Oh, it’s not easy as a singer in a successful band. “I don’t want this body / I don’t want this voice / I don’t want to be here / but I guess I have no choice”, sings Dan Reynolds on his band’s new album Imagine Dragons. Sniff. But at least, the song is called “It’s OK”, in the end he gets along quite well with his body, his voice and his 40 million albums sold. Incidentally, an altitude from which the producer-god-emperor-king Rick Rubin raises an eyelid with interest. He produced album number five, “Mercury – Act 1” (Universal). The result is not that different than before: The band from Las Vegas continues to run their company like a number revue. Everything is covered in a safe manner, dry funk, scruffy ballads, cowboy boot rock, sometimes simple refrains, sometimes thought-heavy whispers (see above). Polemically, one could say: a song for every format radio. But the fact that they can actually supply different broadcasters with such customer-specific accuracy must be booked as a manual work.
“The organized coexistence of heartbeats that hammer out into the universe together, you couldn’t spend an hour and a half better.” King Krule is an eccentric, the punk lamentations of the young Brit always sound like painful loneliness, but he loves the human bath, the euphoria of the live concert. Shortly before the beginning of the Corona era, he was still on tour – a recording from this time is only now being released: “You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down” (XL recordings, available digitally, from December also on CD / vinyl). One would have thought that the soul-sore lamentations needed the lost stalactite cave of the studio recordings, the emptiness between the tones. But not true. They also work in front of a full house. And almost even more astonishing: the audience is not moved, but sings along with entire songs, word for word, even the quietest passages. So frenetic, so breathless that with every beat it becomes clear again how much the man, born in 1994, screams from the hearts of many of his generation. Great.
Does anyone still remember double or triple features in the cinema? It used to be a big deal. For example, three action films in a row. If you stumbled back into the street at two in the morning, everything was mixed up in your head, chases, fights, heroes, villains, upstairs, downstairs, a magical tangle of adrenaline and overwhelming. “I Am Alicia” (Sooper Records), the American singer’s debut album Alicia Walter, has roughly the effect of three Broadway musicals at once. One moment still big band swing with grandeur, the next synth pop with waves, suddenly unbelievable choir chants, polka rhythms, disco strings, then a heavy hook over to minimalist electro gadgets. A triple feature from Kate Bush to Kelis to Lily Allen and back again. Lovingly and quite breathtakingly down to the smallest details, but also a lot of wood. So it’s hardly surprising that Walter burned out shortly before the album was finished. It then took her a year to really get it done. To really grasp all the subtleties as a listener, you might need another one.
Oh, sometimes there are just ideas that are so absurd that they seem completely conclusive again. Elvis Costello asked himself: What if I re-released my funny wave-pop album “This Year’s Model” from 1978? So the original recordings, but without my voice? But with a lot of singers from the Spanish-speaking world? What if they all write new texts for themselves? In Spanish? Which in turn I don’t understand because I can’t speak a word of Spanish? The answer to all these questions is: Vamonos, vamonos! Yes, please do it! “Spanish Model” (Universal) is great fun. Juanes (correct, the one with the monster hit “La Camisa Negra”) nölt in a beautiful Costello parody by “Pump It Up”, the Chilean singer Cami sings “This Year’s Girl” as “La Chica De Hoy”. So it goes 19 pieces long (and sometimes quite wrong). The toy organ, which may have been funny 40 years ago, is more annoying today. But it doesn’t matter. The concept has an incredible charm. Could that please Madness do in Italian or the Stranglers in Greek? (And now hear again: the fantastic “Rock El Casbah” by Rachid Taha!)