Wednesday, January 5, 2022

2021 in Review: Goat Headsoup

Headsoup was released in August 2021 on Rocket Recordings.
Okay. Let's get this out of the way. 

Enigmatic Swedish group, Goat's 2021 record, Headsoup, is dripping with 60s psychedelia. It's inescapable.

But that's just the baseline. It's a wild ride. The first half of the record takes on a kind of jam band feel. No, not in that way. It's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard with a world music flare. And while that marriage of psychedelia and world music might evoke Khruangbin, Goat delivers in a different, more African-tinged way with woodblock percussion on "Dreambuilding" or the woodwinds on "Union of Mind and Soul".

"Union" sends things off in a different direction on side B. That King Gizzard foundation remains, but the jam expands. It's like Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony from Wild Flag came over to lay vocals down and Bill Ward and Geezer Butler ducked out on Black Sabbath to add a darker, fuzzier, more brooding layer to that foundation. That heaviness peppers much of the back half of the album but is most apparent on both "Let It Burn - Edit" and "Fill My Mouth," the latter of which may as well also have Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson swooping in with a flute solo. [It sounds that way.]

And if that sort of amalgamation does create enough of vision of a wall of experimental sounds, then Goat also veers off toward free jazz on "Friday, Pt. 1" in between those heavier two tunes toward the end of the record.

Again, it is a wild ride, this album. I think I may have balked at side A on my first listen, but was drawn in once I started hearing Black Sabbath influences seep in as the record progressed. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Headsoup is a nice diversion if you're looking for a solid palate cleanser or just a fun, challenging listen.


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Tuesday, January 4, 2022

New Music: Widowspeak "Everything is Simple"

The Jacket will hit physical and virtual shelves on March 11.
Well, happy freaking new year. 

I didn't expect such a treasure so early in 2022. But Widowspeak have already hit us with what is going to be a strong contender for Most Listened to Song of 2022, with their release of "Everything is Simple" off the forthcoming album, The Jacket.1

Time is weird in its elasticity anyway. The days are long and the years are short some may say. But Covid time operates on a different plane. I swear it feels like Plum, the group's fifth LP, came out sometime last year. I know it didn't but it still feels that way, and the release of new material and a new album feels like a quick turnaround and an even more pleasant surprise. 

And this song. Oh, this song. 

Back in October, I caught the pair -- then a touring foursome -- at Reggie's in Wilmington, NC, and they played Everything somewhere in the middle of their set. That one floored me as much for how good it was as for the questions it left implanted in my head. Is that new material or something from their back catalog that just isn't registering?

That question haunted me the rest of the show and all the way home (until I could hopefully pull it up on Spotify). Alas, the hurried trip through the Widowspeak discography turned up nothing. I let it go. Other music came along in the days that followed to distracted me. It always does. Almost always.

So I forgot about that song I couldn't place in October. I forgot about it until this morning when I was prompted about new music from Widowspeak. "Okay," I told myself. "I'll give this a whirl."

The first chord hits. 

THAT'S THE SONG!!!!

Indeed it was. Question answered. It was that same typically Americana-tinged Widowspeak with that low rumble of a repeated Robert Earl Thomas guitar riff to boot. Only now, from the studio with a restorative piano part that drifts in and out throughout the tune delivering some additional emotional oomph. As if it needed any extra. Molly Hamilton honed her vocal craft in new ways (to me) on Plum. There was more patience to that delicate voice on the 2020 release that returns in spades here on Everything, tying it all together.  

The video for "Everything is Simple" conjures up a western motif, and you can hear that, too. But this one hits -- because of that riff and its pace -- like something emanating from some dusty blues dive somewhere out on the lonesome plains. There's a tension there. That sludgy guitar part feels like something struggling to escape some hardscrabble life with a piano line that intermittently pops in to goad it into persisting and Hamilton's vocals there to ruefully tell the tale.

It is some combination and one hell of a musical gift to kick off a new year.

The Jacket is out on March 11 on Captured Tracks.


Notes:
1 There's some wisdom to releasing a banger of a single on just the fourth day of the year. 


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Monday, January 3, 2022

2021 in Review: blue smiley return

Return was self released in 2016.
Sometimes the algorithm giveth. 

And sometimes it giveth and makes you shake your head in disbelief that you haven't already stumbled upon a group. I don't even remember what record I was listening to in the late summer -- maybe the latest Quivers album or maybe the new Film School -- that ultimately fed into a blue smiley song from its second LP, return. But I doubled back and gave "bird" a couple more spins before  I was won over enough to give the full album a go. 

Throughout return, the vocals often hover in the fuzzy ether as an instrument but not a predominant one, in the same way they often do on any number of My Bloody Valentine cuts. Yet, this is a tough record to place musically. There is a very definite fuzzy (yeah, I used that term again) heaviness wedded to a jangly pop edge with an occasional synth layered in that makes the whole thing the musical equivalent of a bike with a warped wheel that is also out of alignment. It works, and works well even, but there is something just a little off about it. However, it is off in the most beautiful way.

The aforementioned "bird" and "tree" serve as bookends on the record and are the clear standouts on an album that doesn't mess around. Nine tracks in total clock in at just more than 20 minutes. They almost all arrive with a sort of reckless abandon (raw and urgent), make their point and head out the door, often in under two minutes. It is all just enough to make you want to listen again. 

...and again. 

Sure, I'm late to the party, but return was one of the happiest of my accidental discoveries in all of 2021.


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Sunday, January 2, 2022

2021 in Review: Motorists Surrounded

I don't know. The back half of 2021 saw -- at least where I was looking -- a lot of hype for Geese as an heir to The Strokes. I get it: young, up and coming NYC band with a DIY/garagey sound. Fine, but I'd honestly take Gustaf and their album if I had to choose in the New York space.1 

The thing is, that sound is not confined to Gotham. In fact, north of the border in Toronto, Motorists cooked up a mélange of sound on their 2021 debut LP, Surrounded. (We Are Time [US], Bobo Integral [most everywhere else]). The trio jangle their way through twelve tracks that consistently marry the post-punk of Gang of Four or Pylon with the 80s college radio sensibilities of REM. And yeah, those are lofty comparisons, but Motorists deliver time and again. 

The title track kicks things off catchily enough, but it feeds into the even hookier "Vainglorious." Then you spend the rest of the record saying to yourself, "It can't get any catchier/hookier than this, can it?" I don't know that it does match those first two cuts, but damn, it comes close. 

...a lot. 

This record reminds me of that Barney Stinson line about the science behind a good (music) mix from the early New Year's Eve episode of How I Met Your Mother: "Now, people often think that a good mix should rise and fall, but people are wrong. It should be all rise, baby!

Surrounded rises quickly and maintains a plateau throughout. It is one of the most underrated albums of 2021. I mean, the lo-fi 80s VHS video for the title track -- complete with masked drummer (yeah, covid mask) -- should sell you on that right off the bat. 

Notes:
1 Seriously, with a record called Audio Drag for Ego Slobs, how could you not give the nod to Gustaf anyway?


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Saturday, January 1, 2022

The 2021 Playlist is in

The first rule of playlist is you don't talk about... Wait, that was a different set of rules

Ever since 2012, I have put together a playlist for the year. The premise is simple enough: chuck a bunch of songs into a growing (and evolving in real time) Spotify playlist made up of songs that moved me in some way at some point between January 1 and December 31 of any given year.1  After a couple of trial runs, the rules for assembling said playlists were largely solidified in probably 2014 when I set out with the goal of listening to one new (or new to me) album a day (or at least averaging an album a day over the course of the year). 

[I mean, if that isn't a New Years resolution you can get behind, then I don't know what to tell you.]

Like any set of rules, there is a healthy mix of permissive and restrictive structures that guide inclusion.

On the permissive side, I don't have to like the whole record, most of a record or really the whole song for that matter for a tune to make the cut. There are always a handful of songs every year where there is an element in an otherwise nondescript song that does something for me. Take Barrie's song "Clovers" from 2019, for example. There's a part of me that will always say that that one is a bit too far out on the poppy end of the spectrum to fit neatly into even my broad musical sensibilities. That said, that bouncy synth line about three-quarters of the way in that runs through the end clouds my judgment of the song in its entirety. I fall for it every time. Usually it is something on the low end of the register (read: bass) that draws me in or some other snaps and farts.

There are also low barriers to entry elsewhere. A song does not have to be new, new to me or released in the year of aggregation to be included in the yearly playlist. Again, the main criterion is that a song -- or element of it -- moves me in some way. It can be an older song. Often one will drift back onto my radar through film or TV. Year after year, television gets better and better at augmenting the final product with (what I'll call popular) music. And hey, sometimes nostalgia just brings a song back up into your memory bank and it serves as a sort of mile marker in the year in question.

Yet, there are some restrictions in place that limit what passes muster. Music from one artist or group can appear in the playlist more than once but only if they are songs from different albums or EPs. Just from a listening (back) perspective, you don't want artists to dominate even the shuffle of a playlist. That can mean some Sophie's choice situations if there are two or more tunes on a record that you're torn over including. [There are work-arounds to this. That's why it can be good to have a summer playlist you can dump good but +1 songs into.]

Generally, in recent years I have also had a one song a day for the year goal as well. But I'm less strict about that. There has to be some quality threshold. I'm not going to include a song just to include it and get to 365 songs as New Years approaches. Covid helps in this one area. The pandemic has had me listening to a LOT more music these last two years.  

[As an aside, if you follow along with the Musical interludes I do in my Instagram stories and on Twitter most days, then these playlists might look like an aggregation of those. But just because a song is a musical interlude, does not mean that it will make the playlist. Most interludes do, but some of those are drawn from past playlists as well. And I try not to add a song to multiple yearly playlists. It happens. Hey, music moves us all in different ways at different times. But it happens rarely.]

The 2021 playlist includes 390 tracks and clocks in at a little more than 25 and a half hours. Enjoy. 



1 Playlists cannot (or should not in my mind) be listened to before the end of the first quarter of the year in which they are being curated. The reasoning is twofold. First, it allows for the accumulation of enough songs to actually be a real playlist and not just some weirdly small collection of songs. But second, that rule is in place to give tunes added late in the year to the previous year's playlist a chance to sink in a bit more. Otherwise, they can get lost, ahem, in the shuffle. Regardless, having a contemporaneous playlist always -- ALWAYS -- skews my Spotify Wrapped at the end of November each year. These playlists offer a bit of a "Re-wrapped" for me at the end of the first quarter. ...that includes December music/listens!

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