Indeed it is now Taylor Swiftwho is singing? Difficult to see. The voice ducks very behind the rest, joins in, merges into the overall sound. But it is announced. Taylor Swift – roughly the largest female pop star of the decade, 174 million followers on Instagram alone, could still break the 200 million record sales mark in her life. And she sings now or not, you have to listen very, very carefully, smoothly a bit of second voice on this beautiful song called “Birch” (and then even more clearly solo on the sequel “Renegade”). So flanked, probably, Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon exhibited almost modestly. Vernon is at least easy to recognize because of his voice, as in his main project Bon Iver, changed effects still sounds as if he had swallowed a small moon and is now coughing silvery threads into the darkness.
Big Red Machine is the name of the formation in which Vernon and Dessner have just released the second album “How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?” (Jagjaguwar / 37d03d). Dessner is a member of his two main professions The National and has worked as a producer, among other things, on albums by – so this circle closes – Swift and Ben Howard (he is also a guest on the album). So you would have to speak of a supergroup if this predicate weren’t still so terribly linked to the grandegos of male superstars, who usually form big failed bands with other grandegos. Big Red Machine sound surprisingly ego-free on the follow-up to the self-titled debut. The pianos dab around gently and dimly, as if they were snuggling up with the guitars under a thick felt blanket and secretly reading to them with the flashlight. The drums slap around ecstatically, sometimes almost childlike. Indie, alternative, whatever-pop. And yet, an enormously confusing combination, none of this is misunderstood, but has its own, very enchanting size. The choirs flooded with light, puffy – and numerous. Heaven, there are choirs hanging everywhere. A heaven, oh what, a stratosphere full of choirs. But how beautiful they are all. Great! Really great.
Another size of its own, but one that you absolutely have to like in order to be able to like it, also develop Chvrches (pronounced “churches”, so “tschörtsches”) on their new work. “Screen Violence” (Universal Music), which also comes out on Friday, is a kind of themed album about everything bad to do with screens. So everything. And one would have to listen very carefully here, too, but front woman Lauren Mayberry and her colleagues Iain Cook and Martin Doherty seem to accomplish the equally confusing achievement that really every note that appears somewhere is bred to the absolute maximum volume and intensity. Which is, well, really very powerful.
Jake Bugg, the youngest folkie with the oldest soul, has, be careful: reinvented. 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 doesn’t give much innovation. Many listeners, including men, could be bothered by the astonishingly thumpy stomping 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 also very large pressure waves from a lot of keyboard instruments. And beyond that, there is hardly any reason to worry. Some 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.
And that also applies to pretty much everything Brian Setzer wrote, produced or recorded like this, including for “Gotta Have The Rumble” (Surfdog Records), his album to be released on Friday. As always: very formidable, duck-tailed, pomadic guitar licks, perfectly tipsy swing, deeply oiled vocals. You keep the rockabilly, the typesetter since he started his career with the Stray cats Resurrected like new decade after decade, so easy for rowdy music. Whatever it is, of course – but rowdy music, which, final confusion for today, only works if it is played and sung with absolute technical perfection. And still exhibits excess. Which is the case here again in the finest sense, and the only Beckmesserei might have been that the album, as it is, could have been released ten, twenty, thirty or forty years ago, and no one would have noticed.