Music I Liked – Jes Sah Bi & Peter One, Cemetery Urn, Mitski, Aretha Franklin

This week I finally started exploring new music again, even though I’m still marinating on everything I heard at Pickathon. Things I liked included Jess Sah Bi & Peter One, Cemetery Urn, Mitski, and Aretha Franklin.

Jess Sah Bi & Peter One

A Bandcamp Album of the Day, Our Garden Needs its Flowers by Jess Sah Bi & Peter One. Last week I went to the opera Porgy and Bess. I’m not a Gershwin fan, so even though there was a lot to like about the opera, I didn’t really like the music. Still there was much to process. This was the album I needed to synthesize the experiences of Pickathon and Porgy and Bess.

Cemetery Urn

Death metal to me is a lot like (what I remember of) steak. A good steak is a good steak, and there is only so much you can do to describe it. Every now and then someone does something different with the seasoning, so that you explain why that particular steak is better than another one. Most of the time, describing the right texture and level of browning is all you can do to describe any steak. But even if words don’t capture the difference, some steaks are more memorable than others. Listening to Cemetery Urn‘s Barbaric Retribution, I thought, “This is a good steak,” and Angry Metal Guy must have agreed since they gave it a rare 4.

Mitski

My husband introduced me to Mitski this week with the video for “Best American Girl.” We loved this song because it perfectly captures the way my Chinese-American daughter feels surrounded by buxom white girls. She, on the other hand, missed the point entirely because there was so much inappropriate touching in the video. Whatever, she’ll love it in a couple years. We listened to the rest of Be the Cowboy and it was all good.

Aretha Franklin

I listen widely and have no genre loyalties but there are a few styles of music that leave me cold. I often joke that I have no soul because soul music is one of them. Except for Aretha Franklin. I have always loved Aretha. One of the few vinyl records I ever owned was a collection of her early hits. My husband hated it because sometimes her vocal volume would shift so dramatically the recording equipment couldn’t cope. He thought that was unprofessional. He missed the point entirely. Technology just couldn’t handle her greatness. When she died this week, somebody on KEXP said Aretha taught white people what black joy sounds like. I think she helped us find our soul.