Every day, Dave Segal sifts through the hundreds of tracks that bombard his inbox. On a biweekly basis, he tells you about the two artists whose music most impressed him. This time, Seattle transplant and singer-songwriter Evelyn Frances delivers harrowing art-pop songs about 21st-century NYC life and drummer-producer Kassa Overall jazzes up some ’90s hip-hop classics, including Digable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick.”
Evelyn Frances, “Hold Yourself Together” (self-released)
Seattle-via-NYC singer-songwriter Evelyn Frances made a powerful first impression on me when she opened for experimental-electronic duo Matmos last year at Here-After. Singing like a woman pushed to extremes to retain a semblance of calm while under severe urban pressure, she used electric guitar, flute, and effects pedals in songs that portrayed New York City as a chronic threat to sanity. (Perhaps that’s why she moved to the paradise of tranquility known as Seattle. *cough*) In a review of that show on Slog, I wrote that “[Frances’s] compositions felt as raw and unsettling as a Cassavetes film.” Her new album, Human Patience, reaffirms that observation.
Frances is an artful minimalist who’s ostensibly working in the folk-tinged art-pop vein. Electronics and beats sometimes burst into the frame, adding surprising jolts of adrenaline. At other points, as in the morose lament “I Wonder What the Neighbors Think of Us,” she conjures a chamber-orchestral gravitas. (It should be noted that Frances also plays in the Pixies-like rock band Prim.) Operating alone, she opts for a sparser, more introspective tack. On the opening miniature, “High Hill,” Frances’s voice is close-mic’d for optimal intimacy over an eerie, distressed drone. She sings, “I want to feel vast looking out on the lake/on a high hill,” signaling a desired escape from the Big Apple.
“Yell a Little Louder” begins nearly a cappella, but then shifts abruptly into a jagged, ominous dubstep ripper, with internal-organ-shaking bass. Here, Frances proves that she’s not your typical trad singer-songwriter. Key lines: “I can’t listen to anyone that doesn’t agree with me/I wanna yell a little louder into my own respective void/…you can’t tell me that you suffer more than me.” On “Tired,” the album’s most radio-friendly tune, Frances’s voice becomes wraith-like amid a low-frequency electronic onslaught with booming beats. The track ends with static and Frances’s voice glitching out, as if she’s rebelling against accessibility. Speaking of which, the frosty, alienated ballad “Paint You” uses subtle electronic distortions within a dream-folk framework to approximate a lo-fi take on 10cc’s 1975 hit, “I’m Not in Love.”
“Human Patience” offers a brooding, gorgeous ambient backdrop as well as splenetic beats; it exemplifies Frances’s ability to conjure claustrophobia and vast expanses of space within a single song. About the album title, Frances said, “The phrase ‘human patience’ is a term I happened upon in a book I was reading about human’s impact on the environment and it perfectly summed up a lot of what I write about and how I feel about our species. Our perpetual impatience as humans is a quality that leads to our constant demise.”
Best of all is “Hold Yourself Together.” This is the sparest of folk concrète, but with undercurrents of turbulence, with a mesmerizing acoustic-guitar riff holding it all together, as it were. Frances intones in a soothing whisper various harrowing scenarios about living on “a beautiful island of garbage and dirt and spit and sperm and shit with millions of beautiful strangers/…maybe I’m being paranoid, disgruntled, and uptight, but New York is steadily draining me of everything I thought was mine.” Well, when you put it that way, Evelyn… New York’s loss is Seattle’s gain.
(Human Patience is available digitally and on cassette via Bandcamp.)
Kassa Overall, “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” (Warp)
Garfield High grad Kassa Overall has had the opposite trajectory of Evelyn Frances, moving from Seattle to New York City in 2006 to boost his music career. It’s been a wise decision. Overall’s gone on to work with Yoko Ono, Gary Bartz, Arto Lindsay, Geri Allen, and many others. He’s also built a substantial solo discography, with releases on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings, Jack White’s Third Man, and legendary UK label Warp.
On albums such as 2019’s Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz and 2020’s I Think I’m Good, Overall’s music is not as mercurial and disorienting as fellow modern fusionists such as Flying Lotus and Makaya McCraven’s. What has set them apart, though, are Overall’s lyrics about his mental-health battles and dealing with the oppression that Black Americans regularly face. 2023’s Animals advanced Overall’s facility for working with MCs and represented his most interesting production and beatmaking, thrusting him to the forefront of musicians combining jazz, hip-hop, and R&B elements.
Overall’s new album, CREAM (out September 12), finds him cleverly recontextualizing seven hip-hop club staples from the ’90s and, just to show listeners his roots, Eddie Harris’s 1965 soul-jazz standard, “Freedom Jazz Dance.” Overall demonstrates both a reverence for the original tracks and an uncontrollable urge to mess with their DNA. Hence, we get a serene bossa nova revamp of “Big Poppa,” the Notorious B.I.G.’s smoove, braggadocious rap about living an XXL life. Purist Biggie fans may be ready to die over this. So be it.
For Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me),” Overall makes you realize that this cut was ready-made for a Blue Note-ish renovation, complete with Matt Wong’s beautiful piano embellishments and Emilio Modeste’s wildly intricate sax peregrinations. (Note: El Michels Affair also did a funky af instrumental rendition of this stone classic.) The suave, lecherous swagger of Dr. Dre’s “Nothing But a ‘G’ Thang” gets sidelined for a piece that slithers like Eric Dolphy or Sun Ra at their mellowest and eeriest, with Dre’s original mellifluous background synth motif shifting to the forefront.
Overall’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” deviates from OutKast’s dank, mutedly euphoric original with a jaunty jazz-fusion makeover, featuring Bendji Allonce’s rapid conga patter, Overall’s shifty beats, Wong’s delicately undulating piano, and Rashaan Carter’s probing double bass. On “Back That Azz Up,” Overall transforms Juvenile’s bumptious celebration of callipygian attributes into a slice of classy, low-lit jazz that’s somewhere between Ahmad Jamal and Ramsey Lewis.
CREAM‘s most radical interpretation comes on Digable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” as Overall increases the tempo to a frantic 15/4 meter (it says here). It’s a bold rethink of one of the pinnacles of laid-back hip-hop. This version bursts with vitality and invention, as saxophonists Modeste and Anthony Ware and pianist Wong ratchet up the intensity to John Coltrane-like levels.
Overall told Seattle Times in 2020: “For me, the whole idea for creative music is to push the boundaries and to find something that hasn’t been found already.” Mission accomplished.
