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Stella Donnelly: Beware of the Dogs

On her debut album, Stella Donnelly manages to distill pop music to its bare essentials. With Donnelly’s cute vocal delivery and knack for a good hook,  Beware of the Dogs is delightfully twee, reminiscent of bands like Heavenly or Belle and Sebastian. Her lyrics are quirky and full of personality (“My mum’s still a punk and you’re still shit” is a personal favorite), telling intriguing little snippets of stories. “Boys Will Be Boys” tells the story of her friend’s sexual assault-- a “no means no” message that’s important and relevant, if not a bit too heavy handed. As most of the songs on Beware of the Dogs are pretty minimalist in the way of instrumentation, Donnelly manages to do a lot with a little. Simple guitar chords combined with great melodies and engaging lyrics is a tried-and-true recipe for pop that can never go wrong. 

Grade: A-

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The Futureheads: Powers

Having formed in the early 2000s the Futureheads quickly perfected their brand of post-punk that was popular at the time. With tight angular guitar riffs and fun vocal harmonies between all four members, they churned out a continuous stream of catchy pop songs without losing any of that post-punk edge. Their 2004 self-titled debut captured lightning in a bottle. Five albums and 15 years later, the Futureheads don’t seem to have changed things up much with Powers. Superficially, everything that once made the Futureheads great is still here: punchy guitar riffs, vocal harmonies, irregular time signatures, solid melodies and hooks... but there’s a certain intangible spark that these new songs are lacking. As they mostly stick to their classic formula, these songs are pretty good by themselves, but context is important. As frustrating as it can be when a great band pulls a stylistic 180 and sacrifices everything that was great about them in the first place, it can be equally frustrating when a great band sticks with the same formula they’ve used since the beginning without adding anything new to it. The Futureheads are still great musicians (I saw them last night, they were sick!) and I know they have it within them to expand their horizons and take their sound in a new but equally interesting direction. But even if they don’t, at least they gave us one more solid album of riffy guitar rock. 

Grade: B

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Microwave: Death Is A Warm Blanket

Microwave is a Rock Band, which is really everything you need to know about them. That sounds vague, but hear me out. Rock music isn’t dead or dying like many people think, but the culture and industry of rock music has changed drastically over the past 20 years. We’re at a point where any rock band that does anything to push boundaries or do something interesting with the genre is considered “alternative” or “indie” rock. Consider the Strokes, the Arctic Monkeys, My Chemical Romance, or Hop Along. Most people can acknowledge that those are rock bands, but you wouldn’t describe them that way. There’s always a qualifier. Maybe the Foo Fighters were the last culturally relevant band that could truly be described as Rock. 

Death Is A Warm Blanket seems to have a clear Nirvana influence, but it lacks both the hooks and the subversiveness that made Nirvana great. Whereas a band like Clairo contained all the trappings of indie pop without any of the substance (see my previous review), Microwave might be the grunge version of that. The vocals switch between a grungy mumble and the occasional hardcore growl, but mostly they just sound like nothing. 

Microwave is the type of rock band that a 9 year-old fantasizes about when he gets his first guitar. They’re the type of rock band that plays on the display TVs at a Target. They’re a Spotify algorithm band, a band neither you or your friends have ever heard of but somehow they’re playing sold-out stadiums. It’s a type of rock that will never again be culturally relevant, but will also never seem outdated. Microwave is rock music’s past, present, and future. We’ll never hear about them again. 

Grade: B-

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Clairo: Immunity

Clairo is essentially the average of every indie pop band over the past 5 years. She has that no-frills Frankie Cosmos-esque vocal delivery down pat. Combine that with the washed-out reverby production, synthesizers, and sadgirl lyrics, and you have the perfect summation of the late 2010s DIY scene. Start cuffing those jeans. That is to say, she’s merely captured the aesthetic of an era while delivering very little substance. 

Clairo, who gained traction as an artist through the connections of her marketing exec dad, co-produced Immunity with Rostam of Vampire Weekend fame. It’s not hard to see why some people doubt the authenticity of her DIY roots and see her as an industry plant. I can’t help but wonder what someone with a more original vision could have done with the same resources Clairo’s been privileged with. Her brand of indie pop is an overly familiar style, one that makes me think the only real thing she excels at here is her ability to fit in with the cool kids. And she does fit in, just way too well.

Grade: B-

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Dumb: Club Nights

“Nothing in the Simpsons to surprise,” mumbles Franco Rossino on “Content Jungle”, displaying the type of 90s slacker energy that would make Beck proud. Club Nights is an incredibly loose feeling garage-rock album in which the songs tend to blend together but is good fun nonetheless. It’s full of simple, fast paced riffs reminiscent of other guitar rock bands like Parquet Courts or a less polished Futureheads. The main draw of Dumb is Rossino’s delightfully disinterested talk-singy vocals which strongly bring to mind Pavement. However, Dumb is never as melodic as Pavement and Club Nights doesn’t really have any discernible hooks, at least as far as vocals and lyrics go. Nonetheless, the guitar riffs are punchy and the lyrics are filled with a type of blasé humor that imbues Dumb with a distinct personality and sets them apart from other bands in the genre. 

Grade: B+

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FKA twigs: MAGDALENE

FKA twigs defies classification, which is troubling for me as a bloggy boy because sometimes I think I can only talk about artists by comparing them to other artists. Maybe that’s bad writing. It’s honestly pretty challenging describing how an album sounds without just namedropping or using buzzwords and assuming the readers (all 3 of them) know what I mean. Like you might know what I mean if I describe something as “twinkly midwest emo-revival-adjacent” but that doesn’t make for an interesting read unless I qualify that somehow by talking about the music in some tangible way. And that also means not resorting to random vocab I picked up in AP music theory. ANYWAY, music blogging is hard work. 

The first track on MAGDALENE, “thousand eyes” is almost like a baroque choral chant--it’s heavy and gothic, like an imposing church during a thunderstorm. Some tracks make heavy use of strings (”home with you”), while others are more stripped-down piano ballads (“cellophane”). FKA goes full hip-hop on “holy terrain” with Future contributing verses. Throughout MAGDALENE is some incredibly interesting production, from the way she distorts her own voice, to the samples she uses, to the violent dubstep-like stomp of “fallen alien”, or the quiet beat-boxing of “cellophane”. 

Lyrically, MAGDALENE deals largely with broken relationships, loneliness, and depression. FKA takes pleasure in plunging deep inside herself, putting a magnifying glass up to her deepest insecurities. These songs reveal an artist who feels broken and is using music as an attempt to make herself whole again. The glitched out production reflects a damaged psyche; the faint breathy voice with which she sings on “daybed” is a thin sheet of ice that’s right about to break. FKA twigs isn’t the first artist to deal with these themes, but the urgency with which she cuts into her darkest thoughts and reveals them to us, in a way that feels poetic and honest, is unrivaled. 

Grade: A-

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Origami Angel: Somewhere City

It seems like every new indie band these days is at least somewhat emo influenced, or “emo-adjacent” as some might say. Origami Angel is the only new band I’ve listened to this year that really fits squarely within the emo genre. Specifically, they fit that brand of “midwest” emo with their twinkly guitar riffs and vague math-rock leanings. Only they’re way more polished and poppy than those 90s emo bands, both in terms of the production and Ryland Heagy’s controlled vocal delivery. I decided to give this band a listen because they’ve been generating a lot of buzz in my particular corner of the internet, and that buzz isn’t undeserved. The instrumentals are very solid and engaging with their stop-and-starts and quiet-loud structures. And drummer Pat Doherty really proves himself to be a step above other drummers in the genre with his dynamic, interesting beats. I suppose one criticism I have is that the lyrics don’t hit very hard. They have neither the cryptic weirdness of Cap’n Jazz nor the carrying-the-weight-of-the-world-on-my-shoulders dramatics of Taking Back Sunday. For the most part, the lyrics are standard sadboi fare. However, that doesn’t outweigh the strength of Somewhere City’s instrumentals, which are engaging through and through. 

Grade: B+

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Declan Welsh and The Decadent West: Cheaply Bought, Expensively Sold

I’m spending the semester in Glasgow, so I might as well write about one Glaswegian artist. Ironically I didn’t come upon this band from being here, but from a text I got from my dad saying he listened to them on a plane and that “They’re good.” 

Declan Welsh and The Decadent West are a new band that should’ve been born a little earlier so they could’ve been major players in the alt-rock scene of the mid-naughts. The first two tracks sound heavily influenced by early Arctic Monkeys, while the rest of the album is tinged with Franz Ferdinand (another Glaswegian band) and the Strokes. Call it garage rock or call it post-punk revival, Declan Welsh aren’t doing anything especially original with the genre. Their influences come through clearly, but Declan Welsh leans heavier into pop music tropes than those other artists--particularly the lyrics, which aren’t too inspired or interesting. Nonetheless, Cheaply Bought, Expensively Sold is a pretty fun album. Declan Welsh and The Decadent West are a perfectly competent group of musicians who may not have found their niche yet, but they’re worth keeping an eye on. 

Grade: B

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Wilco: Ode to Joy

I’ve never listened to any Wilco, not even Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but for a band this beloved I can only imagine their earlier albums pack way more punch than Ode to Joy. This is an incredibly subtle album, with slow-tempos and minimalist lyrics that frontman Jeff Tweedy delivers in a faint whisper. And by subtle, I probably just mean boring. Tweedy has been doing this since the 90s, and I guess he’s settled comfortably into his role as an American indie rock mainstay, because on Ode to Joy he isn’t taking any risks. I said something similar about the Mountain Goats’ newest album, In League With Dragons, but the Mountain Goats at least still sound inspired, even if they lack the urgency of earlier releases; Tweedy doesn’t even sound like he’s having fun. There are a couple decent tracks: “Love Is Everywhere (Beware)” has a nice peppy guitar riff with a solid vocal melody, and “Everybody Hides”, the album’s best track, kind of sounds like a whimsical (but forgettable) Arcade Fire tune. I’ll probably go listen to the more well-known Wilco albums to see what the fuss is about, but if you’re not already a Wilco-head I would pass on Ode to Joy. 

Grade: B-

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Control Top: Covert Contracts

Control Top is unapologetically angry, punk in the purest sense of the word.  Singer/bassist Ali Carter isn’t afraid to rage against everything that pisses her off, like boring office jobs, the patriarchy, and the way society constricts and manipulates us. Covert Contracts is evocative of older punk acts like the Descendants, Hüsker Dü, and Bikini Kill. The result is an album that isn’t especially original, but super fun and cathartic as hell. 

Grade: B+

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Kanye West: Jesus Is King

In 2005 Pitchfork described Weezer’s latest album, Make Believe, as being so bad that it retroactively ruined anything good Weezer’s ever done. In that way, I guess Jesus Is King is Kanye West’s Make Believe. He’s been on thin ice for a while, but this album really makes me wonder if Kanye was ever as clever as we gave him credit for.

Okay, so the album doesn’t start off terribly. The first track, “Every Hour”, features an actual gospel choir doing some pretty interesting harmonies over an uptempo piano accompaniment without any rapping at all. The next track, “Selah”, also isn’t bad. Aside from the organ and christian themes, it might have fit in on Yeezus. The third track, “Follow God”, does the classic Kanye thing where he chops up an old soul track and speeds it up, making it into a loop to rap over. It’s pretty fun. But then on track 4, Kanye hits you with the lyric, “Closed on Sunday, you’re my Chick-fil-A,” which in my mind is just unforgivably bad. It’s all downhill from there. 

Kanye’s always been an artist with a sense of humor, which is why he’s gotten a pass for stupid lyrics in the past. We’ve always given him the benefit of the doubt, like we know when he’s being tongue-in-cheek. But when you’re singing about Jesus as wholeheartedly as Kanye is here, there’s no room for irony. And somehow a mega celebrity who’s been completely out of touch with reality for the past decade suddenly finding Jesus doesn’t make for very insightful art. 

Grade: C

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steve.: You Can Do This, Too

Self-aware shithead pop punk! Hell yeah! 

You Can Do This, Too is a 10 track album that clocks in at under 15 minutes. steve. doesn’t waste any time beating around the bush-- their songs are fast-paced power pop tunes that get right to the point with a ton of energy and humor. The album peaks within the first 20 seconds of the first track. The delivery of that opening line, “Officer inbred, what went wrong?” embodies the pure emotive joy that pop punk does better than any other genre, calling to mind early Blink-182 or Joyce Manor’s best songs. The rest of the album is pretty fun too, with lots of hilarious lyrics that feel totally honest while also delving into intentional self-parody (“I’m feeling kinda bitter/ your girl still super-liked me on tinder”). The closing track, “Hawwwwwt Dog Suit” is a great little acoustic emo track, though it has the stupidest fucking lyrics I’ve ever heard. Obviously, that’s the point. 

Grade: B+

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Chris Farren: Born Hot

“He’s a pop mastermind”

        --A text from my good buddy Gary, re Chris Farren

As a self proclaimed “punk rock celebrity” Chris Farren’s whole persona explodes with charisma. Even aside from his music, he should be known as a public figure--the way he jumps around stage like a rockstar and ends every show by exclaiming, “ANOTHER PERFECT SET!!!”, he’s just an incredibly likeable and goofy person. Thankfully that charisma extends to his music. On Born Hot, Chris looks inward at his anxieties in a way that’s entirely sincere, yet he never takes things too seriously. This duality is perfectly captured by the song “Search 4 Me”, in which he sings, “I’ll be panicking in the Starbucks in the Target across the street, wishing I was someone else or just myself with a slightly nicer body.” 

Born Hot is a solid set of high energy powerpop tunes in which every instrument, from the synths and glockenspiels to the buzzy guitar solos, feels very precisely orchestrated. Chris’s whole thing works best when he sticks to the fast tempos, as the slower songs don’t quite pack the same punch (maybe he doesn’t have the sort of voice to be doing ballads). Nonetheless, Born Hot is an incredibly fun album which, despite the loneliness and ennui inherent in much of it, will leave you grinning like an idiot.

Grade: B+

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Vagabon: Vagabon

Vagabon’s first LP, Infinite Worlds, was a punch to the gut. I mean that in the best way possible. It had a rare type of raw energy, reminiscent of Hop Along, grandiose but just as intimate as the best bedroom pop. I love that album, so I really really wanted to love this one. While Infinite Worlds featured electronic instruments, it did so sparingly; it still felt like a real band was playing those songs, and with that came a feeling of immediacy. Vagabon’s sophomore self-titled album, on the other hand, is all electric drums and keyboards. The melodies and beats are pleasant enough, but they sometimes have the same effect as background music, a total 180 from the propulsiveness of her earlier music. It’s not that electronic instruments necessarily equal a less interesting performance, but the way they’re deployed here eliminates much of the variety in dynamics and tempo that had once made Vagabon so compelling. The lyrics are just as vulnerable as they have always been, but her subdued delivery removes a level of impact that her words might otherwise have. 

Grade: B

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Prince Daddy & The Hyena: Cosmic Thrill Seekers

Prince Daddy’s vocals are like someone doing a parody of emo music. They’re like a person doing karaoke who’s too embarrassed to try actually singing so they sing extra poorly on purpose. I know I’m not one to criticize a band for unconventional vocals—the Front Bottoms and AJJ are some of my favorite bands—but these scratchy metal core-adjacent vox are really just grating. And that’s a shame! Because otherwise, these songs feature some pretty solid emo arrangements, complete with crunchy Pinkerton-inspired guitar parts. Seriously, the instrumental aspects of this album are VERY solid, maybe even surpassing those of bands like PUP and Joyce Manor. Who knows, maybe I’ll come around on this singing style, the way I did with the similarly scratchy delivery on early Against Me! songs, but I don’t see that happening. Those Against Me! songs were political and had a unique point of view which made it feel justified when Laura would passionately belt her lines to the point of her voice breaking. On the other hand, Prince Daddy’s lyrics are about as deep as the average Blink-182 song, making this particular affect feel self-conscious and forced, not unhinged.  

Grade: B-

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Craig Finn: I Need A New War

I got the chance to see Craig Finn perform the other day as the headliner for Laura Stevenson. I didn’t know any of Craig’s songs (or Hold Steady songs for that matter), but with the story-telling nature of his songs putting the lyrics front and center, Craig Finn was the perfect artist to see without being familiar with his discography.

Most of the songs on I Need A New War find Craig coming to terms with his troubled past, or else lamenting the lives of friends whom things didn’t work out as well for. Craig’s melancholy talk-singy vocals delivered over mid-tempo rock grooves, along with his penchant for namedropping various American cities imbue the album with a countryish spirit. If I had to compare I Need A New War to any other album from this year (obviously except for the 2019 Hold Steady album I haven’t listened to yet) it would be David Berman’s Purple Mountains; both albums feature men later in their careers wistfully (and perhaps mournfully) examining where they’re at in life. But unlike Berman, this self-examination seems genuinely therapeutic for Craig, for despite the despondency at the album’s core, these songs have an energy of resilience. Craig powers through life’s traumas with mindfulness and grit. He may not have a new war, but at least he gave us a rallying cry.

Grade: A-

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The New Pornographers: In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights

After nearly two decades of making records together, the New Pornographers have never strayed too far from what they do best. In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights finds the Canadian band moving away slightly from the new-wave inspired synthpop of their 2017 release Whiteout Conditions, opting for the more orchestral pop-infused alt rock that’s characterized most of their discography. Their arrangements are just as lush and their lyrics just as cryptic as they have always been, and the interplay between vocalists Neko case and A.C. Newman adds a rich texture to the album. 

However, it’s hard not to feel the absence of Dan Bejar, the Destroyer frontman who has contributed lead vocals and songwriting to multiple songs on all other New Pornographers albums. I always found Bejar’s songs to be album highlights, so his contributions are sorely missed here. With A.C. Newman writing every song, In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights lacks the variety that multiple songwriters brought to earlier releases. I can’t point to any standout tracks on this album, but if you’re a fan of the New Pornographers’ earlier work you’ll still be able to appreciate the inspired arrangements and songwriting. And if you haven’t listened to their earlier work, go do that instead.

Grade: B+