Week of Nov. 6: This week, life-affirming soul and death-haunted folk, plus Brian Eno’s latest collaboration. Did You Skip This Youtube Ad?  Here’s What You Missed Benjamin Booker’s album Witness came out this past summer and was full of classic rock, soul, and funk sounds, with some potent lyrics about the racial and political climate in America today. But in the middle of the album was a soaring soul ballad called “Believe,” which stubbornly insisted on finding hope in dark times. Now, Booker has released a video for the song. It’s been popping up as an ad on Youtube, so your first inclination will be to click on the “Skip Ad” button as quickly as you can so you can watch what you intended to watch. I was scrolling over to the button myself, but the opening image caught my eye and I thought, well, I like Booker’s music, let’s see where he’s going with this. Four minutes later, I had completely forgotten I was watching an “ad.” The ending requires a very strong suspension of disbelief, but I was happy to go there, at least for a moment. Brian Eno and Kevin Shields Release First Collaboration Super-producer, ambient music godfather and musical polymath Brian Eno has for the first time collaborated with Kevin Shields, of the band My Bloody Valentine. Shields helped develop the reverb-drenched, wall-of-distortion style known as shoegaze, which, in its own noisier way, followed one of the central edicts of Eno’s ambient work – that the distinction between musical foreground and background was meaningless. Their 9-minute soundscape, “Only Once Away My Son,” begins with a brief rhythmic gesture that quickly gives way to the sweeping, almost orchestral electronics that Eno has long favored, but with the ragged edges of Shields’ work with MBV. Especially toward the middle of the piece, the distortion becomes increasingly disquieting, even as the piece begins what might otherwise be a majestic ascent. Eno’s subversive “ignorable as it is interesting” dictum of 1980s ambient music is itself subverted here: this is tough to ignore.  Susanna’s Haunting Take On An Old Folk Song The Norwegian singer and occasional songwriter Susanna Wallumrød first came on our radar in the early aughts as half of the group Susanna And The Magical Orchestra (keyboardist Morton Qvenild was the other, magical orchestra half). Both with that project and then on her own simply as Susanna, she has become known for her eccentric and eclectic covers. Joy Division, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, and even KISS have all been reimagined as moody, almost inevitably Nordic ballads. Now Susanna is about to release a new collection called Go Dig My Grave, which will include Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” the “Cold Song” by Baroque composer Henry Purcell (memorably covered by the talented but tragic Klaus Nomi back in the early 80s), Elizabeth Cotten’s greatest hit “Freight Train,” and a number of folk songs. The title track is out now, and it is a bone-chilling version of what was already a haunted old musical tale. Working again with baroque harp player Giovanna Pessi, she adds Ida Hidle’s accordion and Tuva Syvertsen’s fiddle to this spare, unsettling arrangement. Young Fathers’ New Song Has A New Sound The Mercury Prize-winning Scottish band Young Fathers began when G Hastings, Alloysious Massaquoi, and Kayus Bankole met at a teen hip-hop event in Edinburgh. Massaquoi and Bankole are both from West African families, and their last full album, White Men Are Black Men Too, was full of thoughtful, melodic songs that blended hip hop with indie rock and occasional jolts of R&B or gospel. The band has just announced that they’ve finished a new album; “we hope you hear it sometime in the near future,” they write. “For now, here is a song, a song called ‘Lord.’ You can’t dance to it.” The song begins with minimal piano accompaniment, and has nothing resembling rap. Instead, it builds steadily into a bracing, anthemic chorus. It’s not the first time the band has changed up its sound, but it’s an interesting first glimpse at the band’s new, as yet untitled album.  Benjamin Clementine’s New Video, “Jupiter,”  Is About His Home Planet Mercury Prize-winning singer and songwriter Benjamin Clementine looks, and often sounds, like an alien from another planet. But the North London-born musician is now residing here in the States, and when he received his US visa it described him as “an alien of extraordinary abilities.” While strangely worded, this is actually quite accurate, and in his new video for the song “Jupiter,” from his most recent album I Tell A Fly, Clementine has some fun with the idea of being an alien in America when he is in fact from the same planet as everyone else. He apparently doesn’t know which way is up when it comes to the American flag; but when it comes to singing, listen to the effortless way he moves up into his falsetto range in the chorus.   Shabazz Palaces Drop New Video Alternative hip hoppers Shabazz Palaces have already had a productive year – this summer the duo (rapper/producer Ishmael Butler, aka Palaceer Lazaro, and African thumb piano master/multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire) released two related full-length albums, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines. Now they’ve put out a striking black and white (mostly) video for the track “Since C.A.Y.A.” from the first of those two albums. The song features the elastic but elemental bass playing of Thundercat (Stephen Bruner) and Butler’s quicksilver rhymes: “Lost in these streets and sound lost on a beat/Man, I can't even remember my last tweet/You're soc-med selfie came, that's sweet.” The video follows the song’s elliptical nature and occasional Afrocentrism, and includes the memorable image of two enormous snakes on leashes.