The Daily Spin
July Rundown
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. Seven down, five to go!
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: I feel like I’m realizing that I’ve got to like… totally overhaul most of the first couple months of reviews. Either that or we’re shifting 95% of these albums down a quarter-step. As much as I’ve poked fun at them, Eli nailed it by avoiding decimals - I think half-steps were probably the right call for this series.
E: Finally someone recognizes my genius.
I’ll Give You The Best
D: As I said in my review, I have five albums that are true 10s for me. We’d looked at 4 of them prior to this month (22, A Million on February 24, Currents on March 30, In Return on June 16, and In Colour on June 17). The fifth and final album that is currently a perfect 10 for me is RAC’s EGO, an album that I’ve waxed poetic on before as I did in my review last week. To me, it is the perfect example of an album nailing its atmosphere in a way that so rarely do albums manage, particularly considering the sustained cohesiveness of the entire project.
Additionally, I’ve got to mention my current front-runner for 2023’s Album Of The Year - The Japanese House’s In The End It Always Does, an album that took my breath away on first, second, and third listen, perfect indie pop that nails so much of what I’ve wanted from artists like MUNA and boygenius that put out whelming releases recently.
Finally, I’d like to shoutout An Awesome Wave, for its phenomenal run - from Something Good through Ms, four of the strongest tracks in alt-J’s entire catalogue all stacked one after another. Brilliant work. Swimming is a beautiful and at times heavy examination of love, one that feels so authentic at a time when the in move was to be insincere in this regard, and for that, I’ll always love Mac Miller. FutureSex/LoveSounds was the genesis of my interest in music, and there’s not much I can say that’ll top that. It remains an incredible album.
E: I suggested perhaps my favorite album of all-time for our album club. It was an album I didn’t expect to be a big hit (and it wasn’t), but Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team is an inner-circle classic for me nonetheless, and I feel it’s incumbent on me to explain why.
This isn’t an obscure album. It was perhaps one of the most popular indie albums of 2004 and songs from it were used in several other media at the time. My older brother, nearly 12 years my senior, loved this album in college. Whenever he’d come back to visit, this was one of a select few CDs he’d play on repeat in the car (two of the others were In Rainbows and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, both of which I also gave perfect 10/10s).
So, on the one hand, I know this album like the back of it, and that nostalgia definitely plays a factor in my enjoyment. But on the other hand, that’s also true of a lot of other music from my childhood that I actively dislike (so much Christian rock) or have completely forgotten. And In Rainbows this album is not, so why’d it stick with me as an adult?
The best way I can think to describe it is that this album expresses my energy better than perhaps any piece of music I’ve ever heard. It’s powerful, sentimental, almost incomprehensible. It’s classically melodic but experimental and frankly wacky in its presentation. When I listen to this album, I hear the inner workings of my own brain.
This is also true of quite a bit of the later work from The Go! Team; Thunder, Lightning, Strike was their debut album and they’re still going strong almost two decades later.
How To Disappoint Completely
D: It makes me sad to say it, especially because it was part of our Saturday Nights at the [Album] Club series, but John Henry really let me down. I’ve been familiar with TMBG through a few of their works, mostly their later projects that are geared to a younger audience, but for this album to miss so strongly with me left me feeling rather let down by it all.
Every other album more or less landed where I expected it to - we had a few albums that fell outside of the top 150, but given that we’re 212(!) albums in and nothing slipped into the 200s, I’m pretty content with how most everything else fell.
E: Y’know what? I’m not gonna do this one this month. There’s so much negativity in the world and I just think we need more good vibes.
I could go on and on about how Djesse Vol. 1 sounds like amateur hour in my concert choir rehearsal room or about how Greta Van Fleet makes the dullest rock and roll known to humankind, but not this month. I’m all about that toxic positivity. (That’s a good thing, right? It must be if it’s positive.)
Shock Value
D: As I said above, nothing really blew me away, so instead, I’m going to speak to the two albums that my fellow reviewers gave 10s, albums I gave a 7.7 (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill) and 7.3 (Thunder, Lightning, Strike) instead.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill just wound up feeling woefully try-hard in its consciousness, like an album designed so explicitly to be one-note in its quest to preach that it wound up completely taking me out of the headspace to look at it from a musical perspective. When I was able to fall back on that, I thought it was quite good, but those moments were too few and far between for me to really consider it for the eights (and honestly, I think I may have been too high on it at 7.7).
Thunder, Lightning, Strike, meanwhile, takes a different approach - my main gripe with the album, genuinely, is that I find it extremely grating over long distances - with this work, The Go! Team nail down the idea of layering about twenty vocal tracks at once, and in my experience, that feels not cohesive but rather like one sustained panic attack. Not really my cup of tea, as much as I want to claim otherwise, and I wish that more of the high moments that kept pulling me back into the album floated it higher.
E: I was kinda shocked to realize how much I liked FutureSex/LoveSounds. Back in the day, I pretty much only knew it as “the ‘SexyBack’ album” because my parents didn’t want me listening to Justin Timberlake when I was that young and “SexyBack” was on the radio all the damn time.
It wasn’t until this relisten that I fully realized how much of an all-time great singer/producer duo Timberlake and Timbaland were/are. Everything adds up to way more than the sum of its parts throughout the entire record. Timberlake’s vocals range from feeling like a spare string in Timbaland’s production (“What Goes Around…”) to having their own distinct, bombastic style (“Summer Love”) and everything in between.
FutureSex/LoveSounds is a classic pop album, and Justin Timberlake’s solo stuff is perhaps collectively underrated since Man of the Woods dropped and destroyed all his credibility forever. It’s definitely worth a relisten. …FutureSex/LoveSounds, not Man of the Woods. Never listen to Man of the Woods.
In A Word
Quick-hit recaps for each album.
West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum (Kasabian)
D: Somehow I’d never heard this before, but it’s good stuff when it gets rolling.
E: A lesser entry in the 2009 indie rock hall of classics.
Living on a Planet Full of Empty Life (Linus Alberg)
D: Encapsulates emptiness in all its forms, sparse to the point of desolation.
E: Brilliantly layers secondary instruments over the piano riffs only when necessary.
Business Is Business (Young Thug)
D: Business is business is business as usual.
E: The same sound for a decade.
SILLY.BUS (OfF.Brand)
D: It’s silly, but silly has a real short half-life to it.
E: Blessed “last day of school” vibes, but it’d get annoying if it was longer than 13 minutes.
FutureSex/LoveSounds (Justin Timberlake)
D: Timbaland and Timberlake were IT and this record proves the depths of that strength.
E: Didn’t really realize how much this record defined the mid-aughts sound until this relisten.
Enter The Slasher House (Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks)
D: For better or for worse, doesn’t really know how to not be all of itself all the time.
E: Takes the best and worst qualities of Animal Collective/Avey Tare and turns both up to 11.
Djesse Vol. 1 (Jacob Collier)
D: Doesn’t quite understand the concept of taking a breather, but the highs are enthralling.
E: High school performing arts center (derogatory).
Brothers (The Black Keys)
D: The foundation for the iconic sound this group would find their stride with a year later.
E: El Camino is better.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Ms. Lauryn Hill)
D: Weirdly preachy in a way that totally neuters the potential of this record.
E: Incorporates the worst qualities of conscious rap a lot more than I remembered.
In the End It Always Does (The Japanese House)
D: A frontrunner for my album of the year, everything I wanted from boygenius’s release.
E: The best parts of MUNA and boygenius rolled into one.
Lingua d’argento (Alberto Baldan Bembo)
D: [Jon Bois voice] Have you ever heard of the… Minnesota Vikings? [synth power chord]
E: So effortless and yet clearly so complex.
Talon of the Hawk (The Front Bottoms)
D: Another one of those “I know we listened to this but I quite literally can’t recall a single sound from it” albums.
E: Maybe the most stock indie rock album I’ve ever heard.
Titanic Rising (Weyes Blood)
D: Bright spots darkened by misapplied production.
E: How Lana Del Rey would sound if she still made good music.
Glitterbug (The Wombats)
D: One of my favorite jam albums.
E: Evokes some of my favorite indie artists but feels a little underdone.
John Henry (They Might Be Giants)
D: This album is roughly as consistent as my three-point shooting. It isn’t.
E: Classic TMBG comedy with super inconsistent production.
Swimming (Mac Miller)
D: A profound and deeply enjoyable examination of love found and lost.
E: Adept at making you think about both Mac’s struggles and your own.
Time Will Wait for No One (Local Natives)
D: Local Natives have had the same schtick for a hot minute now and they’re good at it, but it’s better suited to Sephora than it is to a record player.
E: Honestly drew a blank on this one; it’s white noise.
Woodland (Paper Kites)
D: Easy on the ears to the point of occasionally fading into nothingness.
E: Marginally above average indie folk.
Shipwreck (Shayfer James)
D: A strong ship moored by inconsistency at key moments.
E: Compositions that remind me of some of my favorite music of the early 2010s.
Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum (Tally Hall)
D: Is this the MCU? Because these Marvels are getting old.
E: High school performing arts center (complimentary).
An Awesome Wave (alt-J)
D: One of the best four-song runs I’ve ever seen on a record bracketed by pretty bog-standard alternative/indie.
E: In Rainbows with worse vocals and less variety.
Somewhere City (Origami Angel)
D: I’M SAD [wildly loud guitar riffs that kinda kick ass]
E: Too much energy blared in the same chord.
Moenie and Kitchi (Gregory and the Hawk)
D: Nothingness, the album.
E: Replacement-level singer-songwriter album with a couple random edgy tracks.
Feed the Beast (Kim Petras)
D: Sex positivity taken beyond all extremes.
E: Stop working with Dr. Luke.
Hunky Dory (David Bowie)
D: Iconic for its time, iconic later on.
E: A music fan’s record.
songs written for piano (Katie Gregson-MacLeod)
D: The piano is great, but it doesn’t always feel like this was actually written to be instrumentalized.
E: Maybe if I was reviewing poetry this’d score two points higher.
Winter High!! - Best of Kohmi’s Party (Kohmi Hirose)
D: An hour of music that only vaguely tickles the senses.
E: Catchy J-pop that also kinda sounds like it’s from a commercial (because it might be!).
EGO (RAC)
D: It doesn’t sparkle the way my other pantheon albums do, but I think the point is realizing that it doesn’t have to in order to excel beyond all expectations.
E: Way better than BOY lmao wow.
Thunder, Lightning, Strike (The Go! Team)
D: At times, like an anxiety attack distilled, at others, phenomenal power-pop.
E: This is what my brain sounds like.
Changing Colours (Babe Rainbow)
D: Two-Face, is that you?
E: Interminable but nostalgically endearing.
Starcatcher (Greta Van Fleet)
D: NASCAR Heat fans stay winning, baby.
E: Still not beating the Led Zeppelin copycat allegations.
And there you have it!
July 1st’s review will be along later today. Thanks, as always, for tuning in.