Tony Stamp explores the second stadium-sized album from Oklahoma rocker Bartees Strange, a diaristic debut LP by RnB musician Yaya Bey, and some forest-set freeform jazz courtesy of Shabaka.
Farm to Table by Bartees Strange
Photo: Luke Piotrowski
There are two things that come up in every profile of Washington DC musician Bartees Strange. One is the circuitous route he took to becoming a musician, from high school football to working for the federal government. The other is his ability to blend myriad genres without effort or artifice.
Increasingly this is the story of post-internet music, but it’s true that Strange straddles a wide divide, from guitar rock to somewhere close to hip hop. On his new album Farm to Table, the music is still categorisable as indie, but his impulses have led to some stadium-sized creations that would feel at home on mainstream radio.
The first half of the album is replete with bangers like ‘Mulholland Drive’, songs with Springsteen-style heft. They veer close to more sanitised rock acts like Kings of Leon but always land somewhere interesting in their choruses.
Bartees Strange grew up singing in church choirs with his mother. She sang opera, and he would go on to attend opera camp during the summer holidays. He started producing music in his bedroom as a teenager, and then played in hardcore bands in his 20s. His first EP consisted of cover versions of songs by The National.
Now in his early 30s, the elasticity of his voice is obvious, from falsetto in ‘Mulholland Drive’ to baritone elsewhere. And his musical background seems to have been concentrated into an ability to forge earworms.
Some musicians work day jobs and have comparatively normal lives, but Strange’s story is good enough to inspire a novel. His dad served in the military and their family moved around a lot - Bartees was born in England and lived in Germany and Greenland before settling in Oklahoma. He played college football and came close to becoming a pro, but wound up working for the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama government. And then he became an indie rock star.
His gratitude at this pivot into music is outlined in the song ‘Cosigns’, in which he thanks Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Courtney Barnett and Justin Vernon for giving him certain opportunities. That he does it in an auto-tuned delivery that comes close to RnB feels like a sly joke, but like everything he does, authentic at the same time. Ending it with “it’s never enough” when talking about his own career seems to acknowledge an abundance of ambition, something his career path certainly backs up.
His experiences growing up Black in a town he describes as conservative and all-white are ones that colour his music in all sorts of ways, most obviously all the signifiers of Black music he includes inside a genre largely made up of white folks.
On his Instagram recently he posed with Tunde Adebimpe from the band TV on the Radio. Part of the caption read “A guy who single-handedly changed my life [and] made me feel so seen as a young black person in a small town. Then came the guitars, and everything else.”
Race is most obviously evoked on the album’s saddest song. Called ‘Hold the Line’, it’s about Gianna Floyd, whose father George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020 when Gianna was 6 years old.
Farm to Table is an album about family, whether it’s George and Gianna Floyd, or Bartees Strange reflecting on his upbringing. 'Tours' directly compares his father’s military service, and how it led him all over the world, to Bartees experience now as a touring musician.
The album’s title reflects the fact that he literally came from a farm, and also hints at social inequity - having ‘a seat at the table’ is a phrase that’s often used in these discussions.
He told NPR: “The table I'm at is this kind of weird alt-rock, indie, alternative space. Historically, there's not a lot of people that look like me here. So my aspiration with my music is for more people like me to be at that table. There's a lot of kids like me that could do something with the shot”.
Remember Your North Star by Yaya Bey
Photo: Shabaka
There are many things that resulted from the ascent of rap as an art form, but the most impactful might be the loosening of restrictions around language. I remember reading an interview with The Violent Femmes years ago where they said they couldn’t have made ‘Add It Up’ if hip hop hadn’t liberated everyone’s use of profanity. It was their biggest hit.
RnB recently has had an infusion of musicians making candid, confessional music that is unfiltered both stylistically and verbally. One of those is Yaya Bey, whose album Remember Your North Star is full of bright, easy-going pop jams which are liberally dotted with curse words, to sometimes hilarious effect.
‘Keisha’ is the platonic ideal of a summertime head-nodder, but in its chorus, Yaya Bey asserts her own worth in such a way I couldn't repeat it on the radio. Like much of the album it’s self-affirming in a way that lets you know she’s going to say whatever she pleases.
The lack of any filter encapsulates the whole project: musically it really does feel like a diary, with some songs carefully sketched, some hurriedly, emotively filled in. Signifiers of other genres appear like polaroids sellotaped into the margins.
At its best, the album splits the difference between upbeat and heartbreaking, as on the pleading ‘Don’t F***ing Call Me’. Its reversed bassline is one of the first elements that really grabbed me, as well as the line "Love you like cooked food baby, you’s a meal". That’s followed with "Only costs a few grey hairs, that’s a steal", a lyric full of wisdom about the nature of long-term relationships.
She was in a seven-year partnership, followed by a marriage that ended in divorce, and Remember Your North Star is in part her way of processing the fallout of both. The RnB jam ‘Big Daddy Ya’ encapsulates that via more self-affirmation: this time she’s the meal.
Yaya Bey has described this album as a thesis, dealing with Black womanhood and misogynoir - misogyny targeting Black women specifically. More tangibly, it’s a response to being controlled creatively: she told Okayplayer that up until two years ago her music was made under the strict vision of her then-husband, and prior to that her ex-partner.
Going through the credits of Remember Your North Star, they’re clear that she wrote, performed and produced almost every track. She worked a full-time job while making the album, and went to therapy. It’s the sound of her repairing herself spiritually, as well as finding herself musically.
‘Meet Me in Brooklyn’ rolls along over a reggae sample, with Bey tweaking her alto voice to fit. ‘Pour Up’ meanwhile dips into dance music. It’s a collaboration with DJ Nativesun that feels club-length, but like most of the songs here, actually clocks in at around 2 minutes.
Remember Your North Star is playful and provocative, with Yaya Bey’s inviting vocal the through-line. The title feels like advice to herself, but across its 18 tracks, some of which are snatches of advice given in conversation, you can feel the push and pull of her inner life. It’s the kind of album that can feel too personal, like you’re hearing something you shouldn’t, but that’s the idea: she’s deliberately unencumbered by expectation or politeness, and if that means the liberal use of well-deployed four-letter words, so be it.
Afrikan Culture by Shabaka
Photo: Shabaka
There are many sides to Shabaka Hutchings. The British saxophonist and clarinettist leads the bands Shabaka and the Ancestors, The Comet is Coming, and the recently disbanded Sons of Kemet - that’s the outfit featuring drummer Tom Skinner, who recently partnered with Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood in The Smile.
Hutchings has performed with legends like Mulatu Astatke and in the Sun Ra Arkestra. But according to a recent New Yorker profile, in his downtime, he likes to play alone in the woods. That tranquil spirit infuses his first solo LP Afrikan Culture.
All of Hutchings’ bands exist within a jazz modality, and while you might not think so on first blush, his solo work is no different. In fact, it’s been released by Impulse Records, home to Charles Mingus and John Coltrane.
He's is the only player here, and he’s used the opportunity to free himself from rhythm and structure, although some does present itself, like the sinuous melody on ‘Black Meditation’.
The carefully chosen palette is itself fascinating. Chimes ring through every track but one, and while Hutchings’ clarinet makes the odd appearance, he’s clearly looking to stretch beyond it. African instruments like kalimba, mbira and kora are used sporadically, and a handmade synthesiser called a music box, but the most prominent is the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute.
You can hear it on the track ‘Ital is Vital’, which nods to Rastafarianism in its title, and contains the rare moment of rhythmic impetus.
Hutchings has said his aim was to create “a forest of sound where melodies and rhythms float in space and emerge in glimpses.” Afrikan Culture may prove too abstract for some listeners, but as a meditative, almost formless experience, I find it thoroughly calming, and I assume that’s the idea.
If any dissonance exists, it’s in the album's name and various references to Blackness when contrasted with his inclusion of non-African instruments. But even that strikes me as musically generous - Hutchings is at the forefront of British jazz, and as such is far too exploratory to tie himself to one single idea.
