04.05.2011 / Arts & Culture
Two worlds apart
This month’s new music releases include a couple of interesting new albums, each of them relevant in its own way. On the one hand, the Fleet Foxes and their modern folk. On the other hand, Stefani Germanotta, a.k.a. Lady Gaga, and her second album, announced by a veritable media blitzkrieg.
The many virtues of Fleet Foxes include the ability to combine an elaborate structure with a taste for vocal melodies, harmonies and sounds that owes a lot to the Sixties and the Seventies, the era of CSN&Y and of the Beach Boys. Besides making some real good music, this young American band represents at best a new generation of musicians who grew up with the Web and can handle the wide color palette inherited by past artists, without fearing to confront the rock purists or History itself.
Like the band’s leader Robin Pecknold said to BBC, “That was how I discovered almost everything when I was a teenager – my dad brought home a modem”. That’s to say the whole history of music is at their disposal. Here is just another short-circuit of the computer revolution: a modem giving birth to a new folk revival throughout Europe and the US. Helplessness blues, the much-awaited sequel to their 2008 debut, is ou now.
See under… Laura Gibson, Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver.
Disrupting certainties and old records is Lady Gaga’s daily bread: she has done this with her looks, dangerously leaning towards kitsch (her Kermit the Frog outfit definitely deserves a Google search) and with an iconoclastic attitude that only a few stars have allowed themselves in recent years. Why not riding the wilful horse of mediatic scandal, then? In the case of her new album, Born this way, the scandal concerns the second single, Judas, whose lyrics have set off a wave of critics from some American religious groups. In the meantime, Gaga has offered a live sample of the song both at Ellen’s talk show and American Idol, where she presented a preview of the video. In the hype that followed, everybody’s talking: while the first single has been compared to friend Madonna’s Express Yourself, the popdance sound of Judas seems to follow Gaga’s previous releases (Bad Romance, Poker Face). For the whole album, you’ll have to wait until May 23.
Seee under… Miss Kittin, Madonna, La Roux
(Michele Segala)
