Deep Album Cuts Vol. 344: Miley Cyrus

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

 







Miley Cyrus is up for Album of the Year at the Grammys for the first time this weekend for Endless Summer Vacation, and that got me thinking about what a strange career she's had up to this point. 

Miley Cyrus album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. I Got Nerve
2. Rock Star
3. I Miss You
4. East Northumberland High
5. Bottom Of The Ocean
6. Breakout
7. Hoedown Throwdown
8. He Could Be The One
9. The Time Of Our Lives
10. Stay
11. Two More Lonely People
12. Been Here All Along
13. Drive
14. Maybe You're Right
15. Karen Don't Be So Sad
16. Something About Space Dude
17. I Would Die For You
18. Inspired
19. D.R.E.A.M. (featuring Ghostface Killah)
20. Plastic Hearts
21. High
22. Rose Colored Lenses
23. You

Track 1 from Hannah Montana (2006)
Track 2 from Hannah Montana 2 (2007)
Tracks 3 and 4 from Meet Miley Cyrus (2007)
Tracks 5 and 6 from Breakout (2008)
Track 7 from Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009)
Track 8 from Hannah Montana 3 (2009)
Track 9 from The Time Of Our Lives EP (2009)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Can't Be Tamed (2010)
Track 12 from Hannah Montana Forever (2010)
Tracks 13 and 14 from Bangerz (2013)
Tracks 15 and 16 from Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz (2015)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Younger Now (2017)
Track 19 from She Is Coming EP (2019)
Tracks 20 and 21 from Plastic Hearts (2020)
Tracks 22 and 23 from Endless Summer Vacation (2023)

It's funny to think now that Hannah Montana, the pop star alter ego that Miley Cyrus played from 2006 to 2011 on the Disney Channel sitcom, was a cottage industry unto itself for a while there, selling millions and millions of albums. But Cyrus began to differentiate between the music she made in character as "Hannah" and the music she was making as herself, "Miley," pretty quickly, in 2007, when Hannah Montana 2 was packaged as a double disc with her 'debut' Meet Miley Cyrus, and she performed both repertoires on her Best of Both Worlds Tour. 

Hannah Montana still has her own Spotify profile and her own discography page on Wikipedia, separate from Miley Cyrus. Looking back, it feels pretty silly, since there's very little musical or vocal difference between Hannah or Miley's music, if any, and it was easy to mix them together -- the first 12 tracks on this playlist are all of a piece, and you probably wouldn't be able to guess without looking which 4 songs are Hannah and which 8 are Miley. The Hannah Montana The Movie soundtrack album confuses things even more with songs credited to Hannah and songs credited to Miley. Of course, the Hannah songs ruled Radio Disney, but for the average pop fan, every song she's remembered for now is a Miley Cyrus song. 

Miley Cyrus made some vague gestures at becoming her own independent-minded edgy singer-songwriter on Breakout and Can't Be Tamed, but all of that felt very minor and quaint compared to the reinvention on Bangerz, her first album after finally closing the door on Hannah Montana. Many white pop starlets had made 'grown up' albums with sexual lyrics or hip-hop-inspired production before Miley Cyrus, but it felt like she was determined to really go further and go for more shock value, and it worked in a sense, because the album was an enormous hit. Personally, I hated "We Can't Stop" and most of the stuff she did in 2013, it all felt so forced. But revisiting that record now, I will admit that she and Mike Will Made It had some cool synth pop tracks like "Drive" and "Maybe You're Right" on there. 

After Bangerz, Cyrus pivoted hard again, and Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is one of the weirdest, most uncommercial albums a pop superstar has ever made at the height of their fame. Many of the songs were written with the Flaming Lips, and Ariel Pink and Phantogram's Sarah Barthel also make appearances, but Cyrus also continued working with Bangerz collaborators like Mike Will and Big Sean, so it's just a bizarre mix of styles. I want to admire it, but at 92 minutes, the album is incredibly indulgent and at times unlistenable. As much as I loved Halsey and Trent Reznor mixing contemporary pop with '90s alternative rock on If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power, that's how much I hate what Miley Cyrus and Wayne Coyne made together. Still, I tried to pull a couple of the more tolerable songs from the album for this playlist. 

Since Bangerz and Dead Petz, Cyrus has sort of stopped flying between extremes and worked out a more toned-down pop/rock sound and image and made some of the best music of her career. She Is Coming was a heavily hyped EP that seemed like part of a major rollout, but then no album followed it, much like The Time Of Our Lives contained one of the biggest songs of her career ("Party in the U.S.A.") but then it never lead to a full album. I love the song "High" on Plastic Hearts, and co-writer Caitlyn Smith recorded an even better version for one of my favorite albums of 2023. 

10:06 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 343: Scarface

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

 






I did a Geto Boys playlist a few years ago after Bushwick Bill died, and really wanted to dive into a Scarface solo playlist then, but didn't get around to it at the time. But in December, Scarface did a fantastic Tiny Desk Concert that brought some attention back to one of the greatest MCs of all time, I personally think easily one of the top 5. 

Scarface album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Born Killer
2. The Money And The Power
3. Lettin' Em Know
4. The Wall
5. No Tears
6. The Diary
7. G's
8. Southside
9. Money Makes The World Go 'Round (f/ Daz Dillinger, Devin The Dude, and K.B.)
10. Untouchable (f/ Roger Troutman)
11. The Geto (f/ Willie D, Ice Cube and K.B.)
12. Greed
13. They Down With Us (f/ UGK)
14. Get Out (f/ Jay-Z)
15. Safe
16. In Cold Blood
17. Never Snitch (f/ Beanie Sigel and The Game)
18. Big Dog Status (f/ Wacko)
19. Forgot About Me (f/ Lil Wayne and Bun B)
20. Do What I Do (f/ Nas, Rick Ross and Z-Ro)

Tracks 1 and 2 from Mr. Scarface Is Back (1991)
Tracks 3 and 4 from The World Is Yours (1993)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from The Diary (1994)
Tracks 8, 9 and 10 from The Untouchable (1997)
Tracks 11 and 12 from My Homies (1998)
Tracks 13 and 14 from The Last Of A Dying Breed (2000)
Tracks 15 and 16 from The Fix (2002)
Track 17 from My Homies Part 2 (2006)
Track 18 from Made (2007)
Track 19 from Emeritus (2008)
Track 20 from Deeply Rooted (2015)

As far as I can tell, Geto Boys were the second southern rap group (after 2 Live Crew) to go platinum in 1991, and though a couple of other Texans went platinum as solo rappers before Scarface (The D.O.C. and Vanilla Ice), it feels like Scarface is more of a true southern rap trailblazer than either of those guys. I was a kid back then, so "Smile" with 2Pac was the first time I heard Scarface, but that song just blew me away, and I still think it's amazing. I got a stack of cheap rap vinyl in the early 2000s that included The Last Of A Dying Breed and I was obsessed with "Get Out" with Jay-Z, I think that's one of the all-time best Jay-Z tracks that the average fan doesn't know. Really all the Scarface/Roc-A-Fella crossovers are classic, "In Cold Blood" is one of Kanye West's greatest productions ever. 

"No Tears" famously appeared in Office Space alongside a couple Geto Boys songs. "Lettin' Em Know" featured a "front, back and side to side" refrain a year before the more famous UGK song. The majority of the tracks on here were produced by the main Rap-A-Lot guys N.O. Joe, Mr. Lee, Mike Dean, and sometimes Scarface himself. I wanna know about the China Black who produced "Safe," though, like I don't know of anything else they produced besides that one amazing track. My Homies was kind of an early example of a label using its biggest star to market a bunch of random tracks -- Scarface is only on half the songs, with a bunch of random Rap-A-Lot guys and Houston rappers filling out the rest of the project. But since it was released at the height of Scarface's popularity and "Sex Faces" was a hit, it's one of his more successful records, one of three platinum Scarface solo albums. I think Scarface is one of the few rap veterans who doesn't have a bad album, the records after The Fix aren't as essential but they're all pretty solid. 

10:05 AM

TV Diary

Monday, January 29, 2024

 






a) "Death And Other Details"
Some people have been quick to say this Hulu series seems like a Knives Out knockoff, and it wouldn't surprise me if its creators were directly inspired by Knives Out -- the main difference is the "world's greatest detective" is Mandy Patinkin with a British accent instead of Daniel Craig with an American accent. I like it, though, I enjoy a good mystery ensemble piece, and it's full of people I enjoy like Rahul Kohli and Jere Burns. 

b) "Expats"
I generally dislike snobbery about film being on another level above good television, but sometimes when a feature director does episodic television, you really do feel the difference on a textural level, like woah, this feels like cinema. And I got that immediately when watching "Expats," an Amazon miniseries directed by Lulu Wang of The Farewell fame. Nicole Kidman has done several series over the last few years, but this is the first one since "Big Little Lies" that really feels worthy of her stature. The first episode opens with some heavy foreshadowing but what happens in the second episode was still a big emotional gut punch to me. 

c) "Griselda"
Much has been made of the fact that Griselda Blanco was not a glamorously beautiful woman but has been portrayed onscreen by Catherine Zeta-Jones and, now, Sofia Vergara. But it's cool to see Vergara take on a serious role and really thrive, she's got some gravitas that she never needed on things like "Modern Family." 

d) "Such Brave Girls"
This British series from creator/star Kat Sadler is really impressive, it's not overly similar to "Fleabag" but I think achieves the same kind of balance in having some dark subject matter but remaining very much a dry comedy and not a dramedy like an American version of this show would probably become. 

e) "The Brothers Sun"
Brad Falchuk co-created most of the shows Ryan Murphy is known for, but for whatever reason isn't remotely as well known as Murphy. And the first series created by Falchuk with Byron Wu instead of his usual producing partner is refreshingly devoid of winky pop culture Ryan Murphy vibes, it's a really fun and entertaining action show about Taiwanese gangsters. With "Warrior" ending, I'm glad there's another newer show with amazing fight choreography. 

f) "Echo"
Speaking of fight choreography, the latest Marvel show on Disney+ picks up where "Daredevil" left off with some great fight scenes, plus appearances from Matt Murdock and Kingpin. Like most of these shows, it's not a home run, but it's a good time most of the time. 

g) "In The Know"
This Peacock series co-created by Mike Judge is about an NPR host, and at times echoes Judge's previous parodies of earnest lefties like "The Goode Family" or Mr. Van Driessen from "Beavis & Butthead." But it was also co-created by star Zach Woods, who's proven on "Silicon Valley" and "Veep" that he just has an incredible way of deadpanning the most absurd dialogue with utter sincerity. "In The Know" has a "Space Ghost Coast to Coast"-style format where everything is animated except for the celebrity guests in the interview segments, and so far it seems kind of hit-and-miss to me, and the stop-motion animation is kind of hideous. 

h) "Ted" 
A lot of people seem to enjoy this series, maybe even more than the original 2012 Ted movie. And while I enjoyed that movie more than I thought I would, I dunno, the series doesn't hit the same. I hate to say it's missing Mark Wahlberg, but the actor playing a younger version of him, Max Burkholder from "Parenthood," really just has no comedy chops at all, all his scenes fall flat. I think Alanna Ubach is a comedic genius and force of nature, but she's kind of underused as this character who's so repressed she's almost catatonic. 

I like the cast and the premise (a small English town where witches have lived openly for centuries) but the first episodes just kinda breezed past me, didn't grab me at all. 

j) "Monsieur Spade"
It's been decades since the iconic character Sam Spade has been portrayed in a major film, so it's kind of odd to get a series where Clive Owen plays an older retired Spade in the south of France. It works, though, probably a better idea than trying to adapt The Maltese Falcon again, as much as I love the book. 

Percy Jackson is 12 in the first novel, and Logan Lerman was like 18 when he started playing the character in two movies a decade ago. The new Disney+ series rebooting the franchise has 14-15-year old Walker Scobell playing the 12-year-old Percy, so I guess they're closer to the spirit of the books, but it's funny to me that Hollywood can never bring itself to have kids play kids their own age. The show is decent so far, the Jason Mantzoukas and Lin-Manuel Miranda cameos were entertaining. 
 
This Australian series on Netflix is based on a novel and I feel like I don't really know where the story is going and might get interesting, but I really just did not enjoy the first episode at all and will probably not stick with it. 

I liked the story and the supporting cast on the first season of "Reacher" more, but the second season has continued to be pretty entertaining and has plenty of Alan Ritchson being gigantic and beating everybody's ass. 

n) "Fisk"
This was one of my favorite international acquisitions on Netflix last year, and they recently released the second season that aired in Australia in 2022. No news yet of whether it'll continue beyond that, but I hope it does. 

Last year I wrote about how I spent a big chunk of 2023 catching up on the first 11 seasons of "Letterkenny." Shortly after that, it was announced that "Letterkeny" would conclude with season 12, which was up to the same standard as the later seasons of the show, but attempted a little more of a sustained storyline. That didn't really feel like it had much of a payoff, but it was still a consistently weird, funny show right up to the end. 

p) "1670"
This Polish series on Netflix is really funny, it's like a modern mockumentary-style sitcom about 17th century noblemen with a sort of "Monty Python" style of historical satire, I love finding shows like this from other parts of the world that have a very familiar kind of comedy that transcends cultures. 

q) "Detective Forst"
Another Polish series on Netflix, a more serious hard-boiled detective story, not bad but haven't gotten very into yet. 

r) "Jessica's Big Little World"
For years, my sons and I have been big fans of the Cartoon Network series "Craig of the Creek," and I wanted to know more about why it took place in a fictional town called Herkleton, Maryland. So last year, I got to talk to the creators of "Craig of the Creek" and the spinoff about Craig's little sister Jessica for a Baltimore Banner piece. "Jessica's Big Little World" is aimed at a younger pre-school audience so I couldn't get my kids interested in it, but it's a pretty cute and occasionally very clever, funny show. There are 10 episodes out now, unfortunately Warner Bros. has been canceling Cartoon Network shows left and right and already decided that "Jessica's Big Little World" will be done after the 20 episodes they've produced. 

s) "Hilda"
I already wrote about this in my 2023 year-end list, but I was really delighted that this show came back for a third and final season, I thought they might be done after the movie, and the season 3 finale really felt like a perfect conclusion to the story. 

t) "Murder In Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning"
It's fun to see Boston rap journalist Dart Adams pop up on TV in this HBO docuseries, but otherwise, a pretty dark story, somehow I never heard about the Charles Stuart case before. 

With Paramount+ having hits with "Yellowstone" and all these other neo western shows, I feel like it's opened up a lane for them to do some pretty cool country music programming, including Willie Nelson's 90th birthday concert and this 4-part docuseries. Even having read Nelson's autobiography and devoured much of his enormous catalog, it's exhilarating to see so much great footage I've never seen before here, with lots of great interviews with Nelson and his family and his friends and his band, including his sister Bobbie before she passed in 2022. I particularly liked when they could delve into some great lesser known albums like Yesterday's Wine. 

Another 4-part docuseries on Paramount+, but a much lighter one, with the Rush frontman having a hang with other bassists of note (Les Claypool, Robert Trujillo, Melissa Auf Der Maur). There's usually a little jamming, a little talk about what's unique about their instrument, but it's mostly just Geddy Lee making dad jokes and nerding out with his friends, a fun like post-Rush side project. 

I've read some things about BTS's history and the context of how they came up in the K-pop world that make them interesting to me, but I really hoped this Disney+ docuseries would humanize the group members or reveal their musical process a little, and it just all feels really dry and corporate and guarded, even when it goes through the music doc "behind the curtain" beats. 

The U.S. team won the Women's World Cup in 2015 and 2019, but this Netflix series is about them unsuccessfully defending their title in 2023. So it's kind of, y'know, not a feelgood doc, but it's an interesting time to get a behind-the-scenes look and see how far U.S. women's soccer has come, and what might've went wrong this time around or whether the competition was just a lot tougher.  

This Netflix docuseries starts with the very interesting premise of a nutrition study with many pairs of twins, with one twin eating a healthy vegan diet and one twin eating a healthy omnivore diet with meat. It's very educational and illuminating, but I feel like as you go along, the show tips its hand at really wanting to convince the viewer to go vegan, and it feels less an open-ended scientific observation and more something dogmatic. That being said, I don't think going vegan is a bad thing, it's nice to hear about the benefits in detail if I ever did go that route. 

Another one of those reality shows where people are kind of encouraged to be their worst selves to win some money, maybe it's better that this show is so explicitly framed that way, but I dunno, just kind of a turn-off for me. 

5:00 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 342: Melanie

Friday, January 26, 2024

 



Melanie Safka, who recorded as simply Melanie, died on Tuesday at the age of 76. And I realized, after hearing the news, that while I was familiar with two of her best known songs, "Brand New Key" and "What Have They Done To My Song Ma," I don't know if I would've been able to tell you who did those songs before this week, and I certainly had no clue those songs were by the same person. And that made me curious to check out her catalog. 

Melanie album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Close To It All
2. Momma Momma
3. Animal Crackers
4. Johnny Boy
5. Any Guy
6. Leftover Wine
7. Citiest People
8. Lovin' Baby Girl
9. Uptown And Down (live)
10. Babe Rainbow
11. Some Say (I Got Devil)
12. Rainbow
13. Steppin'
14. People In The Front Row
15. Between The Road Signs
16. Psychotherapy (live)
17. Maybe Not For A Lifetime
18. Holding Out
19. Autumn Lady
20. Monongahela River
21. Perceive It
22. Groundhog Day

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Born To Be (1968)
Tracks 4 and 5 from Melanie (1969)
Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Candles In The Rain (1970)
Track 9 from Leftover Wine (1970)
Track 10 from The Good Book (1971)
Track 11, 12 and 13 from Gather Me (1971)
Track 14 from Garden In The City (1971)
Track 15 from Stoneground Words (1972)
Track 16 from Melanie At Carnegie Hall (1973)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Madrugada (1974)
Tracks 19 and 20 from As I See It Now (1974)
Tracks 21 from Sunset And Other Beginnings (1975)
Tracks 22 from Photograph (1976)

Melanie got her start the same place as a lot of the other major folk rock acts and singer-songwriters of the '60s and '70s, performing at the Greenwich Village club The Bitter End, where she started to get the attention of labels. Her first album was out when she became one of the lesser known artists to perform at Woodstock. The first three tracks on this playlist ("Animal Crackers," "Close To It All," and "Momma, Momma") were all part of Melanie's set at Woodstock, which was released as a live album in 2019. 

"Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)," inspired by Melanie's experience at Woodstock, became her first top 10 hit in America. Generally, though, her records performed in better in Europe and Australia than in the U.S. Melanie released two live albums in the '70s, both recorded at Carnegie Hall and both of which featured a song she never included on any studio album, "Psychotherapy." It's an amusing high concept song about Freudian analysis set to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and it's been played on "The Dr. Dremento Show." "People In The Front Row" was sampled by the Australian rap group Hilltop Hoods on their biggest hit, 2003's "The Nosebleed Section." 

I ended the playlist around the time she stopped making the charts, but Melanie never stopped making music, releasing her 28th album in 2010 and continuing to perform and write and tour a musical about her life. I really fell in love with Melanie's voice and songwriting eccentricities while making this playlist, she really had a distinctive sound, and her own sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, very eccentric hippie way of looking at the world. And she really uncorks a surprising power in her voice on some of these songs, especially "Any Guy." "Lovin' Baby Girl" is probably my favorite song here, fantastic arrangement and the vocal really makes me wonder if she influenced Patti Smith. Melanie was kind of a trailblazer in a time when artists rarely started their own labels, too, she and husband/producer Peter Schekeryk founded Neighborhood Records, which released her biggest hit "Brand New Key" (with distribution from a Paramount subsidiary). 

11:51 AM

Monthly Report: January 2024 Singles

Thursday, January 25, 2024

























1. Ashley Cooke - "Your Place"
The lead single from Florida country singer Ashley Cooke's second album has one of those classic Nashville choruses where the title has a couple meanings that are woven together very gracefully, and it draws you into the story in the process. Here's the new 2024 singles Spotify playlist I'll be updating with 10 songs every month this year. 

2. Flo Milli - "Never Lose Me"
Flo Milli has held steady at medium famous for a few years now without necessarily seeming like she would break through to the level of having a radio hit. But then she released her 6th single of 2023, which uses the same beat as Detroit rapper Babyface Ray's biggest hit "Ron Artest," and it's very quickly become her first Hot 100 hit. Sometimes when I hear it on the radio they play the remix with Lil Yachty, but he's not really a welcome presence on an extremely sexy song. Flo Milli teased that there's going to be another remix with SZA, so that'll probably be what really puts the song over the top. 

3. The Last Dinner Party - "Nothing Matters"
Once again, a song about sex by beautiful women, because I'm not made of stone, sometimes I'm powerless to resist that kind of thing. I guess this band blew up in their native England last year but "Nothing Matters" is just starting to take off on American alternative radio and it's got me excited for their debut album in February, all five of the songs they have out so far are great. 

4. P1Harmony - "Fall In Love Again"
Tricky Stewart produced a bunch of the biggest R&B songs of the last 25 years, many of them with The-Dream. But Stewart has had a lower profile in recent years, aside from co-producing Beyonce's "Break My Soul," so it was cool to see that he co-wrote Tyla's "Water" and co-produced this great American radio breakthrough from a K-pop group. 

5. Ariana Grande - "Yes, And?" 
Other than the "Problem"/"Break Free" era, Ariana Grande generally can do no wrong in my eyes. This feels like kind of a weirdly low key first single, despite being a Max Martin production that debuted at #1, but I like the sound of it and how she went for making a statement with her lead single after a three year break and a lot of speculation about her personal life.

6. Taylor Swift - "Is It Over Now?"
As with Ariana Grande and Drake and some other superstars, Taylor Swift has had several songs debut at #1 in the last few years, but they're often not the songs that really last or are remembered by people (like, c'mon, the non-diehard fan cannot hum "Cardigan," "Willow," or "All Too Well"). I thought that would be the case when "Is It Over Now?" from 1989 (Taylor's Version) debuted at #1 a few months ago, but it's turned into the new-old pop radio follow-up to the new-old "Cruel Summer" and has really grown on me, a really well constructed lyric. 

7. Lil Nas X - "J. Christ"
It seems foolish to doubt Lil Nas X after he's beaten the odds with a few massive hits, but it feels like he might have a rare miss on his hands with "J. Christ" after the kind of weary reception to him once again actively courting scandal with lots of religious imagery. I think it'd be kind of a shame if this song flops, though, I like it. He makes pop rap with the instincts of someone who grew up in Atlanta in the golden age of trap music, I like his ear for beats. The only time I heard this song on the radio, the DJ referred to the song as "Back Like" and played an edited that muted the word 'Christ.' 

8. Maeta f/ Free Nationals - "Through The Night" 
I liked Maeta's album When I Hear Your Name last summer, I'm glad this song has turned into a bit of a sleeper hit, a rare live band groove on R&B radio. 

9. Jonas Brothers f/ Bailey Zimmerman - "Strong Enough" 
The Jonas Brothers released The Album last year and it wasn't a very successful record, but they've kept touring it and releasing a bunch of new collaborations with the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together, Busted, and rising country star Bailey Zimmerman. "Strong Enough" is produced by the same people who worked on The Album, Jon Bellion and The Monsters & Strangerz, and doesn't really sound country at all, but I like it. 

10. Lil Tecca - "500lbs"
About four years ago, 17-year-old rapper Lil Tecca scored a massive hit with "Ransom" but seemed to quickly sour on rap stardom and talked publicly about retiring from music. Unsurprisingly, though, he never really left, and it seems like he's catching another wave of popularity and just returned to the Hot 100 with "500lbs." 

The Worst Single of the Month: Nate Smith - "World On Fire"
I like Nate Smith's music generally but I don't like that this song recently eclipsed "Whiskey On You" as his biggest hit. The chorus just feels lazy, in a way that irritates me more because it sounds like a slowed-down grungy knockoff of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" (flames go "higher" to rhyme with "fire" and then he says "burn, burn, burn" three times). 

10:20 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 341: Lana Del Rey

Tuesday, January 23, 2024


 


























Lana Del Rey is up for Album of the Year for the 2nd time at the Grammys, and she's headlining Coachella this year. So it feels a good time to look at the catalog of an artist I've never been been entirely at ease with, and give it some more serious consideration. 

Lana Del Rey album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Radio
2. This Is What Makes Us Girls
3. Diet Mountain Dew
4. Cola
5. Fucked My Way Up To The Top
6. Cruel World
7. 24
8. The Blackest Day
9. White Mustang
10. In My Feelings
11. Cinnamon Girl
12. Norman Fucking Rockwell
13. Love Song
14. Dark But Just A Game
15. Wild At Heart
16. If You Lie Down With Me
17. Cherry Blossom
18. Fishtail
19. Sweet

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Born To Die (2012)
Track 4 from the Paradise EP (2012)
Tracks 5 and 6 from Ultraviolence (2014)
Tracks 7 and 8 from Honeymoon (2015)
Tracks 9 and 10 from Lust For Life (2017)
Tracks 11, 12 and 13 from Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Chemtrails Over The Country Club (2020)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Blue Banisters (2021)
Tracks 18 and 19 from Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023)

I was a little baffled the first time I listened to "Video Games" after seeing it on many critics' lists of the best songs of 2011. And even though I'm very familiar with Lana Del Rey now and listened to most of these albums when they came out, I was pretty much just as baffled when I saw "A&W" on many critics' lists of the best songs of 2023. That's not to say I've never liked any of her music -- "West Coast" has always been my favorite song of hers, and I think Ultraviolence and Norman Fucking Rockwell are the albums that appeal to me most, I like her stuff more when it's piano or guitar-driven, some of the 'trap' beats on Lust For Life sound really embarrassing to me. 

I don't wanna be dismissive of Lana Del Rey, she might be the most influential female singer of the past decade, and a lot of artists I enjoy more like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo are heavily indebted to her. That said, I don't know if I'll ever be totally comfortable with Del Rey's vocal style and aesthetic, so much of it reminds me of Kristen Wiig's "SNL" character Shana. As far as the edgy alt-pop girls of the 2010s go, I tend to be more into Tove Lo, Charli XCX, and Halsey. 

On an intellectual level, I like when artists create such a stylized aesthetic and lyrical perspective that they almost become their own genre, and Lana Del Rey has arguably done that as well as Tom Waits or even Jimmy Buffett. And maybe her work is the insightful examination of American femininity that many critics say it is, I'm a man, I try to take music made by women seriously but I'm not gonna 'get' everything. I have trouble with some of her lyrics, even understanding that there's some camp or deliberate humor in there. "My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola"? Like, literally? That raises a lot of questions, some of them about your pH balance. Sometimes I'd put a song into this playlist and then hear her sing something like "baby you're so ghetto" and I just noped out and replaced it with another track. 

In a way I kind of feel bad for Lana Del Rey that, even though she's very successful and has several platinum and gold albums, her only big radio hits familiar to the general listening public are pretty unrepresentative flukes: a dance remix of "Summertime Sadness" and a cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time." So I kind of went into this wondering what an ideal Lana Del Rey radio hit that actually sounds like her other work would be, and I think it would be cool if something like "Radio" or "White Mustang" had been a big mainstream hit. 

7:06 AM

Sunday, January 21, 2024

 





I talked to Kix guitarist Brian Forsythe and longtime Kix fan Chuck Eddy for a Baltimore Banner piece tracing the band's history from their first practice in 1977 to their farewell show in 2023. 

6:52 AM

Movie Diary

Friday, January 19, 2024

 







a) Killers of the Flower Moon
It feels like people have talked more about Killers of the Flower Moon's running time than they did about The Irishman, which was approximately 3 minutes longer. But I thought Scorsese filled the 3+ hours of Killers much more urgently and meaningfully without losing momentum, and there were a lot of excellent moments and performances by great supporting players that would've been lost in a tighter cut. Lily Gladstone rightfully is getting most of the awards season love and she is wonderful and heartbreaking in it, but I think De Niro and DiCaprio where also at their best in at least a few years -- DiCaprio is just gut-wrenching in that scene with Jesse Plemons in the jail, which you don't expect when the guy is such a moron for most of the movie up to that point. 

b) Maestro
I went into A Star Is Born a skeptic and came out with grudging respect for Bradley Cooper as a filmmaker without totally loving the movie. And that process pretty much repeated itself with Maestro, which also gave me more respect for Cooper as an actor -- I had felt iffy about the whole prosthetic nose thing, but it looked real and convincing on film and wasn't distracting, felt like an authentic part of Cooper's performance. I also really thought the combination of black & white and color scenes worked really well, that kind of thing can be very showoffy and unnecessary in the wrong hands but was subtle and effective in Maestro. That being said, it felt kind of subpar as a musician biopic even without falling victim to many of the cliches of musician biopics, because Cooper seemed a lot more disinterested in the music part here than he was with A Star Is Born. If anything it felt like Cooper got too caught up in Leonard Bernstein's personal life and made a generic movie about an imperfect marriage instead of making a movie about a real individual who made important contributions to art and culture. "Fosse/Verdon" threaded the needle in doing both of those things much more successfully than Maestro. 

c) The Boy And The Heron
I respect Hayao Miyazaki a lot more than I actually enjoy his stuff. My whole family has watched a lot of his movies, and my wife in particular is a big fan, but I often feel a little indifferent to them, even as I appreciate his unique talent. I suggest to the family that we all go to The Boy And The Heron on its opening weekend, but our kids are homebodies and just passed on the opportunity to go to the theater, so Jen and I just went on a quick movie date. And I have to say, I'd probably like Miyazaki's movies more if I saw all of them in the theater, I think they benefit from me not having the option of passively getting bored and turning my attention to something else, to appreciate the pacing and emotion of it, because I really enjoyed this one. 

d) Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire
I mostly like Zack Snyder's movies before he sank a decade into a few bloated DCEU movies, and doing straight-up popcorn movies for Netflix like Army of the Dead and Rebel Moon feels like a perfectly fine place for his career to end up these days. Making two movies in a series at the same time never seems to work out great even for an established franchise, and feels a little foolhardy to kick off a new thing, but this was an enjoyable if not particularly memorable spectacle with a few cool FX moments and a decent cast, I will probably check out the next movie. 

e) Barbie
It's always weird watching a cultural phenomenon a few months after the fact, especially when it's a comedy and you've already had a lot of its better jokes ruined for you. It's possible I would've really loved this in a theatre on opening weekend, but as is, it was just okay. In terms of doing a playful, relatively clever twist on a hoary pop culture staple, it lands somewhere above 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie but below 2001's Josie and the Pussycats. I got a few belly laughs out of it, though, I think they did seize the moment well and deliver something that will stay in the zeitgeist for a while, whether or not its reputation as a satirical feminist blockbuster ages well. 

f) Finestkind
Brian Helgeland has a couple Oscar nominations as a screenwriter (for L.A. Confidential and Mystic River), but as a director he's a bit more of an anonymous studio hand who's done middling stuff like Payback, 42, and A Knight's Tale. Finestkind wants to be both a folksy slice of life about Massachusetts scallop fisherman and a suspenseful crime movie, and actually succeeds pretty well, although I think I would've been fine with just a movie about fisherman. Ben Foster continues to be one of the best, most underappreciated actors of his generation, but this is not really one of his best leading roles, and Tommy Lee Jones kind of surprised me by stealing the movie toward the end, his role didn't seem to have much importance to the story initially. 

g) Bank of Dave
Bank of Dave is based on the true story of a businessman in a northern England town who decides to start a community bank after lending money to some of his customers during the 2008 financial crisis and seeing how little they were being helped by the big banks. I mean, you couldn't make up a better David and Goliath story where David is literally a guy named Dave. The movie isn't quite a The Full Monty-style romp but also feels heavily fictionalized and driven by a romantic subplot. That was fine with me, though, particularly because Phoebe Dynevor, who didn't leave much of an impression on me on "Bridgerton," just lights up the screen in this. 

h) Renfield
My wife was really excited about this movie when it came out and was sad that we missed in theaters, but we finally got around to watching it on New Year's Eve, and it turned out to be a pretty ideal little movie for a night like that where you're just staying up and drinking wine. Director Chris McKay uncorked some of the inspired chaos of his modern animated classic The Lego Batman Movie, Nicholas Hoult continues to appeal to me more in comedy than in drama, and Nic Cage was used just the right amount in Renfield to be entertaining but not overbearing. A lot of it was a little closer to a formulaic studio comedy than I would've liked, but they didn't lose the spirit of the loopy premise and cartoonish color scheme. And I like the running ska jokes, especially that they referenced Voodoo Glow Skulls and Mustard Plug instead of spoonfeeding some more obvious references. 

i) Crock of Gold - A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
Last month, Spin published my ranking of every Pogues album the day that Shane MacGowan passed away. I guess someone at Spin had some inside knowledge that MacGowan had taken a turn for the worse because I was actually asked to work on that piece two days before he died. So I had a couple days to pore over those albums and also checked out this documentary directed by Julien Temple (The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle), which came out three years ago and tells the story of the Pogues pretty entertainingly. Fair warning, the movie was produced by Johnny Depp, who worked with MacGowan in The Libertine, and there are some pointless segments in the movie where Depp "interviews" MacGowan but they're really just shooting the shit at a bar. 

8:00 AM

Wednesday, January 17, 2024


 












I ranked and wrote about every Green Day album for Spin. 

10:42 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 340: Sleater-Kinney

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

 






Sleater-Kinney is releasing its 11th album Little Rope this week, so it felt like a good time to look back at the band's catalog. 

Sleater-Kinney album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Sold Out
2. Her Again
3. Little Mouth
4. Anonymous
5. I'm Not Waiting
6. Things You Say
7. It's Enough
8. Heart Factory
9. Living In Exile
10. God Is A Number
11. Banned From The End Of The World
12. Youth Decay
13. Pompeii
14. Far Away
15. Light Rail Coyote
16. Step Aside
17. Let's Call It Love
18. Night Light
19. Modern Girl
20. Price Tag
21. Surface Envy
22. Reach Out
23. The Center Won't Hold
24. No Knives
25. Path Of Wellness

Tracks 1 and 2 from Sleater-Kinney (1995)
Tracks 3, 4 and 5 from Call The Doctor (1996)
Tracks 6. 7 and 8 from Dig Me Out (1997)
Tracks 9, 10 and 11 from The Hot Rock (1999)
Tracks 12 and 13 from All Hands On The Bad One (2000)
Tracks 14, 15 and 16 from One Beat (2002)
Tracks 17, 18 and 19 from The Woods (2004)
Tracks 20 and 21 from No Cities To Love (2015)
Tracks 22 and 23 from The Center Won't Hold (2019)
Tracks 24 and 25 from Path To Wellness (2021)

Sleater-Kinney was always a band that I felt like other people loved a lot more than me, but my brother had their albums and the band has grown on me a lot over their years. I particularly like the albums with Janet Weiss, and how she sort of grounds the trebly interplay between the guitars. As much as I love the bass guitar, I'm a little fascinated with that period in '90s indie rock when bands with two guitars and no bass were a little more common (see also: Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Thurston Moore's Psychic Hearts). I've had a couple bands that played shows with two guitars and no bass, some people don't like that configuration but I dig it. 

It always feels a little silly doing a 'deep cuts' playlist for a band that's really respected as an album act, so I tried to avoid some of the songs that really felt like 'hits' even if they weren't singles or music videos. I made a playlist of my favorite Sleater-Kinney songs around 10 years ago and drew heavily on that as a starting point for this playlist. The Hot Rock is kind of the sleeper of the Sleater-Kinney catalog, it was the only album they released from 1996 to 2005 that placed outside the top 10 in the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Critics Poll. But I love that album, it kind of 'clicked' for me more than Dig Me Out at the time and some days it's still my favorite, I think they fit their instruments together in cool ways on that record, "God Is A Number" and "Living In Exile" rule. 

The Woods is from that period when every band wanted to work with Dave Fridmann and get that blown out drum sound he's famous for, and Sleater-Kinney took it a little further, it sounds like the entire album is in the red. Some people love it, I think it only works perfectly on the closing epic "Let's Call It Love"/"Night Light," which has some of Weiss's best drumming ever. In general, I think One Beat is probably my favorite of their post-'90s albums. The post-reunion albums don't hit quite the same, mostly because they don't wield Corin Tucker's voice like a weapon as much, but there's still some excellent songs on those records. 

10:32 AM

Saturday, January 13, 2024

 




I ranked and wrote about every Violent Femmes album for Spin. 

10:52 AM

Monthly Report: December 2023 Albums

Friday, January 12, 2024

























1. Peter Gabriel - I/O
Peter Gabriel is a legend and can do whatever the hell he wants, but I'm not in love with his unorthodox release strategy for I/O. Gabriel released all 12 of the songs as singles throughout 2023, so I've been listening to the majority of the album for the last few months before finally being able to hear it in full in December. And the album contains two distinct mixes of each song, a 'Bright Side' mix by Spike Stent and a 'Dark Side' mix by Tchad Blake. Both mixes are excellent, and more alike than they are different, but I feel like Gabriel should've just made a decision and committed to one or the other being the definitive version of the album -- for me the Dark Side mix is consistently more appealing, Tchad Blake just has a great ear for texture and makes the drums punch a little more. I regard Peter Gabriel's first 5 albums as classics, and everything since then is kind of on a lower tier, but i/o is pretty damn good, I put it about on the same level as Us, maybe higher because there aren't any overly cartoony attempts at MTV hits. I already did my top 50 albums of 2023 post before I listened to most of these albums, but I still like to do my look back at December releases, don't wanna miss any good albums just because they drop at the end of the year. 

2. Nicki Minaj - Pink Friday 2
This album seemed to get a pretty mixed reception, but I was pleasantly surprised that I like it a lot more than Queen. The only songs I don't really like are the three previously released singles, those could've been loosies if you ask me. Plus, it was exciting to see that Baltimore rapper Tate Kobang, who's been working with Nicki for a couple years now, all over Pink Friday 2. He's featured on a song with Lil Wayne, "RNB," and has writing credits on 5 other songs on the album, including the breakout hit "Everybody," which is pretty cool -- for some background, I was the first person to interview Tate Kobang for Baltimore City Paper in 2013, and also profiled him for Fader in 2015 and Pigeons and Planes in 2016. 

3. Madeline Kenney - The Same Again: ANRM (Tiny Telephone Session)
Madeline Kenney's A New Reality Mind was my 4th favorite album of 2023, so I was delighted that she ended the year by releasing a live-in-the-studio performance of the entire album in order. The intricately textured instrumentation on A New Reality Mind is a big part of the appeal of the album, but I like hearing stripped-down voice-and-piano renditions that really show how strong the bones of the songs are. 

4. Tate McRae - Think Later
Over the last three years, Tate McRae has undergone this gradual evolution from the sad gen z balladeer of "You Broke Me First" to an old-fashioned dance pop diva with choreography-heavy videos and TV performances. And I think I like jiggy era Tate McRae much more than her offbrand Billie Eilish period, although I think the 2022 non-album single "Uh Oh" was especially great, I'm sad it got lost in the shuffle. "We're Not Alike" has a very zeitgeisty "she said she was a girl's girl, that's a lie" chorus, they should probably jump on releasing that as a single. 

5. Dove Cameron - Alchemical: Volume 1
Dove Cameron has been Disney Channel famous for over a decade, but she started to become normal famous in 2022 after coming out as bisexual and releasing the massive gender-bending pop hit "Boyfriend." Instead of capitalizing on her big single at the right time, though, she waited a year to release this 8-song first half of a debut album, which I think was a missed opportunity, her label should've gone all in. Cameron's grown-up pop stuff is perhaps even more overly indebted to Billie Eilish than Tate McRae's early work, but she also has this campy dramatic femme fatale thing that she put to great use in the Chicago/Burlesque-inspired second season of the Apple TV+ film musical parody series "Schmigadoon!" 

6. Shannon Ramsey - Manifest
Shannon Ramsey is a Baltimore-based gospel artist who once appeared on The CW's reality singing competition "The Next," and her debut album is a really funky, danceable record that could fit in with a lot of secular R&B right now but also happens to be a gospel record. A lot of that is thanks to the Baltimore producer King Midas, a hugely talented guy I interviewed for a poorly managed local magazine about 10 years ago, who fills the album with big grooves and vocodered backing vocals, but Ramsey's an excellent singer who pulls off a lot of different vocal styles with total confidence. 

7. Gucci Mane & B.G. - Choppers & Bricks
Last year I made a B.G. deep cuts playlist after he got out of prison, and it's exciting to hear him rapping like he barely missed a step after a decade away. It always felt like out of all the classic era Cash Money rappers, B.G. was the guy who influenced contemporary trap music, even more than Lil Wayne, so it makes total sense that T.I. signed B.G. in the 2000s and now Gucci teamed up with B.G. for his first post-prison project. 

8. Terrace Martin - Ornamental
L.A. producer Terrace Martin quietly had one of the most impressive runs of 2023, releasing 8 albums or EPs fusing jazz and soul and hip-hop on collaborative projects with Alex Isley, Gallant, James Fauntleroy, Calvin Keys, and Dinner Party. Martin ended his busy year with Ornamental, which doesn't really sound like a Christmas album, it's just a bunch of lush instrumental grooves with titles like "Hot Chocolate" and "Starry Night," but I'm not complaining. 

9. various artists - Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90 (Live At The Hollywood Bowl)
Blackbird Presents is a company that has put on a lot of all-star concerts celebrating musical legends, which are usually turned into a live album and/or TV special or DVD. 9 years ago I did the lyric prompter for Blackbird's Emmylou Harris tribute in D.C., which was an amazing night, so every time they do a cool show I get jealous that I wasn't working on it. And I'm really really jealous that I wasn't there for their event last year celebrating Willie Nelson's 90th birthday. The TV special is a trimmed down and abbreviated version of the concert, but the album is the whole 3-hour show. There are some great covers here, including the (fka Dixie) Chicks doing "Bloody Mary Morning," Dwight Yoakam doing "Me and Paul," and Lyle Lovett doing "Hello Walls," as well as Willie duetting with George Strait, Shery Crow, and Snoop Dogg. 

10. Wharton Tiers Ensemble - 23
Wharton Tiers is associated with the the No Wave scene of the early '80s and produced Sonic Youth's Confusion Is Sex and Glenn Branca records. So when I saw Sonic Youth live for the first time in 1998 and Tiers was one of the opening acts, it kind of surprised me that he was leading a band (on drums) that was basically playing fairly straightforward surf rock instrumentals. I like his stuff, though, I was happy to see he had a new record out, his stuff is a little less conventional than I realized in '98 but still kind of a good time groove-driven record.  

The Worst Album of the Month: Omarion - Full Circle: Sonic Book Two
R&B is a genre that, for better and for worse, really relies on the major label system, and when artists stop making hits or age out of their era and go independent, it seems rare that they really know how to keep making high quality records without industry support (Tinashe being a notable recent exception). Omarion's last couple albums aren't a huge step down from his peak records, but he never really made consistently great music, and now it just feels like he's coasting in mediocrity. 

10:20 AM