Shawn Mendes - Illuminate. Nah. This is the guy who did that annoying radio hit earworm about how he'd be needing stitches. My kids love that song. This is kind of like that song, but more like this guy took the most recent John Mayer album, listened to it 3,000 times, wrote new lyrics, wrote significantly lesser guitar parts, and tried to replicate it from memory. Literally, the first song ("Ruin") cribs the guitar start from a Mayer song ("Gravity?" feels like that is where I have heard this) with no shame at all. I do not find this appealing to listen to, despite its bland pretty-ness. The hit is huge, with 511 million streams, so I'm apparently missing out on the greatest new artist on the planet. Try out "Treat You Better."
LVL UP - Return to Love. Ah man, this is so very up my alley. Crunchy, grungy old school homage to the feedback soaked rock of my youth. I think I could listen to "Closing Door" all day.
M.I.A. - AIM. This gal has always been weird, but I have good memories of jamming Kala repeatedly back at my first house here in Austin, and digging on that weirdness as part of a funky groove. This one does the same, with head-bobbing grooves that are sometimes pretty normal in their funk ("Borders"), and others that are just odd ("Jump In"). Some of that can get annoying (the grating sampled voice on "Ali r u ok?") but most of this still grooves in a fun way. Nothing on here will last the way that "Paper Planes" did, but the first four or five songs are all solidly enjoyable bounce. There are two remixes of one song ("Bird Song") but no original of the song, which is odd, but any song in which you can: (1) make it sound like nerd kids with kazoos are bombing a track; (2) use at least 40 bird puns; and (3) sing that you be "rich like an ostrich" is a killer track that must be remixed twice. Spotify is still acting dumb with the play counts, so I'm going to give you the album opener, which I think is the most fun one. This is "Borders."
Wilco - Schmilco. My recollection is that I dogged on their last album. Well, sort of. But I can say for certain that I have not gone back and listened to Star Wars again since I wrote that review. This is another one that confounds me in a similar way. The music is all really quite lovely. Mostly very chilled acoustic-centric tracks, kind of sepia-hued Americana tunes with soft drumming. And its nice. But the album literally keeps ending (and this weird, violent sounding rap begins with the next album in my new music playlist) before I even really remember that I'm trying to listen to this thing. So, its good background music to ignore? That sounds like a mean review, but I don't mean it that way, its more that this would be good background music to fire up when you have some cool wine enthusiasts come over to sip pino grige while you chat about how mean that Trump guy seems. I think that one might sound mean too. I'll just leave it with this album is fine. Spotify still refuses to give play counts, so we'll go with the one I think has the only video available, and actually uses an electric guitar for a sec, "Someone to Lose."
1 comment:
"Hi. We're Wilco*. We make perfectly okay music that you will never think of again. Yet a small handful of people think we are the best musical artist ever."
* - Insert Ryan Adams here as well.
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