Pop, rock, electronic music… Every week, “Libé” helps you find your way around the latest releases.
MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks (Anti-)
The year had taken off with Tigers Blood from Waxahatchee, she will begin her descent with Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman. Two names often mentioned in the same breath, collaborators (Right Back to It on the Waxahatchee album) and among the only ones today able to take up the torch of a timeless and incandescent rock, of this factory of impossible dreams, amalgam of simple ideas, strong images and wide open spaces, to which MJ Lenderman brings with this fourth album a considerable contribution. A record where he slips without embarrassment or effort into the costume of the modern American songwriter, expert in battered melodies and capable of disintegrating the entire literary rentrée in three verses – listen Wristwatch, If the first two chords don’t immediately blow you away, the lyrics will.
A natural little brother of Will Oldham and David Berman, who here evokes his recent break-up with Karly Hartzman (singer of the group Wednesday, of which Lenderman is the guitarist) in a mixture of raw realism, desperate humor and demolished poetry (Bark at the Moon, poignant final title which openly quotes Warren Zevon and Ozzy Osbourne). A Teenage Fanclub all by itself, airy, obvious, unstoppable (On My Knees). A smarter cousin of Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, capable of burying you in a ferruginous blizzard without making a big deal out of it (the screaming guitars of She’s Leaving You). In his book on the Rolling Stones, American journalist Rich Cohen wrote that with Wild Horses, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had written not only the song that all their dreams and aspirations converged on, but also the one that embodied, in its intention and influx, the ultimate goal of any musician, whoever he may be. There is no song here on the level of Wild Horses, but put end to end, the nine titles of Manning Fireworks reach the same horizon. Very large disk. Today Jimmy Batista
Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk (Mom + Pop)
We are justified in being wary of a concept album whose interconnected songs unfold a science fiction story in which the characters reprogram themselves at will by inserting LaserDiscs into their heads. Except that: the distrust does not resist listening to a single song ofImaginal Disk, the second album in the form of a surge from this Floridian duo, hyperactive on the networks as much as in its dense and super danceable pop. We don’t know much about Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin except that Tabula Rasa, the group in which they officiated before founding Magdalena Bay, played dirty progressive rock and proud of it. The music of their duo is undeniably pop, optimistic and without borders, even more so on this Imaginal Disk uninhibited by all aesthetic taboos, at the crossroads of Bangles, ELO and Oneohtrix Point Never. Olivier Lamm
Seefeel, Everything Squared (Warp)
A pioneer of the sensual relationship between shoegaze and gaseous ambient-dub, Seefeel is the most elastic and enigmatic entity of the 90s, opening magnetic fields to freak out compasses but not charts. Hence their relative confidentiality, compensated by the admiration of their peers (Aphex Twin, in particular) which justifies a cult that never extinguishes. The central core Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock have gone dormant several times, going to play in other territories, and their previous reunions, in 2011 and in quartet format, seemed unaccomplished and out of phase. This mini-LP of six tracks (another should follow) on the other hand reconnects with the sensations once felt of a music that transcends the purest sound mass, as if sculpted in clouds and dreams. Visionaries yesterday, they are finally reaping their due. Christopher Conte
Spirit of the Beehive, You’ll Have to Lose Something (Saddle Creek)
It’s scorching hot, you’re young and broke, in your squalid apartment bedroom you’re listening to a Silver Jews album. In his, across the hall, your roommate is blasting a Skinny Puppy song. Doors open, the two records overlapping as you both find yourself in the kitchen sharing your last LSD blotters. Upstairs, your neighbor is taking a shower while listening to John Coltrane on a demagnetized cassette. This is roughly what the fifth album by Spirit of the Beehive sounds like, one of the most exciting bands on the young US independent scene, a trio from Philadelphia mixing comatose alt-rock, jelly psychedelia and industrial beats. Thirty-eight minutes of shattered grace, all liquid guitars and twisted tapes, more melodic and peaceful than usual but still full of relentless ghostly hits. (1 /500, Found a Body). L.J.B.
Wayne Shorter, Celebration, volume 1 (Blue Note)
It was inevitable: a year after his death, which revealed to those who still doubted the importance of Wayne Shorter in the world of music, a first unreleased track has just been released on which it would seem that the saxophonist was working with a former traveling companion, the sound engineer Rob Griffin. A concert by his monumental quartet in Stockholm in 2014, which was to be part of a set of recordings entitled “Unidentified Flying Objects”, but which he would rename Celebration ten days before leaving this world. We hear the poet of sound, at the height of his art, all esoteric restraint and astonishing convolutions, sublimated by three partners – drummer Brian Blade, pianist Danilo Pérez and double bassist John Patitucci – who knew how to get in tune with the strange beauty of his compositions for twenty years. As soon as the record is placed on its groove, a climate of the beyond settles in, of jazz as of the rest, and radiates throughout the piece a feeling of plenitude. Jacques Denis
Peter Von Poehl and Marie Modiano, Capri, Ballad of the Spirits (Nest and Sound)
Capri is never over. In the gardens of the Villa Lysis, where they were invited for a festival, the nomadic lovebirds began to summon the ghosts of the Italian island in 2021 – but not Hervé Vilard – for a drift “musical and dreamlike”, said the pitch, in three languages. The Modiano heiress has already written a novel about it, the inner island, and with his Swedish lover, it is a farandole of pretty turbulent songs with inspirations as broad as the Bay of Naples that resulted from the show given then, and that they now deliver in album. Let’s not count on them for Italian postcards, despite some spaghetti country incursions, because the bottom of their inspiration remains intact, and looks as much towards the California of Laurel Canyon as in the direction of the Frenchy song or Scandinavian pop in natural wood. Beautiful. C.Co.
Augustin Hadelich, American Road Trip (Warner)
A major interpreter of concertos by Brahms, Dvorák, Britten, Dutilleux and Ligeti, violinist Augustin Hadelich demonstrates the same demanding and warm musicality in this “American road trip”, recorded with pianist Orion Weiss. Framed by hits to attract the customer (the Banjo and Fiddle by William Kroll, the Romance Op. 23 d’Amy Beach, le Somewhere Bernstein’s Sonate n° 4 Ives’ polytonal and the repetitive Road Movies Adams’s songs are defended with galvanizing precision and lyricism. The highlight of the CD remaining Netsuke, by the brilliant Stephen Hartke, combining Bartokian frenzy, ragtime accents, the slapped or drawn-out sounds of Japanese music, and exquisite bursts of lunar atonality. Eric Dahan
