Music Reviews: Mdou Moctar, Panda Bear, and Tate McRae

An ear — Tate McRae has managed to check quite a few “main pop girl” boxes.

(Image credit: We Are / Getty Images)

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‘Tears of Injustice’ by Mdou Moctar
‘Sinister Grift’ by Panda Bear
‘So Close to What’ by Tate McRae

‘Tears of Injustice’ by Mdou Moctar

If Mdou Moctar’s 2024 album, Funeral for Justice, was “the electric sound of furious political protest,” said Joe Gross in Rolling Stone, Tears of Injustice is “the mourning after, when people huddle for strength as friends are dying and enemies are in power.” Where Funeral was an explosive mix of psychedelic rock, blues, and guitar riffs worthy of Prince, Tears finds the 40-year-old Nigerien-born singer-guitarist and his band laying down live, acoustic performances of the same material, “reworking the songs in ways no less powerful than the originals.” The five-minute electric version of “Imouhar” is slowed to eight minutes that recall “a Neil Young afternoon in Laurel Canyon one moment and an African desert the next.” Moctar recorded these versions after a 2023 military coup in Niger left him and his band stranded in the U.S., said Selena Fragassi in the Chicago Sun-Times. He sings in his native Tamasheq mixed with French, his contemporary takes on Saharan desert blues “shining a light on the effects of colonialism and exploitation that have left Nigeriens in a constant battle with poverty, inequity, and political unrest.”

‘Sinister Grift’ by Panda Bear

Panda Bear singer-songwriter Noah Lennox saw his marriage to fashion designer Fernanda Pereira collapse shortly before he wrote the songs on Sinister Grift, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. He’d rather it not be viewed purely as an album about divorce, but it’s hard not to hear in it “a kind of lysergic Blood on the Tracks.” With his voice “stripped of the echo and electronic effects” he frequently uses, we seems to be hearing his despair laid bare. On songs such as “Praise” and “Ends Meet,” the lyrics contrast with music that’s “not just richly melodic but also incongruously sun-kissed.” But just after the album’s midpoint, “the whole thing dissolves into mournful, introspective, and abstract territory.” That’s most apparent in the six-minute “atmospheric bruise” of “Elegy for Noah Lou,” said Matt Mitchell in Paste. Already dirge-like, the song drifts into a 90-second passage of “chopped-up field recordings and sobering drones.” As the first Panda Bear album to feature all of Lennox’s Animal Collective bandmates, Sinister Grift blends “well-crafted, old-school rock motifs” with touches of reggae, dub, and drone.

‘So Close to What’ by Tate McRae

On her way to making this, her third album, 21-year-old Tate McRae managed to check quite a few “main pop girl” boxes, said Jaeden Pinder in Pitchfork. She developed an alter ego (Tatiana), gave her fan base a nickname (Tater Tots), racked up nearly 13 billion streams, and even got name-dropped by Drake. Now comes So Close to What, which “amps up the 2000s pop, dials up the sex, and sprinkles in ballads as a small treat.” But “while the result is more enjoyable than its predecessors, its nostalgic rush can’t make up for its lack of originality.” The chopped and pitch-shifted post-chorus of “Miss Possessive” makes for a “serviceable earworm.” Unfortunately, she then repeats the trick on “No I’m Not in Love” and “2 Hands,” and the luster fades. But hear the album for what is, said Steven J. Horowitz in Variety. It gains its force by going all in on retro-pop tropes: “Britney Spears’ dance moves, Nelly Furtado’s hip-pop savvy, Christina Aguilera’s attitude.” Many have tried and failed to cash in on a sound popular before they were born, but McRae “knows what her audience wants” and “serves it up in spades.”