Episode 49
Featuring tracks by Robert Forster, Emma Tricca, Feist, Kara Jackson, Yoni Mayraz, Joel Holmes, Alogte Oho & His Sound Sounds Of Joy, John Carroll Kirby, Do Amor, 30/70, Margarida Campelo, The Chuck Boris Trio and more...
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Episode 49 Highlights
Robert Forster
Accompanied by family members and former bandmates, the Go-Betweens songwriter crafts a sparse but deeply felt album.
For his eighth solo release, The Candle and the Flame, Forster has recorded a hangout album—with the people he actually hangs out with. The songs sound as fresh as morning air through open kitchen windows.
Think before you speak, he offers in “It’s Only Poison,” and speak before you’re forgotten. Far from stifling the imagination, these descendants of what he praised in an earlier song as a family of honest workers have kindled it. The Candle and the Flame is an entrancing flicker.
30/70
‘ART MAKE LOVE’ is the fifth album by 30/70, the mothership of the internationally acclaimed Melbourne born collective.
Expanding far beyond the previous markers of nu-soul and jazz; it is inspired heavily by broken beat complexity, translating dance music into live textures and their truly unique collaborative songwriting.
‘ART MAKE LOVE’ is a statement about the very life giving, love fuelling, interconnected nature of creativity, a reclamation of art in a digital time.
Fruit Bats
Eric D. Johnson rarely lingers at one location too long.
“There’s always been motion in my life between one place and another,” says the Fruit Bats songwriter. “The songs exist in a world that you can sort of travel from one to another," says Johnson. “There are roads and rivers between these songs.”
Those pathways extend straight through the newest Fruit Bats album, aptly titled A River Running to Your Heart. Self-produced by Johnson —a first for Fruit Bats— with Jeremy Harris at Panoramic House just north of San Francisco, it’s Fruit Bats’ tenth full-length release. The album finds the project in the middle of a people-powered climb leading to the biggest shows, loudest accolades, and most enthusiastic new fans in Fruit Bats history! It’s hard to pinpoint a single reason for this mid-career resurgence. But after two decades of making music, hard-earned emotional maturity has clearly seeped into Johnson’s already inviting songs, resulting in a sound that’s connected with audiences like no other previous version of the band.
Feist
Feist’s quietest album to date is warm and comforting throughout, but really peaks when it gets fuller, weirder, and more unpredictable.
Written during the blurry height of the pandemic, when Feist was beginning a new life with her adopted daughter, Tihui, Multitudes is largely a testament to hushed perseverance amid personal and collective upheaval.
It is her quietest album, an invitation to introspection. Half of the 12 songs here don’t have any drums whatsoever, and most of the rest lack anything resembling a steady backbeat. And whereas the distorted tones smeared over 2017’s Pleasure could make it seem as if she were squaring off against her guitar and microphone, Multitudes mostly sounds as cozy as a winter sweater that’s three sizes too big.
Rita Lee (1947-2023)
RITA LEE, the legendary Brazilian musician at the forefront of the Tropicália movement as the co-founder and lead singer for Os Mutantes, died Monday, May 8. She was 75.
Lee enjoyed a successful six-decade career, selling millions of records as a member of Os Mutantes, various other bands, and as a solo act. She suitably earned the honorific title in Brazil as “Rainha do Rock” (“Queen of Rock”), though as she told in an interview last November, “I like being called the ‘patron saint of freedom’ more than the ‘queen of rock’, which I find a little tacky.”
Linda Lewis (1950-2023)
Linda Lewis, who has died aged 72, was a soul singer with an exceptional voice whose solo career encompassed more than a dozen albums and four UK Top 40 hit singles. She was also in demand as a backing vocalist for artists including David Bowie, Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), Rod Stewart, Joan Armatrading and Jamiroquai, and during the 1970s became one of Britain’s leading female singer-songwriters.
Lewis’s vocal dexterity – her voice ranged across five octaves and drew comparisons with Minnie Riperton – did not always seem to get the material it deserved, and at times she was pushed by record companies and producers into pop and disco experiments. But there was renewed interest in her compositions during the last two decades of her life, and tributes were paid by a newer generation of musicians, including the rapper Common, who sampled her song Old Smokey in his 2005 hit Go!, and Basement Jaxx, with whom she collaborated on the track Close Your Eyes (2006).
Tracklist
Emma Tricca - Autumn’s Fiery Tongue
Robert Forster - It’s Only Poison
Fruit Bats - See The World By Night
Spencer Cullum, Yuma Abe - Kingdom Weather
Feist - Hiding Out In The Open
Kara Jackson - no fun/party
Yoni Mayraz - Palms
Joel Holmes, Tenderlonious, Roberto Manzin - Broken Styles
Joel Holmes, Roberto Manzin - Hot Sauce
Dele Sosimi & The Estuary 21 feat. Sam Eagle & Snowboy - Open Up
Alogte Oho & His Sound Sounds Of Joy - La Ka Ba’a
Ná Ozzetti - Com a Boca No Mundo (Rita Lee 1947-2023)
Linda Lewis - What Are You Asking Me For? (1950-2023)
John Carroll Kirby - Oropendola
The Chuck Boris Trio - Funky Nassau
Do Amor - Nossa Bossa
30/70 - Acceptance
Maximum Joy - White and Green Place
Margarida Campelo - Maggie