I'm not going to review it, because I couldn't actually listen to it, but there is a band called Kvelertak that was recommended on Twitter by someone I figured I could trust, and it is very much unpleasant unpleasantness with small sections of lovely Foo Fighter-ish tuneful rock. Did you ever listen to that album The Shape of Punk to Come? There was one track on that old album I thought was boss, but the rest of it made me need have my head ripped open like I was a victim of one of the "good" guys in The Boys.
Also, I grabbed some music from the Spotify new releases page the other day because the cover art and band name sounded good - Nighttime Boogie Association. It is absolutely godawful. I found out later that this is the Pearl Jam drummer with the Foo Fighters drummer, but their sterling pedigrees cannot save this trash.
Nothing But Thieves - Moral Panic. I always get these guys confused with Highly Suspect - another band that does very stylized, pop-forward alt-rock tunes. They're a little bit Killers, a little bit 21 Pilots, a little bit Muse. I liked these guys' earlier albums too - "Trip Switch," "Graveyard Whistling," and "Wake Up Call" from their first album are all very enjoyable. I like that "Can You Afford to Be An Individual?" talks about being a "walking contradiction in a MAGA hat," to make it clear what they are yelling about. The currently more popular song is "Impossible," but the streaming champ for them right now is "Is Everybody Going Crazy?" proving that they love songs with question marks.
Kind of a funky line that weaves throughout the verses, until the chorus kicks in with all of the falsetto that you can handle. I like the "heaven's a mindset away" as a line for these weird pandemic times. "Yeah everybody's going crazy, Cant get through to you lately, We're so hopelessly faded, Is anyone else feeling lonely?, It just can't be me only, Losing our cool so slowly, It would feel so good to steal some time, It would feel so good to make you mine." The breakdown in there is good. "UnPerson" is also a good one, although it is a little more synthy, but also much more danceable. These guys walk the line really close to heavy rock, and just back out each time they get close to the edge, to head back over to a more poppy direction. Sometimes I wish they'd give in the the heavy more. But I dig the album. I'd do it some more.
Wallows - Remote. I kinda think these guys came to ACL one year, and that is why I have them on my radar. They sound fun, kind of like Two Door Cinema Club jamming with Weezer, a little bit whimsical, a little bit rock and roll. It's a got a nice shine to the tracks, a brightness that makes me happy. At only 6 songs, this one feels like an EP or single, but I think the clear winner is "Nobody Gets Me (Like You)."
Oh shit! These guys did come to ACL - this is the band with a semi-famous actor in it. The guy who was the lead in Alexander and the Horrible Bad Super Lame No Good Day. Sorry to make you watch that video - the first 3 minutes are kind of annoying blather. But the tune is a catchy little ditty. "Talk Like That" also has a cuteness and danceability that is very fun. I like this one.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rat's Nest. Much like that title just made me wrinkle my nose in distaste, this album turns up the grungy psych shredding of their prior discs and makes it all skuzzier and louder. Some tunes get into a good Sabbath-ish groove (check the chugging "Mars for the Rich"), but overall, this is a tougher listen than a lot of the old albums from these guys. Too much of everything for my taste. The album is supposed to be some sort of space odyssey, according to something I read online, and maybe that accounts for all the weirdo sounds, but I am not with it in the end.
I can find pleasure in some hard rock. I've dug old stuff that these guys have done. But this disc just never hit right for me - screamy and thrashy and squally in ways I don't need to hear right now. Apparently the same is true for my family, as my wife just walked over from the living room to close the door to the guest bedroom so that she could avoid even the distant flavor of this music. I'm good.
Also, just because you need to hear this semi-psychosis:
Pack a dingos, there mate!
2 Chainz - So Help Me God! 2 Chainz is an interesting rapper to me. I don't think he gets his due as a relatively skilled rapper. I don't know if the early AutoTune stuff, his initial name of Tity Boi, or his general goofiness has hung around his neck to keep him from getting his proper recognition, but I don't feel like anyone talks him up like other top tier rappers. I think he's pretty damn solid. He's funny. He can really dominate a beat and use intricate turns of phrase to match the time. And when he pops up on other people's tracks, he can hammer them and steal the spotlight - "Mercy" was one of those, as was "Bandz a Make Her Dance" or "Fuckin' Problems" or "Rich as Fuck." Weird, I guess I listen to a lot more of him than I thought.
"Money Maker" does a good job of interpolating the song that 2Pac used for "Run Tha Streetz" 20+ years ago - but with kick ass horns, which makes me dig it. I think Wayne sounds like crap on that one - what happened to that dude? And then the next song "Can't Go For That" freaking samples HALL & OATES!!! That is a boss-level move.
LOL. That video is amazing. Hard to believe that they could clear that sample, but hell yeah. The only other Hall & Oates sample I can recall is De La Soul back in the day. The one with Kanye is actually pretty good, as is the one with Kevin Gates. "Quarantine Thick" has Chainz saying that he hates when a pretty girl starts snoring, and it makes me smile every time. The beats on this album are good stuff as well - they move around so that its not all trap and not all boom bap and not all sample-based. I dig that. Pretty good stuff.
I randomly thought of the Wallflowers earlier today, and it dawned on me how much I liked that one album. Without looking it up, I honestly couldn't recall if they ever made anything else, and if they did I don't recall loving it, but that initial disc was really great. "One Headlight" was the big hit, but the whole disc has a warm sound and great songwriting that I recall settling into my brain at the time with a comforting feeling. Makes me remember fondly a girl who I was dating then, and a particular season in my life. Good stuff.
Pheobe Bridgers - If We Make It Through December, which is super freaking depressing. Stranger thing was that, the other day, I had a Pandora playlist doing country-adjacent music and it played the original of the title song, by freaking Merle Haggard! So, this bummer tune, released at the end of the mega-bummer year, right as the pandemic is surging and people are alone and the thought of making it through December is actually an open question, THIS WAS A COVER?!?! What did fucking Hag know about sadness and stuff in 1973? You were probably snorting coke and high fiving the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders while you wrote this. 2020 knows the true meaning of "Now I don't mean to hate December, It's meant to be the happy time of year, And my little girl don't understand, Why daddy can't afford no Christmas gift." Anyway, hell of a good cover. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is pretty straight-forward. "Christmas Song" is almost even more depressing than the Hag's song.
Here's the opening stanza: "Coming back from the country, For the good food and lousy beer, This winter's so dry and the dirt road so dusty, At the lightest fall of rain, the bacteria bloom." Lousy beer and bacteria!?!?! What the hell is this song about? Then the chorus just kicks your teeth on in with Santa's big black boot: "You don't have to be alone to be lonesome, It's easy to forget, The sadness comes crashing like a brick through the window, And it's Christmas so no one can fix it." Faaaaaaacccckkkk!!! Hope an elf put some razor blades in my stocking this year! Someone draw a warm bath! Apparently, this song is actually by a Nebraska band named McCarthy Trenching. So there you go! If you need depressing Christmas music at the end of this year (God, I hope not, I hope we'll all swimming in communal pools of Champagne and listening to nothing but new R.E.M. songs by the end of the year) then this is your stash.
Taylor Swift - evermore. Feeling a little bit of TayTay fatigue right about now. I liked that first secret woodsy disc quite a bit, but now this one drops and its more of the same. I don't think I'd call this the b-sides, these are still lyrically great and very pretty. But I will say that none of these sound like a hit, the way that "Cardigan" did on first listen. Also, the title of this one bugs me because it makes me think of the Led Zeppelin song, which invariably makes me think of the cover of that song that was on the Singles soundtrack that made me distinctly dislike that song. Which also makes me think of the "beach" for Cabin 3 at the summer camp I attended, which was named Evermore as a distinct move to try to make it more cool than the Cabin 4 beach up-river that was named Astral. Those 70's music aficionados still holding on to the cachet of cool in the 90's! SO cool! Anyway, the lyrics here are still very strong, the tunes are still quiet and lovely. The opener is the top streamer (80 freaking million!), but I don't think that is because it is the best song, I think that is just lookie-loos checking it out, realizing it is another disc of quiet forest sprite meditations, and moving on. The next most-streamed is the second song. Then, the sixth song jumps up to claim the third spot, so I'll give you that one, a kind of odd one (makes me think of Carrie Underwood or something) with HAIM on the track. "no body, no crime."
Not as good as "Earl" or anything, but still a fun trip into the murder of a cheatin' husband. I especially like the denouement reveal of "Good thing my daddy made me get a boating license when I was fifteen, And I've cleaned enough houses to know how to cover up a scene." I also like "ivy" and "tis the damn season." Another good disc - I'll hold on to these songs.
The Avalanches - We Will Always Love You. Huh. I wrote this one, and then re-did it entirely. Didn't like it at first. But as I dug into trying to write about it and what was wrong with it, I ended up shifting the narrative in my mind. Weird. Usually the initial opinion is the final one as well.
I liked some of the old stuff from The Avalanches. Kind of cutting edge electronic weirdo music. "Since I Left You" or "Frontier Psychiatrist" had odd samples and kitschy sounds, but they also threw down an undeniable groove. That second one was my jam in about 2000. This album is not that first disc. It's not as weird, it isn't as dense/layered and doesn't mash samples together as much, and rarely has the same deep groove. There are quiet bits in here that I don't recall from the first album. Which isn't necessary bad - "The Divine Chord" is cool sounding and fun, and "Interstellar Love" is the best song on here courtesy of a cool sample from "Eye in the Sky," a Leon Bridges cameo, and a driving beat. The Leon Bridges-sampling "Born to Lose" is funky. "Oh The Sunn!" has a tight groove to it as well. And there are definitely loud, joyous things, like "Music Makes Me High." But the album overall doesn't feel very vital to me the way those old explorations did. Just a nice album of danceable alternative electronic. The top streamer features Rivers Cuomo from Weezer, and is called "Running Red Lights." Just over eight million streams.
That dude is twice my size but can move his body is ways I don't think I could even dream of. Good on you big man. Cuomo is just one of many guests on this thing - Perry Farrell, Blood Orange, Tricky, Neneh Cherry, Mick Jones, MGMT, Kurt Vile, Denzel Curry, Karen O, etc. etc. etc. It's also long as hell - 25 tracks and an hour and 11 minutes long. I entered the listening experience really wanting to like this album, but it feels disjointed and overly long. Would have been cool to cut back, and I think it could be done in a really great way. Turn it into two albums, or a double disc, where one is the fun and groovy stuff, and one is the quieter stuff. And drop some of the fluff. Because it is hard to keep my attention on it - which is maybe a me problem - and yet there are some really great tunes on here. The last song sucks - I read that it is some sort of real space transmission, but it doesn't mean I want to hear those beeps and boops shoved into my ears. I may just save a few tracks here.
Chris Cornell - No One Sings Like You Anymore. People were really digging his cover of Guns N' Roses' "Patience" a few months ago, and its pretty good. The biggest issue with this album to me is that Cornell's voice is kind of grating when it isn't accompanied by the power rock of Soundgarden or Audioslave. "Jump Into the Fire" is a great example of that here - his voice is way too powerful to go over the milquetoast accompaniment. Some tunes are fun, just because they are unexpected - "Sad Sad City," or "Nothing Compares 2 U," or "Watching the Wheels," all three of those are well-known tracks that seem odd to be on here, but it kinda works. It's entirely covers. Feels a little depressing to me, releasing an album of covers after he is already dead. Definitely feels more like a money grab, rather than some album that he had personally written and planned to release before he unexpectedly passed.
It's pretty good, but I also don't much care for the weird electro flourishes at the start. Just let the acoustic speak on there. I'm glad I tried this one, but I won't hold on to it.
I fully attempted to read more last year, but other than a few long spurts, I really did a poor job of reading. I blame it all on the ready allure of Netflix and Prime, sucking me in to more shows and mediocre movies when I really should be curled up with a book. I've got three books waiting for my eyeballs right now, so hopefully I'll get to work on one of those soon. If you have some suggestions for good books to check out, let me know - I'd love recommendations.
The Beastie Boys Book. One of the coolest things I have read in forever. Does a fantastic job of mingling first-person storytelling from the band members, with outsider memories, with other interesting forms of media. Really digs back into how they formed, but also cool shit like discussions of how to make a perfect mixtape in the 80's. If you are at all a fan of the band, can't recommend this enough. I've thought about it ever since I read it.
Stephen King - The Institute. Glad to see King going back to some of his more supernatural freaky things - this one has kids with telekinesis or telepathy - who get snagged out of their homes and brought to a secret facility. Very quick read - and I enjoyed having the majority of it come from the perspective of kids - King always does a good job with those teenager details. Good book.
Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens. Freaking great book. At first, I had a little trouble getting in to the story, solely because I was trying to read a book set in the sweaty swamps of North Carolina while I was literally freezing in a tent at negative 11 degrees, but it is beautifully written - ridiculously descriptive of all of the natural beauty in the swamps - and a solid narrative story of a wild little girl who has to make her way on her own in the swamps, and a little murder mystery thrown in for good measure. Very well done.
Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter. Terrible book. I'm 98% sure that "Faith Hunter" does not exist, and this was some sort of ghostwritten thing that took the actual author 2 hours to slap together before he handed it over to an AI bot and said "Siri, make up a bunch of weird words that sound like they could be future technology." A story about a future woman/nanobot hybrid person/thing who lives in a junkyard that hides alien tech and US military tech and uses that tech and a bunch of brain-connected cats to fight off intruders. This is not right.
Perdido Street Station - China Mieville. I forget where I came across this one - some sort of list of people who do great Sci Fi writing or something - but it is by no means a new book. Starts off mysteriously, you have no clue what the initial character is on about in the first chapter, but then you meet the real protagonists and it gets more interesting. The story itself is a good one - flawed characters trying to get by in a trashed world and then having to step up to fight some nasty monsters - but the prose is some of the most difficult I can recall. Well, not only the wording, it is also the excruciating detail that he uses to set the stage for things. He must have named 300 different neighborhoods in the main city, and each time he names one, he pauses the action to spend half a page providing detail about how it used to be the central fishing district but 38 bad things happened over the decades and now the neighborhood is just full of destitute bird people from an island across nineteen seas. Seriously felt like if Star Wars had paused the action each time a new planet was introduced and a three page Wikipedia page was then put on the screen to read for a silent 10 minutes. I actually enjoyed the book, this is making it sound like it sucks, but there were definitely a lot of details provided to my brain that made absolutely no impact on my understanding of the story itself.
If It Bleeds - Stephen King. A collection of four short stories. I love when he does these books, he's done a bunch of them now, where he goes far longer than a "short" story and makes it more like a little novella. That is especially true on the title story, where he continues a thread off of the tales found in Mr. Mercedes/Finders Keepers/End of Watch and The Outsider. That is the best one in here (although it now made me realize I missed one of that Bill Hodges trilogy). The final story - Rat - has a dark fairy tale aspect to it that doesn't seem especially original. The opening story is a good one from the days when iPhones were freshly released and a big deal, that I really liked. The other one is just plain weird - a story told in three parts, going back in time with each story - that never really explains all of the tangents it creates. Still, a quick, solid read for the whole book.
Full Throttle - Joe Hill. Stephen King's kid, and while a few of these are written jointly with King, they all have a very similar taste and smell. I finished this one while on vacation in Colorado, and several of the stories (this is a book of short stories) have stuck in my craw ever since. The opening one, kind of a Sons of Anarchy meets Maximum Overdrive thing, keeps popping back into my brain, as does one involving vengeful carousel animals. There are a few that seem to try to hard, like the one that is written in the shape of stairs as it talks about a staircase to hell, or the tweeting one, but overall I thought these were really good stories. And they're not all horror either - there is a great one about a time travelling book van, and a cool Narnia-esque one as well. Nice thing about this one is that you don't have to immerse yourself into a 400 page book, because it is a bunch of smaller bites that all satisfy. Liked it.
American Dirt. Man, I feel like my wife really enjoys difficult books. Like, mine might have some weird supernatural scary stuff, or a monster who feeds off of fear, but hers will be emotionally draining. We listened to this one while on our way up and back to vacation, and while it is definitely emotionally draining, I'd also agree that it is great. Some books will affect your mind as you are reading them, and this one, I swear, made me nervous around strangers (even though I was very much not trying to ride the rails through Mexico to escape an omnipresent drug cartel who wanted me dead. But I seriously got out at a filling station and had some nervous tics as I spotted other people there and felt threatened by their totally innocuous actions. Weird. But yes, this book deserves the accolades. In part because it is well-written and a good story, but it also did a good job of humanizing someone who is marginalized in my mind.
The Roxy Letters - Mary Lowry. I went to high school with Mary, so I wanted to support her and buy the book. It's an entertaining read, especially for someone from Austin who has some of the same feelings about the loss of old Austin in favor of chain stores. Kind of a Sex in the City for the less-well-off? A lot of discussion of the clitoris. But also a good number of moments where I actually laughed out loud.
Finders Keepers - Stephen King. Really dug into the King this year. These two books - I did that because If It Bleeds made me realize that I had missed two whole books in the Bill Hodges series - they're good. Definitely some supernatural stuff in here, but also just some classically good story-telling and character building. The main character is just such an odd bird, but you love her for it.
End of Watch - Stephen King. The last of the three Hodges novels, more of the supernatural business - a character who can control other people with a crappy iPad knockoff is very creepy - with a satisfying conclusion to the series. I've heard that the Mr. Mercedes show sucks, which is too bad, because I liked these characters and their arc.
I think that is it - the main lull was the second half of the year. I think the stress of the world around us kept me from reading - hard to drink heavily after doomscrolling Twitter and then sit down to a book. Way easier to turn on the boob tube. Anyway, hope one of these piques your interest!
Dawes - Good Luck With Whatever. I like these guys in general. A reliable source of soft-rock quality, kind of in the same wheelhouse as the Jayhawks or Band of Horses. Saw them years ago at ACL for a bucolic afternoon show on a beautiful day, and they've stuck to me ever since. This album starts with a freaking great song that totally speaks to the age and stage that I live in right now - "Still Feel Like a Kid" goes through all sorts of adult-ish things that he can do or that he now knows about, but it still doesn't make him feel like a grownup. I feel that all the time. All the time. Like, how am I old and responsible enough to have children, or a real job, or a home. In my brain, I'm still 19. It's a weird feeling, but this song nails it. And sounds nice while doing it! "St. Augustine at Night" is another standout to me - one of those good story songs where you can see what he's singing about in your mind's eye the whole time. "Life became a series of birthdays, cars, and pets, just anything to look forward to" is one of the most true and bleakest lines about modern life I can think of. The top streamer is the more rocking "Who Do You Think You're Talking To?" with 1.4 million Spotify streams.
At the end of the day, that isn't my favorite track on the disc, but overall, the whole disc is enjoyable and kind of gently pleasant. I'll save it - I enjoy these guys.
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing... This album was in the RS Top 500 albums of all time listing, and so I figured I needed to check it out. I'd never even heard of DJ Shadow, but I think I had at least heard of every other artist in that Top 500 listing. This is very cool stuff, like, I can fully tell why people would list it as influential to other music and full of interesting ideas about how beats could be arranged. But as a straight listening experience, I can't say that it does much for me. Actually, I like it just fine, it has loads of good grooves, but it feels very disjointed, like each track was intended for a different time than its neighbor, so there isn't a cohesive feeling throughout. And that makes it distracting to listen to at the desk. The top track is one called "Midnight in a Perfect World," with 17.4 million streams (so pretty damn popular!).
Super chilled vibe. Like a Dido/Massive Attack thing going on there. I can see this working really well on a soundtrack, or as a tune to watch people shred slo-mo snowboarding powder to. It almost leaves the hip/hop world on these tracks and turns down the lane for ambient chillwave stuff. And some of these suckers fire past the 7 minute or even 9 minute mark, all in instrumental style. I'm okay without this one, even if it means I'm not as cool as all the crate diggers who love it.
Busta Rhymes - Extinction Level Event 2: The Wrath of God. Hell of an album title. I own the first one of these, and really liked it a lot back in the late nineties. This one has been stressing me out - I am still working from home, and Chris Rock just hops up every once in a while on here and yells out the N-word at a much higher volume than the rest of the music, which is worrying me about what the kids are hearing outside of the guest bedroom. I'll say that the opening track sounds really good for the first half (after Rock is done), but then they change up the beat and I think it slips. The things that stick out are the kinda gimmicky ones like the track with Bel Biv Devoe on it where they just reprise their "Poison" chorus. I don't care for it. "Slow Flow" is kind of cool, although I still find it weird when they can have Ol' Dirty Bastard on a track when the dude's been dead for like a decade. I also dig the one with Rick Ross - that dude has carved himself a lovely little niche of only showing up on some love-making-ass beats. Pimp. I can't really put my finger on what is lacking about this disc, because if I try to isolate particular tracks, I kinda dig them. But each time I run through the album again, I'm stressed and kind of wishing it would be over already. No shock, but the track with Kendrick is the top streamer at 7.9 million. "Look Over Your Shoulder."
Man, how much do you think they had to spend to get that sample of baby Michael? Seems like a very high level expense. Of course, I'm sure getting Kendrick on your verse costs a buttload too. Cool beat for sure, and a solid verse from Kendrick - both of these guys are trying to tell the young guys that they're still the kings. I dig it. Cool sample, good verses (man, when Busta does the fast bit, he's really something else). But I still don't know what to do with this whole album. I guess it is a no.
Disclosure - ENERGY. As is usual with these dudes, you know what you are about to get. A bunch of high energy EDM that is more bright and tuneful than the dubstep wing of that genre. So, very danceable, usually with some singer collaborator who will jump in and give it a good elastic bounce with their syncopated lyrics. Also, Disclosure has some legitimately HUGE songs. I need to quit my job and make some of this sort of music. Literally, their top five tracks total more than 2 billion streams. The top one on this album only has 9.2 million streams, so it ain't in that stratosphere at all. "Birthday," which features Kehlani and Syd. Of course.
I would not enjoy living in those little homes. Makes my skin crawl to even see it. Kinda like the rest of this album - nice enough, not especially memorable. I'm good.
