The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
WordPress appears to be having technical issues tonight, so I’m gonna just toss this up– gotta keep that streak going– and call it a night. The boy downloaded Nightreign tonight and watching him play has proven quite amusing so I’m going to go do that. Hopefully this will actually post.
(Randomly: listening to a Pearl Jam concert from May 8th of this year. I swear, Eddie Vedder has not correctly remembered the lyrics to Wishlist even a single time in his entire career.)
And I listen for the voice inside my head
…nothing?
I’ll do this one myself
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:
Writing tomorrow’s lessons took a thousand years, and I still have to do postcards and Arabic tonight, so … yeah.
Wanna watch a Pearl Jam show?
EDIT: Well, shit. They haven’t, like, blocked me specifically despite what the statement says. Just click through, it’s a good show. 🙂
Pearl Jam, otherwise known as the greatest band on the planet, is on tour right now in support of Dark Matter, their most recent release, which somehow is one of the best albums they’ve ever done. Bands that had their first release in 1991 aren’t allowed to release one of their best albums in 2024. This doesn’t make any sense. They did it anyway.
Anyway, tickets to Deer Creek– fuck you, I don’t know what the hell the Ruoff Center is, it’s Deer Creek– were absolutely fucking ludicrous when the show got announced. Like $600+ for lawn seats.
I’ve been keeping an eye on them anyway, and … well, they’ll be at Deer Creek next week and tickets on the lawn (which, at Deer Creek, are still pretty damn good seats) are down to a much more reasonable $120 apiece, and even actual seats are at a price I’m willing to pay for them.
Now, note that I said “next week.” What do you think that implies about the actual date of the show? Or, more relevantly, the day of the week?
Because the Goddamned show is on a Monday. And I’m sorry, even building in taking the next day off, I absolutely cannot go to a rock concert on a Monday night when I am 48 years old. I just can’t. I have seen these guys in concert three or four times (I am so old I can’t immediately tell you exactly how many) and I have still somehow never seen them play Black live so I absolutely have to see them at least one more time before I die or one of them does, but I genuinely think I could get free tickets and the creeping existential horror that takes over when I even contemplate going out on a Monday night, much less to something I have to drive a couple of hours to, would keep me from going.
I mourn my lost youth. Not a lot; I didn’t really use it that well when I had it, but still.
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.
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.
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