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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone’s favorite digital multi-media band has been teasing their new album Cracker Island since last year, with the release of the eponymous title track that quite caught our fancy. They followed that up with the wonderful “New Gold” featuring Tame Impala, and last month’s classic-Gorillaz, mellow track Baby Queen. As with all Gorillaz albums, Cracker Island is shrouded in a mysterious backstory – this one seeming to involve a cult headed by the band’s “bassist” Murdoc Niccals. Although we would have also been happy with Song Machine Vol. 2, we’re certainly joining in on the anticipation for the full-length Cracker Island, set to release on February 24th.
Jessie Ware – TBA
English singer Jessie Ware’s delectable disco outing What’s Your Pleasure was much-loved in 2020, and she followed it up with the pulsating “Free Yourself” in July of last year. Word on the street is that “Free Yourself” marks the beginning of a new era ahead of her fifth studio album – we can’t wait.
Cardi B – TBA
Yes, we put Cardi on the list last year too. But this time, we have definitive news – Cardi mentioned on the popular radio show The Breakfast Club last month that she pretty much has no choice but to release the album this year.
Dua Lipa – TBA
After the worldwide critical and commercial success of her Future Nostalgia album in March 2020 (what a time that was…), Dua apparently hasn’t taken much time off. Joe Kentish, head of A&R for Dua’s label Warner Records, mentioned way back in 2021 that she was “talking about album No.3 when we barely had No.2 done” – hopefully we’ll see the fruits of that soon.
Rihanna – TBA
Rihanna gave birth less than a year ago, but she’s not letting that stop her. She’s back in the news over the past few months – first and foremost, as the Super Bowl half-time show performer in February. She also released a new song (“Lift Me Up”) after many years, on the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack – narrowly missing out on a Golden Globe award for it too. Here’s hoping she can ride the momentum to the finish line for her 9th album.
Other notable mentions
Lana Del Rey is set to release her new album entitled Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd on March 24th. She released the album’s gauzy, dreamy title track last month – check it out.
Miley Cyrus announced the release of her 8th studio album Endless Summer Vacation, apparently an ode to the city of Los Angeles and its year-round balmy weather. The album is set to drop on March 10th, and new track “Flowers” has just been released as the first single.
Sam Smith’s new album Gloria released on January 27th, and he’s already scored the hit song “Unholy” (featuring German singer Kim Petras) ahead of the album drop.
Top Five Records 