The New York Times
Pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on notable new songs and videos.
• PartyNextDoor featuring Rihanna, "Believe It." A summery acoustic R&B number that would have been at home in the mid-1990s, "Believe It" is the marquee track from the new PartyNextDoor album, Partymobile. He's gentle and a little tentative here, a man making sure he can get back in his partner's good graces:
If I propose, would you say no?
Would you break my heart?
Would you embarrass me or play your part?
Baby don't fold, my heart is yours.
And then there's Rihanna, singing soothing harmony, lightly chastising, playing hard to impress. He's looking for certainty; she's unlikely to give it.
-- JON CARAMANICA
• Kane Brown and John Legend, "Last Time I Say Sorry." A sappy success. Young country star Kane Brown softens the edges of his rich voice for this measured sad-man duet with John Legend, who doesn't give an inch. They are hurt. They are penitent. They will howl until you forgive them.
-- JON CARAMANICA
• Jacob Collier featuring Kimbra and Tank & the Bangas, "In My Bones." Musicianly overkill is Jacob Collier's vice and, in songs like this, his charm. He sings and plays a studio-full of instruments, and he can't resist showing off his endless layerings, his dense harmonies, his slyly elaborate key changes. "In My Bones" is an homage to Prince, a studio concoction savoring a "funky feeling in my bones" (and featuring a lone guest instrumentalist, MonoNeon, busily thumb-popping the electric bass). Kimbra sings where Prince would switch to falsetto; Tank (of Tank & the Bangas) gets a quick rapping cameo. But it's all about virtuosity; every pause and transition gets a conspicuous musical flourish, and the animated video flaunts every one.
-- JON PARELES
• Oh Land, "I Miss One Week Ago," Benjamin Gibbard, "Life in Quarantine"
Cooped-up songwriters are going to write songs, and they're thinking about the same topic nearly everyone else is. Danish songwriter Nanna Oland Fabricius, aka Oh Land, sits at her piano and looks back at the trivial things that worried her before the national lockdown, with a poised vocal and a luminous final ascent; she also released an instrumental for others to record their own versions.
Benjamin Gibbard, from Death Cab for Cutie, strums a guitar and contemplates his city, Seattle, in "these days of no guarantees." Almost fondly, he notes, "People have a way of getting crazy when they think they'll be dead in a month."
-- JON PARELES
• The Kid Laroi, "Addison Rae." The ouroboros is here -- a rap song that began as a snippet name-checking a TikTok star, which was then posted on TikTok, which was then heard by said TikTok star, who then made a TikTok video to it, which then led to a conversation between the TikTok star and the rapper, which then, in essence, forced the rapper's hand into building a whole song atop that snippet so that perhaps the TikTok star would star in the video. This is that song. It's OK.
-- JON CARAMANICA
• Chicago Underground Quartet, "Batida." If you see the words "Chicago Underground" attached to any musical project, you can make a few assumptions. First, trumpeter Rob Mazurek and drummer Chad Taylor will be at the center of it, throwing a global haul of ideas together with a mishmash of electronic abrasions and voluptuous rhythm. And you can bet it will be worth your time. Both were true two decades ago, when Mazurek and Taylor first teamed up with guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist Noel Kupersmith to record the album Chicago Underground Quartet, now a 21st-century avant-garde classic.
And they're still true today. The quartet has just released its long-awaited second album, Good Days, with young multi-instrumentalist Josh Johnson now filling Kupersmith's role (although Johnson uses the piano, organ and synth bass). Most of the pieces here are war horses from the songbooks of Parker, Taylor or Mazurek. The only new tune is "Batida," a grooving Taylor composition whose title and rhythm nod to the dance music styles of Lusophone Africa; the gangly beat becomes a perfect palette for Parker's deliriously crooked guitar style.
-- GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
• Avishai Cohen, "Hidden Chamber." Trumpeter Avishai Cohen and his band Big Vicious wrote much of the material for their debut album together, blurring the processes of composition and rehearsing and recording into a single flow. "Hidden Chamber" is a piece Cohen brought to the band fully written, but even so, the looming, soused-in-effects sound of the band becomes the main propulsive force. The resolute pounding of twin drummers and the wash of guitar echo and beefed-up bass give lift and direction to the sigh of Cohen's trumpet. As things drift away at the end, quotations from Mahatma Gandhi and Wayne Shorter turn an eye toward shared inspiration.
-- GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Style on 04/05/2020