My Method Actor is a consistently solid album that desperately needs something more. I don’t think there’s a single song here that doesn’t hold up to a fairly high standard. Everything here is good music to a fault and that fault is monotony.
She’s got a good groove in “Call It Love” for instance. She has a stellar voice that she doesn’t overuse and it’s very easy to let the song carry you. The same can be said of the gentleness of “Faith’s Late” or the excellent fuzz of “Like I Say” and “Method Actor” but they all fade very easily into the background. My Method Actor ends up very competent and very listenable but unfortunately also very forgettable.
Sabrina Carpenter has charisma that can only be measured in gigawatts. You expect a pop star to be likable, Carpenter is exceptional. There are few flaws that such tremendous personality cannot paper over and Short n’ Sweet does nothing to really test that.
I didn’t like “Espresso” the first time I heard it. It’s not the most interesting pop nor is it the most well done. It’s a decent KPop song done by a white singer, but the current crop of KPop is exceptional and it’s hard to put “Espresso” best to “Super Shy” and not have it suffer.
It’s just so easy to like Sabrina though. She always looks like she’s having fun. She plays very well with the camera. I really enjoy the “Death Becomes Her”-styled video for the quite fun “Taste”.
The music does let her down a bit though. She tries a lot of things and does none of them well. “Bad Chem” also tries KPop but doesn’t even manage the standard of “Espresso.” “Good Graces” takes from some of the better Grimes, “Dumb and Poetic” is a bad Taylor song, “Slim Pickins” is weak country and “Nonsense” is a weak Ari song and a terrible rap showcase.
Sabrina Carpenter clearly has the DNA for superstardom and is always worth watching. Her music needs to catch up with her though and until she picks a lane, it’s hard to see how it will.
We’re getting more Heems exposure than anyone could have expected. It’s not too surprising that it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
He has some fascinating pieces in this album. Trying NY Drill in “RAKHI” is great. The old school NY rap in “DAME” is fun. That could be a Biggie beat. “MANTO” doesn’t have the best flow but Vijay Iyer is top notch in it and the jazz and rap intermingling is excellent.
However, the interludes are terrible. The rolodex stunting is gauche. “RIGHTEOUS” cannot end fast enough. His Juhi Chawla bit is terrible. Firstly, it’s over-explained for a white audience. Secondly, it’s absolutely baby’s first Bollywood movie. Put it together and it’s painfully shallow.
When an album’s music is largely forgettable, the bits that stand out need to sparkle. There are some songs well worth the listen but there’s too much that grates as well.
Ice Spice appears to be on the way down and Y2K! is not going to change that, even if it is a better album than the moment. It’s just that she doesn’t seem to have enough interest in wanting to stay at the top. The second move is the hardest one, the one that proves that you have legs beyond being a momentary sensation and Ice Spice had clips of her looking bored while twerking and ads at her concert as the run-up. Y2K! is not the album to overcome that.
There’s some stuff here that I really like. “Gimme A Light” has her working well in her comfort zone. Ice Spice was a revelation when she came out. We all feared that New York drill’s crossover moment had died with Pop Smoke and Ice Spice delivering the breakout while evolving the form was huge.
She brings in a couple of interesting evolutions over the album. There’s great storytelling in “Plenty Sun” which is a nice development for her. Even more interesting is “Did It First” where she takes the role that I would expect to see from someone like PinkPantheress even to the extent of a Central Cee feature.
There’s not that much of interest here though and that’s made worse by her softening her music in what may be a misguided pop turn. Her voice just felt deeper in “Munch” and her beats were more submerged. It’s all toned down now and that loses the best part of her music.
Y2K! is not a great album but it’s not a bad one either. It’s just that at this point in her career, Ice Spice needed something more than ambivalence.
It feels like one of the big questions of the past few years is how can a rapper age? 3k decided to make a flute album rather than “rap about colonoscopies” and Em continued to fail at any kind of growth. Lupe just seems to have relaxed.
The complaint with Lupe was always that he had great flow but horrible beats. Samurai suits him though. These are airy, jazzy beats and he works well with them. They give him plenty of space to stretch out on his rapping and are never less than pleasant. That’s really all that I’ve ever asked for with his beats; that they don’t distract from his flows.
The flows are still great. His rapping isn’t going to turn heads the way it did in his prime and he doesn’t really have any of the storytelling her that marked his best work but he’s still a pleasure to listen to. Lupe’s old. He doesn’t need to set the world on fire with a new album. He can just relax a bit, have some fun and give us something to spend a little time with.
Slim fooled me again. Over 20 years of substandard music should have taught me better but I fell for it again. “Houdini” was an exciting single and the idea of Em trying a concept album seemed like it might finally be the thing to get him to do something new. Instead, we have the same tired, pointless slop that Eminem has put out since his three classics, just slightly better.
“Houdini” just had him sounding energetic and revitalized. It mines a lot of nostalgia, but it sounds like he’s having fun and putting in effort for the first time in decades. It was the first single in a long time that crossed over from his core audience and deservedly so. Some of this even carries over to the album.
He opens the album with some of that same energy in “Renaissance.” “Brand New Dance” is fun in the way that classic fun Em songs were. There are pieces here that remind you of who Eminem was in his prime.
However, this is a lot of the Eminem problem. I would rather just listen to his old music than his current stuff. He hasn’t added anything of value to his discography in the entirety of The Death of Slim Shady and it has been a long time since the last time he did. With this album, he’s trying to evoke his great music without any of what made that music so great and while the illusion holds up for a song or two, it collapses quickly.
This is at its worst in “Temporary,” where he sings to Hailie about his imagined death. The thing is that Hailie is almost thirty now. She’s married. Audiotapes from her childhood aren’t going to change that. “Like Toy Soldiers” was almost 20 years ago. You can’t sell me on her as an innocent child anymore and trying to do so is dishonest.
He’s out of touch when he tries to recognize her as an adult too. Shilling her nepo-baby podcast on the album is embarrassing in a way that a young Em would have skewered. His references are equally out of touch. I don’t think about South Park anymore. I don’t think about Caitlyn Jenner. I didn’t even think about Christopher Reeves in the year 2000.
This is why the cancel culture conceit doesn’t work. He’s not relevant enough for anyone to care enough to cancel him anymore and he’s not plugged in enough for this album to make waves. His transphobia and whining aren’t transgressive, they’re just tired. I see too much of it and too much that’s much more hateful than Em for this album to do anything. Famous children’s book authors say things more shocking everyday.
Also, notice that Mr. “I say what they don’t want you to hear” doesn’t have a word to say about Gaza through the whole album. Macklemore had a whole song on it. How am I supposed to take any of this seriously when Eminem isn’t even the most controversial white rapper?
When you see someone jump on this bandwagon, it’s almost always a grift and I wish that I could be surprised at Eminem falling like this, but he’s tried to sell NFTs when that was hot and it’s clear now that this is who he is.
The result is that where “Guilty Conscience 2” should have been a synthesis, it’s just exhausting. He’s unconvincing in both voices and it’s because he doesn’t believe in either one. He’s just trying to find a way back into the conversation.
This is an album that desperately needed a real single too. His classic albums had a lot of filler when revisited but the best songs there are still some of the best that rap has ever had to offer. He’s living off technical ability but he’s lost fluidity in his flow and that damages his rap as much as the soullessness. Go back to “Superman” and you can clearly see that he just can’t rap like that anymore.
He litigates his GOAT status frequently here. It’s the entire focus of his second single, “Tobey.” It’s one of the better songs in the album despite an abysmal chorus and another song where you see two guests have decent verses just for Em to show that he is in a different tier altogether.
The thing he misses with this talk though is that he only ever looks at rappers. He should have aimed higher, he should have wanted to be the greatest music artist of all time. He never found the second act that musicians need to sustain. Great musicians reinvent themselves every few years. Em is still taking shots at his mother in his fifties. It’s pretty clear that he’ll never manage anything more.
There is no one in music more consistently excellent than the Vijay Iyer Trio. Compassion is more of the frenetic, highly intelligent jazz they excel at. “Maelstrom,” for instance, lives up to its name and throws you right in the middle of the swirl. These are three virtuosos at work as you can see in the incredible solos of “Tempest.” They’ll take a straightforward base like in “Arch” and layer so much on top of it that the return to the origin is breathtaking. This is spectacular jazz through and through and unmissable for any fan of the music.
There has always been a contradiction at the core of Charli and at the core of why we love her; she has always wanted to be both a pop megastar and indie cool. Traditionally, she has resolved that by alternating albums – one for the masses and one for herself. brat has broken that mold, but not through the compromise you would expect, but instead by being her best music yet from either perspective.
The pop here is otherworldly. The beat of “B2b” is busted. Her ear for music is freer than it has ever been and these songs are absolutely bursting at the seams with fishhooks to pull you somewhere new. The single “Von dutch” is propulsive and cinematic. The switch in “365” blew me away and her reworking of the opener “360” into something new for the closer is fun, not just for the device, but for how it gives us two classic pop songs.
She’s got good variety and good pace changes song-to-song as well. Flipping the slower, more FKA “everything is romantic” to the peppier “Rewind” works well and the whiplash of moving from motherhood in “I think about it all the time” to the cocaine of “365” is an excellent jolt.
brat has Charli committing much more to storytelling than before. The metagame of pop is parasocial at the moment and Charli has never been so open as she is here. The honesty is devastating in “So I,” her song for her long time collaborator SOPHIE who died in 2021.
“Girl, so confusing” might have Lorde references meant for internet detectives but the introspection grounds the album as a whole and it’s compelling to hear her go through her vulnerabilities. It’s also just absurdly good pop. Similarly, “I think about it all the time” does a lot to feed the fanbase but it’s also very clever music and I love the shifting of the word baby. Some of the lyrics really hit even if I feel that we all deserve better than someone from The 1975 though. She’s a little out of her element in the storytelling of “Mean girls” but everything is forgiven of truly great pop.
She also makes the pop star positioning into explicit text throughout the album, especially in the overwrought video for “360.” The song has some great pop rap from her though and some True Romance fragments that I loved to see.
Seeing her in this and in “Von dutch” really bring home just how far Charli has come though. She has dramatically matured from the time of “SuperLove” or even “Boom Clap” and yet brat is not about Charli bending herself to fit the world, as so many of her weaker ventures seemed to be. This is instead the moment where the world has finally begun to catch up with Charli.
For an indie band, Vampire Weekend have been phenomenally successful critically and commercially over their 15-year career. Their excellent debut album Vampire Weekend (2008) offered a mix of prep-school vibes (the band formed at Columbia University), Afro pop, and classical instruments – a sound that was worldly yet elitist. Without letting go of their core ethos, they went on to win not one but two Grammys, for their third album Modern Vampires of the City (2013) and fourth album Father of the Bride (2019), with the latter even being nominated for Album of the Year.
Much of the success of the prior albums has derived from the chemistry between Ezra Koenig, the band’s telegenic, bright frontman, and Rostam Batmanglij, a multi-hyphenate multi-instrumentalist that provided a lot of the band’s eclectic influences. Although Batmanglij left the band after Modern Vampires to launch the electro-funk band Discovery, he was still around to assist with the production and creation of Father of the Bride. The band’s fifth album, Only God Was Above Us, is the first to be created and recorded by the remaining threesome – Koenig, bassist Chris Baio and drummer Chris Tomson – and it was unclear whether the direction of the new music would suffer from one-half of the band’s erstwhile magic spark being out of the picture.
Happily, though, Only God Was Above Us is some of Vampire Weekend’s best work since their debut album – and indeed, strongly reminded the author of that album. “Classical” would fit perfectly on the 2008 record, interspersing the band’s trademark indie-pop sound with chamber music-esque riffs. Although the lyrics are characteristically a tad oblique, Koenig’s “How the cruel, with time, becomes classical” makes one think of the song as a commentary on the famous Churchill quote “History is written by the victors”. And that’s classic Vampire Weekend for you – deceptively high-brow without being too pretentious. “Connect” begins with a twinkling piano and an asymmetric drum beat that will be familiar to long-time listeners of “Mansard Roof”. “Ice Cream Piano”, the album opener, starts off with fuzzy guitars and slow-paced intonations from Koenig, but speeds up into a lively indie-pop track backed by violins and string bass.
Beyond callbacks to their own earlier music, there’s plenty of new ideas on here. Most of the band members are on the cusp of their 40s, and the gentle “Capricorn” refers to these milestones with lines like “Too old for dyin’ young / too young to live alone”. “Gen-X Cops” takes a leaf out of fellow New Yorkers The Voidz with its frenetic opening riff, although the middle sections are all trademark Vampire Weekend. “Hope”, the album closer, is a meandering 8-minute track (to put into perspective, that’s about a sixth of the album’s entire runtime) about forgiveness, growing up, and just rising above it all. It’s very different and very good.
The other songs on here are all decent in their own way. There are some interesting bits with the slow beats and echoing piano on “The Surfer” – the only collaboration on this album with ex-member Batmanglij – and there’s a lovely, alluring lightness to “Pravda”. This writer didn’t care much for the final single “Mary Boone” or for “Prep-School Gangsters, but they could be songs that blossom with time and repeated listens.
Apart from Koenig and Batmanglij, another keystone of the band has been their collaboration with Ariel Rechtshaid, who came in for Modern Vampires (the first two albums being produced by Batmanglij himself) and has produced all their albums since then. The partnership has clearly worked, gaining the band not just the two Grammys but also a wider, more diverse audience beyond the collegiate set from the initial years. As a side note, Rechtshaid was dating Danielle Haim from the band Haim during the Father of the Bride era, which directly led to her presence throughout that album including on the duet between her and Koenig on “Hold You Now”.
As another side note, Vampire Weekend debuted most of the songs from their new album on April 8th in Austin, Texas, three days after the album was released. Not only did the concert fall on Koenig’s 40th birthday – an interesting coincidence given the references to middle-age on this album – it was timed to the North American total solar eclipse. This writer was, fortunately, at that concert and can ascertain that it was a truly magical, otherworldly experience: one that truly brought meaning to the phrase “only God was above us”.
All in all, Only God Was Above Us is some of Vampire Weekend’s most self-assured, unique work since their first album. Also, in an era where big-name artists refuse to self-edit and insist on dumping all their ideas on listeners (looking at you, Beyonce and Taylor Swift), Vampire Weekend’s tightness is commendable. Although there are a couple of so-so tracks on here, Only God Was Above Us is a strong, tight and cohesive album, with each of the ten songs fitting well across the 47-minute run time.
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