John Mayer - Sob Rock. This dude is interesting to me, the way he leans into the cheese. I actually like his music and have thought that his last several albums are solid. I even tried to buy tickets to go see his live show when it swings through town, but the pricing was stupid. I'd love to catch a show, but like $500 for two seats (and not even awesome seats) is plain dumb. Except for one song, I think this album is good. "Shouldn't Matter But It Does" sounds like a Taylor Swift tune. "Last Train Home" makes me think of latter day Eric Clapton. "New Light" is just poppy 80's schtick dancing all over the floor like Anthony Michael Hall. That is the top song by a couple hundred million, with 494.7 million under its belt. That actually surprises me, but good for him. It's a fun song.
Goofy lyrics, goofy sound, goofy video. It all checks out. But its still a good tune. The awful one is the baby-talk-ass "Why You No Love Me." I literally can't handle the chorus. It's a jenky ass song even if the chorus lyrics didn't sound like a Baby Muppet song. "Carry Me Away" and "I Guess I Just Feel Like" are also good tunes. Overall a good disc!
Leon Bridges - Gold-Diggers Sound. Texas Monthly had an excellent article about Bridges a few months back that really dove into him and now I like him even more than I already did. It was just very humanizing to read about his history - a nervousness about performing, but a steely need to get himself out there. There was an awesome anecdote in there about how some of his friends chastised him about acting shy, saying "that shy shit is disrespectful of your gift." I love that. His voice is so damn pretty, and some of these arrangements just match it perfectly. "Steam" is the jam, and "Motorbike" is damn good too. But the current streamer champ is "Sweeter," with features someone named Terrace Martin. 14.7 million streams. I suspect it is on a few playlists.
A beautiful song, a powerful song. "somebody should hand you a felony, 'cause you stole from me, my chance to be. Hopin' for a life more sweeter, instead I'm just a story repeated." Ah, Martin is the sax player who worked with Kendrick Lamar and then helped out on this album. I read about him. Great song. I'll keep this album too.
Ty Segall - Harmonizer. I've laughed about this album before I even got a chance to hear it, because either Sun Radio or KUTX has been playing one of these songs, and I don't think it would actually be possible for my wife to change the stations any quicker than when he starts to make his guitar squawk and squeal. And now that I've heard it, I just have to laugh at the terrible line in the title song about how he wants to "hear our tongues make friction." I'll never get over that line. That tune has more streams right now, but the one that I have been jonesing for and seeking out again and again is "Whisper." 456k streams.
Got a distinct Jack-White-wailing-on-his-guitar-vibe, as well as some of those old school organ licks. And the rest of the album keeps that psych rock fuzzy guitar jam thing going in a very tasty way. I dig the groove. Like, "Play" has a stone cold funk going and yet also sounds like he is torturing his guitar to get it to spill all of its secrets. Somehow he turns the sludgy fuzz of psych rock into something I could dance to - check "Feel Good" - which feels like the people in Sixteen Candles should dance to it. Dig it.
Jade Bird - Different Kinds of Light. I know it doesn't really matter, as thousands of people flock to Austin and now attempt to call it home, but it makes me very pleased that Jade Bird has moved to town. Her songs are lovely, and having her live her just makes me feel like the whole town is a touch better. She was on the ACL poster, but had some BS time slot like 11am on Sunday, so I didn't get to see the show, but I'm hopeful I can rectify that sometime soon. This album has some quiet stuff, and then some funky stuff, and all of it is carried by her insistent voice. She can do a quiet purr or a brassy blast in any given song, and that ease of change is appealing to me anytime. Five of the tracks have more than a million streams, but somehow they are all sprinkled around the album. Can't recall a time when the top tracks were so evenly spread around the playlisting. Second-to-top track is "Houdini" with just over 2 million streams.
Live version, but you'll get the gist anyway. Beautiful. Terribly sad lyrics, but just a beautiful song anyway. The top track is "Headstart," the last song on the album, and a great, driving hammer of a tune. 7.7 million streams and a great groove, and another classic example of her going quiet/loud/quiet to good effect. This is a good album.
Random Non-Musical Interlude That Later Becomes About Music: I read an interesting article advocating against the K-Zone thing during baseball games. I agree with the article, because I was definitely frustrated while watching the World Series this year, yelling about balls and strikes despite those being subjective things that only the ump can call. In the midst of the article, the writers went into a bit about a music book by David Byrne that I thought was cool.
Technology has a habit of ruining our brains like this. In his book, How Music Works, David Byrne catalogs the history of recorded music, and how much the first word in that phrase affected the second one. When Thomas Edison popularized sound recordings in version two of his patented phonograph, the effects were immediate and widespread. The wax records of the time could only store 3 ½ minutes of music per side, making existing classical music virtually unmarketable, and forcing songs into adapting the length that now, to our generation, seems pre-ordained.
It also changed how music was played, and what was going to be used to play it. Instruments with heavy low notes tended to vibrate the records as the impressions were made into the wax, forcing them to play farther away or be eliminated entirely. To make up for the distortions in the surface of the record (and thus in the sound), vibrato, a technique rarely used prior (and even seen as kind of tacky) became standard; if a bad record made a perfect note sound wrong, a warbling voice would at least still hit the range often enough for the brain to fill the correct note in. Now, singing devoid of any vibrato sounds wrong, or at least automatically twee.
Cool! This is why no band uses the bassoon to rock out the low notes! And why 3 minutes songs are the norm!
cleopatrick - BUMMER. Big fan of these guys. I know they're under the radar, I only found them because of ACL. Sounds like Royal Blood or Nothing But Thieves. Or another new fave the Blue Stones. And I know, a large number of people haven't even heard of the comps I just used - but what you're talking about here is bruising, fuzzed-out, pure rock and damn roll. Just two dudes - a guitarist/singer who had about 78 different pedals on stage when I saw their live show, which allows him to change the tone of his guitar in myriad ways, and a drummer who seems deeply pissed off at the skins on his drums. The old track "sanjake" is one that will make me run through a steel wall. Just an amazingly hype song. So, this is their first real album - released in 2021 - and it sticks with that same tried and true method. "THE DRAKE" and "FAMILY VAN" both crush in fantastic ways - and the latter of those is a good example of how he makes the guitar sound like a bass in one second and then a guitar in the next, to really good effect. "GOOD GRIEF" is the top streamer for now with 4.4 million.
Good tune, but a deeply terrible video. Like, I guess you got a video made for zero dollars and all, but that video blows. The thing that bums me out about this band is how few streams they get - I think this stuff absolutely rules. But I guess its not in vogue right now to make rock and roll. The first four tracks fire up over a million streams, as does the second-to-last tune, but then five of the tracks have less than 600k. Too bad, because I think they should be the next big thing. I've got tickets to see them in 2022 and hope that the show will be as good as the ACL performance. Definitely will keep pumping the disc.
Dee Gees - Hail Satin / Foo Fighters - Live. This is some deeply goofy shit, with the Foo Fighters playing five classic Bee Gees songs together in relatively pitch-perfect recreations of the originals. It's funky and funny for a little bit, and then the falsetto fest starts to grate a little bit. "You Should Be Dancing" and "Night Fever" are pretty solid, but "More Than a Woman" is where the bit goes too far. Unsurprisingly, the top track is the first one, which people checked out and got enough from. Feels like the joke could have been accomplished with just one tune, thrown out into the world as a lark, rather than creating a full on EP of it.
They are soooo serious in that video, which definitely makes it more funny. But I definitely don't need to save any of those disco songs. Funny for a sec and now they can move on. Then you get five "live" versions of tracks from Medicine at Midnight. I say "live" because it sounds like they aren't live in front of an audience, but more just raw cuts the guys put together in the studio before they got polished up by the producer. Although "No Son of Mine" pretty much just sounds like I remember the studio version sounding? "Making a Fire" has been in super heavy rotation on the radio here in Austin recently, which is odd, but also a good thing. I guess it's just the new single and I haven't been paying attention. More rock and roll for me! But that album wasn't my favorite Foos disc anyway, so I don't much need these redux versions for my collection.
Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee. Her last album was a tasty one as well, and this one has a little disco sparkle on top of an otherwise great indie rock sound. "Be Sweet" is a sunshiny pop nugget of an aspirational love song. The top track for sure with 12.5 million streams.
Kicks off kinda funky, and then the guitar and drums start to edge closer to disco, before the chorus kicks in and you are required to groove to the track and decide to honor synth-pop as cool. It just bangs with bouncy happiness. Jenky ass video too. "Slide Tackle" also has that disco pop feeling. Other tunes on here are less poppy and more indie, like the nice one that follows "Be Sweet," called "Kokomo, IN," which sounds like something you'd find on some indie budget movie's soundtrack. "Savage Good Boy" is another standout track that makes me think of Neko Case. This is good music. You usually find me on this blog whining about how overly long albums are, but in this case I wish it was even longer!
Guided By Voices - Earth Man Blues. I've heard of GBV for many moons, but I honestly don't know that I have ever heard any of their music. Their top song overall is called "Game of Pricks," from a 1995 album, but it rings no bells at all to me. They feel like the indie alternative rock that the critics love but the masses never figure out. Well, jumping in to their catalog at their 33rd album (just counted that up on Wikipedia) seems like an odd move, but either way, this disc is legit good. If I hadn't just pushed play on it myself, there are multiple songs on here that I think sound like Pearl Jam. The first three songs especially so. "The Disconnected Citizen" absolutely sounds like it could have popped up on one of the later PJ records that I forgot to deep dive on. Despite the critics probably loving this disc, there are literally only two tracks with more than 100k streams. "Trust Them Now" fires up 159k.
Nothing about it sounds new or novel, but it definitely sounds like a really good alternative band jamming some jangly rock and roll into my jangle-hole. Fast paced and good. Insistent drumming, jagged guitars, even some good background ooooohhhhhs! The cover says something about this being a John H. Morrison Musical Production of Earth Man Blues, which makes it sound like a special thing, but I think its just a regular album. Either way, I like it!
Lorde - Solar Power. I'm going to fully admit that I have stared for an unacceptably long time at the cover of this album, trying to discern if I find this acceptable, too much, shocking, titillating, or any other number of thoughts. I don't think Judge Breyer would call it porn, but he might. But I keep looking. As for the music itself, I hate this album with the power of the sun itself. I really liked "Royals," that is still a freaking brilliant song. But nothing on here is even good. I find it interesting that Jack Antonoff was so involved in it, because his super power is to popify everything to a grand sheen that doesn't even look shiny despite being near perfect. Instead, these sound both boring and thrown together. Entirely uninteresting. The title song tries to fire up a touch of dopamine, but its like she just copied someone else's happy music without actually putting her own back in to it. That is the top streamer, but I'm going to give you a different one that has the third most streams but more fully reflects the rest of this album with semi-nonexistent accompaniment. This is "Mood Ring." 27.7 million streams.
"Don't you think the early 2000's sound so far away? ayy ayyya yyayyyayayyyyyayy" Ugh. Sounds like a bad Brittney Spears song that never made it onto one of her albums. "Lets fly somewhere eastern, they'll have what I need" (while she looks knowingly at the camera) is just yucky. Nope. Hate it.
Bleachers - Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night. How about the real Jack Antonoff instead? The new album is agonizingly called Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, and the cover of it makes me think of Jeff Buckley's Grace. Springsteen comes out to holler some gravelly lines about finding tomorrow with a girl like you on "Chinatown." "How Dare You Want More" has saxophone as though it is a Bruce song. "45" starts out sounding like an acoustic Foo Fighters song, but then old Jack starts doing his semi-yelp singing pattern again and you can tell its Bleachers. The album kind of ends with a whimper - I definitely prefer the fun 80's bouncing tunes to the sad sack introspective stuff. Like, "How Dare You Want More" is a fun, snappy little tune, and the "Stop Making This Hurt" track is the winning spot on the album. 10.7 million streams.
Its that bouncy piano riff backed up by the little horn squonks that make it seem like you just need to dance to this tune. Heavy dose of 80's joy right there (even as the lyrics point at a darker moment behind that joyful sound). I don't love the whole album, but there are some bright spots like that one in here.
The Metallica Blacklist. This is a fun idea, but one that leaves me wondering what they were doing with the execution of it. 53 songs, clocking in around four hours, with a super-amazingly-wide list of artists covering tunes from Metallica's Black Album. Which all sounds rad, right? Obvious rockers like Weezer or Royal Blood or White Reaper, but then also left field candidates like Jason Isbell, Moses Sumney, Phoebe Bridgers, or The Neptunes. Chris Stapleton! My Morning Jacket! Cool! But then they organize the damn thing with all the songs grouped together by song. So when you try to listen to the album, you get six versions of "Enter Sandman" right away, before you get seven "Sad But True" versions, etc. Twelve people chose "Nothing Else Matters." Which is a rad song! But hearing it back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back is annoying. Gets very tiresome in a way that I don't think it would have if they would have tried to curate the songs into an order that wasn't so repetitive. Or, even better, force the contributing bands into doing certain songs, so that they could have made 6 complete cover albums. As it is, we have twelve of one song, and yet only one each of "The Struggle Within" and "Of Wolf and Man." Just tell the people what to do and you'd have a much better album.
The stream champ is the weirdo party of Miley Cyrus, Elton John, Yo-Yo Ma, something called WATT, the bassist from Metallica, and the drummer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. 17.5 million streams. Nothing else is even close. J. Balvin has just under 5 million for second place.
That video is terrible. The cover is mediocre. Too close to the original, with some lame classical music flourishes in there.
Some of the tracks just re-use the original vocals and do something else underneath. I find those annoying. Like, whatever SebastiAn is, they just kind of play some funky music and replay the Hetfield vocals over the top. Not good. Same with the Neptunes track and the Mexican Institute of Sound, among others. I was hopeful at the start of Jon Pardi's "Wherever I May Roam." Musically, a good jam with some little country fiddle flourishes that make it kind of fun, but his voice sounds so country-dork I can't take it seriously after the intro. Alessia Cara is the same, the music under piques my interest, but then she just sounds like every pop star doing the pop star voice thing. And some are too close to the original, the Weezer one, the Royal Blood one, the White Reaper one, or the Corey Taylor version of "Holier Than Thou." The Ghost version of "Enter Sandman" starts as though it will be original and interesting, but then mainly turns into a normal recitation of the song, with a touch more harmony. Not interesting to just rip it the exact same way as the originals. They're not bad songs in general, but just too plain. Same with the "Holier Than Thou" covers, even between them they sound too alike. Tiresome.
But the skuzzy psychobilly of Mac DeMarco's "Enter Sandman" is great (and the Juanes version is better than the rest of that tune), the driving Americana of Jason Isbell's "Sad But True," Cage the Elephant and Moses Sumney's lovely and haunting (but separate) covers of "The Unforgiven," Flatbush Zombies turn that song into just a sample/hook and then add whole new rap verses around that to good effect. Probably the best song on here overall is the 12 song string of "Nothing Else Matters," with great versions by Phoebe Bridgers (so depressing and on brand), Dave Gahan, Dermot Kennedy (love the Irish lilt), Igor Levit (just piano, sounds lovely), Chris Stapleton (sounds so Chris Stapleton-ey its hard to believe) and even the goofy little version from My Morning Jacket. The Hootie one is pretty lame and overwrought.
Anyway, this review, like the album, went overly long. There is some good stuff here, but it feels like I could curate a disc with 12 songs on it that is great, versus what they gave us. The best ones are where you get to see some other facet of the music that wasn't so obvious in the original, a deeper look into the lyrics, a different feel.
The War on Drugs - I Don't Live Here Anymore. As I listened to one of the songs on here - "I Don't Wanna Wait" - a great comp dawned on me. For some people, this will sound like the kiss of death, but as a lover of Bryan Adams from back in the day, I think saying that this sounds like classic Bryan Adams is actually a fine compliment. That dude could write a great turn of phrase, play the guitar, and craft up a pop rock nugget or three that still sound great today. And then the rest of the songs sound like Dylan got a backing band who only wants to do songs that would be good to drive to. Which also might sound like an insult, but I don't mean it as one. I love driving songs. "Harmonia's Dream" makes me think of Springsteen and the Killers and some never-created 80's band who were never featured on a soundtrack for E.T. Lots of synth riffage. I'd really like to see this band live - between this album and that last one I find them to be a great version of rock. The opener has the most streams, but I'm going to give you #2 that features nice vocals from Lucius. "I Don't Live Here Anymore" has 3.8 million streams.
Between that guitar solo at the start and the synths, you get that immediate 80's feel. And seeing the singer, it makes me realize that I sometimes mix up this band with Strand of Oaks, and yet they are definitely different bands. A lot of these songs are sad, or at least feature sadness as part of the lyrics. That one up above, and even more so, "Victim," makes me sad. Maybe my mind is trained to remember that 80's sound and think of the things I'm missing from that era, or maybe these songs just really do have some melancholy. Not sure which, but I'm enjoying the sound.
