Family ventures in pop: often difficult. It wasn’t just Brittney Spears who had a greedy-nasty parent. Even with Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, one half of the producer does not come off well. The 25-year-old pop musician Camila Cabello seems to have it better: “Familia” (Epic Records) is the name of their third album and lives up to its title. Camila’s dad appears as a backing vocalist on “La Buena Vida,” a hyper mariachi number complete with horn melancholy and lovesickness. Cabello’s eight-year-old cousin Caro not only lies in the arms of the singer on the album cover, she also says in the yearning island song “Celia” with self-assertion: “Soy de Cuba” – I’m from Cuba. It is not always easy for Cabello to claim this for himself. She was born in Cuba, lived in Mexico and came to the USA at the age of seven. Still, she sometimes feels like an outsider in the Latinx community there. She recently wrote on Instagram: “I just don’t belong as much as everyone else.” The even clearer borrowings from Latin American music from 80s Latin pop queen Gloria Estefan to reggaeton are not just to be understood musically. But also as a sign that one is defining her biographical heritage for herself. Timo Posselt
More of a style search here: “The guitars have disappeared”, says the press release for the new EP hardship. Instead, this time there are terrifying industrial beats, horribly acidic synth screeches and a dark black, well, you can call it rap, which tells of times of isolation on “Träume von Ausfremdung” (Ungemach). Altogether a lot of pathos, but quite soothing. Flight altitude textually: Rammstein for people who are far too young to have misplaced guitars or clothes in the 90s. Flying high musically: Casper, who was locked in a hole in the ground in a Kaspar-Hauser-like experiment and saw the first people ten years later in a glaring room full of extremely loud Moog synthesizers. Jacob Biazza
On the other hand, life here is completely different: “My favorite thing these days is to sit by the window after breakfast in the morning, drink coffee, read and listen to Sun Ra while the sun shines through the trees of the forest,” says the indie pop -Schrat Kurt Ville announced about the new album. Instead of actually traveling, he traveled a lot in his head, he says. “On the piano or on my guitar.” That’s what “(watch my moves)” sounds like too. Dirty guitars, dirty vocals, dirty lyrics (“Flyin like a fast train / I don’t feel a thing / Till when I pull into my station I just… crash n’ burn – yeah”). And otherwise lots of sepia colored light. Is good. Jacob Biazza
The new album from the famous indie folk cynic and philanthropist Father John Misty aka Josh Tillman, is eclectic even by his standards. It starts out as loose-fitting, shellac-creaky chanson gibberish, around 1928. But because Father John Misty is too witty to be caught with a simple concept album “Tillman gone Weimar”, the whole thing hits a snag in the episode: Sixties -Folk, Bossa, a bit of Great American Songbook, at the very end something Psychedelic. It’s all held together by some absolutely fantastic string sections that cannot be praised enough for arranger Drew Erickson. A cat named “Mr. Blue” dies relatively early on, and if that had happened just a little sooner, “maybe she would have brought us back together in June.” In other words: “Chloë and the Next 20th Century” (Sub Pop) could possibly just be an album about love. But because it’s big, impossible nonsense to write an album about love, and Father John Misty knows that, I guess it’s just an album that wants to tell a few people that Father John Misty likes them. With strings and cat content. After all, the world doesn’t have much more left anyway. Jacob Biazza
Kae Tempest is one of the most haunting voices of the British spoken word scene and has always set his own zeitgeist portraits and self-questions to genre-traversing albums. As of 2020, Tempest defines itself as non-binary and carries the pronoun in English they. Rarely has Tempest’s shattering of the present been more immediate than on new album The Line is a Curve (Virgin). Tempest’s view falls on British society from a wide angle: Corona, social inequality, everyday aggression. If the shutter speed of Tempest’s lyrics snaps fast, you can hardly escape the language images in front of deep beats and unspectacular synths. This is how the associated songs succeed along the cadence of Tempest’s words. Strolling in thoughtfulness, the record also loses traction. Timo Posselt
When the senior pop editor of this newspaper tells the intern that he can still write some of his “nerd stuff” in these sacred lines, he doesn’t need to be asked twice. Allow: Daniel Rossenmulti-instrumentalist and backing vocalist for 2010’s WG Dinner By Candlelight Consensus Band Grizzly Bear. With “You Belong There” (Warp/Rough Trade), Rossen has presented such a gentle solo album that you want to crawl into it. The starting point for his chamber pop under the open sky was his parents’ record collection, which is stacked with LPs by Brazilian musicians such as bossa nova pioneer Baden Powell and experimental guitarist Egberto Gismonti. The daring of Rossen’s debut solo album is heard in every moment. For example, in “Tangle” he weaves a piano motif with double bass and discordant vocals in such a way that it almost sounds like free jazz. As with Grizzly Bear, the sorrow of the world weighs on Rossen’s voice, but you can also feel that someone who could have stayed comfortably in the comfort zone of indie rock is breaking free. Timo Posselt