THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 5As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements
in advance and to check the requirements for
in-person attendance.ILLUSTRATION BY NÚRIA JUST
The Toronto punks of PUP—Stefan Babcock (vocals, rhythm guitar),
Steve Sladkowski (lead guitar), Nestor Chumak (bass, keyboard), and
Zack Mykula (percussion)—have spent the past decade making com-
bustible meta-rock about the toil of rocking. They named their second
album “The Dream Is Over,” echoing a doctor’s words to Babcock after
he shredded his vocal cords playing more than four hundred shows.
“Morbid Stuff,” from 2019, explored his subsequent depression. Each
new release has shed more of the band’s sonic inhibitions. PUP’s fourth
album, “The Unraveling of PUPTheBand,” finds the quartet completely
removing any of the limits left on their music, pushing things as far as
possible. With help from a new producer, Peter Katis, the band’s tracks
expand in fun and humorous ways—a piano ballad about buying a piano,
a robot love song, a sudden synth intro. The throttling, self-indulgent
closer, “PUPTheBand Inc. Is Filing for Bankruptcy,” adds a sax solo to a
song about failing upward, its lyrics continuing PUP’s self-aware streak:
“Too old for teen angst, too young to be washed.”—Sheldon PearceROCK1
MUSICChamber Music Society of
Lincoln Center
CLASSICAL Julius Eastman—a gay Black com-
poser who blazed his own path in the Minimalist
movement and died, largely unappreciated, in
1990—has enjoyed a small yet persistent revival
during the past several seasons. In February, the
New York Philharmonic gave the professional
première of his Symphony No. II, in which a pha-
lanx of timpanists hammered away so insistently
that listeners could almost feel the resonance in
their bodies. That boldness is characteristic of
the composer, who reclaimed gay and racial slurs
in the titles of his works. This week, the Cham-
ber Music Society of Lincoln Center programs
Eastman’s “Gay Guerrilla,” a piece that generates
a formidable, indefatigable march of sound from
two pianos. A guerrilla, Eastman once said, “is
someone who is, in any case, sacrificing his life
for a point of view.. .. That is the reason that I
use gay guerrilla, in hopes that I might be one,
if called upon to be one.”—Oussama Zahr (Rose
Studio; April 14 at 7:30.)Cinthie: “DJ-Kicks”
ELECTRONIC The idea of a d.j. taking the listener
on a journey is as dog-eared as dance-music
rhetoric gets. But the path that the Berlin d.j.
Cinthie cuts on her edition of the “DJ-Kicks”
series isn’t a straight one, and though its pro-
gression is hardly unheard of—from airy and
vocal-heavy house to an increasingly dank,
percussive minimalism, then back again—
this particular course is uniquely rewarding.
Cinthie’s mixes expose the seams more than
is usual for this series—tracks sometimes
obtrude into one another, rather than merge
smoothly, a tactic that fits the gleefully
far-flung selections.—Michaelangelo Matos
(Streaming on select platforms.)Sierra Ferrell
COUNTRY The Nashville singer Sierra Ferrell
gained her first big hearing via GemsOnVHS, a
YouTube channel that documents young folk art-
ists in vérité performances shot against bucolic
backdrops. Musicians hatched from online mo-
ments often wilt onstage. Ferrell, however, built
her act not from the comfort of a bedroom but
in freight-train boxcars, and by playing on the
streets as a romantic musical vagabond. Busking
is valuable test prep: her 2021 album, “Long
Time Coming,” effortlessly darts down various
country tributaries, with the singer’s golden
croon soaring atop a crackling studio band. In
concert, she emits only confidence. Once you’ve
performed in a moving train, a packed club in
New York City is child’s play.—Jay Ruttenberg
(Music Hall of Williamsburg; April 18.)Mingus Big Band: Celebrating
100 Years of Charles Mingus
JAZZ Forty-three years after his death, in 1979,
Charles Mingus, the monumental bassist,composer, and bandleader, who would have
been a hundred this year, remains an active
presence in the jazz community. Within a
year of his passing, the celebratory Mingus
Dynasty band was up and running, and off-
shoot ensembles have honored the great icon-
oclast’s music with regularity ever since. The
revolving personnel that make up the Mingus
Big Band have included both veteran players
and instrumentalists too young to have ever
heard their inspiration in person, but all have
been touched by the vigor and formal majesty
of his abiding creations.—Steve Futterman
(Birdland; April 13-16.)Fred Moten
EXPERIMENTAL In 2019, the celebrated poet and
theorist Fred Moten joined two vanguard im-
provisers, the double-bassist Brandon López and
the drummer Gerald Cleaver, for a performance
at Vision Festival, the long-running free-jazz
summit. The following summer, in the wake of
the historic Black Lives Matter uprising, this
New York trio reconvened to quietly record its
monumental début, “Moten/López/Cleaver,”out this week. Through his stately baritone,
Moten sets his poems into motion over an
earthy, edifying rumble at once confrontational
and controlled, including selections from his
2009 book, “B Jenkins,” which he named after
his late mother. For Moten—a professor, Mac-
Arthur “genius,” and scholar of jazz and Black
performance—new pieces voice “precision in
mourning and turbulence,” art’s potentialities
and entanglements. “We are instruments of
clinical ecstasy,” he intones, “and if you want
to listen you got to give up everything.”—Jenn
Pelly (Public Records; April 14.)Wexford Festival Opera
OPERA Founded in 1951, Ireland’s Wexford
Festival Opera devoted much of its first fif-
teen years to bel-canto opera, and its mission
eventually coalesced around the promotion
of obscure works. (This fall, it dusts off Fro-
mental Halévy’s “La Tempesta” and Antonín
Dvořák’s “Armida.”) To celebrate its seventieth
anniversary, the intrepid company makes its
New York City début with a concert by the
soprano Angela Meade, whom the festival