Archive by Author

Lil Uzi Vert – Pink Tape

20 Aug

It’s impossible to predict what Uzi is going to do next. There are just no rules to what they do next. Uzi consistently makes some of the most exciting music in rap with that freedom, but that’s unfortunately the only consistency you’ll find from them.

This is most obvious in “Just Wanna Rock,” currently every sporting event’s first choice for hype music. You cannot really describe “Just Wanna Rock,” let alone find a genre it falls neatly into, but it’s still absurdly compelling with every listen. Uzi’s blatant disregard for norms allow them to make music that doesn’t just bend genre, but instead comes from an alien planet where genre has never existed.

Even more surprising are the places Uzi draws inspiration from though. “Endless Fashion” takes “I’m Blue” and makes something spectacular from it. Everyone has an interpolation these days, most notably Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj on the Barbie Soundtrack, but this is the first one to really commit. Normally a song of this style just has the artists doing whatever they normally do over a nostalgic hook, but Uzi and Nicki modify their flows here to match the song and finally make one of these more than just a gimmick.

Uzi does a similar, if smaller, maneuver in “Mama, I’m Sorry” but cuts it with a couple of other samples to make a very strong cut, but they take yet another left turn with “CS,” an almost straight cover of “Chop Suey!” Now, I’m very clear about my feelings on the music of my youth; the time was a cultural wasteland and System of a Down is very much a part of that. “Chop Suey!” is a very memorable song, and is absolutely a song that I headbanged to when I was 14, but it’s not a good song and Uzi’s cover doesn’t do anything interesting with it. “Werewolf,” though an original track, is also pretty firmly 00s alt-rock and is tiring for being such.

Between the good and the bad, there’s a lot that’s just mediocre. “Amped” is pretty good in the “Just Wanna Rock” way, “All Alone” and “Suicide Doors” are both good Uzi cuts and there are other things one could highlight from the album, but the rest is just not very memorable. Every Uzi album is a mixed bag for the listener to sift through. There’s magic, missteps and always a lot of the mediocre, but when they hit, it feels like the future of music today and that always makes them worth the effort.

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Janelle Monae – The Age of Pleasure

25 Jul

There are a lot of ways to approach Janelle Monae right now. She was in the latest Knives Out. You can see her on the red carpet and on late night. You can even see her as the only four-footer on court at the NBA All-Star game. Still, she started with the music and it’s to the music that we now return, somewhat older and somewhat changed.

The album opens very well with “Float.” Like her progenitor Prince, it’s always hard to pin Janelle down to a single genre and that slipperiness works well in “Float.” It’s a bold, confident song and she looks good in it. She looks even better in “Champagne Shit,” far and away the sexiest song in the album. Her high heels and no shirts sounds amazing and the brass in the chorus sounds every bit as good. The song could do with another complication, but it’s fun enough and it’s hot enough for it not to matter.

Unfortunately though, it’s the only song that really sells the sex. “Lipstick Lover” should be a great sapphic track and I really like the emphasis of lipstick on her neck but it’s just not a great song. “Only Have Eyes 42” is uninteresting music that moves far too slowly and “A Dry Red” is equally slothful. These slow jams just don’t have enough fire in them. There’s no energy, no danger and not even much fun.

She’s much better when she tries Afrobeats though. “Know Better” works really well for her and “The Rush” and its Amaarae feature is a great inclusion. This is the strongest section of the album and I would love to see her go deeper into this space.

This interesting sidetrack highlights the flaw of the album. It feels like it’s meant to be a paen to bisexual bliss but Janelle Monae just can’t sell the pleasure of something that really shouldn’t need much work to sell and this lack of conviction makes the whole thing hollow. There’s still some good music in here, mixed alongside the mediocre, and I really hope she drops a full Afrobeats album soon, but overall, this is far from her best.

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Fado at the Castelo – 2023/06/17

8 Jul

Cards on the table, I’m not at all well versed with Fado. I’ve heard a little Amelia Rodrigues and heard some stuff walking down the street and that’s the entirety of what I know. So, when I had the chance to go see some at the Castelo, I was quite excited to listen to more of this distinctly Portuguese sound and Katia Guerreiro and then Jaca surpassed all of my expectations.

Unexpectedly, the star of the show ended up being the Portuguese guitar. It’s a much pluckier, twangier folksy sound than I expected. I expected the vocals to be the center, but Pedro de Castro’s guitar work was the absolute highlight for me and the band gave him plenty of space to operate. He had some truly excellent solos over the course of the performance.

The vocal work was also noteworthy. Katia Guerreiro has a strong voice and she let it free. The first song was a little one note in the vocals, a little too inundated with the national saudade, but she brought in a lot of fun and a lot of folk in a genre often thought staid over the concert. Her third song had very lighthearted vocals and that energy brought a nice lift after two solemn songs.

They followed that with an opener that was just vocals and a single backing guitar. It was powerful singing, but the return of the Portuguese guitar was an auditory relief after the steamed up vocals. Ms. Guerreiro was able to stay on top of the emotion in her songs, but it was still very good to have the strings as a complement.

The locale also did a lot for the show. Castelo de Sao Jorge is the most iconic of Lisbon’s landmarks and an incredible setting for a concert. I could have done without the peacock’s accompaniment, but it was as good a concert venue as I have ever seen.

She followed that with a straight a cappella section and it was quite solid, but the heavy emotion of the singing needed some kind of counterbalance. The strings came in after a while to temper her voice, but by that point my ears were already oversaturated. It’s clever then that they followed up with something light and fun. I don’t know if it was actually a drinking song, but if not, it should be. It as a fun track done well and had the audience clapping along

The next song brought in the guest vocalist Jaca. It was a great surprise for me, but unfortunately his voice wasn’t quite up to scratch. There was excellent fado guitar work though and the lead vocalist kept up her strong performance.

Jaca did much better with the next song, which was much more pop. This was clearly one of his tracks but Ms. Guerreiro did well in it too. Jaca’s rapping was also quite good and the band played well off him. They even got some trap bass in there.

He dropped one of his singles next, just him and his guitarist. It was a solid track, but definitely needed a second idea somewhere in the song. It was good, but always felt like it was waiting for a small evolution.

He did better in the rapping of his second solo song than the first. He finds a bit more of his own voice with it. The production was unfortunately a little overloud. The guitars were more interesting than the beat but ended up overpowered. He brought in the fado guitar as support very well though. It really picked up the song. Unfortunately though, the song felt like a couple of separate threads that only came together right at the end and didn’t resolve cleanly there. It was still a good listen, but a little bit more work would have made it exceptional.

They went back to the original quartet for a fun folk song. Ms. Guerreira’s stage presence does a lot for these songs. She’s fun and animated for the fun songs. They followed that with a wonderful, tripping string melody. The conversational vocals in the foreground were also excellent, but those strings were nothing short of incredible. The final song was an upbeat lounge track. It honestly belonged in a tourist hotel lobby and not a concert like this. It was definitely their weakest track, but Ms. Guerreria was more than personable enough to carry it.

The encore had some fun pieces. Jaca can rap and there was a wonderful transition straight to the fado guitar. The singer couldn’t quite find the right follow up, but she warmed up to her song quickly. It was getting to be a late night and mistakes started creeping in, but it was still a lot of fun and the two vocalists mixed wonderfully and I really couldn’t have asked for anything more.

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100 gecs – 10,000 gecs

14 Jun

How high is your tolerance for memery? Unless you’ve been totally fried by the internet, it’s probably not quite high enough for 100 gecs. This is music for the terminally online made by the terminally online. It’s loud and noisy and it can be very stupid and being stupid is often the point, but it’s still stupid. For all of that though, it can still sometimes come out with something that changes your life.

“Doritos and Fritos” is what I’m talking about. It skids around the place and memes a lot more than it really should, but there are really interesting fragments studded in there. They just have a much better ear for music than your typical hyperpop band.

In particular, “Dumbest Girl Alive” is incredible. It’s got great lyrics, you can tell that the writers have the internet as their first language. “Put emojis on my grave / I’m the dumbest girl alive” is immediately memorable and “Text, text, text, text, like you’re tryna start a fight / Yeah, I’ll fuckin’ text you back, I’m the dumbest girl alive” is an excellent distillation of the song.

For all that though, the lyrics are much less interesting than what the band does sonically. The alt-rock of my adolescence was something of a cultural wasteland, but it has proved to be incredibly fertile raw material for the musicians of today and 100 gecs take that to the extreme.

Similarly, “Billy Knows Jamie” could have been scoped by Trent Reznor. The production throughout is just the most absurd showcase of talent. Something like “Hollywood Baby” is so clearly intelligent that no posturing can diminish it.

“Frog on the Floor” and “I Got My Tooth Removed” both play much closer to the line though. The edge between dumb and good gets very fine with this album and both of these songs are constantly teetering on both sides of the ledge. “One Million Dollars” has fallen right off though. There’s just not much that’s actually interesting in that song, just a lot of played out sounds mixed together in a rather boring way.

10,000 gecs is an uneven album, but it’s impossible to imagine an album like this that’s not. If you’re willing to let it bounce off the wall, you’ll find a lot to love on the rebound. Just don’t get square in its path.

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Miles Davis – Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud

6 May

As a jazz aficionado, I know a lot of people for whom the genre is really just background music. It plays in movies and lounges and at best it sets tone and at worst it fills space but it’s not really music to pay attention to. You might be one of those people right now. If you are and you’re looking to change that, this is the album for you and the nice thing is that even if you’re already a jazz fan, it’s still the album for you.

This album comes from the film Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud, a French noir New Wave movie. The director Louis Malle gave jazz legend Miles Davis a private screening and then Miles and his band improvised the entire score. The soundtrack is quintessentially noir but elevated to a degree you have never heard before and so a great way to see what exactly makes the difference.

This is made easier by how immediate the difference is. The opening track “Generique” hits you with Miles’ trumpet from the first note and it is a revelation. He gets such a bold, confident sound from the instrument and it’s completely suffused with the melancholy of the noir. I don’t know if you normally consider the trumpet to be a lonely instrument, but the emotion that Miles builds in this track is undeniable.

His trumpet work in the following “L’Assassinat De Carala” is similarly spectacular. He holds his notes much further than you would expect and so keeps you off-balance. It’s never quite the notes you expect, but they’re never out of place.

There are however a couple of tracks that don’t quite fit. “At Bar Du Petit Bac” is closer to generic lounge jazz than I would like albeit done well enough not to warrant much complaint. Similarly, “Sur L’Autoroute” feels out of place. It’s solid frenetic jazz and the drum work deserves special attention for the amount it puts into the space behind the brass, but it still doesn’t really fit into the noir of the rest of the album. The trumpet and sax both get decent solos as well here. It would be quite the solid track in a different album.

On the other hand, “Visite du Vigil” is unique in the album for the space that it gives the bass, but it fits in perfectly with the rest. The way the track builds up perfectly with so few moving parts is a monument of skill.

The album finishes with “Chez Le Photographe Du Motel” which again brings back the focus on the trumpet and the noir. It’s cinematic and evocative. You can see the gumshoe on the rainy road as it plays. Barney Wilen’s sax is more muted but maintains the emotion and goes into some very interesting solo work. The trumpet solo over a very gentle piano and brush is astonishing though. Throughout this album, Miles sets tone and emotion in a way that’s deeply familiar but with a skill that’s exceptional. You may have heard noir jazz before, but you’ll never have heard any this good.

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boygenius – the record

24 Apr

The first boygenius album is exciting even before you hear it. Their EP was excellent music and it’s also just such a good feeling to see three exceptionally talented women living out the friendship we all wish we were lucky enough to have. This album feels like an evolution both in their music and their friendship and is excellent rock to boot.

We’ve heard a lot of Phoebe Bridgers of late and I’m always happy to hear more so it’s good to hear something like “Emily I’m Sorry,” which is as much of a Bridgers cut as anything on Punisher. She’s as delicate and wistful as ever and the apology of the song gives it a beating heart.

It’s fascinating how well it goes into Lucy Dacus’ “True Blue.” It’s much less gossamer than “Emily I’m Sorry” but they flow well into each other and the robustness is like eating something savory after something sweet. She drops some memorable epigrams in it too. “And it feels good to be known so well / I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself” is a strong lyric delivered well but “When you don’t know who you are / You fuck around and find out” is a truly excellent line in its reframing of a particularly trite aphorism.

Meanwhile, Julien Baker’s “Satanist” is one of the best songs of the album. It’s very funny and very personal and brings in a spectacular grungy guitar. Her “Anti-Curse” is also very strong. The lyrics don’t quite cohere, the two threads never splice together but it’s still spectacular indie rock.

There are some misses in the album though. “Letters To An Old Poet” would be too insubstantial were it not for Bridgers’ exceptional lyrics. “You made me feel like an equal / But I’m better than you / And you should know that by now” is an ice-cold line. The acapella opener with all three of them singing is better as an idea than a song. It has none of the energy that the rest of the album does well with and the it’s thankfully followed by the fantastic “$20” which adds a huge jolt.

“Not Strong Enough” really benefits from the video showing the three of them having fun. It makes a more complex statement about friendship, a statement about how you don’t need to be strong enough by yourself, but can instead rely on the people you love. It’s particularly interesting in an album that features a lot of my turn-your turn from the artists as they alternate songs in which they are clearly the lead.

Maybe though, this is what the album is about. It’s not about subsuming the individual for the collective, but instead of making sure that everyone has space for their own voice and sometimes using your own in support. “Not Strong Enough” does a lot of work with the line “Not strong enough to be your man” and then Dacus later reinforces that with a chant of “Always an angel, never a god” but the song, which is Dacus’ from the jump, ends with the three voices coming together powerfully.

The Weeknd – Live At SoFi Stadium

3 Apr

It’s still kind of crazy to see The Weeknd filling a stadium like SoFi. He’s as big a superstar as anyone in the world right now, but it’s sometimes hard not to see him as the kid with the big hair in the small club. It’s also interesting to see because his music isn’t really stadium rock. He has maybe the greatest voice of any male singer and it’s a delicate instrument. His ability to update his catalog for the less subtle arena atmosphere is an impressive feat.

Every song in this feels different from the recorded version. He makes his music much more muscular and less ethereal and makes it all work anyway. This stadium seats 70,240 people. There are cities with fewer people. I spent a night in Pinhão for my last anniversary. That has a population of 10,486. This is not a small crowd.

He works them all well too. He lets each beat ride for a second with each song just to give the crowd time to get hype and he just lets the audience sing key parts. He’s always talking to the crowd and the album does a good job in mixing in so much of their noise. It’s a far cry from when I saw him around 2014 and he would project images of girls in bondage on the screens around him.

I also appreciate his mixing in old hits. It’s fantastic to see a “Crew Love” appearance. He updates some of them up quite a bit too. There’s a whole new beat for “Wicked Games” and I love it. “Often” also feels completely fresh. His voice is much higher in the original and he shifted the beat to something much more ominous for the live crowd.

You can fell the shift in the arena when he goes for the crowd pleasers though. I never really liked “I Feel It Coming”, the most Michael Jackson of his tracks, but when he performs it for an audience, it fits like a glove. I also didn’t really give “Starboy” its due as an audience track until now and this made it shine in a whole new way.

This is The Weeknd in a whole new aspect for me and he handles it excellently. Of course, he has been a superstar for a long time and that Colbert appearance should have been more than enough to demonstrate his capabilities as such, but sometimes it takes me a while to see. Live At SoFi Stadium makes it more than clear though. The Weeknd really can do it all.

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Top Five Songs To Convince Your Wife To Go To A National Concert

26 Mar

It can be very hard to take a band like The National seriously. They’re really not much of a band for subtlety and they only ever traffic in a single emotion. However, they do it well. They’re evocative and cinematic with every beat. They drown you with their longing and nostalgia. There is no one as able to write characters that would rather wallow in mistakes than fix them and no one as able to make that feel romantic. There is a lot to make fun of in all of this, but there’s also really good music and that’s all the argument they really need.

5. Fake Empire

Really here, I just want to highlight the crescendo at the end of the song. It is a fascinating touch. It’s not unusual in rock but I would expect it more from a band like Speedy Ortiz, not from a band as hermetic as The National.

4. I Am Easy To Find

For I Am Easy To Find, The National featured guest vocalists on almost every track and they were all women. It’s incredible how much adding female perspectives did for the album and for this song. The comedy of two people singing about how easy they both are to find when clearly neither of them is going to look is just a fun listen.

3. Exile Vilify

This is as gentle and as heartfelt as The National has ever been and somehow fits perfectly with the emotions of Portal. RIP Companion Cube. You deserved better.

2. I Need My Girl

I don’t think it’s possible to make a more National song than “I Need My Girl.” That title really tells you everything you need to know for the song. However, there will never be a song that does as good a job of capturing a single emotion as this one does. Sometimes, you do need your girl and if you can’t actually have her, at least you can know that there is someone else who feels as you do.

1. City Middle


“You said “I think I’m like Tennessee Williams”
I wait for the click. I wait, but it doesn’t kick in
I think I’m like Tennessee Williams
I wait for the click. I wait, but it doesn’t kick in”

It’s an incredibly compulsive stanza. It completes the song by itself but then moves into a vocalization that lets both you and the song exhale for a perfect extra beat. This is the best of an already excelllent band.

Bonus: Bartees Strange

I love opening acts. They can be a bit of a crapshoot, but that’s true of every concert and Bartees Strange is an exciting choice. Try “Flagey God” and you’ll see why. This club-influenced rock track does a lot of interesting things and has as much of an earworm for a hook as you’ll ever find.

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Let’s Start Here. / CHAOS NOW*

21 Feb

Lil Yachty – Let’s Start Here.

You have to start with Let’s Start Here. being a psychedelic rock album by an Atlanta rapper. There are albums where the means of production are key. Let’s Start Here. would be a much less remarkable album were it not made by Lil Yachty.

A lot of the album is pretty forgettable psychedelic rock. The frustrating thing with this album is that psychedelic rock is so close to Soundcloud rap. They both love soundscapes and they even use similar ones, they just get there from very different places. There could have been a quite interesting album that fused the two better.

Let’s Start Here. sometimes even finds that space. “IVE OFFICIALLY LOST ViSiON!!!!” has some trap vocalizations and some interesting hit-and-runs in the soundscape and is a very impressive track overall. “the BLACK seminole.” emphasizes blackness to good effect and starts the album the right way. “the ride-” works well with a falsetto that could have come from any psych-rock band you could name, but then transitions very nicely into Soundcloud yelps.

However, the majority of the album is just a substandard, uninteresting rock album. “THE zone~” is as boring as rock ever gets and “:(failure):” is, possibly unsurprisingly, the same. There’s even a Bob Ross clipping to really cap off the lack of imagination. He also drops in some more funky songs like “running out of time” and is even less fun there.

Even in the boring parts, this album is something of an intervention and there are pieces that show what this album could have been. The simple fact that it exists is the most interesting part of the whole project, but it finds enough fragments to be at least a little more than just that.

Jean Dawson – CHAOS NOW*

When I was a kid, I would watch VH1 after school and I got fed a lot of 00s alternative rock as a result. I loved it then but when I look back, it’s hard to get away from the fact that a lot of it was garbage. It was a cultural wasteland and there’s not much more to say about it. Jean Dawson tries to take the pieces of it and make something interesting out of them in CHAOS NOW* and succeeds, albeit sporadically.

“THREE HEADS*” has a strong energy to it and punches hard. His changes of pace do well and he keeps a good intensity throughout. “SICK OF IT*” does 00s alt-rock better than any of them ever did and is what it should have been. “0-HEROES” is the song that Blink-182 wishes they made. Unfortunately, even that doesn’t make for a very good song. It just spends too long playing with uninteresting sounds. Sadly, the same is true for “GLORY*”, which sticks too close to the Blink-182 it draws from, even if it has the wonderful line “My mom thinks I keep a gun tucked / Yes ma’am.” There are glimpses of a better song in there, but only ever glimpses.

CHAOS NOW* isn’t as consistent as one would like and so not quite as groundbreaking as one could hope, but it’s always fun to see someone make something of my misspent youth.

Top Five’s Picks of the Albums

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/16JYGCeftP3Sxdh5Fwcndi?utm_source=generator

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Ice Spice – Like..?

4 Feb

Neeharika just put up her list of the most anticipated albums of 2023, but I already got mine with Ice Spice’s debut. “Munch (Feelin’ U)” was comfortably my favorite song of 2022 and “Bikini Bottom” wasn’t far behind. Her boastful, playful, sexy drill is the most exciting thing in music right now. It’s a little disappointing then that the rest of the EP doesn’t quite live up to the singles.

Firstly, both “Munch” and “Bikini Bottom” are as magnificent as ever. She drops incredible punchlines with tremendous confidence. That whole chorus from “Munch” is infinitely quotable and “Ayo, baddie, what it do? / Ayo, Maddie, what it do?” from “Bikini Bottom” always draws a laugh. When she says “Flow the nicest, but I’m rude” it’s just true. She has solved the question of how to do drill.

Unfortunately, the rest of the album is not close to the same quality. Save for a guest verse by Lil TJay, it’s never actually weak and she brings an interesting deepness to “Gangsta Boo” and “Actin’ a Smoochie.” It reminds me a lot of Pop Smoke. I don’t think it’s her at her best, but it’s an experiment that I really appreciate. She also has bars like “No, you cannot have your boo back (Huh) / If I’m shootin’ my shoot, he gon’ shoot back (Grrah)” in “Smoochie” and “I’m think ’cause I be eatin’ oats” in “Princess Diana,” strong lines that her delivery makes unforgettable.

All told though, the EP really doesn’t do much to expand beyond what her glorious singles already put down. Those are strong enough to carry the EP by themselves, but it would have been very nice if there was something more here.

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