Tony Stamp assesses new records from futurist RnB star Kelela, veteran indie rockers Yo La Tengo, and a collaboration between Senegal and Sweden called Wau Wau Collectif.
Raven by Kelela
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This release stands as a totemic entry in 2023’s musical calendar. Here’s an artist who makes futurist RnB that should please everyone from dance club attendees to indie kids, with a stated interest in conceptual records, and music that’s defined by her status as a queer Black woman. The result is heady and intoxicating, an hour spent immersed in synth-scapes and soul croons that feels less like a series of songs, and more like one continuous trip.
Kelela’s career began in 2013 with the mixtape Cut 4 Me, after which she signed to the adventurous label Warp Records, and released an EP and album that both dissected relationship breakups within an analytical framework.
The latter, Take Me Apart, came out six years ago, and was the product of four years' of effort. She’s spoken about working to achieve specific results, and clearly isn’t going to be rushed.
If past entries were about separation, Raven is a celebration of self, in her words an affirmation of "being a Black femme working in dance music". As other music writers have noted, it can feel like a journey through clubland, as the album ebbs and flows through various types of dance music, interspersed with ambient interludes.
In 2019 Kelela made a primer for friends, family and business partners, and being who she is, it became public knowledge. It contained material like the essay Reader on Misogynoir by Kandis Williams, the book Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble, and IGTV videos like Are you stealing from Black folks by author and activist Sonya Renee Taylor.
It’s heady stuff that makes it clear where this musician is coming from, and she’s been equally clear that these are the lines of thought that informed Raven. Lyrically though she’s less specific, letting subtext do the work in songs about joy and independence like ‘Missed Call’.
This approach, celebrating the abandon of club culture through a Black lens, is similar to the one Beyonce took on Renaissance, and Raven is similarly focused and immersive. She also employed a long list of producers, with a lot of crossover across the album. So the mangled guitar and drum breaks of ‘Missed Call’ were supplied by two-thirds of the team that helmed the minimal techno on ‘Bruises’.
For an album with such a cerebral underpinning, Raven’s goals are often achieved wordlessly. Many tracks could be labelled ambient, using Kelela’s voice as texture rather than melody, and often shunning beats altogether.
In my notes I wrote “No hooks just vibes”, and that’s partly true. The second-to-last track is the one that most resembles a pop song, a warm parting gift called ‘Enough For Love’. What it shares with the other fourteen, aside from a fascination with club culture, is an atmosphere of transcendence.
This Stupid World by Yo La Tengo
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Many years ago, someone in a band told me their dream was to achieve a sort of mid-level success: enough to pay the bills, but not so much that you attract the attention of major labels, with all their attendant pressure. This was the key to longevity, they told me.
Recent years have seen many of the nineties’ choicest guitar bands reunite, be it purely for the odd world tour, a la Pavement, or an unexpected lurch into generating new material, a la The Pixies. Then there are the acts that just kept going, pushing through fallow periods to achieve artistic highs.
Low released the most aurally adventurous album of their nearly thirty-year career in 2021, before the tragic death of Mimi Parker. And Yo La Tengo, the amiable New Jersey act formed in the 1980s, just released their sixteenth record and garnered some of their best reviews.
Press for it states that all band members performed at once, and self-produced, stressing that it’s their most ‘live’ sounding work in some time, and that’s true, capturing a spur-of-the-moment feel that was maybe prompted by their last release We Have Amnesia Sometimes, which was recorded with one mic in the centre of the room as the band improvised.
But another reason for its cohesion and sense of purpose might be Ira Caplan’s lyrical preoccupations, seemingly fueled by the same alarming current events the rest of us are worried about.
This is a record that embraces negativity with a certain amount of irony, but musically it’s consistently comforting. In their improv outing the trio was drawn to generate drones, and those are present everywhere here, whether on ‘Fallout’, layered through a jam that’s like a more polite Sonic Youth, or ‘Tonight’s Episode’, which rollicks along on a peppy beat and pseudo-funk bassline. Plenty of bands use walls of guitar noise and feedback to assail their audience, but on Yo La Tengo songs they feel as welcoming as Kaplan’s diminutive voice.
I saw someone online make a joke about James McNew, who’s been Yo La Tengo’s bass player for the past 30 years, making a career of watching Ira Kaplan and his wife Georgia Hubley, who drums and vocalises in the band, singing love songs to each other night after night.
These songs are so gentle they’re easy to mistake for amorous, but dig a little deeper on tracks like ‘Aselestine’, where Hubley takes the lead, and they’re clearly more nuanced, and darker.
Forty years in, Yo La Tengo continue to make music that’s noisy but soothing, humble but secretly profound. The album navigates shoegaze, country, krautrock and plenty more with their usual subtlety, and while it’s lyrically concerned with the state of things, their approach is generous in this regard too.
The title track has Kaplan repeating “This stupid world is killing me”, with the qualifier, it’s “all we have”.
On the closing track ‘Miles Away’ they offer a moment of refuge, with advice to “avert your eyes”, and “ease your mind”.
Mariage by Wau Wau Collectif
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In 2018 Karl Jonas Winqvist found himself stranded in Senegal. The Swedish music archaeologist had spent three months in the town of Toubab Dialaw, where he’d spent part of his time jamming with local musicians. He was due to fly back to Europe when a pilot’s strike extended his stay by a week, and he decided to seize the moment and get some of these collaborations onto tape.
The recordings formed the basis of 2021’s Yarel Sa Doom, and the abundance of material led to a follow-up, an ongoing collaboration between continents dubbed Wau Wau Collectif.
When Winqvist returned to Sweden he stayed in touch with Arouna Kane, a Senegalese musician and studio engineer. The pair refined their recordings into a finished album, then continued to swap files and collaborate over WhatsApp, generating a second record called Mariage.
Listen closely and you’ll hear traces of the modern post-production process, but mostly both albums serve to showcase the Toubab Dialaw locals, a collection of poets, musicians, beat makers and vocalists who gathered to contribute.
The title of Wau Wau Colectif’s first album translates to “educating young people”. At the time they said they wanted to promote “youth education to address the social issues facing contemporary Senegal”. On Mariage, children appear a few times, including a beat-infused treatment of the traditional ‘Xale’.
This album betrays its origin as a collection of leftovers not in terms of quality, but in the ways it stretches in several different directions, whether it’s the inclusion of children and a flexible tempo on 'Xale', or the ominous ‘Thiaroye 1944’, in which Mouhamodou Lo gravely tells the story of the Thiaroye massacre when French forces opened fire on mutineering West African veterans.
Mariage is released by Sahel Sounds, an American label specialising in Saharan music. It’s an artistic union between that region and Sweden, thanks to Karl Winqvist, but primarily a celebration and showcase of the people of one small fishing village. If the collaboration was ever strained, there’s no trace of that in the finished product, which consistently feels light and effortless.
Arouna Kane explained the project in an artful way that relates to its place of origin, saying “It’s like diving into the sea. There are all different species of fish swimming around, but together they make the ocean.”
