Amber Mark, an R&B singer who's from Tennessee but has a Jamaican father and spent a few years growing up in India, has a great worldly sound that takes a bit from everything the way the best R&B often does. She was nominated for a Grammy a few years ago for a 'mini-album' and has collaborated with a weird range of people including The Dirty Projectors and Empress Of, but Three Dimensions Deep is her proper Universal-distributed debut album, and it's fantastic. My favorite track "Most Men" starts with just an organ line and then builds to this simple, funky beat, and the way her voice really carries the track and switches from raspy runs to lush harmonies is masterful. 

I recently did a piece for Spin ranking all 31 Elvis Costello albums, and The Boy Named If came in at a respectable #18, right between Almost Blue and Brutal Youth. Excitement for Costello's new records albums usually enjoys an uptick when he makes a 'rock' record with the Attractions or the Imposters, but I rarely find it useful to measure those albums by how much they resemble his early work. The Boy Named If, however, genuinely sounds more like This Year's Model than any record he's made since 1978. Part of that is become Steve Nieve kind of stays in a narrower lane than usual with buzzy organs, but as always there's a nice variety of tempos and moods here, Pete Thomas is really and truly one of rock's greatest drummers. 

I have mixed feelings about FKA Twigs -- I think she's a really unique talent, but her music isn't the sort of thing I necessarily need a lot of, and while I love LP1 I just kind of listened to Magdalena once or twice and then forgot it existed. But Caprisongs, which is positioned as 'mixtape' rather than album, feels brisk and accessible in a good way, with features (The Weeknd, Daniel Caesar) and producers (Sounwave, Mike Dean, Cirkut) that put her in a slightly more pop context -- although the video with The Weeknd is just hilarious. Maybe she'll follow this with a proper album that's even better, but for now I think this works pretty great as a project unto itself. I think "Oh My Love" is my favorite track but "Thank You Song" is a really killer closing song. 

I listened to this album a lot while prepping for my GQ interview with John Mellencamp, and it's really a remarkable album. Even though Mellencamp has kind of been on this trajectory of making his records rootsier and more intimate for about 35 years now, he's gone to such an interesting extreme, you could play some of these songs for people and they wouldn't be able to guess it's him. There's always been this existential streak in his songs, "Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone" is kind of a famously dark sentiment for a fist-pumping classic rock anthem, but "I Am A Man That Worries" and "I Always Lie To Strangers" feel like he's just willing to stare into the void and not blink. The 3 songs with Bruce Springsteen bring a little more color and hope to the proceedings, but even one of those songs, "A Life Full Of Rain," kind of ends the record on a down note, which I like. 

I've always said that Gunna has yet to have a solo hit -- for a long time all his biggest songs were features or Lil Baby collaborations, and even now his biggest songs have features. His signature solo track is probably an album track like "Drip Or Drown" or "Who You Foolin," not a quickly forgotten single like "One Call" or "Skybox." In any case, Gunna thrives when he has company, and DS4EVER gives him plenty of it, although I think my favorite song is the solo track "Poochie Gown." It baffles me a little that Gunna beat The Weeknd for a #1 album, doing better first week numbers than his mentor Young Thug has ever done, but I've always felt like people were clamoring for Lil Baby and Gunna to filter Thug's sound through a more conventional Atlanta rap aesthetic. 

I always liked Our Lady Peace's singles in the '90s but I didn't really get to know their music better until I met my wife, who's a huge fan. And 2000's Spiritual Machines, sort of a concept album with spoken interludes by Ray Kurzweil, is one of their best albums. So it's interesting to hear them revisit that whole idea with a sequel two decades later, following up on Kurzweil's past predictions about the future and making new ones about the 2030s. Spiritual Machines II is kind of a musical departure for Our Lady Peace, though, a little less guitar-heavy and more groove-driven, produced by TV On The Radio's Dave Sitek and featuring Pussy Riot on one song.

Cat Power is one of those bands that makes me feel like an indie snob because I really liked them a lot more before they were popular, especially those first three albums when Tim Foljahn and Steve Shelley were in the band. 2000's The Covers Record was kind of the beginning of the end of me being an active Cat Power fan, but that's where a lot of people started paying attention. Chan Marshall's third album of Covers is appealing to me a little more than most of the stuff she's made in the 20th century though. Her covers still very often abandon the vocal melodies and musical arrangements of the originals -- apparently Marshall was planning on making an album of new songs but kept finding herself singing other people's lyrics over what her band was playing -- but things are a little more fleshed out than they were on the stark and simple The Covers Record. And this album has her most interesting range of covers, uniting the classic alternative canon (Nico, The Replacements, Iggy Pop) with the modern alternative canon (Lana Del Rey, Frank Ocean) and even things in the classic rock canon like a weirdly good, dramatically different arrangement of Bob Seger's "Against The Wind." 

It's hard for a band that's released 18 albums in under a decade to stamp any one of them as an especially important one. But King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard leader Stu Mackenzie has called 2021's Butterfly 3000 his favorite, and now they've made it the source material for the band's first remix album. It's cool to hear their sound filtered through the aesthetic of guys like DJ Shadow and DaM FunK, and my favorite remix also has my favorite title, because the song that namechecks the Beach Boys is reworked as "2.02 Killer Year (Bullant's Fuck Mike Love Mix)." 

Stevie Wonder is the biggest name in Summer Of Soul and part of the film's amazing opening scene, so it's a little bit of a letdown that he's the most notable absence from the soundtrack album. But it's still an awesome document that starts out on fire with the Chambers Brothers and B.B. King and builds beautifully to the climax of the Sly and the Family Stone and Nina Simone performances toward the end of the album. 

Powerz Records is a Baltimore label that has been doing a series of covers albums featuring local musicians covering Billboard hits of yesteryear. I checked out the latest installment because my friend Mat Leffler-Schulman made a cool "Call Me Maybe" cover for it -- Mat's a prolific producer/engineer who's worked on pretty much all my records, but this is the first track of his own that he's put out since the last album from his Mons project back around 2003. There's some fun stuff on here, it's interesting to see what people pick when their choices are the biggest pop hits ever, there's "Hey Jude" but also some less predictable songs. I particularly like Dave Fell's "Too Closer" cover and Liz Vayda's take on "How Deep Is Your Love." 

Even at Staind's peak, Aaron Lewis was the doleful acoustic balladeer of the nu-metal world, and it wasn't that surprising a decade ago when he embarked on a career as a country singer. But he's been chugging along with this second chapter of his career and picking up steam: now he's signed to the hitmaking country label Big Machine and the lead single from his fourth solo album topped Billboard's country chart. That song, "Am I The Only One," is a vague, monotonous political ballad about "screaming 'what the fuck' at my TV" and choosing to "quit singin' along every time they play a Springsteen song," so cranky and aimless that it makes Toby Keith's right wing anthems seem like high art. The rest of the album isn't quite that bad -- sometimes he sings in a lower register and sounds like a better rock-frontman-turned-country-solo-artist, Darius Rucker -- but the whole Staind-goes-country vibe is still pretty terrible. I'm disappointed in Vince Gill for appearing on this album. 

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