As you can probably tell, I’m still playing catch up from the summer here. It was a better summer than it got credit for.
Local Picks
Brother Ali, “Mysterious Things”
Ali’s preacherly cadence rubs guilty consciences the wrong way, but lyrically he remains as honestly introspective as you could ask of a rap moralist, revisiting past relationships with insight and prickly acceptance. Throughout his latest, Satisfied Soul, Ali is provided with fittingly soulful Ant beats, few as hooky as the bluesy guitar lick here.
Crush Scene, “Price of Being Cool”
That “Jolene” cover last year wasn’t misleading—Crush Scene goes even countrier on this latest single, with some rollicking piano and a brash sax accompaniment like something out of a Huey Smith song. A new direction for the band? Possibly. Though when I spoke to them for this year’s Poised to Pop, they promised some genre-jumping in the near future, so don't be too quick to pin them down.
Dylan Hicks & Small Screens, “Moth and Rust”
On Hicks’s latest, Avian Field Recordings, his band continues to sprawl musically, in directions both planned and improvisational. But there are also miniature vignettes like this one, in which a down-on-his-luck fellow goes to the carnival alone, loses a bunch of games on the midway, and brings down Biblical wrath upon the carnies, quoting Matthew 5:45 and 6:19, as down-on-their-luck fellows will do.
This Duluth singer-songwriter calls her style “tender bubble grunge,” though way back when (before she was born) we’d have just called it alt-rock. The lead single from her July album, To the Core, expresses stinging regret without succumbing to torpor, an ideal mood to match a lyric like, “My hands are soaked in sorrows and my tongue is soaked in gin.”
Runo Plum, “Halfway up the Lawn"
Tuneful, breathy-voiced bedroom-pop gals are all the rage these days. (Well, “rage” seems like the wrong word, but you know what I mean.) Hailing from what one British profiler called “the Minnesota wilderness,” Plum is among the breathier of the lot, but the guitar hook here allows her to keep her bearings. Her debut album, Patching, is due in November.
Non-Local Picks
Hayes Carll, “Progress of Man (Bitcoin and Cattle)”
Carll opens his heart up wide on his latest, We're Only Human, and the title track is genuinely inspirational in its modest way. I of course prefer him at his more sardonic, as on this rambling examination of how our only human excess is murdering the planet, and I admit I can't resist the way he rhymes “Dolores”/”rainforest”/”divor-ess.” Dig that fiddle too.
Snipe Hunter? As good an album as they say, and picking a fave track is tricky. The one where Tyler swears if he ever gets rabies he’s gonna bite you? The one where he warns that “Koala bears get livid when they don't get eucalyptus/Most of 'em carry syphilis/Or chlamydia what's the difference”? Both obvious winners. But I’ll go instead with the most tender, in which the singer courts an older woman who namedrops old movies (I bet some are even from the 20th century) and who looks back to a time “back when the radio spoke to her heart.”
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, “New Threats From the Soul”
I was cool on Davis at first. His pose seemed a little too self-consciously slack for a guy who clearly wrote so carefully, and those David Berman comparisons weren’t doing him any favors either. But this bummed rather than depressed eulogy for a relationship he shouldn't have jettisoned earns its nine-minute run time. "I lie entrenched in my own ignorance and drenched from my head to my toes"? Eh, if you say so. "She had... the kind of smile to get a violent one-or-two-time felon employed"? That's more like it.
The folk oddball died at 83 this spring, but he had one last album in the can, or at least he left behind some finished-enough tracks that someone could gather them into Broken Homes and Gardens, the sort of collection it seems like he could have kept releasing till he hit 100. Hurley diehards will appreciate the talk of food and that cracked falsetto, authenticity junkies will get off on that trace of tape hiss and a little rhythmic jaggedness.
James McMurtry, “Sons of the Second Sons”
McMurtry’s latest, the typically great The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy, has everything you'd ask from the dry Texan: a little pathos, a litle mythos, a sharp eye, and a sharper tongue. He's been charting the decline of the American empire with unrelenting candor at least since "We Can't Make It Here" in 2006; here he places the blame on the descendants of the American settlers (that could mean you) as "Products of genocide...Tellin' ourselves we're free...Salt of the fuckin’ Earth...In search of a Caesar."
Worst New Song
Laufey, “Silver Lining”
I kept my distance when this precious conservatory-trained Icelander of Chinese descent was supposedly exposing Gen Z to "jazz"—every generation gets the ersatz class it yearns for and that's none of my business, I suppose. But now that she's flaunting her faux show tunes to sports arenas like some kind of a pop star, she's fair game. Billie Eilish does this torchy sort of thing 10 times better, and it's like the fifth best thing she does.
Wanna get a local song considered for the playlist? To make things easy on both of us, email keith@racketmn.com with RACKET PLAYLIST in the subject header. (Don’t, as in do NOT, DM or text: If I’m in a good mood, I’ll just ask you to send an email; if I’m in a bad mood I’ll just ignore it.)
