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US musician Valerie June
Photo: Renata Raksha
Album of the week:
Valerie June - "The Moon and Stars: Prescription for Dreamers"
It is curious how this new era demands new categories: Is »The Moon and Stars«, the much too long-awaited new album by US musician Valerie June, a so-called lockdown album because it opens the senses wide, playful to the Dreaming away from the confines of your own four walls animated, so it appears at exactly the right time?
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Album cover of "The Moon and Stars"
Funny how the external circumstances change and condition the reception of pop music.
Because June was finished with the recordings at the end of 2019, her label only advised her not to release the album last year.
Still, it sounds contemporary intimate.
It braces itself with gentle force against the imprisonment of the soul - and penetrates all musical and contemporary locations.
Genre or time have never been reliable parameters when looking at June's music.
She has always transcended these terms with a universal claim, and that also makes her fifth album an event.
Have fun with the categorization, dear Grammys!
Valerie June, born and raised in Tennessee in 1982, lives in Brooklyn and is African American, but that doesn't make her a soul or R&B singer.
As one of the few black artists, Tracy Chapman comes to mind, she also writes her songs as fragile folk or country songs with steel guitar ("Two Roads").
Sometimes they sound like bluegrass and Appalachians (“Colors”, “Fallin”), then again like gospel, delta blues or the pompous southern soul of old hi-records or Stax records loaded with brass and strings (“Call Me a Fool «with Memphis legend Carla Thomas).
Andreas Borcholte's playlist
Photo:
Christian O. Bruch / laif
Valerie June:
Smile
Israel Nash:
Pressure
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:
Viscosity
Louisahhh:
Chaos
Disarstar:
Trauma (feat. Nura)
Palas:
Intro
Sophia Kennedy:
I Can See You
Isolation Berlin:
I want to be like (Nina Hagen)
Sarah Proctor:
The Breaks
Danger Dan:
Run away
Go to Spotify playlist Right arrow Go to Apple Music playlist Right arrow
It's an amazingly multi-layered Americana sound that is deeply rooted in musical traditions, but from this roots foundation also reaches into previously unexplored spheres, psychedelics and Afrofuturism.
June's distinctive voice, trained in the church choir, serves as a link, with which she can act either ethereally tender or diva-like briskly.
She gained more attention in 2013 with her album "Pushin 'Against the Stone", produced by Dan Auerbach (Black Keys), but Valerie June had already emancipated herself from its earthy sound on "The Order of Time" in 2017, "The Moon and Stars «Is now her bravest and musically freest release to date.
Alone the rhapsody-like triplet “Stay / Stay Meditation / You and I” at the beginning of the album expands its spectrum in a stunning way: a retro soul merges into a New Orleans brass band sound with marching drums, flutes haunt the meditation section a jazz ambience before guitar folk meets Afrobeat motifs.
A sovereignly orchestrated, very cool chaos.
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Valerie June
The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers
Label: CONCORD
Availability: In stock.
Sound carrier: Audio CD
Label: CONCORD
Availability: In stock.
Sound carrier: Audio CD
approx € 17.51
Price query time
03/12/2021 2:58 p.m.
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"I don't know how long I'll stay," June sings at one point in this storm of styles, and it's about something private, about romantic going or staying.
But in the further course of the album, produced by Jack Splash (including Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys) with a lot of sound transparency, it becomes clear that June's musical border crossings and escapes are perhaps also looking for a way out of current political and social misery.
Their “prescriptions” aim to stimulate the emotional receptors for the dreams of Martin Luther King or John Lennon, dreams of a better world that overcomes racism and hatred, of humanism and kindness.
"In search for something true", according to the breathed mantra in the key piece "Within You", one only has to immerse oneself deeply enough, esoterically enraptured by the tinkling of steel drums, the clang of violins and the quiet hissing of traps.
If you get involved, Valerie June's soothing soul yoga will conjure up a smile on your worried wrinkled face, which is as disarming as "Smile", the little pop hit on this delightfully utopian album.
(8.4)
Listened briefly:
Disarstar - »German October«
"I'm not one of you," the Hamburg rapper and Marxist Disarstar etched against Balenciaga consumerists and other Dullis in German hits.
Many, like himself, come from the very bottom and could speak against Nazis and capitalist hardship.
But nothing there.
So he has to do it himself, so much the better!
Using elegant trap and R&B beats, he tells left-wing and radical things from the darker side of Pfeffersack-City.
(8.2)
Israel Nash - "Topaz"
Wind instruments, organs, choir singers and many guitars created a rich, yearning country-soul sound in the self-made corrugated iron hut studio of Americana rocker Israel Nash.
It often sounds a little bit epigonal, as if Neil Young got lost in Memphis in the mid-seventies.
But it is touching how Nash makes his heart wide like a canyon in order to overcome the political rifts of the USA.
(7.7)
Louisahhh - "The Practice of Freedom"
Ahhhh, how much one would like to dance to this sound liberated in Berghain!
The New York DJ Louisa Pillot has been hailed as the »Queen of Techno« for years, now she is formulating her feminist, emancipatory messages on a hard, darkly sparkling debut album with dark wave and industrial electronics that leaves a sharp metal taste in the mouth .
Anne Clark's heiress.
(8.0)
Selena Gomez - "Revelación - EP"
"No te tengo a ti / Me tengo a mí", if only it were that simple: "I don't have you anymore, but I have myself," sings US pop star Selena Gomez on her first Spanish-language EP.
Hopefully the proud reflection on their origins (father is Mexican) and the competent nudging Latin rhythms really relieve their heartache (Justin Bieber, still).
Beautiful and melancholy.
(6.5)
