Quick Hits, Vol. 174 (Greta Van Fleet, billy woods, Jim James, J.I.D.)

Greta Van Fleet - From the Fires.  You know how sometimes you can hear a band's influence?  You might note that the guitar licks in a particular White Stripes tune are in the lane of Jimmy Page.  Or that the heavy drums in a Royal Blood tune bang like a Bonham blast.  Or that the Woflmother guy can howl like Robert Plant.  But never, outside of an actual Led Zeppelin album, could you find all of those influences and allegiances so tightly wound together and perfectly stitched into a life-sized Zeppelin tribute statue.  Seriously.  Someone should contact the trademark lawyers because the likeness is uncanny.  In "Highway Tune," when he sings "My my! My my!" and then gives a primal wooooooooaaaaaaahhhhh, it is classic Plant.  At the end of "Flower Power," you get all the "You're Time Is Gonna Come" organs you can stomach.  And as far as I'm concerned, hell yes, gimme some more.  This is highly cool.  "Highway Tune" is the top track, by a large margin, with 11.6 million streams, so get your lighters ready.

Yeah, baby.  Sometimes, the vocals do stray further out into Wolfmother zone, where it is more caricature and less homage, like in "Talk on the Street." And sometime he gets shrill enough to sound like Heart.   But when they have it together (as in most of these tracks), it just works. Total Zeppelin recreation.  I dig it and would be excited to see them play live.

billy woods - Known Unknowns.  I've been putting off a review of this one for a while.  Dunno where I found it, and the guy has no Spotify bio, so I'm lost on context.  Rapper, with a good, well-paced, enunciated flow.  Beats are good, nothing flashy or bass heavy, more like sample-heavy beats but without any samples that I recognize.  Crate digger samples.  or they might not even be samples, just track snippets made to emulate the sampling.  Kind of a madvillian vibe on here.  The top song is the first track of the album, "Bush League," with only 95k streams.

Interesting thing is that this is his 6th album.  Never heard of the dude.  Short tracks, only one cracks 4 minutes, and most are under 3 minutes.  But each of the 18 (?!?) tracks on here packs a load of lyrics in - I feel like I need to stop everything and really study the lyrics to even understand what is happening.  None of it sounds like a radio friendly hit, they are all more densely packed and no pop styles.  I can't decide if I really like this all that much - feels like more work than I'm willing to give to him.  He needs to hook me with something, give me a head bobbing hook or catchy chorus or something.  I've probably been through this disc 10 times by now and I just can't get it into my head.

Jim James - Tribute to 2.  I love me some My Morning Jacket.  The combination of Jim James' voice and their slightly jammy rock is right up my alley.  So I was pumped to see a new Jim James disc.  Less pumped now.  This one opens on a different note, with the horn-assisted, kind of cheesy "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times."  And it stays in that kind of classy, cutesy zone the whole time, like these are all covers of 70's soft rock or 50's do-wop songs that he is trying to put his own spin on.  And lookee there, I just went and looked it up, and this album is all covers.  Some are obvious covers I could ID - Willie's "Funny How Time Slips Away" or Emerson Lake & Palmer's "Lucky Man" - but the rest of these are not in my normal wheelhouse.  That opening track (apparently a Brian Wilson song) is the most popular, but only with 210k.  The streaming numbers fall off precipitously from there, showing me that I'm not alone in feeling underwhelmed by these tunes.

I still think James has a wonderful voice - full of soft creases and crinkles and humor (at times), but this violin and clarinet (?) schlock is dead on arrival for me.  Some of the tunes are better than this, but I won't hold on to any of and will just hope that another MMJ album comes along soon.

J.I.D. - The Never Story.  Never heard of this rapper, but Shea Serrano called him out the other day in an article he wrote about good or bad albums from last year.  Figured I'd try it out.  Sounds a lot like Kendrick, where is just goes and goes and goes, and can go up in pitch in that same earnest way.  He can also sound like Lil Wayne, that kind of high-pitched tone, slightly nasal, punctuated by sharp breaths and squeaks from a voice at its limit.  For a few tracks, I thought he was a female.  Interesting.  Top track, by a ton, is "NEVER," with 16.3 million streams.

Cool song.  Start is a chilled out beat with that Kendrick flow, and then he entirely flips the beat and flow into that more stressful, electronic beat and more of the Lil Wayne sound.  I like it.  "EdEddnEddy" got me all excited for a moment, because they use a slowed down version of the plucked/hold note sample that is used in Tribe's "Scenario," so I get all pumped up to hear that song, and its a chilled ass track instead.  I really like this album.    As usual, I could do without the R&B section of "Hereditary" back to back with "All Bad," as I want my rap album to be just a rap album and not a sneaky way to make me listen to R&B, but "Hereditary" is actually an all-right track.  Probably the first rap album that I think I'll hold on to entirely since DAMN.