I download (or rather, have downloaded) a lot of music that, looking through my music months later, I have no idea what it is or what compelled me to acquire it - usually I have at least a vague notion of genre but then I get to something like Wordwounder by Zijnzijn Zijnzijn! and I just have no fucking clue. With its four tracks, all over ten minutes and two over twenty, not giving any clues with the names ("Breathe In?" "Ash Floats From Fire?" What genres COULDN'T those song titles be?) it could be anything from noise rock to free improv to, well, I was gonna' say grime but nah. I had decided it was probably atmospheric sludge metal (helped by my misreading the title as WorLdwounder) when I put it on and it turned out to actually be... Pauline Oliveros? :/ Droney accordion! That's much better than Cult of Luna! The production is lo-fi to the point of being mostly hiss but the joy of sloppily played accordion still comes through well enough and I was really hoping that it would turn out to be a deconstructed free folk album, but then some rather unremarkable keyboards took over and I realized it would just be drone after all - but with very little accordion past that point, much to my chagrin. The next three tracks are all mostly guitar based and very amateurish -  not that the accordion wasn't but accordions are just GOOD, y'know? So yeah, not remarkable by any stretch of the imagination. Sorry, Zij Zij!.

I guess the main thing I can say about Zara McFarlane's album is that, squished as it between a version of "Police and Thieves" that is the sophisticated black woman equivalent of when a white guy with a guitar covers a pop song and a version of "Plain Gold Ring" that won't exactly have you forgetting your copy of Nina Simone in Concert, "Spinning Wheel" isn't a Blood, Sweat and Tears cover, thank god. The album opens with a mbira-(and possibly balafon?)-led track that had me thinking back to last year's Laura Mvula album, which I actually really dug and led me to expect an album of afro-art pop in the same vein, despite the "soul jazz" tag. Alas, it's the sort of pop album that wears its jazz influence on its sleeve, but somehow doesn't really count as jazz and sometimes abandon that concept entirely, such as on the guitar-only "You'll Get Me in Trouble." When it is trying to be jazz, it seems fixated on getting the point of how jazz it is across, like it's trafficking mostly in genre signifiers. It's just safe and not truly enjoyable enough to make up for that. It makes you long for the days when jazz, even in the mainstream, actually broke rules and set high standards for itself, but then you listen to Yasmina, A Black Woman by Archie Shepp and you get both reinforcement of that starry-eyed view of back in the day and proof that maybe it wasn't always so rosy. The opening drum solo actually prepares you for an absolute classic, and the first few minutes of the title track live up to that assessment - but over the course of twenty minutes the groove gets stale and the next two tracks are just utterly uninteresting - he covers "Body and Soul" for chrissakes! I've always seen Shepp as a second-rate figure compared to the great improvisers of his day and Yasmina certainly isn't up to snuff compared to the best stuff, say, Frank Wright or Pharoah Sanders. But hey they can't all be Jewels of Thought.