Car Seat Headrest – Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) [Matador 2018]
As a longer hi-fi lo-fi redux of his bandcamp masterpiece (according to his cult) it’s virtually impossible to tell if it’s better than Teens of Denial if you hopped on after Will Toldeo signed on to Matador like most of us did. Narratively about his breakup with his boyfriend (or not he’s not sure yet) and all of the teen angst, ennui, horniness, and humor – “Every conversation just ends with you screaming, not even words just ahh ahh ahh ahh” – surrounding it. His toons are full of inertia (and what’s with that dog motif?) that will inevitably be derailed by the spoken sections at the ends of half the songs. In play as always are his extensions of diphthongs, the greatest of which is his stretch of “dogs” into a 13 second gasper for anyone brave enough to sing along with him on track two. The best song however is the one that combines Gang of Four, The Flaming Lips, and K Records, it’s called “Bodies” and transcends the canon of pop just as it lights up the synapses. 4.5/5
Cloud Nothings – Life Without Sound [Carpark/Wichita 2017]
When p4k failed to give it Best New Music there was a tangible tampering of expectations among fans that Dylan Baldi is still dealing with. One’s 20s are when the solipsism of youth begins to fade away which is why the opener ends with “peace in the terror of the mind” after surfacing from the depths of his self-involvement. Sure some of the fury is gone sans the last two tracks which are the worst, but until then are mantras that inhabit the sounds of fuzz being used to guide instead of burn down. Even Baldi’s excitement shines through when he says “what a line” before ripping into a guitar solo unlike any other the band has done a minute later and just two tracks after is the older brother of “Now Hear In” in the form of a beach tune no less. Life without sound is no better than death for a musician like him which is why he sounds like a big brother when he says “Here we are among the living see and count your friends”. 4.0/5
Jenny Lewis – On The Line [Warner Records 2019]
Short story song cycle points mid 30s traditionalist bohemian (sex, drugs, rock’n’roll) tragedy as one way of coping with the way of the world in late stage capitalism. Here it’s bubblegum alt-country to pretty up situations so that they sound quirky instead of unsettling, and it’s no coincidence there so much mixing of uppers with downers. 3.3/5
Modest Mouse – The Moon and Antarctica [Epic 2000]
The debate is always between this one and The Lonesome Crowded West as to which is their magnum opus. I go back and forth myself. By this point they were on a major label and Isaac Brock had his jaw broken, but their real change was their abandonment of empty negative space, that silence around the sound, here replaced by grand barren frost. The subject matter is only cosmic because of the extreme disassociation Brock was going through, think; “I’m gonna live in the city with no more friends and fam-il-y” or “does anybody know a way a body could get away?” On the other side is nature as all-consuming unstoppable force compared to humanity, subsumed by the way “it’s hard to remember to live before you die”. Beauty by definition isn’t objective, even as Brock wails humans ain’t nothing but water and shit his truths – to those who see them as such – tend to birth much more sentiment and empathy than any of the nihilism that he’s too modest about could weigh down. “I could have told you all that I love you” vs. “All this talking all this time and the air fills up, up, up, until there’s nothing left to breathe”. 4.8/5
Cosmic Hero 