The convolutions are never forced, but perpetually questing.Ħ. Lavish with musicianly details, the songs can linger over vocal harmonies, dart ahead as briskly strummed folk-rock, drift into psychedelic pastorales, build elegant chamber-pop interludes or find a haunted solitude. Yet the new songs are still labyrinths of tension and release there’s no telling which way they might waft or surge at any given instant. Vocals are less hazed in overdubs, drums are pushier, lyrics are slightly less enigmatic as they ponder intimacy and distance. GRIZZLY BEAR “Shields” (Warp) Grizzly Bear clarifies its music without simplifying it on its fourth album. Apple’s voice even as they propel her to take chances.ĥ. For songs rooted in show tunes and classical music as well as rock, the rhythms are both a playground and a testing ground, exposing Ms. Apple, usually at her piano, and Charley Drayton, playing all sorts of percussion. But they take place in a wide-open musical space: a studio collaboration between Ms. Its songs grapple with jealousy, insecurity, loneliness, lust and overwhelming self-consciousness. FIONA APPLE “The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do” (Epic) Fiona Apple’s fourth studio album teeters, moment to moment, between obsessive confession and dark vaudeville. As the tracks make eerie, restless dissolves between instruments and electronics, the songs melt down and recast themselves, again and again.Ģ.

And in their sound as well as their lyrics, his songs create hollow spaces that they can only sometimes fill. Kelly, he’s an unusual character for R&B: estranged but observant, admitting an attraction to a man, finding emptiness where others find material or emotional comfort.

Even with some resemblances to Prince and R. FRANK OCEAN “Channel Orange” (Def Jam) The moody introspection of a soul-ballad man fuses with the metaphor-making skills of a rapper in the sparse, aching songs that fill Frank Ocean’s official debut album.

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