Most Convincing Historical Re-creation
Father John Misty — God’s Favorite Customer. For once this guy served me an onion that doesn’t make me want to cry when I slice it. Of course he did it by abandoning the pretense that he’s a Randy Newman acolyte and mimicking Elton John instead. Elton, great as he is, we can do; Randy is inimitable. FJM is such a skilled singer that he really does approach the soapy, soupy, soppy quality of early ’70s records like Madman Over The Water. The lyrics are still too dumb to justify their pomposity, but at least for once, he’s being historically accurate: Bernie Taupin was pompous and dumb, too.
2018 Album That Wore Out Most Quickly
Tinashe’s Joyride. The latest from this still-young and talented artist is, like everything she’s done, a mixed bag: some Beyonce-ish piano balladry, some of that smoke-ring R&B she’s made her name with, some boilerplate sex-me-now pop that could have been singer-songwritten by any old chanteuse, and expensive guest verses from various Migos and their ilk, all of whom proceed with absolute indifference to the subject matter and emotional tenor of the songs. We’ve been here before with Tinashe: this ringmaster cannot control the circus held in her own name. Her mixtapes, uneven though they are, had sonic consistency to them because she produced them herself; Aquarius, her prior studio album, was as bumpy a ride as this is, but it had a couple of hits on it. This doesn’t. This’ll be the fourth time I write that Tinashe has everything you need to be a big star, which is about three times too many. It pleases me that she proceeds with an ingenue’s indifference to the politics of the biz, but in pop, you can only get away with that for so long. This was probably her shot, and her big-money backers aren’t going to be pleased with the outcome. Like another major-label misfit once found out, if you do not want what you haven’t got, it’s a sure thing you won’t be getting what you do not have. Capitalism: built to reward the hungry.
2018 Album You Listened To The Most
Isolation
Thing You Don’t Know, But You Know You Should
Quelle Chris & Jean Grae
Thing You Feel Cheapest About Liking
K.T.S.E. Well, what do you know: the most complete statement out of Camp Kanye this Yeezy season turned out to be the afterthought. Some of his productions for Teyana Taylor are redolent of the “old Kanye” in that they do recall the era when he’d just speed up a soul sample and pinch some tinny drums from a MIDI bank and call it a completed work. But Taylor is such a miracle of a singer that it hardly matters, just like it’s never an issue that her lyrics are so stupid that she actually manages to make a three-way sound unappetizing. I didn’t think that was possible. “Hurry Hurry” is barely even a song: it’s just some sex groaning and a guitar loop that Otis Redding left on the dock of the bay overnight. But goddamn does it work. The theme of the song, just like the theme of all her songs, is that she is horny as hell and needs some genital stimulation ASAP. You can really see how this would appeal to Kanye. Where did he scrounge her up? Some reality show? This is what they promised me Ella Mai would be: an R&B sorcerer who squeezes the soul out of every syllable and never takes a moment off. It’s like Lauryn Hill after several icepick lobotomies. Also, I may not be the gayest fish in the tank, but if I was at a disco in Fire Island Pines and “WTP” came on, you’d best believe I’d vogue. Don’t sic Mike Pence on me, people. Allow Ms. Taylor to sing the blues.
Crummy Album You Listened To A Lot Of Anyway
JB Dunckel’s H+. Air without Nicolas Godin’s bass lines?, That’s like jelly without peanut butter, like Becker without Fagen, like schools without teachers, like Kathy Lee without Regis, like Rasheed without Tonya Tamika. Like Paris without Texas. Dunckel’s moody music stays on brand, and his solo disc does indeed contain the lovably yawnsley themes of transhumanity we’ve come to expect from him, including a song called “Transhumanity” (chorus: “transhumanity/transhumanity”.) But if you’ve got a hankering for some Moon Safari action, Mildlife is the better move.
Album That Felt Most Like An Obligation To Get Through
In The Rainbow Rain. A field of vision that was once wide enough to encompass both the My Lai Massacre and blue balls narrowed to the size of indie rock, and then to the size of his band van, and finally to the size of Will Sheff’s noggin. That’s not a problem, intrinsically: even if it does get stuffy in there, he makes up for it with “mystic” music that borrows from Van Morrison’s undersung ’80s albums. But never again are we getting “The President’s Dead” from this guy. Instead, we have the hallucinatory Will, probably for good. Honestly, I think he still has PTSD from the popular and critical reception of Silver Gymnasium, and he’s drowning his sorrows in magic mushrooms, etc. Either that, or Jonathan Meiburg has him Monarch-programmed.
Album That Sounded Like It Was The Most Fun To Make
When Rayland Baxter’s Wide Awake has been discussed at all, which it rarely has, it’s been called Beatlesque. Kiss of death, I know. You do have to give Rayland his props: he’s got his McCartney imitation down pat, especially his read on “Seventy-Nine Shiny Revolvers” (note last word). He’s even busted out the Hofner bass and achieved that Ringo backslap on the snare. In practice, though, Wide Awake is more like what The Shins would be if they were produced by Butch Walker: reverb rolled away, copious overdubs, emphasis on clarity, a piano player who definitely ate all his vegetaboools, etcetera. James Mercer is a better lyricist than Baxter is, and Butch’s, er… muscular treatment on the boards doesn’t leave the principal any room to hide. But Rayland is confident that his melodies are so strong and his hooks are so shiny that you won’t even notice the words, and for ten tracks and forty minutes he stands in the spotlight and gives it to you straight. Is his swag justified? Well. My guess is that if you didn’t mind the Webb Brothers yanking you back to the sixties with every onanistic move they made, you won’t be too mad at Rayland Baxter for chasing his ’60s daydreams, either. He really put the effort in; him, and Butch, too. This sounds great, if we can agree that by “great” we mean something that would have excited the groupies in the green room at Apple Studios. If you’re going to make a classic rock record in 2018, you may as well shoot the works. Go on, fulfill your Sgt. Pepper fantasies. I only wish Scott Miller was around to appreciate this.
Album That Sounded Like A Chore To Make
Lykke Li’s So Sad So Sexy. This might be the seven mary three of the synthpop revival: the moment where we recognize that we’ve simultaneously gone too far and too formulaic, and we must recognize that musical culture will shift and the party will soon be over. Scandinavian music is usually grueling — what with the monthlong nights and the rain and the freezing temperatures — but this manages to be utterly listless, too. If you’re going to tie the listener to the back of the van and drag him through the mud, the least you can do is step on the accelerator from time to time. Why prolong the agony, you lachrymose Swede? I can’t believe Jeff Bhasker was involved in this one; Rostam, too. They keep this up and they’re going to get booted out of the Illuminati.
Man, I Wish I Knew What This Album Was About
Fenfo. Six or so years ago, Fatoumata Diawara, Malian singer-songwriter, put out an amazing album called Fatou that even you xenophobes ought to appreciate. It was like a desert breeze through the souk, he wrote, cheesily, even though he’d never been to a souk, or, for that matter, a desert. Regardless, I recognize West African magic when I hear it, and if we’re going to sit around praising the likes of Paul Simon and Ezra Koenig, the very least we can do is give their robbery victims a few spins. Anyway, Fenfo isn’t nearly as good as Fatou, so my recommendation to you Doctor Livingstones is that you start with the old one and turn to the new joint if you get desert-thirsty for some more.
Most Consistent Album
Astroworld. Look, Future had to take a breather sometime. If you’re banging your knife and fork on the table, hungry for more of that steaming southern mush, Travis has you covered. Some of this is like latter period Kanye productions minus the classical cohesion. Some of it is just industrial byproduct. The wrinkle here is that he switches up the beat midway through the tracks, but unless you’re sitting there with the running order in front of you, you’ll never notice. It’s just a long float on a beautiful, sluggish bayou. Occasionally, landmarks are discernible. Is that the Weeknd or a rippling reflection off the brackish water? Is that a lump of swamp moss, or is it Drake?
Most Inconsistent Album
For all its faults — and just now I can’t remember what they were — Views never dragged. More Life, on the other hand, bogged down midway through the tracklisting with detours into Ja-fakin’ B.S. and various dreary guest shots from the bakalakarakalaka British rappers you didn’t want to hear. Scorpion cuts out the ethnopiracy and most of the features, too, so when the engine stalls — and stall it does — Aubrey has nobody to blame but himself. As this is a Drake set, there’s some magnificent music scattered about, but the connective tissue continues to weaken. He’ll make you scrounge for it. The principal’s disposition is as sour as ever, and this we’ve come to expect. But this is the first drake album that adds no new dimensions to his paranoia. There’s a lotta bad things they be wishing on him; that’s about it. I wonder what his momma is going to say on his answering machine this time around. Give him this: he still speaks about social media and Instagram culture with authority that no pundit or thinkpiece-writer ever comes close to matching. He’s fully attuned to the tragedy of the moment. Maybe that’s what makes him so damn grouchy. He needs a computer time-out he knows is no longer an available option for him. And not just for him.
Album That Turned Out To Be A Whole Lot Better Than You Initially Thought It Was
Be The Cowboy
Album That Was The Most Fun To Listen To
Camila. I could go for more “esta cosa se prendio” and less “she loves control/she wants it her way”. (“All the things I want to do to you is infinite”, on the other hand, suits me fine.) But why quibble with this state-of-the-art pop star, fresh off the Cuban sandwich press? Hers is not the Latin pop album of my crossover dreams; hell, it isn’t even Gloria Estefan doing the conga. But the tropical breezes blowing through these grooves are brisker than a cursory listen might indicate. Even “Never Be The Same”, the mainstream blockbuster, opens with a barrage of bongo drums. Probably digital, much like the arrivals board at San Juan airport. Camila Cabello claims Taylor Swift as her big influence, and sometimes I even hear it. But most of the time, her music plays like Carly Rae plus strategically placed habaneros. Bite carefully. So open and curious is this cupcake that when she asks who I am in the dark, I don’t even hear the double entendre. And when she says she’s looking for some real friends, I honestly truly madly believe her.
Least Believable Perspective Over An Album
Boy howdy, things are getting slack around Chez Meloy. The last album felt like a showcase for the instrumentalists; this one doesn’t even have that. The ballyhooed move toward ’80s synthpop extends to, oh, about three and a half songs, and Jenny Conlee’s earnest imitation of New Order does not adequately compensate for the sudden lack of chord changes or interesting melodies. They do remain in step with the times, though. “Everything Is Awful” is not a good song, but no lyric suits the mood of 2018 any better. Meloy sings repetitively about how bad things are, but he won’t provide any specifics, and instead pantomimes exhaustion. Even as the words are despondent, the tone is giddy. All are having a jolly good time. By stanza number two, you can already feel the righteous rebuke to the question the song begs: what’s so awful, exactly? Everything, you insensitive fool! Must I enumerate? Don’t you watch the Steven Colbert show? The President’s latest tweet was factually inaccurate and contained two grammatical errors. Awful! La la la la. I expect NPR to take it up as their theme song any day. if they haven’t already.
Most Sympathetic Or Likeable Perspective Over An Album
Insofar as most know about Port Arthur they know it from UGK. Insofar as most of those people know UGK, they know UGK from the world famous Jay-Z collaboration. Big pimpin’ down in P.A.T. and all of that. So I think that a wrong impression has been generated. This is not Bun B’s fault: he just wanted to put on for his city, and he’s done plenty since to let people know that the scale of the pimpin’ in the P.A.T. may have been exaggerated. Port Arthur is an open sore of a city, stuck up a fissure between Texas and Louisiana, irritated by the most caustic oil refinery in the country. The slav-, er, workers who sluice the petroleum through Port Arthur live in neighborhoods abutting the plant that are as house field field field field house as anyplace in Danny Brown’s Detroit – but while Detroit has a glorious history that hipsters itch to claim for themselves, P.A.T. is just a national gutter. One American society, dependent as it is on oil, could not do without, mind you. That contradiction has always been felt in UGK’s music: that’s why they could get away with rapping from the crackhead’s perspective in “Stoned Junkee” without worrying about getting hit with a backpacker tag. It was always going to be jail or legendary status for these guys. Pimp C drew the short straw and got jail. Bun is the legend – so much so that everybody in the south queued up to rhyme on Return Of The Trill. Some of them even do okay; Lil Wayne, in particular, makes himself right at home in the swamp. Mostly this is Bun’s show, and he sounds about as weatherbeaten as you’d expect a resident of a poor city that has been flattened by four historic hurricanes (Katrina, Rita, Ike, Harvey) to sound. Of course this album runs on way too long, and the Ja-fakin number and the Run The Jewels guest appearance should probably have been excised. But Big K.R.I.T.’s reverent production does give this set some semblance of unity, even if it’s a little creepy when K.R.I.T. does his Pimp C imitation. (Cut that out.) Bun remains an underrated storyteller – one whose lived experience gives him the authority to inhabit characters that other emcees wouldn’t touch. For instance, there’s one here where he plays both the dude in the car late at night with the blunt and the policeman forced by circumstances to pull him over and investigate. He lets both voices be heard, and then he pulls the plug on the narrative. He won’t stoop to tell you how it ends. He knows you know how it ends.
Mighty Cut, Foul Out
David Byrne has probably put more herks and jerks and hiccups in the rock and roll canon than any other fella. Usually herks and jerks and hiccups get you a seat on the novelty bus next to Romeo Void. But Byrne had the Frantz-Weymouth rhythm section in his back pocket, so all the tics that made up his performances were just more fodder for the popcorn popper. A million years after True Stories, he’s still herking and jerking away – only neither Chris nor Tina nor Annie Clark are around to bail him out. This has been the story of his solo run, more or less. Rather than change his approach to accommodate 21st century human desires (not that he’d know anything about those), he’s stepped on the herk and jerk accelerator. The result is not the sort of album you’d expect to get out of a man in his mid-sixties, and American Utopia, in a way, inspiring: while most of his peers are wrapping up the circus tents, the klieg lights of the Byrne off-broadway theatre burn on. He’s still irritating; still squinting his eyes and jabbing his finger into your ribs and twisting it around, laughing his head off and making wry, whimsical comments. He’s your well-dressed uncle, a success in a line of work you’ve never heard of, greeting you at the door with a joy buzzer. He hasn’t given us a last will and testament album, and for that, I’ve got to thank him. He clearly believes he’s got miles to go and many tall tales to tell himself about dogs and monkeys and etc. He’s probably right. What god would have the audacity to interrupt such a peppy internal monologue?
Artist You Respect, But You Don’t Like
Kadhja Bonet. I admit to a certain fascination with Childqueen, given that it leads with its idiosyncrasies, it’s boldly (and somewhat disgustingly) anti-social, and there’s nothing out that sounds remotely like it. Over ten tracks, Bonet splits the difference between the Love Theme from Mahogany and the march of the Oompa Loompas. She’s taken the soundtracky bits that annoyed me on prior Janelle Monae albums, soaked them for awhile to bleed out the funk, and muted the backbeat to generate an oddly stationary feeling. It’s sort of like watching the overexposed frames of a wobbly film strip that keeps threatening to jump the frame. This doesn’t rock, it doesn’t soothe, you can’t dance to it, and good luck singing along. Too weird to be background music, too insular to be hallucinatory, and no fun in the slightest, Childqueen exists in a category unto itself. My understanding is that Kadhja Bonet, who is some sort of polymath, played all of this music herself, including the copious strings and woodwinds and fretless bass and warbling synthesizers. I suppose that’s impressive in a way, like one of those dudes on youtube who can juggle and recite the Declaration of Independence while his dick is in a blender. but next time around, she desperately, desperately needs to work with a real percussionist.
Best Line Or Rhyme
On “Tyrant”, Kali Uchis sings “Word on the street you got hoes/I disappear like El Chapo”. Gets me every time. Allow me explain why. She’s not just comparing herself to a Latin American badass. She’s also laying down her zero-tolerance policy. When she gets the word that her man is screwing around, no further discussion is necessary. She’s out of that jail cell before he knows what hits him: no traces left and no fucks given. In a year of welcome statements of female autonomy and self-respect, this was the most succinct, and, for me, the most satisfying.
Most In Need Of An Editor
Smino. Noir reminded me of Malibu by Anderson.Paak in that it’s hypermusical (good) and full of jazz chords (eh… sorta good) and remains focused until it catches an air current and drifts out of reach like a helium balloon. I absolutely get why Chance and Saba are down with this guy: he shares their Soulquarian proclivities. They’re Hippie Johnnies for the hip-hop era. But Chance knows how to structure a song, and how to weave those songs into an album, and how to leave the impress of his personality on everything he does. Saba is a born storyteller. With Smino, it’s all gentle and beautiful flows and gentle and beautiful accompaniment, spreading everywhere in a great undifferentiated mush of gentle and gooey beauty. Before you know it you’ve been staring at the lava lamp for an hour. I realize my experience of this set is meant to be, um, herbally enhanced. Slip me a few of those gummies and maybe I can get on this guy’s zonked wavelength. Or, you know, just throw on the Noname album instead.
Young Upstart Who Should Be Sent Down To The Minors For More Seasoning
Sunflower Bean. Here’s a rhetorical question for you: why are Fleetwood Mac imitators always inept? I don’t mean they’re bad at ripping off Fleetwood Mac; that they’re pretty brazen about. They steal with utter confidence and complete entitlement. I mean they’re bad at music. And that is the one thing you could never say about anyone in Fleetwood Mac. Zeppelin imitators?, they practice. Parliament imitators woodshed for years before they dare to get on a stage and do their copycat funk jams. Beatles imitators practice too much – their reverence gets in the way of their cribbing attempts, if you ask me. But Mac Copyists always sound like they picked up their instruments in a thrift shop a week before recording and learned to play from For Dummies books. There must be something about Fleetwood Mac that encourages duffers to think they can approximate the sound of Rumours without working very hard at it at all. And I think you know what that something is. {Whispers} There were girls in the band.
Hoary Old Bastard Who Should Spare Us All And Retire
Justin Timberlake
Indispensable Elder Who, Lord Willing, Will Never Hang Them Up
The great thing about sounding like a grouchy septuagenarian when you’re young is that when you actually become a grouchy septuagenarian, everybody is used to it already. If Graham Parker’s gripes didn’t piss you off in the late ’70s, no modern-day turn of the rusty crank of his is going to bother you very much. Thirty years ago I started calling this guy Grandpa Graham, and I wasn’t just making light of the irritability that suggested early-onset prostate issues. I was also acknowledging that I was his descendant — once I started writing songs, there was nobody out there whose compositional intentions and general disposition mirrored mine any better. Look at how excitably he jams un-singable words into his already overstuffed verses; I mean, this is fun for him. Check out how wistful he gets about Maida Hill — the place itself, not merely the romantic associations he has with it. How about the pure, irascible glee with which he sings “don’t be a scumbag!” Gotta love him, unless you don’t, and if you don’t, well, he probably doesn’t like you very much either. The new one is mellow, as a direction, but that really means he’s assembled a hotel-bar R&B combo with a horn section and a lighter touch than the Rumour ever had. There’s even a number about his preference for brushed drums, and it’s only partially a metaphor. So here we have an older dude playing music that would have been older dude’s music even when he was a younger dude. Howlin’ Wind, which this album evokes, was throwback music in 1976, so what do you call this? Also, do astringents lose their paint-peeling effectiveness when they’ve been stored in the basement too long? Pry open this dusty can of turpentine and find out.
Worst Song Of The Year, and Worst Rapping, Too
Kanye West, “I Thought About Killing You”.
And Furthermore…
A truth that seems to be eluding the music press: you can’t talk about Kanye + Trump without also discussing Jay-Z. The way I reckon, it’s the poisoned relationship with big brother Jay that’s driven Kanye’s political statements, such as they are, more than any other factor, though I’m sure the president’s misogyny appeals to him plenty. Remember (Mr. West sure does) that Obama called Kanye a jackass. Michelle Obama buddies around with Beyonce, who doesn’t like Kanye anymore, either. So if Jay-Z is going to make an album For Forty-Four, and if Jay and Beyonce are going to hit the trail, however half-heartedly, for Hillary Clinton, well, what’s bound to piss them off more than a big bear hug with the dickhead who humiliated their candidate? These days, Kanye is the man with the pal in the oval office, and Jay and Beyonce, members of the out-party, are stuck with, what?, true love or something? Note that when Kanye is pressed by interviewers to say what it is about Trump’s presidency that he likes, he’s flummoxed: he winds up spewing a whole lot of management-speak about “dragon energy” and creative disruption, and invariably it ends up morphing into a statement about the iconoclasm and nonconformity of Kanye West. Jay-Z and Beyonce, on the other hand, are much more responsible with the talking points, which, while less infuriating, is not exactly what we need out of pop musicians. By now their public politics have been firmly established, and they can speak upon black excellence/generational wealth/aspirational economics at least as well as the average pundit. Speak they do. As Kanye goes low, they keep going high, and higher and higher, until there’s no damn place in pop left to go. Which makes Everything Is Love feel more like a credits roll than a victory lap, to be honest, no matter how much blue-chip confidence the music radiates. Those expressing surprise at Beyonce’s flow, or sprechgesang, or whatever, must be inhabiting a different cultural universe than i do. I mean of course she can rap. She didn’t have to call herself Beeyzus, though. Gilding the lily like that is beneath her.
Worst Singing
I’m not exactly sure why Tracyanne felt she needed Danny, whose unctuous eardrum-murdering performance on “Jacqueline” gives me the willies just to think about it. But perhaps they’re buds, and perhaps she’s still disoriented from Carey Lander’s death. I know I am. You have to hand it to Danny: dude does not seem to mind getting murked on his own shit, as the rap fans used to put it. Then again, given the opportunity, who wouldn’t make a record with Tracyanne Campbell? She could show me up any time. She hasn’t been quite the same singer since “French Navy” and she’s never getting that Underachievers gleam back, but she remains the quintessential elfin indiepop frontwoman. Scotland in a box, like a tin of shortbread cookies from Walker’s.
Worst Instrumentalist
I like the 1975, but Adam Hann has the worst tone and worst instincts of any lead guitarist in pop, and that includes the dude you just heard playing “Eruption” at Sam Ash. That cat-mewling thing that he does?, that would have gotten him kicked out of ABC in 1985. Maybe Spandau Ballet would have found it acceptable, and maybe not.
Worst Lyrics
You heard “The Middle” way more times than you wanted to, I am sure, but I doubt you paid attention to the words. Believe it or not, the verses are a lament: apparently, the narrator has destroyed her house while trying to have sex. Anyway, that’s what I got out of it, and I’m sticking to it. She feels bad about it, but not for the right reasons. Then there’s a chorus that 1.) makes no sense, 2.) has nothing to do with the wreckage that Maren Morris has left while arguboning (badly, it seems). Tip for kids: if you cannot do sex without also doing property damage, there is probably a flaw in the code you’re using. Bring it up with your health teacher.
Worst Lyrics By A Good Lyricist Who Should Have Known Better
I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life. Sonos Audio pitchwoman and occasional pop star does record about her liberal guilt. That’s the headline, and if you can’t handle that, you’d best not proceed to the lede. There’s water in the water fountain, and she drank it, and now she feels bad about it. I am dumbfounded by her sincere conviction that I ought to care. Enjoy your licensing money, Garbus. Nobody begrudges you your big bankroll. Go buy some local artisanal fair trade shit. That blood-soaked dollar won’t rinse itself.
Most Unsexy Person In Pop
Post Malone
Most Overrated
I see that every blue-stater’s favorite cowgirl is swimming in her customary pool of positive notice for her xanaxy new album. Only this time, Kacey Musgraves has actually earned the praise, sort of: Golden Hour is recorded with a heaping helping of radiance and sung way better than anybody ever had reason to suspect she could sing. So: credit where it’s due. On the other hand, as she grows in confidence, her that lazy streak of hers becomes brighter and bolder, and I believe it’s become visible from space, cowboy; I mean, who’s going to tell her to rewrite that slack second verse? Perk up some of these $75 spa treatment melodies? Not these producers. They’re too busy screwing with vocoders and artfully muffling the banjos to care. And I think that what these non-country critics dabbling in country mean when they call this album coherent is that she’s found a sound and an approach that suits her laid-back, pot-hazy, sleepily democratic outlook. She’s against men on high horses and she’s for moms, and taking it sloooww, as if she’s got another gear. So what we have here is a rarity — a persuasive articulation of an inane worldview. There are many worse things, I guess. But we’re reminded again that the step down from Miranda Lambert to the rest of the field is a doozy. And if Taylor Swift is going to keep taking it on the chin for remaining apolitical, how the heck does Musgraves get away with this?
Most Underrated
After the straight-up U2 swipes on Black, how about some U2 swipes plus mandolin and quick-pickin’ banjo. The Mountain is bluegrass, Dierks Bentley style, just like Up On The Ridge was; Dierks seems to think that bluegrass is located at high elevations. I really don’t mean to complain: this may be Nashville machine music, but it’s absolutely earnest in its aspiration to be something more. And more than anything else, it’s that striving above station that gives Dierks the grace that distinguishes him among his peers. Given his unambivalent identification with the Duke boys, he could easily have been agglomerated into bro-country; instead, he’s made himself into a prime peddler of bro-related pathos. He’ll never do that any better than he did on Riser, with its aging playboy characters who’d failed to recognize that the party had stopped long before they’d finished their six-pack. Also, as this fucking cad matures, he slathers on the platitudes thicker and thicker. That the songs don’t quite suffocate under the blanket of warm pieties tells you something. It tells you he’s working, as he always does, from a sturdy compositional core. I recognize that when I hear it, and I remain a fan.
Most Thoroughly Botched Production Job
No doubt you recall how Ashley Monroe kicked off her solo career. She reminded us that she ain’t Dolly and her contemporaries ain’t Porter. Funny, then, that ever since, she has been retreating — and it has indeed been a retreat — into traditionalism. Not content with hauling Vince Gill out of mothballs, she’s actually cut the new one with historical recreation specialist Dave Cobb, the carpenter who has built those sturdy old barns full of sound for Sturgill Simpson et al. Since he’s a deep woods craftsman par excellence, he’s slathered the varnish all over the knotty pine; since he has absolutely no imagination (and since Monroe Suede is a girl) he’s decided to fit her with standard countrypolitan arrangements. Strings all over the place: they’re “nice”, all honeyed and shit. The problem is that she ain’t Patsy, either. She’s monroe suede, aka Hippie Annie — she’s got a pin-light beam of a voice, a delicate touch with the pen, and a good sense of humor, too. She wasn’t made to swim through syrup. Anyway, connoisseurs of Nashville pluck are digging this, I hear. They just love when a girl shows reverence for past models, as they themselves are past models. It makes them think that they have a snowball’s chance.
Neatest Reinvigoration
In the ’00s, Edan was a perennial contender for my Thing You Don’t Know, But You Know You Should category. Then he stopped doing music, and I admit I completely spaced on him. Apparently he made a beat or two for Homeboy Sandman, and that went so well that they put together an EP. Seven songs; it’s all the rage. Humble Pi is hardly shorter than the last Homeboy Sandman full-length: Veins, which was what?, twenty-five minutes?, got knocked for its production, which was to say that there wasn’t any. There were beats, there was a little synthesizer, there was Homeboy Sandman in a bad mood. It was… well, “unalloyed” is one word for it. And Homeboy Sandman is one of the few modern emcees who merits this treatment, and not just because he loves masticating his words and extracting their sugary flavor and blowing big greasy bubbles from them as if they were so much Bubble Yum. It’s also because of the variance of his vocal tonality. All spoken words carry a note plus overtones; Homeboy Sandman just makes that more obvious than other more percussive speakers. Edan, it turns out, does something not too dissimilar with the beats: his mode is broadly psychedelic with loads of ear candy and MPC hijinx, but the feel is abrasive and smart-assy like old-school hip-hop. The busy-ness of these production shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for a fan of, say, J Beez Wit Tha Remedy. As for homeboy sandman himself, he’s as ornery as ever, and his irritation at his lack of recognition runneth over. I prefer it when he directs his attacks at external targets, as he does on “Never Use The Internet Again”, which almost makes me believe he’s never going to use the Internet again. “Anything to get a fucking like/one day I decided I should get a fucking life”. The artlessness of the couplet amplifies the force of the message. Also, amen.
Worst Song On A Good Album
“Best Friend”, the last song on How To Solve Our Human Problems. Gives Danny a run for his money for Worst Singing, too.
Song That Would Drive You Craziest On Infinite Repeat
“Karl Malone” by Joey Purp. I got dope, I got blow, smoke, I got coke, I got blow, I got coke, I got molly man, I got smoke, I got tabs, I got coke, I got ahahhaaaagagahahaghh.
Song That Got Stuck In Your Head The Most This Year
Tierra Whack’s “Hungry Hippos”. “Open up and bite it” became my statement of purpose this autumn. It applies to so much. But at the level of the album’s plot, she’s talking about biting rhymes, style biting — she’s dealing with a man who lacks swag, and as a magnanimous sort, she’s going to allow him to cop some off of her. He likes her “diamonds and her pearls”, and by this, she means the art she’s making. She says “thank you, I designed it”, and she damn well did.
Good Artists Most In Need Of Some New Musical Ideas
I’m pretty sure “Graffiti” is about a school shooting. That’s why the characters are in the bathroom stall: they’re hiding out from a Dylan Klebold type. They’re writing “we were here” type stuff on the walls because they don’t think they’re getting out alive. Now they never will/ never will grow old because they’re about to meet a loon with an AR-15. Time to kill/time stood still, etc. Lest you think I am being too literal, corroborating evidence for my reading comes from the rest of Love Is Dead: Lauren Mayberry believes the bad guys won, and she’s determined to meet the challenge of widespread heartlessness with the sort of big-ass, repetitive choruses that have been her metier lately. I rather think it’s a better application of the thumping borderline-brotronica sound than it was on Every Open Eye, where the songs were about… what, exactly?, burying “it” and rising above? Don’t point the finger at Mayberry: she was all in with the protest music in 2018, and I’m pretty sure she’s realized exactly what she wanted to. No, if you have beef, it’s with Cook and Doherty, because what the fuck happened to those guys? The Bones Of What You Believe earned those Vince Clarke comparisons with some of the most creative synth arrangements ever waxed. To go from that to Greg Kurstin’s warmed-over bass drops is a long way to fall. Then again, Yaz only had enough ideas to fill an album and a third, too.
Running Out Of Gas
I like the song Adam Young wrote about his dad, really I do, at least as much as I like any latter-day Owl City. It’s corny, but it’s got the emotional specificity and uncool vulnerability that has always helped make this project go; see also the beautiful number about his sister on the Sky Sailing record. But too often on Cinematic, he’s made the X-tian filmed entertainment mistake of leading with the wholesomeness and filling in the details after the fact. Which leaves us with a version of humanity that does not intersect in any meaningful way with the one we’ve all got to experience on a day-to-day basis in 2019. It’s a strange, too-sunny diorama he’s asking us to inhabit: nothing moves, and there’s no reference to the real world outside the box of his increasingly constricted and formulaic imagination. So I guess Cinematic is a good name for this project, since Hollywood specializes in exactly that. The music has stubbornly refused to advance an inch since All Things Bright And Beautiful. The engine has stalled in the Minnesota snow — picturesque snow, sure, but cold all the same. As for Kenny Vasoli, I continue to find his Vacationer act the exemplary post-emo project in that it’s allowed him to be himself without jettisoning his entire Starting Line audience. Samples from obscure hula hula records plus trip-hop beats plus the usual lovelorn emo storytelling plus Chesneyish wistful summer’s-end nonsense: that was… well, it wasn’t revolutionary or anything, but it did provide Kenny his own lane. On Gone, Vacationer applied that sound to a fully motivated cycle of songs that benefited mightily from coherence of mood. August is over, and they were packing up the beach chairs, and there goes Kenny’s baby with someone new, etc. Mindset is just variations on a sonic formula, and as such, it mostly resolves to background music designed for beach bars. This record seems to exist because the Vacationer machine broke and kept spitting out copies of Vacationer songs, each one a little more faded than the last as the toner depletes. They should try pressing more buttons at once. Nobody wants to pull the plug.
Most In Need Of A Rescue Helicopter
You can create a spellbinding mood. You can get your beats in place. You can come up with cool synth textures that remind the listener of Marvin Gaye or “Let’s Hear It For The Boy” or whatever. You can dance around like you’ve got an iguana in your shorts, you can foreground your gender or racial fluidity, you can write tearjerkers about your experience of personal trauma. You can check all the boxes. In R&B, if you can’t sing your way out of a paper bag, none of that matters. On past Blood Orange records, Devonte Hynes has always muddled through with the help of his buddies; on Negro Swan, with no Carly Rae or Nelly Furtado in sight, he’s stranded and unarmed in the combat zone. Gulp.
Next Artist To Come Back From The Wilderness
Tracy Chapman
Best Stealth Political Statement
I usually have no truck with social utility arguments made by artists, and i don’t tend to see pop singers as heroes. I also doubt that Natalia Lafourcade, broad-minded though she is, views herself as a pan-Latin freedom fighter: she’s too committed to aesthetics for that. But I cannot help but notice her sub-rosa campaign for dignity and Mexican pride in the wake of… well, you know. Like all folk music projects helmed by urban sophisticates, the Musas albums make their political undercurrents rather manifest: usually the artist wants you to respect a people and a culture that you might not think much about at all. I know I hardly did, and I fancy myself a fan of all things Mexican. As a pop singer and writer (and arranger, and producer) Lafourcade once led with her exceptionalism, so much so that she wrote Hu Hu Hu while living in Ottawa of all places, an expat Joanna Newsom fan who just happened to sing in Spanish. And that, I think, was unsatisfying to her, even as it delighted the heck out of aesthetes like me. So she’s let Manos De Los Macorinos drag her back to the soil and the common people who she’s definitely not one of, and it’s been folklorico galore for the past three years. What Natalia Lafourcade shows me, and ought to show caudillos worldwide if they’d ever consent to listen to these sets, is that you don’t have to be a gauche populist to connect with the people. All you have to do is open your heart. This is a point that J.C. tried to make, up there on that mount, way way back in the day. In case you prefer a more secular gospel, in song Natalia insists on her derecho de nacimiento: her rights by birth. Only the ugliest of Americans would deny that to such a flora linda. Unfortunately… well, you know.
Worst Controversy
Imagine: Pinegrove dropping an album right in the middle of the Kavanaugh hearings. Jesus H. Christmas and a gangbang on Bloomfield Avenue. If they were a Brooklyn band, I might suspect a little anti-marketing and hashtag-chasing. But as they’re a bunch of Jersey schmucks, I know damn well it was just terrible timing. Me, I have been known to release music now and then, and I admit that it’s flattering that those of us who do are now getting held to the same standards as Supreme Court nominees. I am willing to take the polygraph test and quote Dres of the Black Sheep under oath: don’t punch girls/and I don’t punch a clock. But c’mon, our missions are a little different. Judges are responsible for upholding the law. Rockers are responsible for… well, not for undermining it, exactly, but playing fast and loose with it in the name of entertainment. We’re supposed to provide vicarious thrills and make ourselves the outlet for a collective id. Time was — and it wasn’t too fucking long ago, trust me — when sexual misconduct was part of the job description. Guys like me who played it straight and smiley were criticized by rock bros for our inability to be properly predatory. Nikki Sixx is very disappointed in you, young man. My how the worm has turned, at least in the narrow realm of independent pop-rock. These days, a rumor of sexual misconduct can un-person a singer faster than you can say PWR BTTM. Evan Hall’s sex offender shit goes way beyond rumor — he confessed to it, sort of, in one of those posts that smacked of “getting in front of it”, as the spin doctors like to say. It was pretty nauseating, and tone deaf too, and the Internet being what it is, the pile-on was soon the size of Kingda Ka. if you’re among those who believe that Hall, and by extension, Pinegrove, ought to be ostracized, I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you he deserves a second chance. At the very least he traumatized a young woman, and no, Lindsey Graham, that is not something that every red-blooded American boy does while “boofing”. But there is a class of people whose role it is to determine what constitutes criminal behavior and mete out punishment. Those people are called the police. Are you part of the police? Or are you, you know, music fans? Because Evan Hall’s particularly heinous sexually based offenses have nothing to do with whether his records are any good. Spinning those records — and happily singing along! — is not the same as supporting his rapey behavior. It is perfectly permissible for you, as a music listener, to pay attention to Pinegrove and even enjoy it without making yourself complicit in an assault. You can leave the investigations and prosecutions to the guys with the badges. Citizens’ arrests are for the Dukes Of Hazzard. There are critics who argue that the work of art cannot be separated from the actions of the man who makes it, and I dunno… I think that those have got to be the laziest critics in the world. Of course you can disaggregate the record from the biographical details; that’s the whole point of formal artistic evaluation. That’s why you throw away the PR copy before you press play and begin your review. I, too, would much prefer it if the members of the bands I like to cheer would be good Judeo-Islamo-Christians with a side of Buddhism. But c’mon, people, you’ve met guys in bands. They’re maladjusted and anti-social. That’s why they spend all night hitting things and swinging around vibrating sticks and screaming into microphones. I’d love to think they’re better than they used to be about grabbing ass, but they’re probably just as bad, if not worse, about a hundred and one other pernicious things. If you believe the answer is to leave Evan Hall, and white guys in general, over at a rest stop on the side of the highway for awhile and listen instead to records by women and African-Americans, and transsexuals, and Asian refugees, and half-lobsters from Pluto, allow me to heartily co-sign that program — and also point out that this is exactly what we’ve been doing lately, and that we’ll have to keep it up for, oh, at least a hundred years before we balance the scales. We don’t have to get the cops involved. We don’t have to become the cops. We can just pay attention to stories, and storytellers, whose voices we haven’t heard over and over again. Pinegrove deserves a smaller audience than, say, Japanese Breakfast not because Evan Hall assaulted his girlfriend, but because Pinegrove isn’t half as interesting as Japanese Breakfast is. They were never all that great, and now that they’ve grown out of quasi-emo and into standard-issue hickster country-rock, they’ve got very little to add to the musical conversation. If you disagree with me on that aesthetic assessment, and you’re denying yourself the pleasures of the Pinegrove album because you don’t want to be an enabler, you’re not hurting anybody but yourself. Well, I guess you’re hurting Evan Hall, too. Guess you have to decide if that’s worth it to you — whether the thrill of punishing an offender is more gratifying than the thrills of the music would have been. If it is, maybe you’re more of a cop fan than you are a music fan.
And While I’m At It, Rock Writers…
How far we’ve come. Not so long ago it was tough to get readers to put records in sociopolitical context. If in your review you teased out the electoral implications of some dumb pop lyric, people would call you a killjoy and tell you to stop overthinking things. Dance, you cocksucker. Well, [Tony Montana voice], lookit you now, rock criticism, lookit you now. These days, artists who express any discontent whatsoever are immediately assimilated into the political party of their sympathetic reviewer. Here’s the lede, and you’ve read it over and over: in these troubled days when [politician I don’t like] is, unfathomably, ascendant, and the rights of [affinity group the artist belongs to] are being trampled beneath the bootheel of oppression, [album] is a shout of rage, a rallying cry, a furious, unflinching summary of the times. Never mind that there might be deeper reasons for anxiety than the garbage tumbling around in the news cycle, and that musicians aren’t mouthpieces for an ideology workshopped in Westminster. This environment has benefited bands like Shopping – groups that, for one reason or another, are redolent of others with actual political significance and are thus easy targets for projection by the disaffected. Fifteen years ago, they would have been typical dance-punks with typical vague lyrics and typical young-adult axes to grind. In ’18, they were received as agitators. And hey, maybe they really were motivated by Theresa May and assorted backbenchers, but unlike Sleaford Mods, who’ll actually spend a song making fun of Boris Johnson’s haircut, they can’t be arsed to give you any specifics. Their angry Gang Of Four-ish chants (can’t really call them melodies) could be applied to Brexit, but they could also be complaints about the chanter’s girlfriend. The rejoinder to this is something about the personal being political, and yeah, sure, anything can be crammed into the narrow, airless hallway of party politics if you push hard enough. But that’s nowhere you want to hang for long. Democratic politics is a street-fight, and most musicians aren’t brawlers: very few of them, bless them, have given “the issues” a fraction of the attention they’ve paid to their kick-drum sound. When we graft political trenchancy on to these guys, we risk making Milkshake Ducks out of them. and that’s exactly what’s been happening, has it not?, mass disillusionment in the critical-discursive zone when it turns out that our favorite singers and rappers aren’t square with the platform as articulated by Bernie for America. I think we need to reopen ourselves to the possibility of discourse that has nothing to do with who or what is sitting in office. While we’re at it, we need to stop dragging musicians into the muck of our destructive obsessions. That hungry void where public culture ought to be is big and black and growing by the day. The edge is greased and slippery. You don’t want to take that tumble. The next thing you know, you’re red-faced on a talk show and ranting about some rider attached to an omnibus bill, and that, my friends, is the end of youth, the end of rock and roll, the end of hip-hop, the bitter end of everything.
…And Finally
Let me leave this here before I run out of records to rate: no protest song is going to spring us free from this mess. The FBI won’t either. No independent (?) prosecutor is going to fix our problems. The independent (???) judiciary won’t either. No member of law enforcement is going to ride to our rescue. No deep state is going to rise up and re-set the bowling pins. No comedian is going to sear this administration out of power with a sick burn. No renegade Republican is going to wake up and rediscover his set of misplaced ethics. No investigator will rake enough muck to affect the way the world is turning. There is only one way out, and that’s the way in. The American electorate made this happen. Once we decide we’re not having fun anymore — once we’re done with this experiment in governtainment – the American people will make it un-happen. Any old time now. Annnnnnyyyy time.
Place The Next Pop Music Boom Will Come From
Richmond, VA
Will Still Be Making Good Records In 2028
Phoebe Bridgers seems built to last.
Best Album Of 2019
Um… Laura Marling will be back, won’t she? Please?