Back again after a long break between posts, since this batch in particular proved frustratingly middling. The records have good and even great songs bogged down with so much unnecessary filler that you might as well call it fast food. Even the good records come with a lot more baggage than I’d like. But that’s what makes it all compelling, right?
I can’t say it’s all the records’ faults either, I’ve been preoccupied myself having finally dipped my toe into Matthew Mercer’s Critical Role podcast show thing on YouTube and finding that it pairs nicely as audio to my hours long dives into The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. I’ve blown through 64 episodes in season 2 as of right now and despite it’s front of house Whiteness and back of house toxicity that seems to come out of every kind of media that Tumblr supports I find the synergy between these professionals to be sublimely enjoyable.
In any case for all 2 people who actually read this stuff as I post it you’ll notice there’s no Sleater Kinney or Jay-Z. Having finally hit terminal velocity with the two of them I have begun their Compendium pieces and moving forward will be updating those solely until I’ve reached their current discography and posting them after. Probably the Jay-Z sooner since he practically entered music retirement half a decade ago and the women from Sleater Kinney have a new one due out in a few months. Black NY Billionaire and Portland based upper middle class white women, I think CBS could get Chuck Lorre to write a show about that. Might even be a hit. Anyways…
De la Soul – De La Soul is Dead [Tommy Boy 1991]
The skits barely hit and the attempt at Burger King discourse is irritable. But most of the rest of this hour plus deep dive into the psyches of three + one Long Island rappers proves quite enjoyable if unsubstantive. An attempt at the immersion that 21st century rappers would take for granted, they’re always much smarter (like in that Millie song) to the point of almost being obtuse (the baseball one). 3.4/5
Being Dead – When Horses Would Run [Bayonet 2023]
Combine the trash of the B-52s with the ditzy New Age sound of late 60s California and you’ll get about 75% of the way to these Austinites’ oddball sound from the Ty Segall school of garage. Falcon Bitch and Gumball are their names, with accompaniment by Ricky Moto on bass when they play live. A pleasant car record that belies its songs’ characters and their often doped up and crime fueled shenanigans. As a treat. 3.8/5
Hop Along – Get Disowned [Saddle Creek 2012]
The best trick the band does for pathos is to throw in gang vocals here and there to distract from their methodically disjointed sonics and Frances Quinlan’s cryptic dramatics. Or in laymen’s terms, they sound sketched out and sloppy. Such bloodletting yoked to an occasionally pleasant down-home shuffle recalls their label’s founder and his own transition from upstart to dignified bandleader, though he was much younger than any of Hop Along. Maybe I’m being too harsh but the obsession with youth – “young and happy”, “meteor make me young”, “young love is cheap”, the child being spoken to in “Diamond Mine” – has a way of wearing thin when there’s no resolution to look forward to. Is “I want to love something without it having to need me” something to aspire to? Or just the navel gazey solipsism of youth? 3.3/5
Feeble Little Horse – Girl with Fish [Saddle Creek 2023]
Pittsburgh four piece makes electronic supplemented rock about nothing in particular. But they’ve got jokes and keep it short. 3.0/5
Drive By Truckers – The Big To-Do [ATO 2010]
It’s weird how like clockwork the year 2010 was full of cherished character story bands stumbling while muscling up their sound. For what? None of them ever headlined an arena. 3.5/5
Miguel – All I Want is You [ByStorm/Jive 2010]
The Spotify numbers tell the story that “Sure Thing” is this Afro-Hispanic Los Angeles-based crooner’s most beloved song. But TikTok aside, I think hitting it out of the park so greatly on album 1 track 1 is probably unlikely, though coming in a decade plus after the fact may remove some of the shine from when he was a new kid on tha block who had a golden tenor. According to legend Jive wasn’t all that hyped for him to succeed, which doesn’t make much sense considering the sound on the whole is as if Prince The Sex-smith was trying to make something in the era of Young Money’s chart domination; all brass and electro beats and 808s. And though smarter and less macho than one would expect – he wants to see what a sex worker can do and doesn’t judge, then he listens empathetically and closely to a separate beau entirely as she teaches him how to enthrall her – it still feels worn in places that should be triumphant for someone so clearly aligned with R&B’s future. 3.6/5
Open Mike Eagle – Component System With the Auto Reverse [Auto Reverse Records]
His post pandemic album is somehow even weightier than the one about his marriage breaking down and even less focused on him at the center. Mostly Open Mike sounds exhausted even as he leans on his boys Video Dave and Still Rift, their own raps barely in tune to the beats he gathers from multiple producers. Always alternative and articulate but definitely ready to go to bed. 3.0/5
Big Thief – Capacity [Saddle Creek 2017]
It was maybe during the fifth or sixth spin of this NYC based folk band’s second record that I finally started to get those little pleasure tickles that means a record is opening up to me; initially it’s singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker’s acoustic baritone string plucks under the chorus of her Jungian informed tale of coital exploration “Pretty Things”. Additionally, pleasures come in the form of guitarist Buck Meek’s studied post punk chirps, which prove not just intelligent but joyful amongst the dark-not-murky aural background their capable rhythm section creates. Lenker says her big subject is gender but mostly here it’s focused on The Feminine; opening and closing with hope for a male sexual partner to release his masculinity there’s no less than two songs with women’s names, a tale of an Evelyn, and an earth-shattering ode to Mama Lenker’s attempts at taking care of her family in the rural Midwest. A poet or a short story writer I can’t tell, but I can tell that she needs the rest of her band to make these songs feel as communal as they do, the ones where they shy away simply don’t feel as welcoming. 3.7/5
Noname – Sundial [Self released 2023]
The great juxtaposition here is the gospel + jazz ~vibes~ backing a woman who has grown so intellectually cognizant as to become a borderline self-righteous shade thrower. Borderline because Fatimah Warner saves herself by mostly being correct in her analysis of her community’s hypocrisy and points the finger back at herself eventually, but her pettiness is not only incensed, it’s another entity in the room. Capitalism being the frustrating parasite/religion that it is there’s no way to fully extricate from it no matter how queer her lyrics or understanding of one strain of socialism she is. The best slice through the noise is when she notes that the desire to tax the rich is rooted in wanting more money in the first place. All taking away money from billionaires will do is give it to the state, what socialist wants that? It’s not the digs at Black America’s heroes that saves the day but her surrounding herself with features who articulate steadfast support and introspection in verses that nearly bowl her own over. Despite her confusion and attempts to self-sabotage mildly to reformat herself as a human not a hero, it’s a work of precision and beguilingly flawed humanity. 4.2/5
A Tribe Called Quest – Midnight Marauders [Jive 1993]
With their traveler’s guide having moved from mystic-man Jarobi to a digital woman’s voice who claims to be on the cover of the record (feminism on an album that laments groupies? Someone give Bill Clinton his Nobel Peace Prize) Phife, Tip, and Ali create something much more conceptually full by tasking her with guiding us between their 14 attempts at distilling the Afrocentric joy and realism they’ve developed so far. A soundscape of something jazzish but more cosmic in nature due to the electronic flourishes around their boom-bap samples, the trio seems more focused than ever on progressive hip hop. Take their solidifying roles, Phife Dawg’s the shit talking puntastic storyteller who manages to get off such verbal eyebrow raisers as “DC 20 aircraft” and “Siemen’s furniture” but also laments a seriously bad day and comes out feeling only down instead of hateful. While Q-Tip has become the intelligent horndog he’s always been, between making their very backdrops he waxes poetic on slur reclamation and how solid his loving technique is. It being the 90s there’s undercurrents of misogyny (preferable compared to how vile The Chronic, also from 1993, is) and some racial jokes that don’t age well, but as a template for a kind of ebullience that the hip hop scene wouldn’t see again for more than a decade it served its Gen-X core well enough that it inspires achievement. 4.4/5
Cosmic Hero 