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Musician Mitski: The cruel beauty of the laurel rose
Photo:
Ebru Yildiz
Album of the week:
Native to the eastern United States, the laurel rose has beautiful blooms and rich green foliage, but beneath all that gorgeous loveliness lurks toxins and a thicket that wanderers can sometimes find difficult to extricate themselves from.
»Laurel Hell«, laurel hell, is what the locals call this poisonous, often widely branched plant.
A suitable name for the new, sixth album by musician Mitski Miyawaki, 31, which shouldn't have existed at all.
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Mitski
Laurel Hell
Label: Dead Oceans / Cargo
Label: Dead Oceans / Cargo
approx. €12.99
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04.02.2022 3.20 p.m
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Because in the fall of 2019, at the height of her fame as an acclaimed indie pop heroine, Mitski announced her retirement from the industry.
"When the world put me in this position, I didn't realize I was making this deal where I was supposed to sacrifice myself in exchange for the attention," the American of Japanese descent said in a recent interview with the US -»Rolling Stone«.
She says she felt fans wanted too much personal information from her.
But hadn't she already revealed enough of her own soul maze with her songs, which always revealed dark abysses under glittering pop, most recently on her album "Be the Cowboy" struggling for resilience?
Mitski soon realized that she didn't want to go on living without her music after all.
She also owed her indie record label Dead Oceans another album.
Her new song "Working for the Knife", which drags along in grandiose beauty, uses a melancholic melody to address this dilemma of having to put oneself to the knife of her career, even if it hurts.
In rousing synth pop anthems such as "There's Nothing Left for You" or "Love Me More", which also quotes the soundtrack of the eighties empowering classic "Flashdance" and Michael Sembello's hit "Maniac" in the video clip, she tells the conflict between performance shyness and greed for the public as a relationship drama.
Where echoes of those complaining guitars from the early days of their career often saw through the songs, now there is a self-confident, if bittersweet, pop lightness.
Mitski has not yet freed herself, but at least she is now voluntarily dancing through the undergrowth of her career.
The short half hour of "Laurel Hell" draws its strength from the remaining tension for a very good pop album about the soul troubles of a star.
(7.9)
Listened briefly:
Black Country, New Road - »Ants From Up There«
The musicians of Black Country, New Road have little luck with singers: the frontman of the previous band Nervous Conditions had to leave after allegations of sexual harassment, guitarist Isaac Wood took over and initially turned out to be a sensitive, associative vocalist for the emotional status sketches of the band.
But the debut album, stuffed with breakneck high-speed style collages of klezmer, free jazz and experimental post-punk, created a hype in 2021 about the band as a rock 'n' roll manifestation of Generation Z that Wood apparently couldn't resist.
Shortly before the release of »Ants From Up There«, he announced his departure from the band this week.
What now?
If you take the new album as a benchmark, everything is still open for the future: Even if the speed has been throttled in favor of a feverishly celebratory, more cuddly arcade-fire sound, the seven members still play their musicality to the point of exhaustion when every chord, every note would be about survival.
Take the edgy "Bread Song," for example, which draws inspiration from Steve Reich's technique of holding the beat until you can't anymore, and so achieves breathtaking intensity.
This group does not necessarily need singing, as the almost cheesy saxophone etude "Mark's Theme" proves, which is addressed to an uncle who died of Covid-19.
Maybe this is the lockdown album that pushes all other lockdown albums onto the shelf with its complexity and emo heaps.
(8.2)
Los Bitchos - "Let The Festivities Begin!"
But who says only interesting, complex post-post-punk comes out of London these days?
There's weird British world music, too: Los Bitchos are supposed to sound like a clash of Van Halen and the Cocteau Twins — but from Turkey, says Australian-born frontwoman and guitarist Serra Petale of her supposedly hard-drinking
all-female
party band.
The result is a good-natured, outrageous disco-retro-funk with Anatolian, Latin American and Afrobeat influences - a kind of multi-ethnic western soundtrack with twang and tschiggeding, produced in Cinemascope by Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos.
So silly it might be cool.
(7.1)
The Jazz Butcher - »The Highest in the Land«
A notorious pirate who, even after his sinking, still roams the world's pop oceans – that's perhaps how Pat Fish, who died prematurely of cancer last October, saw himself.
At least that's how the line "One more shot for Davy Jones, better make it fast" from his defiantly anticipating death song "Time" could be read.
Fish, aka The Jazz Butcher, achieved modest fame in the 1980s with idiosyncratic indie pop on Alan McGee's Creation label.
With the now posthumous album »The Highest in the Land«, he leaves behind a treasure chest full of Brexit blues and sentimental, sardonic existentialism anthems.
May he rest in heavenly »Soul Happy Hour«.
(7.5)
Yeule - »Glitch Princess«
It's still pretty lonely in this multiverse that meta boss Mark Zuckerberg wants to send us all into.
Nat Ćmiel, a young woman from Singapore who now lives in London, has been haunting the digital wasteland as a self-proclaimed cyborg or disembodied avatar for a number of years – very sad, severely depressed and manic-longing on her second album »Glitch Princess« .
»Take me somewhere pretty / Pretty enough to fill this empty«, she whispers in a hentai girl voice in »Too Dead Inside«.
But in the borderless and genderless virtual reality, apparently a terribly desolate place, she finds little connection and comfort.
Yeule produced the hissing, beeping, often bluntly throbbing electronics that jitter and echo to her singing through all sorts of styles and genres together with Danny L. Harle from the PC Music label, which is notorious for this kind of future pop.
At least you can hold on to the beautiful acoustic ballad »Don't Be so Hard on Your Own Beauty«.
Totally far out in the 21st century.
(8.0)
