Monday, November 30, 2015




























Golden Beat, one of my new bands that debuted a few months ago, will be playing its second show on December 8 at the Windup Space in Baltimore, with Soft Peaks and Albert Bagman. We've got some new songs we've written since the first show, I'm excited.

Sunday, November 29, 2015


















I wrote a thing for Complex about how to throw a killer party according to your favorite rappers.

Movie Diary

Saturday, November 28, 2015




















a) Appropriate Behavior
The debut feature from writer/director/star Desiree Akhavan really impressed me, in some ways it's just another movie about a cool Brooklyn person's love life. But there's some interesting beats to the dialogue and some unusual tangents the story takes, and seeing a movie about a bisexual protagonist that actually tries to depict that lifestyle instead of playing it for jokes was refreshing.

b) The Salvation
Kind of a cool old-fashioned western about Danish settlers, directed by one of those Danish 'Dogme95' dudes, with Mads Mikkelson and Eva Green and other badasses being totally badass.

c) Fifty Shades Of Grey
I've hate-watched a lot of movies lately -- shit, I paid money to see Aloha in the theater -- but I admit that washing this movie to talk shit on it definitely can give off an ironic porn purchase vibe. But I'd heard so many things about how supremely awkward the movie is, and I wasn't disappointed. I thought Dakota Johnson was cute in the short-lived sitcom "Ben And Kate," and seeing her in this movie was kind of weird and disillusioning, like my mild celebrity crush had not yet progressed to 'clamoring for nude scenes' level and besides the chemistry and storytelling in this movie is all so flat that it's difficult to even enjoy nudity as nudity. It may eventually become something for people to satirize and jeer at endlessly like Showgirls, though. 

I have some kind of petty personal stake in rooting against Jeremy Renner and his career, so I appreciate that this movie sold so few tickets that it will probably hurt his chances of headlining movies in the future. He's not really that bad, though, and his performance holds this movie together pretty well, although it's one of those movies based on a true story that really just makes me want to read the books it was based on and strip away all the cinematic window dressing.

This is the passion project that Simon Helberg (Wolowitz from "The Big Bang Theory") apparently took a pile of his sitcom money to make. And in some ways it's just this sadly predictable wish fulfillment kind of movie where the nerdy guy writes and directs himself in a story where he messes up things with his beautiful girlfriend (Melanie Lynskey) because another beautiful woman (Maggie Grace) takes an almost absurdly exaggerated interest in him. The movie, of course, has some self-awareness about all this, but when it tries to play these dynamics for laughs it just gets stupid, and when it tries to go for emotional resonance it's even worse. 

f) Bad Words
Jason Bateman's passion project as a director and star is interesting in that it's one of his first major roles since "Arrested Development" where he isn't playing that put-upon nice guy surrounded by wacky characters. And for a while it's interesting just to watch him play against type and enjoy being kind of a mean, unsympathetic character. But then he spends half the movie saying offensive things to an Indian-American kid, and the movie's modest charm wears thin.

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 52: Alicia Keys

Tuesday, November 24, 2015


















A few months ago I got my first request that I've ever gotten for this series, to do an Alicia Keys playlist. It took me a while to get around to this, but I wanted to get it in before the end of the year, I couldn't say no to a reader, so shout out to Larry. She hasn't released an album in a while, but she's been trickling out new songs for the last year and is making her first appearance on "Empire" this week.

Alicia Keys Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Wreckless Love
2. Dragon Days
3. This Bed
4. Lovin' U
5. I Need You
6. One Thing
7. Heartburn
8. Love Is Blind
9. Never Felt This Way (Interlude)
10. Butterflyz
11. Like The Sea
12. Stolen Moments (Live)
13. Slow Down
14. When It's All Over
15. Love Is My Disease
16. Wake Up
17. Limitedless
18, Where Do We Go From Here
19. Goodbye

Tracks 4, 9, 10 and 19 from Songs In A Minor (2001)
Tracks 2, 7, 13 and 16 from The Diary Of Alicia Keys (2003)
Track 12 from Unplugged (2005)
Tracks 1, 5 and 18 from As I Am (2007)
Tracks 3, 8, 11 and 15 from The Element Of Freedom (2009)
Tracks 6, 14 and 17 from Girl On Fire (2012)

Alicia Keys debuted 14 years ago as the kind of rare instant phenomenon that gets #1 songs and Grammys and multi-platinum sales right out of the gate. And that can make an artist really hard to root for, if it doesn't make you outright root against them. But now that the industry is done trying to convince us that she's a once-in-a-lifetime talent, she's just another singer. In fact she's fallen from prominence a lot faster than some contemporaries from back then like Beyonce, which is funny given how differently they were looked at back then. And now they're both married to guys who wrote "Money, Cash, Hoes," that's gotta count for something.

I still hate "Fallin'" with a passion, she's only had a couple hits I've hated since then, she's mostly built up a pretty respectable catalog, even if she didn't turn out to be the Stevie Wonder-level genius she was marketed as. The sound of Songs In A Minor has dated quickly, and my favorite song on it is the hidden track, "Lovin' U," but she improved quickly. The Diary of Alicia Keys is solid album, with some of her best singles and her best deep cuts. And she's slowly gotten away from the cheesy 'classical piano and hip hop beats' stuff and made some pretty nice contemporary R&B with collaborators including Frank Ocean ("One Thing"), Timbaland ("Heartburn"), Pop & Oak ("Limitedless"), and John Legend ("When It's All Over"). You know how much it pisses me off that Alicia Keys made me enjoy a song called "Limitedless"? Good lord that's a bad title.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince
Vol. 45: Duran Duran
Vol. 46: Rihanna
Vol. 47: Janet Jackson
Vol. 48: Sara Bareilles
Vol. 49: Motley Crue
Vol. 50: The Who
Vol. 51: Coldplay

Monthly Report: November 2015 Singles

Friday, November 20, 2015























1. Colonel Loud f/ T.I., Young Dolph, and Ricco Barrino - "California"
One of my least favorite songs on the radio the last few months was Vivian Green's "Get Right Back To My Baby," which pasted a mediocre new R&B song over a sample of a perfect one, "Before I Let Go" by Frankie Beverly and Maze. So it was refreshing to start hearing another song that made much better use of another one of the old Maze hits I hear constantly on the grown folks R&B stations, "We Are One." Colonel Loud is a guy from North Carolina who got a bunch of other southerners to appear on his tribute to the west coast (which makes the use of Maze all the more appropriate, as an east coast group that didn't get successful until they relocated to San Francisco). There are so many guests, in fact, that Colonel Loud pushes himself out of the spotlight. On the original version, which didn't have T.I. on it, Colonel Loud's verse starts 2 minutes into the song, and with T.I. added to the front you don't hear the song's main artist until 2:31. And he's not bad, at all, he just takes a backseat to the beat, the great hook sung by Fantasia's brother, and even Dolph, who sounds so effortless on here that this song may do more for his career than Colonel Loud's. Here's the favorite 2015 singles playlist I add songs to every month.

2. Future - "March Madness"
When Future's retail album DS2 was released in July, he made the savvy move to include 3 tracks from his 3 recent mixtapes as bonus tracks, with "Trap N****s" as the representative from 56 Nights. But another fan favorite from that tape, "March Madness," only seemed to get more popular after that, and Epic put the song on iTunes as a single about 6 weeks after the release of DS2, almost like an admission that they fucked up by not putting it on the album. As many popular songs as Future has had this year, though, there's only room for one song to get promoted to radio at a time, and the Drake collaborations "Where Ya At" and "Jumpman" seem to have crowded "March Madness" out of any chance of getting a lot of airplay, which is a shame since it's easily one of his best recent songs and pretty much everybody knows it.

3. BJ The Chicago Kid f/ Chance The Rapper - "Church"
After he gave ScHoolboy Q the hook for a #1 radio hit, BJ The Chicago Kid has been overdue to get his own push as a solo artist. And while I liked the single "That Girl" that he had a few months ago, it was really dragged down by a lame verse by OG Maco. So it's nice to see him out with an even stronger single with a much better guest rapper. Earlier this year I talked about what a joy it was to hear Chance The Rapper's voice on the radio for the first time when Action Bronson's single, and while his appearance here isn't as scene-stealing, he still first really perfectly into the song, which humorously toys with Christianity and decidedly secular themes over a church organ beat to great effect much like Meek Mill's "Amen" or Young Dolph's "Preach."

4. Babyface - "We've Got Love"
After last year's great Toni Braxton collaboration album Love, Marriage & Divorce, it's great to hear Babyface back with a solo record and singing a much happier song.

5. Robin Thicke f/ Nicki Minaj - "Back Together"
The Blurred Lines album had a couple pop-leaning follow-up singles that tried to capitalize on Robin Thicke's sudden massive crossover success and never really went anywhere, and then there was the whole unfortunate Paula record that tried to cater to his core R&B radio following and even flopped on that level. So it's interesting to hear Thicke go in the studio with Max Martin and try to make another run at Top 40. It didn't really work, but I think it has more to do with Thicke's terrible public image right now and the fluke-like success of "Blurred Lines," because "Back Together" is pretty great.

6. Fetty Wap - "Again"
People are always trying to count Fetty Wap out -- each of his three massive hits this year was accompanied by a lot of predictions that we'd never hear from him after that. So far his 4th single, "Again," is lurking around the middle of the charts and doesn't seem the momentum to get huge like its predecessors, but I'm in no rush to say he's over. The album still has potential hits like "RGF Island" and we'll probably get several major label rappers who can't write hooks putting out singles featuring Fetty next year. I like "Again" a lot, though, I hate to see it get lost in the shuffle. The amount of lyrics repeated from "Trap Queen" kind of make it feel deliberately minor, more like a remix or coda than a song totally of its own.

7. Rae Sremmurd - "Come Get Her"
While Fetty's working on that 4th hit, Rae Sremmurd are improbably on their 5th hit from SremmLife, a rare accomplishment for rap albums by these days, even among superstars, let alone a debut record that's only moved about 150k. They're supposedly about to put out the lead single from SremmLife 2, but I kinda wish they'd just keep milking the first album for singles, I'd love to hear "Safe Sex Pay Checks" on the radio. "Come Get Her" is far from my favorite song on the album -- it's weird how they make "she's dancing like a stripper" sound like it's a bad thing on the same album that features "Throw Sum Mo." But man that's a great beat, and it's insane how Swae Lee comes up with so many hooky lines that he can just throw out that "Somebody come to the floor, it feels like we've met before" bit at the beginning and never repeat it.

8. Weezer - "Thank God For Girls"
I was only 12 when Weezer's first album came out, but they were the first band my friends liked that I really sneered at like I was too old for that shit. I mean, sure, they have some good songs, but they've just never been my bag, and I've watched over the last couple decades with amusement as Weezer fans gnash their teeth about the band's supposed fall from grace. I've heard enough '90s Weezer to last a lifetime, but I've actually enjoyed a fair amount of their later singles, including this one, which was greeted with even more howls of protest than usual. And hey, Rivers appreciates Swae Lee's ear for hooks.

9. Hailee Steinfeld - "Love Myself"
This got treated like a huge important song as soon as it was released a few months ago, and it is really well produced and kind of refreshing for its pro-masturbation (and self love in a broader sense) message, but it always felt like it was missing something to be really great. So now that it's started to slide off the charts without ever getting really big, I dunno, I have more affection for its modest charms.

10. Kelly Clarkson - "Invincible"
"Heartbeat Song" was such a weak lead single, and I'm even more annoyed that it was the first thing Kelly Clarkson released from Piece By Peace because that killed the momentum so much that any follow-up single had an uphill climb. And "Invincible" is one of those big shameless Sia-penned power ballads that Clarkson sounds amazing singing, it really could've been something if she hadn't released it in the middle of a sharp commercial decline.

Worst Single of the Month: Elle King - "Ex's & Oh's"
So now we have a 2nd Meaghan Trainor who's the daughter or Rob Schneider, I guess? I was happy with Walk The Moon's "Shut Up And Dance" being the sole big song to crossover from alt-rock radio to the pop charts this year, but I guess something else was bound to follow and it was bound to be terrible.

TV Diary

Thursday, November 19, 2015


























a) "Master Of None" 
Earlier this year, I finally let myself stop watching "Louie," and don't regret that decision one bit. So as I started watching "Master Of None," I got this sinking 'here we go again' feeling. After decades of standups shoehorning their personas and comedy style into formulaic network sitcoms, guys like Louie C.K. have loosened the reins for anti-formula shows that are occasionally great but very often poorly acted and indifferently directed short films. And Aziz Ansari's comedic voice isn't as developed as C.K.'s, so the results are even more mixed here. I've only watched about half the episodes so far, and some of them, particularly "Indians On TV," delve into a topic so well that I can understand the excitement around the show. But a lot of it just feels like bad actors doing a table read of bad first draft dialogue, including a disconcerting amount of discussion of a secret Father John Misty show that kind of underlines how much this show is not for me.

b) "Flesh And Bone"
There was a movie about 15 years ago called Center Stage, that took place in the fictional American Ballet Company, and most of the cast was real ballet dances who hadn't acted before -- I've seen it because my wife has watched it about a million times. So we were surprised to see that the Starz mini-series "Flesh And Bone" also takes place at the American Ballet Company, and was choreographed by Center Stage co-star Ethan Stiefel, who also has a small role in "Flesh And Bone." The lead actress, Sarah Hay, is also a dancer with little previous acting experience. This show is very much its own thing and not any kind of spinoff, though, and it quickly unravels into an extremely dark tale of incest and sex trafficking and mental illness. We found it pretty engrossing -- we've watched 7 of the 8 episodes in the space of about a week (it just started airing last week, but it's all available on VOD already), and I'm looking forward to seeing how it ends. It depicts emotional trauma in a murky, impressionistic way that brings "Hannibal" to mind, and the odd tangents it has taken with all the different characters in the ensemble have mostly been surprising.

c) "Into The Badlands"
I've never been huge into martial arts movies, so while the first episode of this looked really cool and had some crazy fight scenes, and the world it introduces is kind of strange and intriguing, I don't know if I give a damn about the story enough to keep watching. It at least seems well executed for what it is, though.

d) "Supergirl" 
I'm not one to argue for every superhero to be made as dark and brooding as possible, and certainly "Supergirl" is one of the last ones that would work for. But this show is maybe a little too sunny and deliberately low stakes. The first couple episodes were charming enough -- Calista Flockhart is surprisingly good as the mean boss, and there's a good meta argument about the name Supergirl in the first episode. But it's mostly kind of boring and reminds me of gross old Jeb Bush.

e) "Ash Vs. Evil Dead" 
Two decades after Army Of Darkness, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell finally gave up on trying to make another Evil Dead movie and settled for a TV show. And that's probably for the best anyway, it feels a little more like its own story than an attempt at recapturing the vibe of the previous movies. Bruce Campbell continues to lean into the knowing campiness of the character, and Raimi's tone and approach is intact, both in the pilot he directed and the episodes directed by others. Nothing mindblowing. but it's been fun and gorey so far, and the supporting cast bounces off of Campbell well.

f) "Breakthrough"
It didn't bode well for "Breakthrough," the new Nat Geo documentary series about scientific discovery, that 5 minutes into the first episode my scientist wife jeered at the screen about an inaccurate statement from the narrator. It's pretty interesting stuff, though. Every episode being directed by a different person means you never know what you're gonna get, but it's all been good so far, although the one by Paul Giamatti, which featured a lot of Giamatti onscreen looking thoughtful about what he just learned, cracked me up.

g) "Donny!" 
I don't really know who Donny Deutsch is, apparently he used to host a show on CNBC, but I don't think he's really famous enough to do a show like this where he plays an exaggerated version of himself. These kinds of shows are always a little self-serving, like he's showing humility by making fun of himself, but "Donny!" shows just how conceited and self-indulgent a show like that can truly be. He tries to be a buffoon while showing off that he's a rich womanizing buffoon who likes to walk around with his shirt off, the whole thing is just strained and creepy and unfunny.

h) "The Last Kingdom" 
This new medieval war show on the BBC is better than "The Bastard Executioner," I guess, but that's a pretty low bar. I think I just don't have any interest in this kind of thing, even if it's done well.

i) "Wicked City"
The other day this became the first new show to get canceled, in a fall season where networks have been extremely gunshy about canceling anything even if it's doing terribly. And it makes sense -- I have no idea who this show was for, or what it wanted to be. I don't know if it was supposed to be about the serial killer, who was creepier on "Gossip Girl" than he is here as an actual psycho, or if it was supposed to be a procedural about Jeremy Sisto's cop who's after him, or whether the second season would continue to follow one or the other or neither if it happened. And as an '80s period piece, it was just really half-assed, almost going out of its way to have scenes where actors impersonated Billy Idol and Def Leppard. I watched it, because Erika Christensen was in it and I'll watch her in anything, but I'm glad they put it out of its misery quickly.

j) "Life In Pieces" 
A couple months ago this is one of the new fall shows I would've pegged for a quick cancellation. Instead, it's gotten a full season order, and I'm just kind of mystified. The one thing that sets it apart from other sitcoms, that each episode is chopped up into 4 self-contained stories, is also the thing that makes it feel like a bunch of stupid webisodes featuring generic character types who are never developed into three-dimensional characters. Zoe Lister-Jones remains the best thing about it, and I'm increasingly afraid that she'll be stuck in this career-stalling show for years like Kat Dennings on "2 Broke Girls."

k) "The Grinder" 
My favorite new comedy of the fall, which continues to be hilarious, especially with the repeated use of footage of Rob Lowe's show-within-the-show legal drama. The whole dynamic with Lowe and Fred Savage kind of needs to be stuck in a holding pattern to work, though, so I don't really see how this show will continue to work for years without getting old, but it's strong enough so far that I'm interested to see them try.

l) "Rosewood"
This show has settled into a nice groove, the cast has so much chemistry. Obviously Morris Chestnut and Jaina Lee Ortiz are the main will-they-or-won't-they duo that drives the show, but the scenes in Rosewood's lab with his lesbian sister and her fiancee that threaten to be too cutesy and wacky work surprisingly well and the tone of the show a little more warm and light than the usual crime procedural.

m) "Quantico"
I like this show a lot, although sometimes it seems to just veer a little too regularly between the terrorist conspiracy stuff and the scenes with sexy people making out to Miguel songs.

n) "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" 
It was probably never realistic to think Colbert on CBS would beat Fallon in the ratings, but after only 2 months on the air he's already getting beaten by Kimmel too. It's not even a bad show, I'm fine with Colbert dropping the satirical edge of his persona. But where I used to be able to watch the first 15 minutes of the "Colbert Report" and get the good stuff, it's a little harder to know when to tune in to this show to see the funny parts, and increasingly I think he's just kind of not a good interviewer. He'll break eye contact with some huge movie star to look at a card on his desk and read off movie titles and then post awkward questions about the movies he definitely hasn't seen, it's awkward.

o) "Brooklyn Nine-Nine"  
This show has just continued to be incredibly strong, and I like that they've started to play with the usual dynamics of the characters already for season 3 -- Samberg and Fumero dating, Braugher and Peretti starting the season working outside the precinct. Not that it's a very plot-heavy show, but the ensemble is so uniformly strong that anything they can throw at the cast is worth seeing. The episode with Bill Hader was hilarious.

p) "Mom" 
Another good show entering its third season that is very good, if not great. Chuck Lorre shows get a bad rap, but if you give that mean, snappy dialogue to someone as good as Allison Janney it can be pretty entertaining.

q) "Billy On The Street"
This show moved from Fuse to TruTV for its fourth season, which I guess is a lateral move. And I still love it, although now that "Difficult People" is going and on its way to a second season, I find myself already thinking of that as Billy Eichner's main gig and this as a side project. Maybe it's just because this show seems to easy to make. Shows are rarely funnier with celebrity cameos, but the celeb walk-ons on this show are always great, especially the Chris Pratt bit this season.

r) "The Soup"
So it was announced this week that E! is cancelling "The Soup" after 11 years (or 24 years if we're counting "Talk Soup" and everything). And while I love this show and still watch it every week -- the 'reunion show' special a couple weeks ago was great -- it kinda does feel like it's run its course, at least with Joel McHale. I kinda wish they were continuing with a different host, though, there's always bad TV worth watching clips of, and all the other clip shows that have tried to run with the "Soup" formula have sucked.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015


















I wrote about artists who aren't afraid to discuss social issues in their music for Complex.

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 51: Coldplay

Monday, November 16, 2015























Coldplay will be releasing their 7th album, A Head Full Of Dreams, in December, just 18 months after their lowest selling album to date, Ghost Stories. Rushing out an unusually fast follow-up to a poorly received album is something of a pop music tradition, but this is a first for Coldplay, who've been steadily releasing blockbusters every 3 years for over a decade. And there have also been some vague implications that the band is either breaking up or going on a longer hiatus than usual after this album. The Stargate-produced Dreams seems to continue the band's unapologetic embrace of the pop stratosphere they've found themselves in, even if they haven't gone full-on Maroon 5. It's not hard to imagine this as the transitional project to set up a Max Martin-produced Chris Martin solo album or something.

Of course, Coldplay have always been the brazenly careerist pop extreme of their era of British 'indie,' making the Radiohead/Jeff Buckley axis of influence into something more upbeat and universal much like U2 did with their postpunk predecessors. They're easy to hate, but they're also easy to enjoy, at least in small doses. And even though they're best as a singles band, they've racked up a decent number of album tracks that I enjoy.

Coldplay Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. A Hopeful Transmission
2. Don't Let It Break Your Heart
3. Warning Sign
4. Lovers In Japan / Reign Of Love
5. Low
6. Everything's Not Lost / Life Is For Living
7. Always In My Head
8. Rainy Day
9. U.F.O.
10. Don't Panic
11. 42
12. Parachutes
13. A Rush Of Blood To The Head
14. X&Y
15. Death And All His Friends / The Escapist
16. Mylo Xyloto
17. Spies
18. Green Eyes
19. Strawberry Swing

Tracks 6, 10, 12 and 17 from Parachutes (2000)
Tracks 3, 13 and 18 from A Rush Of Blood To The Head (2002)
Tracks 5 and 14 from X&Y (2005)
Tracks 4, 11, 15 and 19 from Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends (2008)
Track 8 from Prospekt's March EP (2008)
Tracks 1, 2, 9 and 16 from Mylo Xyloto (2011)
Track 7 from Ghost Stories (2014)

Usually I'm a stickler for what qualifies as a 'deep cut.' but with a band like Coldplay, who have tons of songs that were issued as promotional singles in certain territories but will never be on their inevitable Greatest Hits compilation, I fudged the rules a little more. "Don't Panic" was a single but I never heard it outside the album, and I wanted to pair it with "42" for the Hitchhiker's Guide angle (Douglas Adams references being one of the many things Coldplay got secondhand from Radiohead). Viva La Vida is my favorite album by the band, but most of it was released as singles in some form or another, including the incredible "Lovers In Japan," and "Strawberry Swing," which is now perhaps most famous for being sampled in a Frank Ocean song (which is terrible, I have to say).

I had to cut through some really dopey songs to get down to this list of ones I like. And even though there are moments on even these songs that can be embarrassing, Coldplay's facility for hooks, and a certain accessible flair for pretentious ornamentation, has made for some really nice records. "Everything's Not Lost" and "Warning Sign" could've been hit singles at a time when they had more radio-ready songs than they knew what to do with, "Low" really grew on me recently as a standout from the band's low point X&Y, and "Rainy Day" is a fantastically weird Viva La Vida outtake from the album's companion EP. And there's also title tracks for almost every album, some more substantial than others.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince
Vol. 45: Duran Duran
Vol. 46: Rihanna
Vol. 47: Janet Jackson
Vol. 48: Sara Bareilles
Vol. 49: Mötley Crüe
Vol. 50: The Who

Friday, November 13, 2015


















One Direction and Justin Bieber released albums today, and over on Noisey, I engaged in a friendly debate with Craig Jenkins about who's better and who will sell more the first week.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015
I had a really good conversation with David Turner about Baltimore club music and internet memes, and he quoted me a little in his excellent Pitchfork piece on the topic of club music and Vines.

Monthly Report: October Albums

Monday, November 09, 2015
























1. Janet Jackson - Unbreakable
Having pored over Janet's back catalog before this album was released, and examining the way she kind of spiraled off into a series of frequent unsuccessful albums a decade ago, it's nice to see her come back after a 7 years and sound genuinely refreshed and rejuvenated. It sounds like she spent that time learning to relax and stop chasing hits, and while this isn't her best album, it may be her warmest and happiest. Other than "Burnitup!" trying a little too hard, there's a plush, sumptuous feel to even the uptempo tracks, and Janet's voice shows its age a little, but she stays in a comfortable range. "Take Me Away" is great, "Broken Hearts Heal" is great, really a lot of it is just beautiful and euphoric even if it's not as catchy as Control or as visionary as The Velvet Rope. I put this and most of these other albums on my running Spotify playlist of 2015 albums.

2. Young Thug - Slime Season 2
One of the most frustrating ways in which Young Thug has emulated his hero Lil Wayne in the way he seems to work very hard at recording huge amounts of material but there's very little sense of when or how it's going to come out, and tons of it got leaked before it was mastered or sequenced for  a release. So the exciting thing about him putting out the first Slime Season in September and then following up with the sequel just a few weeks later is that it feels like he's finally doing something with all that material instead of just letting it leak or get too old to use. Apparently a lot of that has to do with Alex Tumay, the engineer who assembled Slime Season 2, and I hope this means more releases like this will become more frequent now -- there's no reason he can't be dropping high quality projects as often as Future, or Gucci back in the day. This one's really too long for its own good, though, shorter mixtapes would be better. I tend to avoid listening to leaked unfinished music, so I'm glad they took some of those tracks and mastered them and got them sounding right on here, there's even a few songs with Rich Homie Quan and Birdman that would've been on that mythical second Rich Gang mixtape. I think my favorite stuff is that run starting with "Bout (Damn) Time" and "Flaws" towards the end. Listen to it on DatPiff.

3. Demi Lovato - Confident
I was always impressed by Demi Lovato's early albums, which had a pretty high level of production and songwriting without ever really having big name pros like Max Martin and Stargate involved in them. So this album kind of feels like a power grab to finally get up to that level and work with Martin and Stargate, and I think it comes off pretty well. Like her last couple albums, it's a bit patchwork and hit'n'miss, but there aren't any big stumbles aside from that awful Iggy Azalea collaboration. She's always theoretically had a good voice for power ballads, but "For You" is really the first good one she's been able to knock out of the park. "Stars," the song with drums that sound sampled (or deliberately emulated) from a Sleigh Bells track, is one of the better songs on the album, her label should cut that check and make it a single.

4. Boosie - Thrilla, Vol. 1
I'm a little relieved that this mixtape just says 'Boosie' on the cover, it gives me hope that he's maybe moving on from that whole 'Boosie Badazz' thing that I was never crazy about. This is his 3rd project since coming home last year, and the first 2 were pretty great, it's really a shame that Boosiemania has dissipated and he's gone back to being underrated. His voice and his music is a little different now but Thrilla is really the closest he's sounded to Trill Ent.-era Boosie since coming back, the old fans might like it a little more. "Bring It Like I Talk It" is the most immediate standout.

5. Shy Glizzy - For Trappers Only
I've always been a fan of Zaytoven's production, and it's impressive that after 10 years on the scene he's been able to produce a whole project with the impact that Future's Beast Mode has had. So it's shrewd of Shy Glizzy to also do an entire tape with Zaytoven, even if it's not a completely perfect MC/producer combination, there's some potent stuff on here. "Going Thru It" with Boosie is awesome, maybe better than anything on Boosie's project. You can listen to it on DatPiff.

6. OMI - Me 4 U
It's interesting to listen to an album that's basically been reverse engineered to match the aesthetic of a remix that accidentally became a worldwide hit. Me 4 U features the popular remix of "Cheerleader," not the original, along with a couple other remixes and many originals that match its 'tropical house' aesthetic, essentially trying to turn a fluke into a formula, in the classic tradition that drives popular music forward as much as it dooms it to repetition. At a certain point it becomes way more of this particular sound than you'll ever need, but OMI's voice suits it, perhaps better than more traditional dancehall. I especially like "Sing It Out Loud," where he ironically laments "tried to write you a beautiful song but my vocabulary ain't that vast," when he actually singing an unusually wordy lyric in a lovely melody.

7. Tiffany Evans - All Me EP
There's a whole circuit of R&B hopefuls that kind of hang around the periphery of the industry for years trying to break through to real stardom -- Tiffany Evans is 23 but has spent literally half her life in that state. She had singles that grazed the charts in 2004, 2008, and again in 2015 with "On Sight" featuring Fetty Wap, which leads off this record. She had anther EP a couple years ago called 143 that I loved, this one isn't as consistent, but it has some jams, "Me And You" is great. She could really sing when she started out at 12 years old, and she continues to sound great, really will be a shame if she continues to drift on the margins.

8. Tamar Braxton - Calling All Lovers
Like Tiffany Evans, Tamar Braxton started her career very young, and kind of kicked around with minor success forever -- with The Braxtons in the '90s and a forgotten solo album in 2000. But in 2013, she finally became a bona fide star, with Love And War moving units and spinning off several radio hits. And now, with the follow up, she's kind of sliding back to the margins with a fraction of the sales or airplay. At least the album is better this time. Love And War was diverse to a fault, and Calling All Lovers covers a little too much ground too -- in the first three tracks you slingshot between a reggae groove, a housey uptempo cut, and a retro soul song. Maybe she wanted to cover a lot of ground or maybe she's just a willing puppet -- or Muppet -- for her producers' whims. But there's enough songs that actually work with her voice that it's not necessarily a problem.

9. White Out w/ Nels Cline - Accidental Sky
I'm not familiar with White Out, but I will listen to anything Nels Cline does, and this was good for a couple listens. As with a lot of noise improv records, you kinda have to go along for the ride and wait for some interesting sounds to happen, and I don't feel like Cline gets into the kind of interesting tangents he gets into with his own bands, but it sounds beautifully recorded and even kind of relaxing at times.

10. Fall Out Boy - Make America Psycho Again
After 10 years as one of the only bands that gets played on both pop radio and rock stations, Fall Out Boy love to cross genre lines more than ever and try to be everything to everybody -- they performed with Thomas Rhett on the CMA's a few days after releasing their rap remix album. American Beauty/American Psycho is a fun, frustrating album with songs I really like and songs I really dislike, and I enjoying hearing them pull apart every song and fit a guest rapper into it, sometimes with major rap producers like Zaytoven providing the new beat. Fall Out Boy have been flirting with rap for most of their career, and I found it pretty irritating early on -- the 'hood' sequence in the "This Ain't A Scene" video was extremely cringe-inducing, and their biggest contribution to the rap world was making Tyga famous. But now they just seem like rock musicians who happen to listen to and appreciate rap, and you get a sense that they just wanted to hear Migos and Juicy J and Black Thought on these songs. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, though, I listened to the Limp Bizkit remix album too.

Worst Album of the Month: Raury - All We Need
Raury is a teenager with a guitar and a straw hat who opened for Outkast a month after releasing his first mixtape, and signed with Columbia Records and appeared on the cover of XXL's Freshmen issue soon after. He's been the butt of a lot of 'industry plant' jokes and chatter from nerds who have no idea how the music industry works and think there's something more shadowy and sinister about some major label-powered careers than others. That's all fine and good, but Raury is such a pretentious high school talent show reject that it is a little mystifying that so much money and effort was put into making him moderately famous with the kind of artistic cachet that well backed artists with no radio potential tend to stumble into. The album is full of awful singing and precious rap verses about how love is good and hate is bad and the ozone layer is good and McDonald's is bad over hand drums and rudimentary guitar strumming. "Mama" is almost a nice song but his voice just kills it. It debuted on the charts at #78, which is impressive given how few units it takes to manage a high chart placement these days. So even if he is an 'industry plant,' whatever that means, no need to be too mad about it now. Listen, there's nothing wrong with the niche he's trying to occupy, some of the most exciting artists of our time are black hippies (and/or members of Black Hippy), but not everybody who went to Woodstock deserved stage time.

Friday, November 06, 2015





This week Ben Carson's presidential campaign released a ridiculous radio ad with a hip hop theme song, and the City Paper asked me and a few other writers to offer our thoughts. I wrote one of the most ridiculous paragraphs I've ever written.

Movie Diary

Thursday, November 05, 2015
























a) Results
I'd already started watching this before I realized that it was directed by 'the godfather of Mumblecore,' which might have stopped me from putting it on. But I like the cast (including Kevin Corrigan, Cobie Smulder, and Constance Zimmer), and the movie didn't annoy me too much with its directorial style. In fact, the blandly naturalistic tone was well suited to the story, which would've become much more obnoxious and possibly offensive if they tried to wring any broad laughs out of it. Instead you just watch these normal people behave awkwardly in this convoluted social situation, which I guess is supposed to be the appeal of these kind of movies. Smulders is pretty good in it, nice to see her demonstrate some range outside of "How I Met Your Mother." But it all felt unstructured and indifferent, Kevin Corrigan seems like the protagonist for the first half hour but by the end he's like a tertiary character in Smulders and Guy Pearce's storyline. 

b) The Leisure Class
"Project Greenlight" turned out to be pretty compelling television this year, but the more interesting the show got, the more it seemed to turn you against the director, Jason Mann, and not want to give his movie, The Leisure Class, a fair shake. Airing the movie on HBO the night after the last episode of the show ended up really stacking the deck against it, even though I really liked that HBO did that, when previously the "Project Greenlight" movies got small theatrical releases and it was unlikely many people would get to see it anytime soon after the show aired. One of the only halfway well known actors in The Leisure Class is Ed Weeks, one of the perennially underused supporting players on "The Mindy Project," and it was kind of nice to see him carry a movie. He plays the straight man to Thom Bell, who also starred in the original short film version, and he really had such an odd unique energy that it was the right move to let him own that character. The first half hour or so actually worked pretty well, but it kinda came off the rails as the premise escalated. Not as good as Feast, the horror comedy that I didn't realize was a "Project Greenlight" movie until after I watched it, but not the total failure some people are making it out to be.

c) Focus
I enjoy a good con man movie, there's so much room for double crosses and uneasy alliances and last minute twists. And this one turned out to be a pretty good opportunity for Will Smith to flex that effortless charisma that he hasn't really used much in the last few years. The second half really picked up interestingly, there's one really cool scene involving a car that kinda comes out of nowhere, and then the ending wraps things up kind of neatly but worked for me. 

d) Maps To The Stars
Hollywood satirizing itself has become such a smug "Entourage" echo chamber of the cliches that show business isn't too uncomfortable exploiting for cameos and meta gags, so it's interesting to see David Cronenberg take it somewhere else that starts out nasty and witty and just gets darker from there. Evan Bird, who was like 13-14 when the movie was shot, has one of the most complex and disturbing roles I've ever seen an actor that young take on. In the end there was a lot going on in the movie and I didn't love all of it, but I'd probably watch it again to try to appreciate it better. 

e) Jupiter Ascending
Ended up watching this when my wife had it on and it was fun, better than I expected. The score was really dramatic and pompous, deleting a lot of that symphonic shit from the audio would've helped the movie come off lighter, and really every Wachowski project could've and should've been punched up by a screenwriter with a sense of humor and an ear for dialogue before they filmed it (Matrix included, fight me), but it was alright.

f) Vice
It's a sci-fi movie with Bruce Willis that I never even heard of when it came out, possibly because Willis's role is so scant he could have filmed his scenes in a single afternoon (and probably did). Mostly the movie is about Thomas Jane in a ridiculous wig. The premise is kind of your garden variety dystopia with an escapist fantasy world populated by androids, really the one thing that stuck out to me is how the movie just lets the 'resort' world and the robots be visually indistinguishable from the real thing so that you really buy into it, where other movies would take pains to make it all seem off or fake. The movie just kinda devolved into an endless series of shootouts and got boring, though. 

g) Cold Comes The Night
Bryan Cranston dresses up like Eric Church and plays a violent blind guy in this fairly pointless, gorey crime flick. The story kind of makes sense but kind of doesn't, and everything about the situation just constantly spirals from bad to worse until the flat, merciful resolution. One of the death scenes with a minor character towards the end is one of the better death scenes I've seen in recent memory, though. 

h) Roadie
I remember Ron Eldard as this clean cut actor that NBC briefly tried to make a star in the '90s, with an arc on "ER" and later on "Men Behaving Badly." But in this movie he has some truly awful hair and sideburns that make him pretty convincing as a washed up old band roadie. The movie is kind of uneventful, although Bobby Cannavale shows up and yells some of the same nonsense about the magic of rock'no'roll that he'll probably be saying in "Vinyl" in a couple months. 

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 50: The Who

Monday, November 02, 2015



















For the 50th installment of this little series I started less than 3 years ago, I wanted to do something special. And naturally, my mind drifted towards a band that is currently between legs of a tour celebrating their 50th anniversary (although really they're 51 now and may be 52 by the time the tour is finished). Of course, the whole spirit of the series is to spotlight artists who are often dismissed as 'singles acts' and give consideration to albums that have not been critically canonized, and obviously that is not the case with The Who. But when you do this many playlists, there's room to mess around with the formula and cover whoever you feel like.

The Who Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Much Too Much
2. I Don't Mind
3. The Ox
4. Boris The Spider
5. A Quick One, While He's Away
6. So Sad About Us
7. Armenia City In The Sky
8. Odorono
9. Tattoo
10. The Acid Queen
11. Tommy Can You Hear Me?
12. My Wife
13. Getting In Tune
14. The Punk And The Godfather
15. Sea And Sand
16. In A Hand Or A Face
17. New Song
18. You
19. Cry If You Want
20. Mike Post Theme

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from My Generation (1965)
Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from A Quick One (1966)
Tracks 7, 8 and 9 from The Who Sell Out (1967)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Tommy (1969)
Tracks 12 and 13 from Who's Next (1971)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Quadrophenia (1973)
Track 16 from The Who By Numbers (1975)
Track 17 from Who Are You (1978)
Track 18 from Face Dances (1981)
Track 19 from It's Hard (1982)
Track 20 from Endless Wire (2006)

It's a testament to how rich The Who's catalog is that this tracklist still kind of looks like a greatest hits, even though I avoided A-sides of singles and anything in classic rock radio rotation. A number of these songs are concert staples, or have been used memorably in television and film. And that's despite the fact that they never released albums as frequently as their contemporaries, even in the '60s -- they still don't have as many albums as The Beatles, despite being around for decades longer. Really, they were the first band to go away for 2 years at a time to formulate an ambitious concept album, which makes the abundance of songs that stand up by themselves all the more remarkable. I mean, the fact that "Odorono" was thrown together for the theme of The Who Sell Out and actually works as a song is amazing.

"A Quick One, While He's Away" is probably the greatest Who song, almost feels like cheating to include it, but it'd be silly not to, since it was never a single or radio hit. The live versions, particularly from "The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus" TV special and Live At Leeds, stomp all over the studio version, but the album recording is still pretty great on its own merits. And I mean, "Tattoo," "So Sad About Us," "Getting In Tune," you can put those up against any other band's very best.

It was fun to give myself a reason to listen to The Who, because lately I've just been going through a phase of Keith Moon worship as a drummer. I mean, I'm always in a state of Keith Moon worship. But lately I've had a good setup with cymbals and toms to really play in that style and this year I started a band that has the right sound to do some Moon-style fills. But the whole band is remarkable, it's hard to think of any other band where every member is one of the absolute best in their respective field and originated sounds and approaches that musicians still use every day.

Given that Pete Townshend wrote virtually all of The Who's most famous songs, it was fun to highlight some of the songs he didn't write. I put three of John Entwistle's tunes on here (the live favorites "Boris The Spider" and "My Wife" as well as the underrated "You," probably the hardest rocker of the post-Moon years). "Armenia City In The Sky" the only Who original not written by a member of the band, Speedy Keen (who went on to write Thunderclap Newman's Townshend-produced hit "Something In The Air"). And "I Don't Mind" is one of several James Brown covers in The Who's early repertoire that is just one of my favorite things the band ever recorded and one of the personal favorites I just had to choose over some more canonical originals. Keith Moon and Roger Daltrey also wrote here and there, including some nice songs on A Quick One, but I ran out of room for them.

Even with the undeniable diminishing returns of their later albums, it's still a lot of fun to dig into The Who's catalog and find gems, including "New Song," which kind of rages against the pitfalls of being an established band competing with its own history. "In A Hand Or A Face" was one that really jumped out at me for the first time putting this together. And "Mike Post Theme" is the song that for me justifies the existence of Endless Wire and makes me glad they gave it one more go. It's funny to think that they're doing their 'last' major tour now, 33 years after their first 'farewell tour' -- one of my favorite bands has been saying goodbye for literally my entire life. I'll probably never get to see them live at this point, but I'm good with the Moon-era live footage, and these records.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince
Vol. 45: Duran Duran
Vol. 46: Rihanna
Vol. 47: Janet Jackson
Vol. 48: Sara Bareilles
Vol. 49: Mötley Crüe