This album came out last Friday but I've had it for quite a while since I was prepping for my GQ interview with Tears For Fears, and it's really a record worth spending time with, I think their best since The Seeds of Love. A lot of our conversation circled around the way they started out the album trying to write a hit with outside collaborators and then abandoned that process and just wrote what came naturally. But even the more downtempo stuff on the album that I like the most, like "Rivers Of Mercy" and "Long, Long, Long Time," has this kind of classic pop sensibility that comes naturally to them. Here's my 2022 albums playlist of every new album I listen to over the course of the year. 

2 Chainz has called Dope Don't Sell Itself his "last trap album," but it's not really clear what that says about his intentions for future albums. He's always been more versatile and cerebral than his biggest hits necessarily let on, and it would be fun to hear him do more soul sample stuff like Dope's "Vlad TV" with Stove God Cooks, although I hope he has some reinvention in mind that's a little less predictable than that. It's probably a good time for him to pivot anyway, since his chart positions have been sliding on these last couple albums, but he's still making great music, "Bet It Back" and "Free B.G." are great examples of his ear for beats, and it's a lot of fun to hear 2 Chainz rip into the "Laffy Taffy" beat on "Neighbors Know My Name." 

Superchunk's 12th album is their mellowest yet, a real contrast to the fired up political punk of 2018's What A Time To Be Alive. And I love Superchunk in every era and every mood, but this one did take a little longer to grow on me (I've had the promo for a while). So far my favorites are "Highly Suspect" and "This Night" and the title track, they use horns and strings in a different way than they did on Come Pick Me Up but also really beautiful, and Jon Wurster is such a versatile drummer that it's fun to hear him kind of stretch his legs on more relaxed tempos and slide all these tasty fills in. 

Last year Two Dollar Guitar's Tim Foljahn released his first new album in a while, the excellent I Dreamed A Dream, and I reconnected with him for the first time since our first interview 20 years ago for a Spin profile. He didn't mention any other new music on the way, so I was pleasantly surprised to see this pop up on his Bandcamp. It's a mostly instrumental record of "experimental explorations and extravagant blunders," lots of synths and drum machines but a very interesting variety of textures, some lovely guitar stuff like "Diamond Peach." Foljahn's singer/songwriter work has a very particular sound and mood but he's always done little things on the side like cassette-only releases for the Old Gold label that toyed with different sounds, cool to hear something new in this vein. 

Up to this point, the small amount of solo material Eddie Vedder had done was mostly played on ukulele or film score stuff, small-scale projects with material that probably wouldn't make sense with Pearl Jam. So I always assumed he'd never do a fairly ambitious star-studded full band solo record like Earthling. And I suspect even this one wouldn't exist if not for the fact that COVID-19 hit right when Pearl Jam had released an album and had to delay plans to do a bunch of touring. But it's an enjoyable record, about half songs that easily could've been on a Pearl Jam record and half songs that couldn't -- the kind of goofy talk-singing Vedder does on the opener "Invincible" makes me cringe, but it sounds like he's having fun and feeling a little liberated to try different approaches. And then there's a stretch in the second half where he's just enjoying the company of legends, a song with Stevie Wonder then one with Elton John then one with Ringo Starr (the one with Stevie is the only one of those I particularly like). And then it ends poignantly with "On My Way," a song that features recently unearthed recordings of Vedder's father singing, the one he never met and wrote "Alive" about. 

Matt Frazao is one of my favorite guitarists in Baltimore, he's been involved in a lot of avant-garde stuff like the Out of Your Head Collective as well as the hip hop band Soul Cannon, and the other day he released a cool solo single called "Funk of the Spheres," he just plays in a lot of different styles and contexts well. And Together We Make Music with Whoarfrost's Jon Lipscomb is a cool spacey electric guitar duel, kind of reminds me of the two albums Thurston Moore and Nels Cline made together in the late '90s. There's applause at the end so I guess this was recorded live at a gig but I'm not sure where or when. 

This is the debut release from a new Baltimore quartet that my buddy Mat mastered. Really cool promising stuff, some of it's very chill pastoral indie rock but "Truth Lounge" and "Shying" have some really cool knotty rhythms and creative drumming from Mike Alfieri. 

February has been an eventful month for long ambitious indie rock albums that excite critics -- I thought the Big Thief and Black Country, New Road albums had some cool moments but I think the best of them is Beach House's 8th album, their first big sprawling double album. I've found it very easy to love and root for most of the successful indie bands from Baltimore, but I've always struggled a little more to click with Beach House, they're just so much mellower than what I tend to go for. But I think Once Twice Melody is my favorite album they've made to date, it's not hugely varied compared to their other albums but the sprawl of 18 songs suits them, so far my favorite songs are "Pink Funeral" and the beautiful 7-minute "Over and Over." 

I'd never heard of Yeat before this album debuted at #6 on the Billboard 200, and this essay makes a compelling case that people who are new to Yeat are missing some important context of the scene he comes out of. But I dunno, I'll risk being old and wrong and just say a white dude from Portland rapping like Young Thug and Playboi Carti sounds dumb and ridiculous. And even with cosigns from Thug and Gunna appearing on this album, he's at best on Lil Keed's level as far as doing this style of rap. 

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »

| Next »