Week of July 2: This week, Drake, Directors, and Dos Santos. Plus a new video from Meshell Ndegeocello.
PREMIERE: The NY-centric Video By Directors, Featuring Sahr Ngaujah
The New York band called Directors features the voice of Sahr Ngaujah; you may recall that Sahr played the title role of the hit Off-Broadway musical Fela!, about the great Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti. That performance earned him nominations for both a Tony and an Olivier Award. His newest role is somewhat less demanding: watch Sahr and the rest of Directors biking and bopping along on the streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx (eventually hanging out with multiple versions of themselves) in the new video for their just-released song called “So Fly.” The track itself is a fun, brassy slice of 60’s-inspired pop, with a sultry trumpet solo by Jordan McLean (a member of the band Antibalas, which was basically the pit band for Fela!). The video is a celebration of the simple pleasures of chilling out on a summer’s day.
Another Great Cover From Meshell Ndegeocello Gets A New Video
The singer and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello’s latest album, Ventriloquism, is both an album of covers as well as an exercise in gender studies. As we’ve noted before in the Weekly Roundup, her cover of Prince’s beautiful ballad“Sometimes It Snows In April” uses Ndegeocello’s androgynous voice to good effect. Now, she’s released a new video for her cover of the song “Sensitivity,” a 1990 song by Ralph Tresvant. The original was a come-on in the hip-hop-inflected R&B style known as New Jack Swing. Ndegeocello’s version recasts it as a kind of neo-Dixieland stomp, complete with banjo and a brass band. She sings Tresvant’s original lyrics without changing the gender (“you need a man with sensitivity – a man like me”), and the video echoes that by showing couples of many different types. The show is stolen, though, by a youthful brass band who know how to bust a move.
Drake Breaks the Internet. Again.
The rapper/singer/producer Drake routinely sets streaming records when he releases a new album, and he apparently feels quite aggrieved when someone has the temerity to top him. That happened earlier this year with Post Malone’s album beerbongs and bentleys, which set a new Spotify record with just under 79 million streams on its first day. Now Drake’s new Scorpion has shattered that mark, with over 132 million streams in its first 24 hours. The album comes with a fraught backstory – in it, Drake acknowledges publicly for the first time that he has a child. In the song “Emotionless,” built around a Mariah Carey sample, he says “I wasn’t hidin’ my kid from the world, I was hidin’ the world from my kid.” Some of the album (much of it, actually) is about Drake himself, his fame, his beefs, and his production chops. And, in a roundabout way, his cash. The track “Don’t Matter To Me” is essentially a duet with Michael Jackson. Clearing the rights for that sample must have cost a genuine fortune, and it’s not only a case of conspicuous consumption, it’s also a suggestive meeting between the former King of Pop and the man who would love to inherit that title.
Let’s Eat Grandma Releases Sophomore Album
First, the band name. The name Let’s Eat Grandma is a whimsical grammar lesson on the importance of the comma. Get it? The band is a duo, comprised of two British teenagers, Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, who’ve been friends since kindergarten. They are both singers and multi-instrumentalists, and their first album, called I, Gemini, was full of strangely off-kilter pop. On Friday, they released their second album, I’m All Ears, which expands their palette to include a lovely ballad (“Ava”), a clanging, metallic track (“Hot Pink”), and a slightly more conventional pop song called “I Will Be Waiting.” Emphasis on the word “slightly.” Strange phrases like “Now all your leaves will change with season/Count to eight to hear the gleaming” are supported by an increasingly lush production that includes a neat little vibraphone solo.
Let’s Eat Grandma plays in New York at Baby’s All Right on September 12.
Dos Santos Offer A New Type Of Latin Psychedelia
In the late 60s/early 70s, the sounds of psychedelic rock met Latin American cumbia and chicha rhythms in places like Peru and Colombia. Largely unnoticed by North Americans at the time, this unexpected fusion of old and new, acoustic and electric, has had lingering echoes. Take for example the Chicago quintet called Dos Santos. Their new album is called Logos, and it’s got a colorful mix of indie rock, Latin music, and some elements of jazz and post-rock in the style of their Chicago neighbors Tortoise. The album’s title track is one of two that features the horns of Antibalas (see the Directors track, above) helping out, and on this song, those horns combine with some group vocals to create a big, progressive sound.
Dos Santos plays in Brooklyn at Barbes on July 14.