When you listen to a great deal music, not dissimilar as to when you have a lot of sex partners, your taste can get overly sophisticated. Verse-chorus-verse stops getting you of and you find yourself listening to lo-fi ambient wallpaper for days on end. Anything to change the sound in your head. Anything to be young again.
I am not claiming that this musical promiscuity lead to Terre Roche’s current collaboration with Guinean djembe drummer Sidiki Conde, and bass guitarist Marion Cherry, is some form of musical threesome, I am suggesting that it sound so different than what I am used to it sounds like a form of musical adventure. Imagine Paul Simon’s Graceland rewritten for the Roches and with more musical give and take; that’s what it sounds like and that sound is not quite international though maybe more so than Vampire Weekend is.
Terre Roche is the musical frontwoman, she is the name we know, and she is a central figure but only as in she is in the middle. The songs are not of a piece, some of them sound like West African folk, “Remember The Elephant (Because She Remembers You) is a sort of African folk, meaning the drums wouldn’t make much sense anywhere else and the language is Mandinka and if you heard Damon Albarn’s “Mali Music” maybe ten years, some of the sounds will have filtered down.
It is good enohg, though my taste tends to run more towards the more soulful Ethiopian music. But where it does work for me is when Terre’s presence is more clearly felt. The very nbext song, “Senero” has a Sunday afyernoon calm and beauty, a long drive home, sort of distance closeness, with words which seem more like a feel for what the words might mean: “you can’t put garbage in anything”?
Better is a playing with the Maestro “American Autumn”, a sort of timeless half remembered track, it plays somewhere far away, with the harmonies a gentleness playing off each other than moving together. A brisk and cool beauty that makes you think of parents and a slowing down.
The album ends with a version of “Shenandoah” for the ages and as in so many covers, it gets to the point through comparison, the song is an American classic, a folk song from at ;east the 19th century, it has the gallop of a horses and the tread of hooves, and when Slaves used to sing it, it is also the sound of running away. But here is a canter in time, a place where Africa and America, the continents meet.
It also leads you back to the beginning and another sense of the song as notice board, town cryer, hailers of heroes, with the lovely “Captain Sully” (the man who landed an airplane on the Hudson). A fitting opening for a song that must have been a surprise to Terre. The shock of the fleeting nature of Terre’s fame, she is a huge star in my world, took her by surprise when she was stuck on Kickstarter trying to fund Afro-Jersey. Terre is the middle Roche, the woman was in effect discovered by Paul Simon and along with elder sister sang on There Goes Rhythmin’ Simon, before beginning a spectacular career with the Roches. You might recall rock nyc reviewing her sister and nieces superb new album last month.
But, as Terre wrote in the New York Times, “Like so many folks my age (I’m 59), I’ve found that the horse I was riding slipped out from underneath me at some point in the last 10 years. I was not asleep for this, merely busy trying to mine the murky depths of my mind for song ideas.”. Forced into fundraising, she found what she was being paid to do had changed.
But the album got funded one way or the other, and the warmth of “Doin’ The Job” makes it worthwhile. And the song itself, a Platonian concept about what you might want and not want to do what you are best for, is very suitable.
Musically, the album is not even about Terre or Marlon, it is about the drums. The drums, more than the different languages or instrumentation. or voices, places you somewhere else than what used to. It is subtle but shifting, it shifts your ears from where you are used to having it.
It is like there is more of it, not the pace but the frills seem to be filling you up.
Have you ever had a three way? Like that.
Grade: B+