album review

Whitney Tai releases Apogee, possibly the best indie album of 2020

Whitney Tai releases Apogee, possibly the best indie album of 2020.

Patrick O’Heffernan

Back in March, Whitney Tai sent me “Surrender”, a single released from her still-under construction album, Apogee. I reviewed it, saying that the song, rather than surrendering, is a triumph of power over pain in which her voice explodes like a solar flare with a truth embedded in the lyrics inspired by the pain of a terrible loss in her life.

Along with the release copy of “Surrender”, Tai included a private copy of the unfinished album, which contained some songs I had heard earlier, like the stunning “The Cure” , and others that were new to me and still raw. Now that the finished released album is in my hands, all I can do is listen in stunned silence to the sound of a supernova in my headphones. Apogee is an all-consuming journey through the heart of a dark star and is possibly the best album of 2020.

Tai’s voice is at once a seductive child and a raging Valkyrie and both travel to the star. Her trademark is delivering seamless blends of scalpel-sharp lyrics, subtle production details, and driving vocals that contain both the child and the Valkyrie. Apogee’s ten songs pull you into her dark star with the gravitational force of a black hole and then fling you into the deep universe of her – and your – vital existence

“Starfish” opens the ‘album like a soft pulse of light from a distant red dwarf, carrying the waves and particles of her most distant/intimate voice: I wrote the script so that we both could lay naked/Like two starfish on a planet that’s just been invaded…Inhale real slow, the air out here could be fatal she sings of the magnetism of a relationship that has orbited beyond its star.

“Not Have Each Other” pulls you deep into a pulsar of kickdrums and baselines and mysterious voices flowing beneath her own urgency that rises with soaring synth notes as she spins out a story we all know and hope won’t be ours. “The Cure” follows, one of Tai’s most powerful and mesmerizing creations, a solar flare of poetic and musical art that walks the cutting edge of dream pop and indie without sacrificing emotional honesty, one of Tai’s unique gifts to music.

But there is no recovery from “The Cure” because she launches you directly into the supernova of “Surrender” and then spins you off into the beat-heavy “Righteous”, with soaring, blood-pumping vocals. Then she triggers your safety chute with “Scolded”, a soft beginning that morphs into a head-bobbing time signature within a mysterious synth architecture. But even here, Tai cannot hold back; her voice ignites and blazes before it floats down, letting you land on a strange planet.

And on that planet is LA’s Melrose Avenue, so she takes your hand and you skip along together in “Meet Me on Melrose” — lighthearted, whimsical, sparkling with a Spanish guitar and rhythms, , but still rising and soaring, carrying you higher, like a contemplative drone above Hollywood. But the respite is short as she serves up “Not Without Love” , another cry for help flung deep into the sky as Tai begs Give me your innocence/I want your broken wings to fly. The music rises but you can feel her Valkyrie circling slowly, crippled but not yet powerless as she declares. We drink the blood of fools/Burnin to break the rules/I’ll show you how to survive.

“Electrified” surges with soft seduction, carried by muted drum heads, subtle details, and lyrics of hope — or maybe delusion: We’re electric, simulations/Of a neon constellation. Whichever, Tai’s pulsing current will take control and you will sing the hook, I am electrified, I am electrified long after the album has ended.

But the album hasn’t ended; there is still “Incantation, the final journey through the nebulae and gas clouds of Tai’s soul, premiering today on Jammerzine. Here, she finds only herself at the heart of the dark star, Faced with myself again and again/Wasting myself again and again. The child is now a woman; the Valkyrie has been left behind, held like a starfish laying naked in the sun, unable to defend Tai as she has only herself – but no, she has us; her music holds us close as she slowly rotates into the urgent bright blackness.

Take a deep breath before you hit “Replay”.

Patrick O’Heffernan, Host of Music Sin Fronteras

Apogee released 2020. Available on all platforms.

Whitney Tai https://www.whitneytaimusic.com/

Put on your headphones and let Ghoste happily haunt your ears.

By Linda Garnett

Put on your headphones and let Ghoste happily haunt your ears.

by Patrick O’Heffernan

When Jenny Bruce turned 50, she decided to become Ghoste – that’s right, “Ghoste” with an “e”. She says the name came to her in a vivid dream of being on stage with the word floating behind her.

But she also recalls her mother telling her that when a woman becomes 50, she becomes invisible, like a ghost. But as anyone who has heard her EP Firefly in a Jar or has seen her at the Rockwood Music Hall in NYC knows well, invisibility is not in her toolbox. So, she decided to celebrate the half-century mark by upping her visibility and adding ethereal electro-pop to her considerable talents and accomplishment as a guitar-based singer/songwriter – and rebranding herself as Ghoste.

The produce of that decision is an unburdened, mesmerizing self-titled album that will transport you into her weightless, ageless, world of very much alive electric, and electrifying music. Ghoste is a shining gem of multi-layered emotion brimming with melancholy, passion, imagery, longing, and self- confidence.

Produced with Matt Anthony at his Engine Sound Studio, Ghoste continues a ten-year successful run these two superbly talented artists have had bringing Bruce’s songs to the world in three Jenny Bruce albums and placements in dozens of TV shows like Dawson’s Creek, All My Children, The Young and the Restless, and Ghost Whisperer and independent films. Their latest creation, Ghoste, blends Bruce/Ghoste’s songbird voice with Anthony’s ethereal landscapes for an adventure in your headphones (and do wear headphones so you can hear the loon call in “Deep Water”).

While the album evokes Ghoste’s haunting musical spirit, each song is different as she releases her voice from the more constrained precision of her Jenny Bruce creations. They range from the hypnotic “Haunted” with Ghoste’s longing, urgent vocals embedding the line I am haunted in your subconscious, to the ethereal soundscape of “Deep Water” with Anthony’ exquisite sonic details accenting Ghoste’s voice, to the very personal and directly into your ears “Stay Up With Me Tonight”, to the syncopated “Back to Life” and “Slow Motion”, and many songs in between.

My favorite – not an easy choice to make with so much musical richness in a single album – is “Hold On”. I love to close my eyes, relax my mind and follow Ghoste’s beautifully modulated singing as it rises and falls, comes intimately close, and then retreats into far recesses in my mind, leaving behind the hook, hold on, hold on.

Ghoste premiered the album the night before Halloween on launchglobaltv.com and hopes to tour it through hunted venues when touring is back on the table. In the meantime, put on your headphones, close your eyes, and let Ghoste happily haunt your ears.

Ghoste, released 10/30/20 is available for purchase on iTunes and Amazon.com and can be streamed on Spotify.

Ghoste. https://www.ghostenyc.com/. Video at https://bit.ly/2JrjIoR

Nancy Sanchez’ La Gran Civilización: a musical tour de forcé unstoppable in any language

By Linda Garnett

Nancy Sanchez’ La Gran Civilización: a musical tour de forcé unstoppable in any language

by Patrick O’Heffernan

Nancy Sanchez is imparable – unstoppable – because she nunca parable – never stops. This
persistence, celebrated in “Imparable” on her latest album La Gran Civilización, plus her
seemingly unlimited talent and non-stop work ethic, has made her one of the fastest rising stars
in today’s diverse musical firmament. It has also helped her shatter the stereotypes of what
women, especially immigrant women, can do and achieve.

The album, which she calls Mexican-American Art Pop, ranges across languages, genres,
nations and collaborators in a collection of 11 stand out songs Sanchez wrote and produced over
the past year with artists she admires and loves. Each is a work of genius in its own right and
together they form an unforgettable musical adventure through the modern archeology of
Mexico’s grand civilizations from the Olmecs to today’s Chicanx’s.

Produced by Joaquin Pacheco with special guest Grammy-winning producer Robert Carranza
(Los Lobos, Ozomatli, Marilyn Manson, Jack Johnson) and Kennedy (BØRNS, 10000 Emerald
Pools) La Gran Civilización demonstrates not only Sanchez’s musical chops but her ability to
pull together teams of the best-in-the-business across genres from jazz to mariachi to cumbia to
pop and then blend her voice and creativity with theirs for songs that are far more than the sum
of their parts or their collaborators. In La Gran Civilización Sanchez is not only an artist but a
meta-creator.

The album opens with the title song Gran Civilización pulsing with rhymes by MC Olmeca
weaving over and around Sanchez’s haunting chorus and reply verses, celebrating pride in the
storied ancestors of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans like Sanchez. The result grabs your gut as
well as your ears and makes you rock and think.

Sanchez moves onto Puerta Del Sol, a rich mariachi song of hope and inspiration for
immigrants, featuring Latin Grammy-Winning Flor De Toloache and produced by multi
Grammy-winning producer Robert Carranza. Sanchez’s voice blends with and emerges from the
guitarrón rhythm and mariachi trumpets and violins with an urgency and seriousness that says
“Now! is our time.”

But the music of Mexico is never far from love, which she presents to us in “Oidos” – featuring
Mexico City-based Madame Récamier, Alvaro Wonatox (Flor Amargo) and a Son Jarocho
musical arrangement performed by Sensacion Jarocha that showcases Sanchez’s romantic voice.
She follows the love song with the cumbia “Money Pa’la Fiesta” swinging us laughingly around
with a girl who just wants to have fun – on a tight budget.

The beat goes on but the fun is tempered with determination in “Imparable”, Sanchez’s
unstoppable fast-beat track of tireless fighting and wining, compressed into a Latin-rocking
anthem earworm worthy of constant replays.

Life has its inspirational downs as well as its inspired ups, and “No Siento Nada” tells us that
when a relationship is not working, we must embrace the self- realization that pain can bring,
along with the power inside to change it.

The next three songs on the album are also earworms, but they enter your brain through a
different puerta. – pop. “In Other Words” is an English language jazzy love song commissioned
as the title track to the feature-length romantic comedy In Other Words featuring La Voz USA
standout Raymundo. “Jive Talkin”, the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever classic, which
Sanchez wrote the Spanish original for, is followed by ‘Mundo Juntos’, a bossa version of “In
Other Worlds”, to keep you swaying and smiling.

Sanchez wraps the album with two reflective, but very different songs: “Que Te Perdone Dios”
a passionate ranchera love song arranged by Mariachi Vargas legacy Pepe Martinez Jr. and
performed by LA’s all-female Mariachi Las Colibri; and the gentle “Sanando Heridas” a paean
to the child within that needs its wounds healed, featuring the incomparable world folk group
Cuñao.

Sanchez was born in Toluca, Mexico, and was only 4 years old when her parents brought her to
the US along with her sister. Her family’s immigrant experience was typical – working multiple
jobs to ensure their children thrived, an ethos seen every day in Latino neighborhoods. Music
came early to Sanchez, blossomed in high school when she got her first guitar, took music
classes, and joined a mariachi-oriented after school music program. By the time she entered
college, she was on her way, immersed in jazz, playing live at top clubs, and recording a jazz EP.
Since then she has won three Best Jazz Singer awards, appeared in the STARZ series Vida,
scored music for film, toured Mexico and the US, played in Iceland – and managed to graduate
from college with a degree in medieval music while releasing multiple albums and videos.

La Gran Civilización, set for release this Friday, is a musical tour de force of skill, talent, and
heart, but also an inspiration whose influence will be felt deeply in our generation. It firmly
positions Nancy Sanchez as a star – and unstoppable in any language.

La Gran Civilización was released Friday, May 22, distributed by ONErpm on all streaming and
download platforms
Nancy Sanchez: http://www.nancysanchezmusic.com/
Gran Civilización video: https://bit.ly/3g8vcJB
Nancy Sanchez is signed with Universal Music Publishing and ONErpm Records

“Búsqueda” by Yanin Saavedra: A stunning debut album that shimmers with promise.

By Linda Garnett

“Búsqueda” by Yanin Saavedra: a stunning debut album that shimmers with promise.

Patrick O’Heffernan

The first time you listen to Yanin Saavedra’s debut album Búsqueda, you realize that this is something different – that your ears are in the presence of a unique and exquisite talent. But – like its title – Búsqueda leaves you searching, probing deeper for the heart of the album and of Yanin herself. So, you listen again, and again.

It is not that Busqueda is addictive, which it is, but that Yanin herself is addictive. She seems to be both a mystery driving your own search and an open book awaiting your perusal. I have never encountered an artist quite like her. In Busqueda she talks to you – literally – but then skips away, beckoning you on a journey like a child running through a dark forest with bright balloons. Her voice curls like soft smoke from a candle and then reforms with the sharpness of a straight razor. She brings these two sonic powers together in 12 songs in an album that is simultaneously a giggling adventure and an incisive introspection with every note precisely shaped by her otherworldly, outlier voice.

Yanin Saavedra has been releasing versions of some of the songs for several months now while she tinkered with the final album, making her fans wait but satisfying them in the interim with live performances and a house concert preview. The wait was worth it; the album is a story on its own, a coherent whole that hangs together like a fast-moving adventure story. Each of the dozen songs is a gem on its own and a connected step in Yanin’s search, moving you forward like clues sprinkled along a wooded path. Each is different, each has a personality that can grab your hand or your throat or both simultaneously.

The title song” Búsqueda” opens the album and sets the tone as Yanin spins out her story in an edgy French-influenced high range that softens seductively when she rolls her Mexican “r’s. It isn’t until the breakdown that you are aware of Alvaro Mendeles’ crystal bell-clear guitar notes moving the song thorough a landscape of strings and her overdubbed voice.

You come down to earth quickly with “Cuestiona la illusión” as the tempo picks up with a faster guitar strum and Angel Madrigal’s gentle snare beats. But as the music moves lightly it reveals the depth of the question she is asking– is this life an illusion? We are searching with her, continuing into “Mariposa” which adds Vincent Hour’s accordion to color the path as Yanin goes from conversational to lyrically seductive.

“Anhelo” – “Yearning” in English – upends the mood, just to make sure you remember we are on a journey so don’t get too relaxed. Opening with pounding drums that back off but still move like a running pulse underneath a Spanish-inflected guitar, the song is like a walk on the beach in Ensenada at midnight. Quick, earthy, joyful, but full of meaning and desire. As your foot stops tapping, Yanin sweeps you into a deeper world with “Haramara”, her voice ringing out as from a cavern with a touch of echo and a guitar movement that tears at your heart. My favorite song on the album.

“Aliento” continues the mystery of” Haramara” but rather than into the arteries of the earth it takes you to the space between the stars that can only be reached by going into your OM mind. An instrumental with a drone backdrop, the search has now gone inside your consciousness and pushed transient thoughts aside. “Sal” pulls you out of the void and kicks up your heels. Dance-paced with the feel of a Spanish-Moroccan nightclub in the 20’s, “Sal” levitates you around the floor like a marionette led by Yanin’s whisper in your ear. Is it gypsy? It is French jazz with a clarinet? Is it banda-rock? Who cares? It is a delightful station on your search. And it gets even more continental as Yanin moves on to “Dans tous les trains”. Truly now you are in Paris at midnight with an accordion-driven cabaret.

But the search returns to Yanin’s unique interior world of Mexican light/heaviness in “Sin Reflexión, before it moves to one of the best songs on the album, “Impermanente”, skipping lightly with brush-energized snares, Estaban’s clarinet, and of course that voice. The mood carries on in “Transformation” but with a more familiar beat and Yanin’s conversational voice, close to the microphone, closer to your ear.

She finishes the album with “Resonancia” a complex interplay of her down-to-earth vocals, accordion, and light touch but complex percussion. After a somewhat pretentious intro Yanin throws open the door to a last dance, but not a last stop of the search. The song stops and takes a sharp turn with bongos and Yanin’s voice resonating with a slight echo and high production overdubbed vocals and precise finger-picking guitar. Like everything else on the album, it is unique, intriguing and addictive.

I for one am very happy Yanin took the time to get all of the details right with the album. She understands, either intuitively or consciously, that her voice is an outlier from those you hear on the radio or streaming services every day. She has taken this understanding to produce a debut album that capitalizes on her outlier voice and shimmers with wonder. Busqueda stands on its own as a work of musical artistry but promises much more to come.

Búsqueda by Yanin Saavedra

Gilberto Rios, bass, double bass

Angel Madrigal, percussion

Luis Mariano Almaguer, guitar

Vincent Houdré, accordion

Juan Pablo Medeles, guitar

Estaban, clarinet

Mixed by Alejandro Meludis and mastered by José Ferrer

Available for download and streaming at Bandcamp

Yanin Saavedra https://www.facebook.com/yaninsaavedra/

Rising Appalachia’s Ley Lines blends cultures and harmonies into pure bliss

By Linda Garnett

Rising Appalachia’s Ley Lines blends cultures and harmonies into pure bliss

Patrick O’Heffernan

The word “ley lines” was coined in 1921 by the amateur English archaeologist Alfred Watkins, describing the apparent alignments among historical and geological spaces, hypothesizing that they had persisted over millennia to facilitate travel, trade, and community. Later, others theorized that global ley lines exist to transmit energy and light from the sun and stars to create magical bliss in spaces for sacred healing rituals. All of which is a good introduction to the music of Rising Appalachia and their just released 7^th studio album, Ley Lines. The album brings stellar energy, blissful melody and a healing message for the soul and the earth.

The Atlanta-based sisters Chloe and Leah Smith have traveled the world, touring by sailboat, train, and van, to fill venues and festivals in the US, Canada, and Europe, and participate in cultural exchange programs in Bulgaria, Ireland, Italy, and Central and South America. Along the way, they have absorbed the rhythms, melodies and the emotions of many cultures. This enables them to seamlessly blend American roots music with Celtic instrumentation and African percussion – with a bit of blues thrown in. Centering their music on their main instrument, their golden harmonizing voices, they take listeners live and recorded across the world on ley lines of musical magic.

Ley Lines distills the Smith sister’s lifetime of musical experience into 12 songs, each one a work of precise craft and joyful art. Opening the album with their voices unifying in “I Believe in Being Ready”, a deeply Southern and seemingly religious apocalyptic ballad driven by the bodhran (Irish hand drum), the sisters immediately let you know this album is something special. It is followed by the swaying “Harmonize”, released in February and premiered by Rolling Stone as the album’s first single. They are then joined by Ani DiFranco on “Speak Out” , asking “what have you done to this kingdom”, excoriating the powers-that-be for pollution of the geographic, political and cultural landscape of their home, the South.

“Love Her in the Morning” and “Shed Your Grace” follow with South Carolina roots, folk, and reggae singer/songwriter Trevor Hall to shift both the tempo and your emotional state as Chloe and Leah weave their harmonies with Celtic undertones and other voices. They move smoothly to the hypnotic, almost blues-like minor-tones of “Sadjuna”, mixing African male vocals with their ghostly synchronization and Irish fiddling in this deeply penetrating song about coastal Ghana. The gut-wrench continues with “Magic Maker” as they sing “what are we going to do with the wicked of the word….the smoke and mirrors…those in power”. Moving onto “Sassafras” they swing back to Appalachia, but with the Irish bodran and subdued sounds of Biko Casini on the n’goni (West African resonant harp).

The mood shifts 180 degrees with their original song “Sunny Days” a delightful a’ cappella tribute to the roots music of Appalachia and old southern gospel extolling the simple beauty of the land – mountains, streams, spaces to find peace –spaces that have been defiled by mines and roads and loggers but still endure.

My favorite song on the album, Rising Appalachia’s version of Robert Hunter’s “Cuckoo” is musically evocative of the Ireland of my ancestors while sailing us through one of Americana’s staunchest stories in a musical vessel of mesmerizing, otherworldly harmonies. Simply stunning.

We go from the close-your-eyes and drift of “Cuckoo” to “Indigo Dance”, a smoky nightclub of a song with the sisters’ blues/rap colored with the trumpet of Maurice Turner and driven gently with David Brown’s standup bass. Ley Lines ends with the most consequential song on an album of consequential songs, “Resilient”. Released last year to high praise on NPR the song was labeled “protest music for the modern age” by Rolling Stone. The sisters sing of “my roots down deep” as Arena Diarra ramps up the tempo and the urgency on the talking drum. An anthem of people/woman/music power, “Resilient” carries you up to the power you know you have, the accomplishments you know you can achieve, and the excitement of being alive. A song to play when you feel down, before you go into battle, and when you are victorious.

Ley Lines is Rising Appalachia’s first studio album recorded outside of the South, completed over a 10-day stretch in a studio overlooking the ocean in Marin County, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The entire band recorded the album live, with Chloe, Leah, David Brown (stand-up bass, baritone guitar) and Biko Casini (percussion, n’goni) and two new members, West African musician Arouna Diarra (n’goni, talking drum) and Irishman Duncan Wickel (fiddle, cello) in the same room. Produced by Joe Henry – the first time they have used an outside producer, it is a remarkable achievement for less than two weeks work. Rising Appalachia also recorded special guests Ani DiFranco, songwriter Trevor, and jazz trumpeter Maurice Turner on specific songs for Ley Lines.

I recently saw Rising Appalachia live and understood immediately why they fill venues small and large worldwide: musicianship that transcends technique into high art, lyrics that mean something, and pure joy onstage. Ley Lines captures all of that and puts the joy directly into your ears.

Patrick O’Heffernan. Host, Music FridayLive!,

Rising Appalachia https://www.risingappalachia.com

Ley Lines released May 3. https://stores.portmerch.com/risingappalachia/

“Harmonize” single available https://risingappalachia.fanlink.to/Harmonize

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