A DIY club and a venue who'd been pretty much the only two spaces bringing in good shows into the area the last few years around where I live both decided to close in the past few weeks. I can't help but feel like this might be too late to bring them back at this point, but it would be nice if it somehow changed their endings.
I understand the perfect 10, but at the same time, it kind of felt like they give the album a 10 because wanted their last perfect 10 album not to be remembered as Kanye.
If an album comes out after the first week of December, I have no issue with publications including it in the following year's list. I do the same. I'm not sure if they've ever done it with albums, but Pitchfork has done this with their songs list, like how "Blinding Lights" was released in November of 2019, but still was included in this year's tracks list.
I harped on this last week, but I kinda wish some of the past week's releases had held off coming out until January instead of in a pile of year-end lists and into the holiday weeks. For instance, that new Channel Tres EP is great and I think if it had dropped at the start of 2021, it could have been an AOTW contender, maybe the first BNM on Pitchfork of 2021, and a lot more people would have been excited to get the new year started off with something fresh and good.
"Other albums of note out this week:
• Vol. 2 of the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack.
• Maggie Rogers’ Notes From The Archives: Recordings 2011-2016.
• Branford Marsalis’ soundtrack for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
• Tycho’s Weather Remixes."
So pretty much Paul McCartney got AOTW for not being a video or move game soundtrack, archives collection, or remix album.
Also, if list season feels premature, it's probably because over the last few years, there's been a race by every major publication to publish theirs by December 1st. Even looking at Pitchfork, in 2015, their 50 Best Albums list was not published until December 16th. Last year, it was the 10th. This year, it was the 8th. It gets earlier and earlier each year, which means that a whole month of new music doesn't get considered.
I lost respect for him at the CMAs when he made a comment during his award speech about how people getting together in person is how it should be. That whole ceremony, with its lack of masks and attendees breaking social distancing to hug, was a big statement for the worse.
Put that in your country song, Eric.
Be it people streaming TV shows or new music, the growing normalization of new content on-demand has broken any form of time when it comes to consumption. It's all fluid now, content is being produced in droves, and there's no fine line distinguishing calendar years.
Personally, I would much rather the new music cycle slow down at the end of year. I've seen some commenters on here remark that it's because 2020 and artists expect that people's holidays plans got cancelled, but I think the truth is closer to the fact that everyone saw a gap on the release schedule that they could take advantage of and had the same idea to drop new stuff at once. And now it's all cancelling each other out.
Not sure of the context, but if you subscribe to Eisold's Heartworm Press, he's been releasing a lot of publications through the imprint lately. He seems pretty happy in domestic bliss and having a young child these days.
An interesting read, though, about how there may not be as much new music next year because a lot of artists are being directed by their labels to not release their albums and to wait closer to the point of when it might be possible to play them live next fall:
https://lastdonutofthenight.substack.com/p/how-much-new-music-is-there-even
I don't think most do or should (although I think many more consider awards deadlines than they let on...), but I do like having a a proper end to the year's releases, a break to let it all soak in, and then starting back up in the new year for a new "season" -- kind of like sports. Content fatigue is real.
I hate to complain about having new music, especially considering how much I enjoyed 'folklore', but something I look forward to at the end of the year is being able to catch up with all of the albums from the past year that I didn't have time to get around to and have been seeing recommended on end of year lists.
This year the new music cycle really didn't stop once list season commenced. It's continuing to pump out headline-worthy new albums and singles. Even Pitchfork, who usually hits pause on their reviews when publishing their year-end lists or holds off on publishing until the bigger album reviews are all in, didn't, and still posted up reviews for the new Bad Bunny and Rico Nasty while their lists were going up.
Because of streaming, there's this expectation that every #NewMusicFriday needs to deliver new "content" weekly, which means whatever was released last week is already forgotten a week later. The average listener is just consuming and disposing music just as quickly, which to me, makes trying to stay atop of everything very exhausting and there are days where I wish I had more time to be able to sit with "older" music, but I also don't want to miss anything else that's new and good either.
Probably not the rant you expected as a reply!
Historically, haven't the "Best Rock Song" noms been pretty bad or very mainstream stuff in the past, like pitting Disturbd against Foo Fighters against Beyoncé feat. Jack White? It seems like the definition of alternative and rock is mostly indie rock now.
Also, I get the reasoning behind the flowers (Fake It Flowers,) but I never tied it into being "extremely 90s" since everyone from the Smiths to Girls did this setup.
Coriky
Dummy
glass beach
Gulch
Higher Power
ISOLA
KeiyaA
Narrow Head
Navy Blue
Pay for Pain
P.E.
Public Practice
Special Interest (really surprised not to see them on here...)
SPICE
Sprain
Truth Cult
The 2020 Coronavirus Music Awards.
Until last night, Eric Church was one of the few mainstream country artists I could stomach, but man, the part about being in a room together rather than on Zoom couldn't be any more tone deaf as I sit here indoors and not having seen a single one of my friends in person since March, so I guess fuck that guy's career and anyone else who showed for the ceremony.
No masks and the social distancing was barely in effect. It was more like the Coronavirus Music Awards. The whole thing sent a really dangerous message out to the public, especially to its target audience that could stand to get the point.
At the ACMs, at least artists wore face masks. The social distancing was pretty half-assed. It will be hard to look at the more liberal artists like Maren Morris, Miranda Lambert and Eric Church again and not think how they all could have at least made an effort to look like they were trying to be safe and set an example, but naaaah, they just went out there and collected their awards in their fancy clothes and rubbing elbows, as if 140,000 new cases of COVID weren't just reported in a day.
I'll have to give this a few more spins, but on first impressions, I loved "Starfall", thought "Red River" was solid, yet as a whole and perhaps because I read the NY Times piece before listening, the album as a whole does feel like it was cobbled together more so. It probably doesn't help that it's freaking snowing outside rather than being the eerie autumn Halloween Eve I imagined when I'd finally hear it. It's still very interesting!
Also, I found this tea spilled to be kind of a drag to discover: Heather was forced out by the band some months ago:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-dXS7PD_zZ/
I'm currently pandemicing at my family's in Western Mass, and can very much confirm it's no Adrianne Lenker quarantine album and the signs on the neighbors' lawns knock my blood pressure up...
Nobody in music journalism ever seems to know where Western Massachusetts is. 106.7 was a Boston radio station. Boston is solid 90 miles east of Western Massachusetts. Daniel Lopatin also is from Wayland, MA. Wayland, MA is somewhere between the central and Greater Boston areas, 70 miles east of Western Massachusetts. Unless I'm wrong, the only connection to Western Mass Daniel Lopatin has is that he went to Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, which IS part of Western Massachusetts.
Fun fact: I alwayf forget that I went to college in that area the same time as he did, and he apparently ran in the same circles as I did, but I had no idea who he was back then (nor did anyone really.) The Altered Zones generation of experimental and indie rock has a lot of Western Mass roots, though, because there's a few others who went on to either write about or make music that broke out the same time as OPN did.
As someone who was a huge stan of Wilderness and still occasionally checks to see if they somehow returned, I can honestly say... no, not at all. Wilderness was almost lethargic, the guitars made use of space, and the vocalist had this echoing wail to his singing. This sounds more nervous and palpitating, the vocals are quick and anxious, and resoundingly British. I enjoy it, but Wilderness spirit animals they are not.
The past month has been overwhelming with new releases that are very good. This point in the year usually does have more big and noteworthy releases, but I'm wondering if the reason this year has been so extra with it is because a lot of artists/labels delayed their release calendars for albums set for spring and summer to the last quarter of the year, with the small hope that the pandemic wouldn't still be as bad as it is right now.
I don't think any album is ever really picked over other albums around here nowadays, making the "Album of the Week" title somewhat moot. There's like, four different formats of praiseworthy album review spots per week on this site now:
- Album of the Week: A review which has become more of a spotlight for a new album that maybe isn't the most popular, biggest name album of the week, but is still pretty good and could use a spotlight.
- Premature Evaluation: This can sometimes be a negative or lukewarm review, but it also seems to be reserved for praising more established names and those more popular indie/mainstream albums that more people know about.
- Interviews: If there's other important good albums that get released, there's likely going to be a feature-length interview that basically reviews the album alongside soundbites from the artist.
- Artist to Watch: A praising review of a new emo or indie rock band's album as narrated by Ian Cohen well before the rest of the world even has a chance to hear it or know who the band even is.
I neve heard of this band until today when the label announced they had signed them. Hours later, here we have an interview, which is more or less a full album review of it.
Not sure what my point is here other than I miss being able to get to know a new band over a string of singles rather than have the same one guy give his take on it and sculpt the narrative.
I'm not totally surprised by how this sounds because I figured she and Jack Antonoff would do more of the same with where NFR left off with diminishing results, and I do wonder if the critical reaction to it will be tepid for that reason alongside everything else Lana has said and done publicly since.
NBC has been enabling Trump from the very beginning, since the days of 'The Apprentice' to humanizing him with appearances on 'SNL' and Jimmy Fallon. Fuck them all.
Beyond NME's suspicious 5 star review, I've read so many reviews of the beabadoobee album where at the end of it, even if it's positive, I can't tell if it's any good or not. I want it to be good, but I also feel like most critiques on it are focused on '90s appropriation and her being an indie-ish major label artist rather than what the music actually sounds like.
I do find it a little odd how the press has rehabilitated his words with a redemption story over the past few years by rebranding his byline as the go-to gatekeeper of all acclaimed emo/emo-adjacent/hardcore/indie punk releases. The only time he seem to get villainous is when he's assigned the review of the third or fourth album by a rock band who is no longer buzzy (like his latest METZ review.)
Most younger listeners in their 20s who listen to emo consider his word gospel because they never had to live through the era of him writing very harsh reviews of 2010s indie albums that often killed them upon arrival.
It's weird how the trajectory for a lot more of today's indie rock artists is to ultimately make pop music instead of making increasingly more original sounding indie rock. There's nothing wrong with how this sounds, but also, it sounds like it could be any pop musician behind it, be it indie or mainstream.
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