King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard has been so prolific for so long now that it's kind of mind-boggling to think that a band's 27th album is one of their very best and they've arguably only just hit their prime in the last few years and are still steadily growing in popularity. Phantom Island is their first time making an album with an orchestra and these songs seem really well suited to having all these strings and brass all over them. It's a little less proggy than a lot of their records, I think pretty much the whole thing is straight ahead 4/4, but there's a lot of room for the orchestration to add texture and drama. Supposedly this is a mellower counterpart to Flight b741 but I've found it pretty upbeat and catchy. I particularly "Panpsych" and "Aerodynamic" but the whole thing flows together well. King Gizzard pulled all their music off Spotify last week (more power to them for taking that stand), but Phantom Island and everything else are still on Bandcamp. 

This album has grown on me a bit since I ranked Pulp's albums last month, although I think I'd still put it in the same spot, just belove We Love Life. I have eagerly greeted every new record from Jarvis Cocker over the last 20 years and never really pined for the band to return, but I will admit that there's a lovely familiarity to what Banks/Doyle/Webber bring to More, which probably reminds me of His 'n' Hers more than any other previous Pulp album. "Farmers Market," which is about the day Cocker met his wife, is really something, one of the most moving songs he's ever written, and some of the other slower songs ("Background Noise," "The Hymn of the North") hit pretty hard too. 

I never heard S.G. Goodman's first two albums, but my interest was piqued when I heard "Fire Sign" from her third album on WTMD. I like the sound of the album and the Kentucky twang of Goodman's voice. But my first listen of the album didn't really grab me until I got to the 9-minute closing track "Heaven Song" and was like shit, that's how you end an album, and listened more closely the next time I played it. I also really like "Snapping Turtle" and "Nature's Child," the duet with Kentucky indie rock royalty Will Oldham. 

Bruce Springsteen's 1998 box set Tracks was a dad rock event nearly on the same scale as The Beatles Anthology, 66 mostly previously unreleased songs from a major artist's vault -- I actually bought Tracks for my own dad that Christmas, and listening to the first disc of it, particularly those first few demos he made for Columbia, really set me on the path to becoming the big Springsteen fan I am today. And Tracks II actually dwarfs the previous box with seven full albums of almost completely unheard stuff. The last disc, Perfect World, is from sessions spanning 17 years, but otherwise each disc captures a specific period of time and pretty much is its own self-contained album, which I really appreciate and makes this more engrossing and digestible than the first Tracks (though that one may contain more top shelf songs overall). The long-rumored Streets of Philadelphia Sessions probably would've been a big hit on the heels of Springsteen's Oscar win, but I'm kind of glad this odd little experiment with Springsteen singing over trip hop beats and the "Ashley's Roachclip" break surfaced now as this intriguing little road not taken. As someone who thinks Western Stars is Springsteen's best post-Rising album, I also really love the disc from that era, Twilight Hours, and the first disc of stuff from between Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. is pretty special too. Both Tracks boxes (149 songs in total!) comprise a pretty remarkable shadow discography that's bigger and better than a lot of artists' entire careers. 

I never saw Turnstile live or knew those guys, but I love that a band that used to play Charm City Art Space and the Sidebar like me and all my friends is now totally fucking huge, at this point possibly the biggest band to come out of Baltimore (I think Beach House are probably bigger by most metrics, but were never really in the zeitgeist as visibly as Turnstile are right now). And I probably enjoy their music more as they get further from hardcore orthodoxy, there's cello and flute and Hayley Williams popping up on one of the several songs that have that Andy Summers-style chorus pedal guitar effect that instantly makes a band sound like The Police. I particularly love when "Look Out For Me" takes a turn into a Baltimore club beat with a sample of Randy from "The Wire." And they still get pretty heavy on "Sole" and pretty fast on "Sunshower" as well. There's a show on MTV Live called "Metal Thrashing Madness" that regularly plays Turnstile videos, though, and that doesn't seem quite right. 

I liked the previous Little Simz albums but didn't always love Inflo's production, and have always found Sault a little overrated. So this whole thing where they fell out over Inflo borrowing money from Simz for Sault's first concert and not repaying it, I feel bad for her but it's a net positive for me because I like Miles Clinton James's production on Lotus. And the righteous anger of "Thief" and "Hollow" makes for some of the most compelling music she's ever made. 

Georgia Beatty is a Baltimore musician who recently sent me her latest album (which is on Bandcamp), The Book of Stars: Collection of the Heir is mostly cello and voice and sometimes guitar, but it feels very ambitious and expansive. I especially like tracks like "Pin Hole Light" and "Yarro" where you can just kind of luxuriate in the deep, warm tone of the cello, that's one instrument I just love listening to with little or no accompaniment. There's a whole companion illustrated book of folktales that go with each song on the album, I don't have that but I think it's pretty cool that she's created this whole multimedia thing.

Matmos has made many albums with a conceptual hook, like building tracks exclusively out of sounds made with plastic objects or from surgery. Metallic Life Review is made entirely with metal objects, which of course gives them a little more leeway to use conventional instruments like horns, vibraphone or pedal steel guitar, though the sounds on this album are still largely pretty novel and unusual. I particularly like the way they shied away from obvious 'industrial' sounds for quieter clangs and reverberations. And it's lovely and bittersweet to hear Susan Alcorn on "Changing States" just a few months after her death. 

I wasn't too familiar with Jill Sobule's music besides her two hits when she died in May, but when I sat down to make a deep cuts playlist soon after, I really fell in love with a number of her songs and mourned her. Sobule hadn't released an album since 2018, but in 2022 she unveiled her musical Fuck 7th Grade, which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and the cast recording was released posthumously. Many of Sobule's songs are autobiographical, so it feels very natural for her to string together some songs from her album and some new compositions into a narrative arc, and it ends with the same beautiful song that I ended my playlist with, "A Good Life." 

When I interviewed Logic a year ago, I asked him about Juicy J turning his voice into a producer tag, and he revealed that they're actually pretty good friends and had been working on album together. Juicy J is such a legend in the Memphis crunk lane that he helped create that I don't think anybody really cares if he diversifies his sound, but it's actually pretty fun to hear him experiment with his sound on last year's jazzy, Robert Glasper-assisted Ravenite Social Club and now the album with Logic. Logic had Juicy J do his usual cadences on the kinds of beats he usually raps on, and then put the vocals on Logic's beats that had, in his words, "Dilla/Tribe vibes," which really sounds pretty dope, it was a clever way to fuse their styles together organically. 

Keke Palmer has been singing as long as she's been acting. And as her film career has thrived in the last few years, it feels like she keeps trying to pull a J.Lo and leverage that into success in music as well and it's really just not happening. 2023's Big Boss was a decent, slightly dated R&B album, she can definitely sing. But Just Keke is a real chore to listen to, partly because there are all these interludes where she tries to remind you she's personable and funny and that social media was briefly obsessed with her relationship with her kid's father, before she goes back to singing these bland, mediocre songs.