point for the singer, who was the first to sign to Phoebe Bridgers’ label, Saddest Factory Records, in 2020.
Skin in the Game
by Slowdive, from the forthcoming album Everything Is Alive
One of the main proponents of shoegaze, that loud, dreamy and pointedly personality-free English wave of bands who were swept aside when grunge and Britpop took over the world in the 1990s, Slowdive reformed a few years back and have a reunion album due out in September. Skin in the Game marks a bold new direction … kidding! It’s Slowdive sounding like the sweet sigh of a big friendly giant in a very echoey cave of guitars, and not for the first time. Still, if you’re going to stick to your knitting this long, it’s good to have a pattern as pretty and woolly as this. The reunited band bring their many guitar-effects pedals to Auckland’s Powerstation on Wednesday, July 26.
Stairway to Heaven
By King Loser, from the album Sonic Super Free Hi-Fi
No, it’s not that one, but a 1994 King Loser original, in which Celia Mancini and Chris Heazlewood invoke Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood and sing dreamily about eating human flesh off the bone. Relevant this week because the terrific eponymous film telling the turbulent story of King Loser has its NZ International Film Festival debut on July 28 before coming to a main-centre cinema near you.
No Beginning
By Tony Allen & Adrian Younge, from the album Tony Allen JID018
The Nigerian drummer who put the beat in Afrobeat, Tony Allen died in 2020 after a career that stretched from work with Fela Kuti to Damon Albarn’s various post-Blur side projects including Gorillaz and the Good, the Bad & the Queen. No Beginning is a track from his posthumous collaboration with Jazz Is Dead label producer Adrian Younge as part of a series paying tribute to master musicians much sampled by the hip-hop generations. This one may not be the grooviest tune on what is an extremely groovy album, but if you ever wondered what an ellipsis sounded like expressed percussively … well, here you go.
That Old Black Magic
by Tony Bennett with the Dave Brubeck Trio from the album The White House Sessions, Live 1962.
A swingin’ time capsule from the vast discography of the late great Tony Bennett that reminds us what was special about the singer before all those duet albums of his elder statesman period. And one that reminds us that his long life rubbed up against American history many times, whether it was on the frontlines of WWII or the Civil Rights Movement. In August 1962, Bennett had become one of America’s biggest pop stars after I Left My Heart in San Francisco — originally released as a B-side — became a hit and the New Yorker’s signature song. Pianist Dave Brubeck was the biggest name in jazz after the million-selling Time Out album. The two played in a park at the invitation of JFK as a thank-you to the college kids attending a summer seminar at the White House. That Old Black Magic came from a spontaneous session that ended the show with Bennett joining the Brubeck Trio for four songs including Black Magic, which, originally, was the only song released from the historic show until the entire concert was unearthed from the vaults in 2013.
Bennett’s connection to the song went back to its origins. The song had first been recorded by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra in 1942. During his time in the US army in occupied Germany Bennett first sang it with the band which still carried the name of the band leader after he was posted missing.
