Quick Hits Vol. 141 (Death from Above 1979, Alison Krauss, Grandaddy, Lorde)

Death from Above 1979 - Outrage is Now.  These dudes came to ACL a few years ago, and I recall clowning on their name because there was some other band who was also at ACL that year that had a similarly weird name with a date in it.  Oh, wait, none of that was a true statement.  Even more funny, I went back to look and now I see that it was actually two other bands, Chain Gang of 1974 and Night Terrors of 1927, who came a few years ago and I've been mixing them all up ever since.  Such a weird thing to have random years thrust into your band name like that...  I'm going to name my band The Beatles of 1976 and see how quick I get sued.

Anyhoo, I like these guys and I like this album quite a bit.  Heavy rock and roll, kind of in the vein of Royal Blood, but with a little more instrumentation and danceyness.  And just two guys in the band.  The top song is surprisingly not the title track, which I think it my favorite, but it is one called "Freeze Me," which has 5.6 million streams.

Ugh, bodybuilders, man.  Like I said, they do some danceyness in their hard stuff.  Just because I want you to notice the other side of this, here is the title track, which is more straightforward thump.

Yeah.  That is the good stuff right there.  This album is not revelatory by any means, but I've enjoyed it.

Alison Krauss - Windy City.  I'm about 98% sure that I have never once spelled her name correctly the first time that I have tried to write it.  She's missing an "l" in her first name and has an extra "s" in the last name, but I can never keep those rules in my mind.  Either way, her voice is still one of the most gorgeous things in music.  Her album "Now That I've Found You," with the cover of "When You Say Nothing At All," and other top notch tracks like "I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby," "In the Palm of Your Hand," or the title track, is just some of the finest sounding things around.  
This album goes between a country sound and a jazz-standards tone, and while her voice is still damn fine, most of this is pretty boring.  I really like the Willie cover ("I Never Cared For You") but although I've generally enjoyed a few turns through this disc today, I'll stick to her classics and let this one go.  Here is the top song, the album opener, "Losing You," with 1.2 million streams.

That is some legit hair on the cover of this album.  Never let anyone say that Krauss didn't go for the real deal big hair look at one time.

Grandaddy - Last Place.  My sister sent me a recommendation for this band a decade or so ago, and they've maintained a little oddball corner of my music world since.  They aren't great, but something about their sound appeals to me anyway.  They fall in between the weirdo atmospherics of the Flaming Lips and the americana-ish-rock of the Jayhawks or Wilco.  Here is the top song from this album, "Way We Won't," with 2.0 million streams.

This album is pretty enjoyable, but I feel like a few listens was enough for me.

Lorde - Melodrama.  Like most other folks, I very much enjoyed her first album and the quirky, clever writing and her ability to take a trope to the shed and make something interesting out of it. I'm not so sure about her these days, after becoming part of Taylor Swift's squad and living the pop star life.  She has squeezed a few of these tracks out over time before the full release of this album, and while some friends thought "Green Light" was good, it sounds super derivative of a load of other pop stars right now, very uninteresting to me.  Really reminds me of that Jess Glynne song from a few years ago - disco-fied, brassy pop.  Not a fan.

Meanwhile, its got 182 million streams, so other people still like it.  I don't know, its like she used to be the opposite of the Katy Perry-type pop star, but then she just jumped right onto the wagon and embraced that sound instead of keeping the moody, clever outsider thing going.  Maybe it was working with the fun/Bleachers guy, but this seems much less appealing to me.  Bits of the rest of the album sound better, especially when you hear her still writing great lyrics, but the tunes themselves leave me wanting something else.  Like the other hit I've heard on the radio some, "Homemade Dynamite," which has some kind of cool couplets of lyrics: "Might get your friend to drive, but he can hardly see, We'll end up painted on the road, Red and chrome, All the broken glass sparkling, I guess we're partying," but the song itself is some generic pop pablum with her lame-sounding stuttered pronunciation of the song title.  Seems like an album that would be good to read, even if it isn't so great to hear.