1. Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral
When Lanegan released his last album with Isobel Campbell, I said here "I’ve always liked Mark Lanegan’s voice and have been procrastinating about getting into the Screaming Trees for going on two decades now," so I am proud to say that I finally listened to Sweet Oblivion on Spotify after almost 20 years of hemming and hawing about buying a Trees album. But anyway, this album's really good too. I think a lot of the narrative about how different it is from his previous stuff with the drum machines and all is a little bit inflated, it sounds a lot like Bubblegum to me, but there are moments like "Ode To Sad Disco" that produce a very strange and very lovely hybrid of thinks you wouldn't really expect to go together.

2. War On Women - Improvised Weapons
I'm a big fan of Shawna Potter and Brooks Harlan's other band Avec, and had the privelege to meet Shawna a while back and she asked me to write a press bio for her new band, War On Women. So I went and checked out the band live not really knowing what to expect and was just blown away. Improvised Weapons, like their live show, is just a quick 20-minute explosion of riot grrl thrash metal where the lyrics are as ruthless and smart as the music is. I really hope people hear and dig this record, it's a hell of a ride.

3. Kalenna - Chamber of Diaries
As a huge stan for Last Train To Paris, I've eagerly followed every Diddy-Dirty Money spinoff mixtape and solo project, and this one is especially good (and now with the apparent demise of Dirty Money as a going concern, all the more reason to closely follow what emerges from these folks). Dawn Richard's A Tell Tale Heart mixtape last year had pockets of serious potential, but the lack of mastering and overall low key vibe just held it back big time for me, whereass Kalenna's first solo mixtape is a little more swaggy and polished but also totally consistent with the LTTP vibe, some really great production, especially on "Poison." A really unfortunate array of guest verses by no-name rappers, though, which is really one of the biggest pitfalls of R&B mixtapes.

4. DDm - Winter And The Tinman's Heart
I reviewed this recently, it's a pretty cool record and it's an interesting moment in the evolution of this battle rapper Midas I first met 5 years ago and has been through a lot of musical and personal upheaval in the time since then, some of which is tied to him coming out as the rare (though increasingly less so) 'gay rapper' but really his music has always been good and interesting regardless of that.

5. Jumpcuts - Electrickery
Another Baltimore band with an album I wrote the press bio for. I've known Andy Shankman for a few years and have in the past year worked on some music with him (he played guitar for the short set I played at my birthday party at the Windup Space in January), and have heard the debut album from his main band, Jumpcuts, in various stages of completion for a while before it finally dropped last month. "Singular" is my favorite song, and as far as I know it's the single from the album because at some point I started telling Andy, "you need to pick a single, and that's the one, 'Singular' is it." The drummer from Celebration and Beach House's producer worked on this, it has some pretty cool synth sounds.

6. Heartless Bastards - Arrow
I liked but didn't love this band's last album, feel pretty much the same about this one although I feel like it may have more potential to grow on me over time, some of the uptempo stuff like "Late In The Night" is really hitting a nice twangy '70s rock sweet spot for me.

7. Rich Kidz - Everybody Eat Bread
Some cats I know were pretty excited about these guys, decided to check out this tape. It's alright, above average swag rap, but I don't like the way this stuff has been turning very earnest and serious with a bunch of half-assed melodic hooks, it's like every corner of the rap world has decided to make concessions to the Drake era.

8. Van Halen - A Different Kind Of Truth
The band sounds good, but David Lee Roth is both the best and worst thing about this album, since he's as entertaingly bawdy and nonsensical as ever ("Bullethead" has the best collection of one-liners), but his voice is pretty damn rough, and it's so easy to imagine that if they'd kissed and made up a little earlier he might've sounded much better.

9. The Sword Swallow - The Sword Swallow
Yet another record by a Baltimore act that I'd had on iPod for a while before it was officially released in February. Back when I worked on my data dump of Jon Ehrens bands last year, The Sword Swallow stood out as one of the weirdest in a roster of weird records, the sound of a pop/rock songwriter just taking apart a bunch of unused compositions and stringing them together into unpredictable collages, surprisingly one of his most fun things to listen to.

10. Gucci Mane - Trap Back
I don't totally get the excitement around this tape. On one hand, Gucci's buzz has been ebbing for so long that there's nowhere to go but up, but on the other hand, I don't think I like this more than Writings On The Wall II, and that was only last summer. In general Gucci getting more bleak and trap-obsessed is just kinda not interesting to me.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26, 2012 at 12:15 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.