EMILE HAYNIE
“We Fall”
(Interscope)
Here’s one way to get over a tortured breakup, Los Angeles-style. If you happen to be a million-selling producer and songwriter, you can hole up for six months in Room 39 of the Chateau Marmont, set up a recording studio, turn wounds and sulking into songs, and invite a multigenerational assortment of singers to add vocals. That’s what Emile Haynie did to record “We Fall.” Lana Del Rey and Nate Ruess, from Fun., join him for a song each, along with musicians as disparate as Randy Newman and Lykke Li. Only in L.A., kids.
The music sounds prettier than the breakup apparently was. Mr. Haynie specializes in stately, neo-Baroque chamber-pop ballads that echo the 1960s but have made a comeback in hip-hop (which is why he has worked with Kanye West and Eminem). He’s also fond of 1960s-style vocal-harmony chorales, like the ones supplied by no less a Los Angeles eminence than Brian Wilson in “Falling Apart.”
The arrangements provide a plush, tuneful backdrop for lyrics that proffer sympathy but also twist the knife. The album’s story line is a tangle of needy personalities, showbiz ambitions, betrayal and vindictiveness. In “Little Ballerina,” Rufus Wainwright sings about being enraptured, despite misgivings, by someone with “bleach-blond hair and a coldhearted stare.”
“Dirty World,” with Mr. Haynie’s own haggard lead vocals, is an ambivalent approach to a woman who’s “beautifully broken.” He offers, “Tell me how bad it hurts,” then warns, “If you want to hide your sorrow/Well you can do that on your own.” Ms. Del Rey may be playing the troubled girlfriend in “Wait for Life,” which echoes the wide-screen approach she and Mr. Haynie used on her 2012 “Born to Die” album; in her scratchy, tremulous voice, she croons, “I can’t let you in, and I can’t keep you out.”
Recriminations soon take over. “A Kiss Goodbye” has the tearful-voiced English R&B singer Sampha moaning, “Did it ever occur that you forgave yourself before I could?” In “Nobody Believes You,” belying its upbeat major key and Beach Boys harmonies, the voices of Colin Blunstone of the Zombies and Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow start out putting down the woman’s friends and go on to insult her intelligence — “It’s a wonder that you figured out your phone” — before bitterly complaining, “I slept sound and you slept around.”
A jovially cynical Mr. Newman shows up in “Who’s to Blame,” singing about “little girls chasin’ fame” and warning, “It’s all in the game.” And in the grandiose finale, “The Other Side,” with Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine overdubbed into a church choir, Mr. Haynie interweaves an admission — “I was never quite enough for you” — and an aspiration: “You don’t even matter no more.” It’s not entirely resolved; true to Hollywood, there’s a chance for a sequel. JON PARELES
BIG SEAN
“Dark Sky Paradise”
(G.O.O.D./Def Jam)
Big Sean clings to vowels like a racecar driver to turns — tenaciously and mind-numbingly, returning to them constantly for fear of slipping off the track.
He has always been a technical rapper but rarely a fun one, managing to squeeze the thrill out of his pyrotechnics, sometimes cramming so many words into phrases that he sounds nervous.
But after a few years of mechanically rearranging sounds into sentences, Big Sean has begun to become sentient. In the last year, he’s made real strides toward lucidity, and on “Dark Sky Paradise,” his third and best album, he is more human than ever before.
Of course, much of this comes in the wake of Drake, who has made emotional terrain safe for those around him, and to whom this version of Big Sean feels indebted. That’s clear from songs like “I Know” and the surprisingly vulnerable “Win Some, Lose Some,” on which Big Sean raps, “I just turned my mama hooptie to a new Caddy/People thinking I’m rich and I wish they knew that/I’ve been signed for four years and I’m just able to do that.”
At his best, Big Sean is a flexible rapper, which he displays here on production that ranges from an exultant single that has an unprintable title to the growling “Paradise.”
Lately, though, what Big Sean’s been known as is a great boyfriend — first at the side of the “Glee” actress Naya Rivera, and now with the pop-R&B siren Ariana Grande, with whom he is often seen public-snuggling (and who appears here on the cynical, amusing “Research,” a bonus track about mistrust in relationships).
So it’s only natural that on this album, he unifies the two sides of his personality — his love for vowels and his love for love — on “Play No Games,” a song built on a sample of Guy’s “Piece of My Love” and which winks at Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey. Here, Big Sean’s all devotion: “Chauffeur a Range for you/I’ll take that flight alone earlier in the day for you/Just to beat you there, prepare, and let you know I’m waiting for you.” It’s great that his heart is overflowing, but so are his verses. JON CARAMANICA
DRKWAV
“The Purge”
(The Royal Potato Family)
The correlation between tight groove and good feeling gets willfully complicated in the music of DRKWAV. Composed of players bound by an antipathy for genre policing — the saxophonist Skerik, the keyboardist John Medeski and the drummer Adam Deitch — DRKWAV is a delivery system for improv-heavy psychedelic fusions. “The Purge,” its debut, is informed as much by the torqued jazz-rock of the early 1970s as by the dark ambient and drum ’n’ bass music of the early ’90s, while still pursuing an indeterminacy of style.
Labels aside, one way to understand DRKWAV is to acknowledge its core audience. Skerik is known for his founding role in Critters Buggin and Garage Á Trois, and Mr. Deitch for his work with Lettuce. Mr. Medeski is the first among equals in Medeski Martin & Wood. All of these bands operate in the broad jam-band ecosystem, with pronounced expertise in the areas of funk and soul.
The departure represented by “The Purge” is largely a matter of tone, and its recording engineer, Randall Dunn, also listed as a producer, was an obvious factor. (His work involves a lot of artfully heavy music, by Earth and others.) The album’s overture is “Darkwave,” an eight-minute celestial event with a lashing beat and a lumbering melody, which Skerik overlays with a graffiti scrawl of arpeggiated runs. Something analogous happens on “Datura,” an even longer track, with a harder undertow.
However irresistible the pull of electronic dance music, DRKWAV never tips fully in that direction: Its rhythmic base is forever rooted in real-time human rapport. Occasionally, on a Meters-esque track called “Scars” and a stutter-step prowl titled “Count Chokulous,” the grooves can call Medeski Martin & Wood to mind. “Shmeeans Kuti” — its title a nod to Fela Kuti and the Lettuce guitarist Adam Smirnoff, who contributes some overdubs — adeptly captures the rolling heave of Afrobeat.
There’s also something from the jazz canon, Eric Dolphy’s “Gazzelloni,” reconfigured with a bobbing backbeat. It’s a welcome outlier, but DRKWAV, whose current tour reaches Brooklyn Bowl on March 5, functions well enough without a hook. NATE CHINEN
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