Olivia Rodrigo – Guts [Geffen 2023]
What she has that her heroes don’t is the skills that her time as a theater kid gave her – meaning she’s not just able to perfect her superlative comic and dramatic timing but also conceptualize scenarios as a writer that, whether or not autobiographical, come alive with the ridiculousness and reality that all theater should immerse its audience in. She inherently understands how to manipulate attention to entertain. And since she’s moved on from the trials and tribulations of high school to the fucked-up machinations of an extremely young adult starlet there best be some of that entertaining to convey aptly how her highs and lows have made her insightful and self-aware. So it’s my pleasure to report that despite a minor stumble here or there she succeeds resoundingly. The instrumentation that emo bandleader turned pop producer Dan Nigro provides to her tried and true banger + ballad verse-chorus-verse frameworks makes this another notch on the belt of recycling pop culture; a rock record is born. My personal favorites are the one where she sleeps with her ex and the one where she wants to get him back. At the center is Olivia Rodrigo, whose emotional intelligence and love of irony seems like they could generate illustrative truths forever, if she wanted. 4.5/5
Miguel – Kaleidoscope Dreams [Black Ice/RCA 2012]
He’s found his place as a much tighter songwriter and instrumentalist who’s sex crazed persona is confident but not aggressive, honest but not cruel, and can be submissive-to-desperate without becoming a manchild. He’s no political philosophy PhD, but he gets points for trying, especially when the results are as winning as this collection of a masculine man with no qualms exploring the flights of Eros. All in all he’s respectful of himself, his potential lovers, and the funk-tinged psychedelics that he imbues to grant some obfuscation – otherwise it’d all be too obvious. 4.3/5
Tyler Childers – Rustin’ in the Rain [Hickman Holler/RCA 2023]
Because he isn’t that young anymore, it’s less likely to touch the soul in a capital-‘R’-Romantic way like Purgatory did, when Childers made drinking and tearing up his Appalachian dirt roads sound so urgently fun that it could’ve distracted from the real story around his Catholic love interest. Getting sober and married to that Catholic certainly played no small part in his own changes either. Childers’ voice is no longer hoarse from the whiskey and cigarettes though it still cracks in its meat and potatoes mining and logging glory; his sound has shifted to the ballroom, invoking a bluegrass tradition of communal spirit as opposed to his “from the front porch” singer-songwriter; and lastly his focus itself has changed to quite literally tilling the earth and maintaining love whether queer, straight, or friendship. Once again Childers is complicating the assumptions of those not from his neck of the woods, though I’d have thought my Yankee ass might’ve stopped being surprised by now. At 7 songs in 28 minutes it’s slight even for a man who regularly kept it under 40, though I suspect it’s because he senses the delicateness of this collection and wished to stay on message. 4.0/5
Hop Along – Painted Shut [Saddle Creek 2015]
It’s not just the little flourishes that they started adding or all the new instruments, it’s that the structures of the songs themselves have become stronger. Joe Reinhart’s intuitive guitar playing creates both tension and texture that touches an aural nerve as Mark Quinlan’s backbeat provides canvas for his sibling Frances’ voice to shift from whisper to mutter to croak to shriek to holler to an impressively classical falsetto. Much has been made of that voice’s capacity to enrapture which I don’t think I could’ve wrapped my head around until now. The same is applicable to their ability to empathize since, no matter how informed by Quinlan’s own life, their subject matter is always a character study requiring vast reserves of emotional bandwidth to switch from perspective to perspective, often in media res. Tempering the crypticness of the past with more clarity than ever before and fully growing into the premier “indie rock” band of Philadelphia for the 2010s, these four will never be major but they might just be Important. 4.3/5
Drive By Truckers – Go-Go Boots [ATO/Play It Again Sam 2011]
Having overblown themselves last time around the Truckers course correct and make the record that they tried to make with The Big To Do by doubling down on their roots; that Muscle Shoals sound that 4-9 white Northern Alabaman session players whipped up to back some of the greatest Black heroes of the 20th century. Note the two Eddie Hinton covers for good measure. Overly muscular riffs and self-pity have given way to acoustic finger plucking, light piano, and tasty guitar licks over a rhythm section that’s sometimes a train and sometimes a meander. Hood’s vignettes, especially his one-two punches over 7:00, have found themselves morally gray once again which is where he works best; having long since discovered that his most vivid oral tradition is that of the Sad But Sympathetic Bastard. And though he remains the meat on the bones of the record it’s actually Cooley and Tucker whose quiet contemplations of the way distance can change a person and loud affirmations in the face of personal tragedy respectively prove brighter in sound and track list placement. It’s definitely a grower, so give it time on a good set of headphones and when it clicks finally you’ll wonder why it feels so short. 3.9/5
Cosmic Hero 