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chaosincurate · 1 year ago

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My Month in Music - September-October 2023

Before we get into the post proper, I just wanted to acknowledge the fact that I've changed up the way I do these My Month in Music posts. If you wanna know why I changed it up or why I went with this new style, I go over it here

Alvvays - Blue Rev (relisten)

Fall Out Boy albums for Retrospective

Model/Actriz - Dogsbody (relisten)

Amy Winehouse - Back to Black (relisten)

The Smiths - Louder Than Bombs (relisten)

Björk - Vespertine (relisten)

The Japanese House - In the End It Always Does (new)

The 1975 - I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it (relisten)

Radiohead - OK Computer (relisten)

Green Day - Revolution Radio (relisten)

D.D. Dumbo - Utopia Defeated (relisten)

Regina Spektor - Soviet Kitsch (relisten)

underscores - Wallsocket (new)

Radiohead - In Rainbows (relisten)

Bobby "Boris" Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers - The "Original" Monster Mash (relisten)

Lovejoy - Pebble Brain (relisten)

David Bowie - "Heroes" (relisten)

The 1975 - Being Funny in a Foreign Language (relisten)

Olivia Rodrigo - GUTS (new)

yeule - softscars (new)

Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia (relisten)

Nina Simone - Pastel Blues

The Smiths - The Queen is Dead (relisten)

Paramore - Riot! (relisten)

JPEGMAFIA - OFFLINE! (relisten)

Green Day - Insomniac (relisten)

Green Day - Nimrod (relisten)

Laufey - Bewitched (new)

Nina Simone - I Put a Spell on You

Sampha - Lahai (new)

Playlist link

Write-ups below

Amy Winehouse - Back to Black

It's been a while since I gave Back to Black the attention it deserves. It is a beautiful, tragic, and occasionally funny in a way that seems to attempt to deflect from any sincerity within the lyrics and themes.

And that is where the album shines brightest for me: the lyrics. Yes, it sounds incredible; the soulful sonic palette is a great selling point in it's own right, but the lyrics are doing so much at once while maintaining a clarity of theme and sentiment that is necessary to reach the heights of popularity and acclaim she has.

The first way the lyrics excel is that humour I mentioned. The apathetic irreverence she displays, whether knowingly or not, catered so well to the characterization of a person who is struggling and is in denial of just how bad their situation has gotten. It's such a realistic representation of how people actually tend to react to their issues in conversation. It removes that layer of abstraction that usually provides artists with a sense of safety when discussing their vulnerabilities and makes it feel so much more real, and by extension, more tragic.

The second way the lyrics excel is with the imagery. There are examples all across the album, but the particular one I want to call attention to here is the chorus (and a few other lines in verses) of Wake Up Alone and it's strict adherence to water metaphors that allow the listener to use previous lines as context to make the next one hit harder.

It gets fierce in my dreams seizing my guts He floods me with dread Soaked in sorrow, he swims in my eyes by the bed Pour myself over him Moon spilling in And I wake up alone

It's a phenomenal album and frankly I need to give it it's flowers more often.

The Japanese House - In the End it Always Does

If I had a penny for every time I loved a woman's bright, cozy, synthy indie pop solo act named after a Japanese noun I would have two pennies. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice.

In the End it Always Does is, as stated above, very bright and cozy. It feels intimate, like how I imagine skipping work to have a day of domestic bliss with a loved one feels. Within it, there is a sense of comfort, devotion, and a certain difficult-to-describe feeling of trying to make the most of a situation.

I think that's what separates it from their comparable contemporaries in The 1975. Both have a very similar approach to creating this vibey soundscape, but where The 1975 likes to get big and exuberant, and create a distance in a way, The Japanese House gets intimate as fuck. I love both approaches, I just bring this up to praise this album for taking (I assume) heavy inspiration from The 1975, whilst still creating an album that provides a very different experience.

D.D. Dumbo - Utopia Defeated

I wanted to shine a light on this one for it's individual, unique sound. While it's my favourite thing about the album, it does make it difficult to describe, so bear with me.

It's hard to determine whether most of the instrumentation in this album is digital or natural, because most instruments are either physical ones that are digitally distorted like crazy, or digital ones that are given convincing imperfections. Eventually, your mind will give up trying to decipher which is which and the music will become a hardened tapestry of sound that can't be separated, but which uses it's inherent, eerie dissonance to create a feeling of distant comfort.

This sound provides a great added layer of meaning to one of my favourites on the album, King Franco Picasso, a song about a cruel and violent autocrat, subjecting and killing freely. Sung through the perspective of a subject whose brother was murdered by this autocrat, the song touches on a guilt of inaction, which pairs with the distantly comforting sound to create an implicit revolutionary feel for me. As if there is hope on the horizon, and familial comfort in the past, but discomfort now.

underscores - Wallsocket

Whoever said this year has been bad for music needs to shush. We may not have the insane peaks of last year (Blue Rev, Ants From Up There, Hellfire, etc.), but right below that standard are swathes of incredible albums contending for album of the year, and this is yet another contender for me.

First, I'll discuss the sound of the album. There is never a moment on this thing, even the slow moments, where you're not forced into being engaged. Of course, the sound might not be to your tastes, but you cannot shrug this album off. It won't allow you to. It refuses to be dull. Refuses to be background music. The blend of indie rock with the chronically online musical vocabulary of hyperpop works so well to provide an experience that feels sincerely indulgent, creatively speaking. It also traverses genre so seamlessly and broadly that it honestly floors me. Particularly in those first three tracks.

Second, I want to quickly touch on themes. Nothing will make me adore an album like an eye for interesting subject matter. Straight-forward love songs or music about partying or feeling yourself or whatever can be good and all, but if you write about bank fraud (Cops and robbers), loved ones being enlisted (Shoot to kill, kill your darlings), or stalkers (Locals (Girls like us) & You don't even know who I am) then I'll be hooked. By the way, those examples are some of my favourites, but they're pretty much all like that. The album has a lot of interesting things to say.

Third and finally, there is a story to this album! I love when an album is well tied together, and perhaps the highest form of that ideal is a story album. I can't say I'm exactly sure what the story is yet, I only have bits and pieces right now, but it's an added element that drags out that bliss of a first listen to a great album

This is my Blue Rev this year, I think. Maybe not my favourite of the year, but definitely an album that I love dearly that I imagine will only grow on me over time.

Olivia Rodrigo - GUTS

I found Olivia Rodrigo's sophomore album to be a massive leap forward. She's really started to establish a sound for herself that gives her plenty of room to experiment, and there is an added level of maturity to the album, even if what is being written about can often still be immature.

It's all about the change in perspective. On a good few tracks on this album, Olivia will give some acknowledgement of how other people feel about the things she's singing about, or will take some amount of blame when she's writing about something going wrong (unless it'd be weird to do so, such as on vampire). It makes the actual events feel more like a true representation of what happened, which I found allowed me to far more easily engage with the music and actually feel it.

I also appreciate the greater variety of sound on display here. On SOUR, I found that I got bored quite quickly with the ballads that made up a great deal of the album. They were mostly great songs, but they were either driver's license or more or less a worse version of it to my ear, so it made for a great collection of songs that I didn't care for as an album. Here though, there are ballads, there are pop-punk bangers, straight pop bops... It's not the most versatile album I've ever heard or anything, but I can't criticise that anymore, which is a big improvement.

I didn't hate SOUR, to be clear. I thought it was solid. But this was one of my favourite pop albums of the year, and it's incredible to see that Olivia Rodrigo is already starting to make good on her potential to be this generation's next undeniable pop star.

Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia

Chances are you don't need me to tell you how good this album is. I feel like there was someone in every musical subculture even remotely tied to pop telling everyone how much this album slaps. And it really deserves the hype. All the way from track 2 to track 9 there isn't a single track that wouldn't deserve to top the charts.

The album is incredibly groovy, very catchy, and one of the most fun albums you could possibly put on. If you're anything resembling a poptimist and haven't heard this yet, I highly recommend it.

Nina Simone - Pastel Blues

Nina Simone is one of jazz's most beloved vocalists, and for good reason. The music is largely pretty basic stuff, but her voice is so interesting and powerful that you're not likely to even notice when it is lacking. She just controls your attention with charismatic vocal performances that balance emotion with technical excellence superbly.

JPEGMAFIA - OFFLINE!

JPEGMAFIA is excellent at making a beat that absolutely shouldn't work just work. The amount of times he uses a vocal sample as a core element of an instrumental, then seamlessly raps over it without either getting too much attention is incredible. The example of that on this album is Hazard Duty Pay! and it is rightly held up as one of the best off this album.

Just because the beats are well balanced though, it doesn't mean it's easy-listening. If you want to grasp this album fully, it'll most likely demand a focused listen, probably even multiple. There is just so much going on at once, and Peggy isn't shy about using a sound for a one-off moment and not repeating it.

It's an incredible piece of art that demands attention, and repays it in abundance with both intricacy and power from the beats, and some really great lyricism too (especially on my personal favourite track REBOUND!)

Green Day - Nimrod

An incredibly underrated album in Green Day's discography. It is a moment where they began to expand creatively and do some more interesting stuff (arguably laying the groundwork for the pop-punk explosion that followed in the 00s), but without losing that initial identity of a bunch of shitheads making music. I don't think what followed was awful by any means, it gave us American Idiot after all, but it definitely lost something.

For me, that leaves Nimrod as the best album from this version of Green Day. Dookie gets plenty of praise for being the first big album of theirs, and a great one by all means, but I for one genuinely prefer this.

Laufey - Bewitched

It's not jazz. But it's very good. I love Laufey's voice, and the sound of this is so incredibly dreamy. From The Start is a great, bouncy tune that really does a great job of conveying a smitten tone, and the best incorporation of a "blah blah blah" I may have ever heard. Then there are songs like Misty, which (whilst it is not jazz) gives off the feeling of being in a jazz club late at night, commanding some degree of attention, but remaining cozy.

It takes the right mindset to appreciate, but if you can get into that mindset, it's one of the better albums of the year.

Sampha - Lahai

Yet another album of the year contender for me, but this one took a little growing on me (and a great turning the tables video on it) before I truly appreciated what it was doing. I can't quite remember what the turning the tables quote was, but one of them said something about how it felt like it connected you to nature, and I'd probably put it slightly differently, but with the same general message: it seems like music that was of the Earth. As if Sampha didn't necessarily create it, but instead mined it out of the ether, and introduced it to our mortal realm.

It feels soothing, cleansing, safe, and tender. If you give it even a little of your attention, it'll reward you and hold on tight to it for the duration of the album, and possibly a little longer. I'd call this one a must-listen for sure.

#chaosincurate #music #music reccs #music recommendation #indie music #alternative #indie pop #amy winehouse #the japanese house #D.D. Dumbo #underscores #olivia rodrigo #dua lipa #nina simone #jpegmafia #green day #laufey lin #sampha

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