It's been really boring and exasperating the last few weeks to watch adults try to shame other adults about enjoying a record that was made by a teenager, especially since I watched all this crap play out with a smaller set of nerds and critics 15-20 years ago. It's boring, you don't have to agree that Sour is a great album with cross-generational appeal but it is, so get over it. Obviously the three singles loom large over the album, but I don't think there's a miss in the bunch and my early favorites are "Jealousy, Jealousy" and "Brutal." A lot of it reminds me of the 'shallow boy' episode of "Boy Meets World," and it kind of feels like "Drivers License" was a really sincere moment of emotional outpouring and now she's just leaning into being the new breakup song girl, sometimes in a campy way, but it works for her. Here's the 2021 albums Spotify playlist that I put all of the new records I listen to into. 

I've always been a huge fan of the band Tim Foljahn fronted, Two Dollar Guitar, as well as his many sideman gigs in the '90s (Cat Power, Thurston Moore, Mosquito, etc.). But I hadn't heard much music from him after Two Dollar Guitar's last album 2006, and felt foolish to realize a few months ago that he'd released very good albums under his own name in 2012 and 2015 that I'd managed to not know about. So I've been enjoying all 3 of his solo albums lately, and I Dreamed A Dream has these really lush surprising string arrangements, which sound especially good on the album's big chugging rocker "Remember Me." I first interviewed Tim over 20 years ago, and it was good to talk to him again recently for a piece that will be out soon. 

"To Lose You" is really great, I hope this is a teaser for a full album soon because the 13 minutes go by really quickly. 

I feel like it's still unfortunately really hard for a rapper's debut album to get commercial traction without big name features, but I like hearing an artist prove they can stand on their own before anything else. And Morray's debut proves that "Quicksand" wasn't a fluke and he can crank out songs of the same quality with a whole bunch of different producers, most them not big established names. "Nothing Now" and "Reflections" are my early favorites, he kind of bends his voice in an interesting way on the latter. And "Bigger Things" is a great closer, he just sounds so sincerely joyful to experience some success and have people feeling his music. 

I don't like The Black Album-style farewell albums because rap retirements are fake, so I really don't like that J. Cole has upped the ante with a pre-farewell album before The Fall Off. And one of the things that really soured me on J. Cole early on was the way Born Sinner tried to borrow the classic album gravitas from other albums via samples, so I rolled my eyes pretty hard at the first track, which features Cam'ron and Lil Jon cameos and a beat that sounds like Jay-Z's "U Don't Know." Despite all that, though, The Off-Season is really strong, could be J. Cole's best project and definitely top 3, "Amari" and "Let Go My Hand" and "Interlude" have great production and some of the most effortless verses in a catalog that has often felt too effortful. It's cool that J. Cole finally lightened up and put some features on his album, too, especially since Morray, the newest star out of North Carolina, got a spot, but I wish it wasn't just a hook. 

When DMX died in April, he'd been working for years with Swizz Beatz and Def Jam on his first major label album in over a decade, and it's fortunate that an album's worth of that material was ready to release mere weeks after his death, while the world is still mourning him. And it feels good to hear the red carpet rolled out for X one last time, his old label and the super-producer whose career he launched reuniting him with Jay-Z, Nas, and The Lox, as well as kind of entertainingly weird mishmash of other guests that ranges from Moneybagg Yo to Bono. The elephant in the room is that DMX doesn't sound quite like he did when he was taking over the world, in fact his voice and his delivery have sounded a little hoarse and worn down for a long time, and sometimes it feels like they're hiding him from the spotlight, putting him on the last verse on the guest-filled early tracks on the album. But as the album goes on, X finds his groove and it feels like his final effort was done justice, even if it couldn't turn the clock back to his classics. And I really have to question the opinions of people who listened to a DMX album and complained about the Swizz Beatz tracks and said the Griselda track was the only good hting on it. 

Speaking of Griselda, I'm amused at how records that sound exactly like this come out 10 times a year and all of them get hailed as incredibly brave and unique masterpieces going against the grain. Like most of these records, Pray For Haiti is pretty good, but it makes me miss street rap with loud drums, I feel like the point's been made now that stuff can sound hard without any percussion added to samples and can kind of help you focus on the lyrics, but it's getting boring to me from a production standpoint. 

It feels like May brought the return of a whole wave of teen pop starlets from the mid-2000s, with new albums by Aly & AJ, The Veronicas, and Sky Sweetnam's weird metal band Sumo Cyco. Aly & AJ tried to do an indie pop rebrand as 78violet a few years ago, but more recently seemed to embrace their earlier commercial work, making a big deal of re-recording their biggest hit with the word "fucking" in place of the word "stupid." The new album is good, though, I think it fits the "Fiona Apple album title but happy" vibe of the title, "Break Yourself" in particular is a cool tune. 

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