Deep Album Cuts Vol. 366: The Greg Kihn Band
Monday, August 26, 2024 
Greg Kihn, best known for the early '80s hits "Jeopardy" and "The Breakup Song," passed away a couple weeks ago at the age of 75. He grew up in Baltimore and was less than a year older than my father -- in fact they both attended Poly (Baltimore Polytechnic Institute) at the same time. I never heard any stories from my dad about knowing or crossing paths with Kihn, but I still feel a certain kihnship with him because of that (Kihn and my father both loved puns).
2. Cold Hard Cash
3. Someday
4. Real Big Man
5. All The Right Reasons
6. In The Naked Eye
7. Sound System
8. Things To Come
9. Make Up
10. Fascination
11. Worse Or Better
12. Nothing's Gonna Change
13. Hurt So Bad
14. Beat of the Night
15. Museum
16. Temper, Tempter
17. Don't Expect To Be Right
18. Can't Have The Hights (Without The Lows)
19. Night After Night
20. Paint You A Picture
21. Confrontation Music
22. I'm In Love Again
23. Tell Me Lies
Track 5 from Beserkley Chartbusters Vol. 1 (1975)
Tracks 11 and 17 from Greg Kihn (1976)
Tracks 4 and 13 from Greg Kihn Again (1977)
Tracks 2 and 15 from Next of Kihn (1978)
Tracks 6 and 18 from With the Naked Eye (1979)
Tracks 8 and 19 from Glass House Rock (1980)
Tracks 1 and 12 from RocKihnRoll (1981)
Tracks 7 and 23 from Kihntinued (1982)
Tracks 3 and 10 from Kihnspiracy (1983)
Tracks 9 and 21 from Kihntagious (1984)
Tracks 16 and 22 from Citizen Kihn (1985)
Tracks 14 and 20 from Love and Rock and Roll (1986)
Greg Kihn moved to California in 1974 and lived in the Bay Area for the rest of his life. Some of Kihn's albums were nominally solo albums and some of them were credited to The Greg Kihn Band, but he pretty much had the same backing band for most of those records and I think they're a big part of his sound. Kihn even spotlighted the other members' songs a bit more than most guys with eponymous bands -- drummer Larry Lynch wrote and sang "Can't Have the Highs (Without the Lows)" and bassist Steve Wright wrote and sang "Night After Night."
Kihn was part of the Beserkley Records roster alongside Jonathan Richman, Earth Quake and the Rubinoos. In fact, The Greg Kihn Band backed Richman on the first released version of "Roadrunner" on the 1974 Beserkley Chartbusters Vol. 1 compilation (the Modern Lovers version was recorded earlier, but released later). "All the Right Reasons" was one of Kihn's two songs on Chartbusters, and a few years later Kihn sang "Roadrunner" on his With the Naked Eye album.
Kihn is kind of known for being one of the few "power pop" acts who actually had a pretty successful chart run, and honestly he probably could've had even more hits if he picked some different singles, some of these deep cuts are catchy as hell. Kihn cranked out 11 albums in 11 years, the period I covered in this playlist, and then his output became more sporadic, with just a handful of albums in recent decades that mostly aren't available on streaming services. The '80s with his biggest hits are pretty strong, but I think Next of Kihn might be his best, that one just rocks a little harder than his other records.
Movie Diary
Thursday, August 22, 2024 
My 14-year-old son has been catching up on a lot of Marvel movies lately, including the first two Deadpool movies, so he asked to go to this. I guess this is the first R-rated movie I've taken him to, although I've let him watch plenty at home (I went to see Pulp Fiction at 12, I'm pretty nonchalant about this stuff as a person and as a parent). Leaving the theater, we agreed that it wasn't the best Deadpool movie, which is probably the first one, but I had a good time, and I think it had easily some of the best action sequences of the series. I always enjoy a good Hugh Jackman performance, Wolverine or otherwise, and here he got to play the character as well as he always has and hit a lot of earnest notes while still making it work in a broad comedic context, mostly as a straight man. I know a lot of people hate MCU humor and especially Deadpool humor at this point, but I dunno, you could do a lot worse for a lead in a comedy than Ryan Reynolds if you ask me.
I don't much care for Casey Affleck as an actor or a person, so I was a little annoyed to see him share top billing in a movie with Matt Damon that would seem like a much more natural layup if it was Ben Affleck instead of his little brother. But Casey Affleck co-wrote The Instigators with "City on a Hill" creator Chuck MacLean, so fair enough, it's his movie, and it's actually really good. Damon and Affleck play two guys whose lives are in shambles and get hired to pull off a heist that goes very wrong almost immediately, like in the first 15 minutes of the movie, and for the rest of the movie they're in constant danger of getting caught or killed, and it's just full of really entertaining twists and great little character actor turns (Michael Stuhlbarg, Ving Rhames, Toby Jones, Andre De Shields, etc.). There's one annoying moment where they steal an iconic dialogue exchange from "The Wire" (and it's delivered by Jack Harlow), but that's pretty early on and it's pretty gold from there.
c) Abigail
I kind of forgot how much I enjoyed 2019's Ready Or Not until recently when I realized its directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, have been busy with a bunch of other projects, including the last two Scream movies (I've never had time for that franchise so I may never see them, but who knows, maybe someday). Abigail, like The Instigators, is about desperate criminals who get stuck in an impossible situation, but this one involves a 12-year-old ballerina who turns out to be a vampire. One of my favorite things about watching a vampire movie or show is figuring out which canonical vampire weaknesses apply and which one don't (garlic? stakes? sunlight?) and Abigail has a bit of fun with that. I think my wife was a little underwhelmed by the cast and some of the twists but I thought it held together very well, was surprised to see Angus Cloud but this is probably the best project in his sadly brief career. Also, I could swear that Dan Stevens was doing a William Friedkin impression for the entire movie, which I loved.
Speaking of weird acting performances that felt like impressions, The Bikeriders featured perhaps the most annoying Tom Hardy voice since The Dark Knight Rises. It almost sounded like he was doing Michael Shannon, when the real Michael Shannon was right there in a prominent supporting role. Everyone besides Hardy was excellent, though, I especially loved Jodie Comer. It was a great idea to kind of tell the story, populated almost entirely by male characters, through her eyes, and it was the first time I've seen her in something besides "Killing Eve" and went woah, she's not just great in that role, she's got a whole other arsenal of voices and characterizations at the ready.
I'm a little irritated that Netflix listed They Shot the Piano Player as a documentary, it kind of gave me a false impression of the movie the entire time I was watching it. I thought the filmmakers had merely animated the true story of journalist Jeff Harris investigating the 1976 disappearance of a bossa nova pianist, and had Jeff Goldblum play Harris (several famous Brazilian musicians, including Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, appear as themselves). But Harris is a fully fictitious character, invented as a narrative device to tell the story of Tenorio Jr., who was rounded up and murdered by Argentinean government forces while on tour. And it's not even contrived very well, Harris/Goldblum is just about to fly to Brazil to write a book about bossa nova, listens to some records and gets intrigued by this pianist who doesn't have a lot of other recordings, and goes down this rabbit hole of learning he disappeared and eventually finding out why. It's an interesting story and the movie is fairly charming, but I dislike the way an animated docudrama was labeled a documentary.
f) Fancy Dance
Fancy Dance is a pretty good Lily Gladstone vehicle that almost completely flew under the radar, despite being released on Apple TV+ like the movie that made her an Oscar-nominated star, Killers of the Flower Moon. I definitely recommend it to anyone that's clamoring for more excellent Gladstone performances, although it's a tight 90-minute missing person story with a few poignant or thrilling moments, nothing earth-shaking.
A better movie than Ghostbusters: Afterlife by at least a thin margin, both because it does the nostalgic Ghostbusters fan service stuff a little better, and because it feels a little more aware of the fact that a comedy starring Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon has effortless charm and charisma to burn. But Jason Reitman made two movies early in his career that were nominated for a total of ten Oscars, so I have to wonder if he's ever going to make something with ambition again or just continue paying tribute to his father and his father's peers (his next movie is about the beginning of "Saturday Night Live").
There have already been two miniseries about Purdue Pharma's role in the opioid crisis, and Pain Hustlers hits a lot of the same notes in in the story of another company, Insys Therapeutics, that played its own role in the opioid crisis. And a slick Netflix movie with big recognizable stars and familiar subject matter that's already been dramatized a lot is the exact kind of thing that gets pans and sinks without a trace after eating up a $50 million budget. Maybe I am still just an irredeemable Emily Blunt fan, though, I thought it was a decent movie that she was very good in, although I'm definitely starting to miss when all the movies she's in were more than decent.
Deep Album Cuts Vol. 365: Tinashe
Wednesday, August 21, 2024 
My last playlist in this series was Charli XCX, and Tinashe seems like a natural choice to follow her with. Both artists started out uploading mixtapes in the early 2010s, landed big mainstream hits in 2014, and both appeared on Ty Dolla Sign's extremely unfortunate 2015 single "Drop That Kitty." And both have spent the last decade weathering ups and downs in the industry that brought them to big comeback moments this summer. Tinashe released Quantum Baby last week and it's a continuation of a great run she's been on the last few years.
2. Far Side of the Moon
3. Cash Race
4. Unconditional
5. Angels f/ Kaash Paige
6. No Broke Boys
7. Touch Pass
8. Ooh La La
9. How Many Times f/ Future
10. The Leap
11. None of My Business
12. Feelings
13. Woke Up Blessed f/ Christian Blue
14. No Contest
15. Sacrifices
16. Tightrope
17. Wildfire
18. Red Flags
19. Link Up
20. C'est La Vie
21. Last Christmas
22. Cross That Line
23. Salt
Tracks 2, 9 and 17 from Aquarius (2014)
Track 10 from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt. 1 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2014)
Tracks 7, 15 and 20 from Nightride (2016)
Tracks 8, 14 and 23 from Joyride (2018)
Tracks 3, 12 and 19 from Songs For You (2019)
Track 21 from Comfort & Joy (2020)
Tracks 4 and 5 from 333 (2021)
Track 13 from 333 (Deluxe) (2022)
Tracks 1, 11 and 16 from BB/ANG3L (2023)
Tracks 6, 18 and 22 from Quantum Baby (2024)
I will say right off the bat, this playlist feels a little incomplete because a lot of Tinashe released several mixtapes from 2011 to 2015 that never made it to Spotify and Apple Music: In Case We Die, Reverie, Black Water, and Amethyst. Most of that stuff is on Tinashe's official Soundcloud and is very much worth listening to, and to the extent that she was known before "2 On," it was because of those tapes (or, I guess, her 3-episode arc on "Two And A Half Men"). Maybe now that Tinashe is an indie artist, she could try to get that music on streaming services in some capacity.
Aquarius was a pretty great debut album and for a moment I think it baffled a lot of people that "2 On" didn't make her into a huge star. RCA really seemed to struggle with letting Tinashe continue her mixtape sound and also pursue something that sounded bigger and more polished, which wound up with weird compromises like Joyride and its preceding project Nightride, which both performed about the same despite one being hyped as 'the big album' and the other being treated more like a mixtape.
Given that Tinashe was putting together pretty good projects before she was signed, though, parting with RCA turned out to be a really good idea and she's made some of her best albums as an indie artist from Songs For You onwards. Christmas albums are often the weakest entry in an artist's discography, and "ultra modern versions of familiar holiday classics" is one of the most common ways they can go badly. So I wanted to put in a word for the Comfort & Joy EP, she really pulls off a nice balancing act with the hip beats and old-fashioned melodies, she's got one of the only covers of Wham's "Last Christmas" that I like.
Monthly Report: August 2024 Singles
Wednesday, August 14, 2024 
1. Tems - "Love Me JeJe"
The current single from Tems's debut album Born In The Wild borrows its chorus and title from "Love Me Jeje," a 1997 song by the Nigerian artist Seyi Sodimu. Given the way Tems has opened all these doors for Afrobeats and modern African music in America in recent years, it's cool to hear her reach back to watch people were doing in her home country over 25 years ago (apparently Sodimu remixed "Love Me Jeje" with K. Michelle a few years ago as well). The original song has a bit of a different sound but I absolutely love the sound of the Tems version, this song puts a smile on my face every time it comes on the radio. Here's the 2024 singles Spotify playlist that I update every month.
2. Billie Eilish - "Birds Of A Feather"
The rollout for Hit Me Hard And Soft heavily emphasized how happy Billie Eilish was to release the whole album all at once, while also repeatedly stressing that "Lunch" would be the lead single once the album was out. The thing is, though, it's a lot harder to control what song people choose to stream more if you don't give one a head start. I called "Birds Of A Feather" my favorite thing Billie Eilish had ever made the first time I heard it, and a lot of people felt similarly, because it's just kept ascending the charts while "Lunch" quickly descended. I think that's kind of a shame because "Lunch" is an excellent song that deserved a full run as a single, but I'm not surprised that "Birds" jumped the line like this, it's so gorgeous.
3. Chappell Roan - "Hot To Go!"
A few months ago I praised Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" while worrying that her label was moving on from the groundswell of enthusiasm for The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess to new music too quickly, instead of letting people focus on the album they slept on last year. I'm happy to be proven wrong, though, because it worked out really well, with "Good Luck" becoming a top 10 single while Rise is also a top 10 album. "After Midnight" and "My Kink Is Karma" are currently battling it out for my favorite song on the album, but I'm happy with "Hot To Go!" becoming the biggest of its six songs on the Hot 100. It has that over-the-top cheerleader vibe that has a lengthy pop hit lineage ("Mickey," "Hollaback Girl," etc.) but it also has such big glorious vocal melodies, I especially love the "Baby, do you like this beat?" pre-chorus part.
4. Coco Jones - "Here We Go (Uh Oh)"
I'm glad Coco's got a proper debut album on the way, it could be really great. That Lenny Williams song has been sampled many times, most notably by Twista and Kanye, and "Here We Go" colors within the lines of "Overnight Celebrity" but Coco adds a great vocal performance to it.
5. Jackson Dean - "Big Blue Sky"
After I interviewed Jackson Dean last year, "Fearless - The Echo" spent almost 70 weeks on the country radio charts. I was sad when the song finally dropped off the charts after falling short of becoming a top 10 hit, but then Dean got to start releasing singles from his second album, which comes out next month. I love that Dean co-wrote "Big Blue Sky" and his other recent singles with members of his backing band, I've played Baltimore indie rock bills with two-thirds of that band (Sean Mercer of Us And Us Only and Rich Kolm of Hollywood Blanks), good dudes.
6. Eddie Vedder - "Save It For Later"
I remember a long time ago, back in the '90s, somebody pointed out that the guitar riff at the end of "Better Man" is similar to The English Beat's "Save It For Later," and then Eddie Vedder started singing "Save It" over the "Better Man" outro in Pearl Jam concerts. Decades later, we finally have a proper Vedder cover of "Save It For Later," recorded for the TV hit "The Bear," and it's a little quieter than I expected it to be, but it's lovely, and is getting some alternative radio airplay. If Vedder ever made a covers album, it would probably be a lot heavier on early '80s new wave and post-punk than people would expect, I've heard him sing lots of Split Enz and X and Squeeze songs over the years.
7. GloRilla - "TGIF"
GloRilla has three different singles as lead artist in the top 15 on R&B/hip hop radio right now, she's really having a better 2024 than any rapper besides Kendrick -- I wouldn't be surprised if "All Dere" gets up there in the next few months too.
8. Offset f/ Gunna - "Style Rare"
Offset and Gunna have released two singles together this year and have worked together a couple times before that, and all their songs together are good, I kinda hope they do a full duo album at some point. I think it's a perfect match, Offset was always better in a group, and most of Gunna's best songs are collaborations but a lot of people aren't working with him these days because of snitching allegations that increasingly seem flimsy and insubstantial.
9. Mitchell Tenpenny - "Not Today"
This song is a bit faster and more lively than Mitchell Tenpenny's other singles, or really modern country radio fare in general. That's probably bad for its commercial prospects, but I like it.
10. Lake Street Dive - "Good Together"
There have been many hit songs in the 7/8 time signature in music history, but the overwhelming majority make it go down smoother with the tension and release of 7/8 verses and 4/4 choruses (even Rush and Soundgarden songs!). So I dig that all of the lead single from Lake Street Dive's is in 7/8, even the chorus, they pull it off really well.
The Worst Single of the Month: Katy Perry - "Woman's World"
A couple years ago, I made a Dr. Luke-free Katy Perry deep cuts playlist and praised Perry for ceasing to work with the producer behind most of her biggest hits after Kesha's rape accusation against him. But I spoke too soon, because Perry recently reunited with Luke to try to recapture her Teenage Dream era ubiquity, and it was a total flop, only getting to #63 on the Hot 100. The worst part is that it's really just Perry's chart reign that's over, Luke has worked on big top 10 hits by Doja Cat, Nicki Minaj and Latto in the last few years and will probably continue to do so.
Sunday, August 11, 2024
I talked to Logic for Stereogum's We've Got A File On You series. I'd interviewed him once before for Rolling Stone, so it was fun to have a wider ranging conversation this time that covered his new album, making movies with Kevin Smith, being parodied on South Park, having his voice made into Juicy J's producer tag, and a lot of other topics.
Saturday, August 10, 2024
Last week, Drew Daniel of Matmos tweeted about an imaginary genre that came to him in a dream called "hit em" that featured 212BPM beats in 5/4 with super crunched out sounds. Almost immediately, producers started making hit em a reality by making their own tracks following Drew's specifications. Since I have a fixation on the 5/4 time signature -- I wrote a whole 5/4 album and make annual DJ mixes of music in 5/4 -- I immediately got to work on my hit em track in the two days I was home last week. I recommend checking out the whole cool variety of music people have posted in reply to Drew's original tweet, it sounds like there's going to be a whole compilation of this stuff.
Wednesday, August 07, 2024
My dad, Rick Shipley, was singing in a cover band in Baltimore County in 1974, around the time he finished college. One night, he struck up a conversation with a musician from California who was in town: Lowell George of Little Feat, who invited my dad to hang out at their studio in Hunt Valley and watch the band work on what would be one of their greatest albums, Feats Don't Fail Me Now. I grew up a Little Feat fan because of that chance meeting, and my dad and I went to several Little Feat shows together before he died in 2017.
The 50th anniversary of Feats Don't Fail Me Now is on Friday, and a few weeks ago Little Feat celebrated the album and their fortuitous time in Baltimore with a show at Pier Six Pavilion. I spoke to two members of Little Feat's 1974 lineup, Bill Payne and Kenny Gradney, for a Baltimore Banner piece about the 8 months that Little Feat spent in Maryland that year.
Deep Album Cuts Vol. 364: Charli XCX
Tuesday, August 06, 2024
Charli XCX started stylizing her name as 'Charli xcx' with the recent release of Brat, one of the most acclaimed albums of 2024. But I don't know, it looks weird to me, I'm not ready to follow suit. Hell, I stuck with calling them 'Matchbox 20' instead of 'Matchbox Twenty' for their playlist.
2. Talk Talk
3. Party 4 U
4. Sucker
5. Backseat featuring Carly Rae Jepsen
6. Dreamer (Compound Version) featuring Starrah and Raye
7. Sympathy Is A Knife
8. Official
9. Body Of My Own
10. Track 10
11. Detonate
12. Take My Hand
13. Secret (Shh)
14. Crash
15. Explode
16. Lipgloss featuring CupcakKe
17. Red Balloon
18. Hello Goodbye
19. Black Roses
20. Yes No Okay
21. Constant Repeat
22. Miss U
23. Silver Cross
Tracks 12 and 19 from True Romance (2013)
Tracks 4 and 9 from Sucker (2014)
Track 17 from Home (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2015)
Track 13 from the Vroom Vroom EP (2016)
Track 15 from The Angry Birds Movie (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2016)
Tracks 6 and 16 from Number 1 Angel (2017)
Tracks 5 and 10 from Pop 2 (2017)
Track 22 from 13 Reasons Why (Season 3 Soundtrack) (2019)
Tracks 8 and 23 from Charli (2019)
Tracks 3 and 11 from How I'm Feeling Now (2020)
Tracks 1, 14 and 21 from Crash (2022)
Track 20 from Bottoms (Original Motion Picture Score) (2023)
Tracks 2 and 7 from Brat (2024)
Track 18 from Brat and it's the same but there's three more songs so it's not (2024)
It's been 11 years since Charli XCX released her debut album, and 10 years since she stormed into American pop culture with her hook on Iggy Azalea's chart-topping hit "Fancy." Since then, she's remained on the mainstream radar, but never at the center of the conversation, until this year, when Brat debuted at #3 on the U.S. charts and then became part of the election news cycle when Charli herself tweeted the words "Kamala IS brat." I was going to include my favorite track on the album, "Apple," on this playlist, until it spawned a viral dance on TikTok and entered the Hot 100, so it doesn't really feel like a deep cut anymore. Last week I was on the beach in Delaware, and a group of women near us was blasting to a playlist that included Brat's biggest single, "360," as well as one of my favorite deep cuts, "Talk Talk." It kind of felt like the much discussed "brat summer" finally reached me in that moment.
Charli getting to this moment is interesting because I think it validates what she's been doing throughout her career, which is to never stop making and releasing music whether or not the industry was clamoring for it. After Sucker established her but didn't quite blow up, she went almost five years between official albums, but stayed really active and started winning over a lot of the people that are her biggest fans today. And really, aside from her taste and prolific output, I just have to root for an attractive brunette with an English accent, because I'm not made of stone.
Charli's initial attempt at a third album, tentatively titled XCX, was shelved after a few singles failed to connect and a lot more tracks got leaked. But the Vroom Vroom EP, featuring her first collaborations with the Scottish producer Sophie, and the mixtapes Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 made Charli part of the ascendant hyperpop movement and an emerging critical favorite. All the while, she'd take any chance to be on soundtracks for TV shows and animated movies, and made some top shelf material in a more conventional chart pop mold -- her song for Home was produced by Stargate and her song for The Angry Birds Movie was produced by Greg Kurstin, both pretty excellent.
"Track 10" from Pop 2 was later reworked into the Charli single "Blame It On Your Love" featuring Lizzo, but I much prefer the original. I was a little skeptical about How I'm Feeling Now being put together very publicly as a 'quarantine album' being recorded and released in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I think it ended up being a pretty good record that became a real snapshot of that weird moment in time more than most of the other quarantine records that trickled out in the following months and years.
"Crash" was co-written and co-produced by Charli's fiance, George Daniel of The 1975 (as was "Apple"). And I love how much "Crash" sounds like The 1975, I kinda hope they make more music together. I forgot that Charli had a song with Starrah, and didn't realize that Raye was also on "Dreamer" years before her recent chart breakthrough. Starrah's really cool, she grew up in the same part of Delaware as me and went to the same schools -- her first music teacher was my first music teacher, shout out to Mr. Hetfield.
I put some of the original album covers in the image at the top of this post, but if you look at the playlist on Spotify, you'll notice that Charli updated all her old albums on streaming services to have Brat-style covers with fuzzy plan text on monochromatic backgrounds. Kind of clever but I also kinda hate how it looks besides the original Brat cover.
TV Diary
Monday, August 05, 2024 
Baltimore Sun journalist Laura Lippman's 2019 novel Lady In The Lake was inspired by the true stories of two murder victims in 1960s Baltimore, a white girl who was heavily covered in the media and a black woman who wasn't. There was lots of excitement in Baltimore when Apple TV+ developed a series based on the book, and even more a couple summers ago when Natalie Portman arrived in town to film the series. I haven't read the book so I'm just taking the story one episode at a time, Alma Har'el (Honey Boy) directed every episode and I love the visual texture, it's a little more of an intense dreamlike vision of '60s Baltimore than, say, Barry Levinson's period films, and music is woven into the episodes really vividly.
Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits was released a year before I was born and I feel like it was the first movies I remember seeing probably a little earlier than I should have when I was 6 or 7, I have fond memories of it but that ending traumatized me a little but I also now remember how ridiculous and hilarious it was. Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement are a pretty good team to make a "Time Bandits" series, they have their own ear for dialogue but it's altogether in a similar spirit to Gilliam and Palin's sense of humor, and the cast is fantastic. When there's one child actor in an adult cast for a project with a sort of adult sense of humor, I often take it as a given that the kid will be the weak link, but Kal-El Tuck is fantastic as Kevin, just makes the dialogue come alive and makes you really see the story through his character's eyes.
My favorite short-lived one season series of the last few years was "Teenage Bounty Hunters," and I'm happy that creator Kathleen Jordan got to make a new limited series for Netflix, although it's a completely different period piece sort of thing. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron in 14th century Italy during the bubonic plague, and Jordan adapts it into a pretty broad comedy, although they thankfully steer clear of playing COVID parallels for laughs, which I think a lot of other people would've done. Tony Hale and Zosia Mamet are the only pretty recognizable actors but the entire cast is great, Douggie McMeekin and Karan Gill are really funny.
d) "A Good Girl's Guide To Murder"
I love English names, I'm watching a British show and suddenly I'm very invested in the life of someone named Pippa who goes by "Pip." "A Good Girl's Guide To Murder" is based on a YA novel that's kind of a murder mystery, and I've only watched one episode but I'm already all the way in, likeable characters and intriguing premise.
I love English names, I'm watching a British show and suddenly I'm very invested in the life of someone named Pippa who goes by "Pip." "A Good Girl's Guide To Murder" is based on a YA novel that's kind of a murder mystery, and I've only watched one episode but I'm already all the way in, likeable characters and intriguing premise.
Roland Emmerich's movies are a little tacky even when they end up being entertaining megabudget affairs with huge stars. And Emmerich's gladiator series for Peacock cost $140 million to make, but once you spread that out over 10 episodes, it looks a little cheap, even with a very overqualified Anthony Hopkins doing his best to give the whole thing some gravitas.
f) "Me"
Apple TV+ has been pretty strong in the sci-fi genre. And this family-friendly show about a 12-year-old boy who discovers that he has superpowers is decent, I definitely don't feel like the audience for it but I think it's a lot better than similarly styled shows you might see on, say, Freeform.
g) "UnPrisoned"
I kind of wish this was on network television instead of Hulu because it's so good at putting some pretty thorny and complex issues of parent-child relationships and the prison industrial complex into this kind of bright, whimsical sitcom with an incredible performance from Delroy Lindo, like it'd be interesting if this reached an audience as broad as "Black-ish" or "Abbott Elementary" or something.
h) "Unstable"
"Unstable" is definitely not on the level of previous Victor Fresco cult classics like "Better Off Ted" and "Santa Clarita Diet" but it's a solid workplace comedy, and Lamorne Morris and one of the Apatow kids are good additions to the cast for the second season.
"Women In Blue" is a Spanish language Apple TV+ series based on the true story of Mexico's first female police force, formed while a serial killer was targeting women in Mexico City in the '70s. I'm only one episode in but it's pretty promising, even if the idea of a show about female cops being empowering itself feels like a dated concept.
This Indian show on Netflix is about a guy with a lot of debt who decides to fix his financial problems by becoming a gigolo, which feels like kind of a cheesy lowbrow premise (although HBO's "Hung" was really a pretty good and underrated show). Fortunately, "Trihbuvan Mishra CA Topper" feels more absurdist than lurid, with a really funky, unpredictable comic rhythm, pretty unique show.
"Master of the House" from Thailand is another foreign language Netflix series where it feels like there's some cultural gap that makes it feel very odd and unfamiliar to me, but in an opposite direction where it just feels off-puttingly serious and melodramatic with extremely over-the-top sex scenes.
l) "Eve"
This Korean show is about a woman infiltrating a wealthy family responsible for her father's death, and I'm always a fan of a good hard-boiled revenge story.
There are so many movies and shows about children magically becoming adults or vice versa, but the Korean show "Miss Night And Day" has a truly odd premise about a woman who switches between being a 20-something and a 50-something. I don't know, maybe this could be done in a really funny way with the right execution, but as a sincere high-concept fantasy dramedy, I don't know, it's a little doofy.
This is an Italian show about a trans woman who learns that she has a 15-year-old son, who she fathered when she was still a man. I'm sure things like this have happened and it's possible to tell a story about it with sensitivity, but this just feels like a sensationalized '80s soap opera storyline in execution.
This Japanese Netflix show is about real estate scammers and I don't know, they try to make it seem cool and exciting like a bank heist and it doesn't really work.
I don't know anything about Spanish football, but this Netflix docuseries is pretty entertaining and dramatic, soccer is such a great high energy sport that seems to really breed big personalities.
q) "Receiver"
I don't know much about American football either, but I like this Netflix series that drills down into the specifics of what receivers and tight ends do so you get a really detailed sense of one part of the game. The first episode about George Kittle is very entertaining, he's a pretty likeable character.
Netflix made the very smart call to start filming a Simone Biles docuseries in the run up to the 2024 Olympics, and put out the first two episodes before the games started, with more episodes filmed in Paris to follow later this year. It's good so far, a great primer on her career thus far that gave me a better appreciation for her incredible accomplishments in Paris.
This Netflix docuseries follows the whole Lou Pearlman more like a true crime series than a music doc, which I thought might irritate me but it feels appropriate, it would be weird to try to talk about '90s boy bands without focusing on how the two biggest groups were formed by an evil bastard who eventually died in prison. I don't like that they took footage of Pearlman and deepfaked it so it seemed like he was speaking words he wrote in a book he published, but at least they put disclaimers up that made it clear that's what they did, which is sadly on the more responsible end of A.I. fucker these days. It's a little more interesting in the early episodes when they have interviews with some of the members of the big groups (AJ and Howie from Backstreet Boys, Chris from NSYNC), I got a little bored when they started covering the O-Town era.
This Hulu series is a good update of the "Project Runway" formula with fashion designers making clothes for recording artists to perform in (Toni Braxton, Coi Leray, Jojo Siwa, etc.). It's fun to see the designers unconstrained by some of the more practical constraints of making clothes for regular people to wear and embrace that they can make something a little more outlandish for a concert.
u) "Mammals"
I just looked up David Attenborough's age and man, I didn't realize he's 98. I'm glad he's still narrating all these awesome nature documentaries, I'm just gonna appreciate him as long as he's doing it.
v) "Omnivore"
A pretty good slick prestige TV docuseries about food and cooking on Apple TV+ where each episode is really thoroughly dedicated to a particular ingredient or concept, kind of like "Salt Fat Acid Heat" with more episodes and more topics.
Ann Burgess was involved in the FBI's program to create a psychological profile for serial killers in the '70s, and the "Mindhunter" character Wendy Carr was loosely based on her. The new Hulu docuseries about Burgess is really interesting, ends up feeling like a nice fact-based companion to "Mindhunter," which is welcome since we're sadly never gonna get a 3rd season of that great show.
Another true crime docuseries that's kind of about women studying killers, in an attempt to solve cold cases. I had no idea a project like this was going on, pretty fascinating how they're doing it.
An Apple TV+ docuseries about a Mexican drug cartel's horse racing money laundering scheme, pretty crazy story, I wouldn't mind seeing this adapted into a scripted series or movie.
The 2016 movie Sausage Party feels like an artifact of a very specific time when Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were at their peak as hitmakers and could make a big gutsy concept like an R-rated computer animated film about food that fucks and says curse words, and actually have box office success. 8 years later, they've continued the movie with an Amazon Prime series with most of the voice cast, but it just feels like a weird reminder of this ugly-ass movie's sort of dated "edgy" sense of humor that nobody was waiting for.
Saturday, August 03, 2024
Rosy Overdrive reviewed the Lithobrake album, give it a listen if you haven't already, I'm really proud of this record. We still have not played a show since the album's released but we're working that out.
Friday, August 02, 2024
Artscape is happening in Baltimore this weekend, but I wrote a Baltimore Banner piece about the underground alternative, SubScape. 50 bands are playing for free at The Crown (which will sadly be closing permanently later this month) and Metro Baltimore, and I talked to a couple of SubScape's organizers as well as the bands Mast Year, Powerwasher, and Blightbeast.
Monthly Report: July 2024 Albums
Thursday, August 01, 2024
1. Zach Bryan - The Great American Bar Scene
Bruce Springsteen has occasionally jumped on songs by younger artists he's influenced -- The Killers, The Gaslight Anthem, Bleachers, Dropkick Murphys -- and it usually feels an exciting moment just for the band even if the song itself is kind an anticlimactic shrug. I like Springsteen's appearance on "Sandpaper" on Zach Bryan's new album, though, it feels like Bryan knew exactly what to do and put together a song with heavy "I'm On Fire" vibes -- it also became The Boss's first Hot 100 entry since 2009. The Great American Bar Scene, like Zach Bryan's last album, opens with a spoken word poem instead of a song, but that's just about the only thing I don't like about it -- he's more or less released all his major label albums in summertime and it's really started to feel like part of the character of these records, this humid sunburned vibe permeating the songs.
2. Ben Seretan - Allora
I'd never heard of New York-based singer-songwriter Ben Seretan before skimming a review of Allora the other day and feeling curious to hear it, but I'm glad I checked it out on a whim. The 8-minute psych rock opener "New Air," which has some glorious shredding, had me hooked right away, that and "Jubilation Blues" are my immediate favorites. Seretan and his band recorded Allora in Italy a few years ago when a European tour fell apart and they instead spent three days recording in a Venice farm house, and you can just feel the in-the-moment spontaneity of the circumstances in the album.
3. Common and Pete Rock - The Auditorium Vol. 1
When I was putting together my Common deep cuts playlist a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that Karriem Riggins did some perfectly good work producing Common's last three albums, but he just had extremely big shoes to fill from Common's earlier albums with No ID, Dilla, and Kanye. So it feels like an overdue course correction for Common to hook up with someone of a really legendary stature like Pete Rock, and they both feel energized by the opportunity to make a late career masterpiece. The first couple tracks are my least favorite songs on The Auditorium, but it feels like once they get warmed up they're just in the zone, Common and C.L. Smooth are more alike than they are different so it just feels like a really natural pairing.
4. Megan Moroney - Am I Okay?
For me, country music and hip hop are the two genres that really let you appreciate the diversity of America's regional accents. Right now, Megan Moroney's Savannah, Georgia drawl is one of my favorite accents on country radio, her personality just comes through so effortlessly in her records. And there's this bittersweet ache in her voice that I just love, whether the song is sad like "28th of June" or exasperated like "No Caller ID" or cautiously hopeful like "This Time's the Charm." I feel like it's a missed opportunity that they haven't released "Mama I Lied" as a single, because it feels like a downtempo sequel to Moroney's breakthrough single "Tennessee Orange."
5. Enslow - Hello
The Baltimore singer-songwriter Enslow released most of the songs from her debut album as singles over the past four years. But the local radio station WTMD had an advance of the album, and in the weeks leading up to the release of Hello, they kept playing one of the few tracks not released in advance, "How You Do It." And it blew me away, just a really lovely indie pop track with a huge hook, I was waiting for the release date just to be able to play it whenever I wanted. The rest of the album is a little more acoustic but "Moonbeam" hits on a similar sound and is also great.
6. Mast Year - Point of View
Mast Year is one of a handful of Baltimore bands playing SubScape this week that I talked to for an upcoming Baltimore Banner piece about the festival. And their second album is awesome, just huge pummeling grooves, my favorite track is the 9-minute "Figure of Speech." Like 2023's Knife, there's a couple quieter instrumentals on Point of View, but the loud sludgy parts of the record are longer and more intense.
7. KMack Knokville and Jay Funk - UNK
Rapper KMack and producer Jay Funk are both legends of Baltimore hip hop who've been making music since the mid-'90s, KMack's old group Annexx Click still gets a lot of love from '90s underground rap collectors. So these guys linking up for a new project in 2024 is like the Baltimore equivalent of the Common/Pete Rock album, and I love hearing them still hungry, still digging in the crates for cool samples to chop and thinking of slick punchlines. You could say KMack sounds like Jadakiss, but he's actually been making records longer than Kiss.
8. Manners Manners - I Held Their Eyes, I Kissed Them All
Another band from Baltimore -- four albums from Baltimore in this post, great month for music from the city! Manners Manners are wonderful people and it's been cool to watch them grow over the years, they sound better with every release, and I always feel like I can tell that Jack Pinder grew up on a lot of the same bands that I did. "Yr Well" and "Cinemattachine" are my favorite songs from this record so far.
9. Brad Tursi - Parallel Love
Old Dominion is one of the few really conventional bands in modern Nashville that writes and plays most of their songs together, and they've amassed a nice run of hits over five albums. Last year, Old Dominion guitarist Brad Tursi wrote a great Teddy Robb single, "Question the Universe," and I was really disappointed that it didn't become a hit. But it turns out Tursi has a whole set of similarly contemplative singer-songwriter material that didn't fit in on the band's albums, and Old Dominion's label Sony quietly released Tursi's debut solo album, which includes his own version of "Question the Universe." It's a compact little record, 10 tracks in 26 minutes, but the songs are still strong enough to leave an impression.
10. JT - City Cinderella
There aren't a lot of groups in popular music these days, and when there is one, people are quick to pick favorites and push for them to go solo, and shame them if they don't take off like Justin or Beyonce. JT was always by far the better rapper in City Girls, but they had a winning brand as a duo, even if it had kind of run its course by their last album. City Cinderella isn't as strong as I hoped it would be, but "'90s Baby" and "Star of the Show" are bangers, she sounds surprisingly good with those kinds of sample-driven beats.
The Worst Album of the Month: Hardy - Quit!!
Lately the country charts have been inundated with artists from other genres, but Michael Wilson Hardy crossed over in the opposite direction. He established himself on country radio, where he's had four top 10 hits, and then made a move to hard rock radio, where he's had three top 10 hits. I think Hardy's country stuff is hit and miss -- in March he released Difftape, a pretty cool all-star tribute to Joe Diffie. But I really don't like his rock material. Hardy opens his third album with a story of somebody writing "quit!!" on a bar napkin and putting it in his tip jar during his early performing days, and how experiences with haters like that fueled his success. It's a nice anecdote, whether or not it's true, but he raps the entire song in a constipated Fred Durst flow (Durst himself shows up on the second half of the album). Nu-metal has retained a little bit of a resurgence in coolness lately, but Quit!! feels like all the worst cliches of the genre embraced by a Nashville opportunist.