billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 7, 2019 (VIDEO)

So it might not be obvious, but I've had a fucking miserable night trying to get all of this put together. Jesus Fucking CHRIST, YouTube can fellate several shotgun barrels, their horrible UI design and worthless back-end deserves all the scorn in the world and every developer and QA tester should be fired into the goddamn sun.

ANYWAY, I have no idea what I'm going to review next, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 7, 2019

So regardless of any scattered tidbits of information we might get the next week or two, I'm at least confident that this week is in the 2020 Billboard year - a pretty busy week too, mostly thanks to the abortive mini-album bomb of Trippie Redd and the return of Christmas music, but I guess I'll take what I can get here as the charts continue to slow down as we head deeper into the holidays?

video review: 'infections of a different kind / a different kind of human' by AURORA

And here we are - everyone who is asking, I think you might handle this one a bit better than last time (or at least I hope so).

Next up... honestly, I've got a pretty light schedule for the week ahead, so we'll have to see - stay tuned!

album review: 'infections of a different kind / a different kind of human' by AURORA

So I've talked a little about backlash that I've received for certain reviews - I don't tend to bring it up much because it honestly doesn't faze me much anymore, but there are certain cases where I'm a little bewildered at the intensity of the anger or vitriol, mostly because it comes in reviews where I'm more mixed on the project than outright negative. And 2016 was a year where I had more of those episodes than most, but what I think threw me off the most starkly was the response to covering the Norwegian indie pop artist AURORA. Now I'll admit I wasn't really kind to her debut project, but the truth was that I was more ambivalent to mixed on it as a whole - it wasn't really bad, but it also wasn't that distinctive or memorable either, a well-trod indie pop lane that frankly has only felt more oversaturated in recent years. The comparisons I originally made were to Christina Perri and Elvya, but going back to All My Demons Greet Me As A Friend now, it's abundantly clear I should have made the parallel to Florence + The Machine, just swapping out some of the chamber pop with lilting, slightly gothic folk that played on creepy girl weirdness in a way that's felt depressing conventional, or at the very least overplayed. 

So I'll admit I was in no hurry to hear more from her and indeed I skipped her 2018 project Infections Of A Different Kind, especially with the expectation this was part one to a full-album part two dropping this year, which is why I'm covering both here. And I figured I'd go in cold here - after all, Florence has grown on me considerably over the past few years and I had to hope that all the Bjork poses AURORA was making would wind up translating to slightly more interesting music, so what did we get on both Infections Of A Different Kind and A Different Kind Of Human?

video review: 'all my demons greeting me as a friend' by aurora

As I said, better than expected. Not great, probably will be forgotten in a week or two, but generally alright, I guess.

Next up... man, I need more time for Denzel Curry and Southern Family... so it's a good thing Billboard BREAKDOWN is up next, so stay tuned!

album review: 'all my demons greeting me as a friend' by aurora

You ever have those artists where you get a glimpse of the cover art and read up on the buzz or reviews and before you hear a second of their music, you immediately have an impression or expectation of what they're going to sound like?

Oh, don't act like I'm the only one here, or that it's not a human reaction, especially if the artist exists in modern pop music. Like it or not, unless you are on the avant-garde or the sort of artist who breaks genre with every album - and those artists do exist in pop music, let's be real here - most modern pop eventually falls along the line of a trend. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - just because something is trendy doesn't automatically make it bad - but it can be predictable. And this is where as a music critic that can get complicated, as we're used to seeing trends come in and out and we're not always grabbed by the presumption of 'novelty'. So when I hear buzz suggesting a new mainstream-accessible artist is 'changing the sound' or is 'so revolutionary', I'm quick to be skeptical because I've seen and heard this before, more than ever in the age of the Internet. But the key thing to note is that audiences, particularly younger audiences, don't always have the frame of reference - and that can be fine, if the audience is willing to trace the artistic lineage of the music. And what frustrates me is when that doesn't happen - when people praised Kanye as a revolutionary after Yeezus while dismissing Death Grips, for an easy example. 

My overall point is that when I first started hearing the buzz behind Aurora, a Norwegian pop singer-songwriter, I had the sinking feeling I knew what I was getting. Oh great, another vaguely foreign indie pop starlet who is just weird enough to appear outside the mainstream while fitting very much within it with subject matter that is 'so deep' but really never goes beyond pop platitudes, I think I've been down this road before. That said, Aurora didn't seem like the sort of studio creation disguising itself as indie pop that you occasionally see, and with the main writing credits on every song, she could very well be a distinctive voice, so I decided to take all of you up on the requests and dig into All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend by Aurora - what did I get?