Danny Brown - Quaranta. An odd album. Sounds cool, like with interesting beats and good flow, but then when you actually listen to the lyrics you realize how deeply personal and fucked up these tracks are. I guess stopping the drinking and drugging needed to come out in an album form and this is it. Like, as an example, "Down Wit It" is interesting to me because it interpolates some lines from "Mind's Playin' Tricks on Me," from one of the most ungainly moments of that otherwise rad song. I love "Mind," but I always found the bit clunky where Scarface raps about his woman but rhymes me with me and then drops a kind of off-beat "Now I'm feeling lonely." But Brown takes a nugget of that and uses it in here really well to describe how broken he feels after the end of a relationship, over a Tame Impala ass beat. I like that little nibble of reference to a deeply sad moment in the old song, in the midst of a new sad song. This disc is like a confessional instead of a party album, which is a weird detour for Brown. And apparently no one likes it - no song has more than 2 million streams. I'll give you the title track, with 1.2 million streams.
Like, in comparison to his old crazy stuff, he just fired up a spaghetti western-ish beat and started dumping his heart onto the page. I won't keep this disc around, but it was interesting.
Peter Gabriel - i/o. What are we even doing here. Two versions of every song? Two hours and seventeen minutes? Come on, Pete. This is a slog. I love me some old school PG - So is a masterpiece. Us was a favorite of mine for a long time. That Last Temptation of Christ album is beautiful. And this is very lovely sounding - his voice is still wonderful and the songs have a generic pleasantness to them that works really well. But the experience of starting and listening to the album feels like work. The top streamer is the title track, with only 3.1 million streams.
"stuff going out, stuff coming in" - feels like a sex joke parody could be made of this pretty easily. The video is freaky and cool. If it was just one group of the songs, I think this would have been so much more enjoyable.
Kid Koala - Carpal Tunner Syndrome. I read about this dude somewhere and just figured I'd toss an album in - deeply weird DJ stuff - lots of samples and scratches and sounds. This is a 2000 album, it doesn't appear that he is doing much currently. I don't know that I really have much to say about it - not my type of music. It is almost hard to work to because it is so disjointed and spazzy. "Fender Bender" is the top track with 746k.
That one is nice, smooth and laid back. Won't keep it around, but was interesting to check out.
Wednesday - Rat Saw God. This is unfortunate, because a lot of this music would really fit in and work well with what I like most about some of the good new indie rock. But the part of the second song, "Bull Believer," where she just screams and wails for a little while? Well that absolutely ruins the whole vibe for me. Awful shit for that small chunk of time. But then "Chosen to Deserve" comes on and its a rad combination of, like, Turnpike Troubadours, The Sundays, and Dinosaur Jr. and I'm wrapped in it. Unsurprisingly, that is the top track on the album. Just over 2 million streams.
She sounds so pretty singing about drinking until she puked on weeknights at her parent's house, or a friend overdosing on Benadryl. Such a good tune though. When the songs don't involve any screaming freakout, I really enjoy these tunes. But, I really can't keep the whole thing because those moments of unpleasantness keep popping up. Completely unnecessary (says old man, shaking fist at sky).
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