365 Days of Albums

A project for 2016 with a new album every day of the year.

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We’re doing four album reviews tonight so we’re going to try to keep things short and sweet.

That being said, Sturgill Simpson’s newest album, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, is a mournful little blend of a few different sounds.

Simpson seems dead set on gleefully blending country and R&B on this album that consistently vacillates between the two.

But the switches between styles, while often rapid, never feels directionless.

Throughout, even in the more upbeat R&B sections, Simpson sounds as though he is dealing with some sort of loss, and he’s able to keenly make the audience feel this. This sort of loss is most obvious on his excellent “In Bloom” cover, which translates the pain of the original Nirvana track into something far more twangy and simplistic.

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Neglect

I'm starting to get very, very bad at this. Especially on the weekends. But, as I said before, my frequent lack of care for the blog comes from the fact that I'm graduating soon and largely have no real time to write. But tomorrow, I'm catching up. Expect 4 album reviews. It'll be dope. Stay tuned.

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LANco’s new Extended Play starts out as generic pop country as it can get, but eventually grows into something more.

This is only a four-track-long EP, but you could easily just skip the first two tracks, as they’re little more than generic rehashings of some of the popular sounds in pop country these days. Twangy guitars, a sort of indie rock sensibility, and lyrics that are about how darn great this town is, the whole nine. You’ve heard these songs before and you’ve heard them done better.

But on the second half, LANco begins to embrace the country stereotypes, almost to the point of seeming tongue-in-cheek, and this is when the EP really opens up into something interesting. 

“American Love Story,” the third track, is the typical country song about lost love, but it’s so typical that it seems self-aware. With this awareness, LANco is able to mess around with bluegrass sounds and create a song that’s genuinely pretty.

After that, the EP closes with “Trouble Maker,” which, much like the previous track, seems fully aware of its own ridiculousness. In that way, LANco is able to make a simple song about wanting to sleep with a girl at a bar feel fresh and fun.

If LANco will be able to continuously embrace the influence traditional country has over them, they may be able to make truly fun records.

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Azel’s newest LP, Bombino, is a stunning achievement in world music that really must be experienced to understand.

I spent much of my day with this album. I’m talking about six straight play-throughs, back to back.

And in those six play-throughs, I struggled to come up with anything more nuanced than “this is good.”

So allow me to flush the format here, and do a bit of a stream of consciousness about Bombino.

Bombino is good.

Bombino is very good.

Azel’s guitar sounds like what it must feel like to be an eagle as it flies above the desert.

Bombino sounds a bit like the music of Saharan Africa and the Spanish countryside, which causes it to sound like it belongs to nowhere in particular.

Which is fitting since, you know, the album sounds a bit like an eagle feels.

Bombino is free and gorgeous and beautiful and it must be experienced now.

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Human Performance by Parquet Courts sounds like what would happen if all of your favorite alt rock acts from the era between the late 1960s and mid 1980s worked on one album together.

Parquet Courts’ influences are incredibly obvious. Occasionally, the group sounds jaunty like The Modern Lovers, other times smooth and soulful like Elvis Costello, and other times jittery like The Velvet Underground.

In fact, I’m pretty sure the guitar solo for “One Man No City” was lifted directly from a track on The Velvet Underground & Nico, but I can’t place which one.

But the thing is, these influences never feel grating. It never comes across as though Parquet Courts ripping off these other bands’ sounds, nor does it ever sound like a simple homage.

Instead, it sounds as though Parquet Courts genuinely asked themselves what these different sounds would sound like together.

And the answer is that they sound like the best punk-influenced album of the year so far.

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Gallant’s debut album Ology is often beautiful, but also sounds a bit like an appetizer for the upcoming Frank Ocean record.

In many ways, Ology feels like what would’ve happened if, on channel ORANGE, Frank were a bit more concerned about making radio hits.

Which is definitely something to be said in Gallant’s favor. He’s found a way to make the decidedly hipster sounds of PBR&B a bit more accessible to pop audiences, with his voice that is equal parts Weeknd and Frank mixed with some dashes of pop acts like Jason Derulo. 

Which leads, in many ways, to R&B that plays it incredibly safe. Gallant sticks to typical stories of love and sex, never dipping into the questions posed by acts like Frank Ocean and The Weeknd. Frank Ocean asks us to accept his bisexuality; The Weeknd wrestles with his addiction on stage. 

Gallant, by contrast, just wants us to hum along.

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On Junk, M83 experiments with nostalgia, and creates some nice 80s-style pop hits, even if they occasionally lose all sense of self.

I think it’s possible to boil down much of my opinions on this album into one song: “For the Kids.”

The song is absolutely gorgeous. With haunting vocals, a groovy bassline, and some of the smoothest saxophone you’ll ever hear, “For the Kids” is the kind of smooth jam that you’ve been waiting almost 40 years to hear a new one of.

However, this is in many ways the issue with this album. So much of it has that late-70s, early-80s synthpop sound that was iconic to those years. For example, Susanne Sundfør’s vocals sound as though they could’ve been delivered by a myriad of other pop queens, and the saxophone solo, which is, I’d like to once again clarify, smooth as hell, sounds a bit like it was copied and pasted from a lost Clarence Clemens piece.

So while M83 rarely makes any sort of misstep on this record, Junk has to be seen as an homage to an earlier sound. While it is undeniably an expertly-crafted homage, it rarely, if ever, raises above that level to say something unique about itself.

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Autolux’s most recent album, PUSSY’S DEAD, is an exciting, gripping romp through a variety of different influences.

Throughout the album it would be easy to compare various moments to bands like Radiohead, Tame Impala, and even some Flaming Lips. 

But the way that Autolux stand out is through an instrumentation style that’s all their own, typically focused on slightly dissonant guitars, groovy bass, and absolutely pummelling drums. 

“Listen to the Order” is perhaps the song that best exemplifies this, and it takes me back to the time that rock used to be the most exciting genre on the scene.

Autolux accomplishes this by blending in various genres, ranging from post-punk to IDM, and of course some traditional alt-rock.

Through the extended use of different genres and influences, Autolux make PUSSY’S DEAD one of the livelier albums of the year.

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Seminal nu-metal and alternative metal band Deftones are back with their eight album, Gore.

And it’s what rock and roll should be.

Deftones have been around for a while. And bands that have been around for as long as them are faced with basically one of two choices: The Rolling Stones approach, where you continue to rest on your laurels and produce the same content continuously, or The Beatles approach, where you consistently reinvent yourself.

Thankfully, Deftones have taken the second approach on this album. This is undeniably their most mature record, dipping into the more experimental reaches of metal in order to create something unique.

Vocals from Chino Moreno vary between incredibly melodic singing and pained, retched screeches, and these vocals come over instrumentation that explores both post-metal and post-punk sounds.

The end result of this record is incredibly enjoyable. Every metalhead should make sure to make time for Gore.

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Interview 2016 is the latest in-between-albums instrumental release from Death Grips, and it shows the group experimenting with something they haven’t used much of before: subtlety.

And this doesn’t just happen by muting the bombastic vocals of MC Ride, although that is certainly a major part of it. Without Ride, Zach Hill and Andy Morin seem far more subdued, and more inclined to explore traditional song structures.

Seriously. In a slight departure for Death Grips, some of the tracks on this EP feature a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, or at least as close to that structure that an instrumental electronic track can get.

But this isn’t to say that this EP feels any less “Death Grips” than other releases by the group. Morin still uses the sound effects that have become iconic to the group, and Hill’s drumming is still incredibly complex.

Just like a trumpet with a mute in it, Death Grips’ switch to slightly more subtle music doesn’t cheapen or lessen the sound in any way; it just shifts it into a different direction.

What excites me most about Interview 2016 is the prospect of hearing some of this more subtle production styling on Death Grips’ upcoming LP, Bottomless Pit. While the absurdly frenetic, bordering-on-not-music lead single “Hot Head” seems to suggest that this sort of subtlety won’t be present on the LP, I’d still love to hear MC Ride growl and bark his way through smoother tracks like those on Interview 2016.

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At the risk of making my blog seem like a metal reviewing blog that occasionally looks at trap and pop albums in between, today we’re checking out the newest EP from experimental metal act Tombs, All Empires Fall. 

Tombs keep things short on this EP, running only about 25 minutes. But in that short amount of time, Tombs run the gamut of metal over the past 20 years or so, channeling the early Norwegian black metal scene on “Obsidian” and working its way into more progressive sounds on the final track, “V,” sounding a bit like Ghost’s most recent LP, Meliora. 

In this way, this short EP seems to mark a transition for the band. The transition from black metal to doom and prog metal sounds across this relatively short EP is seamless, blending retched screeches with powerful singing. 

Through the transitions on this EP, it would seem as though the band is heading in new directions, leaving behind their strictly black metal sound on “Obsidian” in favor of more progressive sounds like “V.” 

And I’m all on board for more of that.

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Pet Shop Boys, the UK’s incredibly successful electro pop duo, are back with their thirteenth album, Super.

And it’s about as nostalgic as can be.

The album starts strong with fun, club-friendly future-hits like “Happiness” and “The Pop Kids.” Super, like all Pet Shop Boys releases, is fun and danceable. Sure, it may seem a bit...similar to much of their previous work, there’s something to be said for finding a niche and sticking to it. Pet Shop Boys do that well here.

Things begin to get a bit weird on the track “The Dictator Decides.” There’s something that just doesn’t make sense about a catchy electro pop track with lyrics speaking about a dystopian world under a dictator. It just doesn’t work for me.

Pet Shop Boys perform at their best when their lyrics are more or less inconsequential; it’s far more comfortable for an audience that is most likely to hear this music at a posh club in London.

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Explosions in the Sky, always the masters of crafting a sense of place with their music, bring you straight to the titular Wilderness on their newest non-soundtrack album, their first since 2011.

The Wilderness firmly occupies a single, specific type of time. Imagine that you’re wandering through a snowy forest in the dead of winter, and I’m talking the kinds of forests they have in Norway that are dense and often dark.

But today, the sun is beating down. In spite of the bitter cold threatening to shrivel up your eyes until they fall out of your head, you begin to sweat underneath your heavy winter clothes.

That’s exactly what The Wilderness feels like; those strange, unearthly days where you’re simultaneously hot and cold and nothing seems to make much sense.

Explosions in the Sky capture this sort of feeling through some incredibly expert musicianship. The group creates a sharp dichotomy between the melody and rhythm parts of their songs.

The melody often employs light and airy shoegaze guitars, while the rhythm sections keep things cold and impersonal. 

This difference between instrumental parts makes the album feel beautifully uncomfortable, just like that bizarre warm-but-cold day.

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Are You Serious, the newest from Andrew Bird, is a gorgeous smattering of styles that I just can’t get enough of.

Bird stays committed to only one thing on this album, and it’s unmitigated smoothness.

Things start off like extra-smooth peanut butter on the album’s opening track, “Capsized,” which starts the album on a decidedly 70s R&B note. But the album quickly moves from there, heading into “Roma Fade” which sounds, in many ways, like it could’ve been a Father John Misty track.

From there, Bird seems to try to capture the magic of Radiohead’s In Rainbows in a definitively more upbeat way on “Truth Lies Low” (pay attention to the strumming guitar toward the end to really hear this influence).

The real gem of this album, though, is “Left Handed Kisses,” featuring Fiona Apple, who provides Bird with a duet that absolutely bristles with emotional charge. Apple and Bird bring a ton of truly negative emotions to this track, and it’s unspeakably beautiful due to it.

Until the full release of the album, you can stream it here, thanks to NPR’s First Listen program. You’ll be glad you did.

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I stumbled upon you blog, and it's such an awesome concept. I don't know if you've heard of an artist named Andrew Bird, but he just released his newest album this past Friday. It isn't on Spotify or other streaming services just yet, but NPR has it on their website. You should review it if you get a chance.

That's a great idea! Andrew Bird it is. I'll listen after work!

[365daysofalbums]

Gwen Stefani’s newest record, This Is What the Truth Feels Like, leaves me wondering a bunch of different things.

But most of them boil down to some variation of “Why?”

Like, why is Fetty Wap on here? He just feels out of place.

Or, why is Gwen Stefani singing about sending photos in a song that somehow feels vaguely out of touch with how modern tech culture works?

Or, seriously, why is Fetty Wap here?

Or, does Gwen really need to be so cringe-worthy on “Naughty”?

Some of the musical ideas here are very enjoyable. Much of this album is, at its core, really good pop music, but it’s often overshadowed by lyrics that suggest a desire for youthfulness that Gwen just doesn’t really have any longer, and super clean production that just feels like a bit too much.

This may be what the truth feels like to Gwen, but in my opinion, many of the glaring shortcomings of this record reveal an attempt to falsely manufacture pop hits, simply to meteor them up the charts.

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In the most complimentary way possible, Weezer’s new self-titled album, otherwise known as The White Album, feels like a collection of sure-fire hit singles.

Now, normally, when I say that an album just feels like a collection of singles, I’m trying to say that each song seems to have been crafted to be popular, with little thought put into place regarding how the songs work together as a unit.

But I don’t think that’s what Weezer is up to here. Instead, the group is carefully considering the ways in which these songs interact with each other, consistently referring to similar themes of love, loss, drugs, and other themes of youth, with this campy sort of offbeat humor that strings the whole album together.

And Weezer knows how to make a clever little pop song. Nothing on this White Album lives up to the genius of a similarly nicknamed self-titled record by a different band, but I’ll be damned before I say that songs like “Thank God for Girls” or “L.A. Girlz” aren’t fun as all hell.