Yard Act – Where’s My Utopia? [Universal 2024]
While in America the default sound for rock bands post-Nirvana has been to filter all you can through an alternative lense and hope you’re catchy enough to have a hit, the Brits have had a clear lineage of post-punk fueling them after the Britpop bubble burst in the late 90’s – peaking multiple times in the last decade. However tired lead sing/talk guy James Smith is of hearing it, he and his fellow 30-somethings make protest music in post-punk’s experimental palette. Not just protesting injustice and the major label rigamarole but his own fucked up-ness resulting from guilt/shame/trauma/what have you with the ironic humor only someone who sees the overwhelming force that ingrained systems exude could have. In fact this time out the leftist and his crew simply sound surprised at how well they’re really doing touring in a mid-sized rock band and able to pay rent for once. Hopefully they can keep it up. 3.7/5
Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven [Epitaph 2024]
I’ll admit I underrated 2019’s Patience, though I still take issue with the thematic muddlement its raw power based in female rage earned some points from me after the fact. That was a breakup album from a self-professed serial monogamist – this one though has been billed as their sex album by leader and lead singer Marisa Dabice. Though despite the quite enjoyable puppy play at the outset it’s really a record about the frustration of singledom surrounded by thick slabs of gee-tar noize. I’m convinced they put all the hardcore songs in the back half to cover up the moment of real vulnerability that Dabice seems to feel in bed with a new lover; “What if one day I don’t love you anymore?”. A serial monogamist knows this feeling well enough to worry about it, and the fact that she’s worrying about it tells me she really likes this person. Best of luck getting it on girlie. 4.0/5
Drive by Truckers – English Oceans [ATO 2014]
Three years later and one more solo album each under the belt of their lead songwriters the Truckers return with a finalized lineup. No third singer for the first time in 15 years means that the Cooley and Hood contributions are all that’s there and for once it’s not the guy you think it is powering the sense of ease it takes to write a song with rural wisdom in it. Cooley, having finally mastered his own range from Mick Jagger howls to the pensive country barman at the lower part of his register, blossoms into an auteur on the level of his foil Patterson Hood, making insights and generally livening up the joint whenever he steps up to the mic for a song he’s written. Hood, however wise and however concise simply sounds exhausted during his turn to document the later Obama years they were living under. Another death song, another murder song, two about women who hate their men, politics. All topics retread for the man who knows them best. Though I will say even without them being the freshest he still gets 70% or so the way to achieving what he wants. 3.8/5
Idles – Tangk [Partisan 2024]
The first thing you’ll notice is probably how much Nigel Godrich’s production is frustratingly tied to the delicate opulence of his main band. Joe Talbot & Co’s cultural moment having ended for now it makes sense to change up sound which, despite Pitchfork’s constant lukewarm takes on them, they manage to do. It’s just the subject matter that they’re scrounging for. Talbot has one real trick, he can snarl in a way that’s both vulnerable and galvanizing, so while his focus on Love this time around is commendable, he was always better at ripping down fascist messengers. 3.6/5
A Tribe Called Quest – The Love Movement [Jive 1998]
The beats are supple and light, the rhymes about love but mostly fucking. When Q-Tip had a message and Phife had interest they would’ve laughed more at how middling it all is I bet. 3.1/5
Schoolboy Q – Blue Lips [TDE/Interscope 2024]
He’s got the same problem the Star Trek Films have, all the even numbered ones are really good and showcase an eclecticism on sound choice and flow capability that makes the surprisingly sterile odd numbered ones hit like aesthetic whiplash. Or something like that, I’ve never seen the movies. But Q seems to have dialed it back in for this half-a-decade-coming collection of songs that despite his socially patriarchal views can paint the man as complex. Everyone talks about Blank Face since that was his artistic peak and this one doesn’t surpass it, but for a Hoover Crip entering his 40s wondering how Kamala can help, why the mass shooting won’t stop, and how he managed to secure financial stability for his kids and friends, it’ll do nicely. 3.8/5
Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us [Columbia 2024]
As the length between each release grows and grows, a rock band tends to hit a certain “terminal mid-ness”. Family, life, other work, what-have-you tends to either remove focus from the music at hand (and why shouldn’t it, stable finances and family should always outweigh other concerns) or inform it in a way that doesn’t have any substance. “Tends” in both cases because there are and always will be creators who capture Essence and Truth on a profound level regardless of subject matter. Koenig and crew had quite a bit to live up to this time around. Removed 11 years from their opulent bildungsroman masterpiece and 5 from their jam-band live and let live sprawl where they tried and barley succeeded in proving that having only half their core song-writing duo could yield results, we have these 10 songs. And luckily it seems like he and his fellows on rhythm have managed to make them competently with winks to their past – New York gets its mentions as always but for the first time there’s a whole lot more noise everywhere you look. The theme is personal conflict, just count how many mentions there are of “war” or how many character studies are fish out of water narratives. While politics have never been their forte it’s to interest more than relief that they seem to have something to say about it now; “each generation makes its own apologies” because “the enemy’s invincible” so “I hope you let it go”. Though disappointeds and defeatists should note that last one is called “Hope” and not “We’re Fucked”. 4.4/5
Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood [ANTI- 2024]
Turns out the Lucinda Williams pallet that the Alabama-born/Northeast-trained ex-punk sunk her teeth into on Saint Cloud is here to stay, with a very helpful boost from fellow rural southern guitar-maestro MJ Lenderman for good measure. It’s hard to tell if it’s better though, Saint Cloud was such a sheer pivot that it has a way of sticking in the head longer. Though last time around was sobriety and taking stock of relationships during (for the consuming public) a world ending pandemic, what Katie Crutchfield’s focus is now seems to be the mundanity of some asshole who isn’t treating her right (hopefully not autobiographical for Kevin Morby’s sake). And again and again she proves her poetry a cut above the rest; “I was drifting in and out/Reticent on the off chance/I’m blunter than a bullseye/Begging for peace of mind” or “I left your heart of glass in my unmade bed/In the right time, you could shine so bright in my doubtful eyes/And I imprint all your ideas on mine/I move awkwardly at the speed of light” or “And I held it like a penny I found/It might bring me something/it might weigh me down”. 4.5/5
Taylor Swift – Tortured Poets Department [Universal 2024]
Turns out she’ll end it with the long term partner, mining every tryst failed and successful that she’s had since in the same way that earned her the typecasting she had in the early 2010s of using breakups for song fodder. Only she’s taken a page out of Rubert Murdoch’s book and used her power to create a ravenous cult with enough capital to make her a billionaire too. Qu sera sera, eh? Leave the Marvel movie length one for the Tik Tokers who will inhale every fart she lets out and focus on the 65 minutes of staid anguish the Millennial pied piper of girl-to-womanhood shares. As Christgau once said about her ultimate rival before he truly fell from grace “…right, there’s a lot here. But right, it’s no masterpiece. Get over it. It’ll do you good.” 3.0/5
Ratboys – The Window [Topshelf 2023]
I peg them as tried and true students of the kind of land-fill indie rock that solidified the term as a genre instead of simply denoting record labels. Death Cab, Modest Mouse, anything Saddle Creek, it’s all intelligent-but-not-brilliant recitations about the ways anxiety can manifest in love and loss. The quality that their producer imbues here on their fifth outing is one that he mastered in his own touchstone band some 20 years ago, a polished yet earnest sound that anyone between the ages of 13 and 19 can wrap their identity around for what will inevitably be a whirlwind summer of ups and downs. Julia Steiner has a keen eye for a turn of phrase and a message to believe in about loving those you hold close even as she’s let down by them. Oh the pain of being known! 3.8/5
Cloud Nothings – Final Summer [Pure Noise 2024]
Healthier, happier or at least working on it (“I need to be happy with what I’ve got in front of me”), and freshly moved (hi neighbor!) Baldi & co make an album where the best songs are for jogging instead of driving. Crazy how once you live in a walkable city it all kind of shifts, huh? 3.5/5
Beyonce – Cowboy Carter [Parkwood/Columbia/Sony 2024]
After the confidence of Renaissance this equally devoted work of anthropology comes across with a chip on its shoulder – country music aside she still cares about not winning a specific Grammy? As if that ceremony isn’t so corrupt as to be meaningless already? Thankfully everything she and her team put together asserts her (still) as the greatest pop star of the century. Working with a slew of white southerners young and old as well as the Black women whose streams she hopes to boost irrevocably to reclaim their right to country music, Beyonce shows what joys that money can buy. Pop, opera, rock’n’roll, choych music, soul and yes country are all here in the mix, which is why she dubbed it a “Beyonce” album and left the debate up to those people who still care about genre in 2024. Being a Black woman from Texas with roots in the French speaking Creoles one state over, her claim to any and all genres is practically a birthright in this country anyway. So go big and long, value family and friends, wage battle between wanderlust and the pulls of back home – she does it all. Eventually even the under a minute ones feel less annoying. 4.1/5
Cosmic Hero 