What Have I Been Listening to?
I’ve never really paid a whole lot of attention to Ariana Grande. I’ve heard and passively liked many of her hits over the years, I was aware of “Dangerous Woman” as one of the poster children of the mid 2010s explosion of extremely long pop albums built to exploit streaming trends, and I thought it was funny when she cameoed in a Final Fantasy gacha game, but until now I’ve never really sat down and scrutinized any of her albums. So with expectations built solely on 10+ years worth of pleasant but sort of forgettable hit singles, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed “petal.”
This is a pretty straightforward pop album with moody, synth forward production, minimal enough to leave Grande’s vocals front and centre. And that’s perfect, because, and I know this is a real hot take, I’m really breaking novel ground here: Ariana Grande is a very good singer. Grande’s bread and butter has always been her huge vocal range and a whole lot of overdubbed harmonizing. This album makes excellent use of both, as often several layers of Grande’s voice will make up most of a song’s harmonic substance. My favourite example of this is on the chorus of the closing track, where there’s nothing playing except for so many layers of Grande’s voice that it almost sounds like a synthesizer pad.
The synthy instrumentals and harmony dense vocals give this album a dreamy quality that I really enjoyed. It’s a cool, mellow listen, but with enough energy and a short enough runtime that it never drags or slows down too much. It’s really excellently paced in general. Both singles are shoved up near the front of the album, which can really kill an album’s pacing, but there are a couple songs later on that stand up to the singles in terms of energy and hookiness, so “petal” avoids that pitfall. The song that’s been stuck in my head the most is “never get over me,” which is buried way down near the bottom of the tracklist. There’s also a perfectly placed little interlude track that breaks things up well, and the closer, “nowhere, nobody” works perfectly, dropping a lot of the instrumentals to land on a soft note of finality.
Really, though, I’ve gotta just circle back to the vocal harmonies. They sound so goddamn good. Grande is hitting Harry Nilsson levels of self-harmonizing on here, and my only real gripe with the album is that it does not possess the analog warmth of 70s era studio recordings. I would kill to hear some of these songs recorded “Nilsson Sings Newman” style: analog, tons of vocal tracks, backed by just a piano. Now I’m just kind of fantasizing, though. My point is, I think this album is worth listening to for the vocal harmony alone, if you’re somebody like me who really likes vocal harmony.
As I write this, I just a couple days ago compiled a big list of all the albums I’ve reviewed, and I’m realizing that I’ve been way more generous with my silly scoring system than I intended to be when I devised it. I thought I’d be using that circle rating way more than I have been, and thought I’d be way stingier with the double star. So I feel a little silly giving this album the double star, but, well, I enjoyed it a lot. And, more importantly, who cares?
Rating: ☆☆
Rico Nasty’s new album “RX” is a straightforward good time. It’s loud and punchy, funny and raunchy, and densely packed with fun wordplay. Nasty’s performances are great, and the production is maximalist in a way that suits the music perfectly. It’s pretty one-note, but therein lies its greatest strength: at just 20 minutes long it doesn’t even threaten to get tedious. This is a quick, high-energy listen, it’s a ton of fun, and any of these songs would bring down the house at a party.
Rating: ☆
I love the Strokes dearly. “Is This It” is one of my favourite albums ever. As a teenager, my first step towards actually putting effort into how I dress and present myself was getting some skinny jeans because I thought the Strokes were really cool. My high school band covered “Reptilia,” and I’m probably the only one of the four of us who isn’t embarrassed thinking about it, because I really love “Reptilia.”
So, it is with enormous regret that I report that Julian Casablancas has undergone terminal boomerfication. This album sees the Strokes slowing down, relying on all of their old tricks without any of their punchiness or sense of pacing. Casablancas retreats into a sea of autotune, a trick which works okay with the more electronic Voidz, but which is almost enough on its own to completely ruin a Strokes album. And, most offensively of all, on “Lonely in the Future” Casablancas complains about how young people are all ripping him off, or something. It’s corny. He’s old, and he isn’t aging gracefully.
The autotune is what I’ve heard people complain about most on this album, and it is rough. It ruins some songs that could be good otherwise, most egregiously “Going Shopping,” a solid Strokes song with a great hook that just begs for Casablancas’ usual roaring belt, and gets his bizarre shot at autocrooning instead. However, it is not the thing that really sinks this album for me. That honour goes to the loose, flabby quality to all of these songs. This is a Strokes album where only one song clocks in under four minutes long. So many of these songs are just structureless masses that get bogged down in each individual Stroke recycling all of their favourite instrumental moves from old material. They needed a producer to step in, but unfortunately they were working with Rick Rubin.
I am pissed off in only the way a fan can be over this album, which is honestly an embarrassing way for me to feel, given my feelings on fandom. Maybe I wouldn’t be so hard on this album if I didn’t like the old Strokes stuff so much. But even if I try to critically detach myself, to look at this is just some album and not as one of my favourite bands reduced to old men yelling at clouds, it’s a boring album. So, I don’t feel bad panning it. I kind of want to get my band to cover “Going Shopping,” just to prove it could’ve been good without that fucking autotune. I’m pretty sure I’m just going to memory hole the rest of this album, though.
Rating: ◻
There’s a new Mountain Goats album out. I’m a simple man. I'll probably never not like something John Darnielle writes.
As I've said before, I find it hard to really talk about the Mountain Goats, because they're so core my taste in music. Initially this review was just those first two sentences. But I've found I do have some thoughts about this in contrast to "Reality Awaits," because here's another artist who I've loved for many, many years, but who are aging much more gracefully.
There's a stretch of Mountain Goats albums I'm not crazy about, that begins somewhere between "Heretic Pride" and "All Eternals Deck" and goes on through "In League With Dragons." The production for a while there was too sterile for my taste, and those albums veered conceptual in ways that didn't always appeal to me. Now, this is all firmly a matter of taste; I wouldn't call anything the Mountain Goats have made bad by any means.
Starting with 2020's "Songs for Pierre Chuvin," miraculously, I've liked every new Mountain Goats album more than the last. This culmintates in "Days," an album which has a little bit of just about everything I've ever liked about a Mountain Goats album. The arrangements are lush and full, a perfection of the soft rock sound they've been working with since "Tallahassee." There are some beautiful, wonderful backing vocals, the likes of which I haven't heard on a Mountain Goats album really since the songs with the Bright Mountain Choir. And the writing is largely song by song, though not without recurring motifs, featuring a mixture of humour and profundity right on par with the likes of "All Hail West Texas" and "Full Force Galesburg," my two favourite Mountain Goats albums. I thought "Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan" was a new height for the band, and "Days" has me pleasantly surprised.
John Darnielle on "Days" is the total opposite of Julian Casablancas on "Reality Awaits." His songwriting has only grown over time, and when he does lean on an old trick he does so with tact. And most importantly, his point of view as a songwriter is resolutely non-boomerish, extending a curiosity and fascination to everything it approaches. John Darnielle would never write "Lonely In the Future."
Rating: ☆☆