Yeah it really sets a shitty tone before you've heard a single bar, which is a shame because even after all the false starts and bullshit I was STOKED to be able to check out a (at least nominally) Jay Electonica album this morning.
Vs.
Vitalogy
No Code
Binaural
Ten
Yield/Avocado
Riot Act
Backspacer
Lightning Bolt
Ten I think suffers from permanent burnout when I'm making lists like this. I don't think it was ever better than Vs. or Vitalogy, but maybe......ONCE! upon a time! I would have placed it at least above Binaural. I still like the singles, actually, and think "Porch", "Porch", and "Why Go" are all burners, but as an album....meh? Also I love Binaural.
I love that they used to do that when the Jacket was opening for PJ.
MMJ was alreayd my favorite band by then so when PJ nabbed them I was like a pig in shit. Not that Pearl Jam hasn't been great about openers for the whole 21st Century - Bob Pollard, Sleater Kinney, Buzzcocks, MMJ - you never know what side of PJ will be reflected in their openers, but you can pretty reliably expect them to be inspired choices of quality artists.
I can't wait to hear this album, even with the measured expectations that the last two albums and forgettable "Superblood Wolfmoon" have ensured I'm approaching it with.
The PE was clearly written from a balanced but loving perspective and to someone who really loves not only the No Code and Yield but also Binaural and Avocado, certain details Ryan mentioned have me hoping to see sides of the band that have been missing for a while. "atmospheric mid-tempo tracks and ballads" has me thinking shades of some cool numbers on No Code and stuff like "Of the Girl", "Light Years", "Parting Ways", "Thin Air", etc. from Binaural.
Even if I'm misreading on that front...it's been seven years, the last year has brought my PJ love out of hibernation, and I'm ready for an album and tour.
This has a somewhat similar feel to the last Avalanches album, down to how much "Noisy Eater" has always reminded me of "Super Fast Jellyfish".
Both great vibrant, genre-defying swirls of 21st Century psychedelia.
O.M.G!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is the first MMJ show announced for the year! Their fan community has been crawling out of their skin to get a confirmed show and has deflated a little each time an appropriate festival's been announced without them.
Come on full tour and some kind of release!
This is far and away my favorite thing Albarn ever did. I only like Blur on a VERY selective song-by-song basis. I like the other Gorillaz albums (well until the hiatus) on a much less selective song-by-song basis (yes I like Demon Days as an album, but no I don't love it).
But this is brilliant work that continued to grow on me for years after I initially picked it up. The range of styles is wide, but it's also wonderfully cohesive, which is a testament to whatever rarified inspiration he was drawing from during recording. It's so lush, dynamic, empathetic, futurist...but it's all clearly The Plactic Beach, whether it's featuring Snoop or Lou Reed or Bobby Womack. The platonic ideal of a Gorrilaz album and one of the clear highlights of a ridiculously great year for music (a bit long admittedly....but there aren't really any bad songs to cut, now are there?).
- Digging on that AotW (R.A.P. Ferreira).
- Loving that there's a new Cornershop album!
- This new Stephen Malkmus album is a gem, such a cool mix of psychedelia, eastern sounds, and country/americana.
I think there's been a lot of good new stuff out so far this year, but not much that quite warrants stronger adjectives yet. But it's also early March and I'm not complaining.
Me either and I've been posting here for...I dunno, a decade? People even tried to tell me about making sure my Gravatar and Wordpress are linked and still nada. It's pretty shameful, no?
Yeah, give Donald Trump 4 more years of picking judges, stoking hatred, and shattering foreign policy!
Even if we think the worst about ol' Bloomers, and he does stink to high heaven, at least in with him in office we know he'd have a party that doesn't just bend over for him the way the GoP does for Trump.
Not that I think we'll have to worry about this scenario unless Bloomberg is somehow as I type in the process of upending every expectation of Super Tuesday voting.
Is he a coward or is that just who he is? Everyone got stoked about him for a hot second when he was on the verge of getting Ted "The Reptile" Cruz out of the Senate, but as soon as he threw his hat into the presidential conversation it seemed like there was plenty to suggest he wasn't a particularly devout progressive. And then he was an awkward spaz on stage and nobody liked him and he went away until he peaked out to say this, which no, I don't think anyone cares about. Problem solved.
Quite true on both points!
The whole cycle is too long in general, and the primary system is an absolute joke. They need to either have it all take place on one day, preferably a holiday (not that they even give us that for Election Day), or at least let people do tiered voting.
Any other way, current way included, puts us all at the behest of Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and scares people from voting for who they really want if that's not one of two, maybe three frontrunners. It's so lame.
I clearly (from my big comment above) don't disagree with every point he has to make, but the reviewer says some things that are just objectively wrong and make you wonder how much you should trust anything else he says:
"The production on these two numbers ("Lost in Yesterday" & "Posthumous Forgiveness") is enjoyable, and harks back to the early parts of the 2010s, where Tame Impala records were never dull."
Huh? How does the production on those two songs sound at all akin to the first two albums? What is this guy talking about?
"Tame Impala have just become genreless vibe music, with very little to grasp onto besides terrible writing and the very occasional synth sound."
The first two statements he makes are subjective, so let's leave those alone. "The very occasional synth sound"? WTF? Synth sounds are practically all the album is!
Come on guy, try a little harder if you're going to rip something like that.
I don't love it as an album. I like it more than I was ready to after the shitshow of a rollout and not loving most of the advance tracks. "Is It True" and "Breathe Deeper" are easily two of my favorite songs of the year so far and I really like the opener, "Lost in Yesterday", and "It Might be Time", too.
But the album is less dynamic than at least his last two, his weak falsetto wears me thin here in a way it hasn't in the past, the familiarity of everything from "Posthumous Forgiveness" ripping the guitar line from "Redbone" to "Lost in Yesterday" ripping "The Moment" and "On Track" seeming like a weaker retread of "Eventually", the laughable "I'm about to do something crazy" refrain on "Instant Destiny" when clearly he's not about to do anything remotely crazy....I think it will be stuck in "like not love" territory for the foreseeable future.
"Real Love", "Home", "Let Me Give the World to You", at least one of the versions of "Here's to the Atom Bomb", "Slow Dawn" - all pretty brilliant, and some of the rockers like "Dross" were really good, too. It's a shame those songs never got much of a chance.
Oh by the way, "Try Try Try" isn't his crowning achievement of the 21st Century - that was "Jesus, I/Mary Star of the Sea" where in the back end Corgan and the Zwan guitar team dump layer upon glorious layer of fuzzed-out arena shoegaze on top of one of Chamberlain's most atomic studio performances to maximum emotional impact.
At the time it came out I remember being baffled and angry that "Stand Inside Your Love" didn't become a huge hit, showing how little I understood (or at least was willing to accept) what constituted a "huge hit" in 2000.
Oh, Hell yes it is.
I've tried and failed to love any other Ween albums the way I do The Mollusk (I prefer to cherry pick songs from their other albums), but The Mollusk is up there with the elite albums of the '90s.
Dude....Pisces. It's more of that utter gold early-90s-era SP and probably my second favorite after SD. If you love that psychedelic rock glory version of the band like I do, you have already waited far too long to dive into Pisces.
Lower-hanging fruit, but that reminds me of when I laid into Creed's album with the awful cover where their faces are carved into a tree for the school paper and some Creed fan got offended and tried to circulate a response review that nobody cared about.
I was still a full-throttle teenage SP fan when this dropped and I loved it, the artier the better. "Glass & the Ghost Children" was my jam. But I have to say, the whole "mystery of the album's story" business really knocked the wind out of my sails when they revealed it to be some half-assed "God is good" parable after all the build up.
Not much that revs my engine this week, but I'll probably check out the Caribou.
But a light load is fine by me after last week - still trying to digest the Greg Dulli, Royce da 5'9", Kamaiyah, King Krule, and Moses Sumney, plus the previous weeks' load of stuff like Tame, Gil Scott-Heron, A.A.L., etc. AND new Strokes, Kikagaku Moyo, Avalanches, & R.A.P. Ferreira songs.
February was a busier month than I expected!
I believe they're currently Honus Honus and a bunch of new guys, not the original band. I haven't heard any of the new stuff, though. Will check that track you shared out, though.
They're pretty watered down on that album. It's decent but any of the previous 3 are WAY better.
If you want peak Man Man at their weirdest/artsiest/noisest, start with Six Demon Bag. If you want peak Man Man at their most polished go with Life Fantastic ("Dark Arts" goes soooooo hard). I agree with Hartford that Rabbit Habits, released between the 2, is probably the ultimate MM album, though.
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