Our Album of the Week says Everything Has Changed, but Fresh Picks has not. New music recommendations and a blast from the past coming at you now.
For albums this week, the long-awaited sophomore release Everything Has Changed from Danielle Ponder and a return to the string band for Jake Blount on Single-Footing Horse.
We have four new singles for you: Sampa the Great's "Location," The Decemberists' "The Better Part of Bravery," Star Moles' "Born Again" and Jeremy Messersmith's "Maybe Today, Satan."
Then sunshine and so much more from Roy Ayers in this week's Pick From '76, Everybody Loves The Sunshine.
Check out this week's suggestions from Asst. Music Director Malachy Koons and Volunteer Coordinator Dan Gannon.
Albums
Album of the Week: Danielle Ponder - Everything Has Changed
From the sweeping soul power of "God of You" to the grooving funk Afrobeat on "Sun and Moon," from the tender honesty of "SKN" to the heartbreaking "Blues," Everything Has Changed is everything we could have wanted from Ponder's heavily anticipated sophomore album. It finds the lawyer-turned-musician navigating a series of tragedies in her personal life with grace, acceptance and growth. -MK
Jake Blount - Single-Footing Horse
Bias alert. I absolutely love Jake Blount, and he does not disappoint on this, his fourth full-length album full of flying fiddle string band wonders. Gone are the cool homemade electronic beats of The New Faith and the Afro-futurism of Symbiont. This is a roots record that is as traditional as a dad joke at a family gathering.
While Blount has an excellent voice, he chooses to let his fiddle playing do most of the talking. Over half the tracks are instrumental cuts full of bouncy, jaunty Appalachian goodness. Blount keeps the tempo high on wondrous tracks like "Garfield's Blackberry Blossom," where the fiddle and banjo will have you, no doubt, bringing your boots in to get re-soled after repeated kitchen hoedowns.
This is get-down music without a doubt. While I haven't a clue what the song "Pork Fat Makes My Chicken Tan" means exactly, it displays Blount stretching his voice into another realm. Blount always seems to have a microscope on the past and a telescope on the future, and his take on old-time music is beyond refreshing. -DG
Singles
Sampa the Great - "Location"
Anyone else even more hyped for Nu Zamrock after this latest banger? The full album — inspired by Sampa learning her uncle George "Groovy Joe" Kunda was a founding member of legendary Zamrock band WITCH — is due out on Oct. 30. Just as her uncle's band broke barriers at the time, Sampa is not worshipping the past, but rather looking forward and blazing a bright path into the future of Zambian music. -MK
The Decemberists - "The Better Part of Bravery"
A surprise new release from Colin Meloy and company, this song is featured on an upcoming animated film called Wildwood. Fittingly, it's based on Meloy's 2011 book of the same name, and the prominent banjo and harmonica are more in line with The Decemberists' folksy The King Is Dead from that same year than with their most recent album As It Ever Was, So it Will Be Again from 2024. Meloy wrote the song specifically for the film's closing credits, and its obvious message of letting go has all the closure you'd expect. -MK
Star Moles - "Born Again"
Earlier this year, Star Moles, a project of Emily Moales, released an underground yet critically acclaimed album called Highway to Hell. Behind the strength of that release, already her fifth, Moales just signed to Dead Oceans and dropped this instant classic. Shuffling along with a loose swagger, the pithy lyrics and her unique phrasing show exactly what the hype is all about. -MK
Jeremy Messersmith - "Maybe Today, Satan"
BREAKING NEWS: Jeremy Messersmith is the latest opener to be dropped from Charley Crockett's tour! (Not really. But Crockett — who allegedly dropped an opener this summer for 'Satanic imagery' — might not like Messersmith's new tune.)
Is that Chastity Brown and a choir of angels singing behind our favorite Minnesota trickster-songwriter? You betcha. Hail Satan! -MK
Pick From '76
Roy Ayers Ubiquity - Everybody Loves The Sunshine
It's true, everybody does love the sunshine, but it's time to love the rest of this 1976 heater from Roy Ayers.
After starting out firmly in the post-bop jazz world, the vibraphonist was well into his groundbreaking jazz-funk fusion era by the time Everybody Loves The Sunshine arrived. Ubiquity (1971) introduced funkier rhythms and vocals, the Coffy Soundtrack (1973) tapped into Curtis Mayfield soul and exotica and Ayers had disco hits on Mystic Voyage (1975).
Out of all this — and an increasing lyrical focus on the spiritual and good vibes — comes Everybody Loves The Sunshine.
"Hey, Uh, What You Say Come On" opens the album with an unrelenting disco groove that builds and builds until no one can stay off the dancefloor. The way the vocal chant intro and eventual groove are mixed together shows Ayers was creating music explicitly for the dance clubs and with DJs in mind.
Ayers and company slow things down for the destined-to-be-sampled "Keep On Walking," the little-used vibraphones setting the mood with the shimmering synthesizers. With its wild group vocals, squelching bass lines and all-around chaotic funk, "You and Me My Love" could be a slightly straightened-out Funkadelic track.
There's more spaced-out and cosmological funk on "It Ain't Your Sign It's Your Mind," and "People And The World" has directions for a better world. Concrete direction? Absolutely not, but they sing everybody love each other with a strong enough conviction they might just be on to something.
And we can't not talk about the title track, a blissed-out four minutes of psychedelic soul that is literally sunshine in its sonic form. How can those six ascending piano notes that follow each line of the verse burrow so deep inside my brain? How can the "my life, my life, my life, my life!" take me to someplace warm and carefree every time?
Okay, I can see why this song takes all the attention, but it hits even harder when you've been dancing your ass off for the past seven tracks. -MK
