Our Spilt Milk: Adrian Younge's "American Negro" and Elf Power's "Winter"

Our favorite things this week include producer Adrian Younge’s exploration of Blackness in America and Elf Power’s elf-iest album.

“Everything that I do is based on the music that was created from ’68 to ’73, through the scope of a hip-hop producer from the golden era,” Adrian Younge says. “I look at those times to make music now.” Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway are frequently invoked in conjunction with the 43-year-old producer’s music, but his soundtracks for Black Dynamite, both seasons of Netflix’s Luke Cage series, and his collaboration with Wu-Tang’s Ghostface Killah make it clear that the artists who scored the indie Black cinema from that period are at least as important. Last year, he released a collaboration with Roy Ayers, the legendary vibraphonist who wrote and performed the soundtrack to Coffy starring Pam Grier in 1968. 

Younge started a series of album titles with the phrase, “Adrian Younge Presents,” and “presents” does a lot of work there, suggesting that his recordings with The Delfonics or Jack Waterson have some kind of frame around them. His 12 Reasons to Die 2 collaboration with Ghostface Killah comes with graphics that recreate the look of Italian horror films from the ‘70s so effectively that I had to check to make sure that there really wasn’t a movie by that name. The contexts Younge creates can’t be taken at face value, as the jazz performed in his ongoing “Jazz is Dead” series illustrates. 

Younge’s work demands to be appreciated through a number of prisms at once, and his most recent project, The American Negro, takes that to extremes. It’s an album that features lush, jazz-inflected funk and R&B that sound like hip-hop samples waiting to be discovered by a DJ, paired with spoken pieces by voices loudly proclaiming Black truths, and spoken pieces by Younge that are equally pointed and political. The tracks interact to amplify, dramatize, question, and emotionally enliven each other, and the whole album has a similar relationship to Invisible Blackness—his interview podcast with such guests as Terrace Martin, Wayne Brady, Nelson George, and Digable Planets Ladybug Mecca—and T.A.N., the 22-minute short film that shares some audio with the album.

You can argue that the didactic spoken word component is overkill since the music that inspires Younge was political, as were the movies whose soundtracks he riffs on. But this is Younge laying thoughts out and working through essential concepts with all the tools in his bag. With The American Negro project. he widens his net to pull in more reference points including Black Arts poetry and avant-garde cinema. The breadth of his conceptual reach makes the whole hard to take in and feel confident in your interaction with it, but the project is a dense, bold exploration of Blackness in America. Even though no single perspective obviously speaks for Younge, the entirety adds up to a profoundly personal expression. (Alex Rawls)

I started binging Elf Power around a month or two into the pandemic when casual song-shuffling stopped working out for me. The band is the longstanding underdog of the Elephant 6 Recording Company from Athens, Georgia, a cult-hit collective from the ‘90s that currently occupies the majority of my binge-music material. Deep dives are extra rewarding when they help piece together a unified canon, and Elephant 6 albums, with their common threads in production style and ethos (as well as frequently reccuring musicians across projects), feel like just that: a unified canon of 60s-inspired experi-pop.

Elf Power makes for the longest E6 binge with 12 albums from 1995 to 2017, threaded by the melodically reserved, structurally direct tunes and weird, whimpery vocals of Andrew Reiger. Of these albums, which trek grounds from Guided by Voices-esque cassette-rock to southern rock to folk, the band's fourth LP, The Winter is Coming from 2000, might best illustrate their underlying personality.

The Winter is Coming feels like Reiger's attempt to pull things back to low-key, lo-fi territory after working with The Flaming Lips' producer for their buzziest release, A Dream in Sound, one of Reiger's least favorite Elf Power songs. The band were diving headfirst into the nature commune / woodsy aesthetic they priorly hinted at without fully embracing, so live shows around this time would often involve eight or so musicians on stage each with an accordion or violin or floor tom or whatever instruments they could dig up, with Reiger chant-singing, "All at once embrace the crimson tide!"

The now-obscure LP we got from this moment feels right at home in the Neutral Milk Hotel warped-folk lineage. But where Neutral Milk Hotel soundtracks death and destruction, The Winter is Coming musically accompanies a little elf in the flowers showing you around his neck of the woods. If that sounds cutesy, you've got the right idea. There's a big smiley face under even the colder songs to an extent that feels downright escapist. But the humble recording quality and overall mellow demeanor keep the album subtle enough to click and not feel overly saccharine.

Plenty of tracks on The Winter is Coming effortlessly sound like nothing I’ve heard before simply due to the novel arrangement choices. “People Underneath” is no more than tambourine, some acoustic strumming, octave harmonies, and a brutally squawky, dissonant guitar playing the number’s laidback hook, adding up to a bizarre combo of chill and grotesque. “The Naughty Villain” features a bafflingly chipper piccolo section atop the album’s boomiest drum groove. Rarely if ever do you hear an indie band play childishness this straightfaced. On the other hand, delightful little folk numbers like "Birds in the Backyard" strike a more agreeable balance while still pulling from Elf Power's trove of lovable arrangement touches.

Elf Power could get a little clumsy, but their formula of relaxed nuggets of pop songwriting set in a surreal, sunshiny patch of nature works like magic for me. Their more produced content is like indie pop candy, but the Elf Power I find most rewarding is all the music they wrote fully off in their own world, all strange and flowery sensibilities on full display. If that’s the Elf Power you’d like to sample, The Winter is Coming should do the trick. (Andreas Jahn)