B+ Noname
Room 25
noname
“Cause when we walk into heaven, nobody’s name gon’ exist,” Noname raps on her self-released debut album.
For the Los Angeles-via-Chicago rapper born Fatimah Warner 26 years ago, the moniker Noname is not an erasure of personality, but a widening of it. It embraces the notion that anything is possible, even as she declares that it may be impossible to truly know her, to pin her down.
On her acclaimed 2016 mixtape, Telefone, Noname established an intimate, intricate style of rapping first heard on key cameos for artists such as Chance the Rapper.
“Windows” centers the album’s sense of resilience, defiance and wanderlust. Its mix of what sounds like a music-box melody and lush strings defines an album that evokes the neo-soul of the late ’90s (Erykah Badu, D’Angelo) and the jazz-tipped hip-hop of the early ’90s (A Tribe Called Quest). The production by Phoelix blends jazzy accents, soul and a relaxed, after-hours vibe.
She insinuates, slides and dances at low volume while blending puns, metaphors, jokes and sly asides with a dexterity that would be dizzying if it didn’t feel so relaxed. She’s like a gentle cascade into a river that ripples out into a dozen tributaries, so many ideas and layers that it’s impossible to follow all of them the first couple of times through a track. That she rewards repeated listens is a given.
She employs her friends to balance the album, to lighten the tone, notably the Caribbean-flavored “Montego Bae” with singer Ravyn Lenae and the finger-snapping “Ace” with Smino and Saba . But the most resonant moments belong to Noname, particularly the scathing “Prayer Song” and the fragile mortality meditation “Don’t Forget About Me.” As self-effacing and understated as Noname can appear, the weight of her songs and words can’t be denied.
Hot tracks: “Prayer Song,” “Don’t Forget About Me,” “Windows”
— GREG KOT
Chicago Tribune (TNS)
A Robbie Fulks and Linda Gail Lewis
Wild! Wild! Wild!
Bloodshot
On “Round Too Long,” the piano-pounding boogie that opens Wild! Wild! Wild!, Linda Gail Lewis fairly spits out, “This ain’t an old folks reunion.” No it’s not. What it is is an out-of-left-field pairing of the sister of Jerry Lee Lewis and veteran Americana singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks. They’re not spring chickens, but you wouldn’t know it — they have combined to produce one of the year’s liveliest and most entertaining sets.
The piano-playing Lewis, 71, has recorded duet albums with her brother and Van Morrison, but she seems to have a special chemistry with the 55-year-old Fulks. Maybe that’s because he has come up with his best material in years. Numbers such as “Round Too Long,” “I Just Lived a Country Song” and “Till Death” echo his brilliant early work, when he embraced the conventions of country while slyly sending them up. On the other hand, there’s no irony in “Foolmaker” or “That’s Why They Call It Temptation,” the latter of which sounds like a classic George-and-Tammy or Conway-and-Loretta duet.
The Fulks originals are augmented by chestnuts like Don Gibson’s “Who Cares,” which introduces some jazzy strains; the gospel-inflected “On the Jericho Road”; and “Boogie Woogie Country Gal,” which gives Lewis another chance to cut loose on the 88s.
For all the sass Lewis displays here, the album ends on a strikingly tender note, with her delivery of the quietly reflective “Hardluck, Louisiana.” The performance underscores the depth of this inspired collaboration. Fulks wrote the ballad, but it’s about Lewis’ childhood, and the feeling she brings to it points up just how perfectly he captured her story.
Hot tracks: “Hardluck, Louisiana,” “Who Cares,” That’s Why They Call It Temptation,” “Till Death”
— NICK CRISTIANO
The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)
SINGLES
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, “Shallow”
The first song from the remake of A Star Is Born, written and directed by Bradley Cooper, is a good, old-fashioned, sound-of-the-1970s, gumption-of-the-1980s, high-treacle-higher-pomp roots ballad. Cooper is a fine singer, fine as in adequate. It’s Lady Gaga who throbs intensely here, leaning deep into the natural husk of her voice, and swapping her ordinary costume for a different type of polish, one that reveals more than it hides.
— JON CARAMANICA
The New York Times
Pistol Annies, “Best Years of My Life”
A restrained country version of a girl-group beat supports Pistol Annies — Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley — through a confession of dead-end desperation, boredom and loveless settling down. “I’m in the middle of the worst of it/These are the best years of my life.” There’s no happy ending: just a drink, some TV reruns and a “recreational Percoset.”
— JON PARELES
The New York Times
Lil Wayne featuring Kendrick Lamar, “Mona Lisa”
An impressive track from Tha Carter V, the long-delayed and borderline apocryphal Lil Wayne album. Lil Wayne’s verse is long and winding, an elaborate story about running scams on rich men by sending beautiful women to distract them. Then Kendrick Lamar has an epic of his own about infidelity and mistrust that, halfway through, shifts gears into antic and proceeds to drive right off an emotional cliff. This is an older song — it was originally part of the leak of parts of this album by Martin Shkreli (convicted of securities fraud in March). Lil Wayne and Lamar are rapping well, but differently. Lamar is a character actor, a texturalist who works equally well with thick and thin brush strokes. Lil Wayne isn’t always this narrative-driven, but his fluency and ease with syllables is unmatched.
— JON CARAMANICA
The New York Times
