Best of 2024 pt. 3 - Albums

Attempting to revive the lost art of writing a year-end album blurb you might read without your eyes glazing over (at least not for the normal reasons)

The Monty Hall problem, but for which album you might think is a 7/10 if you’re being generous

In the past few years I’ve had to admit to myself that even in the days of my most voracious album-oriented listening, I could hardly ever remember how more than a few albums actually sounded once the year turned over. I have no idea what I’ll ultimately remember about my Top 20 albums list, which I keep more as mnemonic crutch than as critical statement.

Last year, this grim acknowledgment led me to ignore albums altogether, merely linking to writing about albums when it occasionally happened, like my Singles Jukebox review of Kesha’s “Eat the Acid.” I never wrote much about my #2 album of the year, Núria Graham’s Cyclamen, and the writing highlight from that album was the comments section for a League of Extraordinary Tracks round in which it did well. As for #3, Mellow & Sleazy x Felo Le Tee’s The III Wise Men, someone else wrote something better than I could muster. One year later, those three are in fact the ones that I still think about and listen to a lot. I’m hoping the same is true of this year’s trio.

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Willow: Empathogen

I spent as much time groaning about Willow’s lyrics this year as I did trying (unsuccessfully) to write a formal piece on why those lyrics are Good, Actually. The short of it was: words are subservient to the song-unit, and when the song-unit works this can, but doesn’t have to, change your relationship to the words. But more often, a song’s holistic quality makes the words’ goodness or badness somewhat moot; this is most obvious in the non-English music I listen to, where I can be anything from curious about what lyrics might mean to actively thankful for not having any clue what they’re talking about. In K-pop, where languages get swapped in and out like outfits in a fashion montage, knowing what the words mean doesn’t tell you everything, or sometimes even very much at all, of what you need to know about the song. There are plenty of songs in English that get by on phonetics: Max Martin was the king of this mode, more so even than spiritual godparents ABBA. For all their uncanny phonetic prowess, ABBA still had higher aspirations and sometimes wrote good words, whereas Max Martin doesn’t care about good words because they’re so rarely the right words. I could but won’t argue that in music, at some level all words are sounds first and signifiers second. That is to say, I think there’s a strong argument to be made that this is true, but I also find that argument too dogmatic to defend.

But the thing is, none of this is really related to what Willow is doing. The words are not subservient to the song-unit. The music does not change my relationship to them. The words’ goodness and badness is not moot—I think about it a lot! And it does not really even work at the phonetic level. But the songs are also wholly the right songs, so my brain short-circuits a little. And, crucially, this short-circuiting is not why I like it, either, it is just an interesting thing that is happening while I like it.

I spent the whole year filibustering my thoughts on this album. But I also spent the whole year listening to it. I mean, I like it: Willow has figured out a neo-soul that doesn’t smack of smugly expansive tasteful gentility even though it can also be that if you want; she’s developed an off-kilter melody strategy heavy on left hooks that she never telegraphs, loves to seesaw between fifth and sixth intervals right at the end of a phrase like a sharp gasp from a jump scare that doesn’t code as pure shock, also as warm surprise (“ha, she got me again”); she’s got more blues in her vocal lines than most pop these days but filters it through pop-punk rigidity rather than, say, R&B flexibility;¹ she’s a distinctive singer without a ton of obvious grain who also manages to avoid the annoying brass/whisper dichotomy we’ve been locked into for some time. The stultifying battle of theater kids versus…well, different theater kids, the whispery ones. Main stage versus the black box next to the boiler room, maybe? Willow’s got to be a theater kid, too — it’s all theater kids — but she’s not main stage and she’s not boiler room.

You get the sense that Willow is following something simpler than all that suggests, something easier, like she has a tune in her head that has to get out. It’s like when Mary Steenburgen had that surgery complication that compelled her to write Oscar bait.² Her hit rate is amazing: I don’t think Willow has flubbed a single tune in something like five years.

I’ll be honest with you, if you’re going to listen to one album on my list because I told you there’s something interesting happening in it, you should pick either the bad one you might like anyway or the good one you probably won’t like. I won’t say which is which, in part because I’m not sure which is which, except that neither of them are the Willow album. I believe everyone will like the Willow album at least a little, but also will not totally understand what I hear in it, which is appropriate because I also don’t totally understand what I hear in it. If it helps, Willow has done this twice now. Her last album, Coping Mechanism, was also my album of the year in 2022. I didn’t write about it then and don’t plan to now.

So consider this a review about the notes you don’t hear and the words you don’t read and the ideas you don’t think up and the blurbs you don’t skim until your eyes glaze over. There must be something going on here, even though I can’t really tell you what it is, and certainly you can’t tell you what it is because if you could why would you still be reading, except to be nice? That’s just sort of the end of it. C’est la vie, it is what it is, insert another tautology here that is insufficient but annoyingly apt. That’s what Empathogen is like. (Oh, also, I guess it slaps?)

070 Shake: Petrichor

About halfway through my second listen to the new 070 Shake album, I had posted enough online about how bizarre and amazing Petrichor was that several people I chat with dropped everything and really listened to it, which is a power of obnoxious evangelism I have over folks maybe once a year (there’s always a wolf eventually, right?), so I try to really make it count. I have no regrets: Kat Stevens informed me that this album is “utter balls (14yo me would be enjoying it immensely),” which got me thinking about how at age 40 I am really proud to have finally matured into a 14-year-old Kat Stevens.

I don’t know what anyone was thinking on this one. The vibe is like the episode of The Twilight Zone with the telepathic kid who can control everyone with his mind, the whole town terrified trying to appease him, smiling with clenched teeth while their hearts are pounding and their palms are sweating. No one said “no” in the making of this album, but it’s not a “yes-and” album either. It’s a “not no, but...” album.

One benefit of consciously avoiding every pop star’s tabloid background is that I don’t feel obligated to pivot in this paragraph to talk about the celebrity context in which this album was created and thus perhaps where all those not-no’s came from, which god forbid might force me to figure out who Lily Rose-Depp is. To be totally honest with you, I could never even keep track of who 070 Shake was, either (they’re not Lily Rose-Depp, that much I can tell you), even though I liked their 2020 album and remember its cover, with its drawing of a woman in a cybernetic suit with wires coming out of the head like Tetsuo: The Iron Man. It sort of sounded like that, too, but not enough.

Katherine St. Asaph gave Petrichor an even-handed review over at Pitchfork, and the main takeaway there for background’s sake is that this album both formally and institutionally emerges from Kanyecore. I don’t have much more use for Kanye Without Kanye than I ever did for Kanye With Kanye (then again, I backed Diddy’s album in the Overrated Asshole Auteur Challenge in 2010, so maybe don’t look to me for opinions here), so I’m thankful that no one ever asked me to review this thing. I would be much less kind to the album, and would have written things like “this album sounds like 100 different bad ideas bruising for a fight but somehow never coming to blows with each other, and in places is, no two ways about it, utter balls.” It’s at least an 8.2.

Will take the opposite approach of the last review and go track by track with this one.

SIN

• The first thing I notice is when the pianist plays a jazz chord—several times—that I’ve been stuck in a rut playing myself for years now because I liked the way it sounded once and just can’t stop playing the damn thing from muscle memory.³ “Sin” has until then been a painfully plain I-IV-I-IV piano ballad, like if “Hallelujah” just kept repeating the first line over and over again. That jazz chord really thwacks you when you’re least expecting it. And this is how the album goes: it keeps thwacking you even though it is seemingly constructed in an environment of dour thwacklessness.

• This song eventually layers on sonics until it has amassed: fake synth choir; electric guitar noodling; annoyingly phased vocals; a Pink Floyd-ish crescendo; a Beatles piano figure played simultaneously with corny 80s synths; the sort of “let’s record the feedback from the amp!” bits that Radiohead might do to show you they woke up like this. Most of this is happening simultaneously. It’s prog rock for Gen Z doomers.

ELEPHANT

• The thing that Kanye never understood about prog is that it’s not just about more, it’s also about awe, and awe seems like an emotion that Kanye is incapable of. It requires a certain humility about the bigness of the universe even if you’re the arrogant fool who will try to manage that bigness. Big sad fuh-hee-lings are one way to point to the wondrous black expanse that is also a void and say, in DiCaprio meme fashion, “that’s the void.”

• I have a theory that you’re either animated by the void outside or the void inside. I’m a void-outside type, enjoy looking inside at all the knick-knacks I’ve got knocking around in here, but try not to think too much about how much nothing there is available to me out there if I go looking for it. For a void-insider, outer space is no big deal because you’ve got all the terrifying nothingness you need whenever you close your eyes. 070 Shake has done the neat trick of making a void-inside album as void-outside music.

• This really is a pretty nifty guitar album. Guitars are great!

PIECES OF YOU

• This album thumps and insists on itself, here’s the second song in a row that tramples like an elephant, this one about the pieces left behind after trampling or being trampled.

• OK, sure, you can definitely hear the Kanye, but it’s a reminder that the only time that Kanye really succeeded as a prog artist (a little) was with 808s and Heartbreak, which is also the only Kanye album I listen to anymore, and is also interestingly bad in some of the same ways that this album is. (Both albums are good! This album is better.)

• Incredible that 070 Shake has cracked the code for layering in plodding piano dirges—throw everything else at the wall, too, the spaghetti and the sauce.

VAGABOND

• Baroque! I suppose it helped immersing myself in 1974 for a month this year; I am much more charitable to prog now than I might have been otherwise.

• Hm, Dark Side of the Moon Sign?

• Speaking of moon signs, this also reminds me of Kesha’s darkly carinvalesque turn on “Rich, White, Straight Men.”

LUNGS

• This is probably where people would bring Yeezus into it, but this isn’t as self-consciously abrasive. Shake’s abrasion is largely intellectual: “well, hm, that shouldn’t go here.”

• There’s a cartoonish bounce underneath, a clinically depressed Bugs Bunny going through the motions, winning the baseball game by himself but without really enjoying it.

INTO YOUR GARDEN F. JT

• Did they let 070 Shake play their own piano, like Lil Wayne doing a guitar solo on that Jon Baptiste song? Probably not.

• This is a hilariously draggy song to bring in a City Girl to feature on. When JT does finally drop the verse you can barely hear her under the reverb and filters, like she’s rapping while there’s a hole in the plane and the wind is threatening to rip the cabin apart.

• This album is a sort of inverse Empathogen. I’ve listened to it about ten times and I couldn’t tell you a single word uttered on it, but the feelings are clear as day. An incessant bummer, occasionally punctuated by vaguely Hawaiian guitar twang.

BATTLEFIELD

• A Beach Boys choral sketch that nearly blossoms into a big ‘10s arena R&B anthem like RAYE might do a meta take on, but it never really goes there. Every time you think this album is going to zig, it…plops down and starts crying in the dirt.

WINTER BABY / NEW JERSEY BLUES

• When I wrote positively about this smeared-mascara 60s sunshine-pop (more Beach Boys, a proper medley this time), I assumed it would make more sense in the context of the album, and it does, in that it doesn’t make sense at all, but that in itself makes a lot of sense.

• Oh, a few words do come through after all — “cherry syrup medicine cures nightmares too, toxic fumes, processed foods.” Don’t spend enough time in California to talk like this.

SONG TO THE SIREN F. COURTNEY LOVE

• I have not done my due diligence on the ins and outs of the Tim Buckley original and its many covers over the years (of course David Lynch loves the This Mortal Coil cover), so I’m ill-equipped to understand the significance of what Mark Richardson told me is the notable choice of keeping the line “puzzled as the oyster.” In my defense, none of the words scan at all.

• They finally made Courtney Love sound like Ashlee Simpson after so many years of Ashlee Simpson sounding like Courtney Love! This means something…this is important..

WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME

• When I was still teaching high school, I worked with a young woman who wasn’t particularly musical but had an overriding idea for a song called “What’s Wrong With Me,” which she imagined as a big soulful R&B spite song to an ex. 070 Shake’s song couldn’t possibly be any further from what I imagined a song with this title could sound like. But then I couldn’t imagine any of the songs on this album; almost no choice made on this album would ever have occurred to me.

BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS

• Are we still having fun? I don’t think so. This is pretty intense. It’s about that feeling where you love and maybe hate someone so much that you want them to murder you. I’ll admit I’m pretty useless with the feelings chart (too often hungry or gross or overstimulated for, say, “despondent” or “lively” or “pensive”) but even given that, I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt like this. Keeping the void on the outside can be protective for this sort of stuff. Seriously, don’t murder me!

NEVER LET US FADE F. CAM

• Swirling around aimlessly with Cam to kill time before the closer. Love it.

LOVE

• I guess that means “Never Let Us Fade” was “Brain Damage” and this is the big “Eclipse”-style choral finale? For the first minute, anyway. Then it just lets a guitar have the last word for the remaining two minutes. Guitar rock is alive and well!

ROSÉ: rosie

Taylor Swift is by some distance the biggest music star in the world, so you’d think there would be a cottage industry of artists trying to out-Taylor Taylor. But although many lesser stars are dubiously compared to Taylor Swift, I think this belies the minimal impact she’s really had directly on the pop marketplace. Swift was always offering an alternative to the water-treading wannabe echoes of the 80s superstar explosion—the slow fade of a Madonna/Michael Jackson/Prince-style claim to global reach. She’s always been something else, and her artistic followers are that, but less so. In fact, lots of supposed Taylors in miniature have opened for her and in many cases have received her blessing: you know that Gracie Abrams is nowhere in the ballpark of competing with Taylor Swift because she has been anointed personally with an album feature. A bishop can’t be the Pope until the current one’s out.

That makes ROSÉ to my knowledge the only direct competition — an Antipope if you will, or a potential rival in a Godzilla versus King Kong sort of way — to the Taylor Swift project: the singular consolidation of the entire landscape of mid-aughts teenpop after teenagers hijacked the adult contemporary charts. If you follow my intellectual contortions to lay out A-pop as a conceptualization of America gradually recognizing itself as merely a huge competitor in a global pop landscape and not the mythic fount of global pop’s dreams and aspirations, you’ll note that this is ROSÉ’s “A-pop album,” but also that the importance of this is that ROSÉ doesn’t actually come from A-pop, but is rather adopting it as her genre of choice in a world domination scheme. To ROSÉ the question is not how to replicate Taylor Swift, but how to replicate Taylor Swift’s scale. How do you get the whole world to pay attention to your minor adult contemporary album while also understanding you are in fact a world-beating transnational pop conglomerate?

ROSÉ doesn’t have the chops to write Taylor Swift songs; there may not be a single surprising word on this whole album. The words operate with a certain K-pop logic that even though what you’re literally saying can signify as such if you’d like, verbal signifying is only a piece of what’s going on. It’s strange, but also strangely compelling, to hear this sort of logic play out in an undeniably cozy and personal milieu, every song at least co-written by ROSÉ (for what it’s worth). You’re not getting a laser show with this material, but you can feel the lasers humming underneath.

The album also helps to recast “APT.” as ROSÉ’s “Shake It Off,” dumped mid-album with songs surrounding it whose vibe it doesn’t match at all. It exists as an opening salvo, put out just to prove she can have a huge cheerleader-stomp #1 if she feels like it, even though that’s not what she’s all about, man. Taylor Swift is way ahead of the curve here, has already gotten to avant-depressive-cheerleader (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”), but again a direct comparison wouldn’t really capture what’s going on. There’s a lot of ground for ROSÉ to cover if she hopes to catch up, and she’s moving quickly.

The two songs with Taylor Swift most obviously in their sights are “two years” and “toxic till the end,” which do to Taylor Swift what Taylor Swift usually does to smaller artists than herself (notably Lana Del Rey and Lorde). This kind of competitive cannibalization suggests intensive study, like an opposing football team reviewing a rival’s footage before a big game, learning the tricks not to play the same way but to block and then dominate in their own way. I’d call the technique, in both Taylor and ROSÉ’s hands, defensive. Taylor was maybe defending against potential up-and-comers, even though she was the equivalent of an NFL team pitted against the #1 seed in the peewee league. (It’s also possible that she was playing with her favorite artists like a cat might play with a mouse.) ROSÉ simply has eyes on the prize, and the means and global platform to try and get it.

Taylor has been out in front for so long that at this point in her career it’s been well over a decade since she’s had any real competition. And Rosie is not “real competition” in the sense that you’d genuinely mistake it for a Taylor Swift album. For one thing, to do what Taylor Swift does, you have to write like Taylor Swift writes, and Taylor Swift’s writing is weird as hell.

There’s a line in “too bad for us” that really pinpoints the un-Swiftian nature of ROSÉ’s writing:

In the desert of us, all our tears turned to dust
Now the roses don’t grow here
I guess that love does what it wants
And that’s just too bad for us

Lots of wasted words and syllables there, a real hash, even though it sounds fine and scans, and at first blush even feels like the germ of an idea for a Taylor Swift line. Taylor Swift might go for a “we are a desert” metaphor (though to my knowledge she’s only used “desert” as a verb), but she would never also make the tears turn to dust there unless there was some oddly literal image to go along with it. And she’d never stick roses in the desert on top of all of that; she’d be somewhere else by then.⁴

The album is more diversified than I’m making things sound, though not by much. ROSÉ hasn’t only created a directly competitive set of Taylor Swift-flavored songs. The album is certainly heavy on confessional lyricism, in a way that makes me want to bring back my phrase from 2006 to describe the Veronicas: anonymous confessional. But stylistically it also has the sort of a-little-more-personal fare you’d get on an Ariana Grande album or maybe a post-Amercian-songbook Lady Gaga album. It’s a savvy, deceptively huge-sounding project.

I’m also drawn to Rosie because Taylor Swift’s own album this year was only good if you currently like Taylor Swift. ROSÉ’s album is the same whether you like her or not. This is, in fact, the sort of mindset Taylor Swift seemed to exhibit around her own career back when she was hungrier; it’s maybe why her biggest fans don’t really care as much about her earlier work, which was constantly compromising itself away from what we now know to be pure uncut Taylor. She had to compete: with country, with Disney, with the world. But now she only competes with Taylor Swift.

By contrast, Rosie is lovely in a broadly palatable way, but it’s also ruthless. Turns out that ROSÉ’s aside in “APT.” was a real threat: “Are you ready? ‘Cuz I’m coming to get you.” So how big of a papal schism are we talking here? Is this really Godzilla, or is it a mere Mothra? Is she human or is she danger? I’d get ready for it, just to be safe.

***

The Top 20:

1. Willow: Empathogen

2. 070 Shake: Petrichor

3. ROSÉ: Rosie

4. Shakes & Les: Funk Series

5. Sexyy Red: In Sexyy We Trust

6. Shakira: Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran

7. d.silvestre: D.Silvestre

8. Confidence Man: 3AM (LA LA LA)

9. Dj Anderson do Paraiso: Queridão

10. Sisso & Maiko: Singeli Ya Maajabu

11. Zee Nxumalo: Inja Ye Game

12. Caxtrinho: Queda Livre

13. Saya Gray: QWERTY II

14. Polo Perks, AyooLii, FearDorian: A Dog’s Chance

15. Amy Allen: s/t

16. Marina Satti: P.O.P.

17. Mabe Fratti: Sentir Que No Sabes

18. AKRIILA: Epistolares

19. Mary Timony: Untame the Tiger

20. Nicki Nicole: NAIKI

That’s it! See you next week with the last post of the year.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

1. She gets at pop-punk not by way of confessional teenpop, too, which is interesting; unlike the crop of new Disney stars who are direct descendants that no one seems to want to talk about as such, Willow is not really in direct dialogue with mid-aughts teen confessional pop, even when she winds up with something as close to a ‘20s Fefe Dobson album as anyone has yet produced (Coping Mechanism). She gets at a similar emotional logic as the teenpop crop but in her own way and on her own path.

2. This is better than Oscar bait— but it’s also not not that. I fully expect Willow to win an Oscar at some point, and of course I support literally every musician getting an Oscar before Taylor Swift does because I find the prospect amusing.

3. It’s some variation on a dominant 7 #5/#9

4. The best I could come up with after some workshopping with a friend was: “Barefoot in the tundra, are we having fun yet?”