I actually won a March Madness bracket. I don't think that has ever happened for me before, and it only netted me $260, but still, pretty sweet! Because I am old and sad, I am considering using it to buy bedside tables. Wheeeee!
Liquid Mike - Paul Bunyan's Slingshot. I don't recall at all how this got in to my new music queue but I absolutely love it. Power pop pleasure from front to back, with mounds and mounds of gritty riffage burying the melodies. According to the internet, the Mike here is a postman from Marquette, Michigan. He sounds a lot like Bob Mould to me on many of these tracks, which get me to the Sugar comparison that I have had a lot while jamming this. They do a good job of combining a skuzzy lo-fi shreddiness with completely melodic pop flourishes. It's grand. I want them at ACL to melt faces. Like, "Works Bomb" is such a rad little blast of a minute and a half underscored by fuzzy riffs and smashing drums. Prior to checking, I literally couldn't figure out what the top single would be - I guessed the album opener just because that's how things usually work, but it is the second tune - "K2" with 72k streams.
Comments are turned off. Why do people do that? But this is a great jam of summertime boredom (although it includes a weird callback to Coldplay by saying that a guy who passed out pissed his pants and they were all yellow). I dig the tambourine in there, which adds something unexpected to an otherwise straight rocker. Excellent shit. The riffs about half way through "American Caveman" are pure bliss. I hear Ween sometimes, but mainly I just hear unhinged pop rock pleasure. Will hold on to.
Kacey Musgraves - Deeper Well. C'mon Kacey! I need you back in the spacey kacey stage, making jokes and writing amazing hooks. Last time was a depressing breakup record, and now this one is more of a "mature" folk record. Which is pretty! Don't get me wrong! But there are tons of pretty but uninteresting albums all over the place, and this one never hooks me. It even starts off with a riff that makes me think of the Mamas and the Papas "California Dreamin'." "Deeper Well" is a nice song, and I like the sentiment of her pushing away her bad habits in favor of finding a better way to use her time. But I'm not fully enamored with it, and it might be the highlight of the disc. Most of the tunes on here don't crack 4 millon streams, but that title tune has 26.8 million.
I'm glad that she has learned so much about herself, and I'm sure that many people hear those lyrics and feel understood/seen. But the whole idea of "you've got dark energy and I've got to take care of myself" are cringey to my old man ears. As "Too Good to be True" kicked in again just now, it made me think of Beck, a comparison that I made to Kacey before because of how "Slow Burn," from Golden Hour, called to Beck's soft/folky vibe from Sea Change and Morning Phase. I love those two Beck albums, so I hope that I'm not being too harsh on this album when it could just be her vibey detour album. Also, I hate "Anime Eyes" so very much. But the majority of this album just slips on by without me noticing it is going.
Willi Carlisle - Critterland. Great songwriter, with that sort of folky songwriter voice that is fine but not entirely powerful enough. Rolling Stone had some sort of little blurb about him in a recent magazine, so I thought I'd give it a chance. The weirdest part for sure is the Dukes of Hazzard-ass short story at the end of the album, where he tells a story of growing weed and paying protection money to the cops, with his spoken word story interjected with little bits of singing. Super strange and way long. BUt most of this sort of makes me think of Tyler Childers, with his hard-scrabble stories over spare and folky tunes. But the opening track, also the title track, is the best one on here and is the most streamed. 151k streams.
That opening is endearingly loose and wild, and then the stories start flowing. That video is like a Southpark episode. The song feels like it should be the self-aware, goofy theme song for a summer camp. Now I want to see him and his critter friends fight off the apocalypse! Anyway, this is a nice little disc. Nothing else on it is insanely catchy, but the songwriting is good and interesting and the music is nice.
Ariana Grande - eternal sunshine. I think this misses the mark for me mainly because I just don't care for her vocals or the backing tunes. R&B is never my thing, and the pop had better be catchy and sticky as hell to get to me. Instead, here, you get a ton of the same-sounding, layered falsetto-feeling, whispery griping over boring beats. "yes, and?" at least provides a different beat sound, like Madonna's "Vogue" for another generation, but the singing bothers me again. And yes, I know that she is a killer technical singer who can hit forty-eight different octaves, but I don't really hear her using that tool here very much. I'm not interested in it. But other people sure as hell are! Lowest streamer on here has over 33 million. Instead of giving you the top one (yes, and, with 327 million) I'm going with second place - "we can't be friends (wait for your love)" at 263 million, because I think it is the superior song.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind! That track, while sounding like an 80's redux for sure, is the best tune on the album with much stronger writing and vocals. Very cinematic. I hope this disc brings all sorts of people cathartic joy and healing from their bad relationships, but I don't find it to be very fun at all.
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