The Daily Spin
August Rundown
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. Two-thirds of the way there!
As always, Eli’s with me for the monthly recap, 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.
And as always, here’s the playlist containing my favorite song from each of the albums I’ve reviewed so far - and this month, it’s even up to date! 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. I got you.
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: Hoo boy. Beginning to shift my marks down a little bit to combat inflation, but even then, still needs some calibration. I have my eye on a few ratings I’ll probably eventually nuke or bless, but nothing so immediately pressing as to jump in and make that adjustment straight out.
E: I’m not actively trying to review albums more or less harshly based on what I believe should be an “average” score, but it is nice to see that my average for this month naturally gravitated closer to 7 than 8 simply because I liked the music less.
I’ll Give You The Best
D: Much like the movie itself (which, at some point, we’ll get a film review series going and speak to more of those, because HOLY SHIT), both variants on the Spider-Verse soundtrack had my absolute heart this month. The standout is, of course, Daniel Pemberton’s score, but I have to give a ton of credit to Metro Boomin for pulling so many influences together so cohesively in what is one of the best ‘inspired by’ compilations I’ve ever listened to.
Outside of that and my own suggestions, it was a pretty eh month, honestly. Hozier’s third was another phenomenal piece of work, though I did feel it failed to quite hit the highs of his self-titled or his second record. The rating is more a reflection of his innate talent than anything else, knowing his floor is higher than so many other people’s ceilings.
E: We listen to so much music here on The Daily Spin that it’s definitely a compliment when I feel compelled to listen to an album twice through, and I felt so compelled with Doc Robinson’s Deep End. It’s soothing, contemplative, and soulful while still being melodic and groovy, and I continue to be amazed at how many good musicians come out of a place as boring as Columbus.
For how overlong albums were in the ‘90s, including OutKast’s debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, it’s hard for me to hold it against this particular record so much because Big Boi and Andre’s love for their roots shines through so brightly from start to finish.
My introduction to 2 Mello was through his B-side remix for Celeste’s Mirror Temple, and that track is so outstanding that I’d been looking forward to Memories of Tokyo-To all month. It did not disappoint. I’ve never even played Jet Set Radio, but boy does this album sure make me want to.
The Alvin and the Chipmunks OST is a landmark piece of musical art that infinitely many other artists are so sure they can’t replicate that nobody has even tried.
How To Disappoint Completely
D: If any of the songs from Alvin and the Chipmunks make my Top Songs of 2023 playlist, I’m deleting my Spotify and chucking Eli through the nearest window in our apartment as penance for suggesting it. What a deeply unfortunate album to have to listen to.
Beyond that, it was kind of a weird month for me - despite being lower on consensus than I have been since about January in a previously mentioned effort to rebalance my scoring, and accounting for the fact that a lot of this music was actively outside of my wheelhouse, I still wasn’t the lowest of the three of us this month. A lot of these albums, especially in the last week of the month, simply fall into the unfortunate space of two categories: music that simply Isn’t For Me (Live. Places. and Coffee and Ramen), or music that I feel has been done much better a thousand times over (Florida).
I also think that the average value of this month was tempered by the above, and as such, I expected a more deflated rating - after a couple of months very influenced by my suggestions and inputs, we’ve moved away to albums suggested by my friends - who I love dearly, but whose music taste is clearly less congruent with mine.
E: I have a hard time articulating what it is about ‘90s britpop that rubs me the wrong way so much, but I didn’t like Pulp and I don’t like Edwyn Collins either. Maybe it’s the completely unremarkable vocal inflection and performance. Maybe it’s that all of the riffs sound stock (doubly hilarious given the opener is titled “The Campaign for Real Rock”). Maybe it’s the closer “Moron” just completely mocking the concept of spiritual connection to music, intentionally or otherwise.
Shock Value
D: As I’m looking back, I’m honestly totally unsurprised by my ratings for this month. I don’t think any one of these necessarily felt lower than I would have expected, nor did any come home higher. I’m definitely a little surprised that so many albums fell below the 6.0 mark for me, because that’s generally my delineator for albums I don’t really have any interest in revisiting, yet here we are. Weird month.
E: This is going to be a UTOPIA rant.
This album, in my humble opinion, stinks.
I wanna start by saying that I don’t dislike Travis Scott as an artist. My vinyl collection is only a few dozen records deep but ASTROWORLD is one of them. I Got™ that record; I understood why it was so tremendously, earth-shatteringly huge. Suffice it to say that I do not Get™ this record.
The most obvious difference to me is the production. Like ASTROWORLD, it’s a mix of Travis’ own work and that of his many collaborators, but Travis clearly intended for this album to go in a significantly darker direction, and it just does not work. In the next section, David claims that Travis tried and failed to make this record his Yeezus, and…yep! I couldn’t improve on that if I tried. Trying to stomach this production for an hour gave me a splitting headache. On some tracks, it’s overloud and mixed like crap; on others, it’s almost too sparse.
Let’s talk about all those collaborators. On ASTROWORLD, none of them were given featuring credits despite being seamlessly woven into the fabric of the record. Unless you’d read a review of the album beforehand, you didn’t know what you were getting into when you clicked ASTROWORLD on Spotify. That is absolutely not the case with this record, for the worse. The first thing you notice when UTOPIA loads on your screen is that 13 of the 19 tracks have features, including some of the biggest names in music and even Dave Chappelle. There are still some pleasant surprises on the production end, like hearing a couple tracks that were clearly the work of Justin Vernon, but otherwise, you’re just looking at that tracklist and waiting for The Weeknd and Beyoncé to show up.
The parts of the record I vibed with seemed to mostly come through the efforts of these features (including the aforementioned Vernon production work) and not Travis’. In fact, I sensed a glaring lack of effort on his part, especially compared to ASTROWORLD. This record, to me, came across as if Travis was intent on coasting on his mega-stardom to easy eight- and nine-digit stream counts, making the features more obvious and artificially inflating the album length to a butt-numbing 19 tracks to capitalize as much as he could.
UTOPIA is the Drake-ification of Travis Scott. I hate what it stands for.
In A Word
Quick-hit recaps for each album.
This Bitter Earth (Veronica Swift)
D: Musical lectures are no better than regular lectures, as it turns out, and this one’s actually worse.
E: Feels like I’m being lectured for 61 minutes to make the grand point of “sexism used to be worse”.
Fine Line (Harry Styles)
D: Walks that fine line between pop superstardom and genuineness with delicious tact.
E: Made everyone take Harry seriously as a capital-A Artist and not just a silly ex-boy band member.
Alvin and the Chipmunks (Alvin and the Chipmunks)
D: [Brad Pitt, Moneyball] There’s good albums, bad albums, 50 feet of crap, and then there’s this.
E: If I had to place this groundbreaking record on the 10-point scale I’d previously been using, I would have given it a 12/10, but I couldn’t, so I rolled it back around to 2.
Djesse Vol. 2 (Jacob Collier)
D: When he puts the pieces together it’s genuinely lovely stuff, but too often it’s like trying to fit the square peg and the star peg and the rectangle peg into the round hole.
E: Sounds like an album of training pieces that came with choral sheet music.
I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it (The 1975)
D: Indie pop at about its finest form.
E: Every single indie pop record in the mid-’10s sounded like this, for better or worse.
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (Daniel Pemberton)
D: I come back to this one to listen for fun, and I don’t do that a whole lot with instrumentals these days.
E: I struggle to think of any meaningful way I would change this soundtrack; almost feels like a 10 by default.
METRO BOOMIN PRESENTS: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE (Metro Boomin)
D: For a genre not totally to my liking and a list of artists outside my comfort zone, Metro Boomin put together a beautiful compilation.
E: Metro Boomin is a master of production and I enjoyed revisiting this quite a lot.
The E.N.D. (The Energy Never Dies) (The Black Eyed Peas)
D: Violently launched back to 2009 with this one and it’s times like this I’m reminded how far we’ve come.
E: I got this CD for Christmas in 2009 and I come back to it once or twice a year; I used to think it was ironic.
How To Train Your Dragon (John Powell)
D: If it were all so majestic as ‘Test Drive’, this could be in the conversation for one of the greatest movie scores ever - but it’s no shame to be in the Hall of Very Good here.
E: There isn’t really a melodic driver in this score and, for all its strengths, I think that’s for the worse.
Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes)
D: Fleeting in memory, fleeting in intrigue.
E: Exceptionally chill music, to the point that the lyrics would have to actively try to get noticed.
Cleopatra (The Lumineers)
D: This second run from one of the icons of the 10s stomp-and-holler movement proves a body of work far bigger than syllables around a campfire.
E: I’m normally a music-over-everything guy, but I think the passion in the vocals is evident to an extent that I can’t help but enjoy despite sparse accompaniment.
Odelay (Beck)
D: Intentionally a little wonky, but to wonderful effect.
E: Certainly sounded a lot weirder in 1996 than it does today, but that’s its own doing.
Nine Circles (Occams Laser)
D: This is the replacement-level version of synthwave music.
E: Okay, well this is a nice synthwave instrumental base for what could be a much better album…where’s the album?
Genetic World (Telepopmusik)
D: When it hooks you, it's extremely fun to dive into, but like a bad fisherman, I’m left floating away more often than not.
E: The lyricism felt like slam poetry; at times powerful, at others overdone.
Pony (Rex Orange County)
D: Soft boy music at its most quintessential.
E: I could say quite a few words about how I feel about this style of music and Rex Orange County in general, but my issues with this album mostly boil down to me not liking his vocal inflection.
Crack-Up (Fleet Foxes)
D: You realize that, whether in eight days between albums or eight years, Fleet Foxes have had exactly one and a half sounds.
E: Kinda felt like this album never started.
Choose Your Character! (The 8-Bit Big Band)
D: Some video games should not be jazzed up.
E: The tracks that were already jazzy sound great here, but too many others just muddle up originally tight compositions.
Dopamine (BØRNS)
D: Like a hit of the eponymous title drug, lifting and fun in so many wonderful ways.
E: The range of emotions and vibes displayed on this record is outstanding, bordering on immaculate, even if BØRNS is probably not a great person.
Deep End (Doc Robinson)
D: Feels a little bit like a plunge into a dark pool - sure, I like some of what I found, but there’s other stuff I’d’ve been fine leaving alone.
E: Ultra smooth.
Gorgeous George (Edwyn Collins)
D: Pervasively mediocre, to the point of being remarkably uninteresting to its core.
E: If there’s anything I’ve learned from this project so far, it’s that low-key ‘90s britpop just doesn’t do it for me.
Unreal Unearth (Hozier)
D: Disjointed at times and loses a bit of that shine from earlier works, but at the end of the day, Hozier remains unique in his ability to capture my ears.
E: The usual Hozier sound is a lot rarer than normal here; sounds ranged from Two Door Cinema Club Jr. to Imagine Dragons Jr. What?
Live. Places (Youngblood Brass Band)
D: Moments of beauty interrupted by the worst of hipster culture’s most negative stereotypes.
E: I’d be two points higher on this if it wasn’t a live album.
Coffee and Ramen (Go! Child)
D: Music that doesn’t really feel like it belongs anywhere and isn’t made for anyone.
E: If a 5/10 on my scale does just as much right as it does wrong, this is the ur 5.
Indigo Child (Raury)
D: A solid talent that is worth keeping an eye on, but this is a rough venture.
E: Catchy, fun, and blessedly short.
An Evening With SIlk Sonic (Silk Sonic)
D: Less Bruno, more Anderson, and maybe this would actually be as great as it should’ve been.
E: Feels like a spinoff Bruno album more than anything else, which is still solid as a baseline, but it stinks that it’s impossible to discuss this album without using the word “disappointing”.
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik (OutKast)
D: Iconic down the line, but looking back, it’s a little flummoxing at times.
E: A love letter to OutKast’s roots, both geographically and etymologically.
Maladroit (Weezer)
D: It’s really hard to make three great albums in a row, and Weezer sure as hell proved it here.
E: A weirdly nothing album from one of the titans of modern rock.
UTOPIA (Travis Scott)
D: Wants to be Yeezus, is definitely not Yeezus.
E: A big miss after the triumph that was ASTROWORLD.
Florida (Sarah Mac Band)
D: Incredibly forgettable music that half the world has done in more memorable and more enjoyable manners by now.
E: This album sounds like the Diet version of more established artists, from Carrie Underwood to Lake Street Dive.
Spirit Phone (Lemon Demon)
D: Stick to the sampling work, Neil.
E: The strong front end of the record does a little less than enough to justify the lull in the middle.
Memories of Tokyo-To (2 Mello)
D: A delightful cocktail of genres that has me hankering to play Jet Set Radio again.
E: Y’know sometimes, actually a lot of times, actually never, people come up to me on the street and say, “hey, you’re that guy who raps”.
And there you have it!
September 1st’s review will be along later today. Thanks, as always, for tuning in.