Monthly Report: April 2024 Albums
1. GloRilla - Ehhthang Ehhthang
In today's hyper-cautious major label environment, 2022's Anyway, Life's Great was marketed as an EP and Ehhthang Ehhthang is marketed as a mixtape. But this is essentially GloRilla's second major label album, and it's a really satisfying step up in quality, she's getting a little more polished in her delivery and her writing without losing the edge that made her a star two years ago, "Yeah Glo" is probably her best song ever and it's not a fluke, everything's up to that quality. And the beat selection is crazy, she hits a more introspective tone on "Aite" and "GFMU - Part 2" but the tracks are still hard. Here's the 2024 albums Spotify playlist with all the new releases I've listened to this year (and some I haven't gotten around to).
2. Pearl Jam - Dark Matter
Andrew Watt made it big as a contemporary hitmaker (Bieber, Post Malone, Dua Lupa) before becoming the guy who helps classic rockers make moderately contemporary-sounding new albums (Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne, Elton John). I liked the Eddie Vedder solo album Watt produced a couple years ago, but it didn't necessarily lead me to expect that a Watt-produced Pearl Jam album would be anything special. But one of my favorite music nerd daydreams is imagining that I get a chance to produce an album by an act I love that hasn't made an essential album in a while, how I would push them to do to get their greatness back. And what Watt does here is not far off from what I'd try with Pearl Jam: get the band to jam and write in a room together instead of polishing each other's solo demos, make sure Mike McCready gets in plenty of showboating guitar solos, and take advantage of the fact that Matt Cameron is a little more metal than the drummers the band had for most of the '90s.
3. Chayce Beckham - Bad For Me
In 2020, Chayce Beckham became the first person to win "American Idol" with an original song he wrote, "23." And for a while that was his only notable accomplishment, because winning that show isn't the ticket to an actual career in music that it once was. But "23" crept up and became an actual hit this year, and he's the only one of the last 7 "Idol" winners to get on the Hot 100, and now the only one of the last 4 winners to release an album. And Bad For Me totally fulfills the promise of "23," I really like all of it but particularly "Everything I Need" and "If I Had A Week."
4. Maggie Rogers - Don't Forget Me
Before Maggie Rogers started her career in New York, she grew up in Easton, Maryland, an area I've never much spent time in but have driven through many many times and think of as a beautiful, idyllic little area on the eastern shore of the Cheseapeake Bay. So in my mind her third album has heavy Talbot County vibes, I kind of miss the heavier looped/electronic elements of her first two albums but I like hearing her do a mellower, more rustic record too. "I Still Do" is a great piano ballad with maybe the best vocal performance of her career, her voice sounds so good on "So Sick of Dreaming" too.
5. Virginia - Black Yacht Rock Vol. 1: City Of Limitless Access
On Pharrell Williams's 51st birthday last month, a website appeared, BlackYachtRock.com, that is streaming an entire new 10-track album that was clearly made by Pharrell, though it's credited to 'Virginia.' It's hard to say if it's just Pharrell or a group, it definitely sounds like someone else played some guitar and piano, but it's all something of a mystery for the moment. He never posted it to his own social media accounts or put it on subscription streaming services, and he's yet to make any public statements or give any interviews about it, so it's kind of flown under the radar. It's really fucking good, though, possibly better than either of Pharrell's proper solo albums, I especially dig "11:11" and "Going Back To VA."
6. X Ambassadors - Townie
My wife loves X Ambassadors and they've really grown on me over the years, Sam Harris has a great voice, probably one of the best singers in mainstream rock in recent memory. I didn't realize until we saw the band live about 5 years ago that Harris's brother Casey plays keyboards in the band, and is blind. And there's a song on this album, "Follow the Sound of My Voice," that is sort of Sam's ode to Casey and it's a real tearjerker, it really destroyed me the first time I listened to it.
7. Future & Metro Boomin - We Still Don't Trust You
When people heard that Future would be dropping a pair of back-to-back albums, and that the second album would be more melodic, people inevitably thought back to the 2017 twofer of FUTURE and HNDRXX. The latter is one of my favorite Future albums, and We Still Don't Trust You doesn't remotely live up to that standard, but it's still pretty enjoyable. The opening title track is hilarious, I laughed out loud the first time I heard it, and it was even funnier a couple days later when I heard it blasting out of a car driving by when I was walking into a hardware store. With 25 songs, released a month after a better album, it's definitely overkill, but there's definitely a decent share of songs that are actually really good and not just kind of funny.
8. Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department
Speaking of overkill! I guess Midnights being fairly concise was a fluke and Taylor Swift is going to keep giving us absurdly overlong albums forever. I called The Tortured Poets Department mediocre the first time I listened to it, but it's grown on me a little. Her breakup songs and end-of-relationship songs have never resonated much for me but she actually sounds like she's obsessively spiraling on this album and it's a little moving at times, she leans into the self-pity but it feels kind of more genuine than a lot of her autobiographical songwriting. I ranked Swift's albums for Spin in 2022, and have been updating those rankings when artists release new albums. So I added TTPD to the piece a few days ago, and wound up putting it a couple spots higher than I initially thought I would, although it's still firmly in the bottom half of her catalog.
9. various artists - The New Look: Season 1 (Apple TV+ Original Series Soundtrack)
The other Jack Antonoff-produced album that was released last month is the soundtrack for "The New Look," a series that takes place in the 1940s and '50s, all of his frequent collaborators (besides Swift) singing old Tin Pan Alley songs and jazz standards. Hearing Lana Del Rey sing "Blue Skies" gave me new respect for her as a vocalist, to hear her go all the way into that retro stylized thing and nail it, the Sam Dew and Florence + The Machine tracks are great too. Antonoff is by far the worst singer on here, in fact, but the Bleachers song is kind of unobtrusive stuck toward the end of the album.
10. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - Challengers (Original Score)
Reznor and Ross have really been on an incredible run of scores the last 15 years, to say nothing of the great NIN music we've gotten, and I haven't seen Challengers but I understand why this one's struck a chord, they really had fun with these tracks. I got a little excited when the album ended with Reznor actually singing on one track, but Challengers director Luca Guadagnino wrote some really embarrassingly stupid lyrics for Reznor to sing on "Compress / Repress," it's kind of unfortunate.
The Worst Album of the Month: ERNEST - Nashville, Tennessee
Lots of rap stars have a sidekick who sounds like a less charismatic mini-me version of them (DMX and Drag-On, Busta Rhymes and Spliff Star, etc.) and that's what I thought of when I listened to Ernest Keith Smith, who's co-written dozens of songs on Morgan Wallen's albums. Smith's third album (as simply 'ERNEST') is, like Wallen's albums, way too long at 26 songs, and it has big features from Wallen, Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson. But ERNEST also sounds so much like Wallen that sometimes I think it's him singing when it isn't, and it's just a really uninspired, endless album.
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Tom : 2:38 PM