Spotify Playlist: Addicted to Self-Control

Cherry Glazerr - Stuffed & Ready

I'm a sucker for 90s nostalgia, and in the current shitshow in which we live, it seems amazing to me now that angsty rock peaked well before the decade was over. Not that Cherry Glazerr is an exercise in nostalgia; while their music leans heavily on "grungy" loud-soft dynamics, it just as much recalls Japanese Breakfast's dream pop and Metric's synth rock. And, not to pigeonhole Clem Creevy, whose emotional palette is far from monochrome, but a pure strain of anger is a prominent part of it, and in the current state of things, it's hard to believe it ever went out of style. In the album's most cathartic moment, Creevy screams "I see myself in you and that's why I fucking hate you!" It's a sentiment that might look banal on paper, but when it comes around, it's earned. When Cherry Glazerr released its third album Apocalipstick in early 2017, Creevy was, in her own words, an overconfident teenager, and is now more world-weary and cynical. She conveys a relatable sense of wrongfootedness, her jabs tempered with self-effacing humour. Stuffed & Ready, however, is not the dirgy, mopey album it might sound like I'm describing. It's a pop album powered by genuine humanity and meticulous songcraft. I'd say it's "stuffed" with hooks and "ready" to rock you, but I'm not a complete and utter fuckwit. Instead I'll say that in a better world, Stuffed & Ready would be a massive hit, but paradoxically, a better world would be unable to produce it.

RIP Ginger Baker

RIP Peter Edward Baker

19 August 1939 - 6 October 2019

This is basically a memorial blog now.

Lorelle Meets The Obsolete - De Facto

One thing I might not have noticed on my first listen had I not known already is that Mexican band Lorelle Meets The Obsolete's fifth album is sung entirely in Spanish. Lorena Quintinilla/Lorelle's vocals are typically half-whispered and placed low in the mix, so I have trouble understanding what she's singing anyway. This particular creative decision is a pointed response to the clusterfuck at the border. I don't speak Spanish, but "La Maga" doesn't need a translation.

2016's Balance introduced more streamlined songwriting to the band's palette; as in the past, and particularly on that album, elements of the band's songs are familiar, even radio-ready, but are used as springboards for songs with less conventional payoff. "Líneas En Hojas"'s bass line evokes "Billie Jean", but it's more of a trance than a floor-filler. "Resistir"'s chords would be at home as the intro to a garage rock song, but the song never progresses beyond them, instead gradually adding sound to ramp up the drama. De Facto walks a fine line, relatively immediate in its appeal without filing down the band's edges to the extent that it could be reasonably described as their "pop" album. It is both their strongest album melodically and their most abstract.

Spotify Playlist: David Berman

RIP David Berman

RIP David Berman

January 4, 1967 - August 7, 2019

Spoon - Everything Hits At Once

In the scheme of things, a Spoon "best of" compilation isn't the worst thing that's ever happened, but it's legitimate to question whether it needs to exist in 2019. Streaming having taken over music consumption, you can listen to any of thousands of playlists on Spotify or dive into the band's catalogue itself.

As these things usually do, Everything At Once presents a skewed version of Spoon's history. Casual listeners can get by without hearing the band's first two albums Telephono and A Series of Sneaks and their least regarded album, 2010's Transference (none of which get a look-in here), and the band would prefer to steer the next potential super fan away from those albums while keeping the compilation concise. The selection is tilted disproportionately towards Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and They Want My Soul rather than consensus favourites Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight. This might be the band's personal taste for their own work. When it comes to omitting the first two albums, the argument could be made those albums' comparative rawness would stand out, but it's harder to argue that "Anything You Want" or "All the Pretty Girls Go to the City" couldn't easily take the place of "Do You" and "Inside Out".

Purely on its merits as a collection of songs, Everything Hits At Once holds up. Quibbles over what could have been included or excluded only underscore the strength of Spoon's catalogue. Its sequence competently corrals a bunch of songs recorded over a 20 year period, but the title almost inadvertently alludes to one of its shortcomings; by design, everything hits not so much at once, but one after the other without reprieve. There's nothing wrong with that approach, but I prefer the push and pull of Spoon's albums, and you don't get that here without the minimalist atmospherics of songs such as "Paper Tiger" and "The Ghost of You Lingers" or acoustic numbers such as "10:20 AM" and "Vittorio E", but hopefully Everything Hits At Once will implore people to discover that for themselves.