Tag: music reviews

2024 in music

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

I bought eighty-six albums in 2024, a number that frankly I find surprising– I wouldn’t have guessed it was that many, and it’s probably upped a bit by the number of singles I purchased this year (See: Lamar, K.) but that’s still a hell of a lot of music. This, like last year, isn’t a Best Of list and the only order it’s going to be in is rough chronological, but here are some albums that I thought were notable from this year. And, yes, “this year” means “I heard it first this year,” not “It came out this year,” although most of these are 2024 releases.

T-Pain’s live album On Top of the Covers: Live from the Sun Rose has no right to be as good as it is. I didn’t realize I was a fan of T-Pain until hearing his cover of War Pigs, which made me spend money, and this album, recorded in front of a tiny crowd and featuring lots of T-Pain just sort of chatting and screwing around with the audience, is spectacular.

Be honest: did you know the Black Crowes were still recording? Did you know that Happiness Bastards was fucking awesome? I bought this one in a state of vague shock– their last release was in 2013, and I’d not heard anything about it prior to seeing it in Itunes’ pre-order list, but any child of the nineties has no right to pass this up. It’s great.

Speaking of bands from the nineties…

I talked about Pearl Jam’s latest release, Dark Matter, quite a lot when it came out, mostly because I didn’t listen to anything else for a month. It’s their best album since Vitalogy. That is the highest of high praise. You’ll notice a lot of live albums in the list later; it’s because I needed live versions of all of the songs on this album. Album of the year, no real competition.

If you had told me at any point prior to its release that one of my favorite hiphop albums of the year would be by LL Cool J I would have laughed at you, but The Force is the best thing he’s released in a long, long time. I used to be a big fan of his and then kinda fell away as he left the harder-edged persona of his earlier albums away (and focused on acting instead of rapping) but this reminds me of everything that he was capable of as a younger rapper, and his duet with Eminem on Murdergram Deux is one of the best songs he’s ever done, complete with the best single verse I’ve ever heard from him.

I found Kharii through TikTok, of all places, where she’s fond of freestyling straight into the camera, and her chill, slightly hippie rap vibe ended up right up my alley. Microdoses of Me is a full-length album and you’ll notice a couple of EPs in the list later as well.

This was Kendrick Lamar’s year in a lot of ways, and his unannounced drop of GNX toward the end of the year was one of the best surprises (possibly the only good surprise) of 2024. Kendrick has always been an artist who I respect more than I like, and his last full-length album kind of left me cold, but GNX is great even if it doesn’t piss on Drake enough. Mustaaaaaaaaaaaard!

Another “wait, they’re still recording?” release, and also another “not really a huge fan, just picked it up for the hell of it” release, The Cure’s new Songs of a Lost World is the most hypnotic, endlessly listenable thing I’ve heard this year. If I was trying to write a book I’d have this on constant repeat, because it just sort of worms its way into your brain and makes you focus. One thing: don’t listen to Endsong, the final track, while driving. It’ll put you in a trance and that’s a bad idea at 70 miles an hour.

They released a double album a couple of weeks ago, pairing this with a live version. Don’t bother; the live version sounds damn near exactly like the studio recording and it was really disappointing.

Okay, one more:

I don’t have the slightest recollection of what caused me to pick up Doechii’s latest album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, because previously I had only heard of her from a couple of clips on TikTok– not even any actual videos, because as far as I know she’s not on the platform, there have just been a couple of her audio clips that have gone viral. Well … thanks, whoever you are? She kind of reminds me of Kharii in that her rapping is really laid back and chill, but more slickly produced and a little bit more mainstream. They even both do the double-i thing. Either way the albums pair together really well.

Here’s the whole list. Let me know if there’s anything else you want me to talk about:

#REVIEW: Orgy of the Damned, by Slash

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I commented to my wife last night, on the eve of the release of Slash’s Orgy of the Damned, that I was super psyched about the album coming out, and I felt kind of odd about it. She asked why, as she does, and I pointed out that he’s had quite a few solo albums since his Guns ‘n’ Roses and Velvet Revolver years (this is number six, as it turns out) and as I own exactly none of them I couldn’t explain why I was so excited about this one in particular. Nonetheless, I’d found out it was coming out a couple of months ago and had been checking on a regular basis since then to see if it had magically come out early.

I genuinely didn’t remember what had gotten me so hyped about it. Then it came out this morning, and I bought and downloaded it immediately. As it turns out, Billie Eilish also has a new album out today, also downloaded immediately, and I chose (poorly, as it turns out, because Billie’s music doesn’t really lend itself to highway driving in my car) to listen to the Eilish album on the way to work. I queued up the Slash album on the way home, and the first song hit.

Oh.

Oh.

Slash– yes, Guns ‘n’ Roses Slash, Velvet Revolver Slash, sexy faceless top-hat big-hair yes-that-Slash, fucking Slash Slash, released a blues album.

Motherfucker.

Yeah, that’s why the fuck I was excited, because some of you with similar tastes as mine are already flailing around and happydancing and spending money, and how I managed to discover that Slash had a blues album coming out and then forgot it was a blues album while still somehow intensely anticipating its release anyway is an open question,(*) but now that it’s here I might actually listen to it more than Dark Matter this week. I mean, maybe not, but it’ll at least come close.

As far as I know the album is entirely covers, mostly of blues standards, although Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes does an absolutely stunning fucking version of Steppenwolf’s The Pusher, which is definitely bluesy as hell but maybe isn’t quite a standard. But he does Hoochie Coochie Man with Billy F. Gibbons, and Born Under a Bad Sign with Paul Rodgers, and Papa Was a Rolling Stone and Stormy Monday, and did you know Iggy Pop was, if not actually still alive, at least still recording music from beyond the grave? Because he does a version of Awful Dream that probably doesn’t live up to Lightnin’ Hopkins but is definitely sung by a corpse while Slash is playing guitar.

Okay, every track’s not amazing. But then there’s Key to the Highway, sung by someone just named Dorothy, who I need to know more about, and Demi Lovato is on here for some reason? And if you haven’t gone out and bought this yet, I’m probably not going to talk you into it, but I really need to go back and check out the rest of Slash’s solo releases, because he truly is one of the most amazing guitarists alive and this album is an absolute delight and there’s no reason to think the rest of his solo work isn’t similarly amazing. Go get it.

(*) It is possible that the fact that the thing is called Orgy of the Damned might have something to do with it, as there are approximately 92087346181 titles available in the English language that are going to immediately scan as more blues-adjacent than “Orgy of the Damned.”

#REVIEW: Dark Matter, by Pearl Jam

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A secret about me: my opinions cannot always be trusted.

I was wandering through old posts the other day, as I am occasionally known to do, and I came across a post where I described Pearl Jam’s last album, Gigaton, as “forgettable” and had very high praise for Binaural, an album that I just said was possibly my least favorite of their albums. So … sometimes my opinions change! This is a thing that happens. In Gigaton’s case I am much more fond of it than I was when it first came out (this has been known to be a thing with their work, I’ll admit it) and while I don’t have anything bad to say about Binaural I was apparently really in the mood for it when I wrote that other paragraph.

So if you want to take me saying that Dark Matter is Pearl Jam’s best album since Vitalogy with a bit of salt, I will not look askance upon you. I will say this: the last time I remember being this floored by an album, the last time it ran through my head constantly for two weeks, the last time I listened to nearly nothing else (other than a few Taylor Swift spins, mostly under duress) for this length of time since it came out, was the Dave Matthews Band’s Crash in 1996.

I will have this entire album memorized soon. I don’t think there’s a single weak track. There’s one song, Something Special, where you could make an argument that it belongs more on an Eddie Vedder solo album than a Pearl Jam album, and one song has a bridge that I feel like sounds like a transition into another one of their songs, but that’s all the criticism I can muster.

It’s amazing. It’s their best work in, literally, two decades. I cannot wait to hear it live, and if you have ever been a Pearl Jam fan you owe it to yourself to pick this up. I’d go through song by song, but somehow I have another hockey game to go to in a few minutes, so this is the best I can do for now. If I’ve still got it on 24/7 rotation in another week or so I’ll go ahead and do that. For now, Scared of Fear, Wreckage, Won’t Tell and Waiting for Stevie are my favorite tracks, but again: there are no skips here. I love it I love it I love it.

Consider this a preview, I guess

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

Yes, I know I haven’t reviewed the Pearl Jam album yet.

I fucking love it. I’ve been sitting on writing about it to see if the shine wears off and it hasn’t. This is their best album in a long, long time– definitely since Avocado and probably before that.

But I’ve been shaky and nauseous since I got home this afternoon after a day of feeling fine, and we’re still doing state testing tomorrow so I absolutely cannot miss work under any circumstances, so I’m probably going to go to bed obscenely early tonight. I’ll try and get a fuller review tomorrow, but if you’ve ever enjoyed a Pearl Jam album, you need to download this one right the hell now.

#REVIEW: The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, by Taylor Swift

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It’s boring.

There, I said it.

I could make this post a lot more complicated and detailed if I wanted to, I suppose. I have had a lot of thoughts about Taylor Swift over the years, and I am fully aware that Ms. Swift has no reason to care in even a hypothetical sense about what I think. She’s a billionaire and she’s more talented and influential than I will ever be at anything and I’m not the target audience for this anyway. I have had many, many opinions about her over the years; I still never really thought disappointment was going to be one of them. One of her greatest talents is how incredibly ear wormy her music is. I don’t care if you’re a Taylor Swift fan or not; you have five of her songs memorized. You may not even know you have five Taylor Swift songs memorized, but you do.

I have listened to this album at least four or five times by now, and I could name a couple of individual lyrics over its 31 tracks, but none because I thought they were clever or impressive. I was psyched about her doing a duet with Post Malone; he’s wasted. There are people mad at her about a line about living in the 1830s that is utterly a nothingburger and is out of context besides. There’s another line in another song that I thought was memorable until I realized that Justin Bieber of all fucking people had already written it. There’s one song where she says fuck, like, sixty times, but I can’t remember the name.

Four listens and I can’t hum a single track and there’s nothing I can even start singing along to even if I was capable of matching the slow, breathy voice she’s using for every single song. The whole thing sounds incredibly samey and there’s little variation in tone or tempo or musicality anywhere.

Also: ma’am, you are in your mid-thirties and it is time to stop singing about high school.

I dunno. I genuinely loved Evermore and Folklore and Midnights was pretty OK with a few tracks I really liked. This one’s a dud for me musically, and lyrically it’s yet another Taylor Swift Has Ex-Boyfriends album after three in a row with very little of that type of content.

I take no pleasure in this, but blech.

In which I’m writing about Weezer for some reason

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Reviews4 Comments

I know, I’m as surprised as you are.

I’m not a fan of Weezer. I’m not not a fan, if that makes any sense; there are probably a dozen Weezer songs that I have at least partially memorized and might sing along with given the opportunity, but if you asked me right now to name even one Weezer song I wouldn’t be able to do it. If a song was playing and you asked me “Is this a Weezer song?” I could probably tell you yes or no, but I wouldn’t bet a lot of money on any one song. They’ve been around a long time and I don’t dislike them, they’re just not my people musically, for whatever that’s worth.

You may have heard about the Teal album. The Teal album is utterly unique in that I can review it merely by listing the tracks on it:

  1. Africa
  2. Everybody Wants to Rule the World
  3. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
  4. Take on Me
  5. Happy Together
  6. Paranoid
  7. Mr. Blue Sky
  8. No Scrubs
  9. Billie Jean
  10. Stand by Me

And right away, boom, you know if you’re going to like the Teal album. (Weezer apparently has named most of their albums Weezer, and then distinguishes them by the color of the cover? Also a thing I didn’t know, so I don’t know if I should be italicizing Teal when it shows up or not. Weird-ass band.) And, more importantly, based on whether you’re wondering why the hell they bothered or you’re right now opening iTunes so you can download this, I know within about five or six years how old you are, because it’s a good damn bet you’re in the decade around being born in 1976 somewhere.

There is not a single song on here that I have ever decided to deliberately listen to, except maybe for No Scrubs, and in that case it’s been a very long time. And yet I literally purchased and downloaded this album within ten seconds of knowing it existed. Ask my wife; she was standing right next to me when it happened. And I’m listening to it right now, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it, and I don’t understand what has happened that those things are true. I mean, don’t get me wrong, these are all good songs, but … why? Why? This album is simultaneously the whitest thing that has ever happened and utterly delightful, and those should not both be true, and I’m very very confused right now.

It is a crime that Never Gonna Give You Up is not on here, by the way.

And here’s what is probably the weirdest part: I feel like it’s weird that the Teal album is my only Weezer album in my music collection, which is over 1100 albums strong (and, for the record, very close to 100% legitimately purchased) and now I feel like I need to spend some more money and buy at least one Weezer album where they’re playing their own music. Am I going to listen to it? I dunno, maybe not. I mean, the next thing I did after buying the Teal album yesterday was buy TLC’s Fanmail, because I didn’t like the idea that Weezer’s version was the only version of No Scrubs I had. So it’s not like this isn’t without precedent, y’know? What album would I buy? Am I just picking my favorite color or looking for a Greatest Hits or their debut (my usual move with a band I don’t own any music from) or …

Yeah. When I complain about not having enough money, remind me of shit like this, will you?

EDIT: Upon checking iTunes again, I note that Weezer has released a collection, called Blue/Green/Red, that is in fact just those three albums, for $13.99. So now I own four Weezer albums. (Also: Oh! These are the Buddy Holly guys! Of course they are.) They also apparently have released an album called Hurley, the cover art of which is a headshot of the guy who played Hurley in Lost. I don’t know what to do with that information, but I felt like those of you who didn’t know it need to.

EDIT EDIT: Island in the Sun and Blister in the Sun are not the same song, and I’d like to tender my sincere apologies to the Violent Femmes for my momentary loss of sense.

In which I make things so complicated

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Reviews1 Comment

imagesI keep almost writing a music post and then not doing it; I’d like to pretend that I don’t know why, but the simple fact is that I don’t have the vaguest idea how to write music reviews.  Despite that, I still write music reviews from time to time; they’re just bad music reviews.  When I read them, I never have any idea what the hell the writer is talking about and half the time I feel like I’m reading word salad.  I also can’t begin a music review without that disclaimer– I can review movies and books and food and other things coherently, but I always feel like I ought to begin any piece about music with an apology.

I’ve downloaded four new albums in the last couple of months.  I even bought one of the four on CD as a backup copy– yeah, the physical version is the backup now.  They are: Pearl Jam’s Lightning Bolt, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Latyrx’s The Second Album, and… uh… speaking of things I always apologize for, avrillavigne’snewCDwhichsheselftitledsoit’scalledAvrilLavigneSHUTUPDON’TJUDGEME.

*Cough.*

Yeah.  I have all seven of her albums (and I live in a world where Avril Lavigne has seven albums, Jesus, what the hell?) and I have felt dirty while buying each and every one of them.  I don’t care, fuck you; I’m gonna keep buying them until she’s old.  Ha!

The really scary part is that her new album may be my favorite of hers, or at least it’s the perfect antidote to spending several days trying to listen to Eminem’s new… thing.  It’s thoroughly poppy and fun, even the bits where she brings in in Marilyn Manson and tries to be all… I don’t know, not cute, which Christ you can’t have a Marilyn Manson cameo on an album with a song called Hello Kitty where you spend most of it yapping in Japanese.  Or something, hell, that might not be Japanese, I really have no idea.  But fuck it, it’s fun, that’s the point.  There’s a song on it called “Bitchin’ Summer” and the damn album was released in November.  Gimme a break.

Eminem’s new album is not any fun, and in fact is probably the most relentlessly angry thing he’s ever released.  There are still bits where he blows away any other rapper working today with his lyrical skills, but… God, the thing is so damn long and so damn pissed off that I just can’t deal with it.  I’m sticking with my initial assessment, which is that it’s exactly like some horrifying hybrid of mid-197os The Who and Pink Floyd released something and decided to call it a concept rap opera, which kind of feels like I’m making shit up and sticking words together but I swear that it makes sense in my head.  Also:  that’s not a recommendation, in case you’re not sure.  The thing is interesting in the sense that it’s so consistently unlistenable, and it’s not unlistenable because it’s bad, it’s unlistenable because Eminem made a conscious decision as an artist to make an album that no one anywhere could ever be happy while listening to, but without releasing an awesome piss-off-fuck-the-world album like, say, Rage Against the Machine or Ice Cube or the fucking Ramones used to be so good at.  Which is an achievement of sorts.  But I don’t want to listen to the damn thing ever again.

The new Latyrx is… well, Latyrx, which is always a recommendation.  It’s deeply weird and experimental too, but in a much better way.  I don’t have a whole lot to say about it right now because honestly I haven’t digested this album yet; the time I’ve spent trying to wrap my head around Eminem’s bullshit has taken away from The Second Album‘s richly deserved braincycles.

And you should already own the new Pearl Jam album because it’s a fucking Pearl Jam album and Pearl Jam is the greatest band on Earth.  This one’s kind of weird too, though; it’s their first album with a title track, which I kinda think ought to be significant even though I can’t quite elucidate how, and there are a bunch of tracks that don’t really sound like Pearl Jam (Let the Records Play and Getaway and maybe a couple of others); the band’s clearly still pushing themselves.  It’s not my favorite album by them (Vitalogy) but it’s got some great tracks on it– Sirens, Yellow Moon, Future Days, and Mind Your Manners, even though MYM took a while to grow on me.  I need to memorize more of it so I can sing along; I can’t ever finalize my opinion of a Pearl Jam album until I can sing along with at least half of it.

There’s a reason I’m not talking about work much today, by the way.  Maybe tomorrow.