New music: Son of Dave, Megan Moroney, Miles Okazaki and Julian Prégardien, Kristian Bezuidenhout

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This article was published 20/07/2024 (775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BLUES

Son of Dave
A Flat City (Goddamn Records)

If your musical taste is all-embracing, there’s definitely room in your broad church for the gritty, bluesy one-man-band grooves of Son of Dave, who’s best-known in these parts as Benjamin Darvill, the mandolinist, guitarist and harmonica-player with the Crash Test Dummies from the late 1980s through the band’s ’90s heyday.

Darvill moved to London in the late 1990s and lived there for 24 years before returning home in the summer of 2021. While in the U.K., when he wasn’t recording or touring with the Dummies, Darvill indulged his musical and theatrical roots by busking and creating his own version of an old-tyme Western medicine show. He learned to thicken the sound of his harmonica-and-vocals solo act by incorporating an effects pedal and an amplified stomp-board into his set-up, enabling him to loop percussion and beatbox rhythms and to distort and layer his harps and vocals (he literally created a “briefcase full of blues”).

The resultant swampy concoction has become Son of Dave’s sole outlet. Darvill left the Dummies in 2000 and has released 11 albums of what could loosely be described as “alternative blooze”’ — imagine the grit of R.L. Burnside, as conjured on harmonica by a pale, red-headed Canadian with legitimate chops, an absurdist sense of humour and an impeccable sense of thrift-shop style.

While A Flat City isn’t Darvill’s first release since coming home, it is the first to overtly acknowledge this Prairie city of contradictions. It opens with Where’s the Party At?, an uptempo blues duet with Edmonton’s Celeigh Cardinal that announces SoD’s return to the ’Peg while subtly acknowledging how things have changed. Second cut Try a Little Hound Dog is a neck-breaking homage to the relentless boogie of Hound Dog Taylor, while He Likes That Classic Rock is a funky send-up of Western Canadian FM listeners of a certain age.

The album’s title track is a classic rock-steady skank (as all Prairie songs should be, really) that wouldn’t sound out of place on the Specials’ first album, and Take Your Baby to a Jazz and Blues Bar is a beatbox-fuelled funk jam that makes an excellent recommendation for a first date. More Mayonnaise and Hogshed are wonderfully surreal vamps, Yahoos sends up North American pickup truck culture, and Darvill takes time to get soulful and real on Everything Goes, a hypnotic, keyboard-based lamentation on the ephemeral nature of existence.

★★★★ out of five

Stream: Where’s the Party At?; A Flat City: Everything Goes

— John Kendle

 

COUNTRY

Megan Moroney
Am I Okay? (Sony)

It begins with the title track: Am I Okay? Megan Moroney, a storied student of country music — and an expert in the genre’s ability to flip a turn of phrase and change its meaning in surprising and unexpected ways — does exactly that. It’s a love song, a declaration that maybe, just maybe, this cowgirl who’s always singing the blues may finally be in a healthy relationship and more confident.

While most of the songs on this 14-track collection veer into less optimistic territory, Moroney’s increased confidence is heard where it matters most: in the strength of her songwriting.

Am I Okay? is more expansive than her 2023 debut album, Lucky, but continues to develop Moroney’s particular charms: there are rallying kiss-offs (Man on the Moon) and soul-crushing ballads (No Caller ID, the Vince Gill-assisted Hope You’re Happy, and the particularly effective, grieving Heaven By Noon, written about an uncle who died on 9/11.)

Pleasures abound: Noah breaks the fourth wall in a way that recalls one of Moroney’s clear predecessors, Taylor Swift. Miss Universe has the best Brad Pitt-reference in a pop-country song since Shania Twain’s That Don’t Impress Me Much.

Mama I Lied is a full-hearted breakup ballad — complete with ascendent strings and Moroney’s confessional rasp filling the room. The spirited instrumentation works: Man on the Moon is a rollicking, rocking country hit, and Indifferent has moments of pop-punk bliss.

In whole, Am I Okay? builds off the strengths of Lucky and demonstrates an artist growing more assertive in her talents, but not immune to the everyday injustices of being in her 20s, a period of bad boyfriends and worse drinks. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more relatable voice in contemporary country music for young women.

★★★★

Stream: Man on the Moon; Am I Okay?

— Maria Sherman, The Associated Press

 

JAZZ

Miles Okazaki
Miniature America (Cygnus Recordings)

Guitarist Miles Okazaki has a discography that is predominantly in “song form,” or reasonably conventional. This release moves him into a remarkable new direction. With a powerful group of 10 musicians, he has created a 22-track sonic examination through short vignettes. The band features Patricia Brennan on vibes, Matt Mitchell on piano, Caroline Davis on alto, Anna Webber on tenor and flute, Jon Irabagon on various saxes, Jacob Garchik on trombone, and vocals by Ganavya, Jen Shyu and Fay Victor.

Most of the tracks are only minutes long, with one or two slightly longer. “I realized I could write some instructional pieces to create the raw materials (‘slabs’ as I called them), and then excavate them, sanding and polishing to find hidden artifacts,” he writes in the liner notes. “There are many pieces on the album that use variations on this technique, which makes them less like compositions and more like sonic treasure hunts.” Lookout Below is an example where Okazaki plays rapid melody fragments while his band members enter and leave without warning. This may sound strange on paper, but it is actually amazing.

Vocal effects are vocalese or quick quotations from poems or other sources. There is a strong Eastern groove to some of the miniatures. Tracks such as The Cocktail Party (piano with people talking) or Whack a Mole (cheeky for 87 seconds) are examples of a constantly shifting landscape of sound and mood. Each band member gets air time without having any extended solos or ensemble riffs. The Cavern has a lovely duet with guitar and trombone that is just over two minutes. Pulsation Station has Okazaki holding two groups together playing at different speeds. Yes, it is very cool. (Do people still say that?)

Listening to this album is like a buffet of fascinating “bites” and the miniatures often make one go back to hear them again. This is a captivating album.

★★★★1/2

Stream: Lookout Below; The Haze

— Keith Black

 

CLASSICAL

Julian Prégardien, Kristian Bezuidenhout
Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin (Harmonia Mundi)

German-born tenor Julian Pregardien performs Schubert’s intimate song cycle Die schone Mullerin, D. 795 (The Fair Maid of the Mill). Kristian Bezuidenhout joins the singer on fortepiano as they have performed the work together since 2010.

Originally composed in 1823, the searing work is based on 20 poems by Wilhelm Muller, highlighting quintessentially Schubertian themes of love and loss, nature, solitude and death.

The soloist brings his expressive artistry to each of the 20 Lieder chronicling the young journeyman miller who falls hopelessly in love with the miller’s daughter; his crisp diction and lyrical phrasing immediately displayed in No. 1, Das Wandern (Wandering). Other highlights include No. 4, Danksagung an den Bach (Thanksgiving to the Brook), the plaintive No. 8, Morgengrub (Morning Greeting), and the driving No. 7, Ungeduld (Impatience).

Both artists infuse the gently rocking finale No. 20, Des Baches Wiegenlied (The Brook’s Lullaby) with grave solemnity, in which the babbling brook “sings” the miller to his eternal rest; performed with utmost sensitivity as they bring this harrowing tale of unrequited love to its fateful close.

★★★★ out of five

Stream: No. 4, Danksagung an den Bach; No. 8, Morgengrub; No. 20, Des Baches Wiegenlied

— Holly Harris