Mick Jenkins has been so consistent over the years but is more slept on than ever, I wish he got mentioned more as part of the progressive wing of Chicago rap with Chance and Noname and Saba and so on. His latest project has a jazzy, cinematic sound courtesy of the British producer Emil that lets Jenkins get into his more conversational flows, but he still occasionally ramps up the intensity in his delivery to great effect, especially on "Pundits (Yappers)." The only thing I don't like is that on the first track he does this botched punchline that implies Chris Farley was in Dumb & Dumber (maybe he thought the Jeff Daniels character was Farley? Or he's got it confused with Tommy Boy?). 

I interviewed Bones Owens a few weeks ago and really got into this record while working on the article, sometimes the guitar tone on an album is just so rich and enjoyable that it becomes my way into the songs, and "Into The Wind" is definitely the one I love the most, love how the harmonies hit on the chorus. I first Bones Owens when he was working with Yelawolf a decade ago, and Yelawolf guests on one track, but that's kind of an outlier, this is just a nice straight-ahead rootsy rock record. 

I really like "Messy," the song from British singer Lola Young's 2024 album that became a big sleeper his this year, and the other stuff I'd heard before sounded pretty good, but it also kinda felt like a 'zoomer Lily Allen' thing that I didn't feel like I necessarily needed more than one or two songs from. So I was pleasantly surprised that her follow-up album I'm Only Fucking Myself, which hasn't had any hits remotely as big as "Messy," is really excellent, she's just a great songwriter and distinctive vocalist with good taste in production beyond the big personality and the funny one-liners, I particularly like "Dealer" and "Can We Ignore It?" (there are emojis in some of the song titles that I'm not typing those, that's just a bridge too far). I'm not surprised that "Post Sex Clarity" is by far the biggest of the non-singles so far, I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes a hit. 

Last month I wrote about Superchunk's 13th album and marveled at their longevity and continued excellence. Sloan is on their 14th album and have been together for almost as long, and in some ways their run is even more impressive because they've had the same lineup the whole time and no long breaks between albums (only four and a half years at most, usually less). Having four singer/songwriters in the band probably helps Sloan a lot -- each guy only has to come up with 3 good songs every few years, a pace I imagine they could keep up as long as they live. For the second or third album in a row, Jay Ferguson has the by far the best trio of songs with "Capitol Cooler," "Collect Yourself," and "Congratulations," which features a fun moment where the phrase "call the authorities" transitions to guitars mimicking a police siren.  

I've seen some people say Am I The Drama? is better than Invasion of Privacy and I really just can't co-sign that, it takes a while to get going and most of my favorite songs are in the second half ("Pretty & Petty," "Better Than You," "Trophies," "Principal"). But a newly divorced Cardi B is going to make a different album from a newly married Cardi B, and the angrier stuff on this record actually reminds me a little more of her earlier mixtape stuff, which is fine with me as someone who saw her potential back on GBMV2, I'm glad she kept her edge instead of fully going into the pop star stratosphere. 

I used to keep my television on MTV Hits in between putting on streaming services because I like catching music videos here and there. Then for some reason MTV Hits disappeared from my premium cable package but I still have MTV Live, which is mostly the same as MTV Hits with a few hours of concert specials every day. On paper that's a nice idea given MTV's massive archive, but they just play the same dozen or so things every couple days, mostly from 2009-2013, including some "Unplugged" episodes from that era when it looked like taping it inside a broom closet, and random concerts by Flo Rida and Tom Odell. Odell is apparently a moderately big deal in the UK, but I never heard of him until I kept seeing his 2013 concert special from a short-lived European subchannel called MTV Brand New. As far as I can tell this never aired in America when it was new, but now it's on American television like once a week, and nobody in America ever cared about Tom Odell. Anyway I've been hate-watching this Tom Odell concert where he cry-sings like Dave Pirner for probably a couple years now, a couple minutes at a time, and so I decided to actually check out his new album and give it a chance. In the studio he's just another middlebrow Thom Yorke wannabe, but not the kind that makes moderately fun stuff like Chris Martin or Matt Bellamy.