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Sufjan Stevens – Javelin

23 Oct

“Shit Talk” is a magnificent song. A single song can absolutely make an album and “Shit Talk” is Sufjan’s best song yet. Crafting a song delicate and intricate enough to carry the emotion running through the song is virtuostic. The song ripples through and around the central contradiction fluidly as the line “I will always love you / but I cannot look at you” melds into the chorus of “I will always love you” and as “No more fighting” morphs to “Hold me closely / hold me tightly, lest I fall” morphs to “I don’t wanna fight at all.” It’s a song more charged by the unfortunate circumstances of Sufjan’s recent life, but would be a masterpiece no matter the context.

The rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to this standard. It opens with “Goodbye Evergreen” and “A Running Start,” both of which are reasonably tuneful but less interesting than I would like and then it ends with “There’s A World” which is again a solid melody but too Simon & Garfunkel for a Sufjan album. I do quite like “Genuflecting Ghost” and “My Red Little Fox” though and “Everything That Rises” is good folk-rock by way of Radiohead.

There is some inconsistency but Javelin ranges from good to some of the best music you will hear this year and you can’t miss that.

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Drake – For All The Dogs

11 Oct

I actually really like this album. In many ways, this is a low for Drake. His strength has never been his albums. He’s a man of moments, not of album-sized statements. This is the first time that there hasn’t even been a single to attach to. However, this is the easiest of his albums to just listen to. He’s had higher highs in all of his other albums but he has also had lower lows.

Honestly, I approach this album as background music. This is the rap equivalent of smooth jazz to me. Even the provocations that he puts in here – the shots at Rihanna, at Esparanza Spalding, the J. Cole feature – don’t really register as something worth thinking about. This is now all such well-trod ground. His talk about women is all stuff we’ve heard from him before. The 21 Savage feature is the same 21 Savage sound we’ve heard before. The Bad Bunny one is the same.

There are a couple of things that I do want to highlight. I really like “7969 Santa.” The production is so open and the song has so much space in it and the “I Don’t Like” sample is quite good. I also want to shout out the chorus of “Rich Baby Daddy” which finally brought out a little energy in Drake.

However, these are mostly just far too many songs that provide really easy-to-find grooves. One of the defenses of bloat is that you can build your own 10-track playlist from the raw materials it provides you, but honestly if I do that with Drake, none of these songs will make it. I’m never going to play this album or any track from it again. This is the least interesting Drake has ever been and somehow the most listenable album he’s ever made.

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Olivia Rodrigo – GUTS

4 Oct

Olivia Rodrigo is very young and there’s nothing that’ll make you feel old quicker than a young popstar. Much of the best music is about bad decisions. “bad idea right?” manages to fall on the right side of making it sound fun. Even better is the soft vocalizing going into grunge. She moves into punk rock with this album and it suits her well. The rock is particularly good in the highlight of the album “ballad of a homeschooled girl.” She hits the chorus perfectly and the stripped-down storytelling is excellent. This is great lo-fi rock and shows her to her best.

“get him back” leans even harder into the mistakes of youth and ends up unconvincing. The rock is fun and the double meaning is cute, but there could have been a fun tension between the two halves of the song and instead it’s just cliche. This tendency towards easy-to-consume narratives regularly brings the album down. “all-american bitch” gestures to Didion (even if the essay has something very different to say), but there’s an honesty in Didion that you don’t see here. SOUR was a sharper, more pointed album and one that had a central motivation that gave Rodrigo a way to be honest. GUTS misses that and so leans hard on tropes instead.

I do really like the move to rock and to punk though. The ballads here like “teenage dream” and “making the bed” do nothing for me, but when she rocks out, she has fun and energy and it’s a great look for her. She’s big enough now to be able to take some risks as she fully defines herself and this was one that paid off magnificently.

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Addison Rae – AR

24 Sep

5 songs on one EP, 2 great, 2 good and 1 okay. “Obsessed” has a wonderful egotism that, along with a slight hitch, makes the chorus an instant earworm. “2 die 4” works well with Charli and songs benefit from truly excellent, truly conceited pop conceits.

“i got it bad” and “it could’ve been you” are both solid pop bangers. “Nothing On (But the Radio)” is a little better than the Gaga original, but still lacking in ideas. I’d rather not have lost two and a half of a twelve minute EP to something so uninspired, but I guess a good cover might at least bring some people in.

Short, sparkling and a little flawed, AR comes in, iridescent as a bubble and pops. This is the kind of moment of time that we listen to pop for. I just wish that music video was better.

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NewJeans – Get Up

12 Sep

This is the sunniest pop that I’ve heard in quite a while. NewJeans are the most unrepentantly fun pop group out there. They’re making bright music and they bring visuals to boot. You cannot skip the videos if you’re checking out this band, they’re an essential part of the experience.

The singles are what make the EP. They’re the best of the songs and they’re immaculately choreographed. The off-cuts are quite forgettable, but Lisbon has never looked so summery as in “Super Shy” and that dance move with the iPhone in “ETA” gets me every time. Even visual-free, this would be immaculate pop, but when you take them at their whole, they are spectacular.

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The Dare – The Sex EP

3 Sep

“Girls” is an incredible song. It’s right there in the sweet spot of smart and dumb and infectious as all get-out. Every single line in this track is all of these at once and horny as hell. This is “Short Skirt / Long Jacket” for the current moment and a much better song in every way. It’s funny, it’s great club music and it’s infinitely quotable. This is the rare song that knows what it wants to be and does it perfectly.

Unfortunately, the rest of the album is more grating than otherwise. “Sex” is almost a real song but ends up short and the rest aren’t even that. Spend your time with “Girls” instead.

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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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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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