Quick Hits, Vol. 170 (Aimee Mann, Katy Perry, Frank Turner, Charly Bliss)

Aimee Mann - Mental Illness.  If you've never gone down the Aimee Mann rabbit hole, you really should.  My first exposure to her was through the I Am Sam soundtrack, if you recall that one.  Great soundtrack, by the way, takes all Beatles songs and has a bunch of indie and alternative artists provide cover versions.  Some of them are really great, and that definitely applies to Mann's "Two of Us."  I grabbed that album many moons ago and played the crap out of it on a huge road trip with friends up to Utah to see the 2002 Olympics.  Try that soundtrack out.  The next tunes I remember of Mann are from the Magnolia soundtrack, with "Save Me" being her top track on Spotify to this day.  And such a great tune.  I caught myself singing the chorus against yesterday while walking the dog - "why don't you save me, from the ranks, of the freaks, who suspect, they could never love anyone."

Anyway, on to this album - Mann has a very beautiful voice, soft in the center, but edged with something that makes her sound like she smiles through pain as she sings.  Layers of harmony, generally acoustic and relaxed arrangements, this is pretty chilled stuff, but it always feels like she is singing from a place of regret and simmering anger.  And with song titles like "Knock it Off" and "You Never Loved Me" and "Lies of Summer," you get that pissed off feeling there too.  The top song is the first one off the album, "Goose Snow Cone," with 1.2 million streams.  So not very popular.

FFS, man.  I'm not a cat guy, being that I am very allergic to them and being around one will make my face die, but damn you Aimee Mann, now I'm all teared up about the fate of Goose the cat who likes to fetch Q-Tips.  This is a good album - kind of a one note thing, so if you don't like that chilled brand of harmonic relaxation tune, then you're not going to find much else to change your mind on here.  Good lyrics and relaxed tunes.

Katy Perry - Witness.  Please don't make me go back through this one again.  Please.  15 songs, just under an hour, and nothing on here is worth a damn.  The only one I had heard before is the godawful "Chained to the Rhythm," that I saw on the Grammy broadcast last year, but is tragically bad.  I guess the Nicki Minaj track "Swish Swish" is the best thing on here, but don't make me think about this anymore.

Oooh, that video is awful.  Even with a kid from Stranger Things in it.  I take it back, this song sucks too.  Do not go listen to this album.

Frank Turner - Songbook.  I was at a friend's birthday party the other night, and an acquaintance told me about this guy.  She was shocked that I didn't know about him already - people figure that I know all music on the planet because I know 4.6% of it and write a million words about it a week.  So, I tossed him in the Q, and to be honest, he is really fun. The first song from this album ("I Still Believe") is kind of like a Flogging Molly/Dropkick Murphys tune, where it starts off slow in an accented lilt, and then a full on punk oi-oi-oi-ooooh! assault kicks in and drives you through the wall before a wooooahhhahhahhhhooooohhhh background kicks in for the pounding ending.  Sweet.
According to the Spotify bio, he was once in a punk band called Million Dead, before going out on his own to make folkier, more acoustic tunes.  And this album is a "career-spanning retrospective" that includes some re-recorded versions of some of his most famous songs.  Which is why this disc is so flipping long - 1:51 and 29 songs.  But it has some really great stuff on it.  Even after that first track, the second track ("I Still Believe") is a fun crowd-sing-a-long about believing in the power of rock and roll its power to make everything right.  Hell yes.
The top track on his entire Spotify is called "Recovery," with just over 6 million streams.

Yeah, baby.  Some of the tunes come across more as emo Dashboard Confessional-sounding tracks ("Long Live the Queen" is a good example), or Snow Patrol ("There She Is"), but most of them are really very fun and more like Irish Punk-lite and Americana ("The Road" could easily be a Texas country tune).  Would be a fun dude to see play live.

Charly Bliss - guppy.  The Ringer's top ten albums of the year pimped this one, and I haven't been able to delete it out of my new music Q since.  Seriously great alt-buzz tunes picked straight up out of the Breeders/Weezer/Veruca Salt/Matthew Sweet world of 90's rock.  It is really good stuff.  The top song is the album opener, "Percolator," but I want to give you the second track, "Westermarck."

I wanna go to Charly Bliss camp!  Love it.  "Black Hole" also rules.  And "DQ."  But I'm a massive sucker for the 90's buzz bin alternative action, so this was going to click for me no matter what.  Every once in a while, the saccharine quality of the vocal bugs, but it doesn't bother me long term.  Gimme some more.