THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 5
ILLUSTRATION BY DEBORA SZPILMAN
Any humane listener would wish that
“J .T. ” did not have reason to exist. The
gripping new Steve Earle album (made
with his band, the Dukes) finds the hard-
scrabble singer covering the work of his
son Justin Townes Earle after his death
last year. The talented younger Earle
began his career in his father’s shadow,
and he now recedes back into it. Yet the
Earle family in mourning is more rol-
licking and clear-eyed than many indie
rockers in the glow of youth. On “Harlem
River Blues,” the LP’s showstopper, the
narrator ponders suicide in eerily celebra-
tory tones, lending the song’s desolation
the wicked thrill of adventure. Devastat-
ingly, the album’s encore, its sole non-Jus-
tin composition, is penned by Earle the
elder. “Your last words to me,” he sings, in
an unsettling disruption of life’s balance,
“were ‘I love you, too.’”—Jay Ruttenberg
COUNTRY-ROCKEULOGY
1
MUSIC
“Aqua Net & Funyuns”
OPERA The new serial from Experiments in
Opera, “Aqua Net & Funyuns,” shows that
opera, in all its grandeur, isn’t incompatible with
the smaller scale of a podcast. The series’ five
musicalized radio plays are designed for both
earbuds and stereo speakers: the conversational
vocal lines are placed forward in the mix, and
they’re often undergirded by simple, looping
orchestrations. The two mysteries, Kamala San-
karam’s “The Understudy” and Tariq Al-Sabir’s
“Beauty Shot,” hook listeners with their punchy
music and cheeky cliffhangers. Every “Aqua
Net” episode splices together acts from three
different works—a perplexing decision given
that the plots are not interlinked—but the or-
ganization has also made each deliciously snack-
size opera available on its own.—Oussama Zahr
Tina Brooks: “The Waiting Game”
JAZZ It hardly diminishes Tina Brooks to label
him a second-tier tenor saxophonist, given that
the first tier, circa 1961, included John Coltrane,
Sonny Rollins, and Stan Getz. A victim of liver
failure in 1974, Brooks was a popular sideman
who cut four albums under his own name, only
one of which was issued in his lifetime. Re-
corded thirteen years before his death, “The
Waiting Game” (now on vinyl, as part of the
Blue Note’s “Tone Poet” series) was the final
work of his truncated career. Sporting a poised
and economical sensibility, Brooks was an un-
common hard-bop player. Surrounded here by
fast company, including the trumpeter Johnny
Coles and the drummer Philly Joe Jones, Brooks
anchored a project that would have found its
rightful place amid brisk competition had it
seen the light of day.—Steve Futterman
Aaron Frazer: “Introducing”
SOUL As the drummer and one of the singers
for the soul-revivalist band Durand Jones &
the Indications, Baltimore’s Aaron Frazer has
flexed a distinctive, sky-high falsetto that’s
practically tailor-made for retro melodies.
His début solo album, “Introducing,” pro-
duced by the Black Keys front man Dan Au-
erbach, agilely riffs on funk, jazz, doo-wop,
and disco sounds, lacquering them with an
updated pop sheen. Flirting with nostalgia
is always a gamble, and a few of these songs
teeter dangerously close to novelty, but, even
when some of the old-school callbacks feel a
touch too saccharine, the musicality manages
to come through.—Julyssa Lopez
Richie Hawtin: “Concept 1 96:12”
ELECTRONIC In 1996, the Canadian techno
producer Richie Hawtin issued “Concept,”
a series of monthly twelve-inch singles that
marked a step away from throbbing warehouse
anthems and toward a liny austerity that pre-
saged the rise, in the early two-thousands, of
minimal techno. Now, for the first time, the
entire series is available digitally. Although
it is drastically uneven—Hawtin would refine
this style on the 1998 album “Consumed,”
credited to Plastikman—on the best of these
gentle, woozy, sometimes disorienting tracks
you sense a new club-land paradigm in em-
bryo.—Michaelangelo Matos
The Kills: “Little Bastards”
ROCK Deep dives into music of the past have
been one way to find comfort in a strange and
tangled present, and the Kills’ compilation
album “Little Bastards” offers a plunge into
the spare, shadowy soundscapes that the band
built back in the early two-thousands. The
English duo mined old recordings, demos,
and outtakes from its previous three albums
for material, unearthing gems such as “Raise
Me,” a boost of adrenaline guided by the pierc-
ing howl of Alison Mosshart’s voice and the
rawness of Jamie Hince’s shrieking guitar.
Beyond providing a hit or two of nostalgia,
the project is fascinating to observe as a time-
lapse view of how a band soldiers on as it
progresses.—J.L.
Moor Mother & billy woods:
“BRASS”
HIP-HOP The experimental musician and poet
Moor Mother and the truthtelling rapper
billy woods found compatibility in shared
knowledge. The two connected on the posse
cut “Ramesses II”—in collaboration with the
duo that woods belongs to, Armand Ham-
mer—before teaming up for Adult Swim’s
eclectic singles series, and their natural chem-
istry spawned a new union; in December, they
quietly released an entire album together that
harnesses that energy. “BRASS” is a haunted
yet dazzling work of interwoven parables that
finds the acerbic artists tapping into a collec-
tive history. Moor Mother, who has dabbled
in noise and jazz, is also a self-described witch
rapper, and here she tunes into that frequency
when reciting powerful Afrofuturist proverbs.
Woods, no stranger to ceding space, is pithy by
nature and economical by necessity. Hearing
their perfectly balanced invocations feels like
unearthing a cache of closely guarded com-
mandments.—Sheldon Pearce
Quintron and Miss Pussycat:
“Goblin Alert!”`
ROCK Through the exuberant rock-and-roll
anthems of “Goblin Alert!,” Quintron and
Miss Pussycat present themselves as trashy,
campy, sacrilegious miscreants, seemingly
sprung from an early John Waters film, raring
to dance. For its first album in nearly a decade,
the New Orleans duo has replaced its drum
machine with a human and added a guitarist,
effectively streamlining its songs without curb-
ing the mania at the band’s core. Unrestrained
and gleeful, “Goblin Alert!” offers a live-wire
good time, magnified by the humor inherent
to an act long known for incorporating pup-
petry into its stage show. “Teen-agers don’t
know shit,” Quintron declares at the album’s
outset, flipping rock music’s long-held gener-
ational politics on their head.—Jay Ruttenberg
R.A.P. Ferreira & Scallops
Hotel: “Bob’s Son”
HIP-HOP In 2018, the underground rapper Rory
Allen Philip Ferreira announced that he was
done recording as milo, the moniker he’d been
using since 2010. Last year, he débuted a new
project as R.A.P. Ferreira and released an ex-
quisite album called “purple moonlight pages.”
The music was heavily influenced by the loose-
ness and the spontaneity of jazz, but his raps
remained carefully crafted, casually cryptic, and
nearly poetic. His new album, “Bob’s Son,” sets
jazz sounds aside, primarily featuring soul sam-
ples, but maintains a jazz spirit. Ferreira calls
the LP an ode to the Beat poet Bob Kaufman,
“the progenitor of abomunism,” whose semi-im-
provised style brought bebop to beatniks. There
has never been a greater sense of swing in Fer-
reira’s raps, and his writing is as sharp as ever.
By the time he performs Kaufman’s “Abomunist
Manifesto,” the album’s grand finale, the two
artists’ techniques begin to converge.—S.P.
