Consumer Guide: June, 2024
An exploration of erotic and existential turmoil, five albums (across nine years) from Jon Langford, and two more from an East African supergroup. Plus: Afropop, amapiano, blues, Isbell, and Taylor.
Asake: Work of Art (Empire) Echoing amapiano log-drum loops provide Nigerian Afropop up-and-comer the sound-effect hooks those of us who can’t understand what the guy’s crooning about wouldn’t otherwise check out (“Olorun,” “Basquiat”) **
Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft (Darkroom/Interscope) I prepped by listening with half an ear, a proven way to find out whether music has the power to grab you even when you've slanted your consciousness elsewhere. And somehow I came away nursing the all too vague conclusion that Finneas had convinced his sister to subjugate her uncanny pop hookiness to his home-schooled avant ambitions—to put their pop-tune hooks on hold and make an album where the musical gestalt was fundamentally textural. Closer listening, however, revealed that textures or no textures this missed the point. Tunefully enough and much more decisively, it’s an album that explores in shifting detail both stardom and one’s early twenties as hotbeds of erotic