The Daily Spin
February 2023 Rundown
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. Two months in! We’re almost at 60 albums.
I’ll be joined by Eli on this one, as he’s been with me reviewing these albums the whole way. Additionally, Preston Pack of The Wild Pitch will have a recap up with their opinions, since they’ve been with us too.
Additionally: a big thing! Here’s the playlist I mentioned yesterday, containing my favorite song from each of the albums I’ve reviewed so far. Each day, going forward, it’ll be updated with my favorite track from that day’s album until we’ve got a full portfolio of 365.
Fear not, your regularly scheduled album review will go live later today. Double dosage today.
Making The Grade
In the process of listening to music and grading albums, nothing is perfect, and as such, we’ve all elected to make some adjustments to our grading.
D: I’ll be honest. No adjustments for me this month - while I’m not certain that I graded things perfectly, when considering this list, I’m not seeing anything that jumps out at me as particularly egregious.
E: I’ll reiterate that I’m not using decimal grades, so my ratings are more akin to a tierlist. And two months in, I’ve pretty much ironed out what each tier sounds like to me, so the only real post facto adjustments are going to come from albums that grew on me or deteriorated in quality through repeated listens. One album fits that bill this month:
Pretty much everything Hayley Williams puts out clicks more with me the more I listen to it, and this was no exception. I definitely listened to This Is Why the most out of every album we visited in February. Hayley/Paramore is near the top of my list for artists I need to see live, so if anyone wants to get me a ticket for their St. Paul show in August…
I’ll Give You The Best
D: I gave my first 10 to one of my favorite albums of all time in Bon Iver’s 22, A Million - and wrote more than 700 words backing up that decision. That’s not particularly surprising, but it is the first album to join my hallowed Hall Of Tens.
This month was, on the surface, worse off than the last one - my average score was 7.3, which is perfectly fine, but I think it’s about two tenths lower than last month’s album, and it shows across all of our rankings, with just three new entries into our collective top 10 (22, A Million at 2, The People’s Champ at 8, and Summer’s Gone at 10).
Just missing out, but worth mentioning to me, are Hailaker’s self-titled, Young Fathers’ newest in Heavy Heavy, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists, all of which sat just on the precipice of 9.0 territory, and Catfish and the Bottlemen landed inside the 9 decile with their 2014 album The Balcony, but that was another favorite of mine, so it shouldn’t be as shocking.
Tracks that stood out include “Homesick” off of The Balcony, one of my favorite songs of all time, but since so many of the favorites are tightly wound, I like to reserve this moment to talk about shocking songs - tracks that came off albums that I didn’t like quite as much on the whole - of these, I think Remi Wolf’s “Quiet On Set” and Wilderado’s “Surefire” both need to land here, as well as Gorillaz’ “Baby Queen”.
E: I didn’t give any albums a 10 this month. Counting the aforementioned This Is Why, I gave five albums a 9.
My favorite album of this month was ODESZA’s Summer’s Gone: my gateway album to indie electronic instrumental music, which is now a large chunk of my listening portfolio when I’m not listening to new albums for this project. “Don’t Stop” is probably my most played song of all time on Spotify.
Quinn XCII’s The People’s Champ is a fresh record of almost vignette-like slice-of-life tracks. Quinn’s a bit of a dorky lyricist but I’m a huge dork, so I’m a fan. Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad has become old enough to qualify as “retro cool” and the production on the whole record is airtight (and quite underrated in retrospect). And Bon Iver’s 22, A Million needs no introduction; it’s an indie classic.
As far as songs go, I’ll just call up my most scrobbled songs of February on last.fm and see what I felt the most like revisiting.
Oh hey, it’s “24” by Jem again. What’s that still doing here? Also yes, that’s Hannah Montana at #1. This will make sense in a few paragraphs, I promise.
I had not listened to anything from Gorillaz’ Cracker Island before Monday, when we listened to it for this project, so that means I listened to “Baby Queen” and “New Gold” a combined 45 times in two days. I thought the album overall relied too heavily on features and the standalone Gorillaz tracks generally disappointed me, but “Baby Queen” is a huge exception and probably my favorite song of the month. Greg Kurstin is one of my favorite producers of all time and his work on Cracker Island is all-around phenomenal.
Paramore’s “The News” went from my least favorite song on the album to my favorite in about three listens. The lyrics are so surface-level, but the more I heard them, the more they moved me, and Williams’ performance definitely sells them.
acloudyskye’s “Riverside” is an excellent, soothing, chiptune-y composition that wouldn’t feel too out of place as a credits track in a platformer.
How To Disappoint Completely
D: We had our two worst albums this month, unfortunately, and a third that sits 56th of 59 as things stand. Not awesome!
Only two of them were albums I was particularly low on, so those are the two I’m going to fixate on for the moment. AJJ’s People Who Can Eat People was unnecessarily edgy, to the point of being embarrassingly fixated on shock value at times. It felt entirely like the album wanted to be “deep” without having an understanding of what that meant or what that looked like.
The other, of course, is Deceit’s This Heat, our current bottom-dweller and the only album below a 3.0 at 2.2. I’ve spoken to my dislike for this album, as I have with all of these albums, so my thoughts will be less wordy, but I cannot, for the life of me, fathom Pitchfork’s revisited review of this album. For as much as I like a venture into experimental music… this is not music. Whatever they were doing is far too out of this world for me, and whether that means that I just don’t get it - my consciousness is not elevated enough for that heat, I suppose. I’m okay with that.
The only other album I’ll make mention of here is because I was lowest relative to consensus on this one (-1.33 points) - it’s Paramore’s This Is Why, an album that I felt like wanted to be so much more than it actually achieved. I touched on this in the review I wrote for it, but it largely comes down to a lack of honest feeling behind the songs for me, tired clichés for the sake of cliché more than powerful hits as Paramore have come to be so known for.
E: My lowest grade last month was a 4, but this month I rated three albums worse than that: two 3s and a 1.
The 3s were Greet Death’s New Hell (incredibly monotonous) and Deceit’s This Heat (so experimental that it hardly even parsed to me as music). I’m on an island in disliking New Hell, as it’s thus far the album I’m lowest on compared to consensus (all year, not just February). To me, it was an album that was somehow worse than the sum of its parts; the music itself was alright, but so much of it blended together for me and sounded so sonically similar that 48 minutes of it just made my brain turn to mush.
I was actually the highest of the three of us on This Heat (the other two rated it 1.7 and 1.9), I think because I could somewhat more appreciate the influence this album had on a lot of more popular (and, let’s be honest, better) artists. This was David’s lowest-rated album of the year to date, so I’m sure you just read him get into it in his segment, but I can’t believe Pitchfork came back to this record 21 years after the fact and gave it a 9.0.
I gave AJJ’s People Who Can Eat People Are The Luckiest People In The World my first 1 of the year. I don’t feel like coming up with new words to describe how much I don’t like this album, so I’ll just repurpose the review I wrote when we listened to it a few weeks ago.
This is sometimes considered one of the quintessential folk punk albums, and if that’s the case then leave me the hell out of this genre. The lyricism on this record is grade school material, and I mean that to its worst degree, including all the gratuitous swearing. It sounds like you’re listening to Britta from Community ramble for an hour and a half, which isn’t good given the record is only 25 minutes long.
There’s absolutely no subtlety to it. The closer, “People”, sounds like a song written for a sitcom as part of a joke in which the main character is trying to support their friend’s music career but doesn’t have the heart to tell them they’re not good at it. Once that song ended, I threw on Hannah Montana’s “Nobody’s Perfect” as ear cleanser and her lyrics were ten times deeper in comparison. The music itself is just as blunt. It’s in your face. You can’t avoid it. It hurts to listen to for more than a few minutes.
I can’t believe frontman Sean Bonnette was in his early 20s when this was released. I would be embarrassed to write lyrics like “your hair, it smells like burning hair” at any age.
I didn’t like it, in other words.
Shock Value
D: I think my positive surprise of the month has to be Hailaker - a name I was completely unfamiliar with prior to listening to them, but they sure closed February on a high note with one of the finest indie folk albums I’ve ever heard. “I Could Be Back” has been in my head since I first heard it, and is likely going to stay there until I find something else to displace it entirely. Absolutely phenomenal stuff, the likes of which I was not expecting at all. A lot of the small acts this month really shone in this regard, defsharp and Wilderado among them. Hailaker takes it, though.
Much like my actual life, February got off to a pretty rocky start. Lots of albums that I didn’t necessarily hang high hopes on wound up underwhelming, and though certain artists shone in brief moments, a lot of our early run was pretty dominated by work I’d heard great things about that left me feeling entirely underwhelmed.
E: This month, we listened to a lot of artists I’d never previously heard of. I’d like to highlight one who disappointed me and one who pleasantly surprised me.
Grivo’s Omit starts out strong, its best track “Trammel” setting you up for a good, downtempo, riff-driven time. Then it spends the rest of the runtime just kinda devolving into nothingness, going off in a bunch of different directions and yet in no direction at all. I’m not sure I understood a single lyric on the entire record until I started specifically listening for them. I gave this album a 5, but if all of it was more like the opener, it could have been a 7 or 8 in my ears.
I didn’t know anything about defsharp before I listened to their EP infrequent flyers program the other week, and I still don’t because their Spotify bio is just two words: “sincerely signed”. But I know they’re an excellent musician and I greatly appreciated that they could incorporate fairly unorthodox sounds into such poppy music without having it sound like a mess or like it was shoehorned in. I gave the EP an 8 and I’ll definitely be checking out more of their stuff.
And there you have it!
March 1st’s review will be along later tonight. Thanks, as always for tuning in.