narrowcast

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Cassowary Records · western blot - hit em: impossible

I made a hit em version of the "Mission: Impossible" theme, rest in peace Lalo Schifrin. I made a hit em DJ set a couple months ago.

2:29 PM

Friday, July 11, 2025

For this week's Deep Cut Friday, I wrote about the My Chemical Romance song that Gerard Way said should have been on The Black Parade. I also ranked 50 Cent's albums and added Talkin to the Trees to my ranking of Neil Young albums.

12:21 PM

Tuesday, July 08, 2025

I previously announced that my book Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music will be out on August 19th, and this week there is a Barnes & Noble sale on preorders of the paperback or eBook.

10:01 AM

Movie Diary

Monday, July 07, 2025

a) The Ballad of Wallis Island

Director James Griffiths and actor/writers Tim Key and Tom Basden made an award-winning short film in 2007, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, and 18 years later they turned it into a feature that's currently on Peacock, and it's really good. I kind of use the word 'dramedy' as a pejorative sometimes because there are so many 'grown up' movies that are all both sad and droll in the same ways, but The Ballad of Wallis Island really deftly mixes together tones. Tim Key's character is a little eccentric and embarrassing, a lottery winner who books his favorite folk duo for a private reunion performance, and there are a few moments where I laughed really hard at the unpredictable things that come out of his mouth. But there's a lot of emotion in the story that comes out in a gradual and unforced way, and things between Basden and Carey Mulligan's characters don't really go where you expect, it's a lovely little movie.

b) Echo Valley

Echo Valley is a thriller on Apple TV+ written by "Mare of Easttown" creator Brad Ingelsby. It has a couple of decent plot twists -- I liked the smaller twist midway through the movie, but I saw the big one at the end coming a mile away, and it would've been a more satisfying movie if they'd gotten to it more elegantly or unexpectedly. It's by far the best performance I've ever seen from Domnhall Gleeson, he's kind of casually menacing and unpredictable in a really charismatic way, and there's a charge to all the scenes he's in. But a lot of the movie is Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney playing these one-note characters that are much harder to watch, a put-upon mother and her troubled daughter.

c) Nonnas

This Netflix movie is the kind of Vince Vaughn movie that used to be in theaters, a charming low stakes comedy about a NYC guy grieving his mother who decides to open a restaurant where Italian-American grandmothers cook their favorite recipes. One of those movies that just knows it has a strong premise and a great ensemble cast and just tries to not get in the way of that. And listen, Susan Sarandon...still got it!

d) Predator: Killer of Killers

My wife hadn't seen Prey, but she saw an ad for Dan Trachtenberg's animated follow-up Predator: Killer of Killers and was excited about it, so we watched both movies back-to-back. Killer of Killers is pretty fun, I don't think I liked it as much as she did, but I dug the animation style and the way they made it seem like an anthology and then tied the three stories together, that was fun. Definitely excited to see what Trachtenberg does with the next theatrical live action Predator movie later this year.

e) Mountainhead

Mountainhead is "Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong's directorial debut (surprisingly, he didn't direct any episodes of the series even though he wrote most of them). And it feels very much like he had an idea for an episode that he never found a place for in the series and decided to burn off as a standalone movie, sort of like when Aaron Sorkin would force "West Wing" episode ideas into "Studio 60" episodes. But Mountainhead is pretty good, makes excellent use of every member of its small cast of four (Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef), even if I feel like the story ran out of steam once Armstrong got the points across that he wanted to.

f) Becoming Led Zeppelin

This doc does a pretty great job of sort of stepping away from the larger-than-life mythology around Led Zeppelin and just explaining how the band happened, all the music that influenced these guys and all the headwinds in rock culture and the music business that made it possible for them to show up and just become a phenomenon. It's a little flat and straightforward, but again, that almost kind of serves the approach they took, and it's cool that they got good substantial interviews with the three living members of the band -- I'd never heard John Paul Jones talk much before and I just kinda love the sound of his voice. Apparently the filmmakers went to great lengths to find some rare John Bonham interview audio so that his voice could be part of the movie along with his bandmates, and I'm really glad they did that, although I wish there was more of that in there.

g) Bono: Stories of Surrender

Bono is pretty divisive as far as frontmen of huge bands go, but I have a higher tolerance for his hammy charisma than a lot of people do, partly because I think U2 has a fantastic and unique sound. So I went into this expecting to enjoy it about as much as a U2 concert, but I did not. I sort of expected he'd do something stripped down like Springsteen on Broadway, but it's a pretty big production with an orchestral backing band and a seasoned film director, Andrew Dominik, making it all very lavish and cinematic and more than just footage of a stage show. But Bono comes out of the gate singing fucking "Vertigo" and it takes quite a while for him to do a rendition I like of a song I like, it just didn't do much for me on a musical level, impressive as it was.

h) On The Count of Three

I've seen a lot of Jerrod Carmichael's standup and various TV projects, but somehow I totally missed that he directed a feature film, On The Count of Three, in 2021. It's about two friends who are both depressed and suicidal and make a suicide pact, and Carmichael and Christopher Abbott are really funny together. But I thought the first half was much better than the second half, where it feels the screenwriters wrote themselves into a corner and did this generic action movie climax and then ended the story with a shrug.

i) Red Rocket

I liked Sean Baker's earlier movies Tangerine and The Florida Project, and had mixed feelings about Anora after its big triumph at the Oscars, so I was curious to go back and see the movie in between that I'd missed, Red Rocket. And man, I don't know. The accolades this movie got look kinda crazy to me now. Around the time Baker made Red Rocket he very explicitly talked about his personal mission to "tell stories that remove stigma and normalize" the lives of sex workers and other marginalized people, which I think really reaffirmed the sense a lot of people had that he's doing really brave, important work. But Red Rocket, I don't know, it's a film that has about as much respect for its characters as your average Farrelly brothers comedy. I'm not one of those people who thinks a movie is inherently flawed or problematic because the protagonist is flawed or problematic, but if you made a personification of all the negative stereotypes about adult film stars, that would basically be Simon Rex's character in this movie, a foolish and compulsively dishonest loser who spends the whole movie stealing from people and grooming a teenager. Again, I'm not offended per se, but I didn't feel like the direction or the acting really elevated the subject matter, it all felt kind of snide and lurid but not particularly funny.

j) Talk To Me

Few things get me more excited to see a movie than a horror movie that comes out of nowhere to become a big word-of-mouth success. Talk To Me was pretty good but I don't know, pretty quickly after the premise was laid out, I got a little bored with it and was just kinda riding out the fact that the acting and direction was good without being on the edge of my seat or caring about the face of the characters. Like the ending was really well done, but it was also really easy to see where it was going, so it didn't feel as satisfying as a classic horror movie ending. Also, the movie subjects you to just a ton of terrible Australian hip-hop.

k) Beau Is Afraid

As much as I loved Hereditary and Midsommar, I was not in a rush to set aside three hours to watch Beau Is Afraid after all the middling reviews or even just the poster that looked like total dogshit. But I'm glad I finally got around to it, it's definitely not as good as Ari Aster's first two features, but I found it pretty compelling in just the sheer volume of disturbing imagery and scenes that the movie inundates you with. That said, I kept thinking about how it would've taken just a couple different casting decisions and a different directorial tone and this would be a full-on comedy, albeit a pretty dark comedy, and I almost wanted to see a version that took itself less seriously.

l) Anatomy of a Fall

I kind of figured that the instrumental version of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." in Anatomy of a Fall was this fleeting minor thing that people talked about a lot because it was such an odd musical choice, but no, it's genuinely something you hear for a substantial stretch of the film and becomes an actual significant plot point. I liked it, but I dunno, it didn't really feel like a Best Picture nom to me, like if this exact same movie was made in America with an American cast, I don't think it would've gotten the level of awards love it got, it would be looked at as just another courtroom drama.

m) The Ritual

A movie called The Ritual just came out in theaters but this is a different one from 2017. My wife read something about it and was intrigued and wanted to watch it, and I'd seen and enjoyed director David Bruckner's other movie The Night House, so I was down. Pretty solid horror movie about four friends walking through a creepy European forest, lots of great atmosphere and good scares. I particularly liked the dream sequences where Bruckner would kind of combine the forest location with other locations from the character's memory in these surreal ways.

n) The Pale Blue Eye

The Pale Blue Eye is based on a novel that's one of those 'historical fiction' things that places real people in fictional situations -- specifically, a young Edgar Allen Poe (played by Harry Melling) assists a detective (played by Christian Bale) in investigating murders at a military academy. A decent little mystery plot, but the whole Poe aspect feels tacked on and pointless. But Melling is really well cast, I'd watch him in a Poe biopic.

o) RRR

Took me a couple years to check this out after its big Oscar run, but I'm glad I did, the musical sequences are so over-the-top and cool. The way they put Indian historical figures into this colorfully stylized, heightened reality was a much more interesting way to combine fact and fiction than something like The Pale Blue Eye.

p) Robot Dreams

I didn't like this as much as Flow, the other recent word-of-mouth hit European animated movie with no dialogue, but it was pretty good. As a big Wall-E fan, though, I'm just starting to reckon with how much fiction there is that aims to make the audience sympathize with a robot's emotions and how I feel about that given all the moronic shit people are doing with artificial intelligence these days, including believing it's their girlfriend or boyfriend or therapist.

q) Mufasa: The Lion King

I don't begrudge directors for taking big money gigs, if this is how Barry Jenkins gets the kind of financial freedom he deserves for making Moonlight, cool. But a live action/CGI remake of a Disney animated classic that's patterned after The Godfather Part II definitely feels like something of a waste of a talent, and I feel like Moana 2 would have benefited from Lin-Manuel Miranda's songwriting more than this did.

10:00 AM

Friday, July 04, 2025

Debbie Harry just turned 80, so I wrote about Blondie's "Fade Away and Radiate" for Deep Cut Friday. Also for Spin this week, I ranked Missy Elliott's albums and wrote about songs by Prince, De La Soul, and Fela Kuti for a list of songs about peace.

11:37 AM

Monthly Report: May 2025 Albums

Thursday, July 03, 2025

1. Ben Kweller - Cover The Mirrors

Ben Kweller is a few months older than me, and when we were both 15 and I was playing in my first garage band, I'd see him on MTV News and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" with his band Radish. After Kweller went solo, I saw him play a great show with Brendan Benson at a bar in Baltimore when he was 21 (I was 20, so security put the Sharpie X's on my hands). I wouldn't say I've followed his career too closely over the years, "Falling" was always the one song I'd come back to now and then, love that one. But I always liked and related to Kweller, and my heart broke hearing about his teenage son Dorian dying in a car accident a couple years ago. Cover the Mirrors is Kweller's first album since that tragedy, and I was holding it together through most of the album, but man, that closing track "Oh Dorian" really made me cry. Kweller's voice is eternally boyish even now in his forties and still makes crisp, catchy pop/rock, so there's this sort of indefatigable sweetness to the album, even when he's singing about depression and going through something absolutely awful. This is in my 2025 albums Spotify playlist along with the other albums in this post.

2. Aminé - 13 Months of Sunshine

Sometimes I feel like people are too obsessed with seasonally appropriate music in hip-hop, I hear a lot about how so-and-so should only drop in the summer or this song shouldn't have come out in the winter. But I will say, pretty much every Aminé album has come out between May and August and that feels about right, even as his lyrics have become gradually more frank and introspective, he just has this ear for bright warm weather beats. DJ Dahi did a lot of the production on here, some of my favorite work from him since the early Vince Staples stuff. On 13 Months of Sunshine's great autobiographical opening track "Feels So Good," Aminé talks about interning at Complex, and I didn't even realize that he was there around the same time I started writing for Complex back in the day. Waxahatchee guests on both the Ben Kweller and Aminé albums, it was kind of fun to notice that as I was putting this post together.

3. Isaiah Falls - LVRS PARADISE (Side A)

I heard the single from this album, "Butterflies" featuring Joyce Wrice, on the radio recently and my ears perked up immediately, because I'm already a fan of Wrice but had never heard of Isaiah Falls, he's definitely quickly becoming one of my favorite newer R&B acts. He excels at slow jams but the uptempo stuff like "A Florida Luv Story" is great too.

4. PinkPantheress - Fancy That

I was a little less enthusiastic about Heaven Knows than To Hell With It, so I started to think that maybe PinkPantheress was one of those artists that just had this very narrow lane and once you get used to what they do, they get less interesting with each release. But Fancy That might be my favorite project from her to date, she's subtly expanding the variety of sounds and styles in her tracks without losing her main signatures (the brevity, that voice that sounds like nobody else). My favorite tracks are probably the three at the end, all in a row, great run.

5. Sparks - MAD!

I had a lot of fun ranking the Sparks catalog a few weeks ago and really finally taking in the size and variety of their output, almost 30 albums over the last 54 years. I found that I have something of a preference towards their more band-oriented music and their more deadpan humor, and a lot of MAD! is just the Mael brothers with Russell delivering the lyrics with an audible smirk. So I didn't take to it as immediately as some of their other albums, but I really like "Hit Me, Baby" and "A Little Bit of Light Banter."

6. Little Feat - Strike Up the Band

Little Feat's classic lineup was, if you ask me, the second greatest band of the 1970s, and it was a great honor to interview Bill Payne and Kenny Gradney last year. I may have even been the first person to publish the news that Little Feat had just recorded an album of new material, their first since 2012. Last year was also the first time I'd seen Little Feat since the death of Paul Barrere, and I was really impressed with the new guitarist and singer Scott Sharrard, a Michigan native born in the '70s who'd previously played in later lineups of the Allman Brothers Band and on Gregg Allman's solo work. In fact, I'm just realizing now that he played on the great cover of Little Feat's "Willin'" on Allman's final album, so this is really just a great match. Sharrard's voice and especially guitar solos fit right in with the classic Little Feat sound and there are some excellent songs, including "Bluegrass Pines," which Payne wrote with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.

7. I'm With Her - Wild And Clear And Blue

Aoife O'Donovan made one of my favorite albums of 2022 and Sarah Jarosz made one of my favorite albums of 2024, but I wasn't really that familiar with their careers before that and didn't realize they were also in a group together with Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek that released an album in 2018. I'm With Her feels like kind of a 2010s cliche kind of name at this point that just reminds me of the Hillary Clinton campaign, but whatever, I love hearing these three voices together, they're a soft rock supergroup much more up my alley than Boygenius.

8. Maddie & Tae - Love & Light

Maddie & Tae's first two albums each had a #1 country radio hit, one of them being 2014's "Girl In A Country Song," which skewered the overwhelmingly male perspective of mainstream country at the time. A decade later, there are even fewer women on country radio, and Maddie & Tae's latest album and all its singles have failed to chart. And that's really frustrating, because Maddie Font and Taylor Kerr have become really consistent, clever songwriters and there are so many songs that could be hits on here, particularly "Drunk Girls In Bathrooms."

9. Maren Morris - Dreamsicle

Maren Morris has had some crossover success with "The Middle" with Zedd and the version of "Bones" with Hozier, but she didn't so much go pop with her fourth major label album as she pointedly left the country music industry. She took a stand for left wing causes like trans rights, called out problematic country superstars like Jason Aldean and Morgan Wallen, divorced her D-list country singer husband, and came out as bisexual. And here's another case of an artist I really like making a record that completely missed the Billboard 200, even though Dreamsicle is packed with excellent songs made with Top 40 hitmaker types like Jack Antonoff, Greg Kurstin, Joel Little, and Julia Michaels. "Push Me Over" should've been a single, that's the one that really stood out to me, both here and on last year's Intermission EP. I really like the piano ballad "Carry Me Through" too, I could go for a whole record that sounds like that.

10. Eric Church - Evangeline vs. The Machine

Eric Church's latest album did chart, but it peaked lower on the Billboard 200 than any of his other studio albums, even the first two from before he really became a hitmaker. That's not totally surprising given that this is one of the riskier albums from one of contemporary mainstream country's biggest risk takers, but I guess it really shows that his guest appearances on the last two Morgan Wallen albums didn't provide any kind of boost to his career. Evangeline vs. The Machine is full of string and brass arrangements that are a big departure from the sound of every previous Church album, and it ends with a cover of "Clap Hands" by Tom Waits. And I like all of that more in theory than in practice, sometimes the orchestrations really overwhelm the songs, and I don't think his version of one of my favorite Waits songs is particularly good. Still, last year's charity single "Darkest Hour" is a great song and I also really like "Rocket's White Lincoln," it's an interesting new chapter to a great catalog.

The Worst Album of the Month: Blondshell - If You Asked For A Picture

There's a lot of inoffensive, well-meaning indie rock that I could snark about but choose not to, they usually seem like nice people with good politics and cool influences and the respect of many of my music critic peers. Now and then a record will get on my nerves, though. A radio station I listen to, WTMD, has played two songs from Blondshell's second album a lot in the last few months, "What's Fair" and "23's A Baby." I really just do not like her bored-sounding voice, and checking out the entire album didn't improve my opinion much. The latter song just irritates me so much, it sounds like a 28-year-old woman acting completely perplexed or annoyed that another woman became a mother at 23, that whole thing these days of adults infantilizing other adults or acting like someone is practically a teen mom if they have kids in their twenties.

11:36 AM

My Favorite Artists of the 1970s

Wednesday, July 02, 2025

I've previously done this for the 2010s, the 1990s, and the 1980s -- taking all my lists of favorite albums for each years of those decades, creating a weighted points system, and tabulating which artists made the most records that I love the most. An extremely nerdy thing to do on top of an already pretty nerdy pursuit, but I find it a lot of fun. And I'd been really looking forward to doing this with the 1970s because it's kind of the peak era of artists I loved who often made one or two albums every year, meaning there's a lot more data to work with. So now that I've listed my 50 favorite albums and 100 favorite singles of each year of the '70s (links at the bottom of the post), I crunched the numbers, and in some instances surprised myself a little bit.

My 50 Favorite Album Artists of the 1970s:

1. David Bowie

2. Joni Mitchell

3. Steely Dan

4. Little Feat

5. Stevie Wonder

6. Neil Young

7. Elton John

8. Thin Lizzy

9. Led Zeppelin

10. Queen

11. Grateful Dead

12. Marvin Gaye

13. Jackson Browne

14. Funkadelic (tie)

14. Willie Nelson (tie)

16. Al Green (tie)

16. The Allman Brothers Band (tie)

18. The Rolling Stones

19. The Who

20. Elvis Costello

21. Tom Waits

22. Bruce Springsteen

23. Fleetwood Mac

24. Donna Summer

25. Electric Light Orchestra

26. The Ramones

27. Todd Rundgren

28. Big Star (tie)

28. Talking Heads (tie)

30. Black Sabbath

31. Van Morrison

32. The Clash

33. Paul Simon

34. Bill Withers

35. Billy Joel

36. Aerosmith

37. Yes

38. Bob Dylan

39. Bob Marley & The Wailers

40. Pink Floyd

41. Parliament (tie)

41. T. Rex (tie)

43. Rush

44. Patti Smith

45. Can

46. Curtis Mayfield

47. George Jones (tie)

47. The Isley Brothers (tie)

47. Roxy Music (tie)

50. Sparks (tie)

50. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (tie)

The top six artists were about what I expected but not in the order I would've predicted. The points totals for those artists was pretty close so it could've gone totally differently if I'd re-listened to certain albums and liked them a lot more or less when I was making the lists. I expected Stevie Wonder to be at or closer to the top, particularly since I rate some of the albums outside his 'big four' more than other people, but then again, he only made two albums (and only one good one) in the second half of the decade. Bowie, on the other hand, was really active through the whole decade, and I rated 10 of his 11 albums pretty highly (sorry, Pin Ups).

A few artists did managed to get on the list with only three '70s albums if they were all great, Elvis Costello being the most prominent of those. If I'd counted Parliament and Funkadelic as the same act, which they essentially were in all but name, they'd actually pull ahead of Stevie Wonder. There are a few other artists who'd move up a spot or two if I'd counted solo albums, and Lou Reed would be on the list if I'd counted Loaded with his solo stuff, but I tried to keep it simple instead of bending the rules for things like that. If I counted every album Brian Eno produced or played on (Roxy Music, Talking Heads, Devo, Bowie, Genesis, John Cale, etc.), he'd be #1! I felt ridiculous having Bob Dylan and Bob Marley next to each other and Bill Withers and Billy Joel next to each other, but that's genuinely just how the numbers shook out.

My 50 Favorite Singles Artists of the 1970s:

1. Steely Dan

2. Stevie Wonder

3. Queen

4. Elton John

5. David Bowie

6. Led Zeppelin

7. Al Green

8. The Who

9. Marvin Gaye

10. The Doobie Brothers

11. The Rolling Stones

12. Fleetwood Mac

13. The Eagles

14. Earth, Wind & Fire

15. Elvis Costello

16. Billy Joel

17. Neil Young

18. George Jones

19. The Isley Brothers

20. The Bee Gees

21. Electric Light Orchestra

22. James Brown

23. Aerosmith

24. The Allman Brothers Band

25. Paul Simon

26. Lynyrd Skynyrd

27. Parliament (tie)

27. Bob Seger (tie)

29. The Doors

30. The Police

31. Paul McCartney (tie)

31. Steve Miller Band (tie)

33. Bill Withers

34. Bruce Springsteen

35. Pink Floyd

36. Donna Summer

37. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

38. Van Halen

39. Bad Company

40. Bob Marley & The Wailers

41. Creedence Clearwater Revival

42. Barry White

43. Thin Lizzy

44. Chicago

45. Heart

46. Van Morrison

47. Boston

48. Jackson Browne

49. The Cars

50. Chic

Things were very close here between Steely Dan and Stevie, but they were well ahead of everyone else. The Doobie Brothers are the top singles act that didn't make it onto the albums list, and Joni Mitchell is the top albums act that didn't make the singles list. If Parliament-Funkadelic were counted as one act here, they'd place just ahead of the Eagles. And Funkadelic did better on albums and Parliament did better on singles. Tom Petty is the only artist who appeared on my '70s, '80s, and '90s artist lists, which feels about right to me.

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1970

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1971

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1972

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1973

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1974

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1975

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1976

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1977

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1978

My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1979

6:00 AM

TV Diary

Monday, June 30, 2025

a) "Stick"

I will always love Owen Wilson for Dignan from Bottle Rocket, so "Stick" won me over immediately with his character who's a little bit of a middle-aged Dignan, but with a backstory that's more like Luke Wilson's character from The Royal Tenenbaums. In terms of the pretty high bar a lot of Apple TV+ shows have set, it feels like a very simple, unambitious show, but it's grown on me a lot. Pretty much the whole show is 5 characters driving around in an RV, and I enjoy the interactions between pretty much amy pair of those characters, it's a great little ensemble cast. But the golf prodigy Santi (Peter Dager) is the reason all of those people have been brought together, and he's by far the least likeable character and least likeable actor in the show, especially after being a seriously irredeemable little shit in the last episode.

b) "Ironheart"

Disney+'s MCU series have been really hit or miss, and given that Ryan Coogler is an exec producer on "Ironheart," which centers on a character that was in Wakanda Forever, and has a bunch of actors I usually enjoy, I hoped this would be one of the good ones. But my feelings are pretty mixed after the first three episodes. The main character has an AI assistant who looks and acts like her dead best friend, which is certainly a timely premise, but I don't care for the way that

c) "Revival"

Melanie Scrofano battled reincarnated dead people for four seasons on "Wynonna Earp," one of my favorite SyFy of the past ten years. So I'm happy that she's back in another SyFy show about people rising from the dead, nothing wrong with having a niche. And this show has a different tone and premise, apparently it's based on an Image Comics series, I'm enjoying the creepy small town Wisconsin atmosphere and the ensemble cast.

d) "The Waterfront"

Kevin Williamson has created some very popular properties including the Scream movies and "Dawson's Creek" and I've seen very very little of his work. Maybe a couple episodes of a show he did with Kevin Bacon a decade ago? I don't know about "The Waterfront," Jake Weary and Humberly Gonzalez have a lot of chemistry so I end up paying attention to their scenes and then tuning out a lot of the rest of the time, which means they're really not utilizing Holt McCallany well.

e) "Patience"

I like seeing shows like 2022's "As We See It" where characters on the autism spectrum are played by actors on the spectrum, and Ella Maisy Purvis plays the title character on "Patience," a British show about an autistic archivist in a criminal records department who starts to help a police detective solve crimes. It's so easy to imagine an American version of this show where it's a totally formulaic procedural that depicts Patience's talent as a gimmicky superpower, so I appreciate the subtle and sensitive way this show approaches the story.

f) "The Survivors"

This is a downbeat Australian drama about the family of a teenager who died in a storm in Tasmania. My wife and I had our honeymoon in Australia and I have particularly fond memories of the day or two we spent in Tasmania, so I like seeing it onscreen even if that's not really at all the point here.

g) "We Were Liars"

"We Were Liars" is based on a YA novel and reminds me a lot of stuff I've seen before about people leading scandalous lives in beautiful idyllic places, especially the way they keep teasing some big catalyzing event without telling you right away what happened. And I have to say I'm probably not sufficiently curious enough to keep watching to learn more.

h) "Countdown"

My wife loves Jensen Ackles from "Supernatural" so I was like hey let's watch his new Amazon show, but she tuned out well before the end of the first episode and I didn't last much longer, really rote crime drama stuff.

i) "The Bear"

Like a lot of people, I've been a little less interested with "The Bear" with each passing season, but I haven't bailed on season 4 or started to actively dislike it like some have. I do think it'd be good if it stopped winning comedy categories at award shows and/or got moved to drama categories, though. Out of the first six episodes of the season that I've watched, I didn't laugh at all until the third episode, although I did laugh pretty hard at that one on multiple occasions. And I haven't seen any self-indulgent episodes that made me despair like S2E7 or S3E1, although Syd's more serious storylines are a lot more compelling than Carmy's at this point. I liked when Carmy finally set a repeating menu, though, that was a nice moment of rare actual character development. Generally, I still like the cast and their characters and the atmosphere and really effective use of music, the episode with Talk Talk and Pretenders songs was especially good.

j) "Iyanu"

This Cartoon Network series about an orphan who discovers she has mystic powers has a pretty cool visual style. I feel like my kids might dig this one but I haven't gotten them to watch it yet. It's already a hit, though, and recently got renewed for a second season, and some Baltimore guys from a production company called Blakwater Music do a lot of the music for the series, happy to see them doing well.

k) "Moonrise"

This Netflix anime series is about a lunar rebellion, which is just an awesome premise, although I'm not that into the animation style.

l) "Go!"

A South African show on Netflix about a sprinter going to an elite school on a scholarship, didn't really take much of an interest in it after sampling an episode.

m) "Caught"

New Jersey novelist Harlan Coben's books have sold 90 million copies, and since 2018 he's had a huge production deal with Netflix that has adapted at least a dozen of his books into series, all limited series that run 5 to 8 episodes, some American productions and some made in France or Poland or Argentina, which is where "Caught" was made. And I have no idea if any of these shows are particularly popular even by Netflix standards, I've never heard anybody talk about any of them, my only knowledge of any of this stuff is seeing it pop up on my Netflix menu. "Caught" is pretty dour, I didn't get too far with it.

n) "Just One Look"

"Just One Look" is another Harlen Coben adaptation, I think the third or fourth Polish production, so maybe they really love this stuff in Poland. This one is about a woman whose husband has disappeared, I found it a little more interesting than most of the Coben shows I've seen.

o) "Until You Burn"

"Until You Burn" is a Colombian show about a guy avenging his dead brother, it's based on a very old novel but my frame of reference is that it mostly reminds me of that ABC show "Revenge."

p) "Japan's Number One Jerk Salaryman"

I guess the title of this Netflix series is riffing on a '60s martial arts movie called Japan's Number One Judo-Man. It's a dramedy about a politician who's kind of a shitty selfish person who gradually becomes a better person in the process of trying to improve his public image, which is a very interestingly unfamiliar concept to someone who mainly knows what politicians are like in America, like I can't even imagine a show with that storyline taking place here unless it was a lot more pointedly satirical.

q) "Bet Your Life"

A charming Turkish show about a guy who can see a ghost and helps them try to solve their murder, I like it and the actress Elsa Bilgic is so beautiful.

r) "Weak Hero"

This is an example of the kind of great title and premise -- an action series about a teenager who outsmarts his bigger and stronger bullies at school -- that you can get from Korea that you would never get from American TV.

s) "Destination X"

I've been complaining a lot lately about the trend of game shows and reality shows being hosted by actors, not totally washed-up actors but reasonably good and respected who should be doing a scripted show instead. In this case, NBC's "Destination X" is hosted by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who stars in a current hit show, "The Boys," and I don't know if that makes it better or worse. I kind of like the concept of "Destination X" even if it's still pretty stupid, and some of the women on the show are really beautiful, as is often the case with these shows.

t) "Call Her Alex"

"Call Her Alex" is a two-part Hulu documentary about Alexandra Cooper, host of the "Call Her Daddy" podcast. I don't know much about all this stuff but it's one of those situations where someone is a lot more earnest about what they do than you might expect, the whole thing takes itself very seriously. One of the episode descriptions is "what starts as a sex podcast evolves into the foundation of an empire."

u) "Harlem Ice"

A nice Disney+ docuseries about a competitive figure skating team from Harlem, it's such an interesting sort of combination of athleticism and choreography.

v) "Underdogs"

I have a higher tolerance for Ryan Reynolds than a lot of people, but this Disney+ show where he does wacky voiceovers to nature footage is pretty annoying.

w) "Welcome To Wrexham"

This show continues to feature Ryan Reynolds in agreeable small doses alongside more interesting figures like Welsh football hooligans. I like how it's a sports doc that deals with the actual games but also gives you such a wide view of the business side and the fans in the team's city, there's some really great storytelling in this show.

x) "Power Moves with Shaqulle O'Neal"

I don't know much about sports or sneakers but I remember how Reebok and Nike were the two big brands when I was growing up, and then at some point I realized that Nike was still huge and Reebok had fallen way behind. So it's interesting to see this show about Shaq and Allen Iverson leading Reebok's effort to be competitive again and land some big athlete endorsements, it's all about the behind-the-scenes process like that movie Air.

y) "How I Escaped My Cult"

There are so many docuseries about cults now, and every episode of this Freeform series is about a different cult, which really shows you what an epidemic it is in America.

z) "Trainwreck"

Netflix frames each "Trainwreck" installment as a feature film but they're really not that much longer than an hour and they release a new one every week, it's really a series. Of the new season, I've watched the Rob Ford one and the Astroworld festival tragedy, and that one really made me angry. I love that some people risked their careers or their business relationships with Live Nation to talk about what happened.

9:59 AM

Saturday, June 28, 2025

I took a look back at the history of country/rap collaborations for Complex.

11:43 AM

Friday, June 27, 2025

I wrote the first edition of Spin's new weekly column Deep Cut Friday about "Wind Chimes" by the Beach Boys. I also wrote pieces ranking the albums of Fugazi, Pulp, Marianne Faithfull, and Alanis Morissette.

10:42 AM

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Today is the 3rd annual Baltimore Club Music Day and I'm very happy to announce that my first book Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music will be out on August 19 via Repeater Books! The book is up for preorder pretty much anywhere books are sold, but don't hesitate to reach out (my email is shipley.al@gmail.com) if you have an independent bookstore or media outlet or podcast or really anywhere I can sell this book or get the word out about it, I am very excited to finally share this thing with the world! I interviewed 50 people over a span of 18 years for this book and I'm really proud of it.

12:10 PM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 389: The Beach Boys

Monday, June 16, 2025

Brian Wilson died on Wednesday at the age of 82, two days after Sly Stone, who was also 82. People have compared it to when David Bowie and Prince died in the same year, but I don't know if we've ever lost two titans of popular music in the same week in unrelated deaths like this before. As this series stretches into nearly 400 volumes, I've covered most of the big names I could possibly cover, but there are always certain indispensable artists I haven't gotten to yet, and the Beach Boys are one of those that stayed at the top of my to-do list, I just kept putting off the exciting but daunting task of trying to boil down this catalog to 80 minutes. Kinda wish I'd gotten it done before Brian passed away, but it gave me a reason to dig in and work on it finally.

The Beach Boys deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Heads You Win, Tails I Lose

2. Chug-A-Lug

3. Farmer's Daughter

4. Catch A Wave

5. No-Go Showboat

6. The Warmth of the Sun

7. All Summer Long

8. Merry Christmas, Baby

9. She Knows Me Too Well

10. In The Back Of My Mind

11. Girl Don't Tell Me

12. Let Him Run Wild

13. You've Got To Hide Your Love Away

14. I'm Waiting For The Day

15. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)

16. Wind Chimes

17. Vegetables

18. Aren't You Glad

19. Let The Wind Blow

20. Busy Doin' Nothin'

21. Be Still

22. Our Prayer

23. Cabinessence

24. All I Wanna Do

25. Forever

26. 'Til I Die

27. Feel Flows

28. All This Is That

29. California Saga (Big Sur)

30. Back Home

31. The Night Was So Young

Tracks 1 and 2 from Surfin' Safari (1962)

Track 3 from Surfin' U.S.A. (1963)

Track 4 from Surfer Girl (1963)

Track 5 from Little Deuce Coupe (1963)

Track 6 from Shut Down Volume 2 (1964)

Track 7 from All Summer Long (1964)

Track 8 from The Beach Boys' Christmas Album (1964)

Tracks 9 and 10 from The Beach Boys Today! (1965)

Tracks 11 and 12 from Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (1965)

Track 13 from Beach Boys' Party! (1965)

Tracks 14 and 15 from Pet Sounds (1966)

Tracks 16 and 17 from Smiley Smile (1967)

Tracks 18 and 19 from Wild Honey (1967)

Tracks 20 and 21 from Friends (1968)

Tracks 22 and 23 from 20/20 (1969)

Tracks 24 and 25 from Sunflower (1970)

Tracks 26 and 27 from Surf's Up (1971)

Track 28 from Carl and the Passions - "So Tough" (1972)

Track 29 from Holland (1973)

Track 30 from 15 Big Ones (1976)

Track 31 from The Beach Boys Love You (1977)

Growing up, the Who and Hendrix were a bit more important to me than the Beach Boys and the Beatles, in terms of me just having an immediate connection to the '60s music that was more about the raw energy of a band. So for me, part of my musical maturation has been caring just as much about studio craftmanship, in a weird way Steely Dan and Burt Bacharach were my gateways to appreciating what Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys did.

Pet Sounds was the only Beach Boys album I heard as a teenager. I'd only just gotten into their great '70s albums Surf's Up and Sunflower and Holland for the first time in the past year and I was amazed, as many people have been, at how modern "All I Wanna Do" and "Feel Flows" sound. And this past week it was really fun to listen to the '60s albums in chronological order and really experience that incredible creative journey the band went on. Hearing how they got to Pet Sounds made me appreciate that album even more. I really almost opened the playlist with "Chug-A-Lug" because I love the idea of starting that journey with a song about drinking root beer.

Of course, the big dividing point in the Beach Boys story is before and after Smile, the legendary 'lost' album that remained uncompleted after Brian Wilson reached a breaking point in 1967, despite the success of the lead single "Good Vibrations." Several tracks written for Smile appeared on other Beach Boys albums over the next few years, sometimes in very different arrangements, including "Vegetables," "Wind Chimes," "Our Prayer," and "Cabinessence" on this playlist (I will say, I like the Smile version of "Wind Chimes" a lot more than the Smiley Smile version here, but both are good).

Smile was eventually completed in a couple forms -- with new recordings as 2004's Brian Wilson Presents Smile, and with the original tapes as 2011's The Smile Sessions. Listening to those, I don't think Smile ever would've surpassed Pet Sounds -- I think it would've been a great follow-up to their pinnacle, the Wish You Were Here to their Dark Side of the Moon. It still feels like one of popular music's great what-if albums, though. I think the band would've been commercially and creatively a lot better off if they'd finished Smile in '67 and released that instead of the comparatively lo-fi Smiley Smile.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine's excellent Stereogum piece about some of Wilson's best deep cuts included some of these tracks ("Farmer's Daughter," "The Warmth of the Sun," "Let Him Run Wild," "Busy Doin' Nothin'," and "The Night Was So Young"). Given that the Beach Boys made 29 albums over the course of 50 years, I thought about whether to try to cover that entire run or cut it off somewhere. And seeing that 1989's Still Cruisin', the album that contained the band's divisive last #1 single "Kokomo," isn't on streaming services kinda made me feel free to end the playlist somewhere earlier, and '77's The Beach Boys Love You seemed like a good place to stop as one of their last well regarded albums.