An inordinately strong group this week:
Outer Peace — Toro y Moi
Holy 21st century Funk! Some may call it Deep Techno R&B; I call it the best album of 2019 (so far).
Remind Me Tomorrow — Sharon Van Etten
Florence + the MGMT.
VIDA — Luis Fonsi
Suave. Smooth. Sex. You may want to sleep with him, but don’t sleep on the producing.
Famous Cry — Blueface
Spoken-rap slapped with melodious, free-flowing swag; now let’s find a producer up to Blue’s snuff. 2019: the year weird rap takes over the genre?
amo — Bring Me the Horizon
I usually find unusual, awesomely unclassifiable music to be unclassifiably awesome, even when that eclecticism toes the line between awesome and awful. For a taste of the dizzyingly-diverse styles on this album, here’s an excerpt — think of it as a running diary — from my notebook chronicling my attempts to figure out how to classify its genre:
- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Pop-EDM?
- Heavy Metal Fall Out Boy?
- Heavy Metal Kidz Bop?
- Or is it Kidz Bop Heavy Metal??
- Is there a difference???
- If hard rock’s on one end of a spectrum, and heavy metal’s on the other, what should we call music that splits the difference? Heavy Rock? Hard Metal? Does “Hard” sound less intense than “Heavy”?
- Trance?!?!
- More like Run the Jewels’ brand of electronic music?
- So does that make it Electronic Rock??
- Or Electronic Metal???
Exhausting, right????????
Ain’t Nothing to It — Cody Johnson
Close your eyes.
Imagine the sound of THE prototypical, most basic-bitch male country crooner.
Now, open your eyes.
Great, I just saved you the trouble of having to listen to this album.
A song titled “Y’all People” dedicated to the “CoJo Nation”? Is he commenting on the racism — with “y’all people” being the southern corollary of “you people” — inflicted upon indigenous tribes? Oh, CoJo Nation is the name of his fans, as in, Cody Johnson Nation? Classic. Be less stereotypical, Dick!
Still Swervin — G Herbo
More like Nil Swervin, AMIRITE?!
A pitfall of hitting it big: what happened to the bootstrap intensity of Herbo’s early work, a ruggedness that’s difficult to maintain when trying so hard to swerve into the paved lane of the mainstream? Hopefully it’s just a bump early in his road to merging the two (lol, what a mixed metaphor).
Quasi-related question: is Juice WLRD the bootleg Post Malone?
DNA — Backstreet Boys
More like the Whacksheeeeeet Oys, AMIRITE?!
Stray Take:
Heard It In A Past Life — Maggie Rogers
I properly reviewed this album last week, but alas, I have a new comp for Maggie after listening to it again (and again…and again…and, yes, again): a poppier Sara Bareilles!
WRITE ALL NITE 