Seems excessive (also like 53 people picked the same 5 songs to cover?), but there's probably a hefty EP's worth of these I'm at least curious to hear. Moses Sumney doing "The Unforgiven," for example, seems very much my shit.
Fascinating because all four of those "influence" tracks are absolute classics that I can never get tired of*, and yet I didn't really get any of that energy from MADLO. Felt much more oriented around production tricks and stylistic curveballs than sturdy writing. Whereas previous CSH albums took fairly unflashy meat-and-potatoes indie rock and made it work brilliantly.
*I can never get tired of "Running Up That Hill" but I actually am kind of tired of hearing it covered. Please, y'all. Dig a little deeper, the Kate Bush discography is a vast territory with many treasures.
I guess it shows how much defining expectations matters. Can you imagine anyone getting Tyler to apologize for this lyric? Unlikely! And yet Billie is groveling because she lipsynced it a third of her lifetime ago.
As is so often the case with these "outrageous" pop stars, it would be cool if the music had even a fraction of that polarizing energy. Doja has some bops, to be sure, but her songs don't seem to aspire beyond competent playlist filler. I guess I'm asking her to release a racially insensitive song about feet or something.
Same feeling exactly about the Foo-MO. The fall line-up is coming together nicely but its still not clear what my first real post-lockdown show is going to be and I'm so thirsty for it. Prob can't spring for Stones tickets anytime in the near future but there's a Stones tribute band playing the neighborhood dive in a couple weeks...
Exactly. When Kanye went total heel you would see tons of "who cares music sucks now" or "always been overrated why nobody never listen to me" type comments. Weak stuff then and now. I get why its tempting to pile on when an artist is in that overexposed/disappearing-up-their-own-ass space, but I honestly think Miss Anthropocene is every bit as good as Visions or Art Angels, and its not that hard for me to ignore the rest of the shit she says/does.
On the upside, 4Runner is my favorite thing he's done as a solo artist. On the downside, the album as a whole is SO boring. And I don't quite understand how someone who has produced so much dynamic pop with other artists can listen to the album and not hear that.
The whole situation reminds me of how Capitol parted ways with JEW after Clarity and then they came back with the hit parade of Bleed American. What I like about this and "Don't Go Putting Wishes in My Head" is how they are her most extroverted and catchy songs but also completely batshit ("ancient, eternal, and surreal as a hug from a dinosaur"?!).
It would be a fair complaint but saying she has "a genre-jumping aughts infatuation to rival Rina Sawayama" is not really the same as calling them rivals full stop.
Chris nailed this one. Slayyyter is a case study in how quickly a transgressive aesthetic can become its own kind of tedious. It's a funny experience listening to queer futurist raunch pop and finding it sort of pedestrian and also kind of pandering (like it was written by an algorithm trained on gay Twitter) but here we are.
I think the strengths you note in your blurb are real. Lorde is good at what she does and even if she has picked a questionable aesthetic direction, she's not going to put out a single that gives you nothing to like. I mostly like it, and there are some little touches in the lyrics that I love, so my reaction is less "its bad" then "why is Lorde doing this?" I definitely agree about hoping she will complicate or subvert this aesthetic in some way with the next single.
Did anyone else have an ungodly mash-up of "Solar Power," "Loaded," "Freedom 90," and "South Side" looping in their head all weekend? Thanks, Lorde discourse!
Why would they choose not to cover this? It's a cool project for her to be involved in, but even if you don't care about that, there's also a new song in the trailer.
Bjork's pop songs are daunting enough to cover, but its a rare treat to hear someone take on her 21st century output. This is really really good though. Really captures the original's spirit of joyous resistance.
It's a double edged sword. Because you can say the band is being judged against their peak material and its a no-win proposition. But conversely, would we even bother with these bands if they had never put out their absolute classics? That's the source of emotional investment that keeps people going back to the late period work, which on its own merits might be perfectly good but is "perfectly good" what we look for when we listen to music?
I don't really know what to make of this album. TCWH was a mess, but I believed that Carrie and Corin believed wholeheartedly in that mess - obviously they believed enough in it to part ways with Janet over it. This is the first time I've ever heard a Sleater-Kinney album that doesn't seem to care if you care about it. Even the songs I enjoy (and there are a good handful) are not *gripping* in the way that you want Sleater-Kinney to be gripping. I think I would slap someone if they turned off any song from Dig Me Out or One Beat or The Woods or No Cities before it delivered the climax. Most of these songs seem to get bored of themselves before they get there.
Screamadelica stands with Exile on Main St. and Blue Lines in the pantheon of great British appropriations of black music. But it's kind of ironic that self-appointed originality police think Primal Scream invented any of that shit. Go listen to Club Classics I if you haven't heard it!
It’s true and also the new Billie Eilish does too. Did someone decide this was going to be the vibe for 2021? If it’s this for pop and emo and jazz for indie I will be going back into lockdown thanks
Indeed its no “Green Light” but I think it’s good. Also keep in mind that 90% of Stereogum commenters HATED “Green Light” when it dropped. They were wrong.
In the sober light of morning, "bad" is probably too strong because I listened again and its not *unenjoyable* but I will go with "the melody and singing are lazy," like it's actually hard to imagine the same band that wrote their last three records thinking this is good enough to launch a new era with
Comments