Tuesday, February 28, 2023
My latest Baltimore Banner column of the best local indie music of February features songs by @, Susan Alcorn, Knub, PLRLS, and Some Fool.
Movie Diary
Thursday, February 23, 2023
a) The Menu
I'm glad I managed to hear this movie mentioned a lot the last few months without really absorbing any details about the plot. I'd recommend going into the movie cold if possible, it's excellent and probably best experienced that way. Unsurprisingly, director Mark Mydol has done a lot of episodes of "Succession" (more surprisingly, his last feature was the 2011 Anna Faris flop What's Your Number?). But I was a little relieved that The Menu isn't really another satire about how evil or pathetic wealthy people are or whatever, it's got some interesting other levels it's operating on and subjects it's commenting on, in some ways it felt like it took the long way around to be something more like Seven or Saw or even Midsommar. Great performances from the entire cast, but especially Hong Chau, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Ralph Feinnes.
I didn't realize that Alison Brie and Dave Franco are married, but they co-wrote this movie that he directed and she stars in. I am fond of making fun of a certain subgenre of movie I've seen dozens of, low budget dramedies starring semifamous sitcom actors, very often passion projects and very often about people who live in big cities going back to their hometown to visit or move in with their parents, reconnect with people they grew up with, etc. Somebody I Used To Know hits a lot of the identifiable tropes of these movies, but I will say that it was better than most of them, in that it wanted to be a comedy rather than a mopey dramedy, and had some decent laughs and sharp satirical moments. It was also fun to see Brie pal around with her "Community" co-star Danny Pudi. Even the plotty emotional stuff mostly worked, which surprised me because for the first half of the movie it felt like a meta version of My Best Friend's Wedding where the characters reference My Best Friend's Wedding. At some points it just felt like Dave Franco really wants you to look at his wife's boobs, which, I mean, I suppose I can oblige him there.
c) Rosaline
This movie is a version of Romeo & Juliet told from the perspective of Rosaline, Juliet's cousin who Romeo was in love with first, a minor character in the original play. It's a pretty clever little romcom, and nice to see Kaitlyn Dever in something lighter for the first time since Booksmart. Kind of reminded me of Ella Enchanted, that sort of thing, with an excellent supporting cast including Minnie Driver and Bradley Whitford.
d) Sharper
Benjamin Caron's debut feature is a fairly clever tale of grifters double crossing each other, told as a series of vignettes from each character's perspective. But there were only a couple reveals that didn't feel inevitable by the time they happened, I feel like it could've used a tighter, faster paced edit of the final cut, or an additional draft of the screenplay with more narrative sleight of hand to make it dazzling and not merely good. And Briana Middleton really held her own with people like Julianne Moore and gave an impressive performance, feels like she could be a major star. What I really liked, though, was the look of the movie, something in the texture reminded me of older movies, and I found this article that gets into how deliberate that was, the use of light and shadow and underexposed long takes in homage to stuff like The Godfather.
e) White Noise
Don DeLillo's White Noise always seemed like one of those novels I should probably read at some point, and this recent adaptation didn't get great reviews so I wasn't in a rush to see it. But then there was the somewhat eerie timing of a derailed train releasing toxic chemicals in Ohio, just like in the movie, happening in real life a couple months after the movie's release, so I felt like okay, I'll watch it. But I dunno, as I watched a Noah Baumbach movie that ended with hundreds of actors dancing to a LCD Soundsystem song, I thought how someday I'll forget this embarrassing NPR totebag of a movie and maybe then I'll read the book.
f) X
This was a pretty good modern take a '70s-style slasher movie. But I kind of rolled my eyes at the whole Mia Goth dual role thing, and the idea that it was worth her sitting in a makeup chair for hours every day to play one of those characters, or that that character should get her own prequel spinoff. But I dunno, I guess I'll watch Pearl too at some point.
This comedy stars Kristen Bell and Alison Janney, who both can really do no wrong in my eyes, and was written by a couple of "Bob's Burgers" writers. They didn't quite knock it out of the park, but I thought it was decent, better than the reviews suggest.
h) Emergency
This movie was an odd little fusion of a hard partying college comedy and a drama about racial inequality. I respected what it was trying to do but by the end it just felt a bit too heavy handed, I would've appreciated if they married those elements a little more cohesively or made it more of an absurdist satire.
i) Black Adam
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has had a pretty charmed life in Hollywood, Southland Tales aside it just feels like he's made one blockbuster after another. But Black Adam is the first movie that really felt like Johnson invested a lot of himself into it and into the hopes of kicking off a franchise, and when it fell short at the box office, the schadenfreude was palpable, I guess a lot of people had been waiting for The Rock's downfall. I don't really relate to that, he's a great screen presence and I wish him well, this movie could have been better but it wasn't terrible, if anything the movie's biggest weakness was he wasn't in it enough in the first half.
20 years ago this month, my future wife and I spent our first Valentine's Day together, stuck in my apartment during a blizzard watching horror movies and eating Chinese food, and that's been our VDay tradition ever since. Picking the movie to watch every year is always the hardest part, we bandied about some high profile recent horror movies to watch but wound up browsing the random low budget stuff on the OnDemand menu and picking Escape The Field. It's one of those horror movies where a few strangers get stranded in a mysterious place together and don't know whether to trust each other -- in this case, six people wake up in a cornfield, each of them with a useful object next to them (gun, knife, lantern, compass, etc.), and decide to team up and find their way out. Theo Rossi is pretty good in the movie but some of the cast really can't act and Shane West is way over-the-top chewing the scenery. The execution was imperfect but I liked the way the story kept both the characters and the viewer guessing, I think I enjoyed it more than my wife did.
It's a little fun to think that Mary McCartney was born a week after her father finished recording Abbey Road, and then grew up to direct a documentary about Abbey Road Studios. That said, maybe she's deserving of some 'nepo baby' snark, because there were some moments when it felt like the interviews were not conducted well and they failed to leave some fairly dull moments on the cutting room floor. It was still a pretty genial and entertaining movie about a fascinating little bit of pop music history, but it probably could've used a more seasoned director.
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
I wrote a Baltimore Banner piece about Keystone Korner, a Baltimore jazz club run by Todd Barkan, who also ran the original Keystone Korner in San Francisco. And I spoke to Barkan as well as musicians like Cindy Blackman Santana and Sean Jones and local music lovers about why this club is special and is helping champion live jazz in Baltimore.
Monthly Report: February 2023 Singles
Thursday, February 16, 2023 
1. Lola Brooke f/ Billy B - "Don't Play With It"
It's interesting that even now, with things moving so fast and songs going viral overnight, there are still songs that take years to break through. "Don't Play With It" was released in May 2021, but I didn't start to see the video circulate on Twitter until late 2022, and in January it started creeping up radio charts and Lola Brooke signed to a major label. She definitely feels like a potential major star, and it's kind of refreshing to hear a New York rapper who feels of-the-moment but isn't on a drill beat (she has about a dozen singles on streaming services and only a couple of the older ones have drill production). It's definitely Lola Brooke's song in the sense of her having the hook and the first verse, but Billy B's verse is great too and she deserves some shine off the song, it's a shame Lola Brooke has been going around performing it solo. Here's the 2023 singles Spotify playlist I'll update throughout the year.
2. Fall Out Boy - "Love From The Other Side"
Amidst all the When We Were Young Fest nostalgia for 2000s emo over the past year, Fall Out Boy were conspicuously silent, so I was pretty curious to see what they'd sound like when they surfaced again, especially since their 2010s comeback really seemed to run aground on their last album. I can't even picture modern day Fall Out Boy reverse engineering the sound of 2003-2005 FOB, but I thought maybe they'd do something stripped-down like 2013's PAX AM Days EP. Instead, "Love From The Other Side" feels like a return to the ornate stadium rock of 2007-2009 Fall Out Boy, which is an era I really loved, so I'm happy to get this side of the band back.
3. Chance The Rapper f/ King Promise - "YAH Know"
I always thought the Chance The Rapper backlash was kind of stupid -- even at the peak of his popularity, he was going against the grain of mainstream rap in a number of ways, and it just felt like the people that had always hated him just eventually found an opening to change the narrative, The Big Day wasn't really significantly different from his other work. So I look forward to whatever he does next, whether it's a comeback or just something that his diehard fans enjoy. And I was pleasantly surprised to see one of his 2022 singles pop up on the rap radio charts recently, a frenetic 6-minute dance track with a wailing Whitney Houston loop and some really great verses.
4. Megan Moroney - "Tennessee Orange"
I'm continually annoyed by the sheer historic scale of Morgan Wallen's success, and am bracing myself because he's about to release another massive double album. So it kind of irritated me that I heard an excellent breakthrough single by a new country singer, and then started to find out that Megan Moroney may or may not be dating Wallen and may or may not have written "Tennessee Orange" about him. Nonetheless, it's a really charming, well written song on the subject of falling in love with a fan of your hometown team's rivals.
5. Eric Church - "Doing Life With Me"
Eric Church's triple album Heart & Soul is almost two years old and still has a single on the radio, with "Doing Life With Me" being a highlight from the middle chapter & that was initially only available to members of Church's fan club. I'm actually kind of bitter because I signed up for a year's subscription to the Church Choir website specifically because I wanted to hear the full album. But the site is really confusingly designed and it took my practically the whole year to actually find where you could stream & on the site. But it's on Spotify now, finally, so that doesn't matter.
6. Miley Cyrus - "Flowers"
I've always had mixed feelings about Miley Cyrus and think her best singles were early stuff like "7 Things" and "See You Again," and have found most of her music from Bangerz forward to be untolerably obnoxious. And it kind of surprised me that "Flowers" turned out to be one of her biggest songs ever, but I like it, it feels a little more restrained than a lot of the songs that turned me off. Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson have done so much great work with Harry Styles that I'm happy to see them starting to branch out and make #1s for other artists.
7. Armani White f/ Denzel Curry - "Goated"
I could not stand Armani White's breakthrough single "Billie Eilish," which just felt like such a lazy instahit, piggybacking on both the name of an established star and a sample of an old Neptunes beat. So I didn't expect to love the follow-up single, but it's pretty catchy. And as fun as it is to hear Denzel Curry kick a great guest verse on a clubby, radio-friendly single, White holds his own pretty well too.
8. Brynn Cartelli - "Convertible In The Rain"
I feel bad for aspiring recording artists who win TV singing competitions now. There were a few short years when "American Idol" was making unknowns into platinum stars. But two decades later, we've just got "Idol" and "The Voice" still handing out useless titles and hopeless major label contracts every year with very little to show for it. So I'll consider it a small victory that Brynn Cartelli is still making music at a major label level 5 years after becoming the youngest winner of "The Voice," and that one of her videos gets enough plays on MTV Live that I got it stuck in my head and realized it has a great chorus.
9. Oxlade - "Ku Lo Sa (A Colors Show)"
The COLORS YouTube channel has been popular for the last few years for a series of in-studio live performances by up-and-coming artists, mostly American rappers and R&B singers, performing against a stylish monochromatic background (looking it up just now, the COLORS studio is in Germany, which I never would've guessed). A lot of these performances have gone viral or circulated heavily on Twitter, but Nigerian singer Oxlade's Afrobeats hit "Ku Lo Sa" seems like the first time the COLORS version of a song has far surpassed the studio version, getting about 30 times more streams on Spotify. There's fairly little difference between the versions, but in either case it's a pretty catchy song.
10. SZA - "Shirt"
SOS is a bona fide blockbuster, with 8 weeks at #1 and counting on the Billboard 200, and with albums that big you tend to get multiple hit singles competing on the charts. "Shirt" came out a few weeks before the album and got a head start, and is currently dominating R&B radio. But "Nobody Gets Me" got promoted to pop radio, and "Kill Bill" became the streaming hit that has gotten highest on the Hot 100, has surged ahead of "Nobody" on Top 40 radio, and is catching up to "Shirt" on R&B radio. Personally, I don't like "Kill Bill" at all, it's probably my least favorite song on the album, but "Shirt" is a banger, I'm impressed that Rodney Jerkins did something that feels this contemporary.
The Worst Song of the Month: Drake and 21 Savage - "Rich Flex"
One of my least favorite things about the streaming era is that the somewhat exciting idea that it's easier for fan favorites to become radio hits runs up against the boring statistical reality that track 1 on an album usually gets the highest streaming numbers on an album. "Rich Flex" is track 1 on Her Loss, just as "Lavender Haze" was track 1 on the Taylor Swift album and "Music From A Sushi Restaurant" was track 1 on the Harry Styles album, and even though I like the latter, I don't think any of those songs really needed to be a single ("Kill Bill" was also track 2 on SOS and the first full song after a brief intro). "Rich Flex" just feels disjointed and arbitrary to me like "Sicko Mode" and most other Drake songs with beat switches, although I may dislike the follow-up single "Spin Bout U" even more.
TV Diary
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
a) "Poker Face"
It's hard to think of a hypothetical new show that would appeal more than Natasha Lyonne fresh off "Russian Doll" and Rian Johnson fresh off Glass Onion doing weekly murder mysteries. But I particularly like the storytelling formula they've chosen, which isn't quite the same as the Knives Out movies. First, you get the entire story of a murder, who the victim was and why they were killed. And only then do you see how Lyonne's character, a gambler on the run named Charlie who has an uncanny ability to tell when people are lying, happens upon this scene, and how she figures out that there was foul play. The crimes are often absurd Rube Goldberg contrivances and the circumstances that land Charlie in the right place at the right time are just as ridiculous, but that's all part of the fun. And the gallery of new characters you meet each week is so well drawn that sometimes you genuinely mourn the victims, or even find yourself rooting for their clever killer.
"Three Pines" is another mystery show, a more conventional and serious one, based on a series of novels. But it's also the most thoroughly Canadian mystery show I've ever seen, with Alfred Molina as a Quebecois inspector named Armand Gamache who looks into a death at a curling competition in the first episode. I like that each case is two episodes, so the stories can stretch out and build some suspense.
c) "Shrinking"
I find Bill Lawrence's career interesting, because he's gradually moved from making very unsentimental setup-and-punchline sitcoms like "Spin City" to a procession of shows that have a bit more heart and sentiment, from "Scrubs" to "Cougar Town" to "Ted Lasso" and now to "Shrinking," a dramedy about a therapist whose wife died in a car crash. Lawrence co-created the show with star Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from "Ted Lasso") and there's some absolutely wonderful writing in here, although sometimes Segel's character and the things he puts his patients through are almost too mortifying to watch. The supporting cast makes it work, particularly Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford, who's a great choice to play the cranky but lovable mentor character that's a staple of Lawrence's shows (Roy Kent, Dr. Cox from "Scrubs").
This Anne Rice adaptation is kinda fun, a neurosurgeon finds out she's secretly the heir to an ancient dynasty of witches and has crazy powers. I don't really know what's going on story-wise but I'll watch anything with Alexandra Daddario in it and there's a good moody color scheme to the whole show.
This British sitcom takes place in a world where almost everybody has superpowers, except for the protagonist, who finds out that her pet cat is actually a human shapeshifter. A silly little show, some of the humor is really corny, but it manages to be pleasant and likable even when it's not funny, and Mairead Tyers is really adorable.
Apparently Diane Gordon has been playing the character Philomena Cunk on British television for about a decade, but this Netflix series is I guess her American debut, and it's a really funny show. It's basically a mockumentary with a clueless reporter interviewing real people and asking them asinine questions, pretty familiar "Daily Show" type stuff, but Gordon takes it all to such an absurd extreme. Every single sentence out of her mouth is wrong in a different way, she manages to keep a straight face no matter what, and you can never predict where a joke is going, except when they manage to work "Pump Up The Jam" into every episode.
"Night Court" was one of those shows I grew up on before I was even old enough to understand a lot of the jokes, to me it and "Cheers" and "Taxi" were like my early glimpses at a broad sitcom simulacrum of the nocturnal adult world, all the things that went on in the city after I went home and went to bed. And of course it was just a very funny, silly show with great cast chemistry. I kind of figured when "30 Rock" did an episode riffing on the idea of a "Night Court" reboot that such a thing would never actually happen, but where in a pretty reboot-crazy time right now and the new "Night Court" has gotten really good ratings. Bringing back John Larroquette as the only person from the original cast (while reversing his role from prosecutor to public defender) and having Melissa Rauch play Harry Stone's daughter is a pretty good foundation to build the show on, but the rest of the ensemble isn't really clicking, feels like anybody could be playing those parts.
h) "Riches"
Not to be confused with the underrated old FX series "The Riches," "Riches" is a British family drama on Amazon about a Black-owned cosmetics. Pretty good show, didn't find it terribly gripping but the acting was strong.
i) "Servant"
"Servant" is the first Apple TV+ series to get to a 4th season and has consistently been one of their best and most unique shows. I'm glad this is the last season, though, they've kept escalating the story and throwing new strange stuff into the mix for so long that I'm curious how it will all end. I think all four of the principle cast members deserve awards, but especially Nell Tiger Free, it's really remarkable how you can go back and forth from being scared of Leanne and then scared for Leanne, very difficult character to get right.
j) "You"
"You" is a bit like "Servant" in that I keep watching the show to see how the writers will paint themselves into a corner and then invent some creative but increasingly implausible way to keep the story going. The returns are a little more diminishing with "You" and I was a little more interested in season 4 before I heard that there's going to be a season 5, at this point I'd like to see them wrap this up and bring Joe's story to a satisfying end. That said, I'm enjoying his whole thing with a new identity and a new set of supporting characters in the UK, Penn Badgley is really a brilliant comic actor when you consider how much this show rests on him being able to express one thing with his face and another with his voiceover.
I would guess that this is my wife's favorite show on TV right now, based on her anticipation of season 2 and her excitement to watch all three new episodes every Friday. I like it too, it really captures the adventure and silliness of D&D. Having Lance Reddick voice the dragon that was the big bad this season was inspired casting.
"Ginny & Georgia" was the butt of a joke on "SNL" recently about how a show can be #1 on Netflix and most people haven't even heard of it. Decent show, kind of a less cutesy "Gilmore Girls." But after Brianne Howey's great performances on "The Passage" and "The Exorcist," I'm kind of bummed that she's known for something like this instead of more sci-fi/horror.
There are so many actors working on multiple series concurrently these days that it feels like it's been ages since I actually saw an actor jump ship from one show to a higher profile one. But Olivia Cooke, my favorite thing about season 1 of "Slow Horses," is conspicuously absent form season 2 now that she's on "House of the Dragon," and I'm not really caught up on "Game of Thrones" stuff to follow her over to that show. "Slow Horses" is alright without her, I guess.
n) "Dead End"
6 months after the animated series "Dead End: Paranormal Park," Netflix premiered an unrelated show called "Dead End," a Polish dark comedy about a bank robbery gone awry. Pretty gory, entertaining show, one of Netflix's better European imports in recent memory.
A pretty sweet little coming-of-age Mexican show on Netflix, hits some of the same notes as "Never Have I Ever" but isn't as funny.
This Indian series on Netflix is about a couple who sue after their children die in a theater fire. So, pretty heartwrenching story, right off the bat. But the first scene, with the family squabbling before the fire, ends with the father telling the mother "Be patient, only a few more years, then they'll be gone," like, just the most corny distasteful 'ironic' dialogue. After that, I even found the title "Trial By Fire" to be mildly offensive, like the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.
q) "Smiley"
"Smiley" is a gay romcom based in Barcelona, some good dialogue and well rounded characters.
r) "The Wheel"
This NBC game show feels like an effortful attempt to reinvent "Hollywood Squares" with celebrities who all have some professed area of trivia question expertise being selected on a spinning wheel. Kind of a fun show but also kind of stupid.
I started watching this HBO Max docuseries when it premiered back in November, before I had heard of the sordid Murdaugh family saga. But then in January, Alex Murdaugh's murder trial began and that being in the news drove me back to finishing the series, which is really a pretty bizarre, jaw-dropping story.
This Netflix docuseries is about the horrifying 2004 incident at a Kentucky McDonald's where a prank caller convinced employees he was a police officer and ordered them to conduct a strip search of a co-worker suspected of theft. This story was the basis of the 2012 film Compliance, which I think is really one of the best movies of the 2010s, albeit a really dark and stomach-turning movie. Often when a story has been both dramatized in a fictional work and detailed in a documentary, I prefer the documentary, but in this case, I think it was maybe just too depressing to get the real story in greater detail.
I've started to feel like one of the things that Netflix makes way too many of is docuseries -- specifically, they've stretched a lot of things into several episodes that easily could've been covered in a movie, or even just a TV newsmagazine segment. I can remember back in the '90s when there were 'Pepsi points' that you could trade in for various prizes. Apparently in one of the ads there was a joke that for 7 million points you could get a Harrier II fighter jet, but they didn't put a legal disclaimer in the ad, so someone actually called their bluff and sued when they couldn't get a 32 million dollar fighter jet from Pepsi. Interesting story, but didn't need to be padded out to 4 episodes running almost 3 hours, they really put a lot of tedious nonsense in here to justify it being a series.
Another Netflix docuseries about a mildly interesting story, of a German Shepherd who wound up with a $400 million trust fund, that really didn't need to be dragged out into several episodes.
It doesn't take much for me to enjoy a nature documentary, especially with a good narrator. But even with voiceover from Morgan Freeman, this one didn't really engage me too much, some good animal footage and okay big-picture CGI stuff, but it just felt a little flat.
My brother and I grew up on Transformers toys and cartoons, and my brother still collects the toys. My kids go through Transformers phases, my 13-year-old has watched each of the Michael Bay movies multiple times. And my 7-year-old recently rediscovered some of his toys and spent a few days having epic Optimus/Megatron battles. I put on the newest series, "Transformers: Earthspark," and while I like the animation style and was entertained by the novelty of Optimus Prime being voiced by Alan Tudyk and Bumblebee voiced by Danny Pudi, my kid didn't really take to it like other Transformers shows and we never returned to it.
Another show I put on because my kid liked the Sonic The Hedgehog movie, but he didn't take any interest in the show, whole thing feels very cheap and looks like it could've been made 20 years ago.
This is an odd little stop-motion animated show on Apple TV+ about a sentient shapes named Square, Circle, and Triangle (although they're three-dimensional so they're really a cube, a sphere, and a pyramid). Triangle is voiced by Scott Adsit from "30 Rock" and Circle is voiced by Gideon Adlon, daughter of veteran voice actor Pamela "Bobby Hill" Adlon. My 7-year-old likes it, we watched every episode in one Saturday.
Monthly Report: January 2023 Albums
Thursday, February 09, 2023
1. Illiterate Light - Sunburned
I'd never heard of the Harrisonburg, Virginia duo Illiterate Light before I heard the Sunburned single "Light Me Up" on the local college station I listen to, WTMD, a couple times last fall, and that song just blew me away and made me an immediate fan. There's some good songs on their 2019 self-titled debut, but this album feels like a big step forward, there's still a folk/blues foundation to their music and Jeff Gorman has that kind of high creaky voice that makes me think of the previous generation of Neil Young disciples like Flaming Lips and Sparklehorse. But they've really blown out their sound into a big bombastic thing on this record that feels more individual and Jake Cochran is a fantastic drummer with a great flair for ghost notes. The penultimate song on the album, "Fuck LA," kind of starts out feeling like a troll or novelty song, but I like the little turn the lyric takes and the point the song eventually arrives at. I can't tell if "Feb 1st" has the same melody as The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger" on purpose but I still really like it. Here's the 2023 albums Spotify playlist that I will update throughout the year as I listen to new releases.
2. Cheat Codes - One Night In Nashville
Country music and EDM exist on such seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum of popular music in most respects that fusions of the two are rare, and tend to be self-consciously campy or shamelessly commercial -- I think of Rednex, Zac Brown's solo album, "Justified & Ancient," or that album Diplo did a couple years ago with Morgan Wallen and Thomas Rhett features. But the LA trio Cheat Codes have always had a mellower, more melodic approach to EDM pop, and I loved their one Hot 100 hit, 2017's "Promises" with Demi Lovato. One Night In Nashville matches country stars and twangy melodies with dance beats with a light touch that really works, Little Big Town and Jimmie Allen sound great, rising stars like MacKenzie Porter and Nate Smith take to the sound naturally, and the ever-adventurous Dolly Parton even puts in an appearance.
3. Gloss Up - Before The Gloss Up
When GloRilla blew up last year, there was a lot of interest around the other women in her crew, who also quickly signed record deals, although it doesn't seem like they have a group name, people just refer to them as 'GloRilla's friends' or whatever. Even on their current radio hit "Shabooya," they're all just credited as solo artists (Gloss Up, K Carobin, Slimeroni, Aleza, and the producer Hitkidd). But Gloss Up's solo project on Quality Control is really strong, she doesn't have as distinctive a voice as GloRilla but bar for bar she's probably a stronger MC. The hooks aren't necessarily the most imaginative (there's a song called "Eeny Meeny Miny Moe" and a song called "Head, Shoulders, Knees, Toes"), but the production more than makes up for it, the last 3 tracks are a really excellent stretch of songs.
4. Margo Price - Strays
Margo Price has been a critical darling for four albums now but I didn't really hear enough of her stuff to get curious until the Strays single "Change of Heart," and yeah, she's pretty good -- don't love her voice but she's definitely a talented writer. I love that Mike Campbell of The Heartbreakers makes an appearance on "Light Me Up," I just think everyone should be itching to work with him since Tom Petty passed and his schedule opened up. But I think the best songs on here are the slower, more cinematic ones like "County Road" and "Hell In The Heartland."
5. Gaz Coombes - Turn The Car Around
I absolutely loved some of Supergrass's early stuff, but I hadn't really kept close track of the band's later albums or their frontman's solo work until 2018's World's Strongest Man. But that record was great and so it Turn The Car Around. What's interesting is how often this album reminds me of Radiohead, which is not something I would've expected back in the '90s when Supergrass and Radiohead seemed like sort of at opposite ends of the British rock spectrum -- I suppose they're both pretty heavily indebted to The Beatles after all, though.
6. Sam Smith - Gloria
While "Unholy" was a clear gamechanger for Sam Smith as their first #1 and a total musical departure, I have to admit that I preferred Smith's less heralded StarGate collaborations like Gloria's first single, "Love Me More." So I'm happy that the album allows "Unholy" to be a singular outlier that still totally works in the context of Gloria, instead of overhauling Smith's sound around it. This might be Smith's best album to date, despite no less than 3 songs with Jessie Reyez, whose voice has always been nails on a chalkboard to me. The gorgeous Ilya and StarGate tracks that bring out the best in Smith's voice, and Ed Sheeran writes a nice piano ballad in the vein of Smith's early hits.
7. Kimbra - A Reckoning
New Zealand singer Kimbra has a pretty solid career in NZ and Australia, but everywhere else, her pop profile consists almost purely of her appearance on Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know." There's nothing really wrong with being known for singing the second half of one of the most popular and acclaimed songs of the 21st century, but I do wish that it had done a bit more to boost Kimbra's solo work, which is pretty good (especially since Gotye himself pretty much stopped releasing music immediately after "Somebody"). Her fourth album A Reckoning is great, reminds me a bit of Bjork's '90s albums in the way Kimbra uses her voice, and the push and pull of pop hooks and weird leftfield electronics.
8. Lil Yachty - Let's Start Here
The 2016 XXL Freshmen cypher featuring Lil Uzi Vert, Kodak Black, 21 Savage, and Lil Yachty helped established them as four defining stars of a new generation of hip hop, and almost 7 years later, they're all still here and in one way or another hitting new career highs (Denzel Curry was also in the cypher and released one of my top ten albums of 2022, but he tends to get left out of the conversation, for better or worse, since he was never a mainstream presence in the same way). For a few years, it seemed like Lil Yachty was the one from that quartet most likely to fade from relevance as a relic of the Soundcloud era, the quirked up goofball who got less interesting the more he tried to make a hit, flopping with a single featuring Drake in 2020. But a few months ago, Yachty scored a fluke hit with "Poland" that emphasized his unique sense of whimsy, and then he released Let's Start Here, probably the most discussed and debated album of 2023 so far. I'm a little amused by how the passionate the discourse around this album is -- bigger rappers have more dramatic moves toward rock and guitar-driven music many times before, from Andre 3000's The Love Below to Lil Wayne's Rebirth and Kid Cudi's Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven. But I will say, I like Let's Start Here more than those albums, or Yachty's previous albums that could feel a little boring and undercooked by mainstream rap standards. He's demonstrated some pretty good taste in how he's curated the sound of this album and his weird nasal voice is more suited to this material than a lot of the beats he was picking before, to his credit the album actually more good than it is 'brave' or 'interesting.'
9. Fred Hersch and Esperanza Spalding - Alive At The Village Vanguard
Esperanza Spalding has probably been one of the most visible jazz musicians of her generation since winning the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2011. But my favorite work by her was when she drifted furthest from jazz -- I would argue that 2016's Emily's D+Evolution is one of the best rock albums of the past decade. She's maintained her footing in jazz all the while, though, and in the past few weeks she won a Grammy for a live album with Wayne Shorter and released another with pianist Fred Hersch. Alive At The Village Vanguard is a rare example of Spalding putting down her bass and working purely as a jazz singer, her and Hersch bouncing from song to song without a setlist, traipsing playfully through standards by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and others. There's a moment on the opener "But Not For Me" that epitomizes the album, where Spalding sort of breaks the fourth wall to talk about how difficult to sing phrases dated phrases from the Gershwin lyric -- "and then some words I don't really understand, because it's like Old English, heigh-ho, alas, and lack-a-day" -- but it still makes musical sense as part of the vocal. She also manages to monologue at length about Tom Cruise movies and the economic sustainability of reusing fake eyelashes on a 12-minute rendition of "Girl Talk," a song written in 1965, and it's delightfully entertaining.
10. Guided By Voices - La La Land
The primary distinguishing trait of Guided By Voices has always been Robert Pollard's exceptional speed and volume as a songwriter, even if he is a skilled and distinctive writer. GBV were considered one of the most prolific bands of the 1990s, a decade in which they released 9 albums (a number that wouldn't be considered extraordinary in the '70s, but was definitely above average in the '90s, and didn't even include several Pollard solo albums). But GBV started cranking out albums at a faster clip after reuniting the classic lineup in 2012, and slipped into an even higher gear around 2016 with the current lineup. La La Land is already GBV's ninth album of the 2020s, which means they've matched their '90s output in under a third of a decade. I was never a GBV diehard -- literally the only CD I own is the greatest hits album, Human Amusements At Hourly Rates -- so I haven't heard remotely all the albums to put this one in perspective, but it's pretty enjoyable absurdist jangle rock in Pollard's comfort zone, it only really goes off the rails once on one of the longer songs, "Cousin Jackie."
The Worst Album of the Month: Maneskin - Rush!
Pitchfork doesn't do over-the-top takedowns of easy targets as often as they used to, but the Jeremy Larson review they ran a couple days ago was a pretty satisfying pan (my favorite line was "a band that sounds like a parody of an early aughts NME cover and whose whole vibe could best be described as Cirque du Soleil: Buckcherry"). Maneskin's biggest American hit and the main reason I have a negative impression of then, "Beggin'," was a cover, and I had a vaguely positive reaction the first time I heard "Supermodel." So in my eternally optimistic outlook, I thought maybe Maneskin's original material was far better than "Beggin'" and I should give them a chance. But yeah, this album is pretty foul, although I suppose it's interesting to hear a rock album from the kind of coked up Eurotrash (this is not slander -- at least 3 songs on this album mention cocaine) that has been running mainstream dance music for decades.
Movie Diary
Wednesday, February 08, 2023 
a) Tar
This was very good, I'd be fine with Cate Blanchett sailing to the Oscar win as expected, although if I had my pick I'd go with Michelle Yeoh. I still think Barbarian has the best post-'Me Too' character study I've seen in a movie. But Tรกr handled it interestingly, it felt nuanced, even if I found myself thinking a lot about how they had to make up a character in order to put the woman at the center of such a tale, and even then they made her sin more an abuse of power rather than rape or violence in order for it to be plausible. But what I really liked was how it felt like maybe an ambiguous Edgar Allen Poe thing where she was kind of haunted by her conscience -- I thought the place she ended up at being kind of a punchline before the credits rolled was kind of a weak ending, but still, a good movie.
b) Causeway
In Causeway, Jennifer Lawrence plays a soldier who comes home from Afghanistan after an injury and cleans pools in New Orleans. It's based on a short story called Red, White, And Water and good lord I'm glad they changed the title. Bryan Tyree Henry, who is absolutely one of the best actors of his generation, got his first Oscar nomination for Causeway, and is excellent in it. I'm not the biggest fan of this kind of movie, a slow moving drama where two people with tragic backstories find an unlikely connection (very Monster's Ball), but Lawrence and Henry are good enough actors to make it work, and the script and direction are nicely understated compared to some most movies in this style. The Russell Harvard scene was great, too, added a whole dimension to the story to bring his character onscreen that late in the movie.
I come from the school of thought that comedy is often harder than drama and most good comedic actors can pull of a serious role when given the chance, but I also tend to roll my eyes at a lot of the roles that comedians take when they want to be taken more seriously. And Aubrey Plaza never necessarily seemed like a versatile talent, given the streak of deadpan sarcastic characters that brought her to fame. But I guess she was just typecast, because she really rose to the occasion recently with "The White Lotus" and especially Emily The Criminal. I was a little surprised at just how bleak the story is, how it pulls no punches about the character's increasingly desperate situation, Plaza's character has mistakes in her past and continues making new mistakes throughout the movie, but she's also up against all these shitty systemic things and you root for her through it all, the political subtext is unmistakable but writer/director John Patton Ford never overdoes it, I thought this movie did a lot of the things Uncut Gems was praised for but better. Good performance from Theo Rossi, too, I always hoped he'd get more substantial roles after his great work on "Sons of Anarchy," and he's one of those actors who's so many different ethnicities that it's fun to see him play different characters with different backgrounds and accents.
I didn't think I would get a chance to watch this Roku original movie. But then my teenage son got a Roku TV for Christmas, so one day while he was at school I hung out in his room and watched "Weird Al"'s satirical biopic starring Daniel Radcliffe. I've been a Yankovic fan for a long long time, and always loved the way his "Behind The Music" episode function as both a parody of the show and a function episode of "Behind The Music." But Weird just delightfully thumbs its nose at reality and feels sort of like a companion to Walk Hard that skewers every music biopic trope that that movie didn't cover (one thing Weird has in common with Walk Hard: a hilarious parade of bad impressions of music legends, including appearances in both by Jack Black). The running bit about "Eat It," the homage to The Doors, the song over the credits, I laughed a lot.
e) You People
Kenya Barris hasn't written a bunch of movies at this point, but You People is the first feature he's directed, and it really just feels like he could not shake his TV background, there's even sitcom interstitials between scenes. This movie has gotten a real love-it-or-hate-it reception, but I'm kind of in the middle with it. David Duchovny's never been funnier (the song he did at the piano, the running Xzibit joke), and the first half hour of the movie is by far the best part, when they're just establishing the characters and their relationships and not contriving all the conflicts that drive the rest of the movie. And Eddie Murphy felt so reined in, like he was trying so hard to be the stern hardass, the scenes with him just turned out dull. I wish Molly Gordon had a bigger role, she's great. Also so weird to see a movie where a character's happy ending storyline is (spoiler alert) getting a job at Complex.
There are corners of the internet, particularly 'Film Twitter,' where Birdman is one of the most hated Oscar movies in recent memory -- personally I thought it was pretty good, but I do see where the detractors are coming from. And Alejandro Inarritu's first film in 7 years feels in many ways like a retread of Birdman, right down to the long, unwieldy title. I'm glad the only Oscar nom it got was for cinematography because there are some really beautiful, impressive shots in this movie. But after a while the story becomes exhausting and has the kind of twist ending that nobody ever likes, absolutely lousy idea.
g) Sharp Stick
I'm not a huge fan of "Girls," but it had a moment where it was a pretty good show in the early seasons. But the film that launched Lena Dunham's career before the show, Tiny Furniture, was awful, and so is the first feature she's directed since then, Sharp Stick. Kristine Froseth impressed me in a small role in last year's otherwise undistinguished "First Ladies," and she really commits to her performance in Sharp Stick, but the whole character and story just feel completely misconceived, it's a bad movie from front to back. Here's hoping Froseth gets better opportunities in the future.
It's hard to separate this movie from the context of Chadwick Boseman's death, it's a tribute that's built around his absence. But it's to the credit of the first Black Panther that the supporting cast and the setting were so well established that you can still tell stories in that world without T'Challa, and their mourning for him resonates because you know the cast feels the same way. I mean, after only one movie, they were able to set a story in Wakanda without Black Panther that worked as well as the various movies and shows in Gotham without Batman, that's impressive. That said, I don't think it was as good as the first movie but I'm really glad they made it, and hope they do more.
This movie did poorly at the box office and got mixed reviews, but my 7-year-old son and I really enjoyed it, I'm glad to hear it's been doing stronger numbers streaming on Disney+. I like the way its approach to sci-fi was inspired by old pulp serials and felt and looked different from a lot of comparable contemporary animated features, it was a cool little universe they created. My 13-year-old son watched it for a few minutes and complained about some abrupt scene transitions, I guess he had a point that it wasn't too gracefully paced, but overall I really liked it.
My 7-year-old has become obsessed with How To Train Your Dragon lately, watching the movies and all 6 seasons of the spinoff shows. The third movie, 2019's The Hidden World, is the only one that's not currently free on any streaming services so I went ahead and paid to watch it and, honestly, it was worth it, it was probably the best movie of the series, such a fun story and the design of the dragons is so cute.
k) Fire Of Love
This movie is on Disney+ and currently up for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars, it's about Kaita and Maurice Krafft, two married French volcanologists. The Kraffts would study volcanos up close in the '70s and '80s with film cameras, most of the movie is comprised of their own footage (spoiler alert, they died in an eruption in Japan in 1991). It's a really touching story, and the footage is just incredible. Miranda July was a weird choice to narrate the movie, though.
I hadn't seen this movie before David Crosby died, so I wound up putting it on while I was writing about Crosby for Spin and quoting and referencing the movie in the piece a couple times. It's a pretty good doc, captures Croz's story and personality and musical accomplishments well, warts and all, Cameron Crowe didn't direct it but he did the interviews with Crosby for the movie and was probably the perfect person to do that.
Monday, February 06, 2023
My latest pieces for Spin: an analysis of everything that happened at The Grammys on Sunday, and a short Valentine's Day piece about Sammy Hagar's love songs.
Friday, February 03, 2023
My Baltimore Banner column of the best local indie music of January features songs by Dosser, End It, The Dirty Grass Players, Piecemeal Flytrap, and Organic Organism.
Thursday, February 02, 2023
The 2023 nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are out, and I broke down the cool/weird/interesting stuff in this year's noms for Spin.
Wednesday, February 01, 2023
Lithobrake's debut EP is out today on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple, all the other usual spots. This was the first time I've really produced a proper band and tried to capture its live sound, I played drums on every track and also sang on track 4. This and the Western Blot album I released a few weeks ago represent the bulk of the recording I've been working on in the past year, and I'm really proud of these records.
Lithobrake is opening for Bedridden at Pie Shop this Thursday.