MUSIC REVIEWS, 7/22/19
Thank God the release schedule is kind of light for July, because it allows me to catch up on the 30-plus albums I still haven't got to from 2019. These were seven I heard this week that I had some kind of opinion on:
Ingrid Michaelson "Stranger Songs" ** and 1/3
MUCH better than her 2016 album It Doesn't Have To Make Sense, but still about halfway between that and the quality of her good stuff. The lyrics on this album are abysmal; if they were any more stock or cliché the project would implode and a black hole would form where these songs once stood. (The number of rhyme schemes on par with "hair" and "care" is groan worthy.)
And it's a shame, because the songs are...okay, some of them are pretty boring. The first two (two and a half, actually) are adult contemporary sludge with very little soul, but when the second verse of "Hey Kid" kicks in it switches from this Wilson Phillips update to something with a backbone. But much like most of the high points on Stranger Songs, it's not quite good...just pleasant.
Track four isn't so pleasant: "Hate You"'s chorus makes me want to claw my skin off. "I don't hate you, I don't hate you, I just hate that I don't hate you". What the fuck, Ingrid? You're better than this. You've graduated third grade. Come on.
Lead off single "Jealous" is one of the high points; if this song had come out in 2015, it would have knocked me on my ass. Now it sounds like it's trying to remake "Closer" by The Chainsmokers but be more about personal reflection. I know this album is all about Stranger Things, but I don't watch the show so I don't care if...
Oh wait. The lyrical badness suddenly makes sense if kids are supposed to be saying it.
Still, as an outsider, it took composing my thoughts for a review and reading some Wikipedia to arrive at that conclusion. To most people, it's going to seem like really bad lyrics and they're not gonna make that connection.
"Missing You", again with a lame chorus but not as lame as "Hate You", does its best late period Tegan and Sara impression and makes pretty good work of it at that. It's unremarkable but decent all the same.
"Best Friend" is an Ingrid Michaelson song with trap infusion in the instrumental. (Really what gets called "trap" a lot (and I'm hella guilty of this) is any modern hip hop or R&B, but part of that confusion is they all use the same damn drum samples; it's all 808's. Something like this, or even Post Malone or Drake are definitely R&B because they're singing most of the time, not rapping. But those genres have been forced together for so long by radio formats because they put black people music on one channel that they eventually became one thing that has signifiers of both but can't really be classified as either. Since nobody bothered to name this new hybrid anything like, say, "Rock and Roll" or "Heavy Metal" when they were given names, Trap is as good a name as any really. But I feel like I'm not the guy that should have the power to name it since it's not my culture, but also...what do we call this stuff? I hate subgenres because the differences between them become so razor thin and now a lot of music is a mash of influences anyway so is genre even still a thing? And wow this went way off the rails. Wasn't I talking about a passable but kinda boring Ingrid Michaelson record?)
"Best Friend" has a perfectly fine instrumental with a premise of falling in love with your best friend but being terrified of confessing because you don't want to risk the friendship. I'm a total sucker for songs like this, especially now that I can look back at a teenage situations with two decades of comfort distance from having to live it (again).
"Mother" I can't tell you anything about, even though I just listened to it twice in the span of an hour. "Christmas Lights" is...again, it's pleasant. It's not quite good, it misses by thaaat much, but it's...pleasant. It's warm, it has empathy, I'll take it in the middle of a dystopia. Sometimes you don't want to feel all the feelings so songs like this are good for feeling only some of them.
"Pretty" is pretty underwhelming, but points for giving more work to Sarah Aarons, who co-wrote Zedd's "Stay" and "The Middle". The New York Times has a YouTube series called Diary Of A Song (which needs more episodes stat!) that detailed how Aarons, a relative unknown in America, co-wrote these two smash hits and sang on the demos. Thing is, I liked her singing better than either Alessia Cara or Maren Morris. I really wish she'd make her own album. But if she's gonna keep banging out songs, I'm down for that too. I just don't happen to think this one was anybody's best work. (This features the "hair" and "care" rhyme scheme I talked about at the beginning.) And then "Take Me Home" doesn't exist and you can't convince me (even while actively listening to it) otherwise.
All in all an undercooked project, which is understandable since Ingrid's main focus at the moment is coming up with a stage adaptation of The Notebook. This was just something she put out...because? I'm kinda glad she did; it doesn't totally wash the bad taste of It Doesn't Have To Make Sense out of my ears but it came up with three or four songs that are worth hearing and seven others that are...pleasant but dull. Still puts her on the right track, and maybe if we haven't descended further into a fascist hellscape and people can still put out music by 2022 or 2023 we'll have a proper good Ingrid album again.
Sunwatchers "Illegal Moves" **
Psychedelic bullshit, but listenable psychedelic bullshit. I liked "New Dad Blues", but then the next two were the same song again. Then tracks four and five went all free jazz and bland in varying degrees and lost me completely. "Ptah, The El Daoud" stabilized and set in for a solid pace; by the end of it I was sort of in the mood. The closer "Strollin' Coma Blues" surprised me with slide guitar not set to a specific rhythm, backed by cymbal washes until the 90 second mark where it locks in on a slow, head nodding groove. Murmuring saxophones and a kit with the snare switched off softly accompany the repeating riff, like Robert Johnson was accompanying his own funeral procession down Bourbon Street. Bluesy New Orleans jazz. I didn't think an album that made me check out around track two could snap me back to attention like that, but here we are. Then the thing goes off the rails and ends with a musical car wreck, aka "Everybody solo!" But eh, it's fine if it's your kind of jam.
(Also, what the fuck is happening on this album cover? Is that the Kool-Aid Man threatening bodily harm to a bunch of notorious world leaders? Uncle Sam's clearly been curb stomped here...)
Hælos "Any Random Kindness" ***
If Ambien and ambient drone are your thing, may I interest you in "Another Universe"? No? How about a song that gets going halfway through, grows a damn skeleton to give it some form and has vocals with a little bit of grit to them while still trying to shake the pills? That would be "Buried In The Sand". I was about to use the Ambien line and sub out "ambient drone" for "half-assed club beats" and call this review a day, but then the song actually showed up and I had to change my tune.
"End Of World Party" starts with the "Yeah! WOOO!" sample from "It Takes Two" by Rob Bass & DJ E-Z Rock and keeps going with what I can only describe as deeply melancholy party rock. Like everybody knows they're about to die and they're deciding to dance one last time with the four minutes they have left.
I notice there's a refrain that sounds like it's saying "trust your government". Considering there's a song called "Deep State" on this album, I knew I needed to read the lyrics then and there. And I was pleasantly surprised: All the songs are about the unsustainable insanity of the world at large in 2019 and not about embracing it.
"Another Universe" wonders openly if the world is getting along normally in another dimension. "Buried In The Sand" is about a dinner party the band attended where no one said a word, just Snapchatted, and how...creepy that was. "End Of World Party" is a song about the coming end we can't seem to do much about and deciding to go out spewing sarcasm and dancing in spite on the way down. "Kyoto" is about government putting economics over environment. "ARK" really seems like it's about Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. "Boy Girl" is two lovers unable to connect, even when they explain how they feel the exact same frustrations, unable to even bond over that.
"Deep State" reminds me of the book I'm reading (which, in turn, reminds me of both 1984 and current political discourse around the world) called Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg that details her experience with Stalinist madness and doublespeak drowning out all common sense and leading to people like herself (who were all lifelong devotees to the Communist Party) being locked up by the Communist Party as enemies conspiring to destroy it on the flimsiest of pretenses. Mere "lack of vigilance" at not reporting her colleague to the authorities for a crime that didn't even exist until they made it up after the fact led Ginzburg to be incarcerated in Russian prison camps from 1937 to 1953. The point being: the lie is repeated often enough and forcefully enough that it becomes truth to all who still live: the rest are dead or locked up.
I was not expecting to go this deep on what I was anticipating to be some mildly okay trip hop at best. There's way more going on beneath the surface.
The one thing going against Any Random Kindness however is repetition. Each song is kind of in the same mode with only three departures: The opener (which I found insomnia curing), and the two closing numbers: "So Long, Goodbye" and "Last One Out (Turn The Lights Off)". "So Long, Goodbye" is a refreshing change of pace, but "Last One Out" is a slog. It's the "not a bang but a whimper" moment we're collectively staring down the barrel at as we speak; whether or not it will be the current societal structure or all mankind at the point of moribundity remains to be seen.
Other than that, Any Random Kindness went beyond my expectations even if it's not always my jam. Definitely worth checking out (while you still have time).
Carly Rae Jepsen "Dedicated" **
I don't know why Carly Rae's magic has never worked on me; I want it to, but I find myself bored stiff by most of her songs. Some of them get through though: "Julien" is decent and "I'll Be Your Girl" caught my ear by being good and different from the rest of the surrounding material. One thing that got on my nerves is the sheer volume of the word "love" over and over and over without some kind of...metaphor or simile or anything to switch it up, just "love" over and over again. Word repetition is one of my pet peeves. And that really shouldn't be the main takeaway from an album by an artist people genuinely...love. I get next to nothing from this competently produced yet mechanical sounding assemblage.
Scott Stapp "The Space Between The Shadows" 1/2 of a *
WHELP. I guess we're doing this.
Full disclosure: I like about...eleven or twelve Creed songs? Not love, mind you, but I don't think they were a complete waste. This album...isn't as lucky.
Listening to the first single "Purpose For Pain" I was like "Sweet! I was wondering what happened to Dust For Life!" (Oh yeah. Nu Metal Deep Cuts. Come and get 'em.) And that's the high point.
Most of this album is innoffensive, forgettable and boring. If you're expecting a car crash, you'll be sorely disappointed. Honestly, that would have given this thing more of a reason to exist. This would have been lame when Creed were still popular. It would have been milquetoast as his solo debut. It would have been just as forgotten as it is now if it came out at any point in the history of rock and roll, and here we are after the end of that time period and it has less reason to exist than ever before. And still it persists.
Oh, there is the children's choir on the self-empowerment anthem "Wake Up Call". That's kind of...you know, even that's not funny. It's sort of remarkable, but...I think this album manages to be a double disappointment because the music is lame, but not lame enough to make proper fun of. It's almost but not quite competent. It's sub-Aldi brand nu metal in 2019, but it's as well done as something like that could possibly be so it doesn't give me anything to work with. Or even remark upon. I mean, if I'm being charitable "Face Of The Sun" has the most teeth of anything here, but...it's still dentures.
The only other feature is the last four or five songs are all increasingly slower, sappier ballads, while still trying to be at least Daughtry levels of 2000's rock, which creates a conundrum of whether that makes them more or less sincere given their source. And again, if I'm being charitable, "Last Hallelujah" has an okay chorus. I'm never going back to listen to it willingly, but it's not the worst.
So yeah, this wasn't as fun as I thought it would be, nor as bad. I guess it's just a waste of time.
Unlike:
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets "And Now For The Whatchamacallit" ****
This shit fuckin' JAMS. Psychedelic bullshit done RIGHT!
Twista "Sunshine" [Single] ****
Also jams. I've never been a big Twista fan, but this song is really good. It features the always solid Anthony Hamilton on the hook and some really warm strings to capture the feeling he was going for. I listened to the first few songs from his new album Summer '96, but wow was that a soulless exercise of bland beats and fast rapping with no substance. (Oh shit. Twista is the Yngvie Malmstein of hip hop! I've cracked the code!)
Sorry I didn't go into more detail about Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, but it was one I wasn't taking notes on and I thought I could use a positive review or two for this. Just trust me, if you're into psychedelic garage prog or even if you've never heard of that but that sounds like something that tickles your fancy, "And Now For The Whatchamacallit" is a damn fine place to start.
Ingrid Michaelson "Stranger Songs" ** and 1/3
MUCH better than her 2016 album It Doesn't Have To Make Sense, but still about halfway between that and the quality of her good stuff. The lyrics on this album are abysmal; if they were any more stock or cliché the project would implode and a black hole would form where these songs once stood. (The number of rhyme schemes on par with "hair" and "care" is groan worthy.)
And it's a shame, because the songs are...okay, some of them are pretty boring. The first two (two and a half, actually) are adult contemporary sludge with very little soul, but when the second verse of "Hey Kid" kicks in it switches from this Wilson Phillips update to something with a backbone. But much like most of the high points on Stranger Songs, it's not quite good...just pleasant.
Track four isn't so pleasant: "Hate You"'s chorus makes me want to claw my skin off. "I don't hate you, I don't hate you, I just hate that I don't hate you". What the fuck, Ingrid? You're better than this. You've graduated third grade. Come on.
Lead off single "Jealous" is one of the high points; if this song had come out in 2015, it would have knocked me on my ass. Now it sounds like it's trying to remake "Closer" by The Chainsmokers but be more about personal reflection. I know this album is all about Stranger Things, but I don't watch the show so I don't care if...
Oh wait. The lyrical badness suddenly makes sense if kids are supposed to be saying it.
Still, as an outsider, it took composing my thoughts for a review and reading some Wikipedia to arrive at that conclusion. To most people, it's going to seem like really bad lyrics and they're not gonna make that connection.
"Missing You", again with a lame chorus but not as lame as "Hate You", does its best late period Tegan and Sara impression and makes pretty good work of it at that. It's unremarkable but decent all the same.
"Best Friend" is an Ingrid Michaelson song with trap infusion in the instrumental. (Really what gets called "trap" a lot (and I'm hella guilty of this) is any modern hip hop or R&B, but part of that confusion is they all use the same damn drum samples; it's all 808's. Something like this, or even Post Malone or Drake are definitely R&B because they're singing most of the time, not rapping. But those genres have been forced together for so long by radio formats because they put black people music on one channel that they eventually became one thing that has signifiers of both but can't really be classified as either. Since nobody bothered to name this new hybrid anything like, say, "Rock and Roll" or "Heavy Metal" when they were given names, Trap is as good a name as any really. But I feel like I'm not the guy that should have the power to name it since it's not my culture, but also...what do we call this stuff? I hate subgenres because the differences between them become so razor thin and now a lot of music is a mash of influences anyway so is genre even still a thing? And wow this went way off the rails. Wasn't I talking about a passable but kinda boring Ingrid Michaelson record?)
"Best Friend" has a perfectly fine instrumental with a premise of falling in love with your best friend but being terrified of confessing because you don't want to risk the friendship. I'm a total sucker for songs like this, especially now that I can look back at a teenage situations with two decades of comfort distance from having to live it (again).
"Mother" I can't tell you anything about, even though I just listened to it twice in the span of an hour. "Christmas Lights" is...again, it's pleasant. It's not quite good, it misses by thaaat much, but it's...pleasant. It's warm, it has empathy, I'll take it in the middle of a dystopia. Sometimes you don't want to feel all the feelings so songs like this are good for feeling only some of them.
"Pretty" is pretty underwhelming, but points for giving more work to Sarah Aarons, who co-wrote Zedd's "Stay" and "The Middle". The New York Times has a YouTube series called Diary Of A Song (which needs more episodes stat!) that detailed how Aarons, a relative unknown in America, co-wrote these two smash hits and sang on the demos. Thing is, I liked her singing better than either Alessia Cara or Maren Morris. I really wish she'd make her own album. But if she's gonna keep banging out songs, I'm down for that too. I just don't happen to think this one was anybody's best work. (This features the "hair" and "care" rhyme scheme I talked about at the beginning.) And then "Take Me Home" doesn't exist and you can't convince me (even while actively listening to it) otherwise.
All in all an undercooked project, which is understandable since Ingrid's main focus at the moment is coming up with a stage adaptation of The Notebook. This was just something she put out...because? I'm kinda glad she did; it doesn't totally wash the bad taste of It Doesn't Have To Make Sense out of my ears but it came up with three or four songs that are worth hearing and seven others that are...pleasant but dull. Still puts her on the right track, and maybe if we haven't descended further into a fascist hellscape and people can still put out music by 2022 or 2023 we'll have a proper good Ingrid album again.
Sunwatchers "Illegal Moves" **
Psychedelic bullshit, but listenable psychedelic bullshit. I liked "New Dad Blues", but then the next two were the same song again. Then tracks four and five went all free jazz and bland in varying degrees and lost me completely. "Ptah, The El Daoud" stabilized and set in for a solid pace; by the end of it I was sort of in the mood. The closer "Strollin' Coma Blues" surprised me with slide guitar not set to a specific rhythm, backed by cymbal washes until the 90 second mark where it locks in on a slow, head nodding groove. Murmuring saxophones and a kit with the snare switched off softly accompany the repeating riff, like Robert Johnson was accompanying his own funeral procession down Bourbon Street. Bluesy New Orleans jazz. I didn't think an album that made me check out around track two could snap me back to attention like that, but here we are. Then the thing goes off the rails and ends with a musical car wreck, aka "Everybody solo!" But eh, it's fine if it's your kind of jam.
(Also, what the fuck is happening on this album cover? Is that the Kool-Aid Man threatening bodily harm to a bunch of notorious world leaders? Uncle Sam's clearly been curb stomped here...)
Hælos "Any Random Kindness" ***
If Ambien and ambient drone are your thing, may I interest you in "Another Universe"? No? How about a song that gets going halfway through, grows a damn skeleton to give it some form and has vocals with a little bit of grit to them while still trying to shake the pills? That would be "Buried In The Sand". I was about to use the Ambien line and sub out "ambient drone" for "half-assed club beats" and call this review a day, but then the song actually showed up and I had to change my tune.
"End Of World Party" starts with the "Yeah! WOOO!" sample from "It Takes Two" by Rob Bass & DJ E-Z Rock and keeps going with what I can only describe as deeply melancholy party rock. Like everybody knows they're about to die and they're deciding to dance one last time with the four minutes they have left.
I notice there's a refrain that sounds like it's saying "trust your government". Considering there's a song called "Deep State" on this album, I knew I needed to read the lyrics then and there. And I was pleasantly surprised: All the songs are about the unsustainable insanity of the world at large in 2019 and not about embracing it.
"Another Universe" wonders openly if the world is getting along normally in another dimension. "Buried In The Sand" is about a dinner party the band attended where no one said a word, just Snapchatted, and how...creepy that was. "End Of World Party" is a song about the coming end we can't seem to do much about and deciding to go out spewing sarcasm and dancing in spite on the way down. "Kyoto" is about government putting economics over environment. "ARK" really seems like it's about Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. "Boy Girl" is two lovers unable to connect, even when they explain how they feel the exact same frustrations, unable to even bond over that.
"Deep State" reminds me of the book I'm reading (which, in turn, reminds me of both 1984 and current political discourse around the world) called Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg that details her experience with Stalinist madness and doublespeak drowning out all common sense and leading to people like herself (who were all lifelong devotees to the Communist Party) being locked up by the Communist Party as enemies conspiring to destroy it on the flimsiest of pretenses. Mere "lack of vigilance" at not reporting her colleague to the authorities for a crime that didn't even exist until they made it up after the fact led Ginzburg to be incarcerated in Russian prison camps from 1937 to 1953. The point being: the lie is repeated often enough and forcefully enough that it becomes truth to all who still live: the rest are dead or locked up.
I was not expecting to go this deep on what I was anticipating to be some mildly okay trip hop at best. There's way more going on beneath the surface.
The one thing going against Any Random Kindness however is repetition. Each song is kind of in the same mode with only three departures: The opener (which I found insomnia curing), and the two closing numbers: "So Long, Goodbye" and "Last One Out (Turn The Lights Off)". "So Long, Goodbye" is a refreshing change of pace, but "Last One Out" is a slog. It's the "not a bang but a whimper" moment we're collectively staring down the barrel at as we speak; whether or not it will be the current societal structure or all mankind at the point of moribundity remains to be seen.
Other than that, Any Random Kindness went beyond my expectations even if it's not always my jam. Definitely worth checking out (while you still have time).
I don't know why Carly Rae's magic has never worked on me; I want it to, but I find myself bored stiff by most of her songs. Some of them get through though: "Julien" is decent and "I'll Be Your Girl" caught my ear by being good and different from the rest of the surrounding material. One thing that got on my nerves is the sheer volume of the word "love" over and over and over without some kind of...metaphor or simile or anything to switch it up, just "love" over and over again. Word repetition is one of my pet peeves. And that really shouldn't be the main takeaway from an album by an artist people genuinely...love. I get next to nothing from this competently produced yet mechanical sounding assemblage.
Scott Stapp "The Space Between The Shadows" 1/2 of a *
WHELP. I guess we're doing this.
Full disclosure: I like about...eleven or twelve Creed songs? Not love, mind you, but I don't think they were a complete waste. This album...isn't as lucky.
Listening to the first single "Purpose For Pain" I was like "Sweet! I was wondering what happened to Dust For Life!" (Oh yeah. Nu Metal Deep Cuts. Come and get 'em.) And that's the high point.
Most of this album is innoffensive, forgettable and boring. If you're expecting a car crash, you'll be sorely disappointed. Honestly, that would have given this thing more of a reason to exist. This would have been lame when Creed were still popular. It would have been milquetoast as his solo debut. It would have been just as forgotten as it is now if it came out at any point in the history of rock and roll, and here we are after the end of that time period and it has less reason to exist than ever before. And still it persists.
Oh, there is the children's choir on the self-empowerment anthem "Wake Up Call". That's kind of...you know, even that's not funny. It's sort of remarkable, but...I think this album manages to be a double disappointment because the music is lame, but not lame enough to make proper fun of. It's almost but not quite competent. It's sub-Aldi brand nu metal in 2019, but it's as well done as something like that could possibly be so it doesn't give me anything to work with. Or even remark upon. I mean, if I'm being charitable "Face Of The Sun" has the most teeth of anything here, but...it's still dentures.
The only other feature is the last four or five songs are all increasingly slower, sappier ballads, while still trying to be at least Daughtry levels of 2000's rock, which creates a conundrum of whether that makes them more or less sincere given their source. And again, if I'm being charitable, "Last Hallelujah" has an okay chorus. I'm never going back to listen to it willingly, but it's not the worst.
So yeah, this wasn't as fun as I thought it would be, nor as bad. I guess it's just a waste of time.
Unlike:
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets "And Now For The Whatchamacallit" ****
This shit fuckin' JAMS. Psychedelic bullshit done RIGHT!
Twista "Sunshine" [Single] ****
Also jams. I've never been a big Twista fan, but this song is really good. It features the always solid Anthony Hamilton on the hook and some really warm strings to capture the feeling he was going for. I listened to the first few songs from his new album Summer '96, but wow was that a soulless exercise of bland beats and fast rapping with no substance. (Oh shit. Twista is the Yngvie Malmstein of hip hop! I've cracked the code!)
Sorry I didn't go into more detail about Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, but it was one I wasn't taking notes on and I thought I could use a positive review or two for this. Just trust me, if you're into psychedelic garage prog or even if you've never heard of that but that sounds like something that tickles your fancy, "And Now For The Whatchamacallit" is a damn fine place to start.
Great reviewing! I've never heard any of these songs, so I'm gunna do that! (:
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