Friday Signal Boost

Artist to watch: Mei Semones

Last week, I shared this small, necessarily incomplete list of attributes that are, or perhaps were, integral to the experience of human music making in pre-digital times. My initial list was somewhat longer — I avoided some areas because they seemed tied to a specific era or style, redlined others because I could find compelling examples to counter the “Things ain’t what they used to be” gripe.

Among that latter category: Song structures that incorporate dramatic shifts of meter or tempo or both, ideally recurring in the form regularly and therefore register as part of the compositional intent. There are zillions of examples in classical music and progressive rock and jazz, fewer in indie-rock and pop music — despite the fact that digital audio makes it easier than ever before to “map” these types of structures on the almighty grid. It didn’t take much searching to encounter a bunch of recent records, by bands like Polyphia and others, brimming with precisely these types of drama-building structures. They might not be common, but they’re not exactly endangered.

A few days later, reading Will Hermes’ consistently enlightening Substack New Music + Old Music (subscribe, won’t you?), I learned about Mei Semones, a singer/songwriter who grew up in Ann Arbor and now lives in Brooklyn. Her songs, which she sings in English and Japanese, sometimes include abrupt — or implied — metric hiccups and groove changes. Check how this crisp samba groove is momentarily upended by power chords on the opening track of her most recent work Animaru:

Semones, who plays guitar, went to Berklee. She clearly has the skills (scars?) of jazz study, but does not let that overrun her smart, intervallically expansive melodies — or, for that matter, her intricate string counterlines. The album springs from a thriving, timeless push-pull between visceral energy, bubbly refrains and structurally intricate composition, suggesting — as Nirvana and many others have done — that those extremes don’t have to be oppositional. At all.