Scientists got nothing on her

Mix 19: Italian souvenirs, big feelings, tricky bangers, Farrah Abraham's AP Psychology paper, and the requisite scattering of oddballs and weirdos

Take me to church

Don’t call it a comeback — you probably didn’t notice I was gone. I have returned from Italy bearing a few Shazam souvenirs — here’s Annalisa’s Eurovision attempt “Sinceramenta” (it’s good but lost to a more worthy challenger; we missed a live performance of it our first night in Milan, along with a performance from superior Eurovision contestant Angelina Mango, that started well after bedtime) and Mira’s “Come with Me” from last year.

I had some excellent espresso, but I did not hear Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” a single time in the wild, even in the restaurant that in two hours played four (four!) Dua Lipa tracks, including all three singles from the new album. (My traveling partner asked me, with irritation, what song was playing each time, and astutely observed that Dua Lipa songs are “just…nothing. Like I’m listening to nothing. It’s water.” A-pop!!)

The music I actually heard the most, though, by about a 10-to-1 margin, was coffee shop bossanova covers of pop hits.

I’ve barely had time to recover from the other side of jet lag, let alone listen to all 4,600 songs in my backlog, so I pulled in some ringers from my albums list this week: Willow, Rachel Chinouriri, Lyrical School, and two from Nyege Nyege Tapes. Hoping to kick off my A-pop series soon-ish, so you may get a second email this week or next laying out what that whole deal (maybe) is.

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Mix 1 // Mix 2 // Mix 3 // Mix 4 // Mix 5 // Mix 6 // Mix 7 // Mix 8 // Mix 9 // Mix 10 // Mix 11 // Mix 12 // Mix 13 // Mix 14 // Mix 15 // Mix 16 // Mix 17 // Mix 18

MIX 19: SCIENTISTS GOT NOTHING ON HER

1. Ashley Monroe: Risen Road

When I first heard Ashley Monroe, I was drawn to a voice like Dolly, and to my knowledge this is the closest she’s ever gotten to a song that calls for Dusty, whom she doesn’t have the pipes for. But less is better, a fitting approach to the song’s alternating godliness and grubbiness: gospel-inflected but lowercase-D dusty, like going dutifully to your little church still high on pills from mom’s purse.

2. Rachel Chinouriri: Cold Call

I knew I wanted to feature something from Chinouriri’s album, but each song I selected that immediately grabbed me turned out to be from some other year I wasn’t paying attention to the modest (or maybe just British?) hype train for this South London singer-songwriter. The more recent one I finally landed on does a somewhat artless LOUDquietLOUD but sells the loud, so I can even overlook “trauma dumps ate me for lunch” in the verse. I’m going to sing the praises of Willow in a few tracks from now; I obviously don’t reject meme therapyspeak out of hand.

3. Baula: Mercury in Retrograde

Swedish indie that to my ears sounds more Britpop than Rachel Chinouriri’s supposed “neo-Britpop,” and provides an adequate transition to…

4. Beabadoobee: Take a Bite

The beabadoobee confessional teenpop throwback! Unlike Ashlee Simpson, beabadoobee did not assert that she did NOT want to sound like Hilary Duff. Hence: a Hilary Duff song—and a deep cut at that. But I’ll take what I can get. The vocals on this made me wonder how much changing production norms (along with the turn to marshmallow mouth affectation in the ‘10s) have obscured the ways in which vocal palettes haven’t changed as much in 20 years as it sometimes might seem. Add the jagged-lilt post-Avril production template on top and…well, see who you get.

5. Willow: Big Feelings

Billie Eilish’s new album is an on-brand admirable disappointment, another example of one of the most famous people in the world just not applying herself. Eilish has an incredible—maybe generational—gift for melody shared with almost no one in her pop peer group in this age of mealy melodies. This fact seems to be outside of the top 20 things anyone else cares about who is not a professional songwriter (“where were you?” asks Cynthia Erivo, to which Carl Perkins might reply, “the spirit world”).¹

So I’ll need to settle for Willow, who is also a gifted melodicist, with a few quirks of style I happen to like — lots of unexpected leaps up a fifth or sixth interval at the end of a phrase, giving her melodies a certain provocative queasiness — and has for the second album in a row possibly put out an AOTY stuffed to the brim with sharpie marker self-help lyrics, pairing some kind of artistic genius with the feeling that you’re being forced to point to variations of a smiley face on a medical chart. (May I make a modest request for Willow to at least learn some Portuguese or something?)

6. TurkodiRoma: Yay Burcun Seni Geriyo

Irrepressible Turkish pop with a Tribe Called Quest-esque bass line (or whichever jazz record they jacked it from).

7. Verito Asprilla, Li Saumet: Apoteósica

This may be the single best export of ama-pop out of South Africa I’ve yet heard — a Colombian take on the sound from avant-reggaeton artist Verito Asprilla and Li Saumet from Bomba Estereo. I figured that, if we were lucky, all music was going to sound like “Chale” eventually (who could resist?). This is one of the first transnational takes I’ve heard that doesn’t feel imitative or lagging behind the sound it’s chasing.

8. Lyrical School: Cho → Cho

Restless and mildly deranged J-pop group Lyrical School got a little weird on this album, even for them — this one’s vintage hyperpop given the just-this-side-of-sincere enthusiasm you’re guaranteed with even the most far-flung Lyrical School stylistic back alleys.

9. Slowboy, zaichkou888, Ivoxygen: Astro (Opium Remix)

I have no idea where this music comes from, I imagine it’s a funky-smelling slime mold growing in some dank corner of Soundcloud. (According to the bio, this particular variety of brainless phonk amoeba is Scandinavian.)

10. Phelimuncasi, Metal Preyers: Ayi ayi we Crazy

11. Sisso, Maiko: Kiboko

Two more-or-less randomly selected tracks from two Nyege Nyege Tapes releases. The first is noisy gqom outfit Phelimuncasi collaborating with a ragtag group of international producers the label assembled calling themselves Metal Preyers. The results are more dissonant and less danceable than their last album, and there’s something a bit clinically experimental about it — I hear close, breathy percussion and extra-screwed vocals coming apart like overstretched silly putty, and I can only think of how effortlessly ahead of its time “My Humps” was. The next song is a bit more exciting to me, some breakneck singeli from Tanzanian artists Sisso and Maiko. Good review of that album over at the Quietus.

12. Pousi: Bahebak Ana

Egyptian pop singer (also styled in English as “Bossy”) started her career ten years ago with more staid-sounding Egyptian pop and now shows signs of a few forced operating system updates, her vocals getting spliced up with syllables scattered around all willy nilly.

13. Yolte: 19
YouTube Premium only

This is the second fun ‘n’ frivolous Greek rap song I’ve found this year with a functionally un-Googleable track name leading to a YouTube dead end. (This is a link to a premium-subscription-only YouTube upload, but the song is available on Spotify.) It swipes shamelessly from “Wait (The Whisper Song),” but I have no idea if it’s a fraction as filthy—it’s all Greek to me [waggles eyebrows].

14. The Feels: скло

Kiev rock band is maybe kinda sorta the Ukrainian Paramore?

15. The Drin: Tigers Cage

Slinky indie number from a Cincinnati band gets half of the Stones right (the riff) and ignores the other half (the vocals) with something between diffidence and contempt, slathering the song in throwback slacker ennui. But they let their still-beating hearts show when someone sneaks in a couple saxophones.

16. Asmaa Hamzaoui, Bnat Timbouktou: Laâfou

Moroccan gnawa music, which I’m unfamiliar with but got a thoughtful write-up in Bandcamp back when they still paid people to do such things:

Sonically, gnawa sits at the crossroads between a variety of music—the quivering cascade of flamenco’s castanets, the deep spiritual cry of the blues, improvised ragas, and the cyclical trance of minimal techno—and has gained increasing international recognition as a key Moroccan art form.

17. DJ Tshegu, Lee McKrazy, Zee Nxumalo f. Al xapo, Vyno Keys, QuayR Musiq: Chengu Shesha

Peppy amapiano from an artist who leads with “TikTok sensation,” exhibits some of the turn to ama-pop when a few featured vocalists (including Zee Nxumalo from my amapiano track of the year so far, “Thula Mbota”) but otherwise sounds like it would fit right in on what I guess would now be an amapiano oldies compilation? How quickly we go from zeitgeist to golden age.

18. Aseel Hameem: Mostafz Alnas

An Iraqi pop star with one global megahit (“Ser Alhayah,” pushing 400 million YouTube views). I prefer the eclectic sonic touches in this one, punctuated with clicks and claps and dings and unexpected syncopated hiccups and a drunken little electric string figure (what instrument is that?) crawling around. It has a haze and sway to it, something you might mistake for swagger but on closer inspection is more like a stagger.

19. Mekit Dolan Muqam Group: Bash Bayawan Muqam

The first of two indulgent instrumental choices to pad out the runtime since I had some room on the mix to breathe this week. The first, via Ryan Dee, is a captivating Uyghur folk Muqam group. Via the bio:

Muqam is a form of large-scale suites which include songs, dances, and instrumental sections, in which the development of music often features a significant degree of improvisation. The Muqam of the Uyghurs is characterized by its diversity of musical styles. Apart from the classical Twelve Muqam, there are also multiple folk Muqam traditions with distinct regional characteristics, including Kumul Maqam, Turpan Muqam, Dolan Muqam, and Ili Muqam. Among them, Dolan Muqam is often considered as the wildest, if not the uncanniest tradition that still exists.

20. Mermaid Chunky: Céilí

The second indulgent instrumental, from a couple of arty Londoners who claim to have discovered jazz via Amy Winehouse and Corinne Bailey Rae (“Then I worked my way backwards to Billie Holiday”) and are now signed to DFA, which unbeknownst to me is still a going concern. The first two minutes of this song can only be described as a recorder jam before things get a bit Enya by way of Animal Collective. (Not sure if either of those descriptions should be read as compliments.)

21. Julie Ragbeer: Mary Whiton Calkins [2023]

This is some kind of ironic-or-is-it viral sensation of the sort that usually worries me, or at least has since all that Rebecca Black business (hooray, she made it!). But the auteur in question is nineteen and seems to be handling niche fame in stride. This is bedroom pop not just as a generalizing euphemism — you can practically hear the posters curling on the wall — and it sounds like Farrah Abraham writing a biography for her AP Psych class. Paper mag compares her to Emily Montes, who first came to my attention from a weird little website that posited that hyperpop is the intersection of Paris Hilton and Farrah Abraham. I don’t totally understand how much of a joke the recent prompt tweet “What's something in the world you know you're directly responsible for but if you were to claim credit you'd sound crazy?” is supposed to be—I’ve seen people make semi-serious claims but also outlandish fictions—but heck, I’ll take credit for anything if you let me.

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That’s it! Until next time, if you’re going to write a biography, make sure it’s also a banger.

Title from Julie Ragbeer’s “Mary Whiton Calkins”

1. Key quote from the article:

Q: And your Barbie song, Billie —

BATISTE So what was … 

ERIVO (Looking at Batiste) Go on and ask her! You have to ask because I’m about to do it myself. I want to know — why that progression of note? (Starts singing the beginning of “What Was I Made For?”)

EILISH Dude. 

ERIVO Immediately my heart goes (motioning toward her heart).

EILISH Thank you. 

ERIVO Where were you?

EILISH That’s the first thing that I wrote — was that exact melody. 

BATISTE First mile.