C Maren Morris
Girl
Columbia
In 2016, Maren Morris broke all the country music rules. Her major label debut album, Hero, was a vivid indictment of country's dull masculinist norms — it had wit, creativity, punch and ambition.
While Morris recorded some of the genre's most promising music, some good it did her. She had a handful of hits — the cheeky "Rich," the desperate "I Could Use a Love Song," the howling "My Church."
It took sidestepping country for Morris to get something like her due. "The Middle," her 2018 electro-pop stomper with Zedd and Grey, hit No. 5 on the Hot 100, but also was the one least specific to her talents.
Hero's best songs were disarmingly detailed; sometimes funny. The scattershot Girl tips away from those strengths in favor of self-help bromides broad enough to exclude no one. Many songs aim for the universal: "The Feels" and "Make Out With Me" are lighthearted looking-for-love fun; "Great Ones" favors abstract image over detail ("You're the perfect storm/So let it pour down on me"); "Good Woman" and "Shade" feel distant. Even "Flavor," which is oriented around female empowerment, veers toward the bland.
Many of her most forceful vocal performances on Girl are far from country music, like the up-tempo soul number "RSVP," which with a few tweaks could easily make sense for, say, Monica or SZA. One of the finest moments is "The Bones," which nods to the Chainsmokers and Daya hit "Don't Let Me Down" and features some of this album's sturdiest songwriting.
When Morris does lean in to country's past, it's to lightly echo Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" on "All My Favorite People," which features Brothers Osborne singing with an arched eyebrow, as if performing a Hee Haw sketch. It's a disruptive way to pay homage.
Hot tracks: "The Bones," "RSVP"
— JON CARAMANICA
The New York Times
B+ Karen O & Danger Mouse
Lux Prima
BMG
Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O teams up with producer-to-the-stars Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) on a balanced collaboration that brings out the best from both, enriched by variations like O's diverse vocals and Burton's orchestral talents.
The nine-minute title track, which translates to "first light," opens the album with a four-part composition presenting Danger Mouse's cinematic soundscapes — whose gloss here makes them ideal for a plastic surgeon's waiting room — enveloping O's much warmer, though no less disquieting sections: "I'm nowhere/I'm no one/I'm nobody/There's nobody but you."
Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner appears on a couple of tracks, including the reverberating, fuzzy "Woman," whose '60s-influenced style also shows up in alternate forms on "Leopard's Tongue" and "Redeemer."
O's voice has a much more delicate, Vashti Bunyan-like character on "Ministry," where an icy Wurlitzer gives the song an outer space feel, while the determined "Turn the Light" has splashes of acoustic guitars, a funkily delicate bass and would have been an ideal guest spot for Damon Albarn, whose Gorillaz have also benefited from the Burton touch.
Another Danger Mouse cohort, Daniele Luppi, conducts the violin-heavy string section, adding drama to the resigned, regretful "Drown" and elegant clarity to "Reveries," where O and her acoustic guitar sound as if seeping through a transistor radio in need of fine-tuning.
"Nox Lumina" (night light) bids the album goodbye with a short set of lyrics that goes around and around, intermittently, hazily fading away before another instrumental section emphasizes the drift, while also making the connection to the album's beginning.
Hot tracks: "Nox Lumina," "Ministry," "Turn the Light," "Lux Prima"
— PABLO GORONDI
The Associated Press
SINGLES
• Anderson .Paak, "King James": The music struts while the lyrics bristle in "King James," from Anderson .Paak's album Ventura, due in April. The springy bass line and jazzy chords reach back to the analog exuberance of 1970s Stevie Wonder, and like Wonder, Anderson .Paak fuses an optimistic sound with a spirit of determined resistance, alluding to a jumping over wall, Colin Kaepernick and deep-seated racial hostility. As party whistles blow, an exuberant chorus joins him to sing, "OK now, just don't stay down/Let's go shake down until we get what we need."
— JON PARELES
The New York Times
• RuthAnne, "Love Again": RuthAnne Cunningham, an Irish singer and songwriter credited on hits from JoJo, Britney Spears and Westlife, uses vintage soul materials for "Love Again." She tops the sturdy gospel chords from "People Get Ready" (and countless other songs) with a familiar pop premise: that her love can rescue a man from his heartbroken misery. There's an aching, unpredictable rawness in her voice that makes the classic plea work one more time.
— JON PARELES
The New York Times
Style on 03/26/2019