Wait, Folie à Deux turns 10 next year? Jesus, that's one of the first album releases I can ever remember feeling genuine hype for. At least it's aged really well.
I feel like there has to be a This Mortal Coil joke in here somewhere, especially since the guy's last name is Russell, but for the life of me I can't seem to formulate it
Listened to this walking around my neighborhood last night and woooow. 6 Feet and New Place 2 Drown in particular didn't blow me away, but this is a trip. It almost feels like outsider music to me at points.
Gonna need to spend more time with this but after one listen I'm really relieved that I'm now 0 for 2 with my worries about potentially disastrous artist/producer pairings this year, since QOTSA came through too.
True, but none of the other musical guests on the show seemed to know either, so I don't really think that's on him. Whatever weird equivocation is going on in the rest of this answer is another story (though I really don't think he should have to apologize for not rushing out a statement fast enough or whatever).
Lil B has been WYLIN the past week or so on Twitter, to the point where I've already had one or two people bring it up IRL. In the aggregate it's pretty friggin entertaining
Agent Intellect is basically perfect to me too, but... I mean... a more challenging and dissonant version of that record that also sounds more like Wire (according to finnegans wake)?? Christ I am so unbelievably excited to listen to this
I haven't listened to The Golden Echo in full in a long time, but 90s Music and Carolina back to back on that album is a ridiculously great pair of songs and I feel like everyone needs to know that.
It's really heartening to hear that they feel themselves to be in a good place as a band, cause these guys are just Too Damn Good to imagine stopping anytime soon. I haven't heard any of these new songs, but from everything I've read about this record there's no way I won't love it.
I love all those bands, and I'll give you QOTSA and Fucked Up in particular. I just have a heavy bias towards post-punk and I think Joe's lyrics are brilliant. Just making a case!
I mean, there was only a year and a half between Under Color and Agent Intellect, so I'd say this is about on schedule.
Also: I think one could definitely make a case for Protomartyr as the best active rock band in America right now. Two albums that good back-to-back, plus they rip live? Please.
In the 7 years between FRR and this, the s/t became my 1st or 2nd favorite album of all time, so I don't think I've been this excited for a record to drop... ever. Leggo
Looking at their Facebook page, they seem to be adding the full catalog, a year per day. If they keep up like this, in a week we may get Ys on Apple Music, which would be sweet. But for now, I can finally check out Twin Infinitives and I See a Darkness and Gastr Del Sol without shame! This pretty much saved my awful week!
Ayy, GBV! I'm still not sure if I like it more than Please Be Honest, but August by Cake is growing on me more every week - and we're only two months away from the follow-up! Though I'd argue that Bears for Lunch and Motivational Jumpsuit are the best of the... uh... first batch of reunion albums.
also, my year so far looks like:
1. Arca - Arca
2. Kendrick Lamar - Damn
3. these
GBV - ABC
Cloud Nothings - Life Without Sound
Blanck Mass - World Eater
Xiu Xiu - Forget
The Magnetic Fields - 50 Song Memoir
Freddie Gibbs - You Only Live 2wice
The New Pornographers - Whiteout Conditions
Gnod - Just Say No to the Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine
Feist - Pleasure
Power Trip - Nightmare Logic
Cherry Glazerr - Apocalypstick
Colin Stetson - All This I Do For Glory
Big Walnuts Yonder - Big Walnuts Yonder (SO! DAMN! AWESOME!!!!!!!)
Alex G - Rocket
Aaron Dilloway - The Gag File
Drake - More Life
Honestly, it's been kind of an off-year for me in terms of connecting with albums. Not sure why :/
HOT TAKE ALERT: Medicine's To the Happy Few is the best shoegaze comeback album this decade.
But yeah, this is sounding really good so far. Slomo is an unbelievable opener and Don't Know Why gets my blood pumping in the best way.
So, this album is basically the LP version of the party I went to a few months back where the belligerently drunk DJ played "Closer" upwards of 10 times in the span of an hour and a half. Noice.
This list has 14 albums I'm looking forward to and it doesn't even include the new ones from Future, Nav, Karriem Riggins, Circus Devils, Stormzy, or THEY. This is an unbelievable week.
Honestly, I've been surprised at how much of Future I'm enjoying. I was already hearing it as somehow both overlong and more consistently good than his last few...
but now we're getting HNDRXX too. Somehow, these two 17-track albums dropping within a week of each other feels 10x more exciting and less exhausting then getting the way shorter Purple Reign and EVOL tapes within the span of a month. And if this one ends up being the emotive counterpoint to the s/t's kind of gross braggadocio... it might be time for me to dust off those #FutureHive memes from 2015.
I'm not gonna dictate how anyone should be reacting to this - I think it's totally shitty, natch - but I will say that I was pretty much ready for something like this after that line about "goin' to Chi-land with them chinks" made me stop dead in the middle of Get Right Witcha. Like, did everyone just decide to let that one slide, or?...
I'm in (what seems like) the superminority that absolutely loves The Terror, so I was worried about this album, especially since The Castle did nothing for me the first time around. But I really like this! Even though I hate it when people talk about what artists "ought" to be doing with their music, I'm still pretty glad they're not done exploring darker sounds.
Just gonna put this here because I've been wondering this for a while: does anyone else prefer Mount Eerie just a bit? Don't get me wrong, I love Glow, Pt. 2, but Mount Eerie is just such a uniquely odd and heavy record. It's definitely in my all-time top 10.
I was wondering about this. I saw the premiere episode and was so geeked by the out-of-nowhere Chastity Belt cameo that I figured I'd watch a few more. Honestly never really picked up that these guys were alt-right; just seemed like typical Adult Swim queasy discomfort comedy, which maybe says more about me than the show. But it seems like AS made the right call; Hyde seems truly awful.
Major props for Lambchop at #1. Though as long as that song is, I always have to listen to it back to back with "Directions to the Can", because that song's just as brilliant.
1. PJ Harvey - A Line in the Sand/The Wheel (both of these songs are perfect)
2. Jenny Hval - Conceptual Romance
3. Schoolboy Q - Groovy Tony / Eddie Kane
4. They Might Be Giants - I Love You For Psychological Reasons
5. Guided by Voices - Please Be Honest
6. Mitski - My Body's Made of Crushed Little Stars
7. ANOHNI - Crisis
8. A Tribe Called Quest - Melatonin
9. Iggy Pop - Sunday
10. Swans - The World Looks Red/The World Looks Black
11. Rae Sremmurd - Black Beatles
12. The Moles - Chills
13. De La x Snoop Dogg - Pain
14. Usher x Future - Rivals
15. Young Thug x Wyclef Jean - Kanye West
16. Blood Orange - But You
17. Open Mike Eagle & Paul White - Admitting the Endorphin Addiction
18. Deerhoof - The Devil and His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue
19. Kanye West - Father Stretch My Hands (1 & 2)
20. Preoccupations - Anxiety
This year was a rough one, so moreso than usual, my top 10 this year is full of songs that just wrecked me lyrically rather than being compositionally/creatively insane or anything. I could have had a completely different bottom ten, but c'est comme ça.
69 Love Songs never feels like a chore to me, but that's partly because Merritt hands the vocals off to all the other members throughout. I'm reeeeally hoping that happens on this one despite it being autobiographical and everything.
Either way, Be True To Your Bar and Me and Fred and Dave and Ted are going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the week.
You think Angel Guts is as poppy as Always/Dear God? Maybe I just need to go back and listen to that record again, but it seemed like a deliberate turn back towards screwiness to my ears.
To think that my first reaction to LA Reid breaking the news back in August was cynical. This is... like, I thought the De La Soul record was better than it had any right to be (I mean, Pain? Snoopies? Spitkicker? Trainwreck? Drawn!?), but this is something else again.
I still have three songs left, but I don't think I've felt this much *joy* listening to an album for the first time since I copped my Life of Pablo leak during SNL back on Valentine's Day. And I'm not even a Tribe fanboy or anything; in fact I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I haven't listened to any of the records after Low End Theory in full. But this thing is special. And the fact that it comes two days after one of the bleakest national moments I think I've ever witnessed just makes it seem even more improbable.
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