Modern Baseball-Holy Ghost [Run For Cover 2016]
Postgrad life vocalized by two young men who find that growing pains don’t disappear easily when entering Puberty 2. Gone are the jokes and the folk, replaced instead by disillusion and post-hardcore that beats down from them as hard as they were beaten down on. Gone too is Lukens’s trademark moan, revealing all too plainly how narrow Ewald’s vocal range really is on this one album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. But in place of hooks, what’s this? Real honest to god SUBSTANCE? Thank the maker these boys can articulate the burnout millennials have been cursed with at birth while trying their damnedest to apologize to the relationships they know they’ve let become strained and weakened. The two love songs are throwaways but they make up for it in experimentation (‘Hiding’) and catharsis (‘Just Another Face’). Is it sublime (in the non-Long Beach sense)? No, but it’s an impressive, and one might even say respectable, attempt. Inspirational line: “I’m not just another face, I’m not just another name. Even if you can’t see it now, we’re proud of what’s to come…and you”. 4.1/5
PUP- Morbid Stuff [Rise 2019]
Although the thesis for all of the morbid stuff doesn’t rear its head until the last verse of track 9 the ride up until then certainly earns the record’s title. Death, ennui, rage, a vignette in which a breadwinner loses his job and contemplates suicide; this kind of macabre is self-loathing at its most snarky. But along the way is the recognition of failure, sibling love, and a LOT of pitch black levity. These four white doods from Toronto also bring the good stuff, by avoiding the literal whine that Tom Delonge released unto their forbearers which exists only now solely as a mark of explicit derivation, and also by providing hooks capable of allowing the listener to feel the dopamine release in real time. The words of caution being that “there can be too much of a good thing” just look at toothaches caused by sugar. Leaving the city probably won’t do much good either—certainly didn’t help Soupy or Stickles. 4.0/5
Tyler the Creator—Igor [Columbia 2019]
Not so much impressionism as art pop, in which the auteur guiding the work attempts to pull the wool over the consumer’s eyes by carefully calculating which components on his last one worked so well (queerness, sincerity, insecurity, yearning ennui—take your pick) and expanding them to capitalize on the effort best he could. Problem is his metaphors are more kitsch than clever whether in the cringey spectrum line, the dude-as-glock one, or the mention of marionette strings coming from what to those of us out of high school recognize is a toxic sadboi’s POV bookended by a mailed in MAGA-hatboi quatrain. What doesn’t help is his reliance on pitch shifting reducing his presence to a side character at best, which is why your ears’ll perk up once Playboi Carti’s pinball tenor cuts through on the outset. This album is difficult because even the ostensibly sincere moments like the last two minutes of track 10 find their solution through self-involved pity instead of acceptance outright, negating the stunning previous four’s almagam of beachy goodness. There’s always a chance that someone listens and is reassured knowing that someone else feels like they do but anyone who finds that much kinship with the subject matter’s perspective should be in therapy. 2.3/5
Vampire Weekend – Father of the Bride [Columbia 2019]
As the late spring afternoon following their previous one’s mid-winter morning this is less bildungsroman, having gotten through that period with the necessary growing pains—the loss of a producer and half of the songwriting team that for Ezra Koenig necessitated collaborative counterpoints in the form of Danielle Haim & Steve Lacy. The result is more logical than what’s expected, just look at the track list, whose length in the tradition of rock is usually reserved for a statement of quality, change, and/or what sticks after a shake up to the core. This one is most exemplary of the latter, true, and while never approaching the dei-combatativeness of “Yah Hey” or the mile a minute plomp of “Cousins” there is always an ebullience to the way the tunes shuffle, flutter, and shine. That same length also allows a fair amount of filler through (some slightly disserviceable others downright forgettable) where Koenig keeps his complexity for the cost of his subtlety. What’s most admirable is his precise articulation of the anxiety many smiling youngins have felt not just for the last few years but decades; what’s most worrisome is that he attributes a certain genocidal feeling to every beating heart. Oy vey. 3.7/5
Cosmic Hero 