May 2024 Listening Report

The Start-of-Summer-Break Special

A month of albums that demand persistence. Albums that follow-up good albums always take some adjusting to, if they’re any good. Like Maggie Rogers, who followed up her triumphant Surrender with a catchy breakup album with a snagging reflective middle I kept getting stuck on; a silly thing to get hung up on after you remember the rest of the album is proof she is one of our foremost current singer-songwriters. Still House Plants’ experimental album took considerable convincing for me to warm up to; the first time I heard the singing I almost immediately turned it off. Nia Archives followed a string of good to great EPs with her first studio album Silence Is Loud. It sounded unfocused at first, but wouldn’t anyone if they suddenly doubled the length of the medium they’ve nearly mastered?

Lots of new jazz is easily described as inventive, kinetic, intricate, and other kind synonyms for chaotic, but my favorite recent jazz has been albums that have all of those characteristics that great jazz has, but is still somehow tranquil and centering (want this but not jazz? Play In C). In the middle of that Venn-diagram lie my favorite jazz albums this year, now including Noah Haidu and Charles Lloyd’s excellent new albums. If you’ve never heard of Byron Asher or his skrontch music, proceed directly to premier jazz album of the 10’s: Byron Asher’s Skrontch Music. His music is best described as avant-garde-New-Orleans-boogie-‘n’-blues. If that doesn’t make you want to play it…

If you tried the Usher album from February and you’re still wondering “where is the good R&B this year?” you need to play SiR. If you watch the music video I posted below, you might assume he aspires to be D'Angelo, but SiR marries R&B with pop sensibilities much more modern than D-Angelo ever strove for, for better or worse.

Is THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT Taylor Swift’s worst album? It sounds boring and lazy for someone of her skill, but the truth is I don’t currently have the critical bandwidth to find out. She has infiltrated nearly every crack of popular music culture during the past couple years — I need a break. Really, she needs a break. I would love for her to step back for a couple years to reflect and relax (maybe give the ozone a break) and come back with a more deliberate style and batch of songs that can remind everyone why she became the world’s biggest popstar. However, I know from the way my high school students talk about and listen to Swift that she doesn’t have to prove anything to her fans. She has ascended from popstar to LLC. I’m sure her next quarterly financial report will show that she’s done everything right.

As for Cindy Lee, my wife had this to offer during our first (and what turned out to be only) listen: “Is it called Diamond Jubilee because by the time you finish it you’re 75?” That about sums it up. Slightly too banal to make consistently good ambient work/reading music, but maybe that’s because I was constantly wondering how this album was hypnotizing so many people. It’s fine!

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Many who know me will not be shocked to see Vampire Weekend’s newest album, Only God Was Above Us, topping this month’s listening report. I fell in love with VW through their 2010 sophomore album Contra, a CD I bought at a flea market for $2.50 on a whim when I was 14 or 15 (along with TV on the Radio’s Dear Science) because I thought I saw the album cover on a listicle somewhere. Shortly after I was playing it constantly. I was finishing up my junior year of high school when Modern Vampires of the City came out. It was one of the first albums I bought upon release. I had been obsessing over the burning Saab in “Diane Young” for months. I remember being disappointed with all the “slowness” of that new album because it didn’t sound like Contra 2. But I bought it, so I tried again, in between obsessive listens to Pretzel Logic, and on the 3rd or 4th play it locked into a groove and was stuck in my car CD player for months that turned into years. Skip ahead to 2019, Father of the Bride is announced and I’m playing the great “Harmony Hall” with trembling anticipation for months. The album comes out in May and I immediately fall in love. I place it in my top 10 of the 10’s — its an immediate A+. I end up with a vinyl and 2 copies of the CD (one came with our concert tickets¹). I remember listening to the Big Thief album that came out the same day, first thinking “who??” and then “why am I listening to this instead of Father of the Bride again?” Now, I’d rather play either of Big Thief’s 2019 albums, not to mention their near-masterpiece 2022 album, than Father of the Bride. It’s clear to me now that it’s by far VW’s worst, which is still very good.

I write all this to point out that my first impression of any album is, as a rule, unreliable, especially when it comes to Vampire Weekend. So, is this new one any good? Simply, better than Father of the Bride, but it only approaches the greatness of their miraculous inaugural trilogy. Statistically speaking, this is the best outcome one could hope for — most artists never make one great album let alone three with one being one of The Greatest. On Only God Was Above Us, we hear threads of ideas germinated on their last album and the album before that that were no doubt suffused into their sound by Airel Rechtshaid’s sensibilities and his interpretation of what made Rostam² an integral part of that so far unimpeachable trilogy. Things like the smart phone recordings of living room pianos; aggressive strumming and even more aggressive riffing — reminiscent of FotB songs like “Sunflower” and Sympathy” — most evident on “Classical” and “Gen-X Cops;” and distorted guitar peaking out to aid the crescendo to a song’s peak (which is what we love so much about “Unbelievers” and “Hannah Hunt”) or used as just another textural ornament. And then there are things that have been there since 2008 and are riffed on here in new loving ways, like Ezra’s penchant for Baroque and Classical (no pun intended) counterpoint and harmonic progression; his use of the pitched too low or high vocals as instrument; Chris Baio’s (or maybe it’s Rechtshaid’s) love of a rubbery bass timbre; the occasional African-style guitar riff punctuated by congas; Chris Tomson (on drums) who likes to switch his subdivision from syncopated eighths to dotted eighth-sixteenths to triplets to keep the groove floating enough to avoid accusations of stiffness.

With the longest average of song lengths in their career (average song lengths for each album in chronological order of release: 3:07, 3:40, 3:35, 3:13, 4:42) they are not completely beating the jam band allegations, especially if you’ve been to one of their live shows, but they skirt the usually jam band pitfalls by staying true to a Baroque theme and variations ethos and because they know when something is worth repeating exactly or when it needs something new to keep your interest (and also by writing good songs with good melodies).

They chose their singles well with “Classical,” “Capricorn,” and “Mary Boone" which make excellent additions to the VW songbook that wouldn’t feel out of place on a greatest hits collection. In a year, I don’t think I would pick this over any of their first 3 albums, but I think I will pick it, happily, for the rest of this year to continue to reflect on the throughlines of their stylistic evolution and stagnation, to wonder about the album they make next that I’ll be slow to warm to, and to reflect on what the old news about Ezra means for his image and brand, if it means anything in the big picture. I hope he wrestles with it more than hoping you’ll let it go or by screaming piano in his dreams.

P.S. One of the first lines on Only God Was Above Us goes “The word was weaponized as soon as it had passed your lips.” Until I looked it up, I thought the line was “The world was weaponized as soon as it had postulates” which I think is much more provocative even though its implication is a little slippery. Maybe not as good as “there’s a bathroom on the right,” but it’s up there!

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A-List

Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us

Leyla McCalla: Sun Without the Heat

Noah Haidu: Standards II

Nia Archives: Silence Is Loud

A. Savage: The Loft Sessions

Charles Lloyd: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow

Byron Asher’s Skrontch Music: Lord, when you send the rain

Still House Plants: If I Don’t Make It, I Love U

SiR: HEAVY

Katie Pruitt: Mantras

Kathryn Williams & Withered Hand: Willson Williams

Maggie Rogers: Don’t Forget Me

Julian Lage: Speak To Me

Bill Orcutt: Four Guitars Live

Aoife O’Donovan: All My Friends

Maya Beiser x Terry Riley: In C

Julieta Eugenio: Stay

Cloud Nothings: Final Summer

Pernice Brothers: Who Will You Believe

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Honorable Mentions

Kirke + Butts: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

English Teacher: This Could Be Texas

Serengeti: Kdiv

The Power of the Heart: A Tribute to Lou Reed

Dave Douglas: Gifts

Beatenberg: The Great Fire of Beatenberg

Tyla

Microwave: Let’s Start Degeneracy

Evan Nicole Bell: Runaway Girl

Old 97’s: American Primitive

Matthew Shipp: New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz

James Carter: Un

Pet Shop Boys: Nonetheless

Queen Esther: Things Are Looking Up

Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace

Bob Vylan: Humble As the Sun

The Libertines: All Quiet on the Western Front

The Fully Celebrated Orchestra: Sob Story

Collapse the Collectors

Brother Ali & UnJust: Love & Service

Jimmy Montague: Tomorrow’s Coffee

Charley Crockett: $10 Cowboy

Fabiana Palladino

The Black Keys: Ohio Players

Amaro Freitas: Y’Y

Red Hot Org & Meshell Ndegeocello: Red Hot & Ra : The Magic City

Pearl Jam: Dark Matter

Sunny Five: Candid

Lucy Rose: This Ain’t The Way You Go Out

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But Not For Me

Taylor Swift: THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT

Ledisi: Good Life

Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee

Chanel Beads: Your Day Will Come

1. They put on a great show, by the way. My wife and I will never forget Ezra explaining that they try to only take song requests from attendees wearing bucket hats, so Ezra starts scanning the crowd and pointing, going “buckethatbuckethatbuckethat.” Some of this concert was actually immortalized in the first release of Vampire Weekend’s vinyl club and newsletter called Frog on the Bass Drum. The $30 vinyl was announced in the middle of a weekday via email and sold out within minutes to people whom I must assume don’t have day jobs. Must be nice. The recording from that concert is the only one I would want to own, purely as a memento of one of my favorite concerts. Vol. 2 of their concert vinyl series was announced months ago and is, of course, still available for purchase.

2. I find it interesting that Rostam shows up as a producer of the song (track 6: “The Surfer”) that is the biggest sonic departure from VW’s previous work.