The Daily Spin
April Rundown
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. Four months down, eight to go; 120 albums complete.
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. 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.
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: Honestly? Nothing from me. I think I’d like to do a half-year retrospective in June and make some adjustments then (I think my scale’s slid upwards somewhat), but it’s not something I’m prepared to work through today.
E: I had The Rings of Power soundtrack as a 9 when I originally listened to it, but not much stuck with me a couple weeks later, so I dropped it to an 8. That is all.
I’ll Give You The Best
D: I am not sure that I can forgive Eli for recommending a parody album about pizza that was legitimately one of my favorites this month. Though it didn’t necessarily rate particularly highly, I definitely caught myself humming along to some of those tunes while I was working/existing. Frightening.
Discounting my own recommendations, the two albums I’d really like to mention are OK Computer - a classic, one I’ve loved but would never have probably picked for a project like this - and The Happy Fits with What Could Be Better - a gorgeously fun little jam session from a band I’ve never given the time they clearly deserve.
E: I am going to ignore R.I.Pizza, Sainthood, Electra Heart, In A Tidal Wave Of Mystery, Nocturnal, Take Me When You Go, and Piece by Piece, all of which were my own suggestions. Though I will say that, while nothing got a 10 from me this month, Electra Heart was the closest.
Of the other 23 albums, I gave five of them 9s. My favorite of these was easily The Happy Fits’ What Could Be Better. I had never heard of The Happy Fits before listening to this record, and I’m attributing that to them somehow never having shown up on the sports video games they were clearly destined to soundtrack; it’s bops all the way down the album.
We also listened to some classics, old (OK Computer) and new (The Record) that pretty much go without saying. I know they’re good. You know they’re good. No explanation necessary.
Let’s see which individual tracks I liked the most this month:
Oh wow, ten Daily Spin tracks this time. Neato. I did say I was close to giving MARINA’s Electra Heart a 10, right?
How To Disappoint Completely
D: Eli’s gonna get to her later, I think, but I’ve got to mention Miley here. Utterly underwhelmed, especially because in my opinion her more recent work was among her best. It felt like she built all this momentum and then, over the course of Endless Summer Vacation, just let it all fizzle away. Deeply disappointing.
I’m also going to mention Kelly Clarkson here, as that was the only other album I gave under a 7. As I’ve just published that review yesterday, I’m not gonna expound upon it too much more - you know why I didn’t like it.
E: The lowest score I gave this month was a 4, but I’m saving that for the next section because I was stunned by how much I disliked it and I have a bone to pick.
The second lowest score I gave this month was a 5. That was for AJR’s OK ORCHESTRA and quite honestly I still think I might have been too easy on it. I’ll start with the good: AJR are really good at making simple party music. Their overloud production and knack for writing good hooks both shine when they aren’t writing about anything of substance. I actually like “Bang!” a lot for this reason. The bad: when they’re trying to be deeper, their style is just far too nonsensical, both in sound and in lyrics, and you get stuff like “I got a girl and she’s 28 / now I’m the coolest guy in all of 8th grade” being trumpeted near the very beginning of a song.
AJR want to be relatable and write about how hard it is to be an adult. That’s something I should theoretically eat right up. I’m 25 and I still don’t have a clue where my career is going despite earning my master’s degree two years ago. I’m currently in my third “entry level” job search and have long since begun to worry that I’ve made a very expensive mistake. But that’s exactly the kind of life experience AJR don’t have because they’ve been popular musicians with a wide safety net for their entire adult lives. The only time I’ve ever felt anything genuine from them has been when they’ve sung about how hard it is to make it in the music industry. Everything else is a farce.
Shock Value
D: That post-Miley run with the Rings of Power, CLANN, and Laufey absolutely knocked my socks off - it’s all similarish in the grand scheme, but I was really excited at how much I enjoyed each of those as a listening experience. Each of them lifted something in me that I wasn’t expecting, and I really appreciated that in retrospect.
On the flipside, I did feel somewhat let down by AJR - I really liked The Click, and it’s clear that they have moved on from that formula. Eli said it best - it’s hard to fall in love with their relatability when, frankly, they’ve never really had it.
E: As usual, I’ll highlight one album I loved a lot more than I expected and one that floored me in its badness.
On the good side, we’ve got Seelie by CLANN, the other album from this month I gave a 9. I find it hard to put what I like about this album into words. I usually try to find some sort of comparison point for the music I review so other people who happen to be reading it get the gist of what I’m describing before they listen for themselves, but this album left me scrambling to come up with one that worked. The best I could muster was some combination of a more ethereal Purity Ring, a more orchestral ODESZA, and a less gimmicky Lindsey Stirling, but none of those seemed fair to Seelie, which transcends all of them at its peak.
On the bad side…Miley. What happened? How’d you go from Plastic Hearts to this? The critical consensus on Plastic Hearts was triumphant: after years of trial and error, Miley had finally found a sound that worked for her, and the tunes were bangers! (Not like the album Bangerz, which was overall pretty bad; actual good songs!) And here Miley follows it up with this amorphous blob that never truly sounds like it wants to be anything at all. I do not get it.
It’s kind of hard to criticize an album that sounds like this without sounding like you’re telling the artist to just stop being sad, and I swear that’s not what I’m doing. It’s not that Miley can’t make sad music. In fact, a decade after the fact, once you remove all of the meme and shock value, I think it’s clear that “Wrecking Ball” is one of her best songs. I know I just jabbed at Bangerz in the last paragraph, but this was its best song not only because Miley’s performance is heart-wrenching but also because you can tell she’s reaching deep inside herself to express emotions that have been eating at her for years.
Most of the time on Endless Summer Vacation, I’m not even sure what she’s supposed to be sad about, and I’m not convinced she is either. So many tracks are just repetitive lyrics backed by uninspired production; to me, it indicates a lack of creative vision. I can’t remember the last time I heard an album have so many songs that were so obviously filler.
And when the songs aren’t filler, they’re “Flowers”, one of the most boring #1s on the Billboard Hot 100 in recent memory. It’s legitimately just a worse version of Bruno Mars’ “When I Was Your Man”, right down to rhyming “flowers” with “hours”, and the demo version makes the comparison all the more obvious. I never thought I’d ask for summer vacation to end but here we are.
In A Word
Quick-hit recaps for each album.
R.I.Pizza (Stoney Calzoney)
D: Better than it has any right being.
E: Satirical music made with love (and loads of talent).
Pale Machine (bo en)
D: Grates at me, a bit.
E: Fun instrumentation with oddly coarse vocals that don’t at all match.
The Record (boygenius)
D: Indie supergroup produces super group effort.
E: 100% worth the wait.
What Could Be Better (The Happy Fits)
D: Than this album? Not much.
E: The most FIFA Music album ever (complimentary), which makes it all the more surprising that this band has never appeared on a FIFA soundtrack.
The Sunset Tree (The Mountain Goats)
D: It’s angsty without being overbearing and joyful without being saccharine.
E: John Darnielle’s most popular work for a reason.
Sainthood (Tegan and Sara)
D: Two genres diverged in a yellow wood, and these two took neither.
E: The sweet spot between underground indie T&S and bubblegum synthpop T&S.
Visions (Touch Sensitive)
D: Turning a big dial that says “80s” on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like I’m on The Price Is Right
E: Why is there a reprise immediately after the song it’s reprising?
Electra Heart (MARINA)
D: This is decent pop that leaves me wishing for… something more.
E: An impeccably produced dance pop record held back only by a few questionable lyrical choices.
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (Chicago Symphony Orchestra)
D: I love me a good orchestral bounce.
E: “The Great Gate of Kiev” is still dancing through my brain a couple weeks later.
Endless Summer Vacation (Miley Cyrus)
D: Everything about this one left me feeling a little hollow.
E: A deeply disappointing and bafflingly uninspired follow-up to Miley’s best record.
Everything I Know About Love (Laufey)
D: If someone told a love story of mine through this medium, I’d be hard pressed to want for a better person to do it.
E: You can tell Laufey is a connoisseur of the classics, but it’s hard for me to remain interested in 16 consecutive sonically similar love songs.
Seelie (CLANN)
D: Sparsely beautiful, sort of like the polar north.
E: When I tried to compare this record to music I was more familiar with, I realized it transcended almost all of it.
The Rings of Power: Season One Soundtrack (Bear McCreary)
D: It’s high fantasy near its best.
E: I have never, and will never, watch this show, so I can’t really do this justice, but I still felt like I was transported to another world, so it did its job.
Barton Hollow (The Civil Wars)
D: Heartbreak, an album. Beautiful.
E: This is what country fans are talking about when they say they wish the genre sounded rootsier or more authentic.
Koyaanisqatsi (Philip Glass)
D: Wish there was a little more pace to it.
E: Interesting musically but too slow-building and repetitive to be thoroughly enjoyable on its own.
Kiko (Los Lobos)
D: When it’s good, it’s delicious, but it shoots itself in the foot.
E: Americana at its best when the melodies can carry a track, but unfortunately that isn’t often enough.
Jesus at the Gay Bar (Cub Sport)
D: It needs a little kick in the pants, but the building blocks to greatness are all there.
E: This type of music is usually right up my alley, but I’m used to my grooves having more prominent basslines.
OK Computer (Radiohead)
D: Utterly phenomenal in nearly all respects.
E: Rightly crowned as an all-time great upon its release in 1997, but clearly not even Radiohead’s best 26 years later.
OK ORCHESTRA (AJR)
D: OK ALBUM?
E: AJR disappeared up their own asses about six years ago and I don’t think they’re ever coming back.
aer (Wisp X)
D: I feel like I should be driving late at night to this.
E: Contemplative instrumental music to skip rocks on a lake to.
BOY (RAC)
D: Third time is not the charm here.
E: Supremely underwhelming quasi-electronic ditties that are almost all too short to be truly fleshed out.
Kaputt (Destroyer)
D: Felt like I was waiting for something to hit that never actually came to fruition.
E: So ethereal as to evoke some sort of wisdom, but too nebulous to stick with me.
Progress (Kōkua)
D: Not bad, just not really my cup of tea.
E: It admittedly takes some pretty interesting music for me to be enthralled by a language I don’t speak, but this album is just that.
Angels In Science Fiction (St. Paul & the Broken Bones)
D: It’s not their best, but they’ve found their groove and they know how to work it.
E: I was mostly bored by this record but I understand that I’m in the minority.
The Score (Fugees)
D: Beyond the moments where I physically cringed, clearly a foundational album in some regards.
E: A classic album that has aged poorly (sometimes due to factors completely outside its control), making it nonsensical to me that Rolling Stone moved it up 335 spots on its “500 best albums” list between 2012 and 2020.
In A Tidal Wave Of Mystery (Capital Cities)
D: Gets old on mass listens but man, this is just good stuff.
E: I had legitimately forgotten how much this album slaps.
Nocturnal (Yuna)
D: It’s classic early-tens electropop.
E: Probably Yuna’s least impressive album, but my favorite all the same.
So Long, See You Tomorrow (Bombay Bicycle Club)
D: If the album was like the album cover this would be the best album of all time.
E: With this album, Bombay Bicycle Club essentially transitioned from being Phoenix into being Hot Chip.
Take Me When You Go (Betty Who)
D: Coulda cut it in half.
E: Excellent synthpop that I didn’t really need 70 minutes of.
Piece by Piece (Kelly Clarkson)
D: Feels like it’s not really going anywhere.
E: Come for great production, stay for Kelly Clarkson finally maturing out of teen pop at age 34.
And there you have it!
May 1st’s review will be along later today. Thanks, as always, for tuning in.
Your one sentence descriptions of OK ORCHESTRA are great