video review: 'death race for love' by juice WRLD

So this was a lot of fun to put together... a terrible album, but hey.

But onto something much better...

album review: 'stay tuned!' by dominique fils-aimé

I was preparing for this to be a difficult review.

And at first that might not make a lot of sense: sure, another little-known artist that I found off Bandcamp, but the ones I often choose to cover have colour and personality that leap off the page and deserve more attention... but Dominique Fils-Aimé was different. For one, instead of a swathe of indie rock, we're dealing with tones that owe a fair bit more to R&B and jazz and explicitly rely on a brand of minimalism in their arrangements that are tasteful and mature... but occasionally can come across as a little too understated and classy for their own good, the sort of mature music folks tend to wind up appreciating more than outright loving. Now that's not saying I didn't like her debut album Nameless from early 2018 - spare but potent as all hell thanks to her striking vocals and subtle, textured grooves, it was a short but rewarding listen - but I was hoping her follow-up here would amp things up just a bit, add a little more texture, tension, and richness to match the vocal arrangements that were such a terrific highlight. So alright, what did we find on Stay Tuned!?

album review: 'death race for love' by juice WRLD

So some of you might be a little confused why I'm reviewing this. If you've been following my series Billboard BREAKDOWN you might remember Juice WRLD as a perennial frustration for me, and that the reviews of this solo sophomore project haven't been good to start with even from the critics inclined to give him a pass - and I'm not one of those people. So why do this to myself? Why listen to a project that is comfortably over a hour long in a blatant stream trolling maneuver by Interscope who is well-aware this guy might not last too long?

Well, part of this is a matter of deeper investigation, because in the wake of the deaths of XXXTENTACION and Lil Peep, two of the biggest personalities within the new breed of emo rap left considerable voids, and Juice WRLD could well fill them - he's certainly more accessible than both acts thanks to his ability to construct a hook, and there's absolutely a market for what he delivers. So yeah, part of this comes from me keeping my ear to the ground especially if this kid might stick around - and while thanks to his terrible singles choices he seems committed to burning out fast, I do think he has some talent on a technical level. Yeah, his autotuned caterwauling is annoying, but he can structure bars and construct a hook. And if I'm going to be humiliatingly honest, I do get Juice WRLD's appeal to a specific demographic... mostly because fifteen years ago I was in that demo, and there's a way to make music that appeals to that group and not suck. I didn't expect it would happen with Juice WRLD, but I figured I'd give him a chance... so what did we find on Death Race For Love?

video review: 'when i get home' by solange

So this happened... I wish I had liked this more, but I do think I grasped it.

Next up... hmm, I've got some ideas, so we'll see - stay tuned!

video review: 'wasteland, baby!' by hozier

Ugh, this was exasperating... still has its moments here, though.

And yet on the topic of disappointments...

album review: 'when i get home' by solange

So I'm going to start this review with two neutral statements that nevertheless are bound to be controversial. The first is this: we primarily experience art emotionally - we might analyze or come to appreciate something intellectually later, but ultimately if we're giving an honest opinion on what moves us and what we'll revisit, it's emotional. And to follow that, #2: when the statement is made, 'it's not for you', that's a statement presumably made to speak to the emotional, lived-in experiences that is assumed to be held by someone who likes the art and how said experiences probably aren't held by someone for whom the art isn't clicking.

So why mention any of this? Well, it has to do with the larger discourse around Solange's critical acclaim in the past couple of years, especially surrounding her breakthough A Seat At The Table, a project I liked and understood but didn't love. And I even said in that review that it's not for me - I can certainly respect its appeal and thoughtfulness and I understand the text and subtext on display, but I was very much aware that it was marketed at an audience to which I don't belong. And let me stress this: that's fine! There's absolutely a place and market for that, and while I might make the argument the most powerful art can transcend emotive boundaries should it be heard by everyone, I'm also aware of the material that resonates most with me won't be to the tastes of everyone: that's why my favourite albums of the past five years have spanned an indie country compilation, a pop rock opera, multiple underground hip-hop tapes, and a twisted slice of jazzy adult-alternative blended with goth rock! 

Now where I take the most issue with the whole 'it's not for you' statement is when it's used as a defense mechanism to shield a project from criticism of the text or subtext, which of course hits the blurry line of whether the person understands it and that art is subject to multiple interpretations, but that's a conversation of nuance and detail, not defense. And with A Seat At The Table, it didn't really come up, mostly because the album was critically acclaimed across the board - more degrees of quality being disputed if anything. But the conversation surrounding the surprise release When I Get Home has been more mixed, and outside of the outlets that have a mandate to support it, I've seen the 'it's not for you' argument pushed more as a deflection surrounding the project's quality, coupled with the presumed lack of understanding. To me that was alarming, so I did proceed with both caution and curiosity into this listen... so what did I find?

album review: 'wasteland, baby!' by hozier

I remember vividly covering Hozier in 2014.

I remember knowing him only for 'Take Me To Church', a swampy soul song with a prominent overwritten gothic streak to match his massive, howling voice, owing obvious debts to blues and soul but also showing an intuitive grasp of the texture to make it stick. In other words, there was no way he wasn't going to become a one-hit wonder, especially in the mid-2010s where the mainstream was caught in transition between garage rock duos and rollicking indie flair and the over-polished pop rock that dominates now, but I had some hope that his self-titled debut would connect, especially as his songwriting had too much unique flair to be discounted. I went in with middling expectations...

And left blown out of the water - and indeed, Hozier set such a high bar for his brand of blues rock and soul that it's not surprising few even tried to follow him. Not only was that self-titled debut one of the best albums of 2014, but it also produced 'Jackie & Wilson', which to this day remains my favourite song of that year. And going back to that album years later I find myself awestruck how well it holds up - the huge low-end smolder balancing terrific melodic hooks, the rich diversity of tones, and that's before you got Hozier's brand of overwritten but understated melodrama, drenched in the iconography of the past but refreshingly modern in its sentiments. I place that self-titled project in the same category as an album like Dolls Of Highland by Kyle Craft in a fusion of textured, old-school rock with contemporary ideas, but where Craft was able to crank out a strong follow-up last year with Full Circle Nightmare, Hozier was more deliberate - mostly because he had the flexibility to rely on a monster hit and the frankly stunning number albums he sold in an era where albums don't sell. So while I was cooler than most on his EP follow-up last year Nina Cried Power - really damn good, just not quite great - I had high hopes for this one. I was a little less enthused to discover that he included a few songs from that EP on this project - and yet not my favourite from that project 'Moment's Silence (Common Tongue)', which was on my short list of songs that nearly made my top 50 songs of 2018 - but hey, we've been waiting five damn years for this, so what did we get from Wasteland, Baby!?

video review: 'phantoms' by marianas trench

So yeah, little disappointing here, but still pretty great all the same.

If you want the larger disappointment... well, stay tuned!

album review: 'phantoms' by marianas trench

So I won't mince words: I was nervous about covering this album.

And I'm not sure why - Marianas Trench is the sort of stridently Canadian pop rock act that has never let me down, with two albums under their belt that are damn near classics: 2009's Masterpiece Theater and 2015's Astoria, which if you all remember the latter was my top album of that year! And I'll admit part of it was just nervous jitters that aren't all that rational: frontman Josh Ramsay is one of the most powerful vocalists working today and a terrific technical songwriter, he's one of the big reasons most of you know who Carly Rae Jepsen even is, and you'd think that would be enough for me to have faith this would be incredible.

But I'll admit I was nervous regardless - it had been four years since Astoria, and pop rock has changed a lot since 2015. Too many promising acts in their lane have either gone pure pop to diminishing returns or outright collapsed, and while Marianas Trench have been unafraid to chase their own lanes before, the few moments I didn't like on Astoria did come through succumbing to questionable modern trends. And more to the point, Astoria had felt like a culmination of larger stories that had run through Masterpiece Theater and Ever After, a semi-autobiographical narrative put to bed for new beginnings ahead, and I just had no idea what to expect. I hadn't checked out any of the singles, I was going in cold to take in the full album experience - for as relentlessly catchy as the singles can be I still hold Marianas Trench as an album act - so what did we get off of Phantoms?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 9, 2019 (VIDEO)

And here we go - not nearly as many copyright complaints as I expected to battle through, but it's alright.

Next up... let's finally get to Marianas Trench, so stay tuned!

video review: 'distance over time' by dream theater

So this was a lot better than Weezer, but I wish I could have loved this one. Good, not great.

Next we're going to Billboard BREAKDOWN - enjoy!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 9, 2019

The only way to describe this week is a mess - and not an especially good one either. And some of this I could predict - I knew Gunna, Lil Pump and Offset would hit the charts with some force, but they honestly didn't seem to register the larger impact I was expecting, and we got a flood of other singles that hit the charts as well from other genres - whether any of it will last is an open question, we'll have to see.

video review: 'weezer (the black album)' by weezer

So yeah, this was pretty execrable... so thankfully we can move on to...

the top ten best hit songs of 2009 (VIDEO)

Yeah, about time I got this done - enjoy!

album review: 'distance over time' by dream theater

Am I the only one who feels like something weird is going on with the hype cycle for Dream Theater this time around?

Seriously - I know the band has been long-running and many could make the argument their last truly transcendent album was over ten years ago and that they've just not been the same since Portnoy left and the vastly overpolished but kind of underwhelming 2016 project The Astonishing had pushed many of the casual fans away... but even with that, a new Dream Theater album didn't use to feel like a surprise from out of nowhere!

And yet here we are: maybe I'm just not attuned to the hype cycle but Dream Theater has released their fourteenth album and it's their shortest since 1992's Images And Words. They have described it as a stream-lined release clocking under an hour with only nine songs - which for a band like Dream Theater who will release EPs longer than some bands' albums is indeed a thing. And when you see the amount of critical acclaim the band has received - which absolutely surprised me, given Dream Theater can be a polarizing act in certain substrata of progressive metal - mostly surrounding how accessible the album is... well, maybe the benefit of lowered expectations had won people over? Honestly, I didn't know what to expect with Distance Over Time - a cute way to say 'speed', although the lack of direction means we're not getting velocity - but enough bad jokes, what did we get?

album review: 'weezer (the black album)' by weezer

So I'll say it: Weezer should not have gotten famous off the Blue Album.

Now if this sounds insane, let me qualify that I'm not saying the album is bad - it's a great listen, arguably one of their best. I'm also not saying that they didn't deserve a cult following or that album shouldn't become a cult classic with time - again, given what it represented in the mid-90s to a swathe of kids looking for the middleground between power pop, indie rock, and grunge, that album fits a role. But with the benefit of hindsight, it was a project that put Weezer on the very top and it's been abundantly clear that Rivers Cuomo has reacted badly to the fame brought on by that project. First you had Pinkerton, an album that won its critical acclaim decades later from those who understood what it meant in emo but was savaged by fans and the critical press alike - and considering Pinkerton was written in a moment of great but ugly vulnerability, it slammed the door on such material for years to come, not helped by the growth of mainstream-accessible emo in the years to come. And so Weezer retreated into self-aware irony, a hermetic vacuum seal of detachment that allowed them become increasingly cynical with every passing year and even mine a real hit out of it... but the returns were diminishing. It wouldn't be until 2014 where the band 'returned to their roots' with Everything Will Be All Right In The End to regain some acclaim from the fans and critics... but what then? Again, it's hard to ignore how much of Weezer's work reads as responses to a long-splintered and impossible-to-please fanbase that can't comprehend the emotional turmoil that spawned a project like Pinkerton - to say nothing of the explosive and immediate backlash it faced - and thus going back through both the White album and Pacific Daydream, it's not hard to place them in the context of Rivers Cuomo's arrested development, with no clear idea where to turn. You want to hope that there's a little more emotional maturity and insight... until you realize through interviews and annotations that it's not coming, and why in the Nine Hells would he want to grow up anyway, if that's all the fans want? So why not put out a cheap and mostly embarrassing album of covers in the Teal Album - people seem to like the adolescent shitposting, why not give them what they want?

Well, to get the answer to that, it looked like we had to go to the Black album, the second project Weezer is releasing in 2019, framed as one of their darkest albums to date and one that is polarizing critics and fans alike - mostly because it's reportedly framed as a response to them. Now if you've been reading most of Weezer's extended discography as a response to their opening success, especially in recent years, this shouldn't come as a surprise - a tension where the center cannot hold - but can we at least get some decent music along the way?

the top ten best hit songs of 2009

So I'll admit to being surprised that this, of all things, is the next top ten people want me to cover. You'd think folks would want me to finish off the 2010s proper before going back to 2009, but there you have it.

But I get it, because while I'd struggle to call it the best of the 2000s, 2009 was a pretty glorious year. Not only did it showcase the birth of YouTube chart criticism, but it was such a potent year to cover! 2009 is widely accepted by most as the birth of the club boom, where the kinetic, rock-tinged pop of the mid-2000s picked up more layers of glitter and went to party hard, picking up a grabbag of whatever hip-hop had survived the ringtone era, whatever rock that was willing to party, and basically lock the placid country scene out of the clubhouse entirely. More to the point, it was impossible to not see 2009 as a year of reckless abandon: the economy had crashed, most of my generation was broke, and if we we didn't have money, we were going to party as if we did - it might have seemed bleak, but I think a lot of us were riding the contact high that came from a new president and a desperate desire to believe in hope... even if that contact high would lead to incoherent silliness and a hangover we'd only halfheartedly regret. But I'll say this: even if I've slowed down a little bit, it's hard not to miss the manic fun of this year, especially when there were so many great hits, so let's get things started with...

resonators 2019 - episode #014 - 'the psycho-social, chemical, biological & electro-magnetic manipulation of human consciousness' by jedi mind tricks (VIDEO)

So yeah, the backlash hasn't quite hit this video yet, but I know it's just a matter of time... eh, I stand by it. Tough to review, but worth it.

Next up... do I want to get Dream Theater out of the way before I cover the onslaught of quality coming? Let's see... stay tuned!

video review: '-' by jetty bones

Yeah, it's a short one, but I'm really happy I found time to get to it - great stuff!

Next up... well, Resonators, but what to follow... stay tuned!

resonators 2019 - episode #014 - 'the psycho-social, chemical, biological & electro-magnetic manipulation of human consciousness' by jedi mind tricks

You know, you'd think with my background I'd be an easier sell on nerdier music.

Because I do describe myself as a nerd - I own and have read hundreds of fantasy and science fiction novels, I've been playing video games and tabletop games for decades, I regularly go to conventions, I still play Magic: The Gathering... for god's sake, I've got a small collection of swords! Even my educational background outside of my career both on-and-offline is in physics, which thanks to the ubiquity of The Big Bang Theory has been branded the 'nerdiest' of scientific disciplines, at least in popular culture. And thus you'd think that "nerdier" art would be an easy sell for me on relatability alone... but most of the time it just doesn't click, and I've struggled to pin down why.

Well, okay, on some level it has to do with the fact that just common reference points doesn't win me over automatically - it'd be nice if people actually said something with said points rather than just for a cheap pop. The larger and more troublesome issues might come with the fact that the "outcast-but-ahead-of-the-curve" veneer of nerdy spaces is just that: a veneer, and more often than not it would reflect many of the same cultural values as non-nerds do, just with an increased lack of social skills. And that's not even getting into how certain nerds have made the concentrated effort to rewrite history and erase the forward-thinking progressive values that did bubble forth in some intellectual spaces, especially if those nerds didn't fit a very specific caricature or demographic... which takes us to underground hip-hop. We already saw with Company Flow and El-P that even though all those guys were plainly nerds it wasn't like they were immune to trends in hip-hop and larger culture at the time, and so when I started digging into the debut of Jedi Mind Tricks, a Philadelphia-based group who released their debut the same year in 1997 and their content was framed as 'forward-thinking' and 'progressive' and also emphasized their points of reference in astronomy, physics, and history, cranking up that nerd cred... look, I'll admit I was cautious. But okay, this won the popular vote very comfortably, so what did we get from The Psycho-Social, Chemical, Biological & Electro-magnetic Manipulation of Human Consciousness, which I'm just going to call The Psycho-Social CD for short?