2nd Grade 21 Savage Aaron Frazer Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties Adrianne Lenker Alkaline Trio Allie X Amen Dunes A Place To Bury Strangers Ariana Grande Bad Bad Hats Barely Civil Beth Gibbons Beyoncé Billie Eilish Bill Ryder-Jones Bleachers Bolis Pupul Bonnie Banane Breymer Bright Eyes Brigitte Calls Me Baby Bruno Berle Bryhm Bullion Camera Obscura Carly Cosgrove Carpool Cassandra Jenkins Cavalier Charli XCX Chime School Cindy Lee Cinnamon Gum Cloud Nothings Dana Gavanski Dasha David Gilmour David Nance & Mowed Sound Dayglow Denzel Curry Dina Ögon Doechii Dua Lipa Ducks Ltd. Dummy Elbow Empress Of Father John Misty Faye Webster Friko Gift Glass Beach Gracie Abrams Haley Heynderickx Halsey Helado Negro Hey, Ily Holy Wire Isobel Campbell Japandroids J. Cole Jessica Pratt John Van Deusen Jordana Kali Uchis Kaonashi Katy Kirby Kanye West & Tye Dolla $ign Kelly Lee Owens Kendrick Lamar Khruangbin Kid Cudi Kim Deal King Hannah Kurvi Tasch Lætitia Sadier Lala Tamar & Ofer Ronen Laura Marling La Femme LL Cool J Lucy Rose Lupe Fiasco Mach-Hommy Magdalena Bay Maren Morris Margaret Glaspy Marika Hackman Marina Allen Mary Timony Mdou Moctar Mean Jeans Megan Thee Stallion Microwave Mildlife Milton Nascimento & Esperanza Spalding Miranda Lambert MJ Lenderman Nathy Peluso Neck Deep Nick Lowe Norah Jones Office Culture Of Montreal Oolong Ora Gartland Origami Angel Osees Oso Oso OT The Real Pedro The Lion Pet Shop Boys Poppy Porridge Radio Real Estate Redd Kross Richard Thompson Ride Rosali Rubblebucket Sabrina Carpenter Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes Say Anything Serengeti Skinshape Soccer Mommy Southtowne Lanes Stetsasonic St. Lenox St. Vincent Taylor Smith The Black Crowes The BV’s The Decemberists The Early November The High Llamas The Lemon Twigs The Paranoid Style The Secret Sisters The Smile Tierra Whack Tindersticks Toro Y Moi Trevor Horn Tyler, The Creator Vampire Weekend Vera Sola Vince Staples Wand Washed Out Why? Willow Wishy Yard Act Zach Bryan


2nd Grade — Scheduled Explosions  Twenty-three exercises in winsome jangle pop and bargain-basement Big Star, most of which clock in under two minutes. They’re over and on to the next one before you can form an assessment of what you’re hearing. Some of this is murkier and/or more aggressive than prior 2nd Grade sets, but if you’ve heard Hit to Hit, you know what you’re getting: guileless vox, six-string riffs, cuteness, sugar-cereal melodies, passionate fealty to the aesthetics of snappiness. Beach Boys, Cheap Trick, Raspberries, Pepperidge Farm cookies, references to Otis Redding and Beatle boots in the same song. You know the drill, and the drill still works, despite all the rust and grease on the bit. Peter Gill is still pretending he is a geeky, unfashionable high school student circa 1978, checking the name on his permission slip, singing jauntily about building a computer, getting one over on the substitute, etc. A child skipping dreamstones on the surface of the retroverse; that’s how he describes himself in the year’s best stealth boast. I heard it firsthand at the secondhand store, he assures us with a sly smile. In the age of copycats, maybe that’s the best we can do. 

21 Savage — American Dream Twenty-One Savage is thirty-one. You’d think I wouldn’t be surprised by that. The kid has been kicking around long enough. Time turned elastic during the pandemic. What bugs me, though: I feel I missed the entire development arc of the 21 Savage/Da Baby/Playboi Carti/Lil Durk generation of quasi-respected rappers. I turn around and these guys are senior citizens. What do we have to show for it? A few strong singles, some memorable features and collaborations, and spotty projects and mixtapes. I guess you could say Whole Lotta Red is a classic of sorts, but only if you don’t give a fuck about words (I do.)  American Dream is an attempt to get on the stick and make the first-rate album that it most certainly isn’t, but it does have its strengths. They’re mostly attributable to the star’s delivery, deliberate as a lawnmower covering a stubborn patch of grass, unexcitable, tricked out with a suspension system that ensures the car will bounce at low speeds. That way, whenever he deigns to accelerate, it’s consequential. 21 remains good at storytelling, even if he doesn’t do it nearly as much as he should, and he plays well with others, especially those like Young Thug who offset his sessile qualities with zany excitability. Despite heady competition in the category, he remains the very worst boyfriend in hip-hop — an utter cad who believes that suction power is a partner’s defining trait, and who gets threatened every time the women around him assert any individuality or initiative. He should spare them all and date a vacuum cleaner.   

Aaron Frazer — Into the Blue  Once upon a time there was a man named Maxwell. He lived in an urban milieu with his Hang Suite. That was a nifty soul throwback and legit Marvin-level babymaker, but it didn’t try too hard to convince you that it had been unearthed from a vault sealed in 1966. Many things about its production suggested familiarity with contemporary pop trends. What mattered was that the songs were catchy. When it came time to follow up the urban hang suite, Maxwell amplified all of the wrong things about his project, simultaneously making his music more diffuse and more expansive. He spaced on the tunes, the urgency, the playfulness, and the horned-up crooning that made Maxwell #1 such a blast. With vigor, Maxwell called attention to the sonic connections between neo-soul and plain old soul as if the first album hadn’t made it clear enough. I don’t remember any of the songs from Embrya, aka Maxwell #2, and unless you are Maxwell’s momma, i’ll bet you don’t, either. While the artist has released seven hundred projects since, that was pretty much that for him. Because if throwing back isn’t fun and free, you’re just going to lose yardage and end up sidelined with a sore arm. Wait, who are we talking about again?  Because it seems like this cautionary tale might have some application to certain contemporary falsetto-slingers. 

Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties — In Lieu of Flowers It’s uncanny how similar Aaron West and Kenny Dennis are. Both characters are working-class guys operating on the outer fringes of the music industry. They lack the social capital to navigate a big-money game, and they don’t have the emotional forbearance that it’d take to transcend their limitations. But the implication of the records is that they’re actually pretty talented. Kenny and Aaron are surrounded by recurring characters who follow them from album to album: Aaron has his steadfast sister, Kenny has his buddies and collaborators. They can be sarcastic and defensive but they lead with their modest-income earnestness; they both love spectator sports, football in particular. Aaron gets wrecked, Kenny, who is a little more circumspect and way less self-destructive, favors O’Douls. Most importantly, they’ve both been deserted by a woman. Aaron’s actions are a slow-release reaction to Dianne’s realization that she’s better off without him; we’re not entirely sure why Jueles leaves Kenny behind, but we can speculate, and her absence hangs over the entire project. The latest chapter of Aaron’s story ends with the protagonist watching his ex-wife push a baby stroller; KDIV wraps with a chance elevator encounter between Kenny’s pal Ders and Jueles. In neither case does the woman acknowledge or even see the main character, but she’s there within shouting distance, tantalizing, opening up the possibility of reunion. Will it happen? Probably not. But if misery loves company and lonely hearts are attracted to those similarly afflicted, maybe Kenny and Aaron could cross paths. Wouldn’t that be something. It’s almost too logical to happen.

Adrianne Lenker — Bright Future  The inclusion of “Vampire Empire” makes this one feel more like a Big Thief album than her prior solo sets did. I kinda wish she’d cut that one with her band, but by now, I’m reluctant to quibble: she’s demonstrated that she knows what she’s doing. These days she’s calmer, sadder, and less potato-ish than she was on Dragon New Warm Mountain. But she’s still trying to lure unwitting chicks to the Catskills with the promise of mutual recognition, ghost stories, star-lit sadness, and rustic domesticity complete with doomed dogs and a pot of who knows what boiling on the hearth. It doesn’t sound too appetizing to me, but you can’t fault Adrianne for her passion or for her faith in her lifestyle decisions. As a tunesmith, she continues to fence her handsome melodies with those wrought-iron chord progressions of hers, and she remains one of the best guitar players working this territory. Unless you are absolutely dead set against hippies and allergic to sonic patchouli, this ought to be part of your life, even if Adrianne takes you so deep into the brambles that you emerge with poison ivy and mosquito bites.

Alkaline Trio — Blood, Hair, And Eyeballs  Back to the Alkaline grind after a long season spent with Blink-182, Matt Skiba puts the tricks he learned on the stadium circuit to the service of his basement band. Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs is an enthusiastic, unapologetic handshake with Blinkish arena music, full of whoa oh ohs and nonstop electric razor buzz in the midrange and so much compression that I think I just shrank an inch. Matt Skiba himself appears to have fully transitioned into a guitar hero when we weren’t looking, matching his melodies with riffs like sparks off of a flywheel. He still won’t solo, though. The man has his limits. What could have been a gruesome exercise in muscling up turns out to be a nifty fusion of Costello-worshipping pub-rock and crowd-pleasing, ham-handed, pop-metallic thunder. They get away with serving these protein powder shakes because they’re as tight as a rugby team in a Mini Cooper, and Matt and Dan Andriano have come up with their best tunes since… well, they always come up with good tunes, don’t they? The big winners here are “Bad Time” and “Teenage Heart,” but nothing is duff, and that swooning, ‘50s-pop melodic sensibility that they accessed at their best is back in spades. Drummer Derek Grant, the third leg of the tripod, celebrated this late-career success by quitting the group. Can’t catch a break, #4080. I’m sure Matt will re-tool and be back at it before you can say Fender Custom Jaguar. Music like this will always be around as long as there are guys ready to marry tuneage to wattage: foursquare, speedy, catchy, sweaty, comforting pop-punk. So ubiquitous that you never need to seek it out. Whenever you want it, there it is, right where you left it.

Allie X — Girl With No Face  Part new wave a la Animotion doing “Obsession,” part Monster Mash. So you might say of all post-Gaga artpop. The Goth intentions of Girl With No Face are consistently undermined by Allie’s chirpiness, but at least she can carry a tune. Though these narrators are supposed to be weirdos, they’re as obsessed with physical appearance as anybody on the pep squad: “Off With Her Tits,” for instance, is a straightforward tale of body dysmorphia and sexual confusion leading to voluntary top surgery. That’s disturbing in a way, but it’s far removed from the obligatory existential horror that dark pop records aim to express. Wear out your copy of Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power first.

A Place to Bury Strangers — Synthesizer  Sure it’s a gimmick. Every good bluesman needs one. Moreover, Oliver Ackermann’s decision to mass produce an album cover that doubles as a musical instrument goes straight to character, as the defense attorneys say.  It’s further enterprising spirit from a resourceful guy who never lets you forget that at heart he’s a box-building boffin. He’s always believed that you can slap a pickup on anything and make it sing if you don’t mind the feedback (he doesn’t).  As for his own singing, well, See Through You was a pivot toward vocal clarity and maybe even a tiptoe toward narrative intelligibility. Synthesizer finds him cannonballing back into the maelstrom of bleeps and grinds, overdriven shrieks and other FX, not fighting back as much as he’s attempting to swim with the current and meld with soundwaves on the submolecular level. This is the sort of thing that gives Oliver his shamanistic reputation, but like most witch-doctoring it’s probably best appreciated when you’ve got your face down in the vat of ayahuasca. The rhythm guitar sounds like an electrified tennis racket getting smashed by John McEnroe. Are you blind, that serve was in. You cannot be serious. 

Ariana Grande — Eternal Sunshine  Eight years ago, it was pure, sleek, seamless Max Martin machine music. That gave way to odd, feathery Pharrell Williams beats that were closer to Scritti Politti than Lauryn Hill. The next set was imperiousness given a sonic shape (pointed, naturally) and the one after that embedded innuendo and sexual demands in songs that led with rhythmic and harmonic sophistication. The new one brings Max back and goes for grace, alluding to early ‘90s R&B via Ariana’s one-girl girl group multi-tracking. Valid approaches all; five for five with each of the five distinct. Ariana’s hero Mariah Carey never did that. Neither, it pains me to concede, did Whitney Houston. Some of Ariana’s contemporaries have had runs of similar consistency, but they’ve done it by playing around with stylistic elements from beyond the Z100 bailiwick: cottagecore, deep house, nu-metal, whatever they can throw into the pot to keep it fresh. With Ariana it is always pop, mainstream pop, pop and nothing but. And these are albums, man, not Sgt. Pepper or even Oh! Inverted World, but cohesive full-length projects nonetheless. I admit this one does not have the musical ambition of Positions or the fireworks of Thank U, Next or the true weirdness of Sweetener. It does have a couple of fairground Tilt-a-Whirl anthems in “Yes, And…” and “We Can’t Be Friends.” Step right up, test your strength, bring the mallet down on the puck with all your might. Ring that bell.

Bad Bad Hats — Bad Bad Hats I finally figured out who these guys are. They’re the indiepop AC/DC. Counterintuitive, I know, but hear me out. Bad Bad Hats are maximalists in intention and minimalists in execution. Just like AC/DC, they ply an aesthetic based around attainable aspirations. They never run a play that’s beyond their capabilities. What they can’t do, they don’t do; what they can do, they do to the hilt, with the amplifiers turned all the way up and everything clear as a freshly minted blu-ray disc. Riffs and chord progressions are simple but never saccharine, and the evenness of the playing helps them dodge charges of redundancy. The singer’s voice is affected and hyper-gendered, but you get used to it; the horny lyrics, largely about desire and/or frustration of desire, are subtly clever and often pretty funny. Arrangements are based around muscular guitar and a rock solid rhythm section. Everybody acts like they’d be slugged in the jaw if they overplay, and perhaps they will be. Even as hard rock veered toward stolidity, AC/DC always remained danceable; indiepop has been mired in the slough of despond, but Bad Bad Hats keeps it unfashionably perky. When AC/DC was accused of making the same album over and over, Angus didn’t deny it, but he asked us to concede that it was a really good album. Bad Bad Hats continues to turn out mild variations on Psychic Reader with minor adjustments here and there: a little more synthesizer on this one, a little more compression on that one, a few more Breeders and Liz Phair bites this time around, a few more overt references to team sports on the last one. Kerry Alexander’s vocals continue to improve. As a guitarist, she’s always been impeccable, devoting herself completely to phrases that intensify the composition and excising everything else. She’s made a meal out of me and she’s come back for more. I’m happy to shake with her all night long.

Barely Civil — I’d Say I’m Not Fine  Tuneful, bracing emo band from Milwaukee. What they’re braced against isn’t entirely clear. Further quarantine mandates and accompanying blue balls, that’s my guess. Barely Civil takes the clean/unclean vox dichotomy to impressive extremes: main dude Connor Erickson floats through eighty five per cent of this set with a Melodyne-saturated elf voice akin to Kenny Vasoli in Vacationer mode. On the other fifteen per cent, he’s threatening to bash his head against the wall. Does he do it? It sure sounds that way. Further dynamics are supplied, or possibly just prompted, by Chris Teti of The World Is a Beautiful Place, who strings tripwires and scatters obstacles across these mixes in the hope that Connor will stub his toe and howl in pain. Convince your charges to go barefoot and keep the floor Lego-strewn: that’s the emo producer’s prime directive. Couple that with a band that knows how to put together an anthem — check “Better Now,” or the guitar break on “Dwindling” — and you’ve got something cooking. 

Beth Gibbons — Lives Outgrown  With the Portishead beats behind her, Beth Gibbons established the outer limits of how doleful a club singer could be. Without them, she’s untenably morose, without even the leavening of a spooky hip-hop scratch to carry her to the end of the song. On Lives Outgrown, it never seems like she’s going to make it: from the very first measures, she’s already trailing off, taking her place in a rocking chair in the sawdustiest part of the house in the woods, maybe knitting something, but mainly staring out the window. The overtures to British folk are welcome from a woman who has never disguised her debt to the witches, but they mostly make her sound old. For a (technically) good album, this is a pretty bad album. 

Beyoncé — Cowboy Carter  A Neutral Good deity solicits pantheon-mates Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson to testify to judgmental rednecks about her country bona fides. Guess George W. Bush and Uncle Jesse were busy that day. The view from Mount Olympus does provide a skewed perspective about life on the ground; I’m told there are whole myths about that. Me, I thought this argument had been settled with the six-gun shoot ‘em up number on Lemonade. As this former ass-music technician continues her long (and fruitful; did I imply it wasn’t fruitful?) transition into professorial mode, she has begun to cultivate some irritating pedagogical tendencies, including the compulsion to belabor a settled point. Beyoncé wants to make it clear to the class that C&W has its roots deep in the American South and the black experience, what with Rhiannon Giddens on banjo and Linda Martell as a deejay, and all that Texas hot sauce and Louisiana heat and the gun up in the dash just in case she has to blast. And so on. And for the first time since she started this campaign of appropriation takebacks, it feels a little like a well-armed overcompensation. Was anybody really wondering if Beyoncé could sing country?  Of course we weren’t wondering. She carried Jay-Z’s wheezy butt straight through the Carters tour. A line dance is completely within her powers. Since I am a superduperfan with a penchant for conceptual velocity, I enjoy every minute of this gas-pedal-stomping road trip around the Gulf states, complete with tire-screech stops at convenience stores and strip clubs and the multi-ethnic supermarket next to the VFW Hall. But even I can concede that Yonce Inc. has applied its arrangement smarts and impeccable musicianship to material that is, compositionally speaking, thinner than what we’re accustomed to getting from the corporation. Some of these conduits and trusses shudder under the weight of the talent that the star is heaping on every single measure. It’s not just that she goes at it all so hard and heavy. It’s that she goes at it hard and heavy for a very long time, and leaves us with a sense that she’s game to lecture past the bell. That’s new. If she keeps that up, they’re liable to stick her in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So to get the most out of Cowboy Carter, I’ve found that it’s best to toss the pre-release hype that twinned it with Renaissance, even if its sociopolitical project makes it an obvious analogue. Instead, I think the album works best if it’s treated like a lark: we’re just tooling around with Beyoncé, listening to classic rock radio, singing along with McCartney and Fleetwood Mac, making up new words to “Jolene” and doing Tina Turner imitations, dropping references to the things she’s read and people who’ve inspired her, basking in the sun of the high American sky. It’s not a requiem, not a reckoning or a reclamation. It’s just a lap in a glorious relay race run by the latest Dixie slammer to hold the torch.

Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft  Instead of outside consultation, Billie returns to the family doctor. Familiar with her complaint as he is, he has fine-tuned the prescription. No more theatrical vo-de-o-do or etheric steam-treatments. No, Finneas is concentrating on what it is that makes this moderate-wattage star shine: sneaky-Pete stuff meant to connote obsessive thoughts and big, sopping, grandiose ballads like “The Greatest.” The mid-song switches between contemporary pop styles almost all work, and they reinforce Billie’s theme of epiphanic conversion to homosexual practices. This is, I am glad to say, much more full-throated than her prior romantic numbers, none of which convinced me that Billie was romantic at all. When she sings about eating her partner for lunch, though, this I believe. It’s a refinement of billie’s spider-munching conception of love as a kind of assumption and absorption of the object. This makes Hit Me Hard and Soft a very different exercise in lesbian literature from Katy Kirby’s coming out story Blue Raspberry. Katy is obsessed with artificiality, and the way in which an unnatural desire warps her view of the realness of her experience, and it situates her narrative in a wider discussion about what the heck queerness even is. Billie, by contrast, is mainly hung up on her own (body) image and sees her partner as a double or mirror, which IMO is not quite so compelling. Then again, as I have said far too many times, I’m not even a girl.

Bill Ryder-Jones — Iechyd Da  Aslow, lovely, ponderous break-up album consisting in its entirety (and it’s a long entirety) of the kind of sad-bastard mid-tempo ballads that served as emotional centerpieces of Britpop albums. Especially Damon Albarn projects — only without Damon’s will to conflate his girl trouble with Britain’s loss of world hegemony. Bill Ryder-Jones’s Scouse storytelling lingers on the precise moment when the narrator realizes that his relationship is irretrievably lost, and then lingers some more, and some more, like the boyfriend in the doorjamb after the fight is over, unsure whether to go home or to search around for some new way to say old words. But this can’t go on, as Bill says in “This Can’t Go On,” and then he goes on for another half hour. “It’s today and I’m back again/there’s not much else to do.” To his credit, Bill appoints his arrangements with heartrending accompaniment that underscores his themes: muted brass, warbly living-room Farfisa, porch chimes, shit reminiscent of a lower-middle class home in a time-worn precinct of a time-worn town. It’s not too much of an oversell to liken Iechyd Da to The Midnight Organ Fight with the sprightly bits shorn off. That said, Frightened Rabbit is endlessly replayable, and I dunno if I can say the same for Bill. It depends on how much you fancy pressing on a bruise.  

Bleachers — Bleachers  The guy never leaves us alone. You’d figure that whopping us over the head with ten thousand Jack Antonoff productions, he’d spare us a bunch more that aren’t even graced by the voice of a pop star. You’d figure wrong. This is exactly what you’d expect it’d be, and one of the things you’d expect it to be is something you don’t want. But even if you’re sick to death of Jack’s sequencers and his two chord progressions and his strange misallocations of Springsteenian grandeur, I’m afraid he can’t be dismissed so easily. There’s the matter of his track record, which includes several of the best albums of the decade. His name is right in the credits. Even if we stick with the popular understanding of Jack as a light touch in the studio, forever allowing his charges to assert themselves artistically, his fingerprints are still all over the masters. When the story of pop in the teens and twenties is written, Jack is going to get many footnotes and references in the index. So eat your Bleachers. At least once or twice. We rag on him, but he’s earned it.

Bolis Pupul — Letter to Yu  You have traveled overseas. You are back in the city of your youth. You’ve returned home to commemorate the end of something: maybe a funeral, or a departure, or a celebration of the life of someone very old. Sounds you remember from your childhood drift over from an adjacent courtyard to the lantern-hung alley where you are walking. There is the babble of speech in a language you once commanded, but has long since slipped away from you. Yet you also hear familiar things: beats and harmonies from your adopted home plus a hybrid of machine hums, voices, synthesizer chords, the flutter and whir of modernity as it meets the horizon. How much interconnectivity has happened since you left?  Is your very existence part of a dialogue; a breath from a mistranslated; a node in the dynamics of misapprehension?  Is our rootlessness a text message left on sent, three dots hanging over a vast sea, waiting for a familiar face on old familiar shore to pick up a cellphone and receive?

Bonnie Banane — Nini  Ambitious, uneven, bilingual art-pop set from a thirty-seven-year-old nonstar Parisian with a conversational delivery and a fruity name. Expect drums clattering in and out of time, thick steam-pressed backing vox, portamento synthesizer, ear candy both delicious and cloying. She promises intense joy and profound sadness, but she says it in French, so you know she doesn’t entirely mean it. An obvious point of comparison here is Melody Gardot, another goofball chanteuse with a taste for throwback psych, film soundtracks, circus music, and that ya-ya stuff that still wafts up from the greasier bends of the Seine. Much like Melody, Bonnie the Banana throws experimental tracks suggestive of progressive rock (check “Hoes of Na”) alongside expensively bottled concoctions from the designer perfume counter (check “Red Flags”) and Róisín-like zaniness bordering on onanism (check “Hop-là”). Bonnie’s utter disregard for commercial considerations and dancefloor wrongfooting also puts me in mind of Kimbra circa Golden Echo. Regardless, it’s all redolent of wealth and privilege, and those of us who appreciate pop music can take some comfort in the apparent existence of venture capitalists willing to burn money on formal experimentation without hope of a return on investment. Those were Euros that might otherwise have gone toward something less savory. You do get the sense that gain of function research was the alternative business plan. Or maybe putting a billionaire in a space rocket.

Breymer — When I Get Through Her top surgery: that’s what Sarah Walk’s narrator would like to endure. It could be heard as a metaphor, I suppose, for whatever challenge the listener is facing. But Sarah is pretty specific here, and she’s a good enough linear storyteller that it’s tough to miss her meaning. If you told me you did, I’m not sure I’d believe you. She establishes her body dysmorphia straight away, and she’s frank about its effect on her relationship with her girlfriend. Then we get the doctors and the dates and the plans, and the fear that accompanies encounters with the medical system. She matches it all nicely to music that evokes memories of Jenny Owen Youngs’s recent exploration of grief and fear and the limits of human will. I can be sympathetic to Sarah’s desire for radical self-definition and her need to escape who she was. When she sings about pre-procedure apprehension, I feel her anxiety. But let’s just say I might not be the best audience for an album about somebody who is removing breasts voluntarily. 

Bright Eyes — Five Dice, All Threes  With his pal Phoebe otherwise engaged, Conor looks elsewhere to soothe his collaborative bone. His right hand man this time out is a character named Alex Orange Drink. You may remember Alex from the middle of the pack punk band So So Glos, and true to brand, he contributes some middle of the pack punk. Did conor need such a contribution? Well, maybe. He’s at the stage of his career where he’s likely to repeat himself if he doesn’t have a friend nearby giving him deadlegs and planting whoopie cushions and whatnot. The difference, it seems, is about two degrees: Phoebe said it was a hundred and three, but Conor and Alex peg it at a hundred and five. No longer is the broken egg merely sizzling on the sidewalk; now, we’re catching some noxious fumes from the bubbling albumen. Conor gives us a litany of the stuff he hates that culminates in a kiss-off to artifical intelligence overlords. Like the mid-period Will Sheff who once imitated him, he’s hung up on the fates of creative people who’ve gone supernova or disappeared or just done themselves in. “El Capitan” is a refreshingly unsympathetic portrayal of a suicide. “Hollywood’s dying like the palm trees,” he tells us, right after asking God to give him a closing date for his own show and getting no reply. In a world deteriorating around him, he’s decided that it’s better to fade away than burn out, but he’s not thrilled with either method of facing the future. Well. He’ll get by with a little help from his friends. 

Brigitte Calls Me Baby — The Future Is Our Way Out  There are guilty pleasures, and then there are pleasures that make you feel like you’re buying yourself a century in purgatory. The demon in question is Wes Leavins, who opens this album by biting Morrissey with the jaw force of a doberman. If you ever thought that Gene was in violation of UN rules for originality, you might want to send an entire peacekeeping force after these guys. Wes’s Moz mimicry extends to attitude, note choice, phrasing, inflections; he’s got the whole thing down pat. Later on the set he tries to do the same thing to Roy Orbison and doesn’t quite get over the bar, but by then, this queer shapeshifter has already convinced us of the versatility of his pipes. The rest of band tries to match his celebrity impressionism with some faux-grandeur of their own, and the results are hit and miss. It’s not that they don’t have chops, it’s that they don’t wag around their pirate’s cutlasses with the same sense of entitlement that the frontman does. Wes has the delusions of stardom that are so often the first step to becoming a star. So far so good on that score. But it strikes me that Wes ought to figure out who, exactly, he is impersonating and why. Otherwise he’s merely showing off his imitative chops for gawkers. That’s of limited entertainment value. Even Red Skelton knew that. 

Bruno Berle — No Reino Dos Afetos 2   This starts out like a sunrise with “Te Amar Eterno,” a bit of updated tropicalía that isn’t too far removed from Tim Bernardes’s experiments in Beatle-Brazil fusion, or Alex Ferreira’s amalgams of tear-stained love notes, ‘70s soft-rock, and tree frog appreciation. Bruno’s voice is a splash of orange juice in the morning, and it spills out and tangs up “Margem Do Céu,” another beachside amble. Unfortunately, the next song is called “Sonho,” and you know what that means. In our not-so-roaring ‘20s, if the dreaded word dream appears in a title — even in Portuguese — that means the artist has licensed himself to zone out. The back half of this set finds Bruno in a hammock, lost in reverb reverie and Sargasso seaweed. By “Acorde E Vem,” he’s matching heavy vocal processing with synthesizer warble in a manner that is sure to please procurers of check-in music at luxury resort chains, but which you’re probably sick of by now. Cue that woodblock sample. This suggests Bruno is more of a singles artist than a sonnet-spinner or seamless album-maker. Because real poets don’t shoot for chill playlist placement. Real poets aren’t chill at all. 

Bryhm — Deep Sea Vents   Okay, Bruce. You’ve gone far enough. Time to rein it in a little. 

Bullion — Affection Producer-auteur project from Nathan Jenkins, the guy who put the charm in Avalon Emerson & the Charm. If you didn’t get too too sick of that one, you’ll find that the trip extends here with the same motorik bounce, the same glassy synths and rock-ribbed bass, and the same weightless cruise on the monorail through the metropolis at night. It’s as if Hot Chip took a sidestep into Japanese city pop around the time of The Warning. Floating on the machine beats are some of the niftiest guitar solos I’ve heard this year, especially the one in “Your Father” that dropped me right in the middle of a Spandau Ballet video. White tie and all. Avalon doesn’t show, but Carly Rae, who Nathan worked with on The Loveliest Time, kicks a sophistipop verse on “Rare.” That’s sweet. Even sweeter: Charlotte Adigery on “World_Train,” the track that epitomizes his production approach: a little proper-British, a little Balearic, a little transience, a little Trevor Horn. Nathan even manages to get a good verse out of Panda Bear. I thought you had to be in Daft Punk to pull that off.

Camera Obscura — Look to the East, Look to the West  Tracyanne Campbell names names. Unless she doesn’t: the kickoff track is clearly about somebody real and gone too soon, but we don’t know who. A former boyfriend? A cousin? A brother? Like a few of the tracks on this trusty, ghostly midlife set, “Liberty Print” starts out like a torch song, until Tracyanne starts singing about a visit a grieving mother. These days, those Glasgow departures feel final. The obvious prompt is the death of the band’s synth player at 33 — osteosarcoma, if you’re keeping score at home, and we’ve all become scorekeepers lately, haven’t we. It’s hard to stay twee through misfortune like that. A lesser songwriter would have packed it right in, and Tracyanne concedes that she’d considered doing just that.  Instead she’s bent herself around tragedy like a vine. The song that namechecks Carey Lander is a crusher, naturally, but I am just as shook by the tune addressed to the “Let Me Go Home” dude who shared lead vox in Camera Obscura for the first two albums. “It’s alright if you find me trite,” she tells him, right before she takes responsibility for derailing his dreams. It’s all contextualized, if not exactly justified, by the survivor’s lines on her face. That and the acknowledgement that there are some countries you can’t get out of, no matter how far you drive.

Carly Cosgrove — The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty  Well-written and well-wrought set from emo wheelwrights, and the better they wright, the hotter the fire they’re playing with. After the outstanding See You in Chemistry made Lucas Naylor a first round draft pick, the Carly combo got out there in bigger clubs and discovered that those fragile, mathy guitar lines that were the number one Carly Cosgrove mark of distinction didn’t reach the back of the hall. The temptation to muscle up and strum power chords must have been irresistible. If you’ve ever been in a rock band, you know how it goes. A packed and screaming house encourages you to play louder and hit harder. This in turn affects the songwriting, especially when the musicians are as good and as tight as these three are. But as everybody from the third wave learned the hard way, emo is not arena rock. Emo does not operate according to the same logic as pop-punk. Those projections of confidence and strength that are so crucial to adjacent forms of music do not work here. They get in the way of the magic narrative: the beleaguered, powerless, defiant, good-hearted kid kicking and screaming his way into an adulthood that he recognizes, rightly, as corrupt. Hell no he won’t go. This is the reason that so many emo classics, from Camping in Alaska to Newfound Interest in Connecticut to Brave Little Abacus to, yes, Home Like Noplace Is There, are made within a Salingeresque cloud of anonymity. It’s also why these projects are unrepeatable: Father Time being undefeated and all that. Anyway, Lucas, I am glad to say, still has an excellent feel for the main idea, even if he’s beginning to accept that growing up means putting down certain shaggy dogs. It’s an ugly business. But he really does want to be a winner, even if he has genuine sympathy for the refusenik narrator who recognizes, rightly, that winning is kinda fascist. Mick Jagger said it in ’66: what a drag it is getting old.   

Carpool — My Life in Subtitles  If I could be where you are/I would be where you are. So says Chris Colasanto, frontman of this ragged but likable rock group from frozen Rochester, on a song that namechecks Icarus. This is not atypical for emo kids: there’s something they’ve got to live up to, but the more they try, the more they wax wings melt. It could be a parent, or a girlfriend, or a buddy who is better at stuff than they are. The dynamic and the dilemma applies equally in all cases. Because pretty soon, they’re in free fall with a heap of feathers and they’re screaming as the ground races to meet them. That’s the interim in which they’ve written their songs — those few moments before going splat. Here’s a good track for your Promise Ring legacy playlist: “I Hate Music.” He doesn’t really. But when he tells you that he knows what it means to be someone to forget, that doesn’t sound like fiction.

Cassandra Jenkins — My Light, My Destroyer  Cassandra attempts to whisper her way straight through her new set. Who has ever gotten away with this? Don’t say Suzanne Vega — even at her gentlest, she always knew when to get full-throated. No, I think the model here is Elliott Smith, who had the advantage of excellent notes ’n’ chords tunesmithing to compensate for all of the hushed wheeze and lager-bottle-breath breeze. How does Cassandra do on that score? Welp, she is rocking a tiny bit more than she did on the last one, but the last one was an elegy for a suicide and a meditation on grief, so that’s kinda expected. As for the words, I believe it when she says she can’t sleep without her partner, and I feel for this natural Brooklynite, facing oblivion alone in a hotel in the middle of Illinois. Them’s the perils of this indie rock business, Cassandra; reaching for a large audience for tiny songs, I mean. Eventually you do discover America.

Cavalier — Different Type Time  “I’m trying to stop the violence/but you wanna pop culture.” I feel him. Throughout this unusual set this most unusual emcee draws a connection between superficiality and the deterioration of virtue. His granny cops new lotto tickets while the doom clock’s ticking. Cavalier isn’t mad about it; he’s just saying. The rapper is candid about the badvice that has followed him from New York to New Orleans, even as his descriptions of the Israelites on the corners at Fulton Mall betray longing for another bite of the Big Apple. His noncombatant idealism extends to the rapping, reminiscent at times of the nonzany Danny Brown, and the production, which is the most beautiful I’ve heard on a rap album in a while. Breathy horns and sweet gumdrop bass, syrupy synthesizer and MPC stutter, everything rattling, rocking, and swaying like an old cable car at night. It’s a deepening of the approach he took on Private Stock, another rap record where the dust on the turntable needle felt like part of the arrangement. That one was released in… hey, has Cavalier really been working on this album for six years? It took them that long to perfect the thump on the kick drum? Time well spent, I say.

Charli XCX — Brat  Look what the cat coughed up. Something slimy and precise. Not that we’d expect anything drier from Charlotte Aitchison, author of at least two of the most booze-sopping frat rock songs of this not-too-fraternal millennium. On her latest, it’s more frat rock, or frat disco, to be precise: hooky club bangerz from the crowded girls baffroom of some sleazeball bar or another. The production here is top dollar and the performances tend to be boss in that drawling, decadent manner that implies the bitter end of empire, but at base these rudimentary synthesizer romps are best understood as digital Louie Louie. No insult meant to anybody on the entertainment committee at Kappa Sigma Phi: Louie Louie was expertly engineered to facilitate the shoveling of substances into the orifices of your choice at the kegger, and Brat is no different. Some credulous characters in the music-crit establishment have even located a feminist statement in Charli’s vigorous expressions of petulance, and all I can say is that I hope these people have a designated driver. As for Charli herself, I still haven’t forgiven her for I don’t care/I love it, not to mention I don’t wanna go to school/I just wanna break the rules. But I believe this free market determinist when she says she wants to dance to the hits only. (Especially if some of those hits are her own.) I’ll even entertain her confession that it’s confusing for her to be a modern girl. But I’m not just going to take her word for it that these characters — transparent self-inserts, if we’re being honest — are intelligent. Show, don’t tell, Charlotte. 

Chime School — The Boy Who Ran the Paisley Hotel   From the name, you’d think this was a jangle pop band with twee leanings expressed via wistful lyrics and melodies that bend chivalrously toward the listener, and yes, some things are exactly what you’d think they’d be. The guys in Chime School hit all their C86 marks and capitulate to formula with aplomb and maybe a bit of the swagger of technicians who’ve fixed the internal routing system just right. There’s a Gallagherishness to the writing, especially on “Words You Say,” but given Noel’s grounding in Sixties pop and the collected works of Morrissey-Marr, I wouldn’t call that a departure from expectation. It’s more of a recognition that certain primal alliances have shifted. A record like this could only have happened in a place as backward looking as Northern California, and sure enough, Andy Pastalaniec adds his voice to the chorus arguing that the teched-up and gentrified Bay ain’t what it used to be. That darn Farhan Zaidi and his computer. San Francisco: it really is one of the most conservative places on earth. 

Cindy Lee — Diamond Jubilee  Though I do find this heavily-echoed, food-poisoned throwback college rock album intriguing, I’m a little confused by the ecstatic reaction it’s gotten. Its vibe isn’t too different from that of the Jake Borgemenke and Joey Joesph album that got absolutely no commercial or critical traction last year: hippie four-track driven sound, allusions to classic rock and the Brill Building, pedal effects, loosey goosiness, good-not-great melodies, funny voices, cinema organ, meandering bits, murk, marijuana, insularity. Most of Cindy Lee’s lyrics are kinda general, torchy, un-poetic reflections on romantic disappointment of the sort that Tracyanne Campbell would emphatically rewrite or embroider with detail. This strolls on for two leisurely hours, through numbers that are well structured like “Kingdom Come” and others that are just pure shloshing bongwater. Patrick Flegel, the man behind the Cindy Lee persona, has a nice guitar tone and a knack for scratchy instrumental passages, but he also has a tendency to noodle and indulge in low-end squall and note-bending for its own sake. I’m left with the feeling that a whole lot of alt-rock listeners really need to be introduced to the Grateful Dead. If they’re impressed by this, Garcia and Hunter are going to blow their minds. 

Cinnamon Gum — The Cinnamon Show  Much like the new Aaron Frazer set minus the accomplished singing. Since it’s no less enjoyable, it suggests that accomplished singing is a wee bit overrated. Like Aaron, the guys from Cinnamon Gum stretch out and slip into a gleaming R&B miasma, and this goes on for way too long before they pick up the tempo and invite you to shake your cinnabon. Before long, they’re firing up the bongos for their own simulation of “Apache,” or just the Apache break.  Much of the rest of this is the grease that gets caught in the filter after the soul has gone down the drain. Just when you’re getting acclimated to that, they roll the credits. C’mon, Cinnamon Gum, don’t tell me about the gaffer and the key grip. I don’t even know who the star is. 

Cloud Nothings — Final Summer  No disrespect meant to the badassery of Dylan Baldi or the ferocity of his guitar band. I’m just saying that this project has always risen or fallen on the strength of its hooks. Since the Cloud Nothings come from the rougher side of pop-punk, those hooks are raw, brutal, and serrated. A certain barbed inelegance is required to embed them in the cheeks of the fish they’re catching. So how’d they do on that score? Pretty well this time around, even if they continue to rely on the move where the band speeds up a little and Dylan yelps something epigrammatic over the six-string sturm-und-drang. (see: “Mouse Policy”). The batting average here isn’t as high as it was on Attack on Memory or the severely underrated Life Without Sound, but they connect more often than they don’t. As for Dylan’s motivation — what makes this man holler so — he’s still not telling you/all he’s going through. For a guy who sounds determined to put something specific across, he’s elliptical to a fault. If something would happen to him, he assures us, he’d get along. Okay, Baldi. Glad we cleared that up.

Dana Gavanski — Late Slap  Given the flat kickball feel of so much modern indie rock it is nice to get a little Obladi from a new artist. Even if she never exactly gets around to Oblada. Dana Gavanski comes off like predespondent Marika Hackman plus mannered mid-period Joe Jackson piano-pop with a pinch of hiccupy Lene Lovich thrown in to keep things moving.  The arrangements on Late Slap are often inspired: snaky bass parts, synth detuned like steel drums, tricky soft rock beats, scratchy new wave guitar, moony, distant robot-in-love noises, deep monk-like backing vox on singular coincidence. Dana threads her melodies through this loosely woven mesh with the discernment — and upper-crusty inflections — of a seamstress for the queen. She’s happy to be on the sofa with the object of her affection, and she enjoys the feel of her fingers in his hair. When she tells us, provisionally but certainly, she’s open to letting go, well, that’s about as wild as the kids are getting these days. We’ll take what depravity we can get.

Dasha — What Happens Now  And here I thought everybody was abandoning Tinseltown for Texas. So I am told by the mainstream news outlets (including the loathsome LA Times), all of which have been forecasting California demise since, oh, the nineteenth century. Maybe Dasha wants reproductive rights; is that so hard for her boyfriend to understand? It seems like those might serve his aims, too. If your girlfriend doesn’t have bodily autonomy, you might as well be sleeping with a real doll. Of course many men want exactly that, at least in the short run, and many women are happy to go along with it. I always thought it was unlikely that a groundswell of voters would sweep the censorious and unfeminist out of office in the event of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, but I still held out hope that we’d do better than we did. Abortion initiatives continue to be popular at the state level, but they’re a poor substitute for that which we were assured by Brett Kavanaugh et. al. was settled law. I take no comfort whatsoever in Trump’s stated disinclination to sign a national ban. He is, you may have noticed, a very vindictive guy. Given the opportunity to stick it to the people who don’t like him, he’s going to be mightily tempted to take it. I’d expect the Pussy Patrol to try to get something draconian on his desk as quickly as possible. With the courts dominated by prudes and party poopers, we’re counting on reasonable Republicans to stand in the way of further erosions of liberty, and, yeah, I don’t know if those guys exist anymore. And this was always the plan: get an operational majority on the Supreme Court, nuke nationwide protections in the name of the children, let states enforce all the restrictions their withered legislators can dream up, monkey with the commerce clause to restrict travel for medical attention, and finally shiv and shimmy their way in your bedroom to impose the oversight they crave. Those of us with sex lives underestimated the rage of the many who weren’t getting any. A coalition of the post-virile elderly and young people — mostly men, but some women, too — who do not want to cultivate the social skills and hygiene that’d make them acceptable lays are coming for your fun and your fulfillment. Year after year, in this very Abstract, I have banged on about exactly this. I have seen the cloud of dust from the unwashed and unattractive horde, I have caught the sun glinting off of the pitchforks, and I’ve been trying to warn those of you who love pop and rap and rock and roll and who sail warm and happy seas under the rainbow flag that our homegrown Taliban will take it all away if we don’t stick together. Birth control, marriage equality, gender-bending, sexual experimentation, the right to dress as you’d like, the Devil’s music: it’s all in the crosshairs. It always has been. If we don’t want to wake up in Tehran circa 1979, we need to stop getting distracted. Millions who voted in ’20 sat out ’24; this disinclination to vote was the deciding factor in this election. Ignore the hot takes and inspect the numbers if you don’t believe me. Not enough people stood up to the fundamentalists and the incels, the book-burners and the border patrollers, and all those who want to make sure you only use your body in the way they want you to. Not enough people heard the backbeat. I think we’d better turn it up.

David Gilmour — Luck and Strange  I really don’t wanna think too hard about how they managed to get Rick Wright on this thing. I’m sure there’s lots of stray floydage sitting around in temperature controlled vaults. Smells vaguely of stale pot in there. Let’s just chalk it up to that. As for the man with the black Strat, he’s still the possessor of the purest tone around — one buoyant enough to float a studio houseboat. That solo on “Scattered”: mmmm. David can bend a note on Tuesday and release the string on Thursday and keep you invested in the note throughout the whole sonic arc. He enlists his daughter Romany to sing a track, and somehow this is less child abusy than it is when Tori Amos does it. The Alt-J guy contributes production that alludes to the past but manages to elude the long angled shadow of the floating pig. Unfortch David’s wife Polly Sampson contributes some reflections on mortality, and these are very bit as dreadful as rock lyrics penned by literati always are; O mean, awkward diction, mixed metaphors, copious cliches, cod-philosophy, the whole Booker Prize-winning shebang. It’s enough to make Roger Waters throttle a Palestinian.  

David Nance & Mowed Sound — David Nance & Mowed Sound  One cannot do the negative boogie forever. Eventually the nihilistic cowboy must slow down and rope a few black cows. With Mowed Sound, David Nance retains his brutal overdriven guitar sound, but puts it to the service of country-rock numbers that bump along the dirt tracks in a rough rectangular fashion, with dangerously loose axles, spraying gravel as they go. Some of this is a sublunar slink, much of it is scrapey and strange, there’s at least one experimental percussion piece, and the principal growls over the clatter about tumbleweeds and vultures and other frontier nonsense. He’s still more interested in the disease than the cure, and he still douses his signal in tar. You are in a hayride on a moonless night, hitting every sinkhole on the farm. Metal machinery of unknown purpose clangs in the distance. Lord knows what pumpkin patch you are headed to.  You smell rust, crops, animal musk, sweat, gasoline. There’s a shed. Maybe you ought to make them stop so you can pee.

Dayglow — Dayglow  Shorn of the synthesizers and machine beats of People in Motion, Dayglow resembles the Strokes fronted by Adam Young on the cusp of a theophany. Late Strokes, mind you — not the coke on the bar at Don Hill’s version of the band, but the one that’s absolutely cool with janky electric guitar, Wang Chung bites, and lyrics about the Mets. Much of Dayglow is a sunny day spaz attack complete with youthful urgency and complaints about Sloan Struble’s temporary (?) mental impairment, and every time I think Sloan is insufficiently depraved to get ahead in showbiz, he whips out and rips open another pixie stick of a melody and pours some (fruity) sugar on us. Is Sloan a true Christian or is he just joyful? Is it high time for us heretics to admit that there’s no discernible difference?  

Denzel Curry — King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2  Beats that are hard, beats that are funky. Beats you can feel in your dental work. Beats so block-thumping and peace-disturbing that I think I just manifested a truck. Right here in the living room, with tinted windows rattling and the trunk bumping up and down. Everglades mud flies everywhere as the engine revs and back tires spin. And I… I like it?, well, yes, and don’t worry, I’ll clean up later. My favorite Floridian hellhound is really squelching around in the sonic filth this time out, with Miami sub-bass under trap bass under digital glitch bass overlaid with various croaks and scrapes and alligator noises. You’ll recall that he dredged this deep once before on Zuu, and though this set isn’t quite as tight or tense as that one is, it does splatter more swamp ooze on the gleaming towers of the South Florida skyline. What about the words, I hear you cry. You bookish character you. Since it’s Denzel, they’re always pretty good, even if he mostly wants you to know that he’s armed. I reckon that’s something you would have surmised anyway.

Dina Ögon — Orion  I would really really appreciate it if someone would prevent me from playing and replaying this half hour exercise in seamlessly executed and scintillating streambait. That is how the digital trout end up on the digital hook, and the next thing you know, you are the fillet on the picnic table at the mountain retreat of some Spotify exec. I haven’t got the faintest idea what these airless funkmasters are saying or even what language they’re speaking. Even at the phonetic level, I’m not sure what consonants or vowels are being made by the vocalists, if vocalists they even are. Instead everything sides into a gravel pit of blunted fricatives and undifferentiated diphthongs. But it all sounds good, and sometimes, it even coheres into a hook, buoyed by scratchy guitar and the kind of bass parts that really put the motor into the merry-go-round. Sometimes I think they’re singing about Huguenots. But of course they aren’t. No, this is an exercise in the sort of post-discursive, post-linguistic pop that the Scandis who run the streaming services would like to make our future — impeccably discharged music with all the rough edges sanded away, nestled into some nebulous middle ground adjacent to all genres and traditions but committed to none, rootless and place-less, pure sound and song as a lubricant to the half-there interactions that increasingly define our lives. What bugs me isn’t that it exists. What bugs me is how well it works.

Doechii — Alligator Bites Never Heal  This lightning-quick rapper and storyteller with alacrity to burn is presently on a come-up that reminds me quite a bit of J. Cole’s. Like Cole, Doechii has come to prominence via a powerful mainstream hip-hop imprint (TDE, in her case) that is allowing her to be herself, if “herself” can be understood to mean an amalgam of respected rap influences that have yet to be fully synthesized. On Alligator Bites, Doechii may remind you of the good version of Nicki Minaj, Azealia Banks circa “212,” and Tierra Whack. There is still lots of solid matter in the blender. She seems like she’s very close to realizing an intelligent and self-aware personal style unlike that of any of her peers, but she isn’t there yet. In the meantime, she’s got bars, puns, and put-downs, and plenty of energy, and that will certainly do. Nevertheless, her best verse of the year is on Chromakopia.    

Dua Lipa — Radical Optimism  I’m not sure how much Mister Kevin from Down Under imparted to this particular Parkerilla. His sonic and compositional signature is vaguely discernible through the blastwave of Dua’s voice on “Illusion” and maybe some of the note choices on “Whatcha Want.” But in no way has the producer dragged his eager charge into Melody’s echo chamber. Parker works for different master now, and they’ve got different expectations. They weren’t going to let him pull an Innerspeaker here, no matter how much Dua respects him. Sometimes they’ll hire an adventurous indie director to make one of those Harry Potter movies and you might think, well, this is gonna be a trip. Then it’s the same castle and the same CGI. The truth is that post-Lonerism Tame Impala has been so thoroughly incorporated into and digested by the body of mainstream music that Kevin Parker’s fancies don’t seem like that much of a departure from expectation anyway. So call this what it is: a sturdy corporate pop album full of catchy but conventional tunes given a mild psychedelic twirl by a celebrated hired gun who, at this point, is a lot closer to Jack Antonoff than he thinks he is. It’s not a foregrounding of the producer’s talents or a fusion of two visions or even a good old-fashioned pop collab. The boardroom is no place for minds to meet.  

Ducks Ltd. — Harm’s Way  The fastest strummers in the West return for another indiepop roundup. The six-strings still chime, and they’re ringing those chimes with the berserk vigor of a Salvation Army Santa with a quota. There are more ducks gathered on the pond then there used to be too; the tight two-man plus beatbox plus string section attack of Modern Fiction has broadened to include a battery of percussionists. On Harm’s Way, the drum machine parts are augmented by live drums, unless it’s the other way around. It’s all a recipe for treble saturation, and the vocalists must expend energy clawing their way through the thicket that might better be applied to performance, or speechifying, or tiddly-winks. The briskness disguises a slight but measurable deterioration in the tunesmithing. I do appreciate Tom McGreevy’s sympathy for the plight of the bulk-innings middle reliever, even if he is a Blow Jays fan. Let’s see if the suits at the Rogers Center will let him call a few innings.  1-2-3 innings, naturally.

Dummy — Free Energy  Stereolabby organ chords and clever pedal board hijinx distinguish this competent band from the many others bending the whammy hammer in emulation of the first wave of college rock space cadets.  If they want to project personality, though, (not sure they do), they’re going to have to try a little harder. Lyrics that aren’t absolute garbage would help. 

Elbow — Audio Vertigo  Phife Dawg once told us he’d bend that ass like elbow macaroni. He was of course talking about the 2024 Elbow album Audio Vertigo, what with its aggression, its sinuousness, its overt threats, its thick and gooey bottom. Guy Garvey’s low end theory is a mixed proposition: on the one hand, this is much less of a precious Fabergé egg than we’ve been getting from him lately, and on the other, the lovely, vaguely latin piano pop feel of sets like Little Fictions and Flying Dream 1 is in abeyance for the season. Barry Manilow feels spurned. Arguably Elbow is more valuable to us when they’re being meticulous, since they’re so good at that and it’s their natural state, but a man must have moods, and the manner in which they are “rocking out,” quote unquote, could not be called un-planned. Thrashers like “Balu” demand the immediate attention, but as usual, it’s the weird deep cuts like “Knife Fight” that end up sticking the best. So goes art rock when you can do it, which they certainly can. On Garvey’s prior sociopolitical sets, he told us of the plight of the huddled masses; on Audio Vertigo, he finally owns up to the fact that he hasn’t seen a huddled mass in years. Guy feels bad about this. But what can you do? God put him on earth to intone lovelorn ballads, overemphasize his syllables, moan about his sad captains, and project a vague and wounded optimism. Don’t fight the big guy, Guy.  

Empress Of — For Your Consideration  Au courant (albeit sleazy) synth pop plus a few tracks en español that tack a good deal closer to La Isla Bonita than these navigators probably intended to go. These baby back ribs are coated with as much grease as the barbecue brush can handle, and now it’s all fatty and sticky and dripping all over your shirt. Loreley claims her sexual prerogatives in a proprietary yet strangely absent manner, and reserves the right to change her mind mid-grind and administer blue balls. Mostly she likes to mix metaphors: “I want your tongue to read my mind” is about the gist of it. Hey, it’s not like you don’t know what she means. Enjoyable, brainless, danceable, inessential. 

Father John Misty — Mahashmashana  Uh oh, this guy again. He’s back to remind us again why we should never take spiritual guidance from an atheist. Once more we will sift through irreligious nonsense about God, showy self-loathing, ironic classicism, references to movies no man should see and detailed accounts of drug experiences no man should have. We will put up with it all because of the voice, which remains top of the line, and because Elton John and Bernie Taupin aren’t hanging out anymore. As Josh ages and the tide of verbiage recedes, his inner core of John Denverness becomes increasingly visible; no doubt this thrills his buddy Lana Del Rey if nobody else. We might charitably view Josh as a Californian prohibited from achieving the Rocky Mountain high he badly wants by accidents of geography and circumstance. Some of the resulting cynicism is redeemed by an undying commitment to bombast that indicates that he believes in something after all, even if that something is cinematic overkill. The rest is covered by the saxophones. And on “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All,” he even finds it in his party-pooping heart to give us a groove. Get down, Father John Misty. 

Faye Webster — Underdressed at the Symphony  This writer has sometimes struggled to find a sound that matches her peculiar wry standoffishness, the lazy smarts of her words, and her can’t-be-arsed attitude about sex and romance. Pretty much none of that plays in country music, where forceful presence, gleefully oversold punchlines, and saloon-rocking consequences of cheating hearts are standard practice. Hence I rate this one ahead of the celebrated I Know I’m Funny Ha Ha, an album that captured pandemic-era limpness and the transience of shallow emotional experience a little too well. Instead of roots-rock, we get hovering synth pads, some humid vocal treatments, slooooow hip-hop beats, and a pianist who sounds like he’s a half-century late to the Caledonia Soul Orchestra audition. And repetition. Lots of repetition. Lots of repetition. Lots of repetition. It’s the sort of environment where one would not be shocked to find Lil Yachty screwing around, and there he is, screwing around. As for Faye herself, she’s okay with having her boyfriend comb her hair, and she doesn’t even mind that he owes her money. But she’d prefer it if they didn’t kiss. Not quite Julia Jacklin levels of anhedonia, but still winkingly tepid. It’s part of her point: we introverts can easily spend our lives going over and over and over the same prefab formulations in our heads, comfortably sitting in pretty ruts, lost in a song and an occasional phone call to mom, watching t-t-t-t-t-t-time slip away. This connoisseur of ennui may finally be getting bored of boredom.

Friko — Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here  Brisk, tight twenty-year throwback rock record from a couple of enterprising kids from Chicago. Like the Japandroids or the Front Bottoms or certain segments on the Muppet Show, one character hollers while the other bangs the drum. Friko evokes memories of several cornerstones of the indie style at once, including Arcade Fire on “Get Numb to It!,” Elliott Smith on “For Ella,” a little Okkervil, a little Modest Mouse, and several eras of Conor Oberst’s career. One can see how these fairly memorable, extremely shoutable songs  ot this band traction in a local club scene. They’re also guilty of some of the same indulgences that made ‘00s indie an irritating proposition, including dense, squashed, undifferentiated sound, warbling vox, guitar noise for its own sake, and constant bellyaching about their surroundings. When Niko Kapetan tells us he’s either too old, too bold, or too stupid to move, I don’t reckon he’s talking about leaving Illinois. I think he means that in a pinch, he can’t motivate himself to act. Anyway, let’s let that pass and call this what it is: a decent start. 

Gift — Illuminator  Well here’s a surprise: the second straight album of top-to-bottom quality-insured tracks from this Bushwick combo fronted by a Michael Quercio-voiced producer-writer with a golden touch in the home studio. Safe at any speed. Most bands working the sunny side of the psychedelic mountain are only good for a blog track or two before their pooched punt. But TJ Freda, who could well be scoring Imax movies on the wonders of the atom or the like, isn’t like that. Dude clearly has something to prove, a firm idea of the long game, and a permanent green light. Ringo drum fills, MBV guitar backwash, Kevin Parker bass and copious Carnival of Light-isms all slide around on the gleaming teflon surface of his music like fried eggs. Flip ‘em and let ‘em sizzle. TJ’s skill at synthesis makes Illuminator one of the year’s true ez listening experiences, and that’s a double-sided spatula right there. You can really see how someone invested in shoegaze — a true believer in the aesthetic value of gazing at shoes — might take offense at TJ’s shameless application of thorny alternative sounds to music that’s about as alternative as Sen. James Lankford (R-OK). I get that. But let’s face it: if shoegaze revivalists ever had anything to contribute, their lack of pop smarts and sound-over-song approach has exhausted their movement by now, if you even want to call it a movement, which I do not. A little mercenary action from a well-meaning neighbor with ambitions beyond the neighborhood might serve them all well.  Unfortunately for TJ, Illuminator comes at the exact moment when popular music is drying out and reaching out and chucking introspection in favor of engagement at the Pink Pony Club. I can’t imagine there’ll be too much appetite for stuff like this until the next lockdown. Timing is everything, vol. #4080. 

Glass Beach — Plastic Death  Can’t knock the ambition. This is a straight-up progressive rock album from a band previously known for chiptune emo, and it comes complete with widdly analog modeling synthesizer, souped-up leads and big blasts of guitar sludge, vibraphone plinks, suspended chords, formal songwriting transgressions, and pandemic-era existential anxiety and body horror. It’s well played — the drummer, in particular, appears to have spent the quarantine listening to Haken, etc., and taking notes. Nothing like a period of repose to encourage woodshedding. That said, the the singer does not have the voice or the charisma to guide the listener through the scrum, or to smooth out his jarring mismatches between adjectives and nouns (“your malnourished architecture trembles with each austere breath,” ick). Also, J McClendon’s mewling Thom Yorke impersonation goes down even worse than Thom Yorke Original Flavor. 

Gracie Abrams — The Secret of Us  I was in the barber’s chair when I greeted the new day. My hairdresser, God bless her, didn’t have a playlist on; instead, it was good old fashioned radio she was listening to. She sang along to the hits: Dasha, Sabrina Carpenter and her bed chem, Olivia Rodrigo, Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova,” I could eat that girl for lunch, etcetera. Even second-order artists like Gracie Abrams sounded right in this context. They were doing what pop singers do, or used to do, telling witty stories about their observations and obsessions, drawing outlines of their characters in brightly colored chalk, stepping to center stage and courting thrown tomatoes, getting over on audacity, aspiration, and charisma, beats and tunes. I did not feel uninvited, but at the same time, I recognized 1.) that this was music for girls, written by young women about the experience of being a girl, and 2.) that girls have aggressively reoriented and rejuvenated popular music every time it seemed like it was getting stuck in the mire. And it was nice to hear all of these artists making their debt to Taylor Swift evident, denying nothing, walking with their heads held high on ground that had been broken for them by an immediate forerunner who reminded everybody of the power of storytelling, talent, sonic clarity, and the projection of personality. All of that stuff had been getting lost, and we can understand why. Reality has been nobody’s sweetheart. Disengagment via reverb tricks, tracking, and lyrical misdirection is exactly what you’d expect to get from young people making records. When there are no good waking options, the only rational thing to do is retreat into a dream; Sam Lowry could tell you that. But pop heroes are irrational people. They don’t gaze at shoes. Pop heroes gaze straight at you.

Haley Heynderickx — Seed of a Seed  Some may call it ironic that the new album from this Phil-Am singer-songwriter from Portland is closer in spirit to the spectral British folk-rock tradition than the latest Laura Marling and the latest Beth Orton put together. But what is the Oregon coast but Norwich with fewer kippers? Seed of a Seed was not produced by Joe Boyd on Whitsunday in the middle of Stonehenge, but it’s still suitable for spellcasting sessions at a coven near you. The obstacle for the witches — the evil ones, mind you — is that Haley isn’t spooky at all. Haley worries that moving to the forest with no skillset is untenable. Plus she’s a little freaked out by the hummingbird’s voraciousness for nectar and the intensity of contemporary cellphone marketing. This is not how a true dryad talks. Her guitar, on the other hand, betrays an enthusiasm for things primal and wooded that her words don’t always carry. She’s added a heavy infusion of Janschitude to her thumb-thumping John Fahey licks and circular six-string patterns, and I’ll be damned if she doesn’t get us there in the glen (are there glens in Oregon) among the purple heather (is there purple heather in Oregon) beside the blasted heath (Oregon is pretty blasted). Somewhere a teakettle is whistling. The ravens are rocking along. In conditions like this, it’d be a Wiccan sin not to weave an enchantment. So go ahead, Haley. Whatever ancient Luddite magic you’ve got cooking, I’m open to it. Into the Wicker Man with me.  

Halsey — The Great Impersonator  No anxiety of influence for Ashley Frangipane. Instead she is upfront about who she is trying to rip off on each of these songs. Imitation is the tacit theme on lots of pop albums but rarely does a magpie operate in plain sight like this. Her targets are the usual customers: Joni, Tori, Bowie, Fiona Applesauce, a little fake metal on the Evanescence tribute, etc.  Mercifully ashley has no time for Leonard Cohen. Whew. She doesn’t mention her mammoth debt to Taylor Alison Swift; maybe that goes without saying. All of this exposure to the greats has mostly made her think about herself, particularly her various psychological problems and eating disorders. We learn (on several tracks) that she has difficulty keeping on the weight. This feels like a humblebrag no matter how forlorn she sounds. She also tells us about specific medical emergencies she’s been through, and her desire to cut herself, and… yeah, did we really need nineteen songs of this in various pop styles? Next time around she can just present us with the medical charts. Obviously she was more interesting when she was hanging out with Trent Reznor and pretending to be evil, but I can see how such company could wear on a person after awhile. I do think that she should be able to tell the difference between love and a panic attack by now. When you have a panic attack, your hands feel numb and your mouth gets dry. When you have love, you feel stirrings in your holes. Take it from a person with a lot of experience with both afflictions, Ashley. 

Helado Negro — Phasor  By now we can see that the constellation of echo-based recording effects, sonic avoidance techniques, and 4AD nostalgia that I affectionately called mushrock is on the way out. The three pop singers who’ve penetrated mass consciousness in 2024 — Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Charli XCX — make music that plays as a straight-up repudiation of mush virtues. Chappell’s album, which is very good, came out in ’23 but didn’t catch fire until this spring; Charli’s Brat has the usual Charli problems, but obscurantism isn’t one of them. Like an ‘80s star, she’s confronting the moment head on. Over on the left of the dial, the long winter of psychedelic dominance is melting away, too, as listeners turn from the Gizzard Wizard approach and taking another look at emo and pop-punk bands who bother to write songs. Meanwhile, rap fans wasted half of the year on a rap battle, which will always be the worst form of hip-hop. In retrospect, the mushrock style was already exhaustedly by 2020, but was given fresh momentum by the pandemic and the dreadful quarantine projects that happened during the period when artists had nothing to do but play around with their protools reverb settings. Taylor Swift’s cautious adoption of mush elements was widely copied by artists with much less to say than she has. In my view, Taylor’s defensible decision to make a double album for the previously committed cleared the field for others to dominate 2024 with a new mush-free sound. You can always count on her to play the long game on behalf of the industry. 

Hey, Ily — Hey, I Loathe You!  Quite a tumbling Katamari of styles over here. Metal, chiptune and 8-bit hijinx, singalong power pop, ninety-miles-a-minute new wave, proggy bits reminiscent of ‘80s Rush, dead mall vaporwave, tape and pedal experimentation, and that easycore tendency to jump from a heavy genre to a lighter one at the exact moment when the noise gets too much to bear. The lyrics, though, are pure emo, full of bad feelings and parental neglect and the realization that love equals worry. There’s a song called “Pass the Body Dysmorphia, Please!” that’s a brutal examination of anorexia, and a pure screamer that ends with an INFP confession/declaration/anthem: “I will never hurt the way I’ve been hurt.” Are they reeling or are they proud? It’s a little of both, I reckon. Also, I appreciate the “Heart of the Sunrise” quote at the apex of the final track. All these emo kids are closet Yes fans, I swear. They know what’s good.

Holy Wire — The Ending of an Age  I like to think of myself as a discerning customer. My sharp ears have earned me a good five dollars and seventy five cents over the years. But if you made a shuffle mix with Holy Wire material and songs by Nation of Language, I am not sure I could tell you which is which. Synthpop is, proudly, art in the age of mechanical reproduction, so it’s not surprising to find two practitioners running off facsimiles of New Order and Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark simultaneously. It’s just that I like to know who I am listening to. The playlist-makers at streaming services behave like it doesn’t really matter; it’s just a brand identity slapped on a particular algorithm, so who cares who the author is, if it can be said that there is an author at all. The tracks work, right?, put a sufficient amount of charge in the motor and turn the ignition and they’ll go. We can appreciate the efficiency of the ride, and even the aesthetics of its design. But the point of the monorail is to get you to the magic kingdom. You’re not supposed to ride it all day. Space Mountain is going to close. 

Isobel Campbell — Bow to Love  So Isobel is a Star Wars fan. That tracks. She’s frequently transmitting from a galaxy far far away. If Belle is Yoda, that makes Stuart Murdoch C-3PO (fussy, anxious, team player even when disassembled) and Sarah Martin R2-D2 (cute, high voice, makes booping noises). Obviously Mark Lanegan is brooding Kylo Ren. He comes into the story later. On her own in Dagobah, Isobel continues to work by subtraction, isolating the mark of compositional distinction in each of her confections and excising all elements that don’t support it. It’s a minimalist approach made sketchier by her wisp of a voice, which floats around these arrangements like a spacecraft in Cloud City. She’ll never do it quite as well as she did on The Green Fields Of Foreverland, but nobody else will, either. Bow to Love is smarter, more seamless, and more experimental than its very good predecessor, even if it lacks There Is No Other…’s trio of undeniable cuts that link Isobel to the British folk-rock tradition. Are her mind tricks sufficient to lift the X-Wing of tweepop from the swampy morass of modern music? There’s room for her on the filk circuit regardless, if there is a filk circuit these days. I assume there is. Weird Al awaits her call.  

Japandroids — Fate & Alcohol  When opening a time capsule, it’s best to wait awhile for the gases from the process of fermentation to become inert. Otherwise phew. Twelve years is not enough for the sulfur to dissipate. The Japandroids haven’t changed at all or altered their approach since the Bush administration. Their imperviousness to transformation makes listening to them in 2024 a pretty good index of how radically the milieu around them has changed. These guys are sitting in the same dive, bragging about their alcohol consumption and clinging to the tatters of their youth. They’re chasing femme fatales in red dresses, only not really, since they can’t get up off the barstool. They don’t wanna know that you love them if you ain’t gonna do something about it, haw haw; they’re going to pump their fists and high-five each other while you make what you can out of their peckers. The constant frenetic strum is meant to connote acceleration from red light to red light as the city whizzes by them on their last chance power drive, our maybe just their trip to the 7-11 for smokes and beef jerky. And the audience that used to cheer for this stuff is gone. Critics who once waved away the bro-down clichés and dropped stars on Japandroids albums have moved on to Adrianne Lenker and Charli XCX.  Moreover, increased clarity isn’t doing them any favors. Separating the vox from the six-string morass calls attention to the inebriated specifics of their shopworn sentiment. They still sound like they’re riding for one hell of a crash. Also, they still need a bass player. 

J. Cole — Might Delete Later  Jermaine Cole, music critic. I like it. More than he does, apparently; he yanked “Seven Minute Drill” from streaming services before we in the digital fifth estate had an opportunity to craft our concurrences and ripostes. Perhaps Cole was ashamed to be associated with the likes of us, which I do understand. More likely he decided that the rabble was right: this was no way to make a modern diss record. Apparently you’re supposed to accuse your target of child molestation. Cole doesn’t have it in him, and that speaks well of Cole. I, for one, cannot work up much interest in Drake’s sex life, and that is after listening to countless albums and mixtapes of Drake banging on about it. I’m much more interested in the track by track peer review model that Cole halfheartedly trots out here, and I reckon if he put both cheeks into it, as the sportscasters say, he’d be on to something. Wouldn’t you tune in for the J. Cole critical discographies series? It could be a whole podcast in rhyme. It’s a much better use of his knack for wordplay and metaphor (“only time they’ll see the ‘Rolls’ reversed is if they lease the Phantom,” tee hee) than what he’s been up to lately. Can’t rightly be making claims of battle rap invincibility after you’ve thoroughly vinced yourself in public, now can you. I reckon Jermaine should take the same sidestep into the booth that Jeff Van Gundy did after Yao Ming bricked all of those shots in the playoffs. He’d make an excellent member of the commentariat. He’s dead wrong about To Pimp a Butterfly, though. That’s a certified classic. 

Jessica Pratt — Here in the Pitch  The return of the elf.  She’s still as elfin as you remember, too, with that little Keebler cookie of a voice of hers sitting to the side of the sumptuous repast of popular music. Maybe the biscuit is getting a wee bit soggy from all of the steam. This time around, Jessica’s producers match her with music as warm and homey and waxy as candle-drippings, and it does connect the artist to the classic folk-pop tradition that has sometimes eluded her. The arrangement aesthetic involves heavy orchestral artillery pittering away as softly as the musicians can manage. Ever wonder if Jessica can bang the timpani and tickle the glockenspiel without getting thrown out of the library? Now, the style of music where hypermuted maximalism is the rule is bossa nova, and Jessica does drop some Jobim changes and “Girl From Ipanema” rhythms into her latest numbers. She’s even enlisted Mauro Refosco, veteran of David Byrne’s South American jungle expeditions, to lay down some percussion. As for the principal, she announces her intention to fix her known problem with assertiveness, which, in pop, has got to be a step in the right direction, even if she’s just planning to plan. Jessica puts her nascent swagger into practice by copping Pink Floyd’s “Wot’s… Uh the Deal” in its entirety. That shows good taste, I think. Everybody knows and loves Dark Side. Only a real art rocker would pilfer a melody from Obscured by Clouds.

John Van Deusen — Anthem Sprinter  Not Christian rock per se but rock made by a songwriter who I recognize immediately as a Christian. It’s not just that the outlook that John Van Deusen expresses through his music feels Christian to me.  it’s that Christianity is central to John’s motivation, and he doesn’t have to carry a cross for us or splash holy water in our direction to make us feel its importance to him. I’d say the same about the first couple of Paramore albums and most of Kendrick’s catalog, too. Adam Young practically lives in this category. Not to disparage anybody’s liturgical or devotional experience, but it has always seemed to me that the Gospel is a real pop song of a message, and it needs to be spread in a popular context that CCM, needlessly self-segregating as it is, refuses to participate in. Thus I wanna give it up to John from the back pews for howling away through another set of Death Cabbish rockers. These are songs sanctified by the purity of his belief and the conviction with which he sings. Church is where you find it, vol. 4080.

Jordana — Lively Premonition  Jordana wears her wampum beads and fills her drawing book with line. But do we really need a Canyon lady who thinks “I love to be loved like a dog” is an acceptable chorus? AM radio soft-rock remains a refuge for those flailing for a direction. But if it was as easy as copying instrument sounds and a certain attitude, Pearl Charles would be a retro-pop star. I think we need to declare the early Seventies off limits for awhile to all those without a handwritten note from Carly Simon.

Kali Uchis — Orquideas  Livelier than Red Moon in Venus and therefore a more appealing proposition, since Kali, big talent though she is, has lately allowed herself to be swamped by her own languor. There has been haze, mist, and gook in the gypsy tent, and now the mystic can’t even make out the triangles on her magic 8-ball. Misdirection and obscurantism is all part of the divination act, sure, but maybe not the good part. When Kali blows off the fog and takes the reins, she proves that there’s nobody better at knitting together the parallel threads of reggaeton, art-pop, and Sade-style Swedish taboo music. She has repaid her debt to Lana Del Rey by adding her own brand of gauzy cinematic nonsense to the Pan-American amalgam that her forerunner has cooked up in California, allowing the mush to serve as a metaphor for intercultural dislocation and the whiplash a girl might get after ping-ponging between Miami, Los Angeles, and Medellín. She’s spaced on the hip-hop beats that gave her early recordings the low-riding drive that they had, but that’s true about LDR, too. Kali can, however, lay us flat with a showstopping trad-Latin ballad like “Te Mata.” Delightful, frustrating. If she’s become too sophisticated to bring us the street beats, maybe she ought to do that kind of thing more often?

Kaonashi — The 3 Faces of Beauty: A Violent Misinterpretation of Morgan Montgomery   In 2021, Kaonashi released a stupefying album called Dear Lemon House, You Ruined Me: Senior Year. You didn’t hear it that year, and neither did I, because it’s cut in an deliberately abrasive and off-putting style — atonal metalcore, with every song splattered all over the listener like a goop-filled water balloon and every vocal delivered with the howling conviction of a samurai in the middle of committing seppuku. I’ve since put myself through the Lemon House experience a few times, and that’s frankly all I can take. But I have heard it enough to recognize its formidable spastic coherence. Once I realized what Peter Rono is yelling about, the brutal musical accompaniment became not merely appropriate but the only possible way to go. Lemon House tells the story of a school shooter and his everyday radicalization, mostly done by parents and teachers who keep missing the signs of impending disaster, and part of Kaonashi’s achievement is that they’ve made this mess-up feel utterly believable. We don’t know if Jamie, the tortured, gender-ambiguous main character of the story, goes through with the assault at the end of the story, but it doesn’t matter. The final accusation delivers one of the most powerful punches that any work of art has landed this century. If I had to re-rank the best albums I’ve heard in the past decade, I’d be remiss if I didn’t put Lemon House near the top. Subsequent Kaonashi projects have stepped back a bit from the abyss, but they’re still pandemonium, and Peter Rono continues to write like a lit master. Or a lit monster; same thing. His brutal, vulgar investigations of Philadelphia after dark, the racial and sexual politics of his city, and the horrors of the Temple University mascot continue to impress the hell out of me. If you ever loved “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies, you owe it to yourself to listen to this at least once. Pro tip, though: keep the lyric sheet in front of you. 

Katy Kirby — Blue Raspberry  Sometimes people will flirt by hanging a mean nickname on you. It’s a cope: a way to approach ungovernable feelings. We apply our cynicism to that which our emotions cannot handle. Saul Bellow told us that love means overvaluing the object of desire, and while I don’t agree with that, it’s easy to see how that understanding might comfort Katy during her transition to same-sex romantic relationships. Still, I can’t imagine that anybody would enjoy being repeatedly likened to cubic zirconia, or, for that matter, blue raspberry. These are artificial things that are valued for the sensations they generate. At base, they’re phony. The rhinestones on the girlfriend’s baseball cap catch Katy’s eye, but she knows they’re not diamonds. Blue raspberry, a popular flavor, corresponds to nothing at the farmstand. Katy imagines that Cubic Zirconia — the character, not the fake gemstone — was born in a laboratory. Thus she must ask herself why she is drawn to the unnatural. Is this all a little homophobic? Well, probably, but it’s also an honest representation of sexual confusion as it might be experienced by a young woman worried about her own authenticity and place in the flow of things. The compositional intelligence she displayed on Cool Dry Place hasn’t exactly sharpened, but she’s now shown that she can extend musical and lyrical ideas over the course of a set. That keeps her a few steps ahead of the competition, especially when she gets unfashionably Beatlesque on salt crystals. Blue Raspberry turns out to be the rare sort of second album that retrospectively enhances the qualities of the first, which augurs well for the future trajectory of the songwriter, if not the partnership with Cubic Zirconia. Because that shit is going nowhere. Get your last thrusts in, Katy.

Kanye West & Tye Dolla $ign — Vultures 1  Sure, parts of this are boring and vainglorious in that specific vainboreous manner that Mister West has been cultivating since the end of the Life of Pablo. He’s been spackling over the cracks in the fundament of his mental facilities with the unguent of overdramatization ever since. And sure, “Carnival” is a bad song. Yet the funny thing about this exhausting and occasionally infuriating set is that it demonstrates how much he’s got left. The big beat at the end of “Paid,” that industrial synth on “Paperwork,” the chord progression on “Hoodrat,” the electropop bite on “Don’t Die,” the ferocious throwback rap-soul on “Burn”… well, let’s put it this way. A lot of name producers have been sweating hard to achieve the same dramatic effects, and they still aren’t close to the drunken master. (Drunken on paranoia and egomania, I mean.) His disposition hasn’t changed too much. As the world has grown more squeamish about exhibitions of power, he’s still telling the same rude jokes and clinging with great belligerence to his arrogance and privilege. Me, I’m from the era when rock stars — and Kanye remains 100% rock star — were obligated to do just that. Otherwise they’d take the Lear Jet away. Vultures elicits more smirks than laughs, and that does hurt, because Kanye at his best was good for a few screamers per album. But you’ll never look at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in the same way. And when Freddie Gibbs comes in and rips up “Back to Me” like your triumphant fat-walleted papa once ripped up bills that he’d paid in full, you’ll even forgive the disgusting movie sample. Oh, Tye Dolla $ign is on this, too?  My ears skip right over that. Just like a stone skipping on the surface of Kanye’s bottomless reservoir of compelling bullshit.

Kelly Lee Owens — Dreamstate  You could call this an overcorrection. That last set of hers was inscrutable, and you can sure as hell scroot this one. On Dreamstate, she’s yoked her synth hijinx to club-ready mushtronica, ‘verbed out and largely inoffensive, and suitable for corporate-sponsored raves, low-key sporting events, and apple product introductions. There’s standard Madonnafied chord changes, standard beat-switches, standard belly itches. Kelly Lee asks her machines to behave, and for the most part they do. Vox are sometimes boilerplate blissed-out dream-pop, and sometimes delivered with a mounting desperation reminiscent of the impoverished whore in Full Metal Jacket. She can’t control herself completely. Wven in this circumscribed context, it’s a pleasure to hear crank what she can out of her electro devices. In retrospect it’s hard to overestimate how seismic those first two albums were for those of us who play synthesizers: rhythm tricks and gates and sweeps and little strategy games played with overtones and latches and the entire battery of options present on the user interface. It was like someone had finally read the manual. It’s hard not to want her to keep shooting the works. But a girl’s gotta dance, too. Regardless, me love her long time.   

Kendrick Lamar — GNX  The most unbearable thing about populism is how phony it is. It is espoused by pots who spend all day calling the kettle black. All of these people drink straight from the money river that flows around the globe and respects no borders. Bolsonaro, for instance, is a notorious dirty-cash launderer and diamond coveter. J.D. Vance is a protégé of Peter Thiel. Kendrick Lamar is, like Drake, a major label recording artist and apparel salesman who has had the undying support of the entertainment industry throughout his adult life. I cannot help but notice that this man of the people who stacked major bank in 2024 by accusing his adversaries of being not like us (us, this peerless individual has the audacity to say!) has Jack Antonoff all over his new album. Never mind that it’s hard to tell what assistance Jack gave to DJ Mustard, a man perfectly capable of cooking up hot hyphy beats on his own. If an Illuminati exists, Jack has got to be part of it. There is nobody who represents the networked Hollywood incursion into pop any more profoundly than Jack does. If Kendrick’s us includes Jack, then his anthem is just as meaningless as the speeches of rich politicians and crypto-manipulators who define elite as anybody who happens to stand in their way.  This year, we watched Kendrick whip up the attack dogs with red meat and set them at the throats of his industry opponents, all in the name of salt-of-the-earth normalcy, and if he keeps this up, he really is liable to land in the cabinet. On GNX, he attempts to have it both ways: Kendrick wants to call himself the latest avatar of near-supernatural black genius, but he also wants to frame himself as an everyday truth-teller and a street-level savior. Like Elon Musk, he’s telling us that he’s simultaneously one of us and way above us. He’s asking us to ignore the evident contradictions and embrace his messianic intentions. As much as the poetry sings, and as good as the rapping and production is, all the stacked horseshit is really starting to reek. It was Drake who stood on the Grammy stage and told his fellow artists that as long as they had a committed audience, they didn’t need to kiss ass and make a big deal out of a trade show and its enticements. I further recall that Kendrick was happy to accept the Pulitzer Prize right alongside Peggy Noonan. It’s Kendrick who, just after the inauguration, will take the stage at the halftime show of the damned Superbowl. There he will perform “Not Like Us” to a world audience increasingly enamored with reactionary solutions. They will hear the song as a repudiation of whatever imaginary cabal they believe is holding them back. Yes, they’ll also think of Drake and his public humiliation in a rhyme battle. But this dispute stopped being a rap beef a long time ago. Like everything else in 2024, it took on terrifying dimensions in a hurry— overtones far beyond the speaker’s control. Because there is nothing more frightening than a mastermind possessed, and then animated, by the zeitgeist.  

Khruangbin — A La Sala  A true menace, that’s what this group has become. They’re the absolute masters at dressing up elevator music in multicultural garb and repackaging it as background sounds for parties that you are absolutely not invited to. On prior albums, they discharged it with a modicum of verve; A La Sala is just a stylish and syncopated flatline. Usually, we can count on the bass player to give this background music a little momentum, but she’s tucked herself into this pillowy mix and gone right to sleep with the rest of the band. Do us a favor and switch off the nightlight.

Kid Cudi — Insano  Lord help me I do enjoy this, even if it’s just about the least insane album released in 2024: a straightforward, interminable corporate rap record with a star who sounds like he’s late for the sneaker marketing meeting. Certain pleasures prevail, though. For instance, there’s the machine-cut gleam of state-of-the-art vocal processing software, synthesizer bass notes that yawn open like the airlocks on spaceships, and the occasional non-sequitur that connects, like when Cudi complains that his buddies keep stealing his cigarette lighters. This is, as they’ll tell you at the 92nd st. YMCA screenwriting class, believable. For a contractual obligation album (which this is), they’ve sure put a lot of work into the drums and the arty digital glitches. Then there’s the presence of DJ Drama, who runs his usual oblivious braggadocious game and makes Insano feels at times like a fast-fading afterimage of Call Me If You Get Lost. As for Cudi, he’s never written a good lyric in his life, and stuck in the Porsche in a traffic jam as he is, he’s not about to push himself any harder than he has to. But like Tim McGraw, he’s got friends that do: A$AP Rocky and Lil Wayne in particular, both of whom pop up when the sledding gets tough. For a bad album, this is pretty good.

Kim Deal — Nobody Loves You More  Even when she was singing about BBC with the Pixies, Kim never exactly had a bombshell voice. That’s why the Breeders had to cannonball into the pop-rock pool with such a gigantic six-string splash. Back at us and on her own, Kim sounds comfortable but more than a little weatherbeaten. At times she’s surprisingly reminiscent of an artist I’d reckon she’s never heard: Amber Papini from Hospitality. She’s paired an upper-middling batch of college rock songs with string and horn arrangements, or synth strings and synth horns — it’s not that easy to tell — arranged by Paul Mertens of Poi Dog Pondering. She’s stirring as much sweetener into the instant coffee as she can find on the diner table, which suggests to me that she’s got a full measure of her limitations. That’s probably why we don’t hear from her too often. When we do, it’s never a hardship. But it’s never a revelation, either. 

King Hannah — Big Swimmer  Pity the poor Brit. Dumbstruck by the alterity of these shores, she wanders the North American continent bemused and disoriented. She cannot make heads or tails of our chaotic ways, and that leads to peril. It happened to Cornwallis at Saratoga, it happened to James Bond, it happened to the daughter of the fifth Baronet of Marling on Short Movie, and now the transatlantic affliction has visited itself upon King Hannah. The big swim here is the trip across the Atlantic followed by immersion in the oceanic expanses of prairie and asphalt. The band channels the vastness of the American sky with big, distorted-ass guitar chords that suggest thunderheads over Kansas, and Hannah Merrick adds spoken-word reflections that play like a traveler’s half-paranoid, half-drowsy internal monologue. Hannah’s attraction to serial killer narrative parallels her fascination with the specific kind of stochastic turmoil she sees in the United States. There is plenty of violence in Britain, but it is grounded in centuries of class struggle and the Tory Bastard Exclusion Act of 1673 and the horror of bangers and mash. Here, violence is just what we feel like doing unless we don’t. A father swinging a hammer at his child barely registers as unusual. That’s not significant; that’s just a Saturday night. I refer Hannah and her sisters to the complete works of K. Hartzman. That ought to clear things up for her.

Kurvi Tasch — On Firm Ground  I picked up on this band because their name is an incredibly obscure Tintin reference, and Captain Haddock over here could not let that languish in the Internet remainder bin. Blistering barnacles and a thundering typhoon. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it: an art rock band with a bone-dry sound and comically spare three-man arrangements. The musicians operate in an odd and hermetic counterpoint in which it often seems like they’re a small time-wrinkle away from each other. Meanwhile the drummer patters away in time signatures unknown and shaves beats, and his bandmates never seem to come in on the one, if we can even discern where the one is. I’m overstating: at least half of the songs on this album are fairly normal. The other half consists of some of the most warped guitar pop I’ve heard all year — music so low-key and undersold that it’s possible these three Montrealers don’t realize how weird they are. Kurvi-Tasch, incidentally, is the distant heavy in King Ottokar’s Scepter. He’s the Stalinesque dictator of Borduria, and he sets the plot in motion by pinching the symbol of rulership from neighboring Syldavia. He never appears in the comic, but he’s referred to in several books. He’s a specter looming over Hergé’s fictional portrayal of Cold War Eastern Europe. See, even their handle turns out to be, on close inspection, a little ominous. 

Lætitia Sadier — Rooting for Love  There are two kinds of Stereolab fans: those who dig Lætitia’s voice and her, um, unique easy-listening approach to song construction, and those who sit through it all in order to get to the synthesizer arrangements. I always considered myself firmly in the latter camp, but Rooting for Love demonstrates that the very good Finding Me Finding You wasn’t a fluke. I finally see how her odd stacks of chords, austere melodies, and mid-song switch-ups invited the creative arrangements we’ve come to expect from Stereolab. Were it not for my heinous racism against the French people, would I have given Læetitia her due earlier? Well, that is neither here nor there IMO. The French have a lot of making up to do for their part in the war, and yes I do blame Lætitia partway. She’s still got two modes as a singer: that flat, melancholy the-revolution-failed affect and that dum de dum delivery that makes it sound like she’s washing her hair in the recording studio. Who knows; maybe she is. What matters is that the underlying architecture of the songs remains cool and characteristically hers. Also, on “Don’t Forget You’re Mine,” it’s fun to hear her needy narrator takes down a pompous, attention-hungry academic with a nice smack in the kisser. It feels like a Parisian slice of life blown in with the sound-dust.  

La Femme — Rock Machine  This baguette-eating combo got lost in the Ardennes Forest for awhile when singer Clemence Quellenec jumped ship after Paradigmes. But they’ve found a new Parisienne to do their wicked bidding and a new focus for their fascination with all things American. The concept is (wait for it) rock and roll, and they believe in it. This we know from “I Believe in Rock and Roll,” in which they shout in heavy French accents about how they believe in rock and roll. Not exactly what Chuck Berry had in mind, but in the interest of transatlanticism, we’ll let it slide. The melodic ideas are pinched straight from new wave, including the “Cool for Cats”-biting “White Nights” and “Gotta Make a Hit,” which sounds like Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine woke up on the wrong side of the Channel. It’s all delivered in that good-natured and insincere tone that only the French can sustain plus a hefty ice cream scoop of transnational silliness. If, to them, rock means hollering and running their guitars and synths through ratty distortion, they really can’t be blamed: they come from a godforsaken place and are thus estranged from the deeper meaning of the backbeat. We can afford to receive their enthusiasm as a gesture of friendship and aspiration. It’s like the way that prepubescent children clumsily playing house, or doctor, are paying a stealth compliment to their elders. 

Lala Tamar & Ofer Ronen — Duo Andalus  In the abstract this sounds like an ethnomusicologist’s praxis thesis: Moroccan-Israeli vocalist who sings in Haqetiya, a dialect spoken by a handful of African Jews, and a flamenco guitarist who emphasizes his music’s Middle Eastern roots. Duo Andalus is saved from the Putumayo world music bin by the uncommon grace of the musicians, who tackle this material with awe and verve that’s far more basement folk club than it is Lincoln Center (relax, I am sure they also appear at Lincoln Center.) Lala Tamar has the sinuous Levantine melisma down pat, and track after track, she charms the snake right out of the basket. But the real revelation here is the nylon six-string picker Ofer Ronen, who keeps his footing on the tricky passages, mimics the singer’s phrasing and intonation to uncanny effect, and maintains a bright, even, communicative tone that never elides passages, disguises a note, or foregrounds precision for its own sake. Like most first-rate guitarists, he’s at his most impressive when he’s keeping things simple: vamping on a suggestive groove and scrobbling away on open chords in the gorgeous “Mi Niña Lola” or picking out arpeggios under Lala’s vocals in “Bat Ahuvat El,” a track as bare and sturdy as a fig tree in the desert. All appreciators of Pour Down Like Silver ought to hear “Fragua Del Bano,” which draws connections between the Celtic, the Sephardic, and the Arabic every bit as well as Richard Thompson once did. Music: the most luminous strand in the interwoven globe. The strongest, too. 

Laura Marling — Patterns in Repeat  Shh, don’t wake the baby. If you must play and sing, do so quietly. There, roll off some of that high end and tuck yourself into your binky. Indeed our new mother sounds tired much of the time, burdened with the cradle-rocking fatigue that comes with new responsibilities. I believe her when she tells us that they’re opening up new emotional possibilities for her, even as half of the tunes on this set will remind you of Marling melodies of yore. But after many listens, I’m left with the impression that the howling child that Laura Marling is lulling into acquiescence is Laura Marling. The grown-up characters on this superhushed album are looking back on loves lost and chances missed, and square-toed capitulations made to grownup conformity, and though the production prohibits them from yelling, you can kinda tell they’re all in a snit. Laura suggests that our compromises are inevitable and likely biological, handed down through generations like a throw-rug, but I dunno, I think she’s more convincing when she kicks back at expectations and lets her controlled, upper-crusty British recalcitrance show. Even in folk rock, patterns are for breaking. 

LL Cool J — The Force Much like the David Gilmour album, this is a missive from a flawed but legendary ass-kicker who is doing things that younger artists are either incapable of doing or unwilling to do. The existence of these sets, then, is a challenge: why, young people, are you getting your brains beaten in by senior citizens? Shouldn’t you be quicker on your feet than this? Why, at one hundred and sixty three, is Gilmour still playing circles around guitarists in their twenties? Why is LL Cool J, who was a senior when Methuselah was a freshman, presently out-communicating rappers with all of their teeth and faculties intact? It cannot simply be that these are exceptional individuals that turn up once in a blue moon. Because there are other members of their peer groups — say, Q-Tip, for instance, who produced The Force in its entirety, and gives us music with good, hard edges and right angles and plenty of colorful happenstance that eludes modern beatmakers — who remain similarly vivid. It is like cutting into a tree and finding a ring close to the core that is brighter and juicier and bolder than the many that have been added since. And we may be thinking that we aren’t looking at the lumber correctly; I mean, the tree is standing, and in decent repair, and adding another thick ring right now. It couldn’t have been so much healthier back then, right? And I hope that the existence of a document such as the Pop Music Abstract and my continued close engagement with popular music lets you know that it is not merely nostalgia when I say to you: sorry, Charli. I was there. It was.

Lucy Rose — This Ain’t the Way You Go Out  It is well established that Lucy Rose is a mushroom. But what sort of mushroom is she? On prior sets she was a regular button mushroom, white and matte, plain with flecks of grit and mycelium, wrapped in cellophane in a blue carton. On the new one, she is more of a slivered and machine-dried mushroom in a Zatarain’s box, surrounded by powdered herbs and spices of varying freshness. The reasoning for the seasoning is Lucy’s encounter with jazz — or to be more exact, London jazz, a benighted form of music featuring limey live instrumentalists who emulate loops in order to cop street credentials and pretend they are hip-hop adjacent. Then they play everything way too fast. This turns out to be a decent counteractive setting for Lucy’s floaty, spore-like songwriting, since she has a pretty good chord vocabulary and she plays everything way too slow. Some London jazz crackerjacks, such as they are, contribute to this album, including producer KWES, who has worked on some of the most irritating and acclaimed albums of the twenty-first century. But the real draw here is Lucy’s vervacious piano. It gives shape to Lucy’s loosest loosie goosies. Also, I didn’t realize a mushroom could play like this. Turns out she’s one funky fungus. 

Lupe Fiasco — Samurai   No surprise to see Lupe, of all rappers, working with large language model artificial intelligence databases. He’s always been uncommonly technophilic. I still haven’t forgiven him for the NFTs. If he’s worried about being replaced by a robot (fat chance IMO), he’s not letting on: midway through the new set, he boasts of bending processors through the pure force of his lyricism. Of course that’s not how aggregators work. The computer can only spit out what we put into it, and I suppose we ought to be grateful to Lupe for contributing his own language patterns to the group effort of making hard rhyme. Then again, I don’t hear any A.I. clients rhyming acropolis with obstinate and dominance when he’s dropping this like Janis Joplin droplets at the apocalypse like Christopher Wallace’s topics atop an obelisk. More to the point, there’s the not-so-small matter of imaginative exertion and concept-mastering, a sub-art as vital to the health of the larger art of rap music as assonance and wordplay. Samurai, for instance, is a half-hour story in verse in which Amy Winehouse is converted to a battle rapper by a malignant but welcome spirit. This prompts, among other things, discourse on the split consciousness inherent in the act of rapping simultaneously as transmogrified Amy Winehouse and plain old Lupe Fiasco. Now would anybody but Lupe 1.) come up with this, 2.) deem it worthy to make an album out of, 3.) choose it as a writing framework over the infinite other frameworks that might be teasing at the rapper’s mind, and 4.) actually figure out how to make it work in the context of half-century old art practice? Maybe one day technology will catch up with that, but that day is not today, and it’s not going to be tomorrow, either. Because the large language model is going to try to solve your problem in the most economical manner possible. It’s not going to give you something wigged out and bleeding and WTF that you’ve got to synthesize and cauterize in the firing chamber of your brain. No matter how much insane shit we feed into the mainframe, its models are going to push its output toward sanity. That’s what Google et. al. has paid for. So maybe the blessing of artificial intelligence is that it really does separate the men from the boys: it makes it easier to recognize on those among us who really are inimitable. Concentrate on that and maybe we can even learn to tolerate it — if we forget about the planet-torching energy it requires to run this shit, I mean. Lupe clearly has.

Mach-Hommy — #RICHAXXHAITIAN  Because he covers his face and refuses to allow Rapgenius to publish his lyrics, this very good Vailsburg emcee has a reputation for inscrutability. But even a cursory inspection of #RICHAXXHAITIAN reveals him to be a traditionalist through and through: miles of words per minute, dusty old-school beats from Griselda affiliates, people in the background hollering bo bo bo, etc. Like Billy Woods and Mos Def, the artists he sometimes resembles, Mach-Hommy proceeds as if cloud rap never happened. The guest list here includes Black Thought, Roc Marciano, and a young guy who sounds so much like Nas that he is probably dogged by a pack of intellectual property lawyers even as I type. The protagonist’s concerns are those of a vigilant citizen rather than an anxious kid — he’s not merely asking us to confront in the parlous state of Haiti, he’d also like us to examine the reasons for its stagnation. As he sounds the alarm, he puts his observations in the context of the global south. Would I prefer it if he rapped more about Newark than he does about Port-au-Prince? Naturally, and selfishly. But in this case, I think we’re safe to dwell in the implied analogy between anarchy in the tropics and dysfunction closer to home.  

Magdalena Bay — Imaginal Disk  Don’t these kids (?) know the way to my heart. Here they are in public, claiming Tony Banks as their number one influence. In interviews they call him the architect of the Genesis sound. No lies detected, Magdalena kids (?). Tony is a famously private guy, so no word from GenesisHQ yet about whether he recognizes any of his code in the nav-software running this sleek, overbooked airliner of a disco album, or “disco album,” since the band dwells in the realm of the theoretical. Synth technology was still in its cradle at the time of Foxtrot, and Tony made the best with what he had; fifty years later, Mica and Matt Magdalena have their pick of modeling synths, softsynths, vintage synths, modular synths and whatnot, and they’re determined to use all of them on every track. There’ll be an arpeggio plus Eighties style wavetable chimes and blings plus squelchy club synthbass plus pads plus digital glitches plus portamento-bent analog leads. How do they balance all of this in the mix, I hear you ask. Ha ha you fool you. They run them all at once, circuit-breakers be damned, and add live drums and machine beats, pitch-altered and highly processed b-vox, and that elastic Tame Impala bass sound that grounds the album in the boogie-down present. The resulting digital hailstorm would be unendurable if it didn’t suit the concept so squarely — and as this is a band devoted to lethally pessimistic speculative fiction, sensory overkill is a defensible aesthetic choice. The world according to Magdalena is a shallow stream of worthless content with an endlessly undulating surface of L.E.D.-lit attractions and superficial stimulations. Which, I’m afraid, kinda checks out. The through-story concerns futuristic (?) lovers who download their personalities from a central databank, and this allows Mica to indulge in Jewish humor like “feeling disk-inserted” and pinch some paranoia from Forever Changes where it suits her. It’s also worth pointing out that the album title is biological-organic, not techno-illusory. An imaginal disc is a body formation that a mutating insect develops in a chrysalis. The disc contains the genetic programming that will, over time, become the physical form of the bug. So maybe Mica’s protagonist doesn’t need outside programming after all. Maybe she’s emerging from her pupa with the feelers and antennae and insect morality that was always sleeping inside her genomic sequence. What looks like a grand parade of lifeless packaging may, in time, be revealed as a stage in a metamorphosis too upsetting, and too fundamental, to contemplate.

Maren Morris — Intermission  Ever since busting through the bro country wall like the Kool-Aid pitcher on Hero, Maren has been casting about for a perfect middle ground between stadium C&W and Beyoncé-loving mainstream R&B. Unfortunately, Hero was that middle ground, and Busbee, alas, is the one collaborator she won’t be getting back. In retrospect that was a match for the ages, and “The Bones” notwithstanding, it was always going to be a bear to follow up. The five song Intermission tacks closer to pure pop than she’s used to going, but there’s still plenty of red dirt clay in her foundation. As fun as it is to hear her flirt with the girlies on “Push Me Over” (“sitting on the fence feels good between my legs,” you’re making me palpitate, Maren) and Benatar around on “This Is How a Woman Leaves,” the only true keeper here is the Joel Little production “Cut,” which suggests what Katy Perry might sound like if Katy could, you know, sing. 

Margaret Glaspy — The Sun Doesn’t Think Despite what you’ve heard on the service formerly known as Twitter, America remains a representational democracy. We know this because the system keeps returning leaders who suck as bad as we do, and for the same reasons we do. The Obama years were salad days for those who thought that hypercentralized, management-based meritocracy was the cure for inequality and injustice, and we’re still paying for that act of hubris. Trump is the perfect reflection of a generation of oafs who carry massive personal debt but act vindictive and entitled anyway. 2024 was the first general election since the COVID spike protein turned our gray matter to slurry, and boy howdy is this brain damage apparent in the choices we’ve been making. The elderly outgoing president appears to be experiencing zombification consistent with protracted contact with the pathogen and its derivatives. The incoming elderly president, the most transparent con man in American political history, hawks his own ignorance like a street mountebank with a bottle of Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir. Our main third party option, who will soon be in charge of our physical welfare, has had his brain eaten by a worm. These are the crisis managers whose charge it is to safeguard the country against the next neurological virus, man-made or natural, that bangs down our barricades. Because it’s coming. Flight is a reasonable impulse. But the trouble with running for the hills is that when you arrive, you’re in the hills. I don’t know how to fish or trap or apply a tourniquet, and I am not too keen on learning. A country boy in his arrogance may believe he can survive. I’m not so deluded. I have a powerful personal interest in avoiding societal collapse. My life and my well-being depends on others — thousands of others — making nonlethal decisions. And this is the two meter thermal exhaust port beneath the main reactor of America. The collective unconscious is, it turns out, something way darker than any rabbit hole. In a democracy, you are ultimately at the mercy of your neighbors. Thus all caveats apply. Choose wisely. Or soon enough, you won’t be choosing at all. 

Marika Hackman — Big Sigh  Ever get the feeling that Marika is not much of a party person? Her mommy does. She thinks Marika is a sack of shit. That kind of castigation from a parental unit is liable to give you a complex. If you can’t get moral support from your own little mommy, who, really, is going to stick up for you? Maybe Mrs. Hackman is dead sick of her daughter’s attitude. You put a smile on your face, young lady. Let it be known that unlike the artist’s parents, I do like Marika, only slightly only slightly less than I used to, as Morrissey sang in a completely different context. Marika is the sort of writer whose (bad) mood bleeds straight into the staff paper; for instance, her will to wrongfoot her interlocutors has always informed her compositional choices, what with major chords going where minor chords are expected to go and vice versa. But her disposition has become so dour and her disgust with corporeality has become so evident that nothing much percolates up from the sludgy black mass in the bottom of the coffee pot. The song titles on her fourth and bleakest set say it all: “Blood,” “Hanging,” “No Caffeine,” and, for good measure, “Vitamins.” She’s bitterly ironic about them. References in the lyrics to intubation, screaming into a bag, organic filth, the sucking of flies on human bodies, cracking bones (several times), the afterbirth, and pulling the wings off of insects. “Show me around your garden of slime,” she tells a prospective partner, “and I’ll show you mine.” Works at the pickup bar every time. I remember when she still had the moxie to sing about suffocating another young woman with her vagina. Grim, but spirited. Murderous intent would improve her outlook substantially. She’ll get back there someday, I’m sure of it.

Marina Allen — Eight Pointed Star Los Angeles country rocker gracefully navigates a well-trod footpath. Points for not using the guardrails, I guess. Marina has a pleasant voice, but she’s also got a habit of letting her pitch wilt and die at the ends of her phrases. It’s a style, and it’s meant to be languorous and sexy, but it mostly sounds like she’s losing interest in her own melodies. Much of Eight Pointed Star is listless even by the bleary standards of Southern California artistic production. “Red Cloud” implies she had some formative experience on the prairie, which I don’t exactly buy; “I’m the same,” a straight-up lift of “Southern Cross,” implies she had a formative experience thinking about Stephen Stills’s boat, which I absolutely do buy. Recommended for those who absolutely must have additional Widowspeak material immediately. That’s nobody at all, I reckon. See also: Rosali.

Mary Timony — Untame the Tiger  When I first saw Mary Timony play at Maxwell’s in the early 1990s, I was struck sideways by her guitar playing. Try though I did to decode her approach to her fretboard, I didn’t understand how she was doing what she was doing. Timony’s six-string idiosyncrasy didn’t seem that far removed from that of Liz Phair. I couldn’t figure out her parts, either. This felt like the future: the guitar was an expansive instrument, full of possibilities, and ready to reward imaginative approaches that didn’t conform to the barred basics. Of course it didn’t turn out that way. I will defend Liz Phair’s pop-move albums before the Hague if I have to, but I cannot deny that I hated how her axe got buried behind slick El Lay parts by pedestrian players. Timony’s handshake with expectations was less sudden. As many rational grownups do, she grew more conventional by degrees. She can allude to progressive rock and roots traditions, as she does on Untame the Tiger, without giving anybody pause. Now and then, especially when she’s singing about a long-term relationship that has dissolved amidst acrimony, her leads rise up like an adder and lash out. They’re like little flashes of the old you, weird and uncompromising, that emerge when the civilized new you is under stress. I could get used to this kind of untaming. Maybe that’s what anger and disappointment is for. They’re static charges from the unconscious meant to jolt us free of our compromises, and bring us back to the unruly hellraisers we once were.

Mdou Moctar — Funeral for Justice  Though Bob Geldof and company are comfortable making sweeping generalizations about where there will or won’t be snow this Christmastime, Africa is a big place. It’s harder to see than America, even. Thus I have always been a little suspicious of those who speak for Africa, and that includes those with actual African birthrights. That African societies have been victimized by Westerners isn’t in dispute, but that victimhood does not fall evenly across the continent. Mdou Moctar, for instance, is from Niger, a country separated by hundreds of miles and several impenetrable biomes from the Mediterranean Africa that calls to American tourists. As his desert version of the Jimi Hendrix Experience intensifies, so has his righteous fury, and on Funeral for Justice, he’s soloing and wagging his finger with equal conviction. Yet even as an acknowledged ugly American, prone to guilt feelings, I begin to fear that he is singing less about his home country and more about that which gets called the global south. Or perhaps he is extrapolating from his own experiences to the experiences of other nonwesterners worldwide. Even the song that promises to be about France turns out to be a wide-net indictment of western callousness. The problem with this is not that the cosmopolitan pop-rock audience will resist this. The problem is that they will sign on to it all too enthusiastically. A bomb that just landed on a baby in Rafah was paid for with your tax money. The cobalt in the phone on which you’re likely reading this on was mined by a worker who is little better than a slave. As the fossil fuel burns, rich governments bar the door to climate refugees. Everybody with a conscience knows about these atrocities, and applause is guaranteed to a singer who slings sonic projectiles against the Goliath of the international military-industrial complex. But I kinda wish Mdou would save his six-string ammunition for something more challenging than a barrel shoot. Because how many Nigerien popular musicians are we working with anyway? Tell me something about where you’re from, Mdou. Not Niger as a symbol for geopolitical imbalance or a battlefield in a global struggle, but Niger as a place with a specific culture and geography and society. If Freddie Gibbs can get me to think about a place as unglamorous as Gary, Indiana, Mdou can tell us something interesting about life in Niamey. There might even be a political dimension to such an act.   

Mean Jeans — Blasted  Imitation Ramones is a little like imitation crab meat. It’s rubbery, it’s everywhere, and it’s only palatable if it’s mixed in with other stuff and you aren’t paying attention. Mean Jeans used to separate themselves from other bands working this same territory by being crudely funny. But the gag file is empty.

Megan Thee Stallion — Megan  I’m pretty disappointed with the way things have been going. Her early projects were so good. I also don’t understand why she keeps getting beats from the volunteer fire department and hiring guys with names like Ka$h in My Sockz to do her production. She’s a big star. Can’t they shell out for Sounwave or somebody?

Microwave — Let’s Start Degeneracy Aging emos go pop, or pop-ish. Truth is these Atlantans were catchier on the charmingly titled Death Is a Warm Blanket, a prior album that sounded like Taking Back Sunday plus additional unnecessary preamp distortion. This time around, it’s mostly synthesizer gloss and cameo appearances by the singer’s non-singer girlfriend, but a few of these numbers do lean back toward the fizzy side of radio-ready pop-punk so as not to confuse the audience completely. Nathan Hardy’s guitar chops and knack for brutally direct hooks haven’t deserted him, nor has his will to overdramatize his rather ordinary life story (though you could say the same thing about every memoirist in the world). The subject this time out is fatalism and its associated delusions: check the initials of the album’s handle, haw haw. Like many hard-living pessimists, Nathan can’t decide whether to self-mythologize, threaten suicide, or appeal to his audience’s pity. The glee with which he tucks into his cannonball-style free fall sorta rules out martyrdom, I reckon. Rock for relapses.   

Mildlife — Chorus  This Melbourne jazz-prog-funk hybrid with two strong records in its discography claim to have been influenced by weird Polish records this time around. As a weird American, I can’t say if this is evident. I do hear traces of Khruangbin and the gussied-up telemarketing hold music (at a multicultural company, naturally) they push on to playlists. Can’t knock Mildlife for following a trend, especially since their chops haven’t atrophied any. The synth guy is still electrifying, and the rhythm section keeps laying down those stereophonic grooves. But nothing here sticks like “The Magnificent Moon,” and I fear that’s by design.  

Milton Nascimento & Esperanza Spalding — Milton + Esperanza  Yes, lousy Beatles covers are released every year. This version of “A Day in the Life” isn’t merely bad; it’s a desecration. I’m sure Paul loves it; he’s perverse like that. The ghost of John, however, is probably rattling some chains. I’m not surprised that Esperanza Spalding was behind it, because her broken compass has always undermined her artistic direction. She did not, however, have to drag Milton Nascimento into it. Jeez, that guy is eighty-two years old. He didn’t need this puke stain on his bib. It’ll wash out, but still, really, Esperanza. I didn’t think you were the kind of candy striper who was a threat to the inpatients.  

Miranda Lambert — Postcards From Texas  Texas Annie never fails to whip up something tasty. That includes this tall stack of cinnamon-dusted Texas toast. But the dynamite cover of David Allan Coe’s “Living on the Run” does throw the rest of the set into relief, and exposes it as a little more listless than what we’re used to. Only so much of this can be lain at the leather-booted feet of fellow Marfa taper John Russell, who tries to split the difference between red dirt ramblers and machine-pressed Music City sound and captures the grandeur of neither. No, some of is down to the star. Her vox: not quite as searing. Her writing: not quite as sharp. Her jokes and one-liners: not as crisply turned. I don’t even necessarily mean the one about the talking armadillo that was probably a lot funnier when Ran and Aaron Raitiere were stoned off of their asses. I mean the doofy back-half ballads and drinky-drinky numbers that get bogged down in the mud of the meandering Sabine. As usual, the album is at its best when Miranda takes the reins and delivers her lacerating pre- and post-divorce numbers: “Run,” “Dammit Randy,” “Remember the Alimony.” Those are keepers, even if we’ve heard stuff like this from her before. It occurs to me that it sometimes takes Miranda a couple of tries to get where she’s headed. What was Palomino if not a refined version of the smooth grownup pop-country moves on Wildcard? What was Platinum if not the imperial-phase saunter that Four the Record tried to be? I’d expect her to complete this turn home to the simple comforts of humid East Texas on her next album. Or maybe she’s entered her decline phase. Hey, it happens to everybody. 

MJ Lenderman — Manning Fireworks  Mister Wednesday returns to the small-town psychosocial preoccupations of Rat Saw God but animates them in language less excoriating than that of Missus Wednesday. Barack Obama appreciates the rhetorical de-escalation. Let us tamp down the excesses of Karly Hartzman. Karly gave us the indelible image of the birds smashing into the same plate glass window every day; MJ’s flock is merely in a heavy wind that “wins again,” but he’s too kind to spell out the exact terms of surrender. We recognize that it isn’t going to be pretty. Our status symbols won’t get us into heaven. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer will watch his girlfriend turned to roadkill by someone’s speeding SUV. We’ll spend Sunday at the redneck water park where the McDonald’s flies its flag at half mast. The sharks won’t acknowledge us, which sucks; until they do, and then boy howdy does it suck more. MJ’s narrators are thoroughly sick of themselves — they can barely pretend that their neato combination wristwatches are worth bragging about. They try to get drunk and that doesn’t work either. Wherever you find me, you’ll find me on my knees, MJ tells us. Is he praying or puking or submitting to coercive authority? It’s all three at once, isn’t it? Every song features classic trash rock and fairground rock quotes: Slade, Ozzy, Zevon, The Band in their strung-out period. As for the music, it alludes not merely to Neil Young but to every Neil Young copyist who has kept on rocking, with ever-decreasing fidelity and resolution, in what we still like to call the free world. Well. For a little while longer at least.    

Nathy Peluso — Grasa  In the South American pop musical sweepstakes, Argentina has neither had an answer for Mon Laferte nor Bomba Estéreo. Grasa is an attempt to kill two birds with one greasy Nathy Peluso-shaped stone. This does catch fire from time to time, especially when Nathy applies her tough girl impudence to big sopping ballads like “Envidia.” But since she can’t quite sing like Mon Laferte or rap like Li Saumet, it may leave you with a desire to play Elegancia Tropical or Autopoiética again. Keeper track: the salsa throwback “La Presa.” Funny how these Latin Alternative albums always work best when artists dispense with the overtures to the contemporary urbano and reggaeton audience and drop some Ricky Ricardo on us instead. Seriously, that’s all I ever ask of them.

Neck Deep — Neck Deep  I sent in fifty box tops from Sugar Smacks and/or Apple Jacks and lookit mom what I got in the mail. Built for speed like any good secret toy surprise. Do kids still redeem box tops I wonder? Do they still play in bratty pop-punk bands? Or is everybody in the skate park listening to Jersey drill now? Couldn’t say. This is some glue-sniffin, power-riffin, butt-cuttin behind the convenience store stuff strongly reminiscent of the days when all sums added up to forty-one. Given the commendable velocity they attain and the doubly-commendable immaturity of the subject matter, you might guess that Neck Deep is a gang of juvenile delinquents from Snot County, CA. Surprise, they’re Welsh dudes. Moreover, this is their sixth project, which feels like some stealth form of pederasty. Not to be missed: “They May Not Mean To But They Do,” an old-fashioned parents-just-don’t-understand number that manages to be caustic and sympathetic to the old folks at the same time. Rebellious and big-hearted, you might call them. Somewhere, Billie Joe Armstrong is nodding in approval, or shaking his head in bewilderment that people still make music like this. Long may they. 

Nick Lowe — Indoor Safari  It is with no small amount of pleasure that I realize that Nick the Basher wants to be Sam Cooke as badly as I do. But if Cupid were to draw back his bow at the behest of seventy-five year old pub rockers, how would we get petulant postcalypso numbers like “Love Starvation”? “I can’t exist in a world like this!,” a pillow-humping Nick protests; it’s a hoot. Somewhere in time, Buddy Holly stops masturbating and salutes. The star is abetted in his time-travel fantasies by the similarly afflicted men in Los Straitjackets!, who aim their spring-reverbed tones straight at the hot-blooded hearts of these deep throwback numbers. All the rock and roll vinegar in the pickle barrel can’t disguise composition that isn’t as tight or inventive as that on The Old Magic. But when Nick connects across the decades — “Raincoat in the River,” “Blue on Blue” — it may make you wonder who the heck needs Bruno Mars. Nick remains a first-rate storyteller sensitive to detail, raffish and funny even in the midst of his desperation, forever representing the low(e) zone in a wisecracking Alfred P. Doolittle kind of way. Get him to the church on time. I like the one where he’s mistaken for Robyn Hitchcock at a party, and the one where the drunk wakes him up with a rendition of “Sweet Caroline.” His despondency does not stop him from whistling along in harmony with a sad trombone from a high window. He even calls out the key. You might call that a very very very good sign. 

Norah Jones — Visions  Try though I may never to ignorah, I find that this new one possesses neither the compositional spark of Pick Me Up Off the Floor nor the kickass piano of Begin Again. Also, it’s not ludicrous in any way, and if you cannot make fun of this absurdly poised pop-soul artist, the Norahpologists among us are robbed of half of our fun. It’s not like Norah is going to be cracking any pop-soul jokes of her own. By now it goes without saying that nothing on this set resembles a hit — not even the modest twenty-first century backgroundy streamy sort of hit that might keep Norah going as she faces oblivion on a cold night in Munchkinland, or wherever the hell she’s setting up shop these days. Instead, in her latest act of self-negation, she finds the place in the mist where she doesn’t exist. Also she wonders, groggily, what it would be like for her to be queen of the sea. I reckon it would mean smooth and tepid sailing for mariners of all sorts. 

Office Culture — Enough  To Big Time Things as Hawaii was to Gideon Gaye. The sound gets blown out, chopped up, electrified and synthesized, and, above all, elongated. The scope gets wider. The composer takes a sad song and makes it sadder. Yet for all the first-blush differences between the two recent Office Culture sets, not all that much has changed. Our man Winston remains a harmonic daredevil, leaping around the scale and landing on intervals and chord changes and substitutions that would make the average songwriter blanch. These songs are appointed with loads of musical happenstance; it’s intentionally diffuse at times, but it’s never uninteresting. The characters are still navigating the labyrinth of social and romantic expectations with many wrong turns and stumbles over roots and such. And they’re still all Gothamites: these are Big Apple stories to the bitter core. What makes Office Culture the most interesting band to come from Brooklyn in a long time is how gracefully Winston intertwines several major threads of New York music: arch showtunes, confessional singer-songwriter café music, crate-raiding instrumental hip-hop, Knitting Factory pop-jazz dissipating in the subway steam. In a city of carpetbaggers en route to rootless homes on the Internet, one (hat) guy remembered where he was and what it all meant. I hope Winston won’t hate me forever for bringing up another artist who loved and lived New York and who refreshed Brill Building sophistipop by marinating it in the street sounds of his youth. When I say that Enough puts me in mind of Billy Joel, I don’t even mean “Damage,” which could slot right into Glass Houses with no dissonance whatsoever. I mean the narrator’s obsessive examination of a semi-requited relationship with someone else’s girl, his amalgam of glib conversational cruelty and romantic sentimentality, the harsh wit, the deep and guilty interest in the interplay between honest and dishonesty. The big piano chords, too. “I was right to be afraid to love you,” he admits late in the album. Guess she didn’t stop when he said he felt nervous. Guess he didn’t, either.

Of Montreal — Lady on the Cusp  Silly me, I thought that Kevin’s anal beads were his prayer beads. Whatever could have given me that impression, I wonder? How about eighteen albums that demonstrate that Kevin recognizes no holy territory beyond his own erogenous zones? That’s not a complaint. Submission to the various penetrations of rock and roll has been a rewarding posture for him for years. But these days Kevin tells us that he is “2 Depressed 2 Fuck,” and you know what?, all Prince orthography aside, I believe him. Why else would this former horndog bust his own boner (via scorpion-stomping, ew) so vigorously? Don’t tell me that he’s trying to vibe with the flighty lady on the cusp; Kevin has never let interpersonal considerations get in the way of his sexual trajectory before, and I doubt he packs the saltpeter to start now. So while this is not the sea-change I was expecting to get from this rainbow-colored art-pop chameleon, it does help explain the flaccid quality of the latest funk, and why the good numbers here are Sylvianbriar-style folk-rock. Kevin hints that relocation to a colder climate (perhaps Montreal?) is partially responsible for the chilling effect on his overworked loins. But most of the trouble is implicitly laid at the feet of his partner, whose trauma is starting to get on his nerves. Nina Twin could tell you how that ends. So could every one of Kevin’s fans.

Oolong — Oolong  If you gave the guys from Cap’n Jazz super-powerful bong hits and unlimited studio time, they might come up with something like this: an album of intense guitar-scribbling and creaky-mattress noises punctuated by drum flams, bursts of vicious distortion and unaccountable screaming. At a certain point of boinginess, midwest emo approaches Captain Beefheart, and Oolong has Tigger-bounced pretty close to that point. Those who are up to the Oolong challenge can count time on these barbed skeins of notes and admire the pure athleticism it requires to make music like this, or we can appreciate the band’s stoned sense of humor (“Pete Zahut” indeed) and twentysomething fatalism. There’s the tightness of bros who have spent countless hours practicing and slamming six packs in a gross Long Island basement, and then there’s the tightness of bros who have t.p.-ed the science teacher’s house together and have sworn not to rat each other out to the principal. However they’ve arrived at this, it’s the year’s most male album, and if you’re male yourself, you might expend some of your testosterenergy by frazzling along to these spastic freakouts. Sure beats listening to Andrew Tate.

Ora Gartland — Everybody Needs a Hero  Woman on the Internet was an Irish pop-rock shadow of Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour: a set of songs about the impossibility of maintaining relationships in a social milieu shaken by constant c-c-comparisons to well-adjusted strangers. Olivia was at wit’s end but we figured she’d survive on battery acid alone; Ora felt a little farther out and not waving but drowning. Thus I’m glad to see her back with another album that suggests she’s been listening to… Olivia Rodrigo, mostly. Maybe it’s all a transatlantic coincidence, or maybe Ora figured that if Olivia and company could plug in and rock like Elastica, she could get her Britpop on, too. Olivia punched back via distorted six-string in a successful and pleasantly acrimonious declaration of autonomy. Ora, by contrast, has fallen head over heels for somebody, and she’s sublimating her fears that her feelings might be unrequited (“I’m three words away from ruining your life,” she tells her would-be boyfriend) by strumming as vigorously as she can get away with in a modern pop context. That said, Ora’s singing is not always pop star grade. But it’s not a disaster, either. To her credit, she’s figuring out how it best fits into her songs, most of which are a cut above the postswiftian average and all of which are enjoyable enough for a Valentine’s Day playlist. That puts Ora in the small club of artists who’ve managed to survive the doozy step from YouTube notoriety to musical quality. As far as I can tell, it’s just Ora and Poppy.  

Origami Angel — Feeling Not Found  Long before Walter Benjamin wrote about art in the age of mechanical reproduction, human beings were concerned about the effects that technologies were having on their brains. Seems reasonable, right?, we spend hours looking at this odd glowing thing. Often it pings peculiar messages at us, many of which are commercial. It must be reconfiguring the way our minds work and altering our interpretations of reality. Musicians sure think so. Nobody with an audio suite has a single nice thing to say about the Internet anymore. Future shock and trepidation over the effects of social media and artificial intelligence are everywhere in every genre. The most popular stars — the ones who are the beneficiaries of digital distribution and targeted marketing — are often the biggest complainers. Ryland Heagy of Origami Angel registers his low-profile gripes about modern living in cleverly-written pop-punk and easycore. But he’s an emo kid at heart, so he concentrates on the awful way techno-isolation makes him feel. I believe him that long hours spent in front of a monitor in search of connection and validation have dimmed his bulb, and he’s certainly at liberty to howl about it if only to produce a few flickers for friends and fans. But this modern subject is most effective when he concedes that the hell we’ve made is oddly optional. Like much of the unpleasant mechanical stuff we deal with, it didn’t have to be this way; in fact it only is this way because we insist that it should be. Yes there are vested interests who profit off of our misfortune. There are addictive qualities built into the systems we interface with. But the punitive qualities of the modern Internet are also the product of our masochism. On some deep and horrid level, we believe this is the world we deserve: one where our value is expressed to strangers in binary code that transcends human language. Because we loathe ourselves, this is the ugly way we believe we ought to be known. This is the electro-spanking we administer on ourselves and the pixel-scarlet numeral we pin to our blouses in shame. The Internet didn’t have to be like this, and it still doesn’t. Artificial intelligence didn’t have to be put to the service of plagiarism, and it still doesn’t. Social media didn’t have to be an awful game where nobody wins, and it still doesn’t. The computers aren’t the problem and never were. The issue is how we fallible and desperate humans have decided to use them. There are terrible forces in the world that are immutable and pipers to whom we must dance whether we want to or not. Technology isn’t like that. It’s just a tool. No matter how much wizardry we think we’re surrounded by, we’re the masters of it, and when it bites us on the ass or boxes us into a corner, we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves. We literally command the kill switch. We need to refamiliarize ourselves with a mechanical device that precedes the Internet and social media and obviates its alleged world-consuming power: the off button.

Osees — Sorcs 80  A crusty old crank with an infinite tub of crust turns the crank on his crustbuster. Now there is splintered crust all over the place and OW some of those shards are sharp. Ann Magnuson told us in ’89 to watch where we dance. I can see glass in the sand.

Oso Oso — Life Till Bones  Join with Jade Lilitri on a tour of the earworm farm. It is a clean modern facility where the health and placement of the earworms is always the staff’s top priority. Look how plump they get. Very robust. As this album neither as experimental as Sore Thumb nor as obsessively tuneful as Basking in the Glow nor as charming as The Yunahon Mixtape, it took it a few spins to click for me. Click it did, and it has been in heavy rotation ever since; in fact it is probably playing at my house as you’re reading this. Jade Lilitri continues to write songs that are 100% Long Island emo and also deeply reminiscent of singalong sitcom title music. People say he monkeys around. Dunno how he does it but I believe I saw Schrodinger’s cat creep across the mixing board. The death of Tavish Maloney has Jade depressed, but his loss hasn’t messed with the basic approach: rhythm guitar so granular and smooth that you’d think it was applied to the tape via aerosol, and hooks that arrive faster than you can say Joyce Manor. Well, maybe not as fast as that, but Jade remains a writer governed by expedience, economy, and coercion. That extends to his relationships: even at the hollow point of Annie’s gun, she can’t have all of his love/all of the time. That said, he’s aware of the precise geopositioning of his girlfriend’s socks on the floor of the bedroom. When he tells her that other people’s stories got him feeling bored because other people’s stories aren’t like hers, he means all the other people. It’s two against the world for Jade. He’s a romantic operating, as all true emos do, without a Plan B, and with nothing more than one sick plan to save him from his demise. Luckily for him, it’s the only plan that ever works.  

OT the Real — Cost of Living  Brutal, enjoyable crime drama from a roughneck North Philadelphian emcee who seems to be having a blast in several senses of the word. OT has about twenty-seven other projects out this year — I tried them too, but this is the one that stuck. I think I’m taken with the velocity of the storytelling, which proceeds at the pace of a nice solid carjacking. his total awareness of the entertainment value of deadeye delivery reminds me very much of the Clipse. Butt jokes, football jokes, gunplay, monkey business, and then he gets away clean after twenty minutes. Into the hooptie and off to the next perpetration. 

Pedro the Lion — Santa Cruz  A memoir-rock project accelerates. Chapter one consisted of the particulars of childhood in Phoenix and came with lots of tasty kids-eye street views; number two was a more introspective, and thus less interesting, exploration of time spent in Lake Havasu. On Santa Cruz, teenaged David Bazan is careening all over the Pacific states: the Bay, Modesto, Seattle. But the autobiographical storytelling never settles long enough to give us much Western flavor, and the music mostly sounds like Pedro the Lion plus a few period-specific synthesizers. The main storytelling driver is the conflict between Christian morality and the exigencies of modern life, and even David’s desire to get his nut in a holy milieu becomes a figure for the compromises that the religious must make to accommodate worldly demands. Thus — and this wasn’t true of the first two installments— the real hero here is David’s clergyman dad, who stands up to the church when he smells a rat and loses his job in the process, keeps his kid on the straight and narrow without being heavy-handed about it, and even teaches David his first guitar chords. Awww. From there, David is off to the Northwest to play drums in a rock band, and yeah, I have to think we’re nearing the point of narration. What would be cool is if David continued the memoir not by wrestling with spiritual dilemmas we know he’ll soon resolve, but by giving us a track by track assessment of It’s Hard to Find a Friend in song. He could do specific songs about the making of other specific songs. Then he could extend the same treatment to the rest of the Pedro the Lion catalog until he’s writing songs about the writing of songs about songs he wrote. It would reinforce my argument that emo logic always twists itself into a Möbius strip. Just like confessional Christianity.

Pet Shop Boys — Nonetheless  Much as I loved the last three albums, this is what we fans of Neil Tennant have been waiting for: a full length set where the electronics are there to support the storytelling. None of that bolshy bolshy stuff. Let it be known that the melodies throughout are finely tuned, with Neil finding deft ways to thread his sly tunes through accompaniment thick enough to score a Forties film drama. Check, for instance, the great “Secret of Happiness” to understand why Noel Gallagher, no sufferer of melodic fools, recognizes Neil as a master. Naturally he comes with topics: the confessions of a narcissistic politician’s bodyguard, non-ironic celebration of the Eurokitsch Schlager tradition, an account of the defection of the gay Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Then he slams the door shut with the romanic-neurotic “Love Is the Law.” On the extended version, they’ve even cemented the connection to the Behaviour album with a redone version of “Being Boring” that might just be better — and sadder —  than the original. 

Poppy — Negative Spaces  It’s not right to say that Moriah has never gone as hard as this. But she’s never sustained her headbanging or her hellacious shrieks for as long as she does here, and this is no brief encounter. About seventy five per cent of Negative Spaces is metalcore or groove metal in one flavor or another with all references to Slipknot/Motionless in White/Devil Wears Prada one hundred per cent intentional. Both her clean and unclean vox continue to congeal and intensify and she rides these truck-collision riffs by Jordan Fish of Bring Me the Horizon with such confidence and sense of belonging that it’s hard to remember the days when she struggled to keep up with the wrinkles of Titanic Sinclair’s production. She’s a bona fide rock star now, and all YouTube provocation aside, she got there the old-fashioned way: touring, bandleading, coaching, distilling and foregrounding a few simple ideas linked to the societal id and our collective nightmares. Thus whether you hang with the latest from Moriah depends on how much grisly midrange guitar distortion you can handle, and also whether you can tolerate a singer who sounds like she’s being vivisected. Get past all of that — admittedly a high hurdle — and you’re likely to agree that this is pretty catchy and generally danceable. They don’t call her Poppy for nothing. Even when she’s shrieking her head off, she’s still got enough self-possession to bait the hook. That’s a hard thing to do on the lip of the abyss. She hasn’t looked down in years, and she’s not going to start now. 

Porridge Radio — Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me  Dana Margolin teams up with Dom Monks, engineer for Laura Marling and Big Thief. Has he turned Porridge Radio into a folk-rock concern? Well shmaybe. They sure do stomp and rattle along in 6/8 more than they once did. There’s a newfound sea shantiness to the sound (check “You Will Come Home”) that suits the saltwater flavor of a band from Brighton. Mostly he’s streamlined the band’s slow builds, which tend to conclude with Dana hollering in a shredded Robert Smith voice about emotional breakdown or self-betrayal or how she needs to hide under the table. Eventually she’ll come out, I’m sure of it. The departure of Maddie Ryall has made this a thinner porridge than it once was — more obviously a vehicle for Margolis’s reflections and an accelerator for her personal catharses. Some of it she’s too tired to let us in on completely. I feel like this happens pretty often to mixed-gender altrock bands with multiple girls in them, especially when one is the leader and the other is not. The side chick tends to split and takes with her the counterweight to the confessional agenda of the frontwoman. The Cacie Dalager-Jess Abbott dynamic comes to mind. Anyway, I’m going to drop this line of investigation before I start crying over Carey Lander again. 

Real Estate — Daniel  Pleasant.

Redd Kross — Redd Kross  Let it be known that this was the year that White Eagle Hall turned into an eight hundred capacity version of the Record Collector in Bordentown. Every power pop and garage rock hero who ever swiped a chorus wholesale from Lennon and McCartney stopped by Newark Avenue. The DB’s did a show. Matthew Sweet played. The New Pornographers played. The Beths and The Lemon Twigs carried the flame for the new jangle generation. Heck, they did a fiftieth anniversary tribute to Radio City just to drive the point home. Of course Redd Kross got in on the action — their hair metal/British Invasion hybrid was a natural fit for the venue’s apparent new focus. I’m sure they did “I’ll Take Your Word For It,” and I am doubly sure a capacity crowd of bespectacled WFMU listeners with Princeton Record Exchange tote bags lost their sugar-fixed minds. If only Scott Miller had held out. He could have played up the block. Hell, if only David Schreiber had held out. Damn damn a thousand times damn.

Richard Thompson — Ship to Shore  Fifty six years later and this guy is still on the ledge. Somebody meet him there already. He’s certainly not going to get any satisfaction or safety nets from the girls he’s singing about. The narrators on Ship to Shore are men with unrequited longing for the impossible to attain, which gives Richard plenty of impetus for tense, chicken-choking guitar solos that crackle with masochism. Yes we have been here before. But rarely has Richard stood, unmoving and utterly humiliated, in this particular draft for as long as he’s doing here. Usually he’ll throw one in about suicide or a mutilated beggar just to change our eye level. Ship to Shore, though, is just brutal accounts of men on the brink, trading away their last shred of self-respect for the vain hope of a smooch. I get it, believe me. There’s the one where the crowd swallows the chick who has just turned the narrator down, and the one about the chick who thinks the narrator is too tainted with sin to touch, and the one where an anorexic shopaholic strings the narrator along only to reject him utterly. Does she even know that I exist, he asks. She does. She’s caught his measure. That’s the whole problem.

Ride — Interplay  Concept set about the defunct Los Angeles based studio, publisher of the postapocalyptic ripper that set the standard for interactive storytelling and turn-based action and combat in a computer role playing game. Just kidding, it’s a better-than-average English rock album from a better-than-average English rock band with a very good rhythm section. Tight playing, hushed male vox in harmony, nebulous lyrics, stretches of dullness, a thicket of six-string. Ride is frequently blamed for shoegaze, and that’s mostly because somebody has to be; it can’t all be down to Slowdive and Loveless, now can it. But these guys were already chafing at the limitations of the style by album two, and by album three, they were completely done with it. For their second act, they’ve barely glanced at a piece of footwear. Instead, Andy Bell has put his time with the Gallaghers to good use, making tasteful psych-rock borne forth on frequency-saturating midrange guitar and projecting himself outward, tentatively but surely, in the classic British way. He opens by asking for a peace sign. Later, on “Last Frontier,” he worries about drowning in the fallout. Hmm… the fallout. Interesting choice of words there. Maybe they’re geeky gamers after all. 

Rosali — Bite Down  Solid vocals and solid songwriting from a geometric solid of an artist. Not a dodecahedron or a cube, mind you, more of a four-sided dice with limited faces. Assistance comes from David Nance, who mainly plays bass and stays out of the way, and the Mowed Sound guys, who add mildly psychedelic interjections here and there and occasionally pretend they’re in Crazy Horse. This makes Rosali the three millionth roots-rock artist to try this particular hybrid of foursquare composition and spacey arrangements, which is not to say that she doesn’t do it well. Cosmic country, I think they call it. The lyrics are lovelorn in a nonspecific manner, and the melodies are comfortable thrift-store outfits, shopworn and soft-seamed, suitable for hitting the town. A small town, mind you. Anyway, you could do a lot worse. See also: Marina Allen.

Rubblebucket — Year of the Banana  The central drama of the Alex Toth + Kalmia Traver story isn’t how or whether these crazy kids can keep the band together after the dissolution of their romantic relationship, because boning was not pivotal to the long-term bounce of their boingy boingy partnership. It isn’t even Kalmia’s recovery from cancer (and fingers crossed for your continued good health, Kalmia). No, it’s that Alex and Kalmia are in a Spring Fling band and they don’t seem to realize it. A really good spring fling band, mind you; your quad should be so lucky. The valley between Rubblebucket’s mass-market aspirations and their niche aesthetic made for some fascinating echoes on the Sun Machine album, and there’ve been some nifty reverberations thereafter. You might say that it’s a good thing that indie songwriters willing to reach beyond their grasp still exist. Self-delusion extends to a comparison to Chappell Roan in their latest press materials, and c’mon guys. Year of the Banana suggests real faith that they can sand off a few edges, add some playlist ‘verb, and white-funk their way to mainstream commercial viability, and of course that isn’t going to happen; just ask Kevin Barnes. But they give it their best, and even as the songwriting has dipped a bit, their best means weird ear candy and audible treats. The bass sound is pure poured rubber cement, the choruses have a poolside at the actor’s retreat vibe, and Kalmia continues to skronk and huff away at her sax like she’s trying to dislodge a ping-pong ball from a roll of toilet paper. Also, there’s a cool serpentine synth solo on a song called “Rattlesnake.” Who has the heart to tell them that Annie Clark beat them to it?

Sabrina Carpenter — Short N’ Sweet  Charli marked the target and Chappell slung the blade. But it was this pint-sized terror who stuck the knife in mushrock, twisted it, and cracked wise as she did. Let all those drowsy, soggy drawlers who liked to compare themselves to narcotics know that when their nemesis came, she was the personification of a very strong cup of coffee. That’s that her espresso. Time to sober up, everybody. The metaphor suits the star, who is a percolating and wide-eyed customer, chock full o’ nuts, impatient, steamy, slightly bitter, wont to prompt rude awakenings in those with whom she must interact. You can really see why the Swifties, suckers for alacrity that they are, went for this big time. This pure pop album doesn’t shoot for the heights of Red or even Midwest Princess; it’s not that sort of set. But it’s well played, well sung, well written, and crisp, quick, and flashing as well water. Cup your hands and lap it up. Like Harry Styles, she alludes to the classics without ever exactly matching the ambitions of the greats. A tease for sure, but it’s not like I don’t appreciate the nods to “She Comes for Conversation” in “Coincidence.” More recent debts to Ariana Grande and Christina Aguilera are, I’m glad to say, fully forgiven via the star’s embodied performances. And though she love-bites the heck out of Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina’s got one thing over her: while the male characters on Sour and Guts are mostly ciphers, Sabrina brings her partner-adversaries to life in pungent verse. Check out the prevaricating drunk on “Lie to Girls” (which you don’t have to do cuz they’ll lie to themselves), the numbnuts on “Slim Pickings,” and the self-impressed masher on “Please Please Please.” Then there’s the consciousness bro on “Dumb and Poetic.” This poor schmuck absorbs a takedown for the ages. Astringent couplet among many: “you’re so empathetic, you’d make a great wife/and I promise the mushrooms aren’t changing your life.” Hahahahahahah. Yeah, I’ll be back for more.

Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes — The Doober  Oddball jazz album that earns most of its points through accretion. Not that these pranksters don’t solo; they sure do. But The Doober takes off when the Sams involved layer breathy sax track upon breathy sax track until the whole thing burbles and wheezes like a synth signal coated with white noise and slightly detuned. Sometimes they’re bagpipes on the glen, and sometimes they land on your collarbone and draw blood before you can slap them away. Thus they slyly defamiliarize a bunch of pop tunes: “The Circle Game,” Chris Isaak’s number, Sheryl Crow’s Bond theme. It’s never not interesting, even if the application of modal logic to these melodies will remind you of why Joni and Sheryl (and you, probably) ultimately prefer pop to jazz. 

Say Anything — …Is Committed  That which is permissible when you begin will become cancellable, and eventually actionable, as time’s arrow flies. The implications of this rule fall hard on emo, and hardest of all on Max Bemis, the most preposterous oversharer ever to cut tracks for a major label. It’s not that Max couldn’t or wouldn’t make “Hey I Can Get Sexual Too” and “Property” in 2024, because he most certainly would. It’s that there’s no taste among punk rock listeners for that sort of thing anymore. In order to access the famous Bemis font of irony, you’ve got to find his fraught relationship to his own desires funny, and I don’t think people are getting the joke. Not that Max cares: he keeps crashing onward, making music about jizzing all over his wife and young men sliding on cum floods and how graceful his dick is. Throw in a litany of name-drop attacks on family members and former collaborators and you can see why even longtime fans are calling this one cringeworthy. Never mind that this isn’t all that far removed from the Max Bemis we’ve always known. I do begin to wonder who the fuck Max is writing this stuff for. Possibly Sherri, who seems happy to contribute backing vox about her determination to masturbate. I’m glad these crazy kids still see eye to eye. Beyond the wretched, overdriven sound and the on-tape weeping, Max continues to arrange notes and chords more skillfully than his peers can. But for once I’m not going to encourage anybody to go digging for the exculpatory evidence. 

Serengeti — KDIV  Why is Kenny Dennis such a hypebeast anyway? What keeps him in the drop line? Feelings of encroaching irrelevance don’t help,I am sure, but we’ve all got those. What makes Kenny such a vivid character is his reach beyond himself with the paltry tools that consumer society makes available to him. He’s determined to cop the latest big-budget brands, but his favorite actor remains Dennehy. He remains rooted in Midwestern working-class existence — slathering giardinara on a roll like the Southsider he is — even as he’s hooping with Dominique Wilkins and dominating the competition on a reality show. While his accidental pal Ajai is in bad shape, Kenny has his talent, his absurdity, and his knack for serendipity as a lifeline. In the umpteenth chapter of his ongoing story, he’s rebounding at least a bit, no longer stuck in menial jobs and ready to barter away his dignity in exchange for the latest Balenciaga and the exclusive-release capital it confers. He’s surrounded himself with a fresh cast, too, including a new girlfriend and new hangers-on. Nevertheless he is papering over a series of absences: his collaborators, his mustache-bearing father, and most importantly, his wife Jueles, whose whereabouts aren’t cleared up. Nor are the circumstances of her departure or her possible return. As her memory hangs over this chaotic but eloquently realized album, Kenny and his listeners are forced to reckon with what’s irretrievably gone, and to think about the things we do to create substitutes for what we’ve lost, and how we might recover some of what is taken from us. As superficial as the concerns of these characters might seem, they don’t take any of that lightly. Not kenny, not Ajai, not former partner Ders, and not, it seems, Jueles herself, whose absence drives the action on this brand-stuffed, beat-crazed idyll. 

Skinshape — Another Side of Skinshape  In 2020, lightning struck Will Dorey. On Umoja, he rounded up African musicians to make African pop and sat back in the producer’s chair to catch the magic. “Afande,” a collaboration with Idd Aziz that’s mostly just a vehicle for Idd Aziz, is the peak of the ride, and it remains inexhaustible. Maybe Will knows that, because he’s never attempted to follow it up. Four limptronica albums later, Umoja looks like a mirage, and one of the craziest and most inexplicable one-offs of the millennium. As deals with the Devil go, it’s an awfully tasty one. 

Soccer Mommy — Evergreen  Sophie turns toward the eternal. Her reflections on the loss of a parent and love — sexual love — for her favorite Stardew Valley character aren’t quite as self-absorbed as other recent pop meditations on mortality. That said, I’ve played this five times and not a tune has stuck. That’s a bad sign from an artist whose mark of distinction used to be her knack for memorable melody. It’s pretty enough that I’m staying with it, but I kinda suspect this is one of those flower buds that never opens, no matter how much sun you give it.   

Southtowne Lanes — Take Care  Hard rock re-creation of the second studio set by the brooding Toronto emcee Drake. J/k, it’s an aggro-emo concept album about the loss of a family member, the barely survivable grief in its wake, and the awesome, world-wrecking power of pain. Take Care is a blind ride around a suburban neighborhood in the company of ghosts and a long sojourn in the shade of hanging questions. Is it possible, the group wonders, to locate compassion in the depths of despair? Can we witness the death of someone we love without dying ourselves?  Southtowne Lanes acknowledges that these things are tough to manage, but managing them, they argue, makes us human. I think Christian Holden might agree. The hooks dig in when then come, but I could use a few more of them, to be honest, and all the metallic screaming and riffing makes this set the farthest thing from a smooth ride. That said, howling in horror in the face of oblivion is a completely justifiable reaction, and one with which I am regrettably familiar.

Stetsasonic — Here We Go Again  Don’t get your hopes up. Prince Paul didn’t do these beats, and it shows. It’s not that this set doesn’t sound okay, or that this conversation isn’t worth picking up where we left it thirty-three years ago. It’s that without Paul’s self-deprecation and sense of cosmic absurdity, the Stetsasonic comeback becomes the latest old-school rap record half-consumed by the emcees’s strenuous Ben Gay-scented promises that they’re back for good. (Note that when this happens, the emcees are never back for good.) Notable it is that their version of Lolita is thirty-two years old and the owner of a labradoodle. They’re doing self-checks in the mirror and worrying about hookers who spread the new disease. Knock them and watch your jimmy fall off. There’s no shortage of castration anxiety anthems in hip-hop, but they do hit differently when they come from emcees in their mid-fifties who spend five minutes rattling off the roll call of fallen soldiers from Coolio to Shock G. I’m afraid nobody stays hard forever. Wouldn’t it be a little frustrating if you did.

St. Lenox — Ten Modern American Work Songs  Winning white collar blues from a singing lawyer who mentions billable hours in the context of a pop song — one about a spelunking trip, no less. Andrew Choi’s latest epistolary exercise finds him firing off letters to campus unionists, funeral attendees, and former co-workers who’ve opted out of a rat race his narrators are still running. The main theme is the way in which jobs suck up the discretionary time of employees and dominate their lives. The next thing the lawyers know, they’re at the office at midnight for reasons that even their accountants don’t understand. Andrew is frank, and sad, about all of this, and implies that office culture (the thing, not the band) is psychologically corrosive. I guess he could always quit and be a rock and roll reprobate like the rest of us. Yet his soul is not that of the witty barroom raconteur, and that, I think, is to his credit: one of the best things about St. Lenox is Andrew’s absolute refusal to chase cleverness. Most of the time he doesn’t bother with end rhyme. His characters are simply reflecting aloud on their lives, and doing it in diaristic-confessional language, confiding in their addressees in unsparing, eloquent prose. He continues to arrange his songs for drum machine, piano, and radio shack synth, keeping the backing track small and tight so he can barge into the mixes shoulder-first like a sitcom character. The approach works better here than it has on prior St. Lenox albums because of the subject matter: these salarymen are feeling so confined that they’re liable to bust right through the cubicle drywall. Even the melisma feels less like a debt to R&B and church music than a sonic metaphor for spirits that can’t stay still. Will all of this reassessment lead to radical action? Not for the narrator of “Courtesan,” the grimmest graduation song you’ll ever hear. Play it for your smug nephew at Princeton commencement.

St. Vincent — All Born Screaming  Peter Gabriel had a band. Phil Collins had a band. Tori Amos had a band, too. Progressive rock solo performers often have quasi-dedicated groups backing them up. The members of those groups aren’t on equal footing with the bandleader, but they’re regular participants in a generative dynamic. During Annie Clark’s peak (some time ago) she enjoyed the creative contributions of some excellent accomplices: the dude from Midlake played the drums, Bobby Sparks took the wigged synthesizer solos, and violinist Daniel Hart assumed the utility role. They all had a pretty good idea of what wonders Annie could work with a guitar, and they put their instruments into a dialogue with hers in a way that can only happen if you know your playmate well. All of those guys are accomplished musicians with great reputations, but they aren’t attractions in their own right; the average music fan has never heard their names. Since Masseduction, Annie has been reframed as a star, which isn’t something that happens often to progressive rock singers — even conventionally beautiful ones. She started getting treated as stars do: hitmaker producers, period-specific arrangements, celebrities on b-vox, Pino Palladino playing bass, etc. I’m pretty sure Dave Grohl, of all people, hits the skins on this new one. These ringers acquit themselves well. but it’s no coincidence that this is when St. Vincent records start to feel pasted together, whipped up according to the agglomerative logic of playlist pop rather than the organic approach associated with actual bands. The arrangements on All Born Screaming suggest that Annie and cult leader Justin Meldal-Johnson are aware of the problem, but not that they know what to do about it. Annie attaches some really good playing to tracks that feel awfully hollow, including at least two half-baked attempts to revisit “Five Years” and another two that are just dumb funk jams zhuzhed up with six-string pyrotechnics and studio trickery. It doesn’t help that Annie has misplaced any sense of lyrical referentiality that she once possessed, falling back instead on factoid-driven cliche and zeitgeisty nonsense: Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, the smothered lovers of Pompeii, stuff like that. This, too, often happens to stars. Talented as she is, I reckon that there’s very little chance she’s going to extract herself from this hole. The Illuminati: it’s like Hotel California, or a roach motel. You can check in but you never check out.

Taylor Smith — The Tortured Poets Department  I am not so besotted that I can’t understand where the hostility is coming from. Taylor has surpassed the mass psychic penetration achieved by public utilities and Presidents, and as she is angling for more, resistance to such megalomania begins to feel like a planetary imperative. On the more mundane aesthetic level, she’s written so many songs by now that she can’t help repeating herself, and boy howdy is she repeating herself repeating herself. But if she ever leaves us alone long enough for the assessment dust to settle, this confessional blowout is going to go down as one of the good ones. My guess is that Midnights is gong to be the one that feels a little bottled up in retrospect, and Tortured Poets will be considered a better expression of the same sonic and lyrical ideas. Because what we have here is a coherent story about a restless woman in a stable but stale relationship making a leap to a more exciting — and more childish — man, and falling on her face in front of everybody when he lacks the maturity (and maybe the will) to catch her. There’s lots of Swift-style cross-referencing and intertextuality, lots of wordplay and jokes, lots of density, lots of specificity. If the lyrics weren’t occasionally awkward, it wouldn’t feel as real as it does, and it wouldn’t be as affecting as it is. This is not to say that Tortured Poets rises to the storytelling heights of the Folklovermore projects, because it’s a different kind of writing exercise. But it certainly communicates. I reckon it was written for the faithful, but it still sold its zillion copies. Musically, I acknowledge that this territory is well-covered. She and Jack keep calling that same Stockton-to-Malone pick and roll you’ve seen a million times. then it goes swish in the basket and it counts all the same. Never has there been a player in this league so determined to run up the score. She makes Madonna look like a peaceful hippie by comparison.

The Black Crowes — Happiness Bastards  Those with a primordial bent need to be careful about what form they return to when they return to form. Miscalibrate the time machine just a hair and you could end up playing first-rate rock to a bunch of troglodytes. 

The BV’s — Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures  When I purchase automobile upholstery of rich Corinthian leather, I want it to come from Corinth. I expect to get my jumping beans from Mexico. Likewise, I prefer my Teutonic post-punk to be made by actual Germans. These Swabian-ass kaisers are delivering their new orders from their Bauhaus-designed fastness in Birksholzspfalen, and yes I did make that last part up, but i’m sure you know what I mean. In long post-punk tradition, some of this album is dead boring, with flat-affect intonation over repetitive two-note guitar figures and stiff beats. But some of it connects. I particularly like this band’s occasional application of Krautrock precision to Bobby Wratten-style mope-pop, and I suspect that Bobby, a man whose northern skies could always use a little brightening, would appreciate it too, even if field mice tend to get flattened on the Autobahn. Demotivational verse from the best track here: “I had a breakdown/in the service area/I had a breakdown/in Bavaria.” Life is a highway, and they’re gonna ride it all night long, or until the motor(ik) stops.  

The Decemberists — As It Ever Was, So It Shall Be Again  I dunno whether stateside musicians have ever come to grips with the violent nihilism of the British folk-rock tradition. In the Seventies these Morris dancing dudes and dudettes were regularly performing shit that would have gotten Ice-T hauled before a congressional subcommittee. Consider Commoner’s Crown, an album that, as the kids say, lives rent-free in Colin Meloy’s head (mine too, Colin). On it, Maddie Prior sharpens up her legendary acuity on the whetstone of infanticide. The album opens with a story with heavy antisemitic overtones about the quasi-ritual sacrifice of Little Sir Hugh. Then they jig. Then comes the the album centerpiece: local serial killer Long Lankin conspires with the nurse to kill the royal baby with a pin. Then he slaughters the mother in a kitchen saturated in her own child’s blood. The they jig again. Sometimes this is understood as the residue of class struggle: childe ballads as peasant wish fulfillment fantasies of the violent overthrow of primogeniture. Others think that the Brits are just sickos. Either way, it isn’t something that Colin, for all his considerable talents, can approach. He loves dark themes and he makes his macabre references, and shy Edward Gorey fans pop their noses out from behind their grandfather clocks to pay attention. But all those misdeeds are under literary-ironic erasure. Colin lacks the wicked will to burn the landlord’s daughter in the wicker man. For starters, he is clearly a good guy. For finishers, he’s an American. D.H. Lawrence was right that Americans are killers, but we’re not those kind of killers. Sure, we will knife you, but for us, it is, as EPMD and Paulie Walnuts would tell you, business never personal. Not so for the Brit, who carries centuries of indignation, class resentment, and horror on the heath. They live in a land where it’s sunny one day of the year, and that day is reserved for football hooliganism. That ill wind is never coming to Springville Hill. I’m not saying Colin should stop trying. I’m just saying his earnest exercises in murder music appreciation might leave you ravenous for the real deal. 

The Early November — The Early November   Taylor Swift is a precocious ingenue with a proprietary streak and a deep belief in fairytale romance. Jay-Z is a business, man, a low-horizon capitalist visionary who has applied the enterprising spirit of the crack game to the financially rewarding project of self-mythology. These artists are way more than that, but those are the fundamentals: the gestural meaning behind the handshake the writer made with the audience years ago. We understand everything we’ve heard from them since — even stuff meant to subvert initial impressions — in the context of those indelible early missives from HQ. Likewise, Ace Enders will always be a beleaguered working-class fella with a side-eye on God, worried about how to feed his family. No matter how arty and weird he gets (and at times he’s been marvelously outré for a regular guy from Hammonton, NJ), he maintains his concern for expectations and propriety. No doubt this endears him to Soupy Campbell, who brings us a more melodramatic version of the same character dynamic on the Aaron West records. My feeling is that Ace’s production collaborations with Soupy bring out the Springsteenian side of both guys, and lookit, here we have The Early November signaling a back to basics move with an album called The Early November. The result is less For All of This than it is mainstream rock radio, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the new set misses more than the ambitious Lilac did. Yet when it works, it provides more sustenance than meat and potatoes ordinarily do. That’s because of the ease with which Ace can reinflate his standard protagonist, and the angelic purity of his singing, which communicates Lawful Good more reliably than do the other weedy characters working the emo tomato patch. There hasn’t been a new Jimmy Eat World album in years. You may as well enjoy “About Me” while you’re waiting.

The High Llamas — Hey Panda  Sean O’Hagan notices mainstream pop. To be fair, it was always there in his peripheral vision, but he was too enamored with Cookie Bay and the nomads to pay it too much attention. He was ripping off Brian Wilson long before his peers began ripping off his ripoffs, and those acts of prescience and larcenous precedence gave his mid-career discography much of its shape. Recent projects — Beets, Corn & Maize in particular — even lost the synthesizer interludes that made Gideon Gaye and Hawaii feel like music from a resort glimpsed from the deck of a UFO. Hey Panda is a pretty radical swing in the other direction: for the first time he’s using machine beats and heavy vocal phasing and pruning his melodies to fit the shape of current pop conventions. When he giftwraps his beats for guest singers, he achieves solidarity, if not commonality, with mixtape-slingers and leftfield playlist deejays. He’s still Sean O’Hagan, though: an outsider with an intense interest in the psychological dynamics of transience. The travel-weariness that has always been there in his voice continues to mark him as a disenchanting force at the summer festival. It’s fitting for a ghostly figure flitting around the verges of contemporary music, alighting on nothing for long, posing hanging questions that he knows damned well will not be answered. 

The Lemon Twigs —  A Dream Is All We Know  I’m gonna make a conservative estimate here and say that a million bands have tried to rip off the Beach Boys and the Beatles. We mostly don’t notice this because the vast majority of those bands are inept. Developmental melody a la “God Only Knows” is a very hard thing to generate. Shoot for that and miss — and most will miss — and you’re just going to come off as a generic indie rock group. So don’t call the brothers D’Addario plagiarists, because that’s not their mode of operation. They have too much respect for their inspirations to lift from them. Instead their offense, if you even want to call it that, is vibe theft. This is the way that compositions by Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney (and occasionally John Lennon) used to get recorded by engineers in the 1960s, and that’s mostly a matter of EQ, microphone positioning, nondigital spring reverbs, two-inch tape machines, things like that. A piece like “How Can I Love Her More” sounds like Wilson circa Wild Honey not because of the composition but because of the way the jewels are set in the bezel. Nothing has been pinched. If the melody wasn’t sturdy, they wouldn’t be able to generate the illusion at all, because original melody was a hallmark of the Beach Boys, and the Lemon Twigs are, ironically, a rather original band. Compare the scores of modern pop singers recycling the same two tunes and the same rudimentary chord progression to something like “They Don’t Know How to Fall in Place” and you’ll see what I mean. You might wish that the D’Addarios would apply their studio talents and songcraft to the sound of now, which could certainly use an infusion of imagination. But maybe they don’t want to. Maybe they’ve concluded, as many other artists have, that modern life is rubbish. You might even concede the point. It’s not like they’re trying to put one over on anybody — they’re out on the road covering “Good Vibrations” note for note. It’s letter perfect. But you already knew that.

The Paranoid Style — The Interrogator Well, check it out. They’ve actually gone and added Peter Holsapple to the starting lineup. Will Rigby pinch hits, too. It turns out they’re not content to merely be something new under the sun and burny and indigestible in the belly. They’d also like to be a really good rock group. It’s hard to blame them. They do like that old time rock and roll. That kinda music just soothes the soul. This set is, as you might expect, witty and wise, with copious references to songs famous and obscure. It’s also the first Paranoid Style project that doesn’t lead with the lyrics. Instead, The Interrogator is a two-fisted band attack complete with dense arrangements indebted to Costello, Westerberg, Misfits-era Kinks, and especially The Pretenders. The prior set appropriated from the crates with enthusiasm and abandon, but the execution wasn’t always sure-footed; on The Interrogator, they land everything they try. Some standouts: the Trust-ish “Styles Make Fights,” the college rock Bonnie and Clyde story “Print the Legend,” the six-string squall of “That Drop Is Steep,” the crossed-armed impertinence of “The Ballad of Pertinent Information.” And it must be said: though they assure us that every good work of conscience is a confidence scheme and cop to some vestigial unease about rock and roll mythology, nothing about their style is too paranoid these days. Instead they seem well-adjusted — surprisingly accepting of the structured class of rock canonicity and willing to play ball. I’m racking my brain here, but I can’t think of another band that went, in two albums flat, from a very weird, very fringe proposition to something fairly normal. Sometimes the Yankees trade for a filthy, cross-eyed, long-haired freak from a second division team, and the next thing you know, he’s shaved and scrubbed, fundamentally solid, and competing for a championship. I guess these things happen to college rockers too, as long as they’re true believers in the pattern. So call them a relic call them what you will.   

The Smile — Wall of Eyes  My feelings about Thom Yorke give me insight into the way some people react to pop-punk vocalists like, say, Jordan Pundik. With Thom, it is just instant revulsion for me. The mewling, lemon sucking vocal tone, the self-importance, the performative introversion and the unearned paranoia. Not that those are the problems with Jordan Pundik. He has other problems.

The Secret Sisters — Mind, Math, Medicine  Two refugees from the Brandi Carlisle alt-country re-education camp show up, slathered with natural finish Minwax (Brandi’s favorite), at the frontier fortress. Perhaps they are fatally contaminated. Lieutenant, shall they be shot on sight or shall we listen to their new record. Hmm. Some of this betrays that particular version of Stockholm syndrome common to those who have escaped the Carlile compound; i.e., a few of these austere numbers sound like Brandi is about to pop out of the bass drum and start pitching sanctimony. Others, like “Paperweight,” channel the lightness that carried this project back when it was less sessile. It’s been a weird career; one of the weirdest around. Right off the bat, the Secret Sisters established that they could do something really well — sing close Everly harmonies on traditional country-folk songs — and a long line of producers have done what they can to make sure they never do it. “Mistake” isn’t a strong enough word. It’s more like malpractice.

Tierra Whack — World Wide Whack Accessibility is a turnoff for Tierra. She’s not just cutting you loose — she’s doing it with a really sharp knife (her words). Maybe what she means is that her partner is too available to others, but I rather think the problem is that he’s too available to her. She’s looking for somebody to take her to see The Matrix and sit beside her in the darkness as she enters a fantasy world headfirst. Subsequent tracks reinforce her feeling of separateness: her pointed refusal to answer the cellphone, for instance, while she’s serenading herself in the shower. Then there’s the one where she prefers her ravioli-eating imaginary friend to anybody real. Balling on her lonely is how she puts it. I think it is in the context of her desire for solitude that we’re meant to receive her hints and queries about suicide. Here is a woman so sensitive that she is shook by the greenness of the grass. We begin to understand her famous preference for brevity. If there’s a childlike vibe to some of her verse and the worldview that informs that verse, it’s the shiver of the overstimulated kid, wide-eyed but on the brink of tears. She insists her mental instability is not related to drugs. It didn’t come from a substance; it’s hers alone. None of these punchy, laconic lines would turn your head in a poetry textbook. Put them in the mouth of a strange girl from North Philadelphia and they become unforgettable. Funny how pop works. It’s built to ennoble difficult personalities from Morrissey to Marilyn Manson to Minnie Mouse.

Tindersticks — Soft Tissue  As there is a limit to how many spooky plinks and spectral plonks I can take before I call the Ghostbusters, I haven’t always cottoned on to what this depressive but talented UK band is up to. On Soft Tissue, everything in the mix (even the vox) sounds like it was played on a marimba made of Tom Waits’s ribcage. But I am impressed with the way they’ve sustained the melancholy tone and mood while kneading Sinatra saloon song flavor into the songs via gorgeous string and brass arrangements.  They’ve got a nice narrative whirlpool working, too, one that builds in intensity and draws us down into Stuart Staples’s godforsaken despondency.  In the wee small hours of the morning, check out the last minute and a half of “Always a Stranger.” It culminates in one of this year’s choicest cuts — “Turned My Back,” in which the narrator ditches his domestic obligations and basically becomes a bum. Freedom!, the backing vocalists promise him, and it sounds about as comforting as a bed under a streetlight. Women: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without’ em. But mostly he can’t live with ‘em.

Toro Y Moi — Hole Erth  “Burning through this bread like a brand new toaster.”  See, that makes sense as a metaphor, sorta, but I don’t think it means what Chaz thinks it means. If your new toaster burns through your bread, you’re bringing it back to Williams-Sonoma. Chaz isn’t trying to imply that he’s defective, is he?  That does not tend to be a winning argument in rap feuds. I pick this nit not (just) to be pedantic, but because it’s an example of the incomplete gestures that define Toro Y Moi. Chaz is trying to be clever not because he values cleverness per se, but because he is making a cloud rap record and cloud rappers play with words. So he does as they do. In order to be in the club for a day — and a day is about as long as he’s ever willing to book the AirB&B for — he’s cracking a joke. Formally. this is the sort of pun you’d expect to get from a cloud rap song. It’s catchy and it works as a hook. But it subtly undermines our faith in the emcee’s authority. No matter how much lean Lil Wayne has guzzled, he’s never going to make a mistake like that. All of his figurative language is going to line up properly to glorify the speaker; boasting, I think we call it. It’s pretty basic to the form. From the perspective of the rap follower if not the rap gatekeeper, this feels like the sort of boo-boo that Drake has been making over the past few sets. It’s the error that suggests that the artist is moving very fast, cutting corners, and not really thinking about what he’s doing. To keep things whizzing by in a blur of unexpected happenstance, he’s loaded his album with collaborations: Kevin Abstract, Porches, Ben Gibbard(!), Duckwrth, etc. Many of these are good, and draw a line from emo/pop-punk to hip-hop as well as anything on Montero did. But this move too, is very late-Drake-like, because as well as these features work as sonic and compositional elements, it never feels like Chaz is in the room with any of his guests. His engagement with their contributions to his project isn’t superficial, exactly, because he suits all of the musicians with sonic settings that bring out the best in each. But it does feel expensive and hollow, like a high-end chocolate bunny. This wasn’t well reviewed, which is a little surprising given how crisply it’s been assembled, and I’d refrain from piling it on if I thought for a second that Chaz wasn’t already on to the next thing. I’m not gonna say he isn’t talented, and I’m not going to argue that his latest isn’t fun for what it is. But he remains what he’s always been: the biggest dilettante in pop.   

Trevor Horn — Echoes: Ancient and Modern  Cara got me a copy of the Trevor Horn memoir for my burf day. As allergic as I am to memoirs, this one was worth it for the 90125 chapter alone. ABC, Seal, Malcolm McLaren, Dear Catastrophe Waitress: so much to say about how these albums were made. We also get a sense of the private Trevor, and he comes off as a real handful. It’s pretty clear he’s burned some big bridges. This may account for some of the peculiar choices on this auto-celebratory tribute record meant to accompany the book — a party thrown by Trevor for Trevor, but attended by fewer of the usual customers than you might expect. For instance, Rick Astley does “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and it’s… a nice try. Robert Fripp’s read on “Relax” is ridiculously awkward; Seal doing “Steppin’ Out” should work, but it’s strangely stiff. Tori Amos’s interpretation of “Swimming Pools” is the only true sensation here, and that’s a non-Trevor song by a non-Trevor artist, sung by a musician who has never worked with Trevor before. As This Is Your Life episodes go, this is maybe not the most uplifting one.

Tyler, The Creator — Chromakopia  This is getting compared to Mr. Morale, and mmhmm, I can see that. It’s not just that this is a simpler and more straighforward version of Tylermusic and therefore an ideal point of entry for those who may have found the writing on Igor too dense. It isn’t even the occasional psychodramatic indulgence. No, it’s that Tyler has really opened up the corn chute this time around, and he’s stocking the silo with a starchy, tasty heirloom variety not dissimilar to that served up by Kendrick. For instance there’s the story about the licentious woman whose posthumous note reveals that she was living life to the fullest after a terminal cancer diagnosis. That’s like Harry Chapin — Harry in the strip club. Then there’s the one where Tyler does battle with the Africanness of his hair, and the one where he forgives the absent father, and the one where he and a girlfriend debate whether to keep or terminate a pregnancy. (Tyler plays both roles, of course; he’s just aching to knock himself up.) These are all marvelously written and performed, full of vivid, muscular Californian vernacular and played to the hilt by an opportunistic entertainer willing to make a hype man out of his own momma. Tyler’s newfound interest in fatherhood seems mostly driven by FOMO. He admits that’s a lousy reason to have a child. But the underlying vision of a world where all decisions are made, sans shame and sans masks, by those who follow their heart’s desires is more than merely profound. It’s the full ripening of the impulse-driven hedonism that used to get Tyler in trouble with the Moral Majority before everybody realized what a nerd he is. One might even call it maturation.  

Vampire Weekend — Only God Was Above Us  On the last one, Ezra Koenig locked Baio and Tomson in the basement closet and applied the Vampire Weekend name to a Muppety solo project while his former “friends” scratched desperately at the door for air. This is how the colonizer operates, Kendrick tells me: intimidation, exploitation, copious references to Phish albums. Genteel guilt has motivated Ezra to initiate a work-release program. Only God Was Above Us still doesn’t feel like a band album, but the other guys do manage to leave their imprint on the arrangements; Tomson even contributes the pretty good “Gen-X Cops,” which sounds like it could have been on the Dams of the West album. Ironically the ringers who Ezra brings in mostly try to sound like Tomson and Baio. Maybe they’re a little more rigorous. But yacht clubby as they pretend-were, was this band ever really about the square corners on folded napkins? As for Rostam, he’s only here as an apparition: his sole contribution turns out to be a leftover sample from Contra days. Again Ariel Rechtshaid et. al. do their best to bust out the (digital) harpsichord in imitation of Rostam’s neoclassical approach to pop arrangement. Often they succeed. But it does prompt a question: if they were going to try this hard to sound like “Vampire Weekend,” why not simply reassemble Vampire Weekend? Guess Mister Batmanjlig is too busy stacking that Carly Rae money to bother. As for Ezra, his gift for melody has not abandoned him. As long as it is in effect, his songs are required listening; check “Prep School Gangsters” for some catchy supporting evidence. This time around the theme is generational dislocation and the belief among the no-longer-so-young but still capricious that they missed their chance to do something historically significant. They’re just slipping politely through the sifter of human history and leaving no trace on the mechanism. True, but perhaps that’s for the best. Ezra remains conflict-averse in a manner unbecoming to a rock star; that said, as a milquetoast myself, I admit I have mentally applied “you don’t want to win this war/cuz you don’t want the peace” to Hamas and the Knesset. I’m not gonna guess which side of the fight Ezra is on. He probably just wants the bullets to stop flying so his battered conscience can get some rest.

Vera Sola — Peacemaker  I’ll lead with the lede. Vera is Dan Aykroyd’s daughter. This is salient to our understanding of Peacemaker because of the kind of album it is: no single, no genre, no relationship to any streaming trend, no apparent commercial intentions, no budgetary restrictions, no way it would have been made by an artist concerned about her next meal. It’s the sort of widescreen art-rock that only seems to come from the SoCal-affiliated and showbiz-connected. There’s a movie playing inside Vera’s head, and she’s scoring it. She’s the lead. Maybe Tom Waits is in it. Seriously, there are allusions to Tom Waits all over this album; two of the songs are basically “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” Then there’s the matter of Vera’s scenery-chewing delivery, which can be hard to hang with. Vera sounds like Shilpa Ray attempting to wheedle herself into a high-class function. At her worst, she acts her way through songs that demand a singer — and that is, again, an affectation common among the children of Tinseltown. If you can get past all of that, this is a strong, uncompromising release without a weak track on it, well-written, well arranged, neatly sequenced and compositionally balanced, and excellently played by Vera, who turns out to be an imaginative guitarist with a neat, brittle style. The more she rocks, the better she does. When she chases metaphors for the romantic psychodrama that consumes her attention, she tends to bag what she’s hunting for. Even her absurd e-nun-ci-a-tion and her absurder education turn out to be net plusses over the course of the set. Hey, what’s Mitchell Froom up to these days? Someone put Vera’s name in his customer referral box.

Vince Staples — Dark Times  Dairy-free and whacktose intolerant for a decade, Vince finally grates us a little cheese. Sharp cheese, mind you; the twenty-four month provolone. Guru Vince is cognizant of the needs of his inner child; he’s even willing to rhyme it with “don’t forget to smile.” Well, to be fair, he’s addressing the homies — one in particular who is stuck in supermax. Vince doesn’t care if you smile. He’s not that far gone. But the warming trend that began on the self-titled project and continued on Ramona Park Broke My Heart has melted much of the surface ice. For once the rapper is willing to concede what longtime listeners already know: while his romantic failures occur in a sociocultural context that makes them particularly bittersweet, they’re still failures. A more generous Vince even makes room for a reasonable female perspective on the shortcomings of hip-hop discourse. That comes right after the one that concludes “women lie a lot,” but you can’t have everything. What you can have: that delicious outro to “Étouffée” that manages to unite bounce, hyphy, and g-funk in the precise manner that Vince’s music does at its best. Later there’s a Kaelin Ellis beat so inspirational that it compels vince to raid Tupac’s book of rhyme pages twice. Life hard but I go harder, he tells us, and it doesn’t even feel like a boast. It’s more like the sort of self-affirmation a commuter might use to get him through his seven A.M. bus ride and up into the office. A kind of prayer, I’d say. A solicitation directed not at a God but at ourselves.

Wand — Vertigo  If this sounds more like solo Cory than teammate Cory, there’s a reason for that. Two Wandsters we’re used to have not come back for more wagging. There’s a new bassist in town, who may well be Cory cleverly disguised as a non-overdubber. More tragically, we’re missing synthesist Sofia Arreguin, who provided a feminine counterweight to Cory’s manly paranoia. To make matters worse, scene-stealing drummer Evan burrows gets lost in the guitorchestral miasma. Basically there is nobody around to check Cory’s tendency toward sonic spectrum-saturating excess. This worked on Western Cum because of how fully he embodied his delusions of Samborahood. On a steel horse he rode, and rode and rode. But the Wand name requires psychedelia or some reasonable approximation thereof, so Cory must oblige with feedback, screeches, and more time-killing dreaminess than we’re used to getting out of this guy. Even the prophecies aren’t as doomy. “Someone’s gonna sleep in the bathroom tonight”? Hell, everybody who has ever toured with an indie band knows that. 

Washed Out — Notes From A Quiet Life  One with no surprises, eh? A part of me is glad to see Ernest Greene, if nobody else, living the Radiodream. As Chaz Bundick has continued to pursue his have-chill-will-travel agenda, Ernest has kept his chill right where he found it. That said, he’s always been tuneful and musically adventurous, and his soundscaping has had as profound an influence over the streambait style of pop as anybody’s. If there was any justice in pop, Spotify would put him on the board of directors. What’s always been missing is the sense of urgency that all great popular music requires, and since he’s clearly got no interest in cultivating any, perhaps we ought to leave him to his rays by the poolside.  

Why? — The Well I Fell Into  For the year’s most middle-aged album, Yoni Wolf resurrects the Why? name to share his feelings about his divorce. They’re bad. He feels bad about it. We know this from the doleful Lee Hazlewood delivery that he adopts when he’s not getting outright Neil Diamond on us. The hip-hop overtures that used to be the defining feature of Yoni’s version of college rock have mostly been relegated to the margins, replaced by piano noodles that connote his waning virility. While there’s lots here about the narrator’s fortysomething exhaustion, feelings of irrelevance, and therapy sessions, we don’t get much of a portrait of the woman who has left Yoni behind. It’s not tough to guess her motivation. It could be she doesn’t want to be compared to a receptacle, or remain in a relationship that is constantly likened to a sputtering economy car. Or maybe she’d prefer a boyfriend who doesn’t think of his Jewish ancestors or Biblical imperatives during sex. “I wanna buss in your great great grandmother’s uterus” indeed. Careful where you’re pointing that shofar, Yoni.  

Willow — Empathogen  Hey, get a load of Will and Jada’s kid. Because “Whip My Hair” this ain’t. For starters, Empathogen sounds live: piano pushed in the mix, big drums, full and unfussy sonic saturation, club-ready attitude. Then there are the shorter pieces that are experimental in the manner of an accelerated kid monkeying around with a chemistry set. Willow’s performances on the longer numbers suggest a good understanding of the temporal basis of pop music — pop as something that unfolds over three intense minutes and demands dynamism from the vocalist. That sounds simple, but in this loopy time, many do mess it up. The overtures to jazz are survivable, the melodies are sporadically memorable, and the lyrical investigation of the contours of Willow’s recovery from whatever psychological problem was dogging her are mostly harmless. Sonic touchstones include Esperanza Spalding and Thundercat (the Hubba Bubba bottom end), Alicia Keys (the keys-driven midrange), Steve Lacy (the innerspacy treble), and Tori Amos in “Crucify” mode. Tori is deliberately and competently evoked all over the set. It all becomes clear when you look at the liner notes and see that Willow’s main producer/co-writer/collaborator here is Chris Greatti, the man who abetted Poppy’s transformation from conceptual comedienne to progressive rocker. Greatti handles the beats and the bass and brings in ringers to handle the rest. And it occurs to me again that there are real artistic benefits to being born into the Illuminati. It’s not just parties at Bohemian Grove and the like. You get your pick of Tinseltown talent. All you have to do is sacrifice a few babies to Moloch. Maybe you have to smile and bear it when Jon Baptiste tinkles all over one of your tracks. How Willow avoided a guest verse from Childish Gambino is beyond my understanding of the machinations of the cabal, though. He must have been spirit cooking with Marina Abramovic that night.

Wishy — Triple Seven  This Indiana indie concern is good at what it does. And what it does is match distorto suspended chords plus feedback a la My Bloody Valentine to white funk EMF You’re Unbelievable beats. 2024 boilerplate, in other words, but really sharp boilerplate with squared edges and high quality ink. As so many bashful vocalists do, the girl singer makes it her mission to blend with the guitars, and i’m sorry to say she succeeds. The boy vocalist, on the other hand, sounds like he wandered over from the Warped Tour. He’s thirsty and a little crabby, and now he’s looming over the cool kids table in a heathaze, completely oblivious to the stylistic clash. And Wishy works sooooo much better when he is singing that it makes you realize that all of these mumble-mouthed moderns would be vastly improved if only their frontpeople would sound off like they’ve got a pair, as my personal hero R. Lee Ermey memorably put it. They don’t even have to be good at it. Just do as this Hoosier goofball has: listen to a garden variety emo album and behave accordingly. C’mon, you diaphanous suckers. Jerry Lee Lewis did not die in a rice paddy in Vietnam so you could dream your lives away. Wake the fuck up already. That’s that me espresso. 

Yard Act — Where’s My Utopia?  Oh my god they’ve turned into the Bloodhound Gang. Other antecedents include the Chili Peppers, Duran Duran once they decided to stop writing music and funk out instead, the leftover jalapeño poppers in the back of the Dust Brothers’ refrigerator, Rippopotamus, and that homecoming dance band that made you want to drop out of university and join the nearest terrorist gang. Part of me is happy that they got away from the post-punk sprechesang thing, but it’s out of the assembly line and straight into the downmarket disco with them. You must ask yourself if Party City is really the context in which you’d like to encounter James Smith’s musings on the futility of human endeavor. Most of the spoken word patter on this set concerns James’s feelings about the sudden upsurge of interest in his band, which is, I am sure, a topic of great fascination for his psychiatrist and accountant alike. Notable it is that the deeper reflections on this rather trying set are pure memoir-rock: accounts of formative moments in the singer’s youth. They’re rounds of the cycle of abuse viewed against the backdrop of class and climate change. These are eloquently written. They’re also good reminders of why I don’t read memoirs.

Zach Bryan — The Great American Bar Scene  Never let them tell you “oh you’ll survive.” Because last time around, lots of people didn’t. You were one of the lucky ones. Will you be lucky again? Will I? I’m not placing any bets one way or another, and I’m certainly not proceeding with any confidence or dismissing anybody’s worries. The American memory, as Robert Wyatt once tried to tell us, is notoriously short and compromised. But I reckon even Robert would have been shocked about how fast we’ve spaced on the finale of the first Trump Administration: everybody stuck at home with the doors closed and the windows sealed and our enterprises and our minds shut down. Years of rotten choices led unswervingly to that outcome. We’ve been trying to piece ourselves back together ever since, though pandemic-related injury (and the pandemic is not over) continues to be a defining feature of American life. Everybody who has studied this seriously has come to the conclusion that cognitive function post-infection is not what it should be. Our impulse control is compromised. Is that a permanent thing, or are we going to be made whole one day?  We don’t know. But COVID-related brain damage is, I reckon, one of the main explanations for Decision ’24. This is not to say that we need a TBI to make terrible mistakes, because we’ve all learned that that isn’t true. One of the weaknesses of democracy is our well-being is dependent on the wisdom of our neighbors, and those neighbors, being all too human, can’t exactly be counted on for superhuman reasoning. Still we must keep the faith or acquiesce to one form of despotism or another. I refuse to spend the next four years obsessing over the outcome of this election, and I advise you to keep your head, too. Remember that this was not your doing, and if you’re reading this, it was likely not the fault of any of your friends, either. You, like me, know that people do a lot of stupid things. You are probably tired of living with the consequences of the terrible decisions of others, but this is the system we’ve chosen and the game we’ve decided to play. A break from the madness would have been nice. Instead we’re plunging back into it, face-first. We don’t have to go looking for it; honestly, we shouldn’t bother. Sooner or later but probably sooner, it’s going to be right in our face. Me, I’ve got my tray table up and my seat back in the full upright position. Turbulence is coming.