Septuagenarian Iggy Pop has a new set of jazz inflected songs - some silly, some profound; Octogenarian bluesman Bobby Rush gets frisky with 'Sweet Lizzy', SiR fills some sweet 'boudoir RnB' with the voice of Jill Scott and Kentucky folk singer Joan Shelley creates an oasis of calm.
Song Crush Selectors: Kirsten Johnstone, Mark Cubey, Yadana Saw and Nick Tipping
Iggy Pop Photo: Rob Baker Ashton
Iggy Pop – Loves Missing
Iggy’s voice is one of the stable and lasting pillars of my music collection. He’s like that piece of mysterious furniture that haunts your childhood but then evolves into a beloved and deeply appreciated heirloom. 'Loves Missing' has the hallmarks I love about Iggy Pop’s music – there’s a haunting trumpet, a musical sparseness that builds through the song and his vocal delivery that evokes a sense of foreboding in me. YS
Iggy Pop - We Are The People
Two years ago, Iggy Pop said that the album he was recording with producer Josh Homme - Post Pop Depression - might be his last. It turned out to be the highest US charting recording for the punk godfather who busted out of Detroit fifty years ago last month with his band The Stooges. Their self-titled debut was widely ignored, as was epochal followup, Funhouse.
Even after David Bowie, who produced the Stooges’ Raw Power, took Pop to Berlin in 1977, got him off heroin, and produced the double whammy of The Idiot and then Lust for Life, Iggy still had way more acclaim from the critics than the general public (his only #1, a cover of Aussie rock’n’roll pioneer Johnny O’Keefe’s 1958 song 'Real Wild Child (Wild One)' came in 1986, in New Zealand).
Now 72, he has followed last year’s EP collaboration with UK duo Underworld (Teatime Dub Encounters), with his eighteenth solo studio recording: Free. A varied collaboration with innovative Texan jazz musician Leron Thomas, and Brooklyn-based guitarist and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate, who operates as Noveller, the album is lean and ruminative, as one might expect from an aged icon of wildness and excess.
Thomas plays brilliant trumpet on goofy and slight tracks like ‘James Bond’, but it’s the more sophisticated canvases that he and Lipstate provide for Pop’s stronger and more meditative outings that really work best. The peak is one of two spoken word pieces set to music. While the Dylan Thomas poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ is swamped by too many effects, ‘We Are the People’, written in 1970 by Lou Reed and published posthumously last year, is acutely contemporary for the America run by another 72-year-old, and is given an expert reading by a man who sounds weary with life, but is fighting off the dark, as he intones in album closer ‘The Dawn’, with sex and love. MC
Bryn Van Vliet - Go To Her
Bryn’s a talented sax player (everyone from the Rodger Fox Big Band to Tunes of I), but his first EP, called EP, reveals a completely different side- one that’s emotionally vulnerable, and closer to Jose Gonzalez than jazz. NT
Bryn van Vliet Photo: Bryn van Vliet
Listen: Bryn Van Vliet - Go To Her
Joan Shelley - I'm Coming Down For You
Louisville, Kentucky songwriter Joan Shelley takes inspiration from her rural surroundings for her album Like the River Loves the Sea. She’s said of the album that it was “built as a haven for overstimulated heads in uncertain times” and it really is an oasis of calm.
This song’s mountain modal tuning and bum-ditty rhythms will fool you into thinking there’s clawhammer banjo in there, but there were no banjos to be found in Iceland, where the album was recorded. With a wisp of Bonnie Prince Billy on backing vocals, a trotting of the snare, and a stoic Joan riding in to save her love, this ticks all my comfort song boxes. KJ
SiR - Still Blue ft. Jill Scott
SiR comes from the TDE stable home to Kendrick Lamar, SZA and Jay Rock. He’s the neo-soul, boudoir RnB flavour of the Californian record label. The album Chasing Summer encompasses many of the trends currently populating contemporary RnB – it’s woozy, dreamy and unhurried. The patron saint of Chasing Summer's sonic palette is Solange and the languid guitar of local cult star Connan Mockasin. 'Still Blue' feature the dreamy, masterful vocals of Jill Scott. It’s a blissful slice of hope where I feel the tempting caress of summer’s warmth as the sharp tendrils of southerly winter try to hang on. YS
Bobby Rush - Sweet Lizzy
One of the last old-school bluesmen, Bobby Rush won his first Grammy at the age of 83, for Best traditional Blues Album. This follow up is closaer to blues rock than straight blues, but it’s still very much along the lines of what Rolling Stone described as his “lusty old man blues”. Classic grooves, from an unapologetically classic musician. NT
