Chrissie Hynde – “Standing In The Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan” (BMG Rights)
Some people like to come back to the classics as they get older: “I’ve finally read the ‘Elective Affinities’ again.” “At the moment I am listening to Karajan again, all Beethoven recordings.” And if these older people are famous musicians, that can also mean: “So now I have recorded an entire album with just Bob Dylan songs.” Bryan Ferry, Judy Collins, Robyn Hitchcock, Leslie West, Steve Wynn and, and, and. Now “Standing In The Doorway” appears: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan “(BMG Rights). Hynde got the idea last year in lockdown, so she sang songs like” You’re A Big Girl Now “,” Blind Willie McTell “or” Tomorrow Is A Long Time “into her smartphone and sent the recordings to her old one Pretenders-Colleagues James Walbourne. He then built a few more instruments around it on the laptop at home. The result sounds like they made music together: unexcited versions, straight forward and true to the work. His Bobness probably likes them too. On the other hand: who knows what they’re hearing at the moment. Max Fellmann
GA-20 – “GA-20 Does Hound Dog Taylor: Try It … You Might Like It!” (Colemine Records)
And while we’re on cover versions: The great, half-forgotten blues hero Hound Dog Taylor always deserves more people to replay his songs. The man came from Chicago, but his profession was not the beer-bellied Chicago blues, but the rough, bony alternative, hard and sharp-edged. Now the trio pays homage to him GA-20 with the album “GA-20 Does Hound Dog Taylor: Try It … You Might Like It!” (Colemine Records). The approach is as straightforward as it is loving: no reinterpretations, no modernizations, nothing there, but please, everything as original as possible (the band is named after an old guitar amplifier). Two guitars, drums, no bass, exactly the same instrumentation as Jon Spencer or that Black Keys inspired. Completely detoxified and direct, three men in a confined space – in some places you get the impression when listening to them that they are already nose to nose in the apartment door and the next thing to do is to dismantle the kitchen. And if you were to say, well, they do very well, but can’t I listen to the original? Then the gentlemen would answer: Hurray, if we can get even one human being to spot old Hound Dog Taylor, we will have done everything right. An act of love. Max Fellmann
Jake Bugg – Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (Sony Music)
Jake Bugg, the youngest Folkie with the oldest soul, has now, be careful, reinvented himself. In the genre of hand-plucked, guitar-creaky truthfulness, in which he has been on the road for a long time for his age, this is a tricky step (and even earlier in his late 20s). At least the purist folk fan gives little innovation, so many listeners, including men, could be bothered by the astonishingly thumpy pounding beats that stand in the way on “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning”. To the Killers-like eighth-note basses, on the handclaps and, again, attention: disco strings. Yes, yes, disco strings. Not that many, though. But there are always synth-cold pizzicati and large-scale pressure waves from a lot of keyboard instruments. And beyond that, there is hardly any reason to worry. A lot of the songs are so good that a really bad production – and the production here is very rarely, if at all, really bad – could harm them. Jakob Biazza
Nura – “On the Search” (Universal Music)
That’s right, it’s getting a bit bland to interpret Nura’s raps only as self-empowerment poetry in a misogynous world. For many years now, she has been reinterpreting the male misogyny poses in hip-hop into something that could perhaps best be described as female hyper-chauvinism. As brute prose that takes the daily degradation of women by male colleagues, inflates it to full grimace and then hurls it back with wonderful brutality. You can hear “Backstage” on her new album “Auf der Suche”: Missy Elliott-Sample, and above it the announcement: “I’m sorry Mama, but your boy is ne hoe!” And then: “He’s well built, like my joints / The girls still want to have fun, so get a friend / You dreamed of that / but I’m sorry, little one / No sex for you tonight Nightliner “(to quote the most youth-free passages). As the mirrors recounted in a large data analysis, it was found at least a year ago that no one uses more sexist terms on average than Nura’s former band SXTN. Wonderful trick, of course: take away the crudest primal screams from all the howler monkeys. Perhaps at some point you will notice yourself what terrible buffoons you are.
And because, unfortunately, many have not noticed it, but said even more clearly: In a genre that is more and more drowning in artistic insignificance due to a lack of new ideas, women are currently taking over the rule anyway. Nura way ahead. Or to put it in her own words: “Fuck promo beef / finally hit your face or make music again!” Jakob Biazza
Villagers – “Fever Dreams” (Domino)
Irish songwriter Conor J. O’Brien releases album after album under the band name with gentle persistence Villagers – with changing musicians. Up in the north, his wistful indie folk always lands at number one on the charts. In the rest of the world, he’s more like the cousin you overlook at family reunions. His songs can keep up with those of godfathers like Elliott Smith or M. Ward. On the new album “Fever Dreams” (Domino) he leans a little more in the direction of pop with big choruses, arms spread out, cinemascope width. The soft rock moments are also lovable: The wonderful “So Simpatico” takes you straight to the Amalfi Coast around 1978. And again and again, when the details are particularly artfully and finely chiseled, when the violins languish and a solitary trombone begins to solo , then O’Brien’s music is reminiscent of that of his Northern Irish colleague Neil Hannon. Hannon has been producing his fantastic music for years under the name The Divine Comedy. Now maybe the two of them could explain what it is all about with the band names, behind which there is only one man. After all, this criticism is not signed with writing group south, but with: Max Fellmann.