I already had deep album cuts playlists of Def Leppard, Radiohead, Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, and Roxy Music, and I wanted to do one more of this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class before the induction ceremony on Friday. And this is the one I kind of waited and put off doing because they have the biggest discography of the whole bunch, arguably the most impressive one, depending on your taste, the band with the most really beloved, consequential albums that are treasured by their fans. You may not think of The Cure as a really exceptional success story, but very few bands have been as consistently big as they have been for 40 years straight. They grew their fanbase really steadily for 15 years, and then sustained it over a generation -- as far as bands that formed in the early days of punk and are still going at a huge level, it's really U2 and then The Cure, although unlike U2, Robert Smith has kind of kept the show going as the only constant member over the years.

The Cure are a band that make me think of how the weird tribal, territorial nature of alternative rock at one point that has if not dissipated then certainly relaxed over the years. I recall a lot of pitting The Cure and The Smiths against each other, and pitting both of them against tougher-sounding (usually American) bands, "goth" being wielded like an insult the way "emo" and "hipster" would be later. This is, of course, partly because I became a big rock fan around 1992, when "High" and "Friday I'm In Love" positioned The Cure as this incredibly uncool band who still had their ridiculous '80s hair, almost like if the Flock of Seagulls guy was still on MTV with the Flock of Seagulls hair in the early '90s. Recently at a band practice, one of my bandmates tried out a new guitar tone on a song, and I said it sounded like The Cure, and there was this funny moment where people in the room were split on whether that was a good, bad, or value neutral thing to say.

But as the '90s and 2000s went on and I shook off the self-conscious rejection of the '80s of my youth, I slowly found myself coming around to The Cure, although mostly in the form of a casual appreciation of their catchiest songs. I'd listen with delight to "Close To Me" on a mix CD over and over, but I'd rarely check out their albums, beyond buying a cheap cassette of Pornography or hearing Disintegration at a friend's house and kind of getting the idea that the really did earn their sadsack goth rep and didn't write pop songs all the time. But they're also really fucking good at writing pop songs.

The Cure deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Push
2. Shake Dog Shake
3. Disintegration
4. Cold
5. Three Imaginary Boys
6. The Baby Screams
7. Hey You!!!
8. From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea
9. The Perfect Girl
10. Bananafishbones
11. 10:15 Saturday Night
12. Plainsong
13. One Hundred Years
14. Play For Today
15. The Blood
16. Prayers For Rain
17. The Drowning Man

Tracks 5 and 11 from Three Imaginary Boys (1979)
Track 14 from Seventeen Seconds (1980)
Track 17 from Faith (1981)
Tracks 4 and 13 from Pornography (1982)
Tracks 2 and 10 from The Top (1984)
Tracks 1, 6 and 15 from The Head On The Door (1985)
Tracks 7 and 9 from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)
Tracks 3, 12 and 16 from Disintegration (1989)
Tracks 8 from Wish (1992)

I thought about trying to be more completist and covering all of The Cure's albums, including the four they've made in the last 25 years (a fifth possibly on the way this year). But honestly, they have so many really long songs that I just didn't feel like I had the room. Brevity is just not their thing, they've only made one album that ran under an hour since 1986.

One interesting thing about The Cure's early period is that for several years, they'd seemingly deliberately release their catchiest uptempo songs as standalone singles, leaving them off of the proper albums entirely, including "Boys Don't Cry," "Jumping Someone Else's Train," "Let's Go To Bed," and "The Love Cats." This had the effect of making the earlier albums darker and more cohesive, although it didn't seem to hurt them commercially (Pornography, for example, was their first top 10 album in the U.K.). But it also gave rise to a lot of compilation releases, including Boys Don't Cry, Japanese Whispers (which was the band's first album on the Billboard 200), and Standing On A Beach aka Staring At The Sea, which is, along with Disintegration, one of the band's only multi-platinum releases in the U.S.

One of the side effects of this practice is that The Cure's first few albums can feel almost unremittingly gloomy. Things start to get a little lighter and more varied on The Top, (the band's only album with "Love Cats" drummer Andy Anderson, who died of cancer last month). And then there's an almost The Wizard of Oz B&W-to-color switch that flips with The Head On The Door and its opening track, "In Between Days," like they finally decided to put the pop songs on the albums. As someone who still really loves The Cure best as a singles band, some of this stuff is still a bit too downtempo for me to want to listen to all the time, but I found some songs I really love on here, particularly "Push." And "From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea" is very justified as the band's biggest live staple from their post-'80s output.

Western Blot's new album Materialistic has been available everywhere since last week, but we're doing the release party show at the Windup Space on March 29th. John German and I have been playing live as Western Blot for 7 years, but this will be the debut of a new lineup with Ishai Barnoy, and we'll also be joined by some of the people who sang on the album, Kathleen Wilson (who designed the above flyer for the show), Koye Berry, and Lizzy Greif, who will be playing her own set at the show, as are Jenny Hates Techno.

Complex ranked all 32 of Future's albums and mixtapes, and I wrote about a dozen of them.

Roxy Music are being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the end of the month (along with Def Leppard and Radiohead and Janet Jackson and Stevie Nicks, among others). And when they were announced a few months ago, I think I was more surprised by Roxy Music than any other induction in quite a while. They were first-time nominees, after being eligible for over 20 years, but mostly I just didn't think they were famous enough, at least not for the fairly America-centric Hall. I always knew of Roxy Music and heard things about them, but mainly as the band that briefly included Brian Eno, almost a footnote to the career of a legendary producer who's been an integral part of more famous records by Talking Heads, U2, Bowie, and others. I thought I didn't know any Roxy Music songs besides Bill Murray singing "More Than This" for a minute in Lost In Translation. But then recently I heard "Love Is The Drug" and realized I've been hearing that song on the radio for ages, but I'd just kind of think "is this 'Double Vision' by Foreigner? is this Robert Palmer? no...I wonder who this is" and then forget about it. So, as I sometimes do, I used this playlist as an excuse to give myself a crash course in an artist who I feel like I should know better.

Roxy Music deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Nightingale
2. Editions of You
3. Ladytron
4. The Space Between
5. Out of the Blue
6. Cry, Cry, Cry
7. Amazona
8. If There Is Something
9. Flesh and Blood
10. Casanova
11. Running Wild
12. In Every Dream A Heartache
13. Re-Make/Re-Model
14. She Sells
15. Grey Lagoons
16. Still Falls The Rain
17. Tara
18. Mother of Pearl

Tracks 3, 8 and 13 from Roxy Music (1972)
Tracks 2, 12 and 15 from For Your Pleasure (1973)
Tracks 7 and 18 from Stranded (1973)
Tracks 5 and 10 from Country Life (1974)
Tracks 1 and 14 from Siren (1975)
Tracks 6 and 16 from Manifesto (1979)
Tracks 9 and 11 from Flesh And Blood (1980)
Tracks 4 and 17 from Avalon (1982)

Some of these songs have been released on compilations without ever being released as a single or charting, like "Out of the Blue," "Editions of You," and "Mother of Pearl," which appeared on Greatest Hits in 1977. It's kind of interesting to listen to a band like this and instantly recognize them as a missing link in a lot of stuff I already listen to. Certainly, there's whole huge strains of new wave, new romantic/synth pop, glam rock, and Britpop that owe a lot to Roxy Music, to say nothing of the band Ladytron. And Roxy Music themselves fuse so many things that came before them together that it almost annoys me when they actually do homages themselves, like the Wilson Pickett and Byrds covers on Flesh + Blood or the silly instrumental riffs on Wagner and The Beatles on "Re-Make/Re-Model."

But I have to admit, there are times when they took some getting used to, particularly on the early albums where Bryan Ferry's singing is a little rougher and more abrasive, closer to John Cale than the smoother delivery he wound up at on later albums. Musically I think a lot of the early stuff is their best (Paul Thompson is a fantastic drummer), but sometimes I just wish the vocals were better on a song like "If There Is Something" (and Bowie does a good job with that song on the cover that Tin Machine released in 1991). But even though I found myself kind of digging on the smoother later records more than I thought I would, it seemed more fun to mix things up chronologically, it all holds together pretty well jumping between eras. The ode to a blowup doll "In Every Dream Home A Heartache" is wonderfully creepy, and the harmonica on on "Grey Lagoons" always strikes me as a really great sounding, somewhat unexpected moment even with a band whose records were full of saxophone, oboe, and other instruments.

1. Sam Smith and Normani - "Dancing With A Stranger" 
I've heard people say that Normani should be gearing her music more towards R&B radio, but in a weird way she's way too much of a traditional R&B star with a big voice who came from the world of girl groups and choreography, like an early Beyonce throwback, so it's hard to even situate her in the SZA era of female R&B stars. And her duets with Khalid and Sam Smith have been good pop/R&B fusions to plant her foot in Top 40 radio, while "Dancing With A Stranger" has actually wound up on the R&B radio chart before Normani's song with 6lack, which surprised me. Here's my favorite 2019 Spotify singles playlist that I update every month.

2. Megan Thee Stallion - "Big Ole Freak" 
The mainstream climate for women is the best it's been in a long time lately -- the Nicki versus Cardi stuff has died down and I think people are ready to just accept them both as established superstars while City Girls, Saweetie, literally 4 people whose names end in Doll, and a number of others elbow their way into the conversation. In this crowded field, Megan Thee Stallion still manages to stand out as one of the most talented as well as having some of the most commercial potential. But what I really like is how well she wields that classic Houston drawl, it's been a minute since there's been a rapper on the radio with that accent and practically never a female rapper. 

3. Summer Walker - "Girls Need Love" 
I haven't even heard the Drake remix yet because I'm sure I will and it will inevitably replace the original on radio playlists. But for now I'm just enjoying the original song when I hear it, which I thought was totally fine as it was, in fact I thought it was more striking for being this quick 2 minute 21 seconds track since the trendy brevity in rap hasn't really carried over to R&B much yet. 

4. Eric Church - "Some Of It" 
"Some Of It" was the immediate standout for me on Desperate Man. I put it on my Eric Church deep album cuts playlist last year, but I probably should've guessed it would eventually be released as a single, so once it was I swapped in a different song from the album for the City Pages version of the playlist. 

5. Pink - "Walk Me Home" 
I'm pleasantly surprised that Pink is releasing an album just 18 months after the last one, and aside from the fact that it was co-written by the same person as her last #1, Nate Reuss, this feels like a surprisingly low key lead single, folky and tender. But what I really like about it is the weird modified waltz rhythm with a really involved, like, 13/8 time signature, really unusual for a major pop star to put out something like that. 

6. Alice Merton - "Funny Business" 
Alice Merton's album didn't blow me away, but this song gets better every time I hear it, I just adore that bleepy little synth hook. I really wish it was getting as many radio spins as "No Roots." 

7. The Blue Stones - "Black Holes (Solid Ground)"
I thought this song might be Royal Blood the first time I heard it, but it turns out it's a different bluesy guitar/drums duo, which I guess is a pretty sturdy formula long after the breakthrough of the White Stripes and the Black Keys (and wow, all these bands have colors in the name or at least evoke a color with the word 'blood,' weird). 

8. Ro James - "Excuse Me" 
Ro James has released quite a few songs since El Dorado almost 3 years ago, and I'm glad that one of them is finally gaining some steam on R&B radio, he really doesn't deserve to go down as a one hit wonder for "Permission." 

9. Kelly Rowland - "Crown" 
I always root for Kelly, she's got the loveliest voice and her solo catalog is better than she usually gets credit for. This is a nice song to dip her toe back in with, hopefully there's more coming with Harmony Samuels, they're a good combination. 

10. Halestorm - "Do Not Disturb" 
I've always liked the kind of throwback sleazy Lita Ford hair metal pinup vibe of some of Halestorm's songs, and this is the best one they've had in that vein in a while. And the totally different direction they took the video in is pretty entertaining too. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper - "Shallow"
Listen, maybe when I eventually watch A Star Is Born and see this song in context it'll make more sense to me and I'll change my mind. But for the time being, this is one of my least favorite songs on the soundtrack. And her using a live TV moment to power this dull power ballad to #1 on the Hot 100 where she couldn't with "Million Reasons" just annoys me, Bonnie Tyler outtake Gaga is my least favorite Gaga.

Today the 2nd album by my band Western Blot, Materialistic, came out on all of the usual digital music services: Bandcamp, iTunes/Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, Amazon, and so on. I've been trickling songs from this record out on singles and an EP over the past year, but I really had a vision for how these songs fit together as a whole, and I'm really excited for people to hear that.

I had been recording at Mobtown Studios in Baltimore for almost a decade when my friend Mat Leffler-Schulman told me they'd be moving the studio out of the building in Charles Village. And I had a record in my head, that I hadn't really written or demoed yet, that I really wanted to make there, so I booked some of the last available sessions at the studio, and wrote and recorded pretty much the whole thing in a couple months.

Ishai Barnoy, who is playing guitar in the new Western Blot live lineup, came by and played on several tracks. I got help on the vocals from lots of Baltimore vocalists who make their own excellent music: Kathleen Wilson (of Thee Lexington Arrows), Koye Berry, Lizzy Greif, Andy Shankman (whose band Jumpcuts also released a single today), Brooks Long (of Brooks Long & The Mad Dog No Good), and Scott Siskind (of Vinny Vegas). And as with my other recent releases, Materialistic was mastered by Dan Coutant and engineered by Robbie Liberati, with cover design by HPJ Art. I'm really grateful to all of those people because Western Blot started as a 'solo project' and I still write everything, play most of the instruments, and sing several songs, but I've come to really enjoy the collaborative aspect of it, and feel like every single thing that someone else contributed to the record made it better than what I would've ended up with on my own. 

One of the things that I've started to do and plan on continuing to do throughout 2019 is to do a lot of deep cuts playlists of the people I consider to be the most consistently excellent album artists of the 2010s. And one of the best in the Top 40 world is easily Ariana Grande. And with two albums in the space of 6 months bringing her to new commercial heights, she now has enough music that I can sift through it for one of these playlists.

Ariana Grande deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Intro
2. You'll Never Know
3. Bad Decisions
4. NASA
5. Goodnight N Go
6. Be My Baby featuring Cashmere Cat
7. Honeymoon Avenue
8. Fake Smile
9. Greedy
10. Piano
11. Make Up
12. Be Alright
13. Sweetener
14. Best Mistake featuring Big Sean
15. Pete Davidson
16. In My Head
17. Better Left Unsaid
18. Snow In California
19. True Love
20. Break Your Heart Right Back featuring Childish Gambino
21. Lovin' It
22. Raindrops (An Angel Cried)
23. Ghostin
24. Know Better / Forever Boy

Tracks 2, 7, 10, 17 and 21 from Yours Truly (2013)
Track 18 from Christmas Kisses EP (2013)
Tracks 1, 6, 14 and 20 from My Everything (2014)
Track 19 from Christmas & Chill EP (2015)
Tracks 3, 9, 12 and 24 from Dangerous Woman (2016)
Tracks 5, 13, 15 and 22 from Sweetener (2018)
Tracks 4, 8, 11, 16 and 23 from Thank U, Next (2019)

Yours Truly is still my favorite Ariana Grande album, she just hit this perfect combination of modern and retro sounds with Babyface and Harmony Samuels on that record. Thank U Next is probably a close 2nd, but every album since the debut has kind of stuffed in some timely guests or producers that feel a little forced to me by comparison. But still she's been pretty impressively consistent, the Pharrell half of Sweetener is the only really glaring misstep, and even that stuff had its moments -- the Bop It memes about "Sweetener" honestly made me like the song more.

Tommy Brown, one of Grande's closest collaborators since the first album, just started producing hit singles for her starting with "Thank U Next" and "7 Rings." But he's always been a part of key album tracks, including "Honeymoon Avenue," "Be Alright," and "Goodnight N Go" (which is a rewritten version of the Imogen Heap song of the same name) up through the bulk of the new album. But she's got a deep bench of collaborators filling out these albums, from Max Martin and Ilya ("Bad Decisions," "Greedy," "Ghostin") to Pop Wansel ("Fake Smile," "In My Head," "Break Your Heart Right Back").

What I really like is how Grande's sensibility as it was laid out from the beginning has been the blueprint for most of what she's done since then -- you can hear how she goes from the doo wop verses to the EDM choruses of "Better Left Unsaid" and that's been the range she's continued to span. Even stuff like the the old-fashioned key change at the end of "Greedy," most of the other artists Max Martin works with would probably not have done that with the track. The homages to '90s hits are kind of how she came through the door but are not really a big part of what she does anymore, but it still felt right to put "Break Your Heart Right Back" and "Lovin' It" in there together.

a) "Miracle Workers"
This show, where God and his angels operate like a disorganized bureaucracy manipulating the lives of people on Earth, is difficult not to compare to "The Good Place," and that comparison doesn't flatter it. But I do enjoy the absurdity of Steve Buscemi as a lazy, disheveled God, who uses a Tinder-like app to try to find a new prophet to speak to, and has to be talked out of destroying Bill Maher's penis. The main plot, where a couple of angels try to save the Earth by getting two awkward nerds to kiss, although Geraldine Viswanathan is absolutely charming (Daniel Radcliffe's role seems kind of bland and beneath him, I don't know why he bothered). I just kinda wish instead of doing a one-off 7-episode miniseries that tries to make that plot seem interesting, they'd just do an ongoing series that focuses on the inherent humor of the premise more.

b) "The Umbrella Academy"
Even though I don't really read comics, I always thought it was so badass that Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance had this whole other successful career with comics and I was really anticipating this show. After watching a few episodes, though, I'm still kinda waiting for it to click, Robert Sheehan is really entertaining and there have been a few great action setpieces but a lot of the characters are just kind of dull. Also it kind of feels like Way made The Royal Tenenbaums with superpowers, complete with the adopted sibling romance.

c) "The Order"
This show about a college student who joins a secret order and enters a world of monsters and magic was rolled out by Netflix just a few weeks after "The Umbrella Academy" and makes me feel like we're really being inundated with a lot of TV right now from a genre that I'm tempted to describe as 'sexy young adult Hogwarts,' with "The Magicians" and "Deadly Class" (ok, "The Umbrella Academy" isn't really about a school, but these shows still kind of fall into a particular category). "The Order" is by far the weakest of all these shows, but it's kind of promising, I've liked Katharine Isabelle in other shows and she seems well cast as a villain.

d) "Workin' Moms"
I always had a crush on Catherine Reitman from her occasional 30 seconds of screentime on "Black-ish" so I'm glad that the Canadian sitcom she created and stars in is now available on Netflix (the first season, anyway, hopefully the other 2 seasons that have aired in Canada will hit Netflix eventually too). And it's really really good, kind of gets the blunt warts-and-all comedy about motherhood right in all the ways that the Australian show "The Letdown" aimed for but didn't quite hit the mark. The whole cast is impressive, particularly Dani Kind and Jessalyn Wanim.

e) "The Passage"
My wife read some of the novels this show is based on so sometimes she kinda gives away a bit of where the story is going and I'm pretty interested to see how long the show stays on the air and how far into the story they get to go. FOX putting Mark-Paul Gosselaar on a new show again so soon kind made me mad about them canceling "Pitch" all over again, but I'm really pleasantly surprised at how he's turned out to be a reliably compelling actor. Babcock is really the most interesting character in the show to me, though my wife says the character was a guy in the books and in the show Babcock is a teenage girl played by Brianne Howey.

f) "Black Monday"
I always thought that "House Of Lies" was beneath Don Cheadle, so I really rolled my eyes when I saw that after it finally went off the air, he signed up for another Showtime comedy about a sleazy fast talking businessman. But "Black Monday" feels like a very different show to me, in part because it's an '80s Wall Street period piece, and in part because it was co-created by David Caspe of "Happy Endings" fame. "Black Monday" very much has the same kind of clever, absurd dialogue as "Happy Endings," just with way more jokes about cocaine and '80s movies, and in some ways it kind of clashes with the concept of the show, which is constantly counting down to the historic titular stock market crash and, it's often implied, possibly the death of the main character. But it's more enjoyable than not, with Cheadle and Regina Hall and Andrew Rannells and Casey Wilson firing all this ridiculous dialogue at each other.

g) "Flack"
I forget sometimes how crappy the production values can be in British television until I see a show like this, where the first episode looked like a student film, which was especially jarring because I'm used to seeing Anna Paquin in major movies or a big budget show like "True Blood." I think maybe subsequent episodes looked a little better or I got used to it, though. There have been some pretty funny bits here and there about the life of a PR flack. But tonally I feel like the show is kind of caught between being a trashy satire and being something a little more serious and woke with higher dramatic stakes, to a lesser degree than "Black Monday."

h) "The Widow"
On Amazon's "The Widow," Kate Beckinsale plays a British woman whose husband dies in a plane crash in Africa, but the more she learns about what happened, the more she realizes that not all is as it seems. It's kinda dour, I don't know if I care enough to keep watching and solve the mystery.

i) "White Dragon"
On Amazon's "White Dragon" (called "Strangers" in the UK), John Simm plays a British man whose wife dies in a car crash in Asia, but the more he learns about what happened, the more he realizes that not all is as it seems. OK it's really not that much like "The Widow," but I couldn't help but notice the parallels when these shows came out on the same service 3 weeks apart. "White Dragon" is a little more intriguing to me, partly because it gender flips the more common 'man turns out to have had a 2nd family the wife knew nothing about' story, but I haven't watched too much of it yet.

j) "American Soul"
I was looking forward to the idea of a lavish period piece series about the history of "Soul Train." And then I watched the first 5 minutes of the "American Soul" pilot, which featured an elderly Don Cornelius sitting at home watching Gladys Knight on an old episode of "Soul Train" and putting a gun to his head, and I just soured on the whole thing. What an absurdly bad way to tell Cornelius's story. And the rest of the first couple episodes I watched really were not good enough to overcome that start.

k) "The ABC Murders"
I've only watched 1 of the 3 episodes of this so far, but I enjoy John Malkovich in almost anything and a detective in a mystery is an especially good fit for him. Agatha Christie wrote 30 other novels about Malkovich's character, Hercule Poirot, so hopefully they'll bring him back for more of these.

l) "Tropical Cop Tales"
This is one of those Adult Swim shows from the 'unceasingly loud and aggressively unfunny and pointless' end of the spectrum, I actually really like the visual style of the show and can imagine maybe a slightly less absurdist, more traditionally satirical half hour version of this show really appealing to me, but as is I just kind of hate it.

m) "Weird City"
I haven't bothered with the first couple free episodes of an original series from YouTube Premium (formerly YouTube Red) since the entertaining "Ryan Hansen Solves Crimes On Television," but I figured I'd check out this anthology series produced by Jordan Peele. I really, really hated it, though, I'm surprised that it's gotten mostly positive reviews. For a sci-fi show that takes place in a city of the future where a wall literally separates the haves from the have-nots, its social commentary is surprisingly toothless. Everyone just walks around like their absurd dystopia, where people buy crystal meth-infused pomegranate juice from vending machines, but it's all kind of sitcommy and goofy, not even Idiocracy-style broad satire, and I just hated the stories in the first 2 episodes, especially the repulsive Michael Cera one.

n) "Northern Rescue"
Even though I think it's kind of annoying for people to act amazed at the similarities between siblings, I have to admit it's very hard to watch Billy Baldwin (excuse me, William Baldwin, as he's billed) in this Canadian drama without feeling like I'm watching an uncanny valley simulation of Alec Baldwin. They've always been the 2 most similar of the Baldwin brothers, but as they get older it's especially striking. Show seems kind of boring though.

o) "Losers"
I feel like this Netflix doc series about profiles in losing is a really great idea, well executed. I often think about how at any given moment, at least the half of the people playing in a team sport or competition lost their last game or match or whatever. In most other professions and pursuits, there are good days and bad days, but it's not so black and white, you don't have to see things as a loss. In sports, though, sometimes you just lose, and I like how they highlight stories of people who found another path after a big loss.

p) "Dating Around"
This Netflix show kind of feels like a refreshing take on the hoary old dating show format, you just watch someone go on 5 blind dates and at the end you see which person they choose to go on a second date with. There's no narration, no host, no interviews, you just see how they interact and kind of find yourself guessing or hoping who they pick, it's stupid and voyeuristic but I feel like here and there you see some genuine emotion.

q) "The Giant Beast That Is The Global Economy"
There are so many shows with funny people doing deep dives about big, complex issues that this Amazon show with Kal Penn talking about world economics seems to have already faded into the background. But I was impressed with what I've seen, the angle that it's this big intimidating topic that people really need help getting their heads around is, I think, pretty correct for most people and certainly for me, and they made it pretty entertaining and digestible.

r) "Presidents At War"
This History Channel miniseries about the military experience of POTUSes is interesting, although I think the big takeaway that will stick with me is how weird it is to see pictures of Richard Nixon as a young man but still that big ugly prematurely old-looking Nixon head.

s) "The Gifted"
I liked the addition of Grace Byers to the cast, but for the most part season 2 of "The Gifted" was just a bigger slide towards being less and less interesting to me than the first season was. It's occasionally entertaining, but it's a big ensemble and some of the characters are just dull to me. Also, Erg, the mutant who has one eye he sees through and one with an eye patch covering it that he blasts energy beams out of of, really has the character design they should have given Cyclops in the first place.

t) "Corporate"
The first season of "Corporate" was solid but I still kinda dismissed it as 'dark Dilbert' or whatever latest satire of office culture. But I have to admit that the second season has been great, every episode has just taken apart some topic or another (dogs in the office, going out on a weeknight, bosses invading employees' privacy) in some hilarious creative way or another.

u) "I'm Sorry"
This show has also really grown on me after 2 seasons. There are so many shows about the life of comedians and comedy writers and so on, but what "I'm Sorry" kind of nails better than others is the idea that someone who comes up with funny, dirty, inappropriate jokes all day can't always shut it off when they're talking to their kids or parents at school, etc. I miss Jason Mantzoukas not being around in the second season, but Andrea Savage and Tom Everett Scott have great obnoxious married couple banter.

v) "Crashing"
"Crashing" is very much of a piece with other shows about the lives of comedians, and when it debuted I found the initial format of each episode being about a different famous comic hanging out with Pete Holmes and playing an unflattering version of themselves kind of wearying. But by the end of the third season, I felt like the episodes stopped feeling so formulaic and it had really grown on me. I'm not surprised it didn't get renewed, but I think they ended on a good note. After one season about Pete's wife cheating on and leaving him and one season about him dating someone who barely seemed to like him, I was actually rooting for his relationship this season before it all kind of went awry in a way that was somewhat dramatically satisfying. Pete Holmes should've known that showing his ass on HBO and having sex in clothing store dressing rooms was not what people tuned in for, though, it felt like they were just forcing the premium cable content at a certain point.

w) "High Maintenance"
I like to make fun of this show a lot because it's almost like the endpoint of decades of TV made under the assumption that every single thing that happens in NYC is interesting (actual dialogue: "What happened?" "New York happened. She got me." "She gets you, but then she gets you"). But now and then there's a pretty entertaining episode like the Cat Cohen one, I love her. I really just do not care about 'The Guy' or find it charming that he doesn't have a name, or that they gave him a girlfriend and got Britt Lower all disheveled and hipstery for the part.

x) "Documentary Now!"
Everybody involved in this show has a bunch of other projects, but I'm amused that the guy with the most writing credits on the third season, Seth Meyers, is the one who literally hosts a talk show 5 nights a week. It's been really great so far, though, the 2-part cult episode got off to a slow start, but then the 2nd part after the twist was maybe the funniest episode they've ever done, and the musical cast recording episode was also just fantastic, I can't believe John Mulaney wrote all those hysterically perfect songs just for the episode.

y) "Broad City"
I feel like "Broad City" has been gently rolling down hill from the first season where it felt kind of fresh and exciting, so right now seems the right time for them to do a final season and move onto other things. They're both such great performers that I'm more interested in seeing them do other things at this point. A couple of the recent episodes have been good, though, Ilana Glazer is still occasionally just an insane force of nature.

I've had a love/hate relationship with this show for the last 9 seasons, and with Emmy Rossum's last episode airing this week, I'd like to think I'm probably done with it. She was really the glue of the show, I don't think it makes sense without her (in fact I was always hoping they'd kill off William H. Macy if the show ever continued without one of the main stars). But I have to admit, they did a good job with these last few episodes of giving Fiona a nice arc to go out on, kinda hitting rock bottom and then getting to start over while also giving Lip a chance to kind of grow up and step into her role in the family. Maybe Emmy will finally get a well deserved Emmy out of this.

1. Ariana Grande - Thank U, Next
I haven't been 100% on board with the run-up to the album, exciting as it is for a pop singer to kind of toss out of the Top 40 promo cycle rulebook and follow up a successful album 6 months later with an even more successful album. But I wound up pretty happy with the resulting record, since the two #1 singles are probably the weakest ones on a very good album, in my view. It's better than Sweetener, but that's almost a given since she didn't let Pharrell torpedo half the album this time around. But what surprised me is how relaxed, playful, and often romantic the album is, given that it was partly spurred by a broken engagement and some other heavy stuff. Grande has always been an impressive vocalist, stacking harmonies and hitting high notes, but I think she's really fully found her voice as a songwriter on "Needy" and "Fake Smile." Here's the 2019 albums playlist that I've filled with all the records I've been listening to. 

2. Our Native Daughters - Songs Of Our Native Daughters
I really enjoyed Rhiannon Giddens's 2017 album Freedom Highway, and this group feels like a bigger, more ambitious piece of the same project of kind of reclaiming American folk music for black women, with a supergroup with 3 other women who play banjo and guitar. But really this stuff just feels very alive and in the moment considering that it's released by Smithsonian Folkways and includes a lot of songs that are decades old, "Polly Ann's Hammer" is a clever and kind of profound twist on the John Henry story with a focus on his wife, and "Mama's Cryin' Long" has an outrageously cool handclap/stomp rhythm in a 9/8 time signature.

3. Kehlani - While We Wait
It's been 2 years since Kehlani's big debut album and she released this little 9-song stopgap mixtape during her pregnancy. But honestly, I like this more than the album, it just feels a little more intimate and charmingly low key. Also I'm glad that she didn't clear a song with a TLC sample for this project, because SweetSexySavage leaned on the '90s R&B samples and interpolations way too much anyway, but the Musiq Soulchild duet is surprisingly a good fit.

4. Julia Jacklin - Crushing
Eleni Mandell hasn't released an album in a few years so it's nice that this Australian singer/songwriter Julia Jacklin is scratching a similar itch for me with her new record. She's got a great withering sense of humor on "Convention" in particular.

5. Yung Baby Tate - Girls
Atlanta's Yung Baby Tate is more a singer than a rapper but kind of both, this follow-up to 2018's Boys is pretty enjoyable, this bright melodic neon celebration of femininity where every song title is "Bad Girl" or "Wild Girl" or "Flower Girl" and so on. She produces her own stuff and some of these tracks are really impressive.

6. Chaka Khan - Hello Happiness
I think I already lost the war as far as Kanye's run of 7-song 20-something minute records being classified as albums and not EPs, but Chaka Khan's first record in over a decade is that length and it really works so well and feels so complete unto itself that I'm cool with considering it an album. Switch puts a little of a modern electronic sheen on the production but it's very much derived from the funk and disco era she came out of, it's a good mesh of styles.

7. Rustin Man - Drift Code
By coincidence, Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis died last week within a month of the release of the first album by any member of Talk Talk in over a decade, bassist Paul Webb's second album as Rustin Man. Even though Webb left Talk Talk between Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, this album feels to me very much of a piece with the band's later stuff, with lots of spare arrangements and interesting textures, I went back to this album for a second listen after making my Talk Talk playlist and it appealed to me even more than the first time. Some more time signature nerdiness: there's a great 5/4 rhythm on "Our Tomorrows."

8. Gary Clark Jr. - This Land
I've never really paid close attention to Gary Clark Jr. because maybe he struck me as a little too old-fashioned to be interesting, but there's a nice sharp modern edge to this record that hits me better than the other stuff he's done, the falsetto power ballad of "Pearl Cadillac" is especially nice. The title track is a little heavy handed for my taste as a Defiant Trump Era Anthem but honestly it's hard for everyone to not be constantly writing songs like that at this point.

9. Mercury Rev - Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited
Back in 1968, The Delta Sweete was a crushing sophomore slump -- Bobbie Gentry's debut Ode To Billie Joe had topped the album chart and its title track had topped the singles chart, but the follow-up concept album and its lead single got to #132 and #52 on the charts, respectively. Half a century later, The Delta Sweete has grown in statue to the point that Mercury Rev has covered the whole thing with an assortment of guests vocalists including Norah Jones, Hope Sandoval, and Beth Orton. It's largely a faithful recreation of the album, but it's a great record and it's fun to hear some other vocalists take a swing at Gentry's distinctive vocal style.

10. Gunna - Drip Or Drown 2
My theory now is that Gunna sounds like if Young Thug only exhaled while rapping and Lil Baby sounds like if Young Thug only inhaled while rapping. But it's interesting to me that while Drip Harder was Gunna's first really high charting album, and Drip Or Drown 2's first week was about as good, he feels very much like Lil Baby's sidekick now, just a lot less visible, all the songs he started to have on the charts a few months ago besides "Drip Too Hard" never got far on the radio, even the Travis Scott song (meanwhile one of Lil Baby's solo tracks from Drip Harder is blowing up). Gunna isn't exactly charismatic but he has a good ear for beats and this record is growing on me.

The World Album of the Month: Avril Lavigne - Head Above Water
I think those early Avril hits have aged well, but she really just sounds lost now, the Nicki Minaj feature and the Chad Kroeger kind of sit at opposite ends as different kind of bad ideas on this album, but the whole thing is just kind of awkward and full of notably annoying songs like "Souvenir" and "Bigger Wow."