Deep Album Cuts Vol. 257: Primus

Friday, April 29, 2022






Primus released a new EP last week, Conspiranoid, and it's pretty good, put me in a mood to make a playlist looking back on their catalog. 

Primus deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. American Life
2. Pudding Time
3. Welcome To This World
4. Over The Electric Grapevine
5. Groundhog's Day
6. The Scheme
7. Golden Boy
8. Marry The Ice Cube
9. Here Come The Bastards
10. Erin On The Side Of Caution
11. Bob
12. Dirty Drowning Man
13. Behind My Camel
14. Intruder
15. Semi-Wondrous Boat Ride
16. Hennepin Crawler
17. Sgt. Baker
18. Del Davis Tree Farm
19. To Defy The Laws Of Tradition

Track 5 from Suck On This (1989)
Tracks 2 and 19 from Frizzle Fry (1990)
Tracks 1, 9 and 17 from Sailing The Seas Of Cheese (1991)
Track 14 from the Miscellaneous Debris EP (1992)
Track 3 and 11 from Pork Soda (1993)
Track 4 and 18 from Tales From The Punchbowl (1995)
Track 7 from Brown Album (1997)
Track 13 from the Rhinoplasty EP (1998)
Track 12 from Antipop (1999)
Track 8 from the Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People EP (2003)
Track 16 from Green Naugahyde (2011)
Track 15 from Primus & The Chocolate Factory with the Fungi Ensemble (2014)
Track 6 from The Desaturating Seven (2017)
Track 10 from the Conspiranoid EP (2022)

Primus are kind of an acquired taste that people seem to love or hate, which I get --- there's a reason "Primus sucks!" became the tongue-in-cheek motto of Primus fans everywhere. But I've lived with and played in bands with two bassists who love Primus, my brother Zac and my college roommate Mike, and have a lot of fondness for the band. My brother and I got on board from "My Name Is Mud" and I have a great amount of affection for Pork Soda and Tales of the Punchbowl, but I kind of found out later that the first couple albums were really the ones that build their fanbase and Sailing The Seas of Cheese is definitely their classic. Definitely one of the strangest, most niche hard rock bands that's ever gone platinum. 

In the '90s, I was very conscious of who were "120 Minutes" bands and who were "Headbanger's Ball" bands, and Primus was one of the few who were regulars on both shows, along with Faith No More and most of the big Seattle bands. Les Claypool, Primus's frontman and weirdo bass virtuoso, went through a few different iterations of Primus before they wound up with their definitive lineup with Larry LaLonde on guitar and Tim "Herb" Alexander on drums. But Herb is kind of the John Frusciante of Primus who's left and returned multiple times, with drummers who were briefly in Primus in the '80s rejoining: Brain Mantia was with the band for the Brown Album, Rhinoplasty, and Antipop, and Jay Lane plays on Green Naugahyde. 

I think Brown Album gets kind of a bad rap but is a really cool record with a very raw, ugly sound. And it was recorded the same year Primus made probably the most famous piece of music of the band's career: the theme song for "South Park." But at the time I kind of dismissed Antipop, which was the last album the band made before an extended hiatus and felt like they were relying on the band's famous friends and fans: tracks on the album were produced by Fred Durst, Tom Morello, Tom Waits, and even "South Park"'s Matt Stone. But that album holds up better than I anticipated, and I particularly like the Stewart Copeland-produced "Dirty Drowning Man." 

It's also a lot of fun to hear the band reveal their influences on the covers-heavy EPs, I knew Primus's versions of "Intruder" and "The Family And The Fishing Net" before I ever heard the Peter Gabriel originals. And in recent years they've been engaged in some interesting tribute projects, including a recent tour where they cover Rush's A Farewell To Kings, and an album interpreting music from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. The boat ride scene was always the creepiest part of that movie so that's the song that really makes the most sense with the Primus treatment. 

In 2006, Interscope released a Primus best-of compilation, They Can't All Be Zingers. And while it contains mostly singles, it had a few particularly popular album tracks, including "To Defy The Laws Of Tradition," "Marry The Ice Cube," and "Over The Electric Grapevine," which I always thought was a high point of Tales From The Punchbowl, I'm glad to see it's become an acknowledged classic and live staple. And I leaned pretty heavily on their most played live songs for the playlist, including "Groundhog's Day," "Here Come The Bastards," "American Life," "Pudding Time," and "Sgt. Baker." 

8:12 AM

Reading Diary

Monday, April 25, 2022




a) Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, by Kelefa Sanneh
Kelefa Sanneh has been one of the best music critics for a couple decades now, so when I saw that he'd published a book last fall, I automatically put it on my Christmas wishlist, and soon after received it as a gift. I hadn't looked closely at the title and kind of assumed the book was about actual record labels, which would've been interesting too, until I sat down to read it and realized that it was about music genres, which is a topic a little more closer to my heart (every year I write lists of the year's best pop, rap, rock, R&B and country singles and look at how the main U.S. radio formats are doing). Because he's really attempting to synthesize the last 70 or so years into one digestible book, Sanneh isn't saying a lot here that I didn't already know, but he pulls all the disparate strands of the story together in fairly elegant and inventive ways to make these messy complex histories form a coherent narrative. 

b) Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, by Kory Stamper
When I was a kid, there was a gigantic dictionary in my mom's house where I'd regularly look up unfamiliar, and when I was a teenager I'd write in notebooks that invariably had a page or two where I'd just keep a list of favorite words that I found especially interesting or chewy or fun to say/write. So I'm enough of a word nerd to want to read about how dictionaries are written, but former Merriam-Webster associate editor Kory Stamper is young enough and has enough of a sense of humor about her work to write a book that's accessible and entertaining enough about the topic that I'd recommend it to just about anyone. I learned a lot of little nuggets of trivia and insight about the English language that I never knew, and laughed out loud a few times. Stamper was also by far the best talking head in the silly "History of Swear Words" thing on Netflix with Nic Cage. 

c) Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
Please Kill Me was published over 25 years ago and remains seemingly unchallenged as the definitive book about punk rock, so I finally got around to reading it. And it definitely lives up to the hype, I love a good oral history where the participants get to just tell things from their perspective (sometimes even contradicting each other) and the writer compiling it all never pokes their nose in to clarify anything or tie it together. I often get annoyed when books or articles about music focus too much on biography and too little on the actual music, but Please Kill Me is precisely great because it's so tawdry and full of weird tangents about hangers-on and torrid affairs and petty feuds, it helps deflate a lot of the stuffy mythology around the Velvets and the Stooges and the Ramones and so on and give you a really visceral sense of who they were as people and how that influenced the music. 

7:00 AM

Sunday, April 24, 2022




I reviewed the first 4 episodes of the new The Man Who Fell To Earth series, which premieres tonight on Showtime, for Consequence. 

5:37 AM

Saturday, April 23, 2022





Spin ran a list of the 50 greatest albums of 1972, and I wrote about Music Of My Mind, Still Bill, and Amazing Grace. 

5:34 AM

Monthly Report: April 2022 Singles

Friday, April 22, 2022




1. Tate McRae - "She's All I Wanna Be"
Last year after Olivia Rodrigo's "Good 4 U" hit, I wrote a Spin piece about one of my favorite topics, rock songs by pop singers, hoping that we'd get a wave of guitar-driven Top 40 confections like we did after "Since U Been Gone." So far that wave has been hit and miss -- I don't really like Gayle's "abcdefu" but her other songs are pretty good, the Machine Gun Kelly-adjacent pop punk revival has had a mild impact on pop radio, and the great rock songs on Halsey's album didn't get the attention they deserved. But "She's All I Wanna Be" is a gem -- Tate McRae's breakthrough "You Broke Me First" felt like MOR pop with a Billie Eilish-derived vocal style, but her voice sounds much better on a big gleaming Greg Kurstin guitar pop jam. Here's the 2022 singles Spotify playlist I update every month. 

2. Harry Styles - "As It Was"
One Direction was also very often in my beloved guitar pop niche, and Harry Styles's solo career has been a little more dad rock but also pretty consistently excellent. "As It Was" is notable as probably as maybe the fastest Hot 100 #1 with live drums in years, if not decades, kind of emulating the vague "Take On Me" '80s synth pop vibe of "Blinded By The Lights" with a slightly more low key, handmade aesthetic. 

3. Tems - "Free Mind"
I really liked If Orange Was A Place, the solo EP that Tems released last year after the success of "Essence" that made me wonder if it would be Tems rather than Wizkid that would become a longterm fixture on American R&B radio. But as it turned out, an older song Tems released back in 2020 has really become her big follow-up to "Essence." 

4. JNR Choi f/ Sam Tompkins - "To The Moon"
The success of Tems and other Afrobeats artists is just part of an interesting moment where American rap/R&B radio sounds more international than perhaps ever before right now. A big driver of that is drill, which started in Chicago, then took on a new form in London, which then became the current sound of New York. Brooklyn drill hits take a lot of their production cues from UK drill, which to my ears always sounded more like a descendant of previous British rap movements like grime than Chicago drill, but up to this point we've mostly gotten Americans like Pop Smoke and Fivio Foreign rapping over those UK-influenced beats. So it feels notable that JNR Choi is from London and we've now got a full-fledged British rap song all over American rap radio -- there's a remix with Gunna that's definitely helping but I don't consistently hear that version on the radio as much as the original. "To The Moon" is also funny because it's built on a loop of unknown British singer Sam Tompkins covering a song from the first Bruno Mars album. So circa 2022 retro R&B Bruno is on the airwaves right alongside a remnant of early 2010s pop crooner Bruno. 

5. Kay Flock f/ Cardi B, Dougie B and Bory 300 - "Shake It"
A lot of established stars have jumped on drill beats right now with varying levels of musical comfort or commercial success, but Cardi B feels like one person who's still so well keyed into the energy of young New York that it just sounds completely natural for her to storm into the middle of a posse cut with 3 young drill rappers and steal the spotlight. "Shake It" is 1 minute 58 seconds and has 4 rappers on it, so the mic is getting passed around like a hot potato, but it somehow works for the whole thing to dart in and out so quickly. 

6. Florence + The Machine - "Free"
My wife loves Florence + The Machine and has made me a fan too over the past few years, especially after we saw them live in 2018 and it was just an amazing show. I was a little skeptical to hear that the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff worked on the new album, but all four of the advance singles from Dance Fever have been great. The one that's stuck with me the most has been "Free," partly because of the video, which co-stars Bill Nighy and is quite cute and charming. But then the song's bridge, and the final shot of the video, which is followed by a note that it was filmed in Ukraine last November, before the war broke out, really kind of hit me with this emotional gut punch. 

7. Shawn Mendes - "When You're Gone"
I don't know why Shawn Mendes stopped working with Teddy Geiger, that was really the magic combination behind all his best music. But "When You're Gone" is pretty good, a little mellower than his other uptempo songs but has a nice bittersweet melody. 

8. Jack Harlow - "First Class"
Fergie's "Glamorous" is a classic and I kind of like that she's finally being treated properly as white rap royalty being sampled on someone else's #1. Harlow still has this tedious careerist vibe that seeps out here and there in every verse but he's definitely found his footing as a hitmaker, I get why this is the one of his last few solo singles that blew up, although that "sweet sweet semen" line is pretty terrible. 

9. Yung Bleu f/ Kehlani - "Beautiful Lies"
A couple months ago I grudgingly admitted to enjoying one of Yung Bleu's many songs that have been ubiquitous on the radio, and another one has grown on me since then. I like how much empty space there is in this song in between the sections with drums, and his voice sounds good contrasting with Kehlani's. 

10. 2 Chainz f/ Moneybagg Yo and Beatking - "Pop Music"
"Pop Music" is not my favorite song from Dope Don't Sell Itself but it's a fun one, 2 Chainz is one of the few established rappers who has just the right energy for a Beatking track. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Bring Me The Horizon - "Die 4 U"
I'd seen Bring Me The Horizon's name around for years without actually hearing their music, but I'd seen descriptors like 'metalcore' and assumed there music was pretty heavy. So I was a little surprised when I heard a song on the radio that sounded like The Kid Laroi that turned out to be Bring Me The Horizon, this shit is terrible. 

5:00 AM

Friday, April 15, 2022





I wrote about the fascinating history of She Wants Revenge, and frontman Justin Warfield's past life as a teenage rap star, for Consequence. 

12:31 PM

Monthly Report: March 2022 Albums

Thursday, April 14, 2022






1. Lucky Daye - Candydrip
Lucky Daye's duets collection Table For Two was one of my favorite EPs of 2021, and I was pretty excited when it won the Grammy for Best Progressive R&B album last week (in fact it was a good night for R&B EPs in general, since Heaux Tales won Best R&B Album). Lucky Daye's frequent producer D'Mile also got to go up and accept a Grammy with Silk Sonic, he's been on a great run the last few years, it's really great to see these guys get some well deserved recognition. And with "Over" blowing up on the radio, it really feels like this is Lucky Daye's year, this album is fantastic, I love the balance between sort of old-fashioned soul and some slick modern textures, and the way the first three tracks run together is sublime. Alex Isley, who co-wrote and co-produced a couple tracks on Candydrip, also released a very good album, Marigold with Jack Dine, in March. Here's my 2022 albums Spotify playlist that most of these albums are in. 

2. Jarv Is - This Is Going To Hurt (Original Soundtrack)
Jarvis Cocker had been releasing music pretty sporadically since Pulp disbanded, but he's had a nice prolific run in the last two years: Beyond The Pale from his new band Jarv Is, a collection of French pop songs he recorded for Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, and now a Jarv Is soundtrack album for a BBC series. I kind of assumed This Is Going To Be Hurt would be maybe a couple songs and a lot of instrumental stuff composed as incidental music for the show, but it's mostly full-only vocal songs. And it's really excellent, possibly my second favorite post-Pulp album he's made after Further Complications, my favorites so far are "Dare To Love" and "Just Another One Of Those Days." 

3. Maren Morris - Humble Quest
Humble Quest debuted on the charts significantly lower than Maren Morris's previous two major label albums, which is a shame, I thought she was on the verge of household name status after the success of "Bones." Like Carly Pearce, Morris made two albums with the late producer Michael Busbee and has a largely different team on her new record but didn't miss a beat, this is right up to the standard of her other stuff. "The Furthest Thing" is gorgeous and I think "Tall Guys" is the real surefire hit on here, they're nuts if they don't release that as a single. 

4. LÉON - Circles
I've been following the Swedish singer Lotta Lindgren aka LÉON since I heard her debut single "Tired Of Talking" back in 2016, and her third album is excellent stuff, really wish she got more recognition, in America or anywhere really. She has kind of an unusual voice and a great ear for these sort of gentle contemplative pop songs, "Soaked" and "Lift You Up" are standouts on this album. 

5. Rosalía - Motomami
I definitely feel too out of my depth to really say too much about what's happening in Latin pop, especially since I don't speak a lick of Spanish, but I still like to check what the biggest artists are doing and have really loved a lot of Rosalía's stuff the last few years. Her 2017 debut album Los Angeles produced by Raul Refree, who I interviewed a couple years ago, was largely acoustic and steeped in flamenco conventions, but she's very quickly moved into this cutting edge beat-driven reggaeton/pop sound. I don't know what to compare that kind of evolution to, maybe it's a little like the journey from Taylor Swift to 1989 but I dunno, a lot less dorky and MOR. Tracks like "Diablo" and "Bulerias" just sound so cool in terms of the production and the vocal arrangements. And I try to read translations of the lyrics sometimes just to get a handle on what she's saying, like, the piano ballad called "Hentai," that's some wild shit. 

6. Sonic Youth - In/Out/In
I really enjoyed ranking every Sonic Youth album for Spin last month and having an excuse to revisit my favorite band's discography, but a few people did express disappointment that I only covered the 15 'proper' albums. The thing is, I love their whole sprawling catalog of more experimental releases, but I don't see them as essential in the same way and would've felt weird including them just to rank almost all of them below almost all of the proper albums. And I love that they're still dipping into the archives and putting things together like In/Out/In, 44 minutes of previously unreleased improvisations from across the band's fertile last decade together. "In & Out" has some Kim Gordon vocals and "Machine" is a bit of a rocker, but mostly it just feels like you're in the studio with them one afternoon hearing them try to work out new material. Some of the later more conceptual and/or collaborative SYR releases were cool, but I feel like this is like if they'd just continued doing things more in the vein of SYR1 and SYR2, which is great. I'm such a huge Steve Shelley fan and I love hearing him sort of conduct the band and steer the rising and falling energy on pieces like these. 

7. Charli XCX - Crash
Charli XCX was a slightly left-of-center pop artist from the beginning, but after she couldn't quite sustain the chart success of "Boom Clap" and "Fancy," it felt like she took a very deliberate, critic-friendly pivot towards the insurgent 'hyperpop' movement. And I think that it was a sincere creative decision that suited her to an extent, but I've never really loved that stuff and thought Charli's records in that lane were some of the only music from that scene that I found even moderately appealing. So I was kind of glad when Charli sort of made this overt renewed bid for mainstream stardom with Crash, the last album on her Atlantic contract. Honestly, she should be a huge star and in the wake of Dua Lipa's success it feels like there's a clear blueprint for how she could be, so I'm glad she went for it. Some of the fans she picked up in the Number 1 Angel/Pop 2 era didn't seem to agree, though, and there were some tense exchanges between Charli and her snobbier fans in the run-up to Crash, it kind of reminded me of the way rock fans act when an indie band signs to a major label and makes a more polished record, which is hilarious given the context. But personally, it's my favorite Charli XCX album since Sucker, and I think the title track and "Yuck" are some of the best songs she's ever done. And even if she hasn't quite returned to Top 40 radio, it feels like the gambit has largely worked, Crash is her first top 10 album in America and her first #1 album in the UK. 

8. Juliett Class - Juliett Class EP
Joan Sullivan of the Baltimore band The Selkies has a new New York-based band, and I'm really enjoying their 4-song debut recorded by J. Robbins. In some ways it's got that classic '90s riot grrrl sound, but there's a surprising little theremin cameo on "Shut Off." And Niabi Aquena's voice is really striking on the midtempo stuff like "Next Week" that kind of builds in intensity off of how she varies her delivery. 

9. Pluralone - This Is The Show
I really enjoyed interviewing Josh Klinghoffer last fall while he was in the midst of putting together the album that would eventually be This Is The Show and had just become a touring member of Pearl Jam, he's a very interesting and musically adventurous guy. Of course, Red Hot Chili Peppers just released their first post-Klinghoffer album, but in the meantime he's just totally hit the ground running and has made three Pluralone albums since parting with the band. One thing that surprised me was when I asked about his songwriting influences and he named a lot of '80s and '90s British bands (Blur, Radiohead, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths), but now I totally hear it, especially on songs on this new record like "Offend" and "Any More Alone." 

10. Cannons - Fever Dream
"Fire For You," the breakthrough radio hit by the L.A. trio Cannons, was in my year-end top 10 for 2020. And their next single "Bad Dream" and its parent album hit the same sweet spot of hazy synth pop with big basslines and dreamily soft vocals. They don't throw many surprises in the mix but it works for them, I think "Goodbye" is the one that sticks with me the most so far. 

The Worst Album of the Month: Ghost - Impera
Given the way the Swedish band Ghost wears these elaborate face-concealing 'ghoul' costumes and gets respectful coverage from non-metal media outlets, I kind of assumed for years that they made some super heavy shit. So I was kind of shocked when I heard a Ghost song on the radio one day and these guys sound like total weenies. It's mostly the lead singer's voice, but even the music has these really mild arty or theatrical flourishes, it all just sounds unspeakably lame. And somehow they keep getting more popular with every album. And yes, I listened to Machine Gun Kelly's Mainstream Sellout, this is worse. 

12:10 PM

TV Diary

Wednesday, April 13, 2022









I mostly like that Disney+'s Marvel series have run towards trippy parallel universe things like "WandaVision" and "Loki," but I'm not trying too hard to keep track of what's going on in "Moon Knight," I'm just along for the ride. Oscar Isaac is a great actor but despite the sort-of duel roles of him playing two guys who share the same body, one meek and British and the other brave and American, it doesn't feel like it's a very challenging project for him. The last couple episodes with May Calamawy from "Ramy" have been great, much better than the first episode in my opinion, but it also makes me really impatient for a new season of "Ramy." 

I don't know a whole lot about Julia Child, but I enjoyed 2009's Julie & Julia, with Meryl Streep as Child, charting her course to publishing her first cookbook. And I think "Julia," which sort of picks up the story from there, with Sarah Lancashire as Child as she was becoming a TV star, is even better. The cast is just fantastic, with David Hyde Pierce and Bebe Neuwirth giving the whole thing a bit of a 'Frasier without Frasier' vibe at times. And it's just very entertaining and at times touching to see Julia and her husband Paul slowly figure out her career and take this big leap. Fran Kranz doesn't feel especially convincing as the stodgy snobbish public television intellectual, though. 

"The Outlaws" is kind of a silly British dark comedy created by Stephen Merchant, with Christopher Walken as the token American, in a group of convicted criminals in a work release program who find a bunch of stolen money. It's kind of overly broad comedy with one-dimensional characters, but the cast is great and makes it work, especially Darren Boyd, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Rhianne Barreto. 

The case of 18-year-old Conrad Roy's suicide, and his girlfriend Michelle Carter's manslaughter conviction for encouraging him to kill himself, is one of the more horrifying and fascinating news stories of the past decade. But after 3 episodes of this series, which stars Elle Fanning as Carter, I don't know if I feel any closer to understanding who Carter is or why she did what she did, and I don't even know if I want to understand, it's just such an awfully sad story. 

Long before "Winning Time" debuted, we learned a few months ago that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell's longtime professional partnership had ended when Ferrell wanted the lead role and McKay gave it to John C. Reilly. However poorly McKay may have handled the situation, his instincts were correct in that Reilly is perfect as Jerry Buss and it's hard to picture Ferrell pulling it off as well. The first episode is exhausting with all of McKay's directorial tics, and the second episode directed by Jonah Hill is even more annoyingly directed (at one point he cuts a split second of a dog humping another dog into a scene of one guy dominating over another guy in a basketball game). But I feel like the show has found a groove over the last few episodes, Quincy Isaiah is fantastic as Magic Johnson, as are Solomon Hughes, Jason Segel, and Gaby Hoffman, just a ton of great performances elevating the show. 

"The Dropout" is so far the gem of this recent spate of shows about the rise and fall of various startups. "Super Pumped," like "Winning Time," is being set up as an anthology series where the second season will be about Facebook, which should be interesting because it feels like The Social Network is one of the main reasons all of these shows exist in the first place. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a pretty good performance but it feels, to his credit maybe, like he seems like too good a guy to be totally believable as someone who's as big an asshole as Travis Kalanick. I kind of wish "Super Pumped" stuck more to the creators' established style on "Billions," the Quentin Tarantino narration (???) and other flashy fourth wall-breaking bits feel a little too flashy. I already wrote about this show's frequent usage of Pearl Jam's music, which is a little hit and miss, sometimes the songs suit the scene and sometimes they don't. 

I was very amused when I finished the "Super Pumped" finale and then put on the latest episode of "WeCrashed," which basically takes place at the same time and touches on Kalanick resigning from Uber. It feels like it's all connected in the Bad CEOS cinematic universe. I like and respect Anne Hathaway and neither like nor respect Jared Leto, but I have to say they're both kind of equally well equipped to play a pair of people with fragile egos who start to believe their own hype with disastrous results. I love how O.T. Fagbenie's character finally shows up and sort of says what the viewer is thinking in the last couple episodes. 

It's funny that Michael Mann is exec producing a show called "Tokyo Vice" but it's not a "Miami Vice" spinoff. There's definitely a big drop off in quality from the Mann-directed first episode to the second episode, though, and I wish major directors would stop working with Ansel Elgort, I'm tired of looking at his weird giant toddler face. It seems mildly promising but I dunno, do we still need these kinds of '(seemingly) the only white man in an Asian country' stories. Also, here's another show with some Pearl Jam on the soundtrack, nice use of "Release" in the first episode.

It's exciting to see Samuel L. Jackson star in a series, but I feel like it hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention since "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey" is kind of a slow moving character study of an old man with dementia. Jackson is great in it, and the murder mystery aspect keeps it moving forward, but I have to admit it's kind of fallen short of my expectations. 

This French scripted series on Netflix is about comedians trying to get their careers off the ground in Paris. And it's interesting to see how the style of standup comedy developed in America is now a global thing and even the jokes in this show feel very contemporary to what a comedian would be doing in the U.S. in 2022. And it's a charming little show, some very likable characters. 

We liked this Canadian medical drama when it debuted on NBC in 2020 when they were short on fall programming right after Covid hit, less into it now that it's returned for a second season. 

I like that romcoms are flourishing on TV right now, although there's a reason it's a genre is more traditionally suited to movies: if you tried to draw out the will-they-or-won't-they break-up-and-make-up cycle over multiple episodes or seasons, it can feel kind of repetitive and exhausting. Despite those pitfalls, the second season of "Starstruck" is as good as the first, if not better, really glad this show returned, I just adore Rose Matafeo and her delightful New Zealand accent. 

m) "Woke"
Rose McIver has left "Woke" for a better show where she doesn't use her delightful New Zealand accent, but it's still a moderately entertaining show, although it's kind of hit and miss with its glib attempts at finding humor in progressive politics.

"Killing Eve" continued to be a pretty excellent show for a while after season 1 head writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge moved on to her many other projects. But as the show wrapped up its 4th and final season this week, it feels undeniable that the show had a steady decline as they cycled through a different head writer each season, and it's hard not to wonder what could've been if Waller-Bridge stayed on, or if they simply ended the series earlier. Anjana Vasan from "We Are Lady Parts" was a good addition to the cast this season, but I really just did not care about how the story ended. It was okay, I guess, it's pretty funny that anybody expected a happy ending enough to be upset about it. 

"Snowfall" is still pretty good, but it definitely feels this season that it's officially past its peak, I think everyone breathed a little sigh of relief at the recent announcement that the next season will be the last. 

At least "Better Things" seems to be going out at the top of its game with this final season,the episodes just breeze by as these little slice of life stories that end up sticking with me for a while. Mikey Madison's arc this season was handled really well, great performance by her, felt like the show's typically delicate way of approaching something other shows would turn into a big overblown 'abortion storyline.' Casey Wilson was great in this week's episode, and I've always loved Kevin Pollak, I'm glad to see so much of him lately on both "Better Things" and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." 

So many shows are coming back for 7-episode second seasons after there were more episodes in the first season ("Upload," "Space Force," "Russian Doll"), what's up with that? Anyhow, "Upload" was a moderately entertaining show the first time around, I'm glad it's back. The second season wasn't quite as good, but I feel like Allegra Edwards has grown into a really interesting sorta-villain, and Andy Allo is so super fine she was literally a Prince protege. 

The idea of "Bridgerton" was always that each season would follow a different set of main characters, just like the novel series it's based on. But the massive popularity of the first season inevitably set people up for a little disappointment if they didn't realize that, and it seems like there's already some consensus that season 2 is just not as good as the first. As a casual viewer, though, I dunno, it's fine, I'm happy to keep watching. 

s) "The Courtship"
Given the durable popularity of both dating shows like "The Bachelor" and Regency era romances like "Bridgerton," it seems like a potential slam dunk to just do a dating reality show where everyone wears fancy clothes in a castle. But "The Courtship" is a very silly show, and it doesn't seem to have resonated -- NBC aired two episodes that got such poor ratings that they moved the rest of the series to the USA Network. 

t) "The Ultimatum: Marry Or Move On"
Meanwhile the dating show everyone is buzzing about is this goofy Netflix 'social experiment' show where 6 unmarried couples kind of swap partners for 8 weeks before deciding if they want to go back to their relationship and get married. I saw a tweet that made the excellent point that "The Ultimatum" is full of super attractive people in their mid-20s but the show would make a lot more sense if they had couples in their 30s who've been together a decade or more but never married. 

u) "American Song Contest"
I've never really followed Eurovision but can understand the fascination with it, and was skeptical about an attempt at an American version. But I'm impressed with the effort NBC has put behind this -- they're putting on 50-something performances representing every state and territory, and just about everyone has the production values of a major awards show performance. In fact sometimes the creative staging and visual effects outshine the singers and their songs, the production team really went all-out. And I appreciate that because there are so many performances to get through, there's no judges' panel bits or other filler moments that a lot of these kinds of shows have, you just get these quick host segments where Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg keep the energy up. I still need to listen to the studio recordings of most of the songs on Spotify, but based on the performances, I think my favorite song so far is probably West Virginia's and my wife is rooting for Tennessee, and I really rolled my eyes at Oregon and Texas's songs. My wife doesn't like that a few states are represented by established stars (Jewel, Michael Bolton, etc.) but I think it's fine and so far they don't seem to have any particular advantage in the competition. I just hope Sisqo does a good job representing Maryland next week. 

v) "Becoming A Popstar"
This competition reality show on MTV where musicians who have a following on TikTok compete to become pop stars is the kind of thing that would be easy to make fun of. But honestly, TikTok has been a huge driver of pop music in the last few years and it's just a smart idea to pick some people from that platform and let them work with professional producers and choreographers and music video directors and try to make that leap to something bigger and more polished. I don't like everybody on the show and some of my favorites have already been eliminated, but I like the overall concept of the show.

w) "Domino Masters"
This isn't quite as entertaining as its predecessor "Lego Masters," but it is pretty exciting once they start toppling the incredibly complex domino arrangements and you get to watch the whole thing come alive. 

I've never followed sports at all but I feel like I absorb a lot more information about sports than I used to now because of Twitter. And Bomani Jones is one of the sports commentators who I don't even follow but he always seems really smart and reasonable on Twitter so I checked out his new weekly HBO show and it's excellent, kind of feels more like a counterpart to "Last Week Tonight" that simply has a sports emphasis. 

Netflix's interactive programs are still enough of a novelty that I like to try them out, this is apparently based on a popular mobile app called 'Trivia Crack' that they wisely renamed for the Netflix version. I found it really boringly easy at first, and then I tried the 'hard mode' and it was moderately more challenging but still pretty boring, just not the timekiller for me. 

z) "Pinecone & Pony"
A really cute animated show on Apple TV+, I was surprised my 6-year-old didn't take to it when I put it on because it definitely reminds me of stuff he enjoys like "Centaurworld."

12:00 PM

Tuesday, April 12, 2022





I reviewed Jack White's Fear of the Dawn for Consequence. 

8:01 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 256: John Mellencamp

Monday, April 11, 2022




Back in January I interviewed John Mellencamp for GQ and I really enjoyed the experience, I think he's a really smart and interesting guy. His people agreed to a 30-minute call, but I managed to keep him talking for a full hour and finally let him go a few minutes before his next scheduled interview. In the first 5 minutes, he said "y'know, I'm from the midwest" as context for a story and, jackass that I am, I couldn't stop myself from sarcastically going "wait...you're from the midwest? I didn't know that." So for a second, I thought maybe I'd just blown the entire interview, but he laughed it off and continued with what he was saying. So I wouldn't say he doesn't take himself as seriously as people sometimes say he does. 

John Mellencamp deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Dream Killing Town
2. Where The Sidewalk Ends
3. Goodnight
4. Great Midwest
5. Cheap Shot
6. Tonight
7. Danger List
8. Thundering Hearts
9. Kid Inside
10. Jackie O
11. Golden Gates
12. The Kind Of Fella I Am
13. Between A Laugh And A Tear
14. Down And Out In Paradise
15. Hot Dogs And Hamburgers
16. Theo And Weird Henry
17. Void In My Heart
18. I Ain't Ever Satisfied
19. Sweet Evening Breeze
20. Brothers
21. The Full Catastrophe

Track 1 from Chestnut Street Incident (1976)
Tracks 3 and 3 from A Biography (1978)
Track 4 from John Cougar (1979)
Tracks 5 and 6 from Nothin' Matters And What If It Did (1980)
Tracks 7 and 8 from American Fool (1982)
Track 9 from The Kid Inside (1983)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Uh-Huh (1983)
Tracks 12 and 13 from Scarecrow (1985)
Tracks 14 and 15 from The Lonesome Jubilee (1987)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Big Daddy (1989)
Track 18 from Whenever We Wanted (1991)
Track 19 from Human Wheels (1993)
Track 20 from Dance Naked (1994)
Track 21 from Mr. Happy Go Lucky (1996)

Obviously, Mellencamp was famously saddled with a silly stage name early in his career. And most people who become famous with a stage name never manage to shake it off, but he did, even if it took him a while. He was credited as 'Johnny Cougar' on albums from 1976 to '78, then 'John Cougar' from '79 to '82, then 'John Cougar Mellencamp' from '83 to '89, and finally released his 11th album as simply John Mellencamp in '91. 

As I noted in the GQ piece, a young Mellencamp played in a glam band, Trash, named after the New York Dolls song, and his first manager was Tony DeFries, best known for working with David Bowie. The voice and aesthetic that Mellencamp would eventually be known for are already pretty identifiable on his debut album, which opens with a song called "American Dream," features the refrain "I'm just a small town boy" on "Chestnut Street," and contains covers of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. But some of the outtakes that appear on reissues of the album include covers of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World" and The Stooges' "I Need Somebody," so you can hear a little of the glam Mellencamp road not taken.  

The Kid Inside was recorded in 1977 as Mellencamp's second album, but it remained shelved until Tony DeFries released it in 1983 to capitalize on the singer's newfound stardom. And that album's title track had an interesting self-deprecating lyric: "It's hard for me to justify my position when everything I'm saying can be said better by Mr. Springsteen." When he wrote those words, Mellencamp was just a relative unknown looking at Springsteen's fame from afar, but by the time the song was released in '83, they were pretty much on the same level (in fact, by then Mellencamp had a solo #1, which Bruce never got). And one of the coolest things about Mellencamp's latest album is the three songs with Springsteen, getting to finally hear these guys kick back together and harmonize, I love when artists who seem to be in competition with each other get a little older and get around to working together. 

I'm a big fan of Nothin' Matters And What If It Did, which was produced by Stax Records legend Steve Cropper and featured Edith Massey, who was in all the early John Waters movies, on the cover. "Cheap Shot" is a funny sort of middle finger to his record label and his name change that closes the album after he originally suggested opening the album with it (a completely different song called "Cheap Shot" also appeared on The Kid Inside). And "Tonight" is a very catchy song that probably could've been a hit if not for some of the more risque lyrics ("She says 'come here little boy, I'll put my pussy right on your face"). 

One thing I talked about with Mellencamp that didn't fit into the GQ piece was his work with John Prine: "In the '80s he would come to Indiana, and we'd sit around and write stuff, but we never wrote anything very good, to be quite honest." I think he's being a little overly modest, "Jackie O" is a pretty cool song with a playful drum machine beat that sounds nothing like anything Mellencamp made in the '80s. And the Prine deep cut they wrote together, "Take A Look At My Heart," is really good, too. 

In the the mid-'80s, when vinyl was still the primary format people bought albums on but CDs and cassettes were gaining steam, some artists would feature songs on the CD and tape editions that didn't fit on the single LP album. That was the case for Scarecrow, which had "The Kind of Fella I Am" with Ry Cooder on tapes and CDs but not vinyl. "Between A Laugh And A Tear" with Rickie Lee Jones is another highlight on that album.

Much has been made of the sort of depressing content of one of Mellencamp's most famous lyrics, "Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone." And I kind of love this dark misanthropic streak running through Mellencamp's songs, it kind of runs against his '80s pop idol image and even the perspective of a lot of his peers. I really like the song "Brothers," kind of a dark sibling rivalry song that totally doesn't go how you'd expect it to. I don't know if it's autobiographical at all, Mellencamp has two brothers, and one of them, Ted Mellencamp, who passed away a few years ago, was his tour manager. 

Mellencamp's 1999 album Rough Harvest contained some acoustic arrangements of covers and favorite songs from his catalog. And alongside some of hits, that album revisited "Between A Laugh And A Tear" and "The Full Catastrophe," which is also one of the most played deep cuts in his live repertoire, along with "Thundering Hearts," "Golden Gates" and "Down And Out In Paradise." 

8:00 AM

Friday, April 08, 2022






Metal Lords is out today on Netflix, and I reviewed the movie for Consequence. 

8:30 AM

My Top 100 Singles of 1984

Thursday, April 07, 2022




Here's the Spotify playlist and the '84 albums list I posted last week: 

1. Van Halen - "Panama" 
2. Wham! - "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go"
3. Madonna - "Borderline" 
4. Don Henley - "The Boys Of Summer" 
5. Prince - "When Doves Cry"
6. Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time"
7. Wang Chung - "Dance Hall Days" 
8. General Public - "Tenderness" 
9. Nena - "99 Luftballoons"
10. Michael Jackson - "Thriller"
11. R.E.M. - "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)"
12. Van Halen - "Hot For Teacher"
13. Billy Idol - "Rebel Yell" 
14. Suicidal Tendencies - "Institutionalized"
15. Bruce Springsteen - "Dancing In The Dark"
16. Madonna - "Like A Virgin"
17. Billy Joel - "The Longest Time" 
18. John Waite - "Missing You" 
19. Pretenders - "Middle of the Road" 
20. The Cars - "You Might Think"
21. Culture Club - "Karma Chameleon" 
22. T La Rock - "It's Yours" 
23. Tones On Tail - "Go!"
24. UTFO – “Roxanne, Roxanne”
25. Face To Face - "10-9-8"
26. Run-DMC - "Hard Times" 
27. Prince - "Let's Go Crazy"
28. Shannon - "Let The Music Play"
29. Cheryl Lynn - "Encore" 
30. Depeche Mode – “People Are People”
31. The Go-Go's - "Head Over Heels" 
32. Ray Parker, Jr. - "Ghostbusters"
33. Huey Lewis and the News - "I Want A New Drug" 
34. Billy Idol - "Eyes Without A Face"  
35. Bruce Springsteen - "Born In The U.S.A."
36. The Cars - "Drive"
37. The Police - "Wrapped Around Your Finger"
38. Pat Benatar - "We Belong" 
39. Bon Jovi - "Runaway" 
40. Run-DMC - "Rock Box" 
41. Chaka Khan - "I Feel For You"
42. U2 - "Pride (In The Name Of Love)"  
43. John Mellencamp - "Pink Houses"
44. ZZ Top - "Legs" 
45. The Replacements - "I Will Dare" 
46. Twisted Sister - "We're Not Gonna Take It" 
47. Eugene Wilde - "Gotta Get You Home Tonight"
48. Dennis Edwards f/ Siedah Garrett – “Don’t Look Any Further”
49. Newcleus - "Jam On It" 
50. Jocelyn Brown – “Somebody Else’s Guy”
51. LL Cool J - "I Need A Beat" 
52. Ashford & Simpson - "Solid" 
53. Sheila E. - "The Glamorous Life"
54. Cyndi Lauper - "She Bop"
55. Billy Idol - "Flesh For Fantasy" 
56. Queen - "Radio Ga Ga" 
57. Thompson Twins – “Doctor! Doctor!”
58. Deniece Williams - "Let's Hear It For The Boy" 
59. Kenny Loggins - "Footloose" 
60. Billy Joel - "Keeping The Faith" 
61. The Pointer Sisters - "I'm So Excited" 
62. R.E.M. - "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville"
63. Midnight Star – “No Parking (On The Dance Floor)”
64. Prince - "Purple Rain"
65. Tina Turner - "What's Love Got To Do With It" 
66. Cyndi Lauper - "All Through The Night" 
67. Dio - "The Last In Line"
68. Huey Lewis and the News - "If This Is It" 
69. Sade - "Smooth Operator" 
70. INXS - "Original Sin" 
71. Elton John - "Sad Songs (Say So Much)"
72. Van Halen - "Jump"
73. The Pointer Sisters - "Jump (For My Love)"
74. Queen - "I Want To Break Free" 
75. Talking Heads - "Girlfriend Is Better (live)"
76. Echo & The Bunnymen - "The Killing Moon" 
77. Thompson Twins - "Hold Me Now" 
78. Twisted Sister - "I Wanna Rock" 
79. New Edition - "Cool It Now" 
80. Laid Back – “White Horse”
81. Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson - "To All The Girls I've Loved Before" 
82. The Cars - "Magic"
83. Bryan Adams - "Run To You"
84. Duran Duran - "The Reflex" 
85. Eurythmics - "Here Comes The Rain Again" 
86. Van Halen - "I'll Wait" 
87. John Lennon – “Nobody Told Me”
88. Def Leppard - "Bringin' On The Heartbreak (Remix)" 
89. James Ingram and Michael McDonald - "Ya Mo B There" 
90. Daryl Hall & John Oates - "Out Of Touch" 
91. The Pointer Sisters - "Automatic" 
92. Billy Ocean - "Caribbean Queen (No More Love On The Run)" 
93. Corey Hart - "Sunglasses At Night" 
94. Madonna - "Lucky Star"
95. Billy Squier - "Rock Me Tonite" 
96. Lionel Richie - "Hello"
97. The Cars - "Hello Again" 
98. Duran Duran - "The Wild Boys" 
99. John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band - "On The Dark Side" 
100. Bruce Springsteen - "Cover Me"

1984 has earned a reputation over time as sort of the peak year of '80s pop. An excellent writer I know, Michaelangelo Matos, even wrote a book about 1984 that I need to read at some point. And back in 2014 I actually contributed some blurbs (as did Matos) to a Rolling Stone piece ranking the top 100 singles of "pop's greatest year," so it was fun to look back at that and compare it to how I ranked many of the same songs in my personal list. 

8:28 AM

Movie Diary

Wednesday, April 06, 2022







a) Deep Water
It was amusing to watch the discourse around Deep Water break down from December, when its theatrical release was canceled and held up as an example of the death of 'films for grown-ups' getting played in theaters, to March, when the movie came out on Hulu and was mostly panned. I kind of liked seeing Lyne's first movie in 20 years, though, I enjoy the weird dreamlike feel of his movies, it seems like kind of an accident that he's the director that really made erotic thrillers into a blockbuster phenomenon. But sometimes that slippery unreal texture can get irritating when the plot gets going, and it kind of feels like Deep Water does away with a lot of normal exposition and world-building and just gives you this weird group of people who have no jobs as far as you can tell and are constantly throwing parties. But I think Ben Affleck's weird inert performance was what really dragged the movie down, on paper this movie could kind of play off his image like Gone Girl but it felt like he didn't know how to play the character. 

b) The Bubble
This also got pretty bad reviews, although I thought it was pretty funny, at least the first half, and kind of a refreshingly silly change of pace from most movies directed by Judd Apatow that are these morose character studies of different comedians playing non-famous versions of themselves. At its best, it's a fun mean sendup of action movies like Tropic Thunder, but then it kind of fell apart when they actually gave it the exact same ending as Tropic Thunder. And at its worst, it resembled The TV Set, another showbiz satire starring David Duchovny that was produced by Apatow. Karen Gillan and Pedro Pascal were pretty good in it, though. 

c) Windfall
This one I really liked much more than the middling reviews it got, I thought Charlie McDowell's direction was full of clever framing and angles that helped tell the story visually. And the score by Danny Bensi and Sander Jurriaans built the tension really well, had kind of a Hitchcockian vibe. And for a movie that was almost entirely three actors in a house, a billionaire and his wife and a guy robbing them, the cast was really strong. Jesse Plemons got to play kind of a thorny, argumentative character that I've never seen him done before, Jason Segel kind of shrugged off all of his vulnerable comedic roles and played a scary, paranoid antagonist, and Lily Collins's performance kind of sneaks up on you as you slowly realize that the story turns on what's going through her head. Maybe people disliked the stretches where the movie depicted the inevitable boredom of people spending two long days together doing nothing, but I thought those scenes were full of good character moments. 

d) Fresh
This got far better reviews than the three above films but I thought it was a real letdown, personally -- I'm really unhappy with the critical consensus this week! Basically, a woman goes on a few bad dates and then meets a nice guy at the grocery store and starts falling for him...and then he drugs her and chains her to the floor and reveals that he kills women and serves their flesh in gourmet meals for wealthy cannibals. But Sebastian Stan is the bad guy and, like in "Pam & Tommy," I just don't think he has the presence or acting chops to pull off this role, the movie automatically would have been twice as good with someone really charismatic and terrifying playing that character. Daisy Edgar-Jones from "Normal People" and Jonica T. Gibbs from "Twenties" are good in it, though. Also, the opening titles for Fresh didn't start until 33 minutes in, and Drive My Car's opening titles were about 40 minutes in. What a weird disorienting decision that is! 

e) Death On The Nile
I barely paid attention to Murder On The Orient Express when I watched it, so I put this on and kind of kept up the tradition, occasionally catching some inexplicably terrible acting moment. 

f) The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
I enjoyed The Hitman's Bodyguard far more than would be considered respectable, and I thought the sequel was equally entertaining. Giving Salma Hayek a bigger role was definitely the right call, she's kind of underrated as a comedic actress and she's so funny with Samuel L. Jackson, this movie gave her some of her best lines since "30 Rock." 

8:24 AM

Monday, April 04, 2022





I wrote a whole big thing for Spin breaking down everything interesting that happened at the Grammys on Sunday. 

7:28 PM

Sunday, April 03, 2022






Consequence ran a list of the 100 best Netflix series of all time, and I contributed blurbs about some of my favorites including GLOW, Russian Doll, Teenage Bounty Hunters, and Santa Clarita Diet. 

12:01 PM

Saturday, April 02, 2022






I wrote about and ranked every Red Hot Chili Peppers album for Spin. 

11:28 AM

Friday, April 01, 2022

 




A new Western Blot record is out today, the Excel EP is a few songs I finished a couple weeks ago, as well as "Summer Of Death," written and sung by longtime Western Blot guitarist Ishai Barnoy. Mat Leffler-Schulman mastered it and I did the cover art with some help from my wife Jennifer German. 

11:25 AM