From the Funhouse #2
by Owen Neaman, Arts and Culture Editor
We’re back, and I’ve got double the number of albums that I had last week. Everyone decided to drop hour-long albums on 9/11 for some reason, so I’m only reviewing the brand new stuff as much as I’d like to write about the Wednesday and Ms. Gloom remix albums. Also, if there’s an album (local, independently released, not on Metacritic) that you want me to write about, send an email. I can’t bite you.
Happy Christian Guilt Autumn,
Jhené Aiko – Westside Whimsy
Jhené Aiko spends one hour ripping on her Big Sean and fighting the I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck War over chill R&B beats to sleep/study/go through five stages of relationship grief to. Respectable. The songs are still trippy and sunny and her voice is still gorgeous, and if you wanted, you could put this album on and just luxuriate in its pure serenity. As a breakup album, though, it gets pretty thematically repetitious and boring, and wouldn’t lose much if she cut Tyga’s GPT generated feature. Keep Kendrick Lamar singing sensually (not even about Big Sean) in autotune, though. Yeah, progress isn’t linear, but this album could be half as long.
Hear: “Ceilings”
For Best Listening: Listen to the song Big Sean was on with her six years ago first.
Lizzy McAlpine – angel
It’s nice hearing McAlpine do pastoral and live-sounding indie folk after her heavily poppified last album. The lyrics are still personal, but her storytelling is more impressionistic here. She refuses to name names or state what aches her, but still manages to evoke despondence. “Peach” and “the crowd” are annoyingly passive aggressive, but most songs have lyrics that read as accurate emotional confusion. The tunes that sound like home demos from a quiet cabin and the rural direction yield some of her strongest songs, but right when the album sounds ready to set off on a musical journey, McAlpine stops and restarts from square one. This gets frustrating, and the bad pacing (especially a seven-minute hike of a song in the latter half) gets tedious. It’s bookended nicely, though, and perhaps a few October listens will make me more enthusiastic.
Hear: “A car wash and a new pair of pants”
For Best Listening: Pray for rain.
Beck – Ride Lonesome
I have a soft spot for Beck’s lonesome desert-cowboy schtick; Sea Change got me through my first high school breakup. I don’t see this album getting anyone through theirs. This is Beck’s second time ripping off Sea Change, and he’s created a carbon copy down to the first lazy guitar strum on the opening song. None of these songs are offensively bad; it’s just the guy’s mumbly croon, guitar, and a smattering of orchestra arrangements. For all the acoustic melodrama it reaches for, this album has no intimacy whatsoever. Emulating the cinema of his first breakup album results in the musical analog of watching Sea Change Three 3D in a theater over FaceTime.
Hear: Sea Change
For Best Listening: Have your girlfriend dump you for joining the Church of Scientology.
Yeat – Cocoon
The Drake feature might be the best thing about this EP, and that’s hard for me. After Yeat put out a double album earlier this year, it’s hard to read this as more than tracks that didn’t make the cut for ADL. Some of the bitcrushed beats and buzzy synths are muscular enough to potentially be amazing Yeat songs, but none of the songs apart from “MISS MY DAWG” and the title track are lyrically memorable or catchy when there’s far better Rage and Cloud Rap with a hundredth of the budget.
Hear: “Cocoon”
For Best Listening: Learn how to üse ümlaüts.
Pretty Sick – Anarchy
I don’t understand why Dirty Hit Records is bent on calling Pretty Sick grunge or shoegaze for the sake of indie cred when this album is just electronica. A lot of the songs on here concern themselves with dipping their toes in all those aesthetics, but the gems here are the songs where Sabrina Fuentes is just concerned with making danceable bangers. Does that make her indie sleaze? Who knows. It’s pretty clear that she’s trying to shake the rock label; the drums are obnoxiously compressed and loud, and some of these songs sound like SoundCloud demos more than songs because of the production. She still has her cynicism, and I’m hoping she throws herself at dance music instead of just trying it on.
Hear: “Hyper Independence”
For Best Listening: Did they livestream Solarity last year?
Slow Pulp – Melodie
Shoegaze often forgets to be catchy, but Slow Pulp nail it on this one. The airy vocals and the spacey acoustic guitars of the first few tracks are proof enough that their songcraft was never really dependent on volume to sound hazy and dreamy. When the blankets of fuzz finally come in, it’s crystalline, and the guitars and vocals don’t sound like they’re fighting for clarity like most other shoegaze bands. Apart from some uninteresting solo piano songs, this entire album sounds nocturnal and pulsing. I’m sure these songs kick ass live.
Hear: “Like Me”
For Best Listening: Read WOBC Tinnitus PSA backwards thrice.
Beabadoobee – Pylon
Beabadoobee enlists members of Deftones, Turnstile, and Paramore and needs none of them. This album’s far more itchy and scratchy than This Is How Tomorrow Moves, chock-full of beeps and glitches, but her voice stays center-stage for the whole ride. Despite the album’s midwest emo and clear ’90s rock influence, these textures lose all purpose when they’re pushed to the edges of the mix. Maybe I’m asking too much, but these songs would be far more alive if they weren’t mixed like pop songs or Trending Audios. Many also just have abrupt changes indicating the obligatory punk-ish sections of songs, and I’d prefer the good stuff just be mixed differently to bring the grime up to the front.
Hear: “Sun Has Set”
For Best Listening: Find out what Chino Moreno did on this album.
This Is Lorelei – The Singer in My Band
I’ll be damned, he’s made a line dance album. I think you could still tell that Nate Amos is a member of Water From Your Eyes by listening to this album, ’cause it sounds like the rodeo of guitars, drums, and vocal harmonies have been recorded in a bedroom closet on certain songs. Amos never sets into a simplistic country rock rhythm, and the banjos and fiddles sound wonderfully haphazard when tucked into ditties like “Oh No Now My.” For “alt-country,” this is a pretty airtight and straightforward collection of hummable twang. MJ Lenderman is sweating somewhere, I’ll stop bringing him up.
Hear: “Oh No Now My”
For Best Listening: Look your gift horse in the mouth.
