a) "Jett"
I put on this Cinemax series kind of expecting that at best it'd be a trashy sexy summer diversion crime drama with Carla Gugino. But it really exceeded my expectations, lot of clever plotting and Elmore Leonard neo noir vibes (probably not a coincidence, since creator Sebastian Gutierrez did screenplay for the adaptation of The Big Bounce and wrote for the "Karen Sisco" series starring Gugino). The dialogue is really snappy but there's some dark moments that kind of keep it from becoming too breezy or predictable. And Gugino gets a more complex role than the femme fatale she's played a hundred times -- a master thief who gets out of jail and tries to live a normal suburban mom life and gets forced to go back to pulling heists.

b) "Too Old To Die Young"
I haven't seen Drive or any other Nicolas Winding Refn movies, mostly because they didn't seem like something I'd enjoy, and his new series for Amazon seems to confirm that suspicion. The first couple episodes I watched ran over 90 minutes, and the last episode is only 30 minutes, so not only is this show guilty of streaming drama sprawl, but also the whole annoying variable episode length trend. And everything just goes so incredibly slowly, with these long lingering scenes with minimal dialogue that comes off more pretentious when it seems to punctuate several minutes of silence. I mean, I don't need every show to adhere to familiar TV rhythms, but it almost feels like he's going for some eerie Lynchian thing and just really falling short. It was especially glaring after watching "Jett," which manages to do the whole artsy crime drama thing with lots of stylized lighting without getting indulgent or boring.

c) "Los Espookys"
I wasn't sure what to expect of a Spanish language HBO comedy where the only familiar name is Fred Armisen, who I feel like I've had my fill of at this point. But "Los Espookys" is incredibly funny, I laughed out loud so many times during the first two episodes, particularly at almost anything Tati (Ana Fabrega) said. I can be a bit lazy about reading subtitles, but when the dialogue is this consistently funny, it's worth watching attentively. And the whole premise of a group of friends starting a business of using horror effects in practical situations (staging an exorcism to make a priest look good, scaring people out of a house so that they won't get an inheritance) is just incredibly entertaining.

d) "American Princess"
After a few years of moving toward making pretty impressive scripted series, Lifetime has spent the last year canceling those shows or letting them continue elsewhere ("UnReal," "You," "Mary Kills People") and focusing back towards Lifetime original movies. So I was pleasantly surprised to see the premiere of "American Princess," a series that is a bit frothier than other recent Lifetime shows but has a lot of personality and quite a few 4-letter words. The premise is kind of a stock runaway bride thing where a woman gets cheated on on her wedding day and decides to kind of blow up her life and go work at a renaissance fair. It's nice to see Lucas Neff from "Raising Hope" land on another good show, and Australian actress Georgia Flood is really charming and has a convincing accent as the titular American princess.

e) "Euphoria"
Son of Barry and "Euphoria" creator Sam Levinson is the latest 2nd generation writer-director to join the ranks of Sofia Coppola, Jason Reitman, Jake Kasdan, Max Landis, etc. And it would be an understatement to say that "Euphoria" is a different kind of coming age story than, say, Liberty Heights. Right now all the talk around this show is about all the edgy transgressive stuff with sex and drugs and high schoolers, but I'm interested to see if there's really a show there once the shock value wears off. Right now it all feels like this generation's American Beauty, pushing the envelope in a very timely and self-congratulatory way, there's even a scene where a teen couple jokes about plotting a murder and I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a tip of the hat to American Beauty or not.

f) "City On A Hill"
"City On A Hill" has frequently been likened to "The Wire" if it took place in Boston, a comparison I was wary of right off the bat. While Kevin Bacon's scenery-chewing performance as FBI agent Jackie Rohr feels like an almost even broader variation on McNulty, and Seth Gilliam (Carver from "The Wire") pops up here and there, I'd prefer to just set that thought aside and take the show on its own terms. It's not bad so far, although I cracked up when the first episode of the show about Boston ended with a song by the band Boston playing while the "produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon" credit flashed on the screen.

g) "NOS4A2"
Zachary Quinto wears a lot of makeup and prosthetics in this show to play an old immortal monster who feeds on the souls of children or whatever, and he looks like crap, the makeup department failed on this one. I'm not sure if the show would be good if not for that, but it doesn't help.

h) "Songland"
The idea of doing a reality show competition for songwriters instead of singers is cool on paper but it very easily could have been a mess, and I'm happy to say that "Songland" really got the format right -- in particular that each episode has a different set of writers pitching to one particular pop star, instead of an ongoing tournament or anything like that. And even though it necessarily gives you a very quick and selective peek at the creative process, it can be fun to watch Ryan Tedder or Ester Dean offer notes or arrangement suggestions in real time and start playing with the song before they've even decided whether it's proceeding to the next level of the competition. I don't think they always end up with the best song, but the results have been overall pretty decent so far -- I think Kelsea Ballerini ended up with the best song and Meghan Trainor ended up with the most potential for a hit.

i) "Holey Moley"
While ABC is reviving lots of old school game shows for their summer programming, the standout is this kind of unapologetically silly new show that treats mini-golf like an epic sport with a couple of commentators, one of them Rob Riggle, calling the game. It's absolutely ridiculous but it leans into it, so it works.

j) "Trinkets"
A new Netflix teen drama about girls who shoplift, good premise but the execution felt a little dull to me. Brianna Hildebrand is good, though, I was impressed by her on the second season of "The Exorcist."

k) "The InBetween"
A new NBC show where a woman who can see and speak to dead people helps a police detective solves murders. I'm so tired of these shows, it's weird how supernatural procedurals have become such a repetitive predictable genre.

l) "Blood & Treasure"
CBS's new Romancing The Stone knockoff summer action series is crappy even by CBS standards, just lousy production values and bland mannequin actors.

m) "Chambers"
With all the movie stars doing television these days, Uma Thurman seems like the perfect kind of interesting risk-taking actress to come in to the TV world and do great things. But for whatever reason, she's had this kind of embarrassing run of giving perfectly good performances on unloved network shows like "The Slap" and "Smash." The highlight of her TV career so far was a great recurring role on the underrated "The Imposters," but that show was on Bravo and practically nobody saw it. And her latest indignity is "Chambers," a show that Netflix canceled less than 2 months after releasing the first season. "Chambers" wasn't bad per se, the whole melodrama of Sivan Alyra Rose playing a teenage girl who gets a heart transplant and starts having visions of the girl whose heart she got is pretty well done. But Thurman, who plays the donor's mother, really doesn't have a very interesting role, at least in the first episode, I feel like Uma needs to get on the next season of "Big Little Lies" or something, someone please get her into a good TV project.

n) "Bonding"
Netflix has been doing more and more comedies with really short episodes, and so far "Bonding," which runs between 13 and 17 minutes, has been one of the best examples of that. It's about a dominatrix who enlists her comedian best friend to be her leather-bound BDSM assistant, and it's nice to see a show just focus on two characters and not have a whole supporting ensemble with their own B plots to pad it out to a traditional sitcom length. Obviously, contrasting the BDSM world with more traditional social interactions is the central joke of the show, but it's not the worst joke to base a show on.

o) "Special"
Another Netflix comedy with little bite-sized 15-minute episodes, you could watch the whole seasons of these shows in the time it takes to watch a movie. There are so many shows where the disabled character isn't played by an actor with that disability, so it's refreshing to see writer/creator/star Ryan O'Connell, who has cerebral palsy, make a really bluntly funny show about his life and portray it on camera.

p) "No Good Nick"
This Netflix show is really strange, it's shot like a Nickelodeon sitcom and has a laugh track, but it has kind of a serialized plot about a teenage con artist getting herself adopted by a family so that she can rob them. I kind of respect that they're trying to do something different and blur genres a little, I really wanted it to be good since Sean Astin is the dad, but the humor is still kind of too cheesy to enjoy as an adult.

q) "Traitors"
I like how this British show opens right at the end of the World War II and hinges on how instead of everybody breathing easy and celebrating peace there was all this other stuff going on with loyalties between nations and espionage and traitors, it's an interesting moment in history.

r) "Historical Roasts"
A few summers ago I worked at a comedy festival in D.C. that included a roast of James Carville with a bunch of the Comedy Central roast guys like Jeff Ross and Bob Saget. And it was fun to be a part of that world for one night and basically have these guys bringing me script changes and asking me if the dirty version of a joke or the dirtier version was funnier. The humor was often only political in the broadest strokes, but it worked for the needs of the occasion. And Ross's latest show on Netflix is a little disappointing because it feels like it just doesn't quite function as well as that night did. Once you have Bob Saget dressed up as Lincoln and John Stamos as John Wilkes Booth, it becomes some whole goofy over thing. If the person being roasted is pretending to be someone else, you can't even look to them for genuine reactions if a cutting joke is being made about them personally, it kind of cancels out the point of the roast.

s) "Klepper"
I thought Jordan Klepper's clueless white guy persona on "The Daily Show" was really funny, as was the amped up paranoid persona on his short-lived "The Opposition with Jordan Klepper." But the latter got canceled, so now Comedy Central is trying something different, having him do a weekly show where he does field pieces and sheds the satirical persona to be a little more earnest and honest. It's a well made show, he's covering important topics, but it's a little boring, and I miss "The Opposition."

t) "The Aquarium"
I love aquariums and I'm happy that I live near Baltimore's National Aquarium and have been there dozens of times. So I like Animal Planet's new reality show filmed in an even larger place, the Georgia Aquarium, it's really fun to get a behind-the-scenes look at how these places function and how handlers have to, say, convince a bunch of seals to ride a freight elevator.

u) "Nature's Strangest Mysteries: Solved"
Another new Animal Planet show, has some pretty amusing footage and weird trivia, but the production values of the show feel kind of slapdash.

v) "Chip And Potato"
A Netflix kid's show about a pug that my kids had zero interest in, and usually nothing is too cutesy for my 4-year-old.

w) "Vida"
The first season of "Vida" was great but felt too short at only 6 episodes, so I'm glad they're up to 10 episodes for the second season. For a show that grapples with a lot of emotions and big issues, the sex scenes often feel kind of gratuitous, so I'm amused that the second season opened with a super gratuitous and lengthy orgy scene that ended with Lyn declaring she was going to abstain from sex for a while, although I don't think the show is actually going to commit to toning that stuff down.

x) "The Butcher"
I kind of love this new History Channel competitive reality show about cutting meat, it's really entertaining to see all the usual reality competition tropes applied to something like this, and these people really are talented. I can't watch it hungry, though.

y) "Forged In Fire"
This other longer-running History Channel show about people who make knives has a similar appeal, although I don't like it as much as my wife, who for a while was watching it every time I came home late from working at night.

z) "Attack On Titan"
Another show my wife has been watching a lot when I work late, so I'll come in halfway through an episode and be lost. I'm still a total anime novice, though, I think I'd have a hard time following this show even if I tried, it seems really strange.

Little Feat frontman Lowell George died on June 29, 1979. Since the 40th anniversary of his passing is coming up this week, I thought I'd put together something about one of my favorite bands, who mean more and more to me with each passing year. George's deeply original songwriting and distinctive slide guitar (played with a Sears and Roebuck socket wrench case as a slide), backed by incredibly versatile musicians like pianist/keyboards Bill Payne and drummer Richie Hayward, made Little Feat stand out even in the crowded field of '70s California bands blending rock, country and blues. They toured with The Who and the Grateful Dead, and were given high praise by Zep and the Stones and Clapton, but never really reached household name status in their own right.

Little Feat deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Strawberry Flats
2. I've Been The One
3. Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie
4. Sailin' Shoes
5. Cold, Cold, Cold
6. Teenage Nervous Breakdown
7. Fool Yourself
8. Two Trains
9. Roll Um Easy
10. Feats Don't Fail Me Now
11. Skin It Back
12. The Fan
13. Long Distance Love
14. Mercenary Territory
15. Hi Roller
16. Red Streamliner
17. Fat Man In The Bathtub (live)
18. A Apolitical Blues (live)
19. Be One Now
20. Front Page News
21. Hangin' On To The Good Times
22. Feelin's All Gone

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Little Feat (1971)
Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from Sailin' Shoes (1972)
Tracks 7, 8 and 9 from Dixie Chicken (1973)
Tracks 10, 11 and 12 from Feats Don't Fail Me Now (1974)
Tracks 13 and 14 from The Last Record Album (1975)
Tracks 15 and 16 from Time Loves A Hero (1977)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Waiting For Columbus (1978)
Track 19 from Down On The Farm (1979)
Track 20 from Hoy-Hoy! (1981)
Track 21 from The Let It Roll (1988)
Track 22 from Representing The Mambo (1990)

Since Little Feat were a cult band who won over more fans with their concerts and albums than with singles, it's more difficult than usual to distinguish between 'hits' and 'deep cuts.' I couldn't justify including the band's most famous song, "Willin'" (which I wrote a lengthy Stereogum piece about in 2017), even if it was never a single. I also avoided songs that were released as A-sides that I would consider essential to any Little Feat best-of collection (including "Dixie Chicken," "All That You Dream," "Easy To Slip," "Spanish Moon," "Oh Atlanta," "Spanish Moon," "Time Loves A Hero," and "Hamburger Midnight"). That said, if this playlist is your introduction to Little Feat, I'd say it's a good one, with a lot of what would be considered their signature songs, like "Fat Man In The Bath Tub," "Feats Don't Fail Me Now," "Sailin' Shoes," "Two Trains," "Roll Um Easy," and "Teenage Nervous Breakdown."

Lowell George played in Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention for 6 months in 1968 and 1969. And with Zappa's help, he ended up with his own band signed to Warner Brothers, and led Little Feat for 7 studio albums, before dying at the age of 34. His last album with the band, Down On The Farm, was completed and released a few months after his death.

Little Feat's self-titled debut is kind of an outlier, starting with its cover art, which doesn't feature the kind of distinctive Neon Park illustrations that are on the covers of all the albums at the top of this post. With dry production and a smaller quartet configuration than the classic 6-piece lineup they had from their 3rd album onward, Little Feat positions the band as something of a west coast answer to The Band. I've always been fond of the album's odd little closing track "Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie," which packs a whole lot of words and musical twists and turns into under 2 minutes. To my surprise, rehearsal tapes of the early months of Little Feat have surfaced in which "Willie" is 14 minutes long, with many many more lyrics and musical tangents that follow from where the album version cuts off. It might be the most Zappa thing the band ever did, before George fully established his own musical identity out of the Mothers' shadow. The same rehearsal tape also features an early version of "The Fan" -- by the time that song had made it onto an album they'd changed the opening lyric "heard you got an infection from a guitar player of great renown," which makes me wonder what rock star it may have been referring to.

The next few Little Feat albums after their debut are simply fantastic, some of the best albums of the '70s. Dixie Chicken may be the consensus pick, but Sailin' Shoes is probably my favorite (dig the primitive early drum machine heard on many of Lowell George's demos that drummer Richie Hayward thumps over top of on "Cold, Cold, Cold"). But I also have a lot of fondness for Feats Don't Fail Me Now, the album that Little Feat was recording in Baltimore County when my father met Lowell George and briefly visited the band in their Hunt Valley studio (Baltimore, of course, gets a famous shout out on the title track). Feats is the most relentlessly upbeat and electric Little Feat album, with no ballads and possibly not even a single acoustic guitar strum.

1975's The Last Record Album was not a farewell or record or even an intended one; the title was simply a reference to the 1971 box office hit The Last Picture Show. It's not their best album, but I heard it so many times in my dad's car and love every minute of it, it's kind of the album where you get the best balance of the best of the band's three most prolific songwriters (George, Payne, and guitarist Paul Barrere). Little Feat toured the UK for the first time in support of that album and were well received; iconic radio DJ John Peel made his first Festive Fifty list in 1976 and it included both "Willin'" and "Long Distance Love" (the latter of which also inspired the title of "Of Missing Persons," Jackson Browne's 1980 song dedicated to Lowell George). Like many '70s bands, the double live album was a tipping point for Little Feat, and it's sad to think that the band never really got to capitalize on 1978's Waiting For Columbus so perfectly packaging some of the band's best songs into one great live record and bringing in new fans.

Lowell George really had a great way of writing lyrics that could be bluntly plainspoken in one breath and strikingly poetic or intellectual in the next -- "eloquent profanity, it rolls right off my tongue," as he would say in "Roll Um Easy." There are so many turns of phrase in these songs that rattle around in my head -- "haven't slept in a bed for a week and my shoes feel like they're part of my feet" ("Strawberry Flats") or "some kind of man, he can't do anything wrong/ if I see him I'll tell him you're waiting" ("Mercenary Territory"). "Teenage Nervous Breakdown" is probably the band's fastest song but features tongue twisters like "unscrupulous operators could confuse, could exploit and deceive/ conditional reflex theories and changing probabilities."

Little Feat never had a Hot 100 hit, but they were popular enough on AOR radio that I wonder if they may have charted in the '70s if there was a rock singles chart at the time. When Billboard did roll out the Rock Tracks chart (now the Mainstream Rock chart) in 1981, Little Feat finally charted with 1974's "Rock And Roll Doctor," re-released in support of the Hoy-Hoy! compilation that mixed together rarities with the best of the Lowell George era of the band. My pick from Hoy-Hoy! for this playlist is the original Feats Don't Fail Me Now era version of "Front Page News," a song that the band recorded for at least 3 different albums before it finally landed on Down On The Farm (the 1975 version appears on 2000's Hotcakes & Outtakes box set). Bill Payne wrote some great songs for Little Feat, and I think that was one that Lowell George was wrong to keep tinkering with, it was at its best in its first incarnation.

The surviving members of the band reformed Little Feat in 1987, and their first two albums were arguably the most commercially successful records of the band's career, with several rock radio hits including the #1 singles "Hate To Lose Your Lovin'" and "Texas Twister." Payne and Barrere had become increasingly confident songwriters over the course of Little Feat's original run. So their later reunion albums, while more slick and sometimes missing Lowell George's eccentric touch, are still pretty excellent records. I might've used more of their later records for the playlist, but the independent albums after Representing The Mambo aren't all available on streaming services. Craig Fuller, best known as the voice of Pure Prairie League's classic rock staple "Amie," joined Little Feat for their first few reunion albums, and he's got a similar vocal range to Lowell George and fills out their sound well. On "Hangin' On To The Good Times," which he co-wrote with Payne and Barrere, Fuller sings about Spotcheck Billy and Juanita, the characters from George's song "Fat Man In The Bathtub," and I go back on forth on whether it's a welcome callback to the band's origins or an odd way of kind of continuing a story without the person who started it.

There are some notable cameos on these songs, including Bonnie Raitt (backing vocals on "Two Trains"), Michael McDonald (backing vocals on "Red Streamliner"), Emmylou Harris (backing vocals on "Front Page News"), Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor (on the Waiting For Columbus rendition of "A Apolitical Blues"), and the Tower of Power horns (on "Hi Roller"). And some of these songs have been covered notably. Van Halen's 1988 album OU812 had a cover of "A Apolitical Blues" (incidentally, Ted Templeman produced the original Sailin' Shoes version of the song as well as most of Van Halen's albums before OU812). The Golden Palominos' 1986 album Blast of Silence opens with Syd Straw singing "I've Been The One," and closes with her singing another song from Little Feat's debut, "Brides of Jesus." Phish covered "Fat Man In The Bathtub" and all the other songs on Waiting For Columbus for one of their annual Halloween shows where they cover an album in its entirety. And of course, the first couple of bars of "Fool Yourself" were looped on many many '90s hip hop tracks, including A Tribe Called Quest's "Bonita Applebaum" and The Fugees' "Killing Me Softly."

a) Booksmart
The discourse around this movie has been weird, basically a bunch of adults rallying around a teen movie and almost seeming mad at actual teens for not caring about it. But it's pretty good, I'd say, as a 30-something, I'm always happy to see a high school movie that isn't obsessed with explicitly or implicitly channeling John Hughes and other '80s movies. In a way it kinda felt like an unintentional riff on Say Anything... though, like Beanie Feldstein's character was another version of Diane Court, the straight-A student valedictorian who suddenly realizes upon graduating that she could've been having more fun the whole time. I really enjoyed the supporting cast most of all, though, Skyler Gisondo from "Santa Clarita Diet" and Noah Galvin from "The Real O'Neils" were great and Billie Lourd stole every scene she was in, I didn't realize until after the movie that she's Carrie Fisher's daughter and it was driving me nuts why she seemed so familiar.

b) mid90s
It's weird to think that Superbad is now such a canonical coming-of-age movie that a decade later we have one of its stars directing his own acclaimed coming-of-age movie while his sister stars in her own acclaimed coming-of-age movie (Booksmart) that's widely regarded as a gender-flipped successor to Superbad (I have nothing against Superbad, it's fine I guess -- I think at this point I'm mostly appreciative to it for launching Emma Stone's career). I didn't care for mid90s at all, and it shouldn't have been too hard for me to identify strongly with it, as someone who's about the same age as Jonah Hill and was kind of a skateboarder-adjacent budding teenage dirtbag in that period. One thing about teen shows/movies is that the actors are often so much older than their characters that when you get the rare 13-year-old character who actually looks like 13, like Sunny Suljic (who was actually 12 when this was shot), it really kind of grabs your attention and brings home just how small kids are when they start becoming little pubescent delinquents. But I dunno, there was this flat affect realism to the whole movie that just didn't work for me, even when the period details were right and the story was intense it kind of felt like a very drab and po-faced take on adolescence.

c) Bad Times At The El Royale
When I started seeing ads for this I kinda thought it could go either way, might be great and might be terrible. It got pretty good reviews but I didn't care for it at all. I've come to kind of hate the whole genre of using hotels as a way to tie together vignettes about different people checking into a hotel (Four Rooms, Identity, "Room 104," and so on). It just felt like a big ambitious mess of people playing simple archetypes in a broad campy version of the 1960s and by the time the big mysterious story fell into place I really just didn't care. I really like Lewis Pullman, though, he was as good in this as he was in "Catch-22."

d) A Star Is Born
I've been rolling my eyes about this movie since the moment it was announced, just the idea of Lady Gaga acting in Bradley Cooper's directorial debut remaking an oft-remade old Hollywood classic, everything about this just did not appeal to me, and I was kind of appalled by people loving the movie and "Shallow" going to #1. But OK, I'll fess up, this was a good movie, I think Cooper did his homework and did an impressive job of turning himself into a singer and guitarist, and casting Sam Elliott as his brother so that his speaking voice made sense as Sam Elliott-ish. I smiled a lot in the first half of the movie, the love story was genuinely engaging. I wasn't as into the second half, maybe just because of the sad inevitability of it, and it didn't entirely feel earned on some level. But it's not like it's an uphill battle to make it plausible that a famous, beloved musician would descend into a downward spiral of alcoholism. I'm still annoyed that Andrew Dice Clay is getting rehabilitated with roles in Oscar movies, but I actually didn't recognize him the entire time I was watching him in this, so good on him, I guess.

e) The Shape of Water
Guillermo del Toro has such unique gifts as a filmmaker and is one person who I always want to see work with bigger budgets and more resources. So in a way I was rooting for and celebrating The Shape of Water's success and Oscar glory long before I even saw it, and it almost felt anticlimactic to finally see it. It's very good, though, Sally Hawkins really held together the movie in a way that I think few other people in that role would have been able to.

f) Baby Driver
This didn't really come out that long ago, but it feels like forever since something with Kevin Spacey in it came out without being tainted and hobbled by his presence. But it's also a movie where he plays a supporting role as an unredeemable bad guy, so that part of the movie still functions pretty well. Really fun, entertaining movie, the car stunts were so wild and well executed that I wish Fast and Furious movies took some cues from this. I never liked Ansel Elgort but I will admit that he was perfect for this role, his whole tall arrogant boyish vibe was just what the character needed.

1. Kane Brown - "Good As You" 
I've liked some of Kane Brown's singles and disliked some of them, but I've been waiting to hear one that really won me over and made the best use of his voice, and "Good As You" is the one for me. Such a lovely relaxed guitar-driven groove with just a little banjo in the mix. Here's the playlist of my favorite 2019 singles that I update every month. 

2. NOTD and Felix Jaehn f/ Captain Cuts and Georgia Ku - "So Close" 
In 2015, two of the most inescapable songs of the summer were German DJ/producer Felix Jaehn's remix of OMI's "Cheerleader" and Walk The Moon's "Shut Up And Dance," which was a breakthrough for American production trio Captain Cuts. And I'd love it if "So Close" was as ubiquitous in the summer of 2019. It's funny to think that it took Jaehn, the Captain Cuts guys, plus a Swedish production duo and an English singer to put together such a simple dance pop song, but however it came together, I like its shamelessly sugary hooks. 

3. Of Monsters And Men - "Alligator"  
I wonder if anyone ever shouts "Judas!" at folky acoustic alternative hitmakers like Mumford And Sons and Of Monsters And Men when they plug in amps and unveil a harder rocking sound. I like this way more than any of the previous Of Monsters And Men singles, though, it almost reminds me of The Joy Formidable.

4. Ciara - "Thinkin Bout You"
This song is pretty delightful, and the video enhances its breezy blissed out atmosphere. It's weird, though, a song that sounds like this would've done great on R&B radio or pop radio or both at different points in the last 30 or 40 years, but at this particular moment, it doesn't quite fit in with either. 

5. Beyonce - "Before I Let Go"
The original "Before I Let Go" is such a stone cold classic that I'm wary of anybody touching it, even someone of Beyonce's caliber -- I was especially annoyed a few years ago when Vivian Green sampled it and then sang a mediocre new song over it. But this is a worthy cover, Tay Keith's previous work on hit singles has been pretty minimalist so I was pleasantly surprised by how much he threw into the pot here, from the Cameo interpolation to the horn section that helped tie this studio track to the Homecoming live album it appeared on. I also have to wonder if Beyonce was really doing a whole clever tribute on another level with how this track was released, since "Before I Let Go" was first released as a new studio track towards the end of Maze and Frankie Beverly's Live In New Orleans album. 

6. Eli Young Band - "Love Ain't"
Country music rules because you can rhyme "ain't" with "cain't." This song hits a lot of the familiar notes of a song addressed to someone who's in a bad relationship, but I like the particular way this lyric comes at it, telling them that the way they're being treated doesn't sound like love, it's kind of over-the-top but touching, makes me think of people I knew who were in shitty relationships but excused the mean or possessive behavior as acts of love. 

7. The Revivalists - "Change" 
The Revivalists are one of the more faceless bands getting regular play on alternative radio these days, even though they should be kind of easy to set apart with their horn section and bluesier sound, half the time when I hear a song besides their big hit "Wish I Knew You" I have no clue who it could be. This song has really grown on me, though. Also, I don't know if they're tipping a hat to Q-Tip with that "she's such a vibrant thing" part of the song. 

8. Pink f/ Chris Stapleton - "Love Me Anyway" 
In the dubious world of pop stars dipping their toe into country music, Pink was never somebody I really looked to for that kind of crossover, but she certainly has the voice to pull it off, and this nice acoustic track from Hard 2B Human has gotten a little country radio airplay. 

9. Martin Garrix f/ Macklemore and Patrick Stump - "Summer Days"
It's petty, but I often wish that Patrick Stump had the kind of ubiquity that his old Decaydance understudy Brendon Urie currently enjoys. After the brilliant flop of Soul Punk, I don't dare hope that he makes another go at a solo career, but I'm glad that he's still doing some hooks and stuff outside Fall Out Boy, this slap bass-driven EDM track would be a pretty ideal summer jam if it wasn't for all the unnecessary Macklemore parts of the song.

10. Marshmello f/ Chvrches - "Here With Me" 
My 9-year-old son who doesn't know who Beyonce is has a much higher awareness of Marshmello, which is a good indication that making dance music while wearing a big ridiculous costume that makes your head look like a marshmellow or something is a smarter move than it may seem. Marshmello, to an even greater degree than the other big names of crossover EDM, has mastered the art of making hits with every conceivable kind of popular artist, from top 40 singers to rappers to R&B singers to alt-rock bands. But this also means he works with people who'd never work with each other, which inevitably results in some culture clash, as when Marshmello followed up his very catchy Chvrches collaboration with a Chris Brown collaboration, and Chvrches got a lot of antagonistic bullshit from Brown and his fans for saying they were disappointed that Marshmello would work with an abuser.

The Worst Single of the Month: DJ Khaled f/ SZA - "Just Us" 
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people re-record the beat of a classic rap song instead of sampling it (and one of my other pet peeves is that half of people don't hear the difference or don't care and call it a 'sample' anyway). Even when the effort to replicate all the little details of the track are kind of impressive, I still get this kind of awful uncanny valley feeling listening to these remade beats. And the reconstructed beat for Outkast's "Ms. Jackson" on the new DJ Khaled record is like nails on chalkboard to me, I hate it so much. It's a shame, because it was a great idea for him to have a showcase for SZA while she's between albums and I like her vocal just fine, but the execution of the beat just irritates me too much to enjoy the track. 

Last week, Kelis's second album Wanderland was released to American streaming services and iTunes for the first time, much to the surprise of everyone, including Kelis herself. In 2001, labels still thought it make sense to roll out album releases in different countries at different times, and released Wanderland in parts of Europe and Asia, but then never got around to releasing it in America after the failure of the single "Young Fresh 'n New." So now that all 6 of Kelis's albums are on Spotify, it seemed like a good time to make a playlist of her deep cuts.

Kelis deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. No Turning Back
2. Roller Rink
3. Mars
4. I Want Your Love
5. Suspended
6. Popular Thug f/ Pusha T
7. Scared Money
8. Perfect Day
9. I Don't Care Anymore
10. Flash Back
11. Suga Honey Iced Tea
12. Rolling Through The Hood
13. Attention f/ Raphael Saadiq
14. Marathon
15. Living Proof
16. I Don't Think So
17. Till The Wheels Fall Off
18. Segue 2
19. Home
20. Bless The Telephone
21. Forever Be

Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 from Kaleidoscope (1999)
Tracks 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 from Wanderland (2001)
Tracks 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 from Tasty (2003)
Tracks 15, 16 and 17 from Kelis Was Here (2006)
Tracks 18 and 19 from Flesh Tone (2010)
Tracks 20 and 21 from Food (2014)

Kaleidoscope was the first album produced entirely by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo (the first that was officially released, anyway, since Clipse's 1999 album Exclusive Audio Footage was shelved), kicking off the last 20 years of The Neptunes and their various associates and proteges shaping popular music. I really love that whole early wave of albums from the Neptunes/Star Trak camp, the debut albums by Clipse, N.E.R.D., Kenna, Spymob and Kelis are all so great and unique. The music that those folks made later on gets a lot of love, too, but to me there's something special about what they came out of the gate with, and the things that Pharrell and Chad chose to use their industry clout to promote after making hits with established stars.

I think it's usually kind of a smug cliche to say someone didn't sell more records because they were "ahead of their time," but I definitely feel like that was the case for Kelis. People didn't really know how to categorize her or tried to fit her into the R&B category when it didn't necessarily suit her, she was kind of more the Grace Jones of her time than someone who fit into the R&B landscape. Her voice can have a sandpaper quality to it sometimes that I don't love, but a lot of times it's hard to imagine someone with a more conventional voice sounding as good on these songs.

As a fan of Kaleidoscope who never heard the follow-up in all the years it was only available as an import or bootleg, it's really great to finally listen to Wanderland (a longtime fan of the album, Tyler, The Creator, singled out "Scared Money" and "Shooting Stars" as his favorites last week). I think it might be her best album. Of course, some of it I had heard before, because "Flash Back" also appeared on Tasty (as "Flashback"), and "Popular Thug" was remixed with a Nas verse on the 2003 compilation The Neptunes Present... Clones. But the stuff I've never heard before is great, and in a way it's the best argument for Kelis's versatility and The Neptunes' genre-blurring vision. Wanderland features "Perfect Day," a collaboration with No Doubt that's as good as anything from Rock Steady, an Eazy-E interpolation with Fieldy from KoRn on bass, and a cover of "I Don't Care Anymore" by Phil Collins originally recorded for the Collins tribute album Urban Renewal (there was also a live cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the Japanese release of Wanderland).

The first 12 tracks on here are all Neptunes productions, some of the best beats they ever made, but then Kelis started to branch out with other producers and collaborators. And one of the things that I notice about the songs with other producers on Tasty and Kelis Is Here is that it feels like guys like will.i.am and Raphael Saadiq were trying to fit into her previously established sound and give her Neptunes-ish beats (although I really like the Saadiq tracks on those albums, he's really spanned every corner of modern R&B and has excelled at practically everything). There's some cool outliers, though, I wish she did more Max Martin/Dr. Luke guitar-driven stuff like "I Don't Think So."

Kelis finally broke completely out of the template of her early records with her two very different albums earlier this decade. Flesh Tone was a full-on EDM/house record with production by David Guetta and Benny Benassi, and Food had an earthy old school sound with live instrumentation by David Sitek from TV On The Radio. With that kind of pendulum swing, I think she's finally kinda gotten out of the Neptunes' shadow and stepped away from the kind of commercial expectations that got Wanderland shelved, so it's exciting to think of what else she could do in the future.

Complex did its overview of the best albums of the first half of 2019, and I wrote about Anderson .Paak, Boogie, and Gunna.

a) "Good Omens"
I remember reading Good Omens as a teenager and being really entertained by it and imagining how readily it could be adapted into a really fun movie. But now that I'm finally seeing it adapted onscreen as a miniseries, I have to admit my distant memories from 20 years ago are kind of foggy, I feel like I'm vicariously excited for how happy teenage me would've been to see this. But it is pretty well done, you probably can't ask for better leads than David Tennant and Michael Sheen, and Frances McDormand as the voice of God is somehow perfect.

b) "Catch-22"
I remember reading at most half of Catch-22 as a teenager and liking the book's sense of humor but somehow not being compelled to read on as I had with Vonnegut's absurdist reflections on WWII. I'm really impressed by this Hulu miniseries, though, it feels like they really captured the voice of the book and got a great cast, great meaty role for Christopher Abbott after he chewed his leg off to get out of "Girls," and really memorable turns by newcomers Daniel David Stewart and Lewis Pullman (son of Bill!). What really surprised me is that out of the trio of older actors playing commading officers, Kyle Chandler really upstages George Clooney and Hugh Laurie. Also, the flight scenes are really shot interestingly, looks a little different from anything I've seen in a World War II movie before.

c) "The Name of the Rose"
I've never read The Name of the Rose, so I'm not really sure where the story is going, but it's great seeing John Turturro and Michael Emerson act opposite each other, they're both incredible. Turturro being in another miniseries just kind of makes me wish that "The Night Of" had been turned into a multi-season series, though, I would've really loved that.

d) "The Hot Zone"
My wife read Richard Preston's The Hot Zone as a teenager and it was one of the formative experiences that made her want to study viruses and infectious diseases, so it's fun to watch this with her and get her running commentary. Her theory is that the people that cooperated with the TV adaptation got to be a bigger part of the narrative, and Nancy Jaax might not have done everything that they Julianna Margulies do in the show. But hey, it's Hollywood, sometimes it makes sense to kind of twist the truth so you have more of a main character to experience the story through.

e) "Fleabag"
The first season of "Fleabag" was so good and self-contained, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge has so many other projects going on, that I didn't get my hopes up that it would ever return. But the second season is really fantastic, took the whole thing in an interesting new direction and kind of put some clever new wrinkles in the conceit of Waller-Bridge breaking the fourth wall to address the camera in the middle of interacting with other characters in the 'reality' of the narrative. There were so many times I just laughed out loud, more than almost any other show recently.

f) "Gentleman Jack"
This show is about  Ann Lister, a British woman who lived semi-openly as a lesbian in the 1840s, which is pretty interesting in and of itself. But what I found really fascinating is that Lister left behind a diary with millions of words about her daily life. And while I'm usually wary of shows that use the main character's first person voiceover narration as a storytelling crutch, I really kinda wish they'd done that for "Gentleman Jack," since there's so much text in the actual person's words available to draw from. Instead, they just occasionally have actress Suranne Jones address the camera, very similarly to "Fleabag" in the middle of dialogue scenes, and it happens so sporadically and with so little payoff that it just doesn't feel like they committed to the choice, like it's just a whim. Also the theme song that plays over the credits is just awful.

g) "When They See Us"
It's morbidly amusing that Felicity Huffman plays probably the most contemptible person she's ever played in "When They See Us," and it's come out so soon after the biggest scandal of her life broke and people are looking at her as a bad person in real life for the first time. The young actors playing the Central Park 5 in this seem to be giving the most impressive performances, though, they've really done a good job of communicating what a horrible and confusing situation these kids were in.

h) "State of the Union"
Each episode of "State of the Union" is about 10 minutes long, and consists of a British couple in a troubled marriage (Chris O'Dowd and Rosamund Pike) meeting in a pub before a therapy appointment and kind of planning out what they'll discuss in that week's session, written by Nick Hornby and Stephen Frears. Having read High Fidelity, I regard Hornby's insight into relationships with suspicion, but he's got an ear for dialogue, and by the end of the 10 quick little episodes I really found it kind of engrossing and well done, Rosamund Pike really is an amazing actress. I wouldn't have minded if they'd done full half hour episodes, but it's kind of easy to imagine these dialogue-driven one-on-one scenes being padded out with the stuff you'd usually see in a show about a marriage, and it's kind of refreshing to feel like they trimmed the fat and just did the good parts. I'm also amused that in their marriage, as in my marriage, the husband is a music critic and the wife has a postgraduate degree in biology.

i) "It's Bruno!"
Each episode of "It's Bruno!" is about 15 minutes long, and consists of a guy walking his dog in New York. Even though it's somewhat a joke about dog people and their obsession with their dogs, it also feels like the show itself is too self-involved to realize that it's not interesting, it's just an incredibly pointless charmless series of sitcommy vignettes that, despite being shorter than a normal sitcom, still feels kind of padded and drawn out.

j) "Huge In France"

k) "What/If"
The first episode of "What/If" can be described as a gender swapped version of Indecent Proposal, with Renee Zellweger in the Robert Redford role. It's possible the story goes somewhere else entirely from there, but I haven't gotten that far yet, it was really just so unpromising. I might try to watch more and hope it gets interesting, just because I adore Jane Levy and don't want her to have wasted her time in something bad.

l) "The Society"
In "The Society," a group of high schoolers are bused out of town on a class trip, and when they return to their hometown that night, the entire town is empty, all of the adults and other people are just gone, all the buildings are vacant.

m) "High Seas"
This Netflix import from Spain that takes place in the 1940s reminds me of another recent Netflix import from Brazil, "Most Beautiful Thing," that took place in the '50s. Both have a real glamorous look and melodramatic vibe that really conjures the era well, this one's more of a mystery, I haven't watched it much yet but it seems interesting.

n) "Tuca & Bertie"
I've never really been into "Bojack Horseman" so a similar-looking show created by one of that show's animators probably didn't have a high chance of appealing to me, but at least it's not another animated sitcom about depression. But it still has that weird flat affect to it, it stars Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong, two people who have big personalities and their own perspectives and can be very funny, and yet they just kind of blandly read their dialogue here, it's just a drag.

o) "The Red Line"
Between Clooney in "Catch-22," Margulies in "The Hot Zone," and Noah Wyle in this, the last few weeks have been very big for miniseries with actors from "ER." "The Red Line" is by far the weak link of that trio, though, it kind of reminds me of self-important early 2000s Oscar movies like Traffic and Monster's Ball that kind of revel in tragedy and try to make something profound out of the interconnectedness of people's lives, I never cared for that kind of thing.

p) "The New Negroes with Baron Vaughn and Open Mike Eagle"
I've never really heard Open Mike Eagle's music, but I know Baron Vaughn from other TV shows, so I'll just call this show a "Grace And Frankie" side project. It's mostly a showcase for black standups with Open Mike Eagle doing a new song and video at the end of each episode, I've seen a lot of the comics before but Candice Thompson was new to me and I really enjoyed her set.

q) "Games People Play"
Lauren London has such a beautiful, luminous screen presence, I'm surprised it took this long for her to get a starring role in a series, it's kind of unfortunate that this show premiered so soon after Nipsey Hussle's murder and she kind of became this tragic figure and probably didn't promote the show as much as she otherwise would have. It's one of BET's better recent scripted shows, they've started to step things up on that side, but it's kind of a soap opera, not really my thing.

r) "Selling Sunset"
This Netflix reality show about luxury real estate brokers in L.A. has such a perfectly oily douchey vibe, with these two kind of creepy middle-aged twin brothers and the young women who work for them, it just emanates wealthy awfulness.

s) "Paradise Hotel"
I'm so used to terrible reality shows enjoying lots of success that it's kind of refreshing when something like a reboot of the infamously bad 2003 reality show "Paradise Hotel" flops so hard that FOX canceled it after a few episodes and aired a truncated season.

t) "Jailbirds"
Considering that one of Netflix's first big successful series was "Orange Is The New Black" and they now produce a billion documentary shows, I'm surprised it took this long for them to make a docuseries about women in prison. It's pretty well done as a character study of individual prisoners, but kinda too sad for me to watch more than an episode or two of.

u) "The Wrestlers"
A Viceland docuseries about, uh, wrestlers, obviously. Seems pretty well done but I don't think I can bring myself to care about the subject matter even a little.

v) "Portals To Hell"
Given his experience with reality television and that he's the son of the prince of fucking darkness, I suppose Jack Osbourne is as good a choice as anybody to co-host a Travel Channel show about famously haunted buildings. It's a good idea for a show, it kinda makes me want to go to some of these places myself, I hadn't heard of a lot of them.

w) "Bug Diaries"
I've watched this show a bit with my bug-obsessed 4-year-old, it's pretty cute. Jason Alexander plays a cicada in one episode and Wallace Shawn plays a spider.

x) "Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas"
I respect Wyatt Cenac's commitment to being just about the only topical comedy show from a "Daily Show" alum that doesn't have a studio audience, and the second season has had some pretty interesting subjects. But I think even in the 'deep dive' genre of these shows that focus on one topic for all or most of each episode, I tend to enjoy John Oliver and Hasan Minhaj's shows more.

y) "The Last O.G."
This show has settled into a comfortable groove, it's pleasant to watch, but Tracy Morgan really seldom gets to be as funny as he usually is in everything else, and the same can be said for Tiffany Haddish.

z) "The Chi"
It's been weird to watch most of the second season of "The Chi" after the story broke that lead actor Jason Mitchell has been fired from the show (and at least one other project) for harassing women on the set. I never really thought he followed through on the potential he showed in Straight Outta Compton, though, his guest spot on "Forever" was a really engaging episode but he seemed to struggle witih the dialogue, and he never really felt like a convincing center of a big ensemble on "The Chi," I think it's possible the show could carry on and perhaps even improve doing the next season without him.

1. Megan Thee Stallion - Fever
It's reductive to call Megan Thee Stallion the female Pimp C, but a lot of the appeal is definitely in the way she says gleefully profane shit in a sneering Houston twang that brings him to mind so much. And Fever kind of has a hybrid Houston/Memphis sound, with 4 tracks produced by Juicy J or Project Pat, without sounding too retro '90s southern rap. She's taken pains to call Fever a mixtape when people call it an album, which usually means there's another record with higher profile features around the feature, but I'd love to see more confidence in the strength of this record, it's great and really zeroes in on what she does best, even the R&Bish track "Best You Ever Had" is still really well written and sleazy like "Big Ole Freak," she's just so talented at talking shit. Here's the 2019 albums playlist that I throw all the new albums I listen to into, it's an easy place to find most of these.

2. YG - 4Real 4Real
These days only the biggest of the biggest rappers can get away with making an every album every 2 years and not constantly dropping mixtapes, but YG got into such a good 2 year rhythm that I was surprised to see him come back just 9 months after Stay Dangerous, but he topped that album, it was worth it to get something new this soon. That 1-2 punch of "Hard Bottoms & White Socks" and "Bottle Service" is incredible, really one of the best openings to an album that I've heard in a minute.

3. Pale Spring - Cygnus
Baltimore natives Emily Harper Scott aka Pale Spring and her husband and co-producer Drew Scott have relocated to L.A. lately, but it's cool to see them repping Baltimore with a really impressive record, her full-length debut after two excellent EPs. There's kind of a dark synth pop/trip hop vibe but there's often a really simple unadorned beauty to her voice and acoustic guitar at the center of the mix, in contrast to how these kinds of records often sound like the singer is almost hiding behind moody production and vocal effects.

4. Denzel Curry - ZUU
I always think about how Denzel Curry was in the same XXL Freshmen cypher in 2016 with Lil Uzi Vert, Kodak Black, 21 Savage and Lil Yachty, how even then he was kind of the outlier in that group, and even moreso now that those other four guys have gone on to pretty much define the Soundcloud generation. And that's kind of a shame, because Curry is at least as talented as those guys, much more in some cases, but it feels like he's finding his way. I wasn't totally sure what to make of last year's TA1300, it kind of gave me a Hopsin vibe, but ZUU is a little more straightforward and offers a clearer picture of his talent and his potential, I think "Speedboat" is my favorite but it's cool to hear him hang with Rick Ross on "Birdz."

5. Jamila Woods - LEGACY! LEGACY!
Jamila Woods has an Ivy League degree in African-American studies and every song on LEGACY! LEGACY! is named after a giant of black American art and culture ("BALDWIN," "SUN RA," "BASQUIAT," and so on). But the album doesn't feel like an academic exercise, it sounds like a set of songs where her research on these figures is kind of baked into the perspective, the titles certainly give you something to think about as you listen but it sounds great with or without the larger context.

6. Moneybagg Yo - 43VA HEARTLESS
Moneybagg Yo followed up 2017's Heartless and 2018's 2 Heartless with the new 43VA HEARTLESS, which is the most confusing thing since Chief Keef released the Bang 4 EP before the Bang 3 album. But I feel like Moneybagg Yo is still a little slept on, this is his highest charting album to date and outsold YG the first week, but outside his fanbase I don't know if people have really noticed how popular he is or how talented he is. Not sure if I like this one more than 2 Heartless but it's solid, "No Filter" is one of Tay Keith's best tracks to date.

7. Ari Lennox - Shea Butter Baby
"Whipped Cream" made a bit impression on me as the first Ari Lennox song I heard, and I think it's still be my favorite song on here, but "New Apartment" and "Up Late" are excellent too. She might really be making her own lane of earthy woke pussy poppin' music.

8. Micah E. Wood - Micah E. Wood
I first encountered Micah E. Wood's work as a photographer, taking portraits of the same Baltimore musicians I often write about, but he's also a musician himself. His new album has been growing on me, it's kind of electro pop with a little hip hop in the production but at its core the songs are very emotional and often piano-driven, it really feels like you're getting in this guy's head and hearing some of his innermost thoughts.

9. Superchunk - Acoustic Foolish
I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Superchunk's 1994 album Foolish. It's one of the best albums by one of my favorite bands, but I never agree with the consensus that it's their best, which I think was bolstered the Rumours-like context of the songs being written about the breakup between two members of the band. I just like the albums they made directly before (On The Mouth) and after (Here's Where The Strings Come In) more. That said, it's an ideal record for them to revisit with acoustic re-recordings for its 25th anniversary. For years I've had an acoustic Superchunk playlist of the various demos and acoustic versions of songs they've put on B-sides and stuff over the years, and it's fun to add to that. The vocals are sometimes a little buried on the original album, so it feels like I'm hearing some of these lyrics for the first time, and there's some beautiful unexpected touches like the saxophone on "Saving My Ticket."

10. James Bay - Oh My Messy Mind EP
Electric Light was one of my favorite albums of 2018, but it made virtually no commercial impact. So I'm kinda glad to see that James Bay's label is still interested in his career, and has been sending him out for concerts and TV appearances and releasing a single and an EP with some big name producers and co-writers (Ryan Tedder, Julia Michaels, Joel Little, Dan Wilson, Ariel Rechtshaid, etc.). The result is a little more acoustic and mellow than the album, but it's a good fit for his voice, I wouldn't mind if he keeps going in this direction if it gets him more chart success, "Rescue" is my favorite.

The Worst Album of the Month: Logic - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Logic's never been one of my favorite rappers, but I think he's an interesting and talented guy who's carved out a unique career, and I enjoyed interviewing him a couple years ago on the release date of Everybody, a pretty good album that made him a lot more famous. But listening to his latest album feels a little like watching The Social Network, like you're just watching this nerdy kid who grew up to be a smart, successful guy let his ego get bigger as his grudges and resentments drive him more and more, the whole thing is so bitter and aggrieved about fame and how rap fans see him and how he looks at the women that he got divorced to spend time with. The biggest song on the album is his highly hyped Eminem collaboration, and you can almost see this record as an Eminem album in terms of his complicated relationship with fame, but somehow he doesn't wear it as well, it just feels kind of dull and whiny.