The first five

So I have decided to write about my records. I’ve enjoyed similar Instagram accounts, and I’ll probably be looking to cull the collection back, as I wait for a new phase of my life to begin in the fall. I’ll be revisiting stuff and spending about 10 minutes writing something up for each, five at a time. I’m doing it in alphabetical order by title, so I don’t have to write about like five Animal Collective albums in a row, according to how Discogs arranges the titles. The records I own don’t always reflect my tastes; they’re just stuff I picked up here and there on the journey through life, and some of my favorite music doesn’t work well on vinyl to my ears and preferences, so I don’t buy it. Anyway, here are the first five.

Kahil El’Zabar - “Kahil El’Zabar’s America the Beautiful” (2020)

In 2020, like a lot of people I went to a few Black Lives Matters rallies, and one thing I noticed was my response to range of speakers on hand. The older speakers delivered their message in what I might consider paragraphs; there was a setup, a compiling of personal details, and a payoff, which might unfurl over several minutes. The younger speakers delivered their messages in what I might consider a Twitter feed; short, sometimes disconnected, bursts of thought that often mirrored sentiments from elsewhere—an IRL retweet of sorts. The crowd responded far more enthusiastically to the younger speakers, and that is as it should be—these are the courageous people who will potentially be leaders for decades to come. But I’m old, and I felt more moved, more disturbed, more compelled to act, from the older speakers. I suppose that observation leads me to this album, which came out in 2020 and reflected a lot of what I heard in an abstract, profound way that resonates with me (and to be clear: lots of young people are doing great things with jazz and maybe I’ll get to them). The positioning of history and present, pain and healing, harsh sounds and hope, all points to a brighter future yet one that needs to be fought for. It’s a deeply political American album that is almost entirely wordless, full of depth and urgency, and boasting a selection of covers (“America the Beautiful,” “Express Yourself,” “How Can We Mend a Broken Heart”) that poses more questions than answers. Kahil El’Zabar, age 66 in 2020, had an incredible year and maybe I’ll do this project long enough to get to his other album from that time. Maybe too I’ll get around to picking up his stunning record from this year too.

Circuit Des Yeux - -io (2021)

Haley Fohr, who records as Circuit Des Yeux and Jackie Lynn, is maybe my favorite artist working in any medium right now. I have felt a closeness with her last couple of albums that have felt difficult to quantify, and this last one is her most expansive yet, a cosmic, orchestral voyage through grief and loneliness, dread and disappointment; a record that feels far more expensive than it no doubt was to create. I don’t know how she did it. Fohr’s talents for writing orchestrated compositions and lyrics that encompass the microscopic to the galactic are breathtaking to consider, and they grow more elaborate with each release, but her voice is her true gift. Here she turns it supernova, going fully operatic while channeling the likes of Björk or Scott Walker and devastating everything in her path. She uses the full range of this instrument, often leaping several octaves skyward from her elastic baritone, and utilizing pitch like punctuation marks—even when you can’t quite make out the lyrics, you get the meaning. How do we process loss? How do we navigate times like these? Not only is there no easy answer; there is no answer at all.

David Bowie - ‘Heroes’ (1977)

It’s silly to say that David Bowie has a single “underrated” album in his discography, but it’s also rare for him to have an album in which the reputation of a single song threatens eclipses the entire host album to this degree. And so: arguably, we’ll say, underrated. The first two songs go as hard as anything he’s recorded; “Beauty and the Beast” would earn more credit for inventing New Wave if it wasn’t so aggressive. Furthermore very little feels in its right place; the guitars sound like factories and the saxophones sound like guitars; the bass often takes lead and the piano is banged on like drums. Side B dissolves into ambient instrumentals; the same trick he pulled on “Low” but to slightly lesser effect. I do appreciate that these instrumentals cover far-ranging ground. “Sense of Doubt” sounds like the score to a Peter Lorre horror film, and melts into the meditative “Moss Garden” (complete with Bowie himself on koto). Bowie has a reputation as a musical chameleon, but one rarely gets the sense it’s commercially motivated. Rather, I think, it’s born of an innate intellectual curiosity; I’ve always linked his musical restlessness to the fact that he’s also famously a voracious reader. And yeah, the title track here is pretty good too.

Air - 10,000 Hz Legend (2001)

Air came out in 1998 with such a fully realized sound that they never quite figured out how to grow it from there. While they did have moments after Moon Safari, this album—which I copped for a couple bucks after a local store ordered way too many of the reissues—is not one of them. The electro-acoustic forays that wander idly into Lee Hazlewood’s Sweden period or Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” asides fall flat, and the safe, KCRW-ready collaborations with Beck and Jason Falkner and goopy and generic, remaining to this day rooted to that too-precious early-00s moment of pop and downtempo “electronica” cross-pollination. Don’t think I’ll keep this one around.

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - 100 Days, 100 Nights (2007)

A) I have an uneasy and sometimes suspicious attitude toward retro-soul. I am generally apathetic to intentionally retro music in general, but in this instance it’s the result of living in a mostly white area where people have no desire to engage with contemporary R&B but flock in droves to see Black artists who make music that sounds like it came out 50 years ago. It’s hard to square, I’m sorry. B) I interviewed Sharon Jones around 2010, and she brought up Amy Winehouse completely unprompted, unable to hide the resentment she felt toward her. This made sense to me—Amy recorded with the Dap-Tones and rode their backbeat to a much greater level of success. It’s hard not to conclude that this was, in part, because Amy was younger, thinner, and whiter than Sharon, with tabloid-ready looks and personal life. All of this is true. Though I’m not a huge fan of Winehouse, however I tend to think Amy took that classic Motown sound in more contemporary directions—“Rehab” is not something you’d hear on a Temptations album. Mark Ronson seemed to bolster the rhythm section on stuff like “You Know I’m No Good” in modern, almost hip-hop directions. It makes sense that Winehouse’s music would gain more attention, but no, I don’t think Sharon Jones would have received it even with the exact same album, for the obvious reasons. C) That being said, Jones is an underrated performer in her own right. She often gets the Black woman accolades akin to being a “force of nature,” which is to say, someone who channels her talents as opposed to owning them, denying her agency over creative choices and the labor they put in. Sharon was over 45 years old when she broke through with the Dap-Tones, come on (dying of cancer shortly after finding success and fulfillment becomes an acute fear when you reach your 40s). Her singing is full of tension and release, a storyteller’s sense of narrative and suspense, even while treading worn-out themes. She was a fantastic talent.