Music Blurbs, Vol. 4

More of my capsule commentaries.

Dustin Kensrue
Guitarist/singer/songwriter founded Thrice in the late 1990s when he was still attending high school in SoCal. Thrice – which has remained active save for a brief hiatus more than a decade ago – is an exemplar of the nexus in which post-hardcore and emo coexist. And then there’s Kensrue’s concurrent solo career; across six albums, he has embarked upon a musical journey that would be inconceivable within the framework of his band. Please Come Home (2007) was built on a foundation of country, folk and blues. 2008’s This Good Night is Still Everywhere is a covers and Christmas-themed release; it added back some hardcore attitude but kept the rootsy textures. Kensrue returned after a break in 2013 with The Water & the Blood, a Contemporary Christian set of songs written to be sung in church. His 2015 release Carry the Fire wove together love songs and emo themes, earning rave reviews for his efforts. Less than a year later, he released Thoughts That Float on a Different Blood, a live album that distilled all of his musical virtues into 40 minutes, captured live onstage. And the album’s mostly-covers character provided more clues as to the wide and welcoming point of view that Dustin Kensrue brings to his own music. Now his latest, Desert Dreaming (released April 4) finds him heading back to country/Americana in an ode to the American southwest.

Anne Akiko Meyers
The classical music world is quite different from the pop milieu, but both have their leading lights. And in the classical realm, violinist Anne Akiko Meyers is without doubt a rock star. Meyers burst onto the national stage at the tender age of 11 with a bravura performance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. More than forty years later, the preternaturally youthful Meyers is stil lat the top of her game. Along the way, Meyers has amassed a sterling pedigree. She’s a trustee of the Juilliard School and a Grammy Award nominee for 2023’s Fandango with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Didamel. Featured on more than three dozen albums, Meyers is a world-class violinist – playing historic Guarneri and Stradivarius instruments – and that rare artist who manages both critical acclaim and large-scale commercial success. Her dates with the Utah Symphony under the direction of conductor Giancarlo Guerrero will feature a performance of Arturo Márquez’s acclaimed Fandango, a concerto for violin and orchestra in three movements. The program also includes two other works. First up is Jennifer Higdon’s Fanfare Ritmico, a single-movement orchestral composition from 2000. The program also features Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3, the acclaimed American composer’s final major work that includes the popular “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

Mdou Moctar
The digital age brought with it some fundamental shifts in music industry paradigms. Tuareg guitarist and songwriter Mdou Moctar was a beneficiary of those changes, leveraging them to catapult himself to prominence in his home country of Niger. These days he tours the globe with his distinctive music. Moctar’s music draws from Tuareg folk traditions and rhythms, but with the power, energy and attitude of rock. Yet they’re rarely constrained by the rules – structure, tempo, meter – that govern most popular rock music. Westerners might perceive a psychedelic flavor to his instrumental approach, but that quality might have more to do with its hypnotic, freewheeling nature than anything else. Tempo shifts, extended guitar solos, one-chord trancelike jams and a conventional melody might all appear in one song. Women’s rights, religion, and Western exploitation of Africa all figure into the lyrics of Moctar’s original songs, but English-speaking listeners are likely to miss all that, as he sings in his native Tamasheq language. But the emotions at the core of his music get through.

The Mother Hips
Across twelve studio albums and five live releases, the Mother Hips have recorded and released music that can be variously described as alternative rock, jam, folk rock, psychedelic, Americana and even power pop. And along the way the Mother Hips have built and cultivated a loyal fan base. The Chico, California group began in the early ‘90s, gigging around the Bay Area and building a following. The band released their debut, Back to the Grotto in 1993, a time by which the original vinyl era was over, having given way to the CD. Fast forward nearly three decades: in celebration of their 30th anniversary, beginning in 2021 the Mother Hips reissued their entire catalog on the resurgent vinyl format – one album at a time – over the following months. Those records are a varied lot, but the band’s stylistic metamorphoses are a feature, not a bug; a significant part of the Mother Hips’ appeal among its fans is the group’s creatively restless approach to making music. Their most recent studio release, 2023’s When We Disappear continues that eclectic character, folding in elements of Beach Boys-style vocal harmony, rootsy Americana and a jam band mindset applied to pop-length songcraft.

New Kids on the Block
Repackaging hip-hop for a pop audience, New Kids on the Block were a genuine ‘80s phenomenon. A slow-burn success, NKOTB began as a manufactured pop group assembled by entrepreneurs seeking to create a white act that could build on the success of black vocal group New Edition. The classic lineup of youngsters – brothers Jonathan and Jordan Knight, Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg and Danny Wood – came together by 1985. The group was an early example of the so-called “boy band” trend, scoring triple Platinum (more than three million units sold) with their self-titled 1986 debut album. NKOTB’s sustained success arguably paved the way for a raft of other boy bands including The Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. The group’s second album – 1988’s Hangin’ Tough – shifted a staggering 8 million units, and the next two albums were commercial successes as well. Along the way, the group placed 11 of its singles on the Billboard Top Ten singles charts. NKOTB landed numerous music industry awards, headlining and co-headlining successful concert tours. The group split by 1995, but all five members reunited in 2008 and have remained mostly active since that time, albeit with more measured commercial success. Today they’re neither new nor kids (Wahlberg was 15 when he joined; today he’s 54), but their latest album, 2024’s Still Kids has received critical praise for its brand of timeless and accessible pop music.