3 Music Reviews

reviewed by dave heaton

DJ Ordeal, Sea/Seagull (Entr’acte)

”I like the idea that just about anything and everything could be made into some form of music,” DJ Ordeal writes in the notes on the Sea/Seagull LP. For the “Sea” side we’re hearing the sea as music – crashing waves and their environs: chirping birds, mostly. But of course we’re hearing more than just a straight field recording. A voice keeps coming in to say something indecipherable. Strings appear, like the film-score soundtrack to this sea scene, and then disappear. To come back later, and disappear quickly again. A voice sings high at the end, nearly as high as the birds. Is this a sign that the birds weren’t really birds, or just a foreshadowing of the B Side, where the birds are and are not birds. Here we hear “Seagull” – the essence of “seagull,” that is. Ordeal processed human vocals to sound like seagulls, and of course they do and don’t sound like gulls. They sound like some warped cartoon version of a gull’s cry, and they continue to warp before our ears. At first it resembles free jazz skronks and cries, but then form emerges. A melody forms a repeats, from this strange shrieks – disorienting, but not. Both pieces play off our own memories and experiences – every time we’ve visited a body of water is somehow evoked. At the same time the pieces both feel strange and new. And also very much like music: odd, interesting music. – dave heaton

Remora, Songs I Sing (North Pole

Songs I Sing is a perfectly descriptive title for this collection, as that’s what’s on it. Its genesis was the songs Remora (Brian John Mitchell) would find himself singing a cappella on-stage, to fill time while switching instruments or changing a guitar string. He took these songs and recorded them, mostly in a house but also, in a couple cases, in a hotel room and as a voicemail message. Strung all together like this, they form a strange and alluring animal: a demonstration of how disorienting yet comforting one voice singing can be. Some resemble the quickly written, straight-from-the-head songs of a child (“Half-Birthday”, “Sores”), others reverent hymns (“We Will Fall”, which structurally resembles a prayer but lyrically more of a confessional letter). There’s some element of folk tradition in these too, no matter how humorously or jokingly it’s conveyed. (No surprise, then, when he sings “Motherless Child”). He sings sometimes in a Townes Van Zandt-style troubadour’s voice (“I Called Your Mom”), sometimes the same way he sings Remora’s usual song-drones, sometimes demonic (“Heartworms”), and sometimes in a wicked-fast, odd way (the shortest songs, generally). All in all, this album comes off like a joke/experiment, but it’s also hard to shake, resembling as it does the ghosts of voices past, strung together as one. Think of exorcisms, of spirits singing through people, but also those goofy little ditties we all sing to our loved ones, in the moment. – dave heaton

Sa-Ra, The Hollywood Recordings (Babygrande)

The threesome Sa-Ra (aka The Sa-Ra Creative Partners) play a style of hip-hop soul that angles to be new and forward-looking…and sort of is, but sort of isn’t. There’s heavy Prince overtones to the overlapping androgynous vocals and sexual come-ons of many of the tracks; George Clinton’s presence hanging behind it as well. And there’s a heavy debt to the late, great J Dilla (who appears on one track himself) in both the future-soul beats and the off-track, words-interrupted style of rhyme/speaking. The ‘90s “neo-soul” that Dilla helped produce is part of the picture too, and not just in the appearances of singers like Erykah Badu and Bilal. So everything pseudo-new is really old, but yet in the moment this still feels pretty fresh, mostly from the overlapping vocals and how well they mesh with the slowly rolling funk of the music. And when their own voices start to get old, Sa-Ra will bring in another, more technically skilled singer to nail the chorus, or a serious MC like Talib Kweli or Pharoahe Monch to liven up the scene. There’s plenty of ego-stroking going on here, for sure (“You’re so sexy that sometimes it scares me,” they get guest female vocalist Rozzi Daime to sing to them), but Sa-Ra is at least trying to shake off the gloss of modern R&B, to combine the roughness of hip-hop with the sexiness of a slow jam, while furthering the tradition of freaky soul music. – dave heaton