Listen, it’s midnight on Saturday. I decided to review two albums this time for some reason. I’m not doing an intro this week.
As I write this, I am watching the Japan/Venezuela quarterfinal game of the WBC, late on Saturday night. So far it has been probably the best and most exciting of the WBC games I’ve caught, even more so than the USA/Canada game from last night, which had me hooting and hollering before uh, crashing back to earth (it really looked like the Naylor brothers were going to deliver us, for a minute there, didn’t it?). But as exciting as Canada’s almost-upset was, it didn’t have Ronald Acuña Jr. hitting a leadoff home run, and then Shohei Ohtani responding with a leadoff home run of his own. I mean, come on, is there a better way for a Baseball game to start?
Watching this, I’m getting a powerful feeling of Baseball is Back. The guys playing in this thing are all showing such incredible passion and energy, and they’re delivering great moments. Maybe the best thing about the WBC is how superstars get about as much spotlight as comparative randos. A Japanese bench player who came in as a substitute hit a three run homer in this game I’m watching. Last night a minor league pitcher nicknamed “Tugboat” pitched a scoreless eighth and ninth for Canada, facing down guys like Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber in the process. I love Tugboat! The Italian team has an espresso machine in the dugout, isn’t that cool?
Then there’s team USA, who suck. They built a Death Star, and then decided that meant they needed to act like the Empire. Former Big Beautiful Boy Cal Raleigh is out here rationalizing refusing his Mariners’ teammates handshakes while wearing a “Front Toward Enemy” shirt. Guy who didn’t kill Bin Laden and notable lunatic Robert J. O’Neill gave a speech in the locker room. And then there’s that Paul Skenes quote I mentioned last week, about America needing to “dominate” other countries. It’s all very military! The guys from the other countries are having fun playing a game, these American dorks are playing soldier for some reason.
So, let’s all root for the Dominican Republic tomorrow. This American Team needs to be put out of their misery. In the meantime, let’s appreciate Canadian heroes like Josh Naylor, Bo Naylor, and Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson. This country seldom produces actual heroes, so we really need to appreciate our sports heroes.
I’ve been humbled this week. Harry Styles has a new album out, and I like it. For years I’ve resisted the gravity that pulls seemingly all of popular culture into this man’s orbit, asserting that each album is just a smoothed over version of some old aesthetic trend or movement, that the man brings very little to his performances, and that his writing is just exactly competent enough to produce some hits. For years before that I, as a skinny white guy with long curly hair, have endured Styles being nearly everyone’s default pick for my celebrity lookalike, even though I do not actually look anything like him, my spite growing in magnitude every time the comparison is invoked. What I’m saying is that I’ve had my flag planted on the hater hill for a long time, with regards to Harry Styles.
But now I’m eating humble pie, because I have found myself enjoying “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.” a lot this week. Styles is going in a pretty bold new direction on this one, drawing directly from LCD Soundsystem to make a whole bunch of synthed the hell out dance bangers. It’s like he decided to make an album specifically to win over his most committed hater (me). This album is just all the same serviceable hooks Styles has reliably delivered on his other solo stuff, but over extremely fun dance punk synthesizers, instead of the smooth nothing instrumentals that dominated pop music in the early 2020s.
Great bass sounds abound, but I’d like to zero on on my one specific favourite sound on the whole album. It’s a lead that comes in on the chorus of “Ready, Steady, Go!” Every time I listen to “Ready, Steady, Go!” I find the verse starting to lose me a little. Then the chorus comes in, and this lead that sounds like it grew up nextdoor to will.i.am on one side and VVVVVV on the other shows up. It’s this high pitched staccato descending thing that, for lack of a less silly way to say this, just tickles me. I love it.
My favourite song on this thing is a tossup between “Are You Listening Yet” and “Dance No More.” The former is Styles at his most LCD Soundsystem, so obviously I like it, the latter is a funk number, which is a pretty big swing that fits in wonderfully with the joyful, party energy of the rest of the album.
The slower numbers are good, too. “Coming Up Roses” is a big theatrical ballad over a lush string arrangement, which would come off as corny if the album wasn’t made entirely of big swings. As is, it’s a really fun change of pace. “Paint By Numbers” is an acoustic guitar ballad that feels like it could give “Cigarette Daydreams” a run for its money in the “song you, a millenial/gen Z cusper, learn on acoustic guitar to impress your girlfriend” arena.
”Taste Back” is the only song on here that doesn’t really land for me; I find its hook sort of annoying. It still has a bunch of synth sounds that are essentially candy, though. On the larger scale my only real complaint is that I think the pacing is a little odd. Both of the big slow numbers are on the back half of the album. They arrive late enough that the steady upbeat dance energy is getting a little tired by the time they come to break up the pace. Honestly I would’ve loved to see something really bold being done with the sequencing, like putting “Coming Up Roses” near the front.
But on a less concrete level, I have more to complain about. This album feels like it’s pandering to me. There’s something inauthentic going on here, and really I can tell you exactly what it is. This is Harry Styles making an LCD Soundsystem album. I like it because I like LCD Soundsystem. Styles’ solo career has been going on for nearly a decade now and I’d still be hard pressed to really describe his creative voice. He is the perfect pop star because he excels at amalgamating other sounds into smooth, easily digestible hits. I enjoyed this album a lot, but like an itch the entire time a thought was sitting in the back of my mind: “I could just be listening to LCD Soundsystem right now.” There are a million lovely synth sounds on “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.,” but none of them come close to having the same teeth as the bass on “Dance Yrself Clean.”
Rating: ☆
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The other album I listened to this week was Ella Guro’s “Saint Elizabeth.” I mentioned this one briefly in last week’s post, with vague promises of an eventual more full review.
Ella Guro is the solo project of writer and musician Liz Ryerson, who I’ve followed on Twitter and then Bluesky for video game commentary for years. Let this be a lesson: when people you follow online for being generally interesting post music they made, run, don’t walk.
The word that keeps coming to me by way of describing what “Saint Elizabeth” sounds like is “generous.” This is an incredibly sonically generous album, every song just absolutely jam packed full of varied motifs, little melodic hooks, layers and layers of ambient drone and crunchy samples, and synth sounds that make me go “ooh.” It’s dense, and jagged, and often daunting in its scale: the length of some songs, the extended ambient sections, the maximalism of the arrangements and mixes. This makes it really rewarding to sit with and dig into, but it also isn’t without its simpler pleasures. It has hooks, it has beats, it has crunchy, video gamey synthesizers.
To get a little more specific, I love the way these songs move. Parts come in and out, such that you often feel like you’re on unstable ground. Sometimes the songs dissolve almost entirely, like on the bridge of “terrible town,” where the instrumental falls out behind the vocal, which starts to distort and break apart. Then the groove starts coming back, and it swells into another chorus, creating a forceful dynamic shift. All the songs shift and change like this, shrinking and expanding, lulling into a drone before bringing back an earlier motif with increased emphasis.
I also just love how this album sounds, its textures, timbres, and melodic motifs. The bassline at the start of “whyte dress” has a wonderful fuzzy, rumbly tone, and it reminds me of the bass riff at the end of “The Revolution of Hearts pt. 2” by Helium, which is among the highest compliments I can give. The chorus to “terrible town” is maybe my favourite part of the whole album. It has a great melody, and I love Ryerson’s vocal delivery. Late in “bloodbath” there’s an instrumental break where this horn sound shows up playing a big descending lead line, and it made me audibly go “fuck yeah” last time I listened to it. If I went on picking out little moments I like in this way, we would be here all day.
This album probably isn’t for everybody, but that’s also sort of the point. You can’t make something interesting and please everyone. “Saint Elizabeth” is dense, labyrinthine, and weird, and just absolutely stuffed with wonderful sounds. There’s some music I listen to, enjoy, and forget about. This, though, is an album I’ll keep coming back to, sure to find something new to appreciate every time.
Rating: ☆☆