Favorite Music of 2017

As always, I feel like I need to emphasize that it's impossible to listen to everything, and it's even more impossible to give everything the time needed to truly appreciate it all. I'm also really bad at listening to metal and hip hop. So please let me know what I missed! Chances are I didn't even hear it.

Anyway, here's my list. As I did last year, I put links to the original reviews of the albums, if I'd reviewed them. And as always, feel free to share your own favorite music of the year. I love all this nerdy, list-trading stuff at the year's end.

Favorite Albums:

1. Björk: Utopia
Some years, the #1 spot is a no-brainer; others, it's hard to pick out one record above the rest. This year is the latter; any of these first four albums could have been my #1. But I'm giving it to Björk anyway because she freakin' deserves it. A companion of sorts to 2015's Vulnicura, Utopia takes everything that was compelling about that album and flips it—sweeping strings in place of broody electronica, ecstatically optimistic emotional landscapes instead of heart-rending pain. That's not to say this album is all sunshine, but it's so very full of life in a way that's world-shaking and contagious. Björk has called it her "Tinder" album... is this what Tinder is like?

2. Neil Cicierega: Mouth Moods
I'm still amazed at just how funny this album is, how seamlessly produced it is, how endlessly inventive with seemingly played-out pieces of pop music flotsam it is. It's a masterpiece, a call for all other works of mash-up artistry to stop because there's nowhere left to go from here.

[Read original review]

3. Harriet Tubman: Araminta
I've left way too much jazz rotting on the vine of my "I should listen to this more closely" list, but of the works I had time to spend with, Araminta is the far-and-away winner. It's tense and uncompromising in the spirit of the best jazz fusion, but it's also smooth enough to not get lost in the technical weeds.

[Read original review]

4. Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up
We had a lot of late 2000s indie rockers come back with albums this year, and most of them were pretty good. But only a few of them (I'd say this and the LCD Soundsystem album) actually feel like genuine evolutions of the band's output, and of those, only Fleet Foxes had the stones to make a freaky, elliptical, proggy puzzle of an album, and if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about proggy puzzle albums.

[Read original review here]

5. SZA: CTRL
"Love Galore" is the most well-deserved Top 40 hit of the year, and the rest of the album is at least as good. I liked the Solange record from last year a lot, but I think I'm feeling about this album what everyone else said they felt about that album.

[Read original review here]

6. Kendrick Lamar: DAMN.
Kendrick's fourth album is his darkest by a considerable stretch. For Kendrick, the world of 2017 is arbitrary and its God capricious, and most troubling of all is Lamar's sneaking suspicion that he might deserve it all. It's a profound and uneasy exploration of depression, and it's one that, even if I've never quite been able to embrace, I've never been able to shake either.

[Read original review here]

7. Spoon: Hot Thoughts
I mean, it's a Spoon album. Y'all know what this is.

[Read original review here]

8. Foxygen: Hang
Foxygen go glam and give us the great Queen album we never knew we needed in 2017.

[Read original review here]

9. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Polygondwanaland
King Gizzard released a lot of music in 2017. But only one of their many albums has "Crumbling Castle," the 10-minute psych rock opus that kicks off this album.

[Read original review here]

10. White Stag: Emergence
Local Knox-prog pride. The most ambitious and successful band in Knoxville's prog rock scene makes their most ambitious and successful album yet.

[Read original review here]







Great 2017 Songs Not On These Albums:

Arcade Fire: "Everything Now"—People made fun of the ABBA synths on this song, but Arcade Fire has always been a little cornball. Besides, the track's mix of cornball and earnest despair is one of the few places on the uneven Everything Now album that hits the exact tone the band is going for.

J Balvin & Willy William: "Mi Gente (feat. Beyoncé)"—I mean, "Despacito" is okay, but I've never been a huge Daddy Yankee fan, and I hope we can all agree that as long as we need English-language pop stars to ensure the crossover of Spanish-language songs, Beyoncé is a much better ambassador than the Biebs. Besides, this song owns; "Despacito" does not.

David Bowie: "When I Met You"—Unless there's some hidden trove somewhere, this is the last music we'll ever hear from David Bowie. He's not talking to us here, but it's hard not to feel like lines like "You have just everything/But nothing at all" are meant to usher us into a Bowie-less world. To paraphrase my wife's favorite movie, I am so uninterested in a world without Bowie. But it's the world we have now, and at least we have this song—everything and nothing at all.

Brockhampton: "Gummy"—It sounds like an M.I.A. song covered by West Coast rappers, and I dig it.

Cardi B: "Bodak Yellow"—I love a good rags-to-riches-self-love debut, and here we are with the catchiest one in years.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Cut to the Feeling"—Have we all agreed that CRJ is the pop queen of the 2010s? Because when the best pop song of the year comes from a tossed-off tie-in to a crappy animated movie, kept off the best pop album of the 2010s because it wasn't good enough, I think we need to start edging Taylor Swift off the stage to make room for Carly.

Coldplay: "All I Can Think About Is You"—It sounds like old Coldplay, and I love old Coldplay, so sue me.

Brian Eno & Kevin Shields: "Only Once Away My Son"—A collaboration between Eno and the My Bloody Valentine guy is obviously great on paper, but it's still remarkable to hear just how great it is in the flesh. A magnificent drone that soothes and shakes in equal measure.

Father John Misty: "Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution"—Considering we haven't had a major, society-upheaving revolution in the Western world (yet), it may be a tad premature for ol' J. Tillman to be having anxiety about the post-revolution world. Still, there's something affecting about the way his character recognizes our current system's inherent problems while still feeling a sort of melancholy about what might be lost if we overthrew it all.

HAIM: "I Want You Back"—This was knocking about with "Cut to the Feeling" as my Song of the Summer. The platonic ideal of that HAIM appropriation of '90s pop kitsch with millennial sensibilities.

Jay-Z: "The Story of O.J."—Possibly Jay-Z's best song, and definitely Jay-Z's best music video. Also: "You wanna know what's more important than throwing away money at a strip club? ... ... ... Credit."

LCD Soundsystem: "Other Voices"—I praised LCD up in the Crack-Up blurb for actually evolving their sound, and good on Murphy for that. But I guess my favorite American Dream track is the one that sounds most like their old stuff. Am I losing my edge? I'm probably losing my edge, right?

Lorde: "Green Light"—I like contemplative, moody Lorde as much as the rest of y'all, but come on, this song rocks. Lorde cuts loose and gives us the yearning pop song we'll never deserve.

The National: "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness"—I might be too far out of my indie rock 4 lyfe phase to deeply care about a The National album again, but this song has some very cool guitar work and even a guitar solo. It's really great and not at all weepy. I like weepy, but this is what I'm talking about.

Margo Price: "All American Made"—Price's sophomore record doesn't have anything as great as show-stoppingly great as "Hands of Time," but it does have "All American Made," a melancholy piece of social commentary that feels like it stepped of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. She says she wrote it during the Obama presidency, and a few of the lines bear that out (surely we don't need to wonder if Trump "sleeps at night"), but this piece is oh-so 2017.

St. Vincent: "Los Ageless"—Out of an album full of St. Vincent trying to be more melodically immediate, this song is the most melodically immediate, and with an absolutely killer chorus, too.

Sufjan Stevens: "Wallowa Lake Monster"—There's a persistent theme in my music-listening habits this year where I kept listening to isolated Sufjan Stevens songs and thinking, "Boy, that's really good; I should listen to one of his albums." I still haven't listened to one of his albums all the way through, but this song, a previously unreleased track from his Carrie & Lowell sessions, is really good.

Taylor Swift: "New Year's Day"—The old Taylor may be dead, but this is a convincing imitation of her. There are more forward-thinking songs on reputation, and if I'd spent more time with the album, I might have chosen one of them. Still, "Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere" is one of those perfectly realized lines that Swift shrugs off so effortlessly that it's easy to miss that she's one of the most talented pop writers of her generation.

The War on Drugs: "Strangest Thing"—Some of The War on Drugs's "lookatme, I'm '80s heartland rock!" thing wears thin at times, but on the other hand, there's "Strangest Thing," pretty much the best-case scenario for this aesthetic, a monster midtempo composition that starts big with its synths and guitars and just keeps getting bigger for its nearly 7 minutes.

Kamasi Washington: "Truth"—It's a 13-minute jazz composition that's both standalone and the culmination of a bunch of musical themes from Washington's Harmony of Difference EP. Beautiful and bright and lively, it's the sort of song that lives up to jazz's ideal as the most socially constructive American genre.

Mini-Reviews for February 13 - 19, 2017

Last week, I had more negative reviews that I think I've ever hard. Well, this week, I'm pretty sure I have a higher concentration of A reviews than I've ever had. A nice turn of events, to be sure.

Movies

Passion (2012)
This relatively typical Brian De Palma erotic thriller is almost dumb enough to work. Almost. There's an admirable straight-facedness to the silliness here that might read a little more readily as deadpan if De Palma were just a tiny bit nuttier with his style—we've of course got a split-screen segment, and Rachel McAdams in villain mode is something I wasn't aware I needed so badly. But in between the fireworks, the film is just kind of dull and tepid, making at least 75 percent of the movie generic trash (and not the good kind). Grade: C+

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
As a musical about the survivor of a botched sex-change operation in East Germany, the film has plenty of poignant and surprising things to say about gender identity and the specifics of Hedwig's experience. However, the biggest success of the film is that it's music is comprised entirely of glam rock songs that really and truly rock. I've seen my fair share of musicals that attempt to exist within rock aesthetic—from Memphis to Hairspray—and often, the truth is that it's only rock in the vaguest of touches, instead sticking closely to native show tune archetypes. Not so with Hedwig, whose songs sound everything like the peers of Lou Reed, David Bowie, and T. Rex in the early '70s, only if all of those artists had collectively decided to eschew any semblance of coyness and innuendo and instead gone right for the sexually explicit melodrama. It's all delightfully funny, raucous, and full of feelings—likely the greatest crop of songs in a 21st-century film yet, animating a truly great 21st-century film. Grade: A

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
At the risk of seeming foolish through absolutist statements, Taxi Driver is the most spiritually bereft of any work by the legendarily spiritual Martin Scorsese. Maybe this is (along with its troublesome social subtext) why it's the only acclaimed Scorsese that I've never really felt much about. So imagine my joy upon discovering that, among other things, Bringing Out the Dead is a sort of corrective to the aspirituality of Taxi Driver. Set in the same (albeit two decades removed) New York underbelly, populated by much the same cast of misfits, criminals, destitutes, social outcasts, the movie again stars a man obligated to roam the city nightlife and pick up strangers—this time, he's driving an ambulance, and that redemptive role, rather than the purgatorial taxi, seems to have made all the difference. Bringing Out the Dead is practically ecstatic in its spirituality, and the line between here and hereafter has never been so porous in Scorsese's work: everywhere, the streets are haunted by the memories (but come on, we know [heck, we're told] they're ghosts) of those souls lost under the watch of Nicolas Cage's ambulance driver. The dead walk and talk, and even the living speak openly of of Jesus, imbuing something as profane as the revival of a heroin overdose with implication of holy resurrection. And then there's the final shot, which is, for all intents and purposes, the spitting image of a Renaissance devotional image. I don't know why people don't talk about this one more; it's one of Scorsese's masterpieces. Grade: A

Whisper of the Heart (耳をすませば) (1995)
It's minor Studio Ghibli fare, lacking the depth of texture and wonder that characterizes the studio's best work. But minor is far from bad, and Whisper of the Heart is a savory little slice-of-life film, chronicling a low-stakes but heartfelt coming of age. I love how small everything is: the story, under most circumstances, would have been a micro-budget live-action indie, but under director Yoshifumi Kondo (his sole director credit before his death in 1998), it's languished over in lavish detail that brings its myriad poignancies and trivialities to life. Like I said, it's not among the studio's best—a few last-minute gestures ring a little false, stretching the smallness a bit too much—but it is the sort of modest work that it seems only Ghibli would put out with this care. Grade: B+

Ordet (1955)
Ordet is, to vaguely spoil its simple plot, a film about recontextualizing the idea of a miracle. Set in that ever-fertile environment for religious dialogue, postwar Europe, the movie focuses intently on the problems of modernity and science within Christian supernatural belief. Characters grapple with God's silence; they experience crushing hardship; they stare in horror at the abyss of losing belief—this is about 90% of the film before the humble yet powerful insertion of the supernatural into this context. In doing so, Ordet is able to simultaneously set its story within a rational, mid-century perspective that wouldn't feel out of place within one of the more cynical post-belief Bergman films or any number of the "death of God" European art films from the '50s and '60s and also preserve its supernatural underpinnings as legitimately supernatural and not just a convenient quirk of the film's world. If you've been raised in Christianity and read the Bible at all, you'll know the tendency for the stories of miracles to take on a mundane quality through sheer repetition ("Well, of course Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, I know that already"). Ordet, then, with its viciously realist, doubting setting, becomes a compelling reminder of the sheer wonder of the miraculous that I think we've lost through our familiarity and distance from the events depicted in scripture. The result is one of the most beautiful and affirming ruminations on faith I've ever seen committed to film. Grade: A

Music

Foxygen - Hang (2017)
We could use more glam in what's left of the indie rock scene, so it's a nice evolution to have Foxygen, former Velvet Underground torchbearers, follow in Lou Reed's footsteps toward poppier, more theatrical ground. With the lush strings and chamber pop production, though, Lou Reed probably isn't the best point of reference anymore; "Follow the Leader" feels a bit like a T. Rex strut, while the singalong "Avalon" has the hallmarks of a great Queen track. And that's just the opening two songs. It's not groundbreaking music, but, especially after the double-album dud, ...And Star Power, it's lively, boisterous, and, most of all, lots of fun. Grade: B+

The Men - Leave Home (2011)
The debut by prolific punk rockers The Men has all the mean ferocity of the band's best work with little of the spacey fluff that's padded out some of their more recent releases. The first song, "If You Leave..." is sedate and fuzzed out, the weakest track here, but don't let that fool you; track two, "Lotus," with its "ONE TWO THREE FOUR" count off and subsequent guitar theatrics, kicks the album into a high gear it seldom leaves and often betters later on, particularly in the scorching mid-album duo, "L.A.D.O.C.H." and "()." It's solid, high-energy punk throughout and worth checking out if you're looking for that sort of thing. Grade: B+

Favorite Music of 2013

Well, folks, it's almost the end of 2013, and you know what that means for the pop culture world: lists. Being the shameless trend-follower that I am, I decided to make a list of my own. So here it is. My favorite music of 2013.

It speaks to my unhealthy addiction to obsessing about pop culture that I managed to craft this post in the midst of end-of-semester projects and papers. Yeah, making lists like these is pretty self-indulgent (even more so in my case, considering I really know next to nothing about music), but I've been doing the whole self-indulgent-blogger thing for about five months already, so why stop now? I do realize that it's only the 7th of December, so this is technically my favorite 2013 music released between January 1st and December 7th. Having looked at the release schedule for the rest of the month, though, I don't think I'll be interested in anything else released this month.

Still, it's probably in my best interest to admit that this list was not made with any sort of comprehensive knowledge of 2013's musical output. Even not counting these last few weeks of December I'm ignoring, I'm sure there are many, many great albums and songs I've missed, especially because I have only a narrow exposure to this year's releases. Metal and rap, for example, are almost completely absent from this post because I don't keep up with either genre very closely. So if you think I've missed something great, let me know! I'm always open for music suggestions. Alternately, I realize this list (as well as all other pop culture lists) is a bit reductive and arbitrary, so if you disagree with my rankings, let me know that, too! Discussion is the great product of lists like these, and I wholeheatedly encourage it.

Sorry for all the wordiness, both in the above introduction and in the commentary below. Feel free to skip it all if you want. It won't hurt my feelings. Now, without further ado, let the listing commence.

Favorite Albums

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
Vampire Weekend shed most of their world-music and twee influences and upped the thematic heft of their lyrics, and they managed to do so without losing their ear for lightweight melody, by itself a great achievement. What's even more impressive is that in the process they created something that is actually profound, something I never expected of VW (a band I considered good but mostly just "for fun," whatever that means). Modern Vampires of the City is about the disconnect between doubt and faith that in the end comes down on the side of doubt, but what's great about it is its nuance in that position, making the faith just as appealing, if only romantically so. Very compelling stuff.

2. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
The rumors are true: Reflektor is too long, the lyrics can be overbearing, and it lacks the chest-thumping climax of previous Arcade Fire albums. It speaks to the towering achievement of Reflektor that even with those flaws, the Arcade Fire's latest is a near-masterpiece of rock theatrics. You'll be hard-pressed to find a band out there right now (especially in the increasingly complacent indie world that birthed AF) so committed the marriage of sonic expansion and conceptual complexity. More so than ever before, Arcade Fire's approach to music recalls the '70s heyday of Neil Young, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie, when rock was not only a sound but a medium for philosophical discourse.

3. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
Before Shaking the Habitual, I hadn't listened to The Knife very much outside of "Heartbeats," the closest this duo every got to a hit song. With Shaking the Habitual, though, The Knife is about as far from "Heartbeats" as you could imagine. Gone are the electronica hooks, and in their place are dissonance, ambiance, and polyphonic rhythms. It's hypnotic and tense music full of strange left turns (19-minute ambient interlude, anyone?) and dance beats to soundtrack the most paranoid party you've ever been to. The whole thing takes some close listening to get into, but once you're on its brainwave, it's entirely worth the effort.

4. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
When I wrote about Janelle Monáe's first album, The ArchAndroid, in my 2010 year-end list of albums (in one of those old-fashioned Facebook notes, no less—hello, old-school social media), I wrote that she was the only contemporary R&B artist I really liked. Well, things have changed in the three years since (both in my own musical tastes and the creatively renewed R&B scene), but Janelle Monáe is still the queen of whatever genre she decides to try on. The Electric Lady isn't quite as colorful as the kaleidoscopic ArchAndroid, more focused on soul and funk grooves, but it's still an inventive, danceable, and infectiously fun entry into Monáe's android world. Power up!

5. Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic
I don't really have anything to add to my initial write-up on this album and its position in the current musical landscape. It's a great album full of fun songs with great hooks, made even greater for people like me who hold an unabashed affection for the late-'60s underground scene its production mimics. Fans of Loaded rejoice!

6. Savages: Silence Yourself 
Sufjan Stevens may not have been a big fan of the font used on the cover (and I'm wont to agree with him—it's a bit cluttered, isn't it, folks?), but other than that, there's not much to complain about with Savages' debut. Propulsive tunes like "She Will" and "I Am Here" are give the record an awesomely primal punk sound, while pieces like "Waiting For a Sign" and "Marshall Dear" texture out the album with tinges of black metal and jazz. The way I'm talking about it kind of makes Savages' music sound academic, and in a sense it is. But really, Silence Yourself just rocks hard. Prepare to headbang.
 

7. My Bloody Valentine: m b v
I was still in diapers when the last (and long-presumed final) My Bloody Valentine record, Loveless, debuted, so I can't make any claims to the decades-long wait that some fans endured for this album. Still, having a new MBV album was an unexpected pleasure for me, and having that album somehow not turn into indie rock's Chinese Democracy (much less be this good) was an even greater pleasure. With the glut of dream pop/shoegaze that indie rock has experienced in recent years, it's pretty awesome that the granddaddy of the genre can still come back to teach everyone something new.

8. David Bowie: The Next Day 
Next in this year's "Surprise Art-Rock Return" is David Bowie, an artist who I (along with many others) assumed had entered that semi-retired, semi-nostalgic state of his career where he would churn a new single every few years just to let everyone know he was still alive (see also: The Rolling Stones). Boy was I wrong. With The Next Day, Bowie comes out of the gates swinging, delivering a smart, winning collection of hard rock ("The Next Day"), majestic ballads ("You Feel So Lonely You Could Die"), and classic-Bowie weirdness ("Dancing In Outer Space"). Semi-retired, nothing.

9. Jars of Clay: Inland 
I have a lot of problems with CCM (that's Contemporary Christian Music, for those of you unfamiliar with the wild, woolly world of Evangelical lingo). But Jars of Clay have always been a bright spot in the genre for me, and on this album, they've rarely been better. On Inland (without a doubt their best work since Good Monsters [by my money, still their masterpiece]), Jars of Clay deliver some of the most poignant and insightful lyrics of their career, set to some of their most adventurous musicianship in years. It's a compelling look at what it means to be aging, irrelevant, and Christian in 2013, and you'll be hard-pressed to find introspection that balances doubt and joy so well.

10. The National: Trouble Will Find Me 
Speaking of balancing doubt and joy... well, The National aren't so good at it. This Brooklyn quintet has always skewed much closer to the doubting (some might say despairing) end of the emotional spectrum, and this album is no different. Trouble Will Find Me shows The National in the rockingest mood they've been in since 2008's Boxer, but don't let the increased tempo fool you; these are still the same sad sacks we know and love, and the results are typically gorgeous. What's pleasantly surprising about this one, though, is that the band gets less and less dour as the album progresses, and by "Humiliation," the lyrics are actually playful. Maybe they're closer to joy than I think.


10 Great Songs Not On These Albums

Atoms for Peace: "Default"—While the Atoms for Peace album AMOK lacked the warmth and sparse sensuality that made Radiohead's underrated King of Limbs so enjoyable for me (was I the only one hoping Flea would play a more prominent role in AfP?), Thom Yorke's latest project yielded its fair share of good songs, most notably this one. "Default" is groovy and percussive and awesome in a way that Radiohead hasn't been for years.

Chance the Rapper: "Pusha Man (feat. Nate Fox & Lili K.)"—Chance the Rapper's mixtape Acid Rap was number 11 on the albums list, so really, the whole thing is worth a listen. But this song in particular captures the best of Chance the Rapper: the jazzy production, Chance's woozy delivery, the uneasiness with drug culture, and the tension between hedonism and social commentary that undergirds the whole mixtape.

The Civil Wars: "From This Valley"—This one's just gorgeous. There was apparently some intra-band turmoil leading up to the release of The Civil Wars' eponymous second album (so much so that it's kind of a surprise that there's an album at all), but you can't hear any of it on this song. It's a beautiful bit of country folk, and if we never hear anything else from The Civil Wars again, it might well be their mini-Abbey Road, for all the joy its 3:33 run time exudes.

Daft Punk: "Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams)"—Daft Punk albums tend to run a little long and tedious for my tastes (this year's Random Access Memories included), but taken in single doses, this duo can sure crank out some excellent tunes. Of the veritable tsunami of neo-disco that's come out in the past few years, "Get Lucky" is among the best, funkiest, and catchiest of them all, not to mention a pretty great return to pop songwriting by Daft Punk.

The Flaming Lips: "You Lust (feat. Phantogram)"—Has there ever been a group so determined to defy aging-rock-band conventions as The Flaming Lips? Thirty years into their careers, these guys are still constantly pushing themselves into new territories, be it 24-hour-long songs, Virgin Mobile commercials, possible Ke$ha collaborations, or, as is the case with "You Lust," 13-minute krautrock jams. "You Lust" sounds more like a cut from a Can or Kraftwerk album than anything from the band that released The Soft Bulletin, but that doesn't stop it from being a fantastically aggressive, provocative piece of music. It's dark stuff, to be sure, but it's also riveting to hear unfold.

Laura Marling: "Master Hunter"—This British folk singer channels Joni Mitchell and especially Led Zeppelin III-period Led Zeppelin, and the results are fantastic. Laura Marling delivers an awesome three minutes of progressive folk, sounding at once mythic and personal.

Saint Pepsi: "Call Me Maybe (SAINT PEPSI Edit)"—I've already written at length about my love for "Call Me Maybe," so I'll just leave you with this proposition: what if it were an R&B slow jam? Wonder no more.

Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"—Even for someone like me who doesn't listen to a lot of radio Top 40, 2013 was a great year for pop music. Exhibit A: "Mirrors." While I never really got into the whole "JT pretends to be Stevie Wonder" shtick that was The 20/20 Experience, "Mirrors" hits that epic, melodic, just-cheesy-enough sweet spot that all Justin Timberlake songs should aim for. Don't listen to the radio edit; let all eight minutes of the album cut wash over you. An added bonus: the song also has a seriously great music video set to the eight-minute version.

Kanye West: "New Slaves"—Yeezus. Good grief. For every brilliant moment Kanye delivers on that album (and there are quite a few), there are at least three more eye-rolling, narcissistic, and straight-up ugly ones in close proximity. "New Slaves," however, manages to condense everything great about Yeezus (the noisy production, the social commentary, the classic-soul allusions) without absorbing the worst (the misogyny, the self-obsession, the *ugh* "Jesus wept" line). There's still plenty of ugliness in "New Slaves," but I'd argue that it's necessary ugliness in service of the song's razor-sharp criticism of consumerism. Kanye's often a provocateur, but when he's using that status to call out the racism in consumer culture and big business, I don't so much mind it.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Sacrilege"—Mosquito is not a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, but "Sacrilege," the lead single and opening track from that album, is most definitely a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song. One of their best ever, I'd say. It takes the high production values and sweeping scope of their more recent albums and mixes it with the visceral impact of their earlier work. The end product is stunning.

Until next time!

Where Have You Gone, Velvet Underground?: How the Indie Scene No Longer Seems Interested in Lou Reed and Company

The Velvet Underground was an New York City-based rock band who, under Andy Warhol's management, permanently altered the landscape of popular music through its blah blah blah blah. You know the story. Or if you don't, the introduction to the band's Wikipedia article can bring you up to speed with the highlights. Calling the Velvet Underground influential is one of the oldest lines in rock criticism, so I'm not really going to spend too much time defending it. Plenty of more insightful ink has already been spilled on the topic; no use rehashing all that here. The Velvet Underground's output is a landmark in music history, one that has inspired many an artist. You won't here me arguing that point.

But is it still inspiring artists?

Ironically, this question came to me after listening to the most recent album from Foxygen, a band that is without a doubt inspired by the Velvet Underground. If you haven't already, go give Foxygen's latest, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, a few spins. In my reckoning, it's one of the year's best albums, and also one of the funnest, especially if you're into late-'60s-style psych rock. The album takes tons of cues from that era's heavy-hitters, including the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and any number of bands captured on the Nuggets compilation, and it spins those allusions into a playful homage.

But as much as McCartney and Mick Jagger have left fingerprints all over the record, the reference point that stuck me most was that of the Velvet Underground, particularly from the poppier Velvet Underground/Loaded iteration of the band. There is, of course, that famous Brian Eno quote that "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies [of the first Velvet Underground record] started a band," and Foxgen is definitely one of them, at least metaphorically (the band members' birth dates preclude them from actually being around for the first pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico).

The influence is most pronounced on the album's second track, "No Destruction" (embedded below), but you can hear VU touches in all the songs, from the "Herion"-style, slow-to-fast percussion/organ sections in "On Blue Mountain" to lead singer Sam France's channeling of Lou Reed's drawling monotone pretty much throughout the album.

We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic is only Foxygen's second album released since Jagjaguwar Records picked them up in early 2011 (I have yet to listen to their first album, Take the Kids Off Broadway), which makes them relative newcomers to the music industry. And as I got to listening to this newcomer's album more and more over the past week, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I heard another new band that sounded remotely like it could be one of those Eno 30,000.

Of course, pop and rock radio has never had very much to do with the Velvet Underground, but where the lack of VU influence is sort of surprising to me is in the (for lack of a better term) indie music scene, an arena that has embraced the Velvet Underground sound in the past. Looking at the current generation of headlining indie darlings (Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Janelle Monáe, etc.) it's hard not to notice how distinctly un-VU most of them sound. Sure, it can be argued that none of these bands could exist in their current form without the foundations laid by the Velvet Underground, but when it comes to what they sound like[1], the Beach Boys, the Band, Prince, world music, and, um, '80s adult contemporary[2] seem like more relevant touchstones than "Sister Ray" or "Sweet Jane." There are a few exceptions (The Men and everybody's-favorite-2013-debuting-band Savages come to mind), but those are notable more for their rarity than for their place within larger trends. Compare that to the rise of indie music in the '80s and '90s, when bands like R.E.M., Belle and Sebastian[3], the Pixies, Joy Division, and My Bloody Valentine found creative potential bursting out of every nuance of the Velvet Underground's distortion-meets-NYC-underbelly sound.

I can think of two reasons that might explain the weaning of indie music from the Velvet Underground. First, perhaps the Velvet Underground sound became too much of a default template for indie music, and maybe this made the deviations from VU territory become more innovative and therefore more emulated. If you look at the best (or at least the most notable) indie rock records from about a decade ago, when current-gen bands would have been forming their sound—Funeral, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, White Blood Cells—a lot of them became known not for their use of VU-inspired noise and distortion but for the addition of electronics, nontraditional instruments, and pre-VU genres like folk and the blues. So maybe it was those elements that seemed fresher and more inspiring to younger artists, causing electronic dance music and Americana to replace post-punk and noise rock as the go-to sounds for indie bands.

Second, there's the increasing influence of hip hop and R&B on the scene, two genres that have never felt very much of the Velvet Underground's pull. When the mid-2000s thrust indie music into the mainstream, it tore down a bunch of the self-imposed stylistic barriers surrounding indie rock (guitars, whiteness), and put the scene into a conversation that included not just Arcade Fire and the Shins but also Outkast and Beyoncé. When Pitchfork has more to say about Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, and Kenye West than the new My Bloody Valentine and David Bowie albums, you know something has changed in the indie world.

And that's good. I like seeing music scenes going in new directions. Great as it is, the Velvet Underground isn't the be-all, end-all of music, even rock music, and I welcome the chance indie music has to kill its idols, so to speak. A lot of thrilling things are going on in the music world now, and I'm all for the new ideas coming out of those exciting transitions. Sometimes it's nice to have a good ol' throwback, though. And that's when I put on that new Foxygen album for the fifth time today.

But, then again, I could be wrong. Maybe you think I'm totally missing out some great new bands. Maybe you think there hasn't really been a big change in the VU's influence. Or maybe you think my reasons for the change are complete garbage. Or maybe you just want to share some related anecdote. Don't be shy: share it in the comments! Make your voice known! I'd love to hear from y'all.

Until next time.


1] A tricky game if there ever was one. If you listen hard enough to the nuances, anything can sound like it was influenced by anyone. But let's not overthink it; I'm just talking about the main sonic aesthetic of these bands.

2] Two years later, I am still confounded by the production choice to turn one of Bon Iver's prettier tunes into a Michael Bolton song.

3] Who have in recent years excised the hazier VU sound present on early albums like If You're Feeling Sinister in favor of the sunnier territory of power pop and '70s FM. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just sayin'.