ACL 2021?

 Holy crap.

Was just sitting here working on some boring stuff that I put off during last week's Snowpocalypse '21: The Weatherman Strikes Back when I realized that by now I would be deeply in the midst of prediction mode for this fall's ACL.  Like, by now I would have done a few posts and spent many hours poring over concert calendars and album releases and other festivals' posters.  How weird!

And how sad!  I have no clue how I'd even go about doing predictions this year.  Will the bands I was honing in on last year - Pearl Jam or Rage Against the Machine are the ones I recall - still going to be the hot stuff 18 months later?  Like, last year there was some excitement for some bands to show up and be the hot new thing, but will the Black Pumas be an exciting draw when they haven't released anything new in several years by now?  Are there tours that will be happening by October?  Can artists FINALLY release their new tunes?  Will the other asshole festivals who are crowding into October steal a bunch of top line artists that ACL would have otherwise scored?

That is the worst thing right now in my head, that maybe ACL would have finally scored Springsteen or something, but now they are going to get snagged by Coachella out from under us.

I don't see that Coachella has released a lineup for 2021, and as of now they don't even have dates for the fest - they cancelled the April dates and haven't named new ones in October.  In 2020 they were supposed to have Rage, Travis Scott, and Frank Ocean as the top line headliners.  Would Travis Scott be interesting by now?  I mean, not to me of course, but to the drug-addled teens who never noticed that his lyrics were butt?  Bonnaroo is supposed to happen in September 2-5, with no new lineup announced yet.  Last year was supposed to be Tool, Lizzo, and Tame Impala.  Lizzo puts on a killer show, but it feels like the world has moved on from her a little, right?  Lolla claims to be going off July 28 - August 1.  They didn't put out a real lineup before cancellation last year, so no clue who it would have been.

In smaller fests, Outside Lands claims to be going forward in August with Tame Impala, Lizzo, and The Strokes as their top three.  New Orleans Jazz Fest claims to be going from Oct. 8 to Oct. 17 (but no lineup).  Governor's Ball is supposed to happen Sept. 24-26, no lineup announced.

ACL is supposed to kick off on October 1 and the second weekend will end on October 10.  Personally, I feel good about it happening.  I know we just crossed 500,000 dead in the U.S., and half the country thinks that the vaccine is some sort of nefarious plot by Bill Gates to sell pedophile pizza to toddlers, or something, but I feel like the arrows are pointed in the right direction to us having a lot of vaccinated folks by summertime.  And also, if I don't have hope about my favorite festival, then what's the damn point of loving music anyway?

Quick Hits, Vol. 274 oldies - Billy Joe Shaver, Marvin Gaye, The Stone Roses, Gillian Welch, Black Sabbath, Portishead)

Now this is an eclectic group of albums.  Shaver is in here because the man died and I wanted to dig back into his music.  These others were either part of the Rolling Stone 500 or otherwise were things I was interested to experience.

I don't know if you have noticed this recently, but the quality of albums released recently has been terrible.  Or maybe I just don't have my radar tuned to the right channels, but when I look at the new releases listed on Spotify, I haven't seen anything of interest in two straight weeks.  It's a wasteland of singles by people I know I don't care for, along with people I've never heard of (Ashnikko?  Why Don't We?  dvsn?).  I really need for ACL to come back so that I can find new music from its poster!

Billy Joe Shaver - Old Five and Dimers Like Me.  A bunch of these songs are classics that someone else made famous.  "Black Rose" is a classic Waylon Jennings tune.  The title track is one that I know because of Jerry Jeff Walker.  "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train" has been covered a lot, I know the Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson versions, but some rockabilly band also covered it in my brain.  The interesting thing about this album is how many are semi-gospel tunes - "Jesus Christ, What a Man," "Jesus Was Our Savior and Cotton Was Our King" seem really weird to put on an album of honky tonk confessionals about getting stoned too much and trouble with the law.  I guess that is what made him so interesting as a writer! "Black Rose" is the stream champ at 898k.

This was a 1973 release, Shaver's first album.  Doesn't seem like he ever really got his due - I'm sure he did just fine for himself with so many people covering his tunes - "Live Forever" isn't on this album, but it's probably his top track - but seems like a bummer for him to have been overshadowed his whole life.  "Good Christian Soldier" isn't the best song on here, but it sums up his contradictions well - "Cause Lord, it's hard to be a Christian Soldier, when you tote a gun. And it hurts to have to watch a grown man cry.  But we're playin' cards and ridin' home and havin' lots of fun, tellin' jokes and learning how to die."  Solid set of tunes.

Marvin Gaye - What's Goin' On.  This 1971 album jumped up to the number one album of all time in the Rolling Stone rankings this year.  Which was very surprising to me.  It's beautiful - Gaye's voice is smooth, liquid, silky gorgeousness.  Like watching a crowd of birds changing directions as one up in the sky with a perfect sunset glowing in the background.  And the topics are, sadly, still very timely, with tracks like "What's Going On" and "Save the Children" and "Mercy Mercy Me" and "Inner City Blues."  Unfortunately, those issues - police brutality, human rights, drug addiction, dead-end wars, and environmental issues - are still completely relevant right now.  So, I can fully acknowledge that this is a beautiful and worthwhile album.  But at the same time, I can also say that I don't much care for it.  In the same way you aren't going to find me listening to the new John Legend or Michael Buble or whatever other modern easy listening R&B stuff is out there, I wouldn't need to listen to this album repeatedly.  That being said, I'll always be pleased when "Mercy Mercy Me" comes on, and if you don't dig the funky strut of "Right On," then you're nuts.  Marvin Gaye is a stud.

The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses.  This was one of those bands that blew up and then flamed out in the late 80's/early 90's British alt rock wave that came before Oasis and Blur and all of the bigger groups.  They were hot for one big album - this one - in 1989 - and it was huge for a little bit.  Still respected as a top album, years later.  It owes a debt to the old new wave rock stuff, and is a little shoegazey and goth at times, but it's undeniably poppy rock as well.  "I Wanna Be Adored" has a Smiths-y quality that kind of slinks around the bass line.  I love it. 

"Don't Stop" comes off as a Beatles-ish psychedelic freakout.  From reading a little about the band, it sounds like their label is what killed them.  After releasing this album, they got sued by their label and, even though they eventually won, it took some five years to release the follow-up album, which landed like a lemon slice tossed out of a speeding convertible.  "She Bangs The Drums" is a little more overtly pop rock - brassy guitar sounds and a swinging beat.  One of my favorite things about this album is how almost every song ends up having a shift in feel at some point.  "She's a Waterfall" ends very differently than it began, "I am the Resurrection" just breaks it down into an entirely different song (which is a great freaking song - sounds like something Austin Powers would groove to while screaming YEAH BABY repeatedly).  "Fools Gold" is a jam as well, love the background beat and the wah wah guitar.  This disc is good stuff.

Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator).  I knew Welch, generally, because of her playing on things like the Oh Brother Where Art Though soundtrack or with Alison Kraus or The Decemberists.  This album was in the RS Top 500, so I thought I'd give it a run.  Freaking great album.  Folky Americana that sounds like some bleak observations of an Appalachian woman looking back with regret.  The title track is just plain gorgeous - her voice sounds both rusty and clear, weathered and freshly laundered.  The guitarwork is excellent as well.  And generally, that is all there is - her voice and the guitar - no drums, no bass - just Welch sitting in the dog run of her cabin singing her heart out for the chickens scratching in her yard.  I've really enjoyed this one.  It's got a realness to it that I love each time it comes back on.  Literally, just listen to the opening guitar on this - it creates a mood before her lyrics even enter in.  

Such a badass.  The harmonies that come in later.  I'm officially going to obsess about this song now.  Going to do everything in my power to make this my top streamed song of 2021.  "April the 14th Part 1" is also lovely.

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath.  It would be hard for anyone to have never heard of Sabbath.  I've obviously been listening to their stuff as a general proposition since I first turned on KLBJ 93.7 here in Austin as like an 8 year old.  "War Pigs" or "Iron Man" or "Paranoid" have been used on radio and in movies and in commercials and whatever for years.  They're woven into the fabric of classic rock and roll as surely as Zeppelin and Floyd.  But I honestly don't think I have ever just listened to a Sabbath album.  This one is wild - their debut album in 1970 - its sooooo fucking heavy and awesome.  The opening track is "Black Sabbath," and it's so gloomy and doomy and dark and rad.  I love it.  The opening is a rainstorm, that devolves into a super spare guitar and drum bit under Ozzy, until the bells of doom begin to ring and the guitar gets to work.  Fucking love it when Ozzy yells "oh noooo, noooo, please God help me" like an actual dying person begging for God's help and the quicksand sucks him under.  The album is only six songs, which is odd, but the third track is almost ten minutes and has four names, and the final track is over 14 minutes and has three names, so I guess it is really a 10 song album?  Strange thing to consider.  Pedantic song counting aside, this is legit good.  Sad that it took me so long to find it and jam it - I've been enjoying their grandkids like The Queens of the Stone Age for years, but never went back to the source material.  "The Wizard" farts around with a harmonica to go along with the sludge rock and I dig it.  Bluesy and dirty.  "Bassically" kinda rules (at least I assume that is the name of that portion of the four-named song), and "N.I.B." is a great wall of sound.  Great disc.

Portishead - Dummy.  1994.  This was a classic electronic album that, according to Wikipedia, was credited with popularizing the triphop genre.  The opening track makes me think of Bjork - maybe "Hunter" - but it's the second track that was the big hit back in the day.  Always makes me think of the music that played in the movie Big when he would have dealings with the fortune teller machine.  "Sour Times."

Cool song.  Kinda downbeat James Bond vibe, kinda gypsy beat thing.  The whole album has some of the same coolness.  It's just cool.  You can imagine cool people listening to it and doing cool things in cool places with other cool people.  But I don't love it.  I keep getting to the end and feeling a little glad it is done.  Weird.

Quick Hits, Vol. 276 (Morgan Wallen)

I hate the google algorithms.  The other day, for work, I searched to find out what a Gantt Chart is (some sort of spreadsheet to show the timing and workflow of a project) and now every single YouTube video I watch starts with some upbeat ad that starts with " DO YOU LOVE GANTT CHARTS?!?!"

Morgan Wallen - Dangerous (The Double Album).  First off, up yours for releasing a double album and broadcasting that in the album title.  33 freaking songs?!?!  Good gravy.  Second off, this is a wonderfully awful Wikipedia entry about his "Early life" : "Wallen was most likley [sic] born in Sneedville, Tennessee.[2] His father was maybe a Baptist pastor and, as a child, Wallen may have taken piano and violin lessons. He was probably offered a scholarship to play baseball in college, but after an injury, possibly chose to pursue music instead."  So weird.  His whole Wikipedia is written that way, as though none of the facts are true and may not be.  So, he might have been on The Voice and gotten his boost from that experience.  Sounds like he collaborated a lot with Florida Georgia Line after and on his first album, as well as touring with them.  A track from that album called "Whiskey Glasses" ended up the number one song on country radio for 2019.  Which is wild, in that I've never heard of that whatsoever.  The album broke a record by sticking on the Top Country Albums chart for 114 weeks.  And now a song off of this album was chosen as one of Time Magazine's top 10 songs of 2020 ("7 Summers").  What is actually happening right now?  I've never even heard this dude's name spoken before.

Anyway, apart from all of that, some of these songs are pretty solidly enjoyable - "7 Summers" is good, even if it is a little bit in the easy listening zone.  But most of them are absolutely pop country dreck that I want nothing to do with.  I know that I'm not in tune with Nashville (see that last paragraph), but I'm just never going to want a drum machine in a country song.  So, things like "Blame it on Me" or "Wasted on You" are never going to be acceptable to me.  I don't care if lyrically they sounds like a cross between Prine, Van Zandt, and Clark - get that shit out of here.  And lyrically, this ain't anywhere near that - lots of beer and whiskey and redneck and boats and "shakin' them hips" and trucks are involved in here.

But his cover of the Jason Isbell song "Cover Me Up" is great, and Chris Stapleton does a duet with him which made me wonder if he wasn't so terrible.  But no, much of this album is pretty tough for me to try to enjoy.  "Somethin' Country" and "Country A$$ Shit" are just terrible bro country dreck.  Verse two of that second one starts so: "Yeah, I just wanna drink a beer/ I just wanna get a line wet/ Let the sun put some more red on my neck/ Wave at the girls on they rental pontoons/ While my bass boat speakers go boom, boom."  I know he, and his fans, could give a shit about what some guy from Austin thinks about his songs, but good gravy that sucks.

Makes me wonder what I would think of Alan Jackson if he came out today.  Some of his lyrics tracked that sort of sentiment, but I think they also seemed a little more vulnerable - I'm singing "Chattahoochee" in my head, and lyrics like "dreamin' 'bout women" and "lot about livin' and a little 'bout love" or "settled for a burger and a grape snow cone" just seem much more pleasant and real that a boatful of drunk pricks ogling girls while they blast bass loud enough for the entire lake to hear.  And yes, I'm officially old.

"More Than My Hometown" is the top track, with 108 million streams.

Oh, he's full on doing the Billy Ray Cyrus hairdo as well.  I mean, and he loves her more than the feeling when the bass hits the hook!?!  Deep love right there.  Also, what a dick.  Unless it's Austin, there is no reason to love a hometown more than a woman.

I wrote this earlier last week, and in the days since then I've read about Wallen a ton - he apparently was caught on camera dropping an N-bomb.  The reaction has been bewilderingly immediate - the guy had the number one album in the country for the past three weeks running, and yet his label has suspended him, his manager has dropped him, radio and playlists are dropping him out of rotation, everyone has come out against him.  Not defending his use of that word by any means, but the speed with which the world has whipped around to kick his ass to the curb is shocking to me.  Also, because I think his music is generally butt, I don't care if he gets cancelled, its just fascinating to see.

Totally didn't intend for this entry to just be about Wallen, but it got long enough to where I think I'll just fire it out there.

Quick Hits, Vol. 273 (Miley Cyrus, Sturgill Simpson, The Dead Pirates, Moon Taxi)

I know I'm some level of Dad chump for this, but I really like Greta Van Fleet.  Two new singles are tucked into my playlist right now, and the second one ("My Way, Soon") musically sounds like a Pearl Jam cut off of Vitology or Vs and it is sending me to a wonderful place.  I'm well aware that makes me a bad music lover, but I love it anyway.

Miley Cyrus - Plastic Hearts.  I read someone authentically trying to make the case that this was the best rock album of 2020, which hurt my heart just a little bit.  But I figured I needed to check it out - I kinda like rock and roll.  The song that immediately catches me and makes me wonder if that might be true is the hella catchy "Midnight Sky," which interpolates a little "Edge of Seventeen" (and smartly ties Miley to Stevie Nicks).  But I think it is generous to call this album rock - it has an edge to it, but it's still mainly synths and drum machines and a more new wave/pop/disco sound.  But, that song jams either way.  Sounds like something that could have been made for the 80's station on Grand Theft Auto.  Just before the chorus each time, that lead in where the music bails out for a bit makes me want to point a finger gun at the stage and scream it with her.  Stream champ as well at 246.3 million.

Even going for the 80's Benetar haircut.  Her other big single from this disc is with another big singer who is trading in modern sounds for another decade's guiding aesthetic - Dua Lipa and her 70's disco thing.  It's not just Nicks she bites from - she full-on covers "Heart of Glass," evokes Joan Jett while duetting with her on "Bad Karma," does the same with Billy Idol of "Night Crawling," covers the Cranberries' "Zombie," and "Never Be Me" steals from The Cars' "Drive" pretty obviously.  I guess some of these songs are rock - if you make the rock tent wide enough to still capture something like Avril Lavigne or Ashleeeee Simpson or Pink.  Doesn't quite pass my rock sniff test - it's more like a Korean bar band who is trying to approximate American rock and roll.

Sturgill Simpson - Cuttin' Grass Vol. 2.  I know I just said that I am getting Taylor swift overload right now, so this is going to come off as twisted, but Sturgill could release one of these a week for the rest of my life and I'd die a happy man.  The first track, "Call to Arms," combines a breakneck breakdown that sounds like a train just an inch away from launching off the tracks with killer lyrics excoriating the war machine chewing up our boys.  What a great fucking song.  And this rearrangement of it is just a hillbilly freakout.  "Sea Stories" is another similarly great one that involves poking some fun at the armed services.  And as with the earlier album, it is high fun to hear some of the great songs from his old albums reimagined into bluegrass.  "Welcome to Earth" starts as a pretty true-to-the-original lullaby, and then turns into a pickin' session.  "Brace for Impact" and "Keep It Between the Lines" remain excellent songs, just with a different flavor now.  The top track is the third one - "Oh Sarah" - with 1.1 million streams.

Sweetly sad love song from the Sailor's Guide album, with that great line of "so forgive me if sometimes I seem a little crazy, but god damn, sometimes crazy is how I feel."  I know some people didn't want to hear volume one, so I get if you won't buy in a second time, but I love the reimagining of his great tunes for a different style.

The Dead Pirates - Highmare.  This is an older album (2016) that found it's way into my queue because of a Drew Magary article.  So, if you know anything about his taste in music, you know that this is something that makes him want to run through a brick wall, and is chock full of riff-tastic shreds.  Reading up on the band, they have an odd backstory - the band was apparently created only because the founder wanted music to soundtrack the animations that he makes.  "At the time, the “band” was just Mcbess himself, a chance for him to stretch his creative muscles beyond the Max Fleischer-inspired artwork and videos for which he’s become known."  What they've made is some psych rock/stoner rock goodness, and if you're into cartoon boobies, some fun video action to go with the top song - this is "UGO," which has over 4 million streams.

Got a little spooky surf guitar thing going on there at the start with the extra reverb, until the action kicks in almost 4 minutes along.  I like the drum drumming himself in the face and flinching each time.  But then he dies!  Poor drum!  But then he lives!  I dig the fuzzy guitar outro.  Solid album - nothing that's going to make the big time, but a fine disc of rock and roll.

Moon Taxi - Silver Dream.  I've been a fan of this band for a while - saw them open for the Revivalists several years ago when I didn't know anything about either of those bands, and the Moon Taxi energy is absolutely awesome to behold.  I didn't love their last album quite as much as the old stuff, and this one is similarly a little too glossy and McDonalds-commercial-ready for me.  I still like it, but I'd rather hear something a little scummier.  The title track has this lovely dreaminess to it, a wide-open vista of 80's superheroes flying through clouds as they seek out adventure.  So far, not a lot of streams - most of the songs on the disc are at around 20k streams, except for "Hometown Heroes," which is the only one over 9 figures, at 2.4 million streams.

That video is hella jenky.  And the song is fine, it's just a little cutesy for my taste - feels like some one hit wonder song where a normally rockin' band broke out the ukulele and got people all pumped up for the new Uke song.  I want more real instrumentation and less sounds that feel like drum machine bits. "One Step Away" is absolutely a Black Keys song, and you cannot convince me otherwise.  Best track on here for sure.  I don't think I'll keep it.