Monthly Report: April 2023 Albums
1. Caitlyn Smith - High & Low
I listen to, I dunno, probably over 300 new albums a year, and one unfortunate byproduct of that is that there are some damn good albums that I listen to once or twice and then forget all about. I was very impressed by Caitlyn Smith's second album Supernova and praised it in this space, but I don't think I thought about the album again, much listened to it, in the last three years until I saw that Smith released a new album. And High & Low is even better, so I don't plan on making that mistake again. The opener "High" in particular is just powerful as hell, and I was a little surprised to see that Miley Cyrus co-wrote that song (Smith wrote for Cyrus's last two albums, in addition to big country names like Little Big Town and Jason Aldean). Even more, I'm impressed that Smith self-produced High & Low, which sounds as rich and detailed as anything I've heard out of Nashville in the last couple years. Here's my 2023 albums Spotify playlist that has all the new releases I've listened to this year (and some others I haven't gotten around to it, it's mostly there for me but maybe it'd be useful to other people).
2. El Michels Affair & Black Thought - Glorious Game
I love the run of collaborative albums Black Thought has been on the last five years, and Glorious Game is probably my favorite since Streams Of Thought Vol. 2. Still, I wish it didn't take him working outside The Roots this much for people to really finally rate him as an all-time great rapper, what he's doing now is not substantially different from what he's been doing for the last 30 years. And it's kind of funny that his latest album is with El Michels Affair, another live hip hop band, albeit one that manages to come out of the shadow of The Roots and have their own sound that is often shaped by bandleader Leon Michels' flute and sax. I think "Miracle" and "I Would Never" are my favorite tracks so far.
3. Rae Sremmurd - Sremm 4 Life
When I publish a piece, I tend to just play it as it lays and have no regrets about whatever I choose to write. However, last year I wrote a Complex piece listing the 22 greatest rap duos ever, and I can't believe I completely left Rae Sremmurd off the list and didn't even think of them until after it was published. The fact that I could forget them, unfortunately, kind of speaks to how much Rae Sremmurd has fallen from prominence since their first two albums. And I think that's a shame, because they still write incredibly catchy songs and have a great ear for beats, "Flaunt It/Cheap" definitely leaps out as my favorite so far.
4. Mast Year - Knife
Mast Year are one of the more promising new Baltimore bands I've heard lately, although I regrettably missed their show last week and haven't seen them live yet. I enjoyed their 2-song instrumental demo, and their debut album builds on the same powerful sludgy sound but adds vocals and some quiet interludes that make the loud songs hit harder.
5. NLE Choppa - Cottonwood 2
At 70 minutes, Cottonwood 2 is way longer than it needs to be, and three days after it was released, NLE Choppa released a deluxe edition that made it even longer, over 100 minutes. Overlong rap albums have been a tradition for decades, but these days it's considered a strategy to help pad out an album's streaming numbers, as is the practice of releasing a deluxe version within days of the original album. That didn't really work (Cottonwood 2 debuted at #21 on the Billboard 200, lower than NLE Choppa's top 10 debut in 2020). But I don't really mind because the kid gets great beats, "Glide With Me" and "Ain't Gonna Answer" and "Stomp Em Out" sound awesome, and "Do It Again" is still one of my favorite singles of the year so far. Memphis rap has been more fertile than ever the last few years, and NLE Choppa is starting to become one of my favorite artists out of the city.
6. Metallica - 72 Seasons
When I rank an artist's albums for Spin, I try to find all the different peaks and valleys in their career and not default to conventional wisdom. But when ranking Metallica's albums last month, it felt unavoidable to sort their catalog into big obvious eras: everything pre-1992 at the top, everything post-2004 in the middle, and everything from the '92-'04 era at the bottom. And while my love for LULU was the one weird choice I stuck my neck out on, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I rated 72 Seasons over the other back-to-basics late period albums, Death Magnetic and Hardwired. All of these albums are too long and can wear me down a little, but there's fairly little on 72 Seasons that doesn't kick ass, and aside from the singles my favorite tracks are "Shadows Follow" and "Inamorata."
7. Wednesday - Rat Saw God
Even though I've been in the music media ecosystem for a couple decades now, the way music critics just seem to suddenly anoint a band as important still mystifies me. The North Carolina band Wednesday just seemed to go from 0 to 60 in terms of indie band buzz with the release of their 5th album, which is the kind of thing that's easy to be cynical about. But Rat Saw God is a pretty excellent record, I have no problem with it getting love, it's kind of nice to see this much excitement for an album with prominent lap steel. Karly Hartzman has an appealing twang in her voice and some great little observational details in her lyrics, and their guitar tones are pretty noisy and cool, I think "Quarry" and "Chosen To Deserve" are my favorite tracks so far.
8. Smokey Robinson - Gasms
Smokey Robinson evolved from Motown's wholesome tales of romance and heartbreak in the '60s to more overtly sexual slow jams in the '70s just like Marvin Gaye and many other contemporaries. Still, it was a mild shock to hear that Smokey Robinson decided to make the most absurdly horny album of his career at 83 years old and call it Gasms. The opening title track tips all the way over into camp ("you give me those mindgasms, those hard to find gasms"), but the rest of the album is solid and only intermittently ridiculous, you can't deny the craftmanship of a pop legend even when he's not taking himself seriously at all.
9. Pearl Jam - Give Way
Jack Irons played drums for Pearl Jam for a little over 3 years in the '90s, and I absolutely love what he brought to the band's sound on No Code and Yield, and have always been a little bitter that there was no official live album from the Irons era (but literally hundreds of live albums from the Matt Cameron era). So I was pretty overjoyed to find out that one of this year's Record Store Day releases is a recording from Pearl Jam's last tour with Irons that was nearly released officially back in 1998. I wish there were more than two No Code songs on here, but the Yield stuff sounds fantastic, especially "MFC" and "Given To Fly," and Irons totally takes "Immortality" to another level.
10. Jack Harlow - Jackman
For really boring orthodox hip hop heads, there's a one-size-fits-all idea of a perfect rap album that resembles Illmatic or The Blueprint or a Griselda record, now and then I'll see someone say that Drake needs to make a 10-song album with soul samples and no guests. Jack Harlow's always been a straight A student rapper who literally tried to Malcolm Gladwell his way through 10 thousand hours of rapping experience to become a great MC, so it's not a surprise that he decided to do a predictable credibility grab like this after notching a couple of #1 pop hits but. Jackman is a solid record, though, I think this kind of approach suits him a little more than, say, J. Cole. Lyrically, Harlow is a self-obsessed careerist like Kanye or Drake who's never found a topic to write about more urgently than his own show business narrative, but the songs on Jackman are too short to get boring and "Blame On Me" is a pretty impressive song. "Gang Gang Gang" is a weird one, though, not sure what he was trying to accomplish there.
The Worst Album of the Month: NF - Hope
NF is a young white rapper who's technically more successful than Jack Harlow (more platinum albums, more #1 albums) but a lot less visible because he makes Christian hip hop. I don't wanna dismiss religious rappers categorically because great MCs have done interesting things rapping about their faith, from Scarface to Chance The Rapper, but wholesome CCM rap is certainly not the most fertile territory, and NF mostly sounds like Twenty One Pilots rap songs with more anonymous production. And the way he raps at detractors and calls them broke on "Turn My Back" doesn't feel very Christlike.
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