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Cracker Island

Gorillaz have always lacked consistency. Maybe by necessity. I mean, from its beginning its always been an excuse for Damon Albarn to collaborate with artist new and legacy, from Beck to St. Vincent, Grace Jones and Jehnny Beth, De La Soul, on and on. And while that's cool, I never feel like Gorillaz has lived up to its star-studded potential. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a lot of Gorillaz work. Nearly every record gives a few new classic, great jams. Even on forgettable records like The Now Now, there's synth-rock gem "Tranz." Humanz is utterly inconsistent, but "Andromeda" is incredible, "Saturnz Barz" is fun and spooky. But, really, have Gorillaz ever had a good record front to back? I just find the rotating cast of artists so whip-lashy. Gorillaz have long felt like single artists, albums more like playlists than definitive statements. And maybe that's because I find Demon Dayz drab, boring. Their early work is fun, but can veer into alt mall fodder. Though, perhaps I haven't given Plastic Beach as much of a listen as I should. I dunno, I just feel like Gorillaz were never built, nor maybe even intended to be an album band. It worked out, I guess. Gorillaz are built to thrive in the streaming age since their albums are never terrible, never offensive, just a little skippable, a little forgettable. And that's most of what Cracker Island left me thinking. I like it. Two tracks in, I thought it was amazing. Oil is just fantastic, Albarn's radio-processed focals over a drum machine rock beat is always a winning combo. Stevie Nicks sounds great on it. The title track is fun too, even if Thundercat is underused. But then the record keeps going with buzzy synths and it all blends together. Oh, Kevin Parker is there, that tracks. Wait, what's the premise of this one? The band's on a cult island or something? Bad Bunny sounds cool among the blissed out pop of it all. There's something about Gorillaz that sounds like the background of every skate store and every mall and every water park. The band tee everyone owns and all your *cool* friends sort of listen to. So many artists and 20 years of records and remember when the gang was stuck in a haunted house? That's about the time the Netflix film got announced; now it's cancelled. Are the Power Puff Girls cannon in the Gorillaz universe? There's so much context, so much high conceptness that pays off in music that is so disconnected from Gorillaz: The Virtual Band *and* from Albarn: the guy behind it. Cracker Island is fine. Good, actually. Some great songs, quite a few skips, but nothing terrible.

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There's a Boygenius record

$20

It’s January, new year. It’s the start of a new quarter and I feel like I’m gonna die. They’re lacking coverage, so my work just doubled my hours. My Co-Star started “Today, nothing makes sense,” and I almost cried for the second time. There’s a Boygenius record coming out.

One of the songs is called “$20” and I haven’t really thought about what it’s really about. Right now, I know it’s lodged in my head, but I don’t know all the lyrics, so I jump around the song singing random ones and fill in the gaps when I forget. 

“$20” feels like a collage of images: broken car, bedroom conversation, shotgun pointed to the ground. There’s something really enticing about the line, “In another life we were arsonists.” The riff of a guitar and the tack of a snare that chugs the song along…

Towards the end, Baker, Dacus, and Bridgers sing separately over one another. The sounds swell and everything is racing. Dacus comes in clear, “Take a break, make your escape/There’s only so much I can take;” Bridgers works her way up to a scream: “May I please have twenty dollars?” “Can you give me twenty dollars?” “I know you have twenty dollars!” Baker mumblers and fades out as Dacus grounds the song over her; Bridgers is a cathartic rage. 

It’s so desperate, but they’re there to carry one another. Bridgers’ plea comes across as a small ask. Just give me this one fucking thing. Dacus is the voice of reason, reminding to take a step back. 

An egregiously loud siren blared outside my window and I thought to open it and scream. “$20” is a pittance, and right now it’s everything.

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Disorganized: 2022

Thoughts on the year

Disorganized: 2022

I always get sentimental at the end of the year. Come the end of December, I start gathering the previous months into collective parts. I revisit the art I experienced, the media I consumed. Ask: “which affected me most harshly?” “Which do I like?” “What stayed with me?” “What did I forget?” I’m still in college, so the beginning of winter is an ostensibly relaxing period where I still have time to do this. 

It starts at the beginning of December when I make my annual Spotify “Favorites 20xx” playlist, archiving the music that defined my year. My 2022 playlist makes clear that my music preferences were erratic, fleeting, undefined. I listened to a lot of music; I liked most of it. But no album truly wriggled into my subconsciousness. Nothing became a compulsive listening habit like Jubilee, Home Video, Screen Violence, or Mythopoetics had done in 2021. And certainly nothing like Punisher, Notes on a Conditional Form, Miss Anthropocene, or Likewise had done the year before. 

Again, that’s not for a lack of good music. Again again, I listened to more music this year than any year prior. But I find myself in a state of general positivity, few negative reactions to anything, few ecstatic ones. The closest an album’s come to a 30-50 minute earworm has been Sylvan Esso’s No Rules Sandy. I first put it on while getting ready for bed and ended up stomping, jumping, and full-body punching around my bathroom, working up a humid sweat as my body’s moisture mixed with the residual wet of my night time shower.

Art Moore’s self-titled debut was simple and beautiful, instantly understandable. Midnights was frictionless and went down mostly easy, like medicine chased with honey. Little bitter, but mostly sweet. Don’t worry, the medicinal taste only lasts a minute and you’ll forget you’d even taken anything by morning.

Likewise, Florist should have been an immersive listen, a circle of personable synth around a campfire with a guitar. And it was! It’s great, but after a few days of listening, I stopped and mostly forgot about it, despite it being a record I know I would have been consumed by a year ago. 

This happened with a lot more albums too: Surrender, Cool it Down, Be Careful With Yourself, This is a Photograph, Preacher’s Daughter, Bronco, CAPRISONGS, Two Ribbons, Glitch Princess, Weather Alive…I could go on. They’re some of my favorite albums of the year, yet I feel little to no personal connection to any of them. There is no denying their quality, their artistry, but all of them had a very brief presence in my life. The albums that have stuck with me and become compulsive listens are connected to specific times, moments, and emotions from my life. They become part of my history. Sometimes, they are the key to my history, helping me remember temporal selves when they come on. 2022 had few songs that did that for me. 

The ones I kept on were: The 1975’s “Happiness,” Sylvan Esso’s “How Did You Know” and “Look at Me,” Art Moore’s “A Different Life,” Maggie Rogers’ “That’s Where I Am,” Björk’s “Atopos” and “Ovule,” Jockstrap’s “Jennifer B,” Ethel Cain’s “American Teenager,” Dry Cleaning’s “Don’t Press Me,” and Phoebe Bridger’s “Sidelines.” That seems like a lot, actually. I don’t know, maybe I haven’t sorted my thoughts on them yet. But, undeniably, something feels missing and hollow. 

The same went for video games, though this has been oncoming for a long time. I think I know why and I wish I didn’t. I played less video games this year than I ever have, which is sad. I love video games; I feel it is the medium that I understand the most. But I find that I just don’t have the time anymore. Well, I do. Video games just take so much work for me now: the control memorization, the story, the mechanics, etc. It seems so much to come back to my apartment, take my shoes off, turn on my switch, decide what to play, remember how to play it, and play it. I just can’t do that anymore. Not right now, at least. 

I saw some great films, though. After Yang was thought-provoking, Memoria was more than worth the wait, Neptune Frost was fantastic. I saw C’mon C’mon, which I think about a lot, despite the Joaquin Phoenix of it all. And what more can be said of Everything Everywhere All at Once? I saw it first at my university’s on-campus theatre. Bad choice. Very loud audience who laughed while I felt at the verge of tears—weird disconnect. I still loved it, though. I tried to watch it a second time by myself in my room and I had to turn it off during Waymond’s monologue/montage because I was sobbing so hard. I had to clean snot off my keyboard the next morning. Marcel the Shell was also great, as was Skinamarink (which really comes out next year). 

I didn’t watch much TV, but I just did most of Chainsaw Man and I loved it.

2022 felt like a liminal year for me. I feel so different from how I did a year ago. In some ways, I feel more comfortable than I ever have, but I think in transporting so much, I feel a new sense of uncomfortable. I don’t think I understand it yet, and I didn’t even know a move was happening until recently. I think that mood leaked into everything else I did. 

I had the worst panic attack I’ve ever had in my life in 2022. I had the least anxiety I’ve ever had in social situations in 2022. I drank too much coffee and spent too much on clothes. 

I recently watched The Banshees of Inisherin and I hated it. Well-acted, beautifully shot, clever, at times visceral. But I hated it because of its premise. Colm truly doesn’t have a good reason to dislike Pádraic; he just does. By the end of the film, Colm has accomplished what he wanted, he’s grown less cold, but he still doesn’t want to be friends with Pádraic and he can’t explain why other than flatly stating, “I just don’t like you anymore.” And that fucks with my head. I can’t figure it out and I don’t think you’re supposed to. It feels like pointless misery, endless and irreconcilable misery. It got a chuckle out of me, though.

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Thoughts on World Wide Pop

Superorganism’s second album, World Wide Pop, has a lot in its hands. After a tumultuous four years consisting of an initial blow-up and critical success coinciding with their self-titled debut, Superorganism went mostly dark after resurfacing allegations of sexual misconduct concerning its member Emily (Mark Turner). Now, with the departure of Turner alongside two other members, Superorganism returns as a 5-piece with a lot to prove. The resulting album is an uneven listen, with songs ranging from some of their best to some of their most irritating. Thematically, it deals with carving a place for fun while on the precipice of environmental collapse and everyday anxieties, both personal and systemic; meanwhile, Superorganism tries to acknowledge their troubled last four years while charting a path forward. While the track list is mixed, it mostly succeeds in its purpose.

World Wide Pop’s opener, “Black Hole Baby” is maybe the album at its best. It is a great showcase of Superorganism’s propulsive maximalism. The mix is clear, Orono’s delivery juxtaposes against them perfectly, and it sets up the topics the album will grapple with throughout. It is effective both as a literal “welcome back” to the band and its production quirks, and as an indicator of the darker, more serious topics ahead. The subsequent songs, “World Wide Pop” and “On & On,” keep up the momentum with more party-oriented takes on postmodern anxieties; a literal formation of Norman Fucking Rockwell’s: “The culture is lit/and if this is it/I had a ball.” “On & On” is one of the best cuts here, showcasing Orono’s growth as a singer as her usual deadpan delivery is given a hint of exhaustion and concern that suits its ruminations on everyday mundanity and trying to live a “normal” life right now: “Am I insane or is this just the normal way?”

The album falters most when the production overshadows Orono. “It’s Raining” drowns out its lead singer with the presence of guests Dylan Cartlidge and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. Both appearances take the form of bizarre, near-rap verses; both feel forced and stand out as unfortunate, if forgivably short, moments against the rest of the album. CHAI’s presence, however, is appreciated on the chorus. The same cannot be said of lead single “Teenager. The band has often tread a line between interest and annoyance; “Teenager” almost exclusively falls into the latter category. While Orono and Pi Ja Ma’s verses are fairly typical Superorganism fare, their enjoyability is cut off by the grating, snot-nosed intonations of the high-pitched and high-processed chorus. It, and the accompanying video, feel like an empty sugar-rush reminiscent of the shock-face, “giant red arrow” side of children’s YouTube.

The album suffers in its midsection. The three song run of “Solar System,” “Into the Sun,” and “Put Down Your Phone” is a near slog. “Solar System” drowns itself out with its mix and sheer number of effects, reverbs, and instruments. There is so much happening that everything becomes indistinct. “Into the Sun’s” beat, consequently, sounds too similar and fades into the blur of the previous song. Superorganism’s debut was marked by earworm-y sounds and samples juxtaposed with Orono’s tired delivery. This, at times, is lost. There are simply too many voices in the mix; the samples are being used less creatively. They can feel tossed in, creating a sludge of internet-ness and angst that never quite becomes offensive, but feels dull. When the production finally picks back up, the lyrics can feel forced and out of touch, like in “Put Down Your Phone’s” rote title message. The bubbly, chant-like chorus is not enough to make up for the shallow observation.

For all the production mishaps, World Wide Pop rarely fumbles its overall themes. Nearly every song here has at least one clever or relatable observation rooted among the band’s signature humor. “crushing.zip” has a sticky hook that draws you into a song that encapsulates one’s inability to relate their experience of mental illness. Just before anything can be said, the words are swept away by autotune and ruminations on added sugars. The feeling is summed by the declaration, “Honestly I hate it, but I don’t mind a bit.” The song marks a great final quarter for the album, the following tracks being among Superorganism’s best.

While “Don’t Let the Colony Collapse” is one of the more straightforward cuts, it excels in its conveyance of capitalist disappointment. Its sarcastic chorus mocks those who claim that this system is the best we have got. The song is a well-deserved, cathartic fuck-you for a band who deal more often in irony than plain criticism. Its closer, “Everything Falls Apart” begins with an explosion and ends with a lulling outro. It synthesizes nearly the whole of World Wide Pop with its title phrase as Orono sings of breakable Instagram boutique trash, feelings of impending doom, and the near dissolution of the band, “And Superorganism/everything fell apart except for us.” It is obvious that Superorganism—like many a band (perhaps every a band)—has become a way for its members to process and persevere through both their time and their anxieties. Orono sings as much, on “Oh Come On”: “You all cheer and it makes it worth it/Step offstage feeling almost perfect.” The maximalism mix of these songs is only a reflection of life’s equally disorienting chaos. As per the chorus, making albums, performing—this is their way of turning it off. Despite its production mishaps and mixed track list, with World Wide Pop Superorganism chart a way forward for themselves. If anything, the album proves that they have to—there’s too much at stake.