JQR’s secret city

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Sister Suvi 2009 03.mp3 (6992 KB)

Sister Suvi, the trio of Merril Garbus, Nico Dann and Patrick
Gregoire, in concert wields the clarity, density, and menace of a
falling chandelier. At Bowery Ballroom Thursday night, Merril
disavowed the "power trio" label, but really, what else do you call a
three piece that works so hard to create space within their songs?
There's harmonic space, with lots of drones, revealing the
compositional skeleton like a delicate chain drawing attention to its
decolletage; there's rhythmic space, with off-meter handclaps and
tarantella-like drumstick beats that pull the emphases away from the
ones and threes (and twos and fours) like a stuttering set of power
drapes opening to reveal a puppet stage; there's always space in the
arrangement for another ukulele-powered surge. La Garbus gets more out
of her ukulele than any recent performer I've seen, largely by
committing her performance and songcraft utterly into its twangling,
tinny, overprocessed care. It does for a guitar (not to diminish
Gregoire's guitar wrangling) but smaller, thinner, more vulnerable.
And her voices: Merril's alto just hovers in the air, like a giant
gong reverberating in the silence of the arrangements.
 
I don't want to make Sister Suvi sound like Merril Garbus plus two,
but it was the promise of Tune-Yards that got me out to the show, and
I think her many gifts make her the most natural starting point for
the Sister Suvi initiate like yourself, dear Reader. Thao Nguyen came
on after, and wisely featured both Merril and opening act Samantha
Crain as backup singers. The sound of Merril's gorgeously calm and
centered voice settling over Thao's bony and pinched vocals and
arrangements was the layer of snow that reveals the classic cityscape
underneath.
 

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(Every once in a while, Google Analytics's list of keywords that bring
you, Dear Reader, to my blog comes up with good ideas to write about.
The scary thing is that converse of the truism that there is someone
writing about pretty much anything on the Internet holds true: there
is someone searching for pretty much everything on the Internet. Et
voilà today's post, inspired for you by the intrepid Googlenaut
searching for "Written description of how soukous women have their waist". My blog was at
no. 3 when I wrote this post; I should hope it rises somewhat.)
 
The Dany Engobo/Coeurs Brisés videos, where the mild and inoffensive
zouk tunes clearly play a supporting role to the hypnotic
tummy-shaking of the Coeurs Brisés (Broken Hearts) troupe of dancers,
could be, if you took them lightly, campy as all get out, but I don't
see them that way. Instead, there's something deeply serious about the
attractiveness of lissome women moving hypnotically to the middle-aged
male head of family. Strangely enough, watching such dance videos for
an hour or so, or the length of a VHS tape, always proved relaxing,
like a nice afternoon nap, rather than erotically stimulating.
 
A couple years later I met the guitarist Diblo Dibala after a summer
concert at South Street Seaport. My buddy from work Rose was a friend
of one of his two backup dancers, the older one. The younger one had
managed to shatter boundaries by being a Brooklyn girl (bizarrely
nicknamed Electra) who was touring the world as an African dancer.
This only reinforced to me the complete inauthenticity of soukous
music and soukous-dancing videos; these were products of late
20th-century cultural capitalism, not the honest and straightforward
expression of prelapsarian village life that is the default approach
to African cultural products. In other words, folks were watching
these videos (and Diblo's dancers) not because they had some kind of
cultural relevance to the viewer, but because they liked the dancing,
or the physiques of the dancers, or both. My interest was validated; I
didn't have to come from some Kinshasa faubourg in order to
appreciate it.
 
Here are some examples:

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This is one of those songs that seems like it was assembled so
carefully. It's in the electronica-pastiche mode, with a sultry female
vocal in Portuguese and a samba band playing behind it. It also has an
accordion, but the instrument is so tight on the beat that it sounds
much more like a sample of an accordion than a real accordion. The
real star of this song is the guitar line, which sounds harsh and
acrid and complements the vaguely Elza Soares–sounding woman by
reinforcing her air of menace.
 
Meanwhile, because it's a dance-electronica kind of record, it kind of
loses track after a chorus or two, in order to give the listener time
to really understand what's going on. The bass keeps bouncing atop the
samba drums and below the woman, singing these long melodic lines, and
the sawing sound of the accordion.
 
[Meanwhile, here at the air terminal, where I'm writing these reviews,
I look over at the television, and there is a woman in a
platinum-blonde wig driving evasively. It kind of goes along with the
tune, in a weird way.]

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Compay Segundo is one of the Buena Vista Social Club musicians. I
believe he's the guitarist. This morsel has him playing (if it's not
him, I do apologize) behind a set of female singers, kind of like a
Cuban Pipettes, real relaxed and on the beat. It's a good salsa, for
sure.
 
But in the end the guitar playing doesn't go completely bananas, or
sound as if he just lit the axe on fire and is still playing it, the
way that Franco did with similar rhythms. I have to say, I prefer the
Lingala singing of Kékélé over the same rhythms and nearly the same
instrumentation. Lingala is truly the international language of love.
 
This does have a nice little four-bar guitar solo, and then he chimes
in singing on the last chorus. Nice ending!

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Oh boy, finally a real bomb of a song. There's something about the
Gainsbourg approach, even beyond his French-lover persona, that makes
his music irresistible. This one starts out with a kind of
jungly-rhythm, then the female chorus pops in with the wordless
singing, le-le-le-le-le-le and so on.
 
I think what it is about Gainsbourg is his willingness to submit to a
relatively narrow dynamic range, especially in the difference between
the verse and the chorus. It creates a sense of tension in the song,
that matches up with the clippity-cloppity beat and the crazy jungle
sounds. I'm waiting for the song to explode into something that Sly
and the Family Stone would do, and it never does. Fantastic.

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This sounds exactly like Forro in the Dark for the first half-minute.
It must be the accordion and the lilting rhythm. Once they start
singing, however, you can tell the difference. Forro in the Dark sing
in Portuguese, not Spanish like this one, and these guys are also much
less dynamic than Forro. They are kind of whispering along the verse.
 
It actually sounds like the song from Triplets of Belleville,
but then in the descansa it changes around and sounds more
traditionally Latin American. I'll call it so-so. Lyrics are bland,
also. Maybe better to hear it performed live in a dance club.

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I think someone sent me this one. Britt sings the first chorus in his
trademark Spoon way. The guy has a pretty recognizable voice for
someone who sings without a noticeable accent: that is to say that he
has a phrasing that you can pick up when you hear him singing.
 
'The Way We Get By' is built on a piano riff and some other
instruments accompanying the keyboard. It could be a Ben Folds song if
it didn't have the inimitable vocals. The lyrics don't really
transport me, and it seems as if it needs a video or a string section
for me really to get into it.

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I have no idea what this song is or what it's doing on my music player.
 
The opening intro, with phone-pad tones chirping out the melody, seems
jarringly bright compared with the opening verse and the soft vocals.
This one plus the Bola Johnson could make a nice mini-set of
garçons fragiles en anglais, although Bola wasn't singing in
English.
 
Aha! It's a cover of the Cher chestnut. "Do you believe…in life after love?"
 
Jonathan's snap judgment: So-so. The dialpad-tone accompaniment comes
across as gimmicky, but then so does covering a Cher song without
belting it like the karaoke veteran inside you.

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