Every year at about this time, I make a big playlist of all the albums I can remember liking one or more tracks from; each year, I find a few album tracks I’d missed first time around, but this year there have been more albums than usual where I’ve found myself thinking, “why didn’t I listen to this all the time?”
I suspect the problem I had with Miguel’s Wildheart is that I liked “Coffee” so much, I forget how good the rest of the album was. Read more↴
The record I was most disappointed by in 2015 was Demi Lovato’s Confident. Lovato is extremely charming and also admirable, but her last few albums have been hit and miss. I first heard her music back in 2009, when she was part of Disney’s market segmentation strategy (Selena Gomez was going to be the baby Karen O for tween hipsters, while Lovato was aimed towards fledgeling emo demographic). She released two excellent albums in this vein (probably the best example of emo-Demi is “Remember December“) before addiction and mental health problems derailed her career. Since then, I think she’s struggled to find a musical identity. Her obvious vocal ability combined, I guess, with the emotional narrative that’s more-or-less unavoidable when celebrity journalism forces you to live a breakdown in public, has led her sing a lot of big ballads (of which the best is still “Skyscraper“), but she’s also made the decision to pursue a more pop direction, with mixed results. The two great lead singles from Confident suggested she’d finally nailed the pop side of her career; unfortunately, the rest of the album consists of some of the worst ballads she’s ever recorded, with slick songwriting and production that is desperately aiming for Sia and ends up overwhelming the emotion Lovato is capable of portraying. Read more↴
The term that best describes Bieber’s recent singles, both lyrically and vocally, is “whiny.” But on “What do you Mean” and “Sorry,” there’s something about the beat that makes this work; perhaps its the anxious bounce of the rhythm that performs the vulnerability that Bieber’s vocals are trying for. Beiber keeps up this self-pitying tone – which is almost de rigeur post Drake – for the whole album, which gets very boring very quickly, with one exception. In “Love Yourself” the title phrase is perfectly poised on the ambiguity between patronising pseudo empowerment rhetoric and a euphemism for “fuck yourself,” and that pushes the passive-aggression underlying this whole male self-pity jam trend to a moment of clarity. It’s so, so, gross, but perhaps Bieber has done us a service by producing such a perfect, I guess, artifact of 2015 normative masculinity.
CL continues her long march towards actually releasing her solo album with another banger.
Tkay Maidza continues to be the best Australian rapper, as far as I am aware, although I don’t know if I like this new track quite as much as I like her previous, the fabulously unexpected sino-grime of “M.O.B.”
I only just discovered that Maya Jane Coles had released a new album this year, although it’s under her Nocturnal Sunshine alias, which she uses, I guess, to make tracks that sound like 90s dance group Sunscreem (that’s a recommendation, in case it’s not clear).
I do like The Sounds, so I guess it makes sense that Spotify would recommend I listen to makthaverskan, who turn out to be another Swedish new wave band, although they tend more to the gothier, Cure-esque end of new wave. Or, on this, their most recent track, a slightly poppier At the Drive In.
Salute is a really great album; it’s thematically coherent and uses a carefully chosen range of musical styles (primarily from 90s R&B) that complement those themes. I begin by gushing about Salute in order to make it clear that when I say Get Weird isn’t as good as Salute, that doesn’t mean Get Weird isn’t good. The singles, “Black Magic” and “Love me Like You” are both very fun (especially with their teen-movie pastiche videos), and I like the 80s synth-funk of “Weird People,” too, although I suspect they were going more for Prince than for the Huey Lewis and the News sound they end up with. But it doesn’t have the awe-inspiring focus of Salute; and it’s probably nor coincidence that my favourite track on the new album is the one that’s closest to the sound of their last, “Hair.” Read more↴
f(x)’s aesthetics are always top notch, but I’ve generally found their music to be pretty hit and miss. The same is true of their new album, which is largely forgettable but has two fantastic tracks. One is the title track, “4 Walls,” a great slice of garage, and the other is a piano-led house track called “Rude Love.” Read more↴