album review: 'the owl' by zac brown band

When you think of the Zac Brown Band, what do you think of?

Mostly likely you think of the band responsible for songs like 'Chicken Fried' or 'Toes' or 'Knee Deep', lightweight, relaxing fodder that has a bit of a jam band vibe but a lot of rich, warm harmonies and colour. If you're more of a fan you probably remember songs like 'Goodbye In Her Eyes' and 'Colder Weather' and how the band has always had an underrated strength for ballads, or even how their 2012 album Uncaged took a willingness to experiment into one of the best mainstream country albums of the decade. 

If you're deeper in the country scene, however, especially recently, you might know the Zac Brown Band a little differently. You might know that frontman Zac Brown has been chafing at what he might view as the arbitrary restrictions of country - seemingly unaware of how the indie scene has been plumbing new depths and sounds every single year, which you'd think he'd know given his collaboration with Dave Cobb in 2016, but that's a different story. You might have heard that the same year he put out a back to basics album Welcome Home produced by Dave Cobb, he also made an EDM-folktronica... thing called Sir Rosevelt near the end of that year... which wound up being universally panned by anyone who knows electronic music as dated, badly produced, and while having catchy moments feeling more than ever like a vanity project. And that's what we were hoping would remain the case for the Zac Brown Band, especially after their dabblings with electronic music on 2015's Jekyll + Hyde, which for the record did see some success, but nowhere near consistent enough to sustain a full project - so if Zac Brown had a side project to shove that sound into, all fine and good.

What nobody was suspecting was The Owl, a project where it appeared that Zac Brown was doubling down on the electronics and pop flourishes to the shock and alienation of all of their country fans - and let me make this clear, the buzz has been horrible for this album. Even mainstream critics are not giving this a pass, so as one of the few guys who can defend pieces of Zac Brown's electronic forays, I wanted to give this a chance... so what did The Owl deliver?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 28, 2019 (VIDEO)

So yeah, this was better - but next up, ugh, it's not good... stay tuned?

video review: 'sunshine kitty' by tove lo

Oh boy, this was a pretty sizable disappointment... but trust me when I say I've got something much worse in the wings - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 28, 2019

These are the album bomb weeks I always tend to find a bit perplexing... because the fuse seems "delayed", for lack of better words. Post Malone may have cut a swathe across the Hot 100, but like with other huge album bombs, many of his songs didn't crash out that hard, which meant that many other songs didn't rebound as big as you'd expect. All of this translates to a relatively mild week for me, and while I'm not complaining, I can't help but feel I'm waiting for the next shoe to drop.

album review: 'sunshine kitty' by tove lo

At this point, I'm a little mystified why I'm as eager as I am to look up a new Tove Lo album. 

Seriously, there are other projects that would normally be higher on my list - it's not like I don't have catch-up projects from last week and Tove Lo isn't even the biggest story coming out of this week of releases, be it Blink-182 somehow impressing the longtime fans or the Zac Brown Band delivering an outright catastrophe. And yet my thoughts kept coming back to the fact that of the mainstream and mainstream-adjacent pop acts this decade, she's been among the most ambitious, working to structure narrative-driven concept albums that actually can have some lyrical nuance at their best - I'm not about to forget her closer track 'hey you got drugs?' from her last album Blue Lips that somehow wound up as one of my favourite songs of 2017. But then I remember how damn inconsistent her production is, and how there have been tracts of her albums that feel like they're reaching for more insight than they actually deliver, or how thematically much of her first three albums have been retracing the same burned-out arc, or how she dove so deeply into selling sexuality that it almost has reached parody. I mean, credit to her for owning it as much as she has, but when your albums as of late have been titled Lady Wood, Blue Lips, and Sunshine Kitty, the double entendres are getting played out. But regardless, the reviews seem... well, as inconsistent as ever for her, but I was curious, so what did we get from Sunshine Kitty?

video review: 'miami memory' by alex cameron

Yeah, can't say I'm not a little underwhelmed, but it is still good.

Next up... yep, it's Peggy - stay tuned!

album review: 'miami memory' by alex cameron

It's funny, I saw a tweet a couple days ago by someone who had been watching my past couple reviews, specifically those of the Highwomen and Rapsody, and who remarked that given my current upcoming slate of projects to cover, the discussions of feminism and toxic masculinity were going to surge to the forefront yet again. And to do any of my upcoming reviews properly - given my current docket includes JPEGMAFIA and Chelsea Wolfe and Jenny Hval and eventually I'll get to Tropical Fuck Storm - the political discourse is inevitable.

Now granted, I'm not going to deny it can be dense or draining or frustrating - I've seen the subscriber drop-off after certain, more political reviews, so I get it, especially given that I don't tend to be as funny as your average critic who can lean into the memes and wittiness alongside my analysis. But hey, this could be a good test, given how the artist himself has always embraced some of the parodic side of his work: Alex Cameron! I'll be honest, the fact that his cult following has inflated the way it has is a real treat to see - I was kind of lukewarm on his debut but by the time I got to Forced Witness a few months late, I was astounded how much wit, melodic flair, and dissection of "traditional masculinity" was wedged into his retro 80s pop rock sound. I still that album as an absolute delight and one of the sleeper best of 2017 - and in retrospect, it's only grown on me since. And I'll admit a certain wry fascination with Alex Cameron: his shambling theatricality, his blend of pop sounds and willingness to embrace satire that most guys will never have the balls to seize, all with a real earnest intensity that I have to respect, to the point where it should surprise nobody he's dating Jemima Kirke, who you might recognize as Jessa from HBO's Girls! So for me to say that I was excited for Miami Memory was an understatement, even if he had a tough project to follow - so what did we get?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 21, 2019 (VIDEO)

Yeah, long and tough episode, messy situation.

Anyway, next up is Alex Cameron, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 21, 2019

So I'll be honest: when I created my album bomb rules, there inevitably were going to be projects that just skirt around them - it hasn't been a perfect process, and one that I'll probably revisit for the next Billboard year, just taking the data I have into account. Normally it has been the albums that have a full six or seven songs released - just under my eight song cut-off - and in those cases it's normally the full swathe of other releases that leads to a lengthy episode. Of course, the other factor comes when the artist is so big that the vast majority of his new entries hit in the top 40, and given this happened with Post Malone... yeah, album bomb rules are in effect, but I'm still going to wind up covering the majority of the album anyway, so mission accomplished, I guess?

video review: 'charli' by charli xcx

First big album review of the week (in a week stacked with some heavy ones), but next up is a frankly monstrous episode of Billboard BREAKDOWN, so stay tuned!

album review: 'charli' by charli xcx

I saw Charli XCX live less than a month ago. I saw her on the main stage at Reading Festival as she blew through so many of the hits she had either created or cowritten and she was dancing her ass off to ramp up the energy for a tough afternoon set... and yet even as I watching, I had the lingering feeling that something was wrong. This should all be working... and yet it wasn't quite getting there.

And when I reflect upon her career and the constant spurt of hype from critics whenever she pushes out another genre-pushing pop project, I'm left with the niggling feeling that Charli XCX has been torn between a few different worlds for a long time. On the one hand, you have the mainstream push where she could absolutely be huge, with the distinctive voice, the theatricality, the knack for hooks, the surprisingly deep well of connections and guests she can pull upon, where she can build a whole set on those moments! But that's not all she is, and where she's mused publicly where she might be better off writing behind the scenes... because the other side of her art is the PC Music and SOPHIE side with the contorted electronics and sounds dragging pop music forward kicking and screaming, where she's grabbed so many critics, but not really the mainstream in the same way, at least not yet. At the festival I left convinced that for a nightclub or theater show she would be far more effective with her experimental work instead of fighting to hold a listless and scorching festival audience mid-afternoon, and fair enough - atmosphere is often one of the hardest things for any artist to control or manipulate, especially on a massive stage where she didn't seem to have a huge team behind her - but at this point I feel like I've been watching Charli's hype for most of the decade, and while I have to applaud her sustainability, you have to wonder why her balancing act hasn't quite blown her up into a superstar yet, especially if the music is good. Some of that I have to blame on her team and label, but when you are an artist ahead of your time with hype that seems bigger than her audience... well again, it's tough.

Now for me, I've never quite been truly 'wowed' by a Charli XCX project all the way through - more of my lingering tonal issues with the PC Music camp which don't always connect - but hey, I do find her a fascinating artist and I did have real hopes for Charli, so did it click this all the way this time?

video review: 'great hits' by SHREDDERS

So, guess who got demonetized for talking about (and not so implicitly endorsing) antifa (and then lost a bunch of subs as a result)?

Eh, whatever, I'll keep chugging along - if you know, you know. Enjoy!

album review: 'great hits' by SHREDDERS

You know, I've talked a fair bit recently about 'expectations', where as a critic I've gotten used to tempering them and praying for the surprise, which is a hell of a lot better than setting them high and falling short. And that's absolutely the case that I had when I was going through my schedule and came up on SHREDDERS. Don't get me wrong, I like these guys - P.O.S and Sims can spit their asses off and Paper Tiger and Lazerbeak would give them all the warping, abrasive production that they would need... but I remembered being a little underwhelmed by their debut Dangerous Jumps, and I just left with the feeling that for as single-minded and thorny as the project was, outside of scattered moments it never quite hit as much as I was hoping. 

And going into Great Hits, I'll admit my expectations were even lower: seven songs, just over twenty minutes of material, the buzz hadn't really coalesced, and they were following a Sims collaboration project from last year that was a little underwhelming and an album from fellow Doomtree crew member Dessa that is damn near a classic in my books. So I figured if we were just going to get more of Dangerous Jumps, it might be the sort of project that'd fit well on the Trailing Edge and I'd just move on, but I still wanted to give it a shot... so what did we get?

video review: 'eve' by rapsody

So yeah, this was a little disappointing - really wished it connected more strongly, but it happens.

But I did manage to find some hip-hop where again, I'm late to the party, but I'm excited as hell to talk about it - stay tuned!

album review: 'eve' by rapsody

Yes, I'm late again - not as late as last time, but still late, and that's on me.

And yet that got me thinking: Rapsody is one of those rappers who should be discussed among terrific rappers right now, a lyricist who can bend flows with cutting bars and who has the significant production talents of 9th Wonder behind her, along with the pedigree to command respect of spitters past and present... and yet for as much as I praised Laila's Wisdom late in 2017, it wasn't a project I often felt inclined to revisit in the same way. And I can't just say it's rooted in the rush of the year-end, because Ruston Kelly dropped at the end of last year and I still play that album, so what the hell is it?

Well, after a quick relisten to Laila's Wisdom which served as a welcome reminder of its quality, I did get something of an answer: density. Rapsody stacks her bars deep, and placed against textured production and heavy subject matter, but light on melodic hooks or straightforward bangers, it means I place her in a category with other heavy-hitting lyricists from the underground that I need to be in a specific mood to hear. And let me stress that's not to denigrate her - that's an elite group, for sure, and it's also one that as I get older I revisit more, but I do feel that the next big step for Rapsody would be finding a way to transcend that barrier and group, which may come more through composition and song structure than outright bars, or a thematic core that resonated more deeply. And given the mountains of critical acclaim given to Eve - similar to what was given to Laila's Wisdom but also a little more muted than I expected - I did have high hopes for this, so what did Rapsody deliver?

video review: 'the highwomen' by the highwomen

Well, this was well-worth the review... let's see if the trolls decide to come down on this one...

Anyway, I'm on a kick for this sort of thing, so Rapsody is up next - stay tuned!

album review: 'the highwomen' by the highwomen

This is the sort of album where it would be too easy to set impossible expectations... providing, of course, you could contextualize a release like this anyway. That's the funny thing with a lot of supergroups, because given the individual members even a little more thought, you might see where it makes sense, until it just doesn't.

Now for me, go through three of the artists and it made complete sense. Brandi Carlile was coming off a Grammy-nominated year and probably had enough clout off her back catalog to land exactly what she wanted. Amanda Shires might have less immediate acclaim, as some have just pigeonholed her as the wife of Jason Isbell - which does a massive disservice to her fantastic violin work and an increasingly eclectic discography, including an album last year that didn't quite win me over but was certainly weird enough to attract attention. Then there's Natalie Hemby, the name that might not get the most immediate recognition unless you've been reading the liner notes of A Star Is Born, but I knew her most from her 2017 debut Puxico, an excellent album that I still can't find on vinyl to this day - seriously, if anyone would send me a lead, I'd be incredibly grateful here! But all three of these women made sense working together - not quite firebrands in the same way as the Pistol Annies, but maybe closer to case/lang/veirs or Trio, the legendary team-up between Dolly Parton, Linda Rondstadt, and Emmylou Harris, and when you see cowriting credits from Isbell, Miranda Lambert, Sheryl Crow, and Lori McKenna, plus production from Dave Cobb... shit, is there such a thing as stacking the deck?

And then there's Maren Morris - ironically the most "popular" artist on this list in terms of hits, but the name that stuck out like a sore thumb when I saw the supergroup lineup in terms of her sound and critical acclaim. Hell, you could make the argument that with her last album she was content to mine country for credibility as she continued her pop pivot... which is why her inclusion here is so damn fascinating. I mean, her best music has always been country so if her pop work was just a means to an end to get the industry pull to get here, all the power to her, especially if she could leverage her fanbase to bring a bigger audience to some fantastic talent. In other words, expectations were high: what did we get from The Highwomen?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 14, 2019 (VIDEO)

Yeah, rough episode... it happens.

Next up, I'm finally going to talk about The Highwomen, then probably Lower Dens - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 14, 2019

This week does not matter. Now the natural expansion of that is saying, 'look, the Billboard Hot 100 is a badly constructed fugazi of contradictions and payola, none of it really matters', but let's focus on this week here, because next week Post Malone is going to bulldoze through here with a full Hollywood's Bleeding album bomb, and most of what showed up here will be gone: you've been warned.

video review: 'hollywood's bleeding' by post malone

Okay, this was... actually surprisingly easy to assemble, Post Malone is like that for me.

Next up is a big one and the most pleasant of surprises... stay tuned!