MARY LAMBERT
“Heart on My Sleeve”
(Capitol)
NICO & VINZ
“Black Star Elephant”
(Warner Bros.)
Sincerity went out of fashion, like, two decades ago, right?
That’s one reason for the paucity of issues-minded pop in recent years. Whatever the real enemy is — capitalism, narcissism or any of their cousins — pop music has become an underused vehicle for unironic statements of change, a state of affairs that qualifies Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” as a real empowerment anthem. Broadly speaking, sloganeering has been exiled to the fringes.
And yet, a couple of times a year, a song penetrates through the self-involved clutter. Last year, it was “Same Love,” the Macklemore & Ryan Lewis song about marriage equality that might have remained a curio were it not for, first, the duo’s unlikely crossover success preceding its release and, second, the indelible hook written and sung by Mary Lambert. This year it’s “Am I Wrong,” a bright, Police-esque pop-soul number by the Afro-Norwegian duo Nico & Vinz, singers with clean, burr-less voices and relentless optimism.
For Ms. Lambert and Nico & Vinz, who made their initial mark by finding a way to make earnestness something more than a personal crusade, sincerity is its own performance. But their initial success forces a test: Can they stick to their causes in the face of pop’s filthy, irresistible lucre?
Nico & Vinz embed their answer to that question in “People,” a song from “Black Star Elephant,” their first album released in this country. “If everybody were poor,” the song begins, “we would all be rich.” For a few minutes, they then go on to romanticize poverty, or lament the ways in which work takes energy away from family, and love, and spiritual purity. It’s numbingly direct, ideologically underfed, and sure, catchy enough.
So goes the rest of this album, which gives the most obvious of platitudes the most glossy of sheens. Nico and Vinz are resolutely positive singers, and to complement that attitude, they’ve opted for production that echoes the neutered global pop of the 1980s, sprinkled with African influences. The album’s social commitments are stronger than its aesthetic commitments, but it doesn’t suffer for that. Behind that choice seems to be an understanding that reaching the most really means alienating the fewest. At minimum, it’s the sort of approach that makes sentiments like the refrain of “Miracles” — “It don’t have to be miracles/The fire’s within our soul” — go down easier.
More so than Nico & Vinz, Ms. Lambert uses her soapbox for something beyond mere preaching on “Heart on My Sleeve,” her major-label debut album. She, too, is a warm singer, but more in a nurturing way. Her politics are universal, but also severely personal.
This album is full of the sort of self-lacerating confessional music that was all the rage two decades ago, and now, in a different time, feels both completely foreign and surprisingly refreshing. There’s even a spoken-word interlude. “Secrets,” the brisk album opener, catalogs a litany of neuroses and flaws in a manner both direct and tongue in cheek: “I’m overweight, I’m always late, I’ve got too many things to say.”
Those things become Ms. Lambert’s strengths in her music. And while there’s nothing as directly political as “Same Love” here, there are sly moments of statement making. Her cover of Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl,” or the impressive, sensual soul baring of “Rib Cage,” a collaboration with Angel Haze and K. Flay. Ms. Lambert has made an album that doesn’t wear its politics on its sleeve, and that is its own form of political triumph. JON CARAMANICA
ANGALEENA PRESLEY
“American Middle Class”
(Slate Creek/Thirty Tigers)
As one-third of the high-test country sisterhood Pistol Annies, Angaleena Presley has honed a reputation for straight talk and sass, putting fresh spin on a formalist mode. Her fellow Annies, Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe, are well ahead of her in the solo-career department, but Ms. Presley, 38, seems to have taken her time for a reason. “American Middle Class,” her debut album, comes fully formed, clear about its purpose.
You could call it a concept album, insofar as its 12 songs — all Ms. Presley’s, almost half bearing a sole songwriting credit — adhere to the same subject area of hard times and short horizons, of scraping and striving and coming up short. “You sure ain’t rich, and you sure as hell/Ain’t poor enough to get one little break,” she belts on the title track, a tribute to her upbringing as a Kentucky coal miner’s daughter.
She sings wryly of a community’s response to prescription drug abuse (“Pain Pills”) and the related scourge of small-town boredom (“Dry County Blues”), under the musical cover of country traditionalism. On “Grocery Store,” she plays out hypotheticals in her mind, making a watchful sport out of empathy. These are sturdy, insightful songs, and Ms. Presley, who produced the album with Jordan Powell, presents them well.
She’s a warm, agreeable singer, with neither the flint nor the sheen of a more dynamic peer like Ms. Lambert. That limits the size of her audience, but it’s not a problem within the self-contained world of the album.
What is a problem are the handful of songs that recall other, stronger efforts: “Knocked Up,” with a premise recently tackled by both Ms. Lambert and Ms. Monroe; “Drunk,” which evokes “Hungover,” by another Nashville contemporary, Brandy Clark; “Surrender,” a ballad written with Luke Laird and Barry Dean, better suited to an upstart like Cassadee Pope. But for now, at least, Ms. Presley has her identity locked tight. NATE CHINEN