The Daily Spin
June Rundown
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. We’re halfway 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: We’re almost exactly one-half of the way through The Daily Spin, and for the most part, I’m really happy with how I’ve graded things. I think I’ll continue to consider my scale and adjust as necessary, as I do think that there’s been some definite inflation from January to June (and the averages say as much), but even then.
E: When I first listened to Peach Pit, it was last month and I thought they were just okay. This past month, I’ve been made to listen to two more albums by Peach Pit and I also still think they’re just okay, and now I’m tired of listening to them.
I’ll Give You The Best
D: Admittedly, I stacked this month pretty hard, especially around my birthday weekend. I gave two 10s, a 9.9, a 9.7, a 9.6, a pair of 9.5s, and a 9.1 and while these were tempered by a few albums where I was way low in terms of the aggregate, it’s not hard to make clear which of these were personal favorites.
In Colour remains my favorite album of all-time - truly, if I could only pick one album to rate a 10, that would be it. ODESZA’s In Return was the single most pivotal album in developing a lot of my music taste through college, the first time that I really heard a song and thought this is what I’m looking for. Jai Paul’s Bait Ones is intentionally unfinished, and even so, it is so remarkably forward-thinking and so close to perfection that it sits at a 9.9, the first album to land that score on my end. Prince’s Purple Rain is iconic, both as a Minnesotan and as someone that likes music that clearly just fucks, while the xx tell such a gorgeous love story with I See You that it’s hard not to focus on it and all the beauty it contains. Beach House and Sufjan Stevens broke my heart two different ways with Depression Cherry and Carrie & Lowell, respectively, and yet I would absolutely thank them for doing so every single time, and the final album to score above a 9 for me was The Avalanches’ Wildflower, an incredible composition of sampling that leaves you feeling the full scope of what music is capable of being.
E: No 10s this month, but the album that came closest for me was CHVRCHES’ 2013 debut, The Bones of What You Believe. CHVRCHES are my favorite band, and though the trio has clearly expanded a lot on their sound from this fairly pared-down synthpop offering, something about the relative simplicity of it all makes this the record of theirs I revisit the most. The only reason I didn’t give it a 10 was because its closer, “You Caught the Light”, is a near-six-minute slog that I skip on almost every playthrough. Maybe I’m judging it too harshly, but I’ve been pretty consistent in that a 10 to me is a perfect album, and having a long, blah track as your closer is a blemish, no matter how small.
My favorite track this month was easily “Lone Digger” from Caravan Palace’s aptly titled <|º_º|>. Listen to it once and you’ll listen to it 30 times, dancing all the way. Honorable mention to “Shapes” from Defunctland’s Lines soundtrack, a song that reminds me of Carnival Night Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and truly makes me feel like I’m at an amusement park.
How To Disappoint Completely
D: I had the three lowest ratings of the month across all three of us, so I think it only makes sense for me to speak to those, even if I did have some idea ahead of time that they were probably going to be towards the bottom. Liana Flores’ recently was really the only surprise disappointment, I think, and I’m not even entirely sure why I disliked it so strongly, but it just felt very contrived and for a 13-minute album or however short it was, I found myself still feeling tired of the tracks. Not a great combination.
Zach Callison and Will Wood fall into the same bucket for me, to an extent - where Callison massively overdoes the theatrics on A Picture Perfect Hollywood Heartbreak is exactly where Wood tends to fly into hysterics in an effort to be less normal on The Normal Album, both done in a way that actively detract from the listening experience and the cohesiveness of the albums as a whole. Theatrics can be employed well, but in both of these cases, I would have said the opposite was true.
E: My ratings this month were six 7s, eight 9s, and sixteen 8s, so it’s hard to say anything “disappointed” me, per se. Listening to two albums from Peach Pit - a band I think is merely okay - in relatively quick succession near the beginning of the month was probably the low point, which is more than I can say about any of the previous months.
Shock Value
D: The only album that distinctly stands out to me as receiving a lower rating than I expected was ABBA’s The Visitors, mainly because I think it deviates so strongly from ABBA’s winning formula in a way that isn’t exploratory enough to be new, nor does it highlight the strengths of the group as you’d like an album to.
E: I was surprised to like Will Wood’s The Normal Album as much as I did, especially given most of the Will Wood work I’d previously heard didn’t work nearly as well for me. It’s largely an album about the struggle of conforming to society as a neurodivergent person, and unlike David, I think the way it’s presented almost always adds to the experience. I listen to this album and I think, “wow, the world seems like a really obnoxious place to live from the perspective of the performer”, and then I also think, “wow, the world is a really obnoxious place to live”. The theming can get a little jumbled and somewhat anachronistic, but I enjoyed the raw energy of this record quite a lot regardless.
The most surprising “low” score I gave this month was certainly the 8 I gave to Prince’s Purple Rain, surprising because 1) it’s an all-time classic and most retrospectives have given it a perfect or near-perfect score, and 2) Prince is the Minnesota guy. I guess all I can say is that the album has nine tracks, and when it was over, I didn’t want to relisten to more than half of them outside of the film they soundtrack. Four obviously iconic songs - “Let’s Go Crazy”, “When Doves Cry”, “I Would Die 4 U”, and “Purple Rain” - are flanked by five fairly high concept tracks that, while innovative and influential, were not super satisfying to consume in the moment. That’s not to say I dislike the album or think it’s bad; 8 is a marginally above average score for me on the year. I just don’t want to lie to myself when reviewing music or completely discard my personal tastes to consider popular opinion or trends.
In A Word
Quick-hit recaps for each album.
The Visitors (ABBA)
D: It feels weird to actively dissuade a group from exploring different styles but when you find a wheelhouse as strong as ABBA’s, maybe that’s just what needs to happen.
E: ABBA’s saddest album, for better or worse.
Wildflower (The Avalanches)
D: Pushes every boundary of what we know music to be to create a cohesive yet innovative record.
E: Sounds like the experience of walking through a bustling city on a busy Saturday.
Being So Normal (Peach Pit)
D: Slowly falls into inanity.
E: The front half is fine; the back half is sluggish.
Over the Garden Wall OST (The Blasting Company)
D: Watch the show, if you haven’t yet.
E: A great soundtrack that serves as the backbone of a great show.
Bunny (Beach Fossils)
D: Extremely difficult to distinguish this from any other indie album.
E: Well, it’s more melodic and rhythmic than some of the other indie rock we’ve reviewed recently.
The Little Prince OST (Hans Zimmer and Richard Harvey)
D: Never seen the movie, didn’t need to to feel the cues of this soundtrack.
E: The scat singing in “Turnaround” is still stuck in my head.
You and Your Friends (Peach Pit)
D: How have we listened to this much Peach Pit?
E: I didn’t expect to listen to three Peach Pit albums when I took on this project and yet.
Carrie & Lowell (Sufjan Stevens)
D: Deeply honest and uncomfortably bare, but done with brilliance.
E: Melancholy music true to the intensity often harbored in such negative emotions.
The Bones of What You Believe (CHVRCHES)
D: A major player in developing my love for electropop.
E: I’m still not sure I shouldn’t have given this a 10; one of my favorite albums.
Strange Trails (Lord Huron)
D: Everyone thinks of the Dale commercial or 13 Reasons Why, but there are trails not taken worth visiting in this one.
E: There’s a lot more to it than just “The Night We Met”.
Purple Rain (Prince)
D: Some of the most iconic tracks of all time, and one that’s so prominently about fucking that you just kinda have to move on.
E: Four iconic tracks and five okay ones.
Weathervanes (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit)
D: Coulda had a real bombshell if it ended where it should have.
E: Good Americana that goes on four tracks too long.
A Picture Perfect Hollywood Heartbreak (Zach Callison)
D: The guy who voices Steven Universe decides to deep-dive an absurdist… something, and it doesn’t follow through.
E: Starts out sounding like some weird, adult-sounding Disney Channel Original Movie soundtrack and then slowly descends into insanity.
The Normal Album (Will Wood)
D: [holds up spork]
E: It works so well because it’s performed intentionally ridiculously.
Waterfall (Fish in a Birdcage)
D: I know we listened to this, but it sort of just faded into the background by the end of it all.
E: I wanted to rate this higher but by the end of the album I realized I didn’t remember any of it.
In Return (ODESZA)
D: I credit this album for developing my love of music into what it is now, the perfect big-room indietronica record.
E: Somewhere between the trance-inducing Summer’s Gone and the poppier sound of everything ODESZA has released since.
In Colour (Jamie xx)
D: My favorite album of all time, the sort of production that lives with you for the rest of your life.
E: Masterfully composed songs that stick with you through good times and bad.
Depression Cherry (Beach House)
D: Phenomenal, but would be even better if it knew when to cut things off.
E: It’s good, but with an average song length of 4:58, I wish more of them could be condensed to 3:58.
The Age of Pleasure (Janelle Monae)
D: Feels a little bit of a shock-value play, kind of a disappointing sequel to her last work.
E: A sexual awakening album that perhaps would have popped monocles in 1993 but seems tame for 2023.
recently (Liana Flores)
D: Coffee shop music [derogatory]
E: An extremely coffeehouse EP (meant as neither a compliment nor an insult).
Adventure (The Lydian Collective)
D: Coffee shop music [complimentary]
E: The chill jam band vibes remind me of Pigeons Playing Ping Pong in the best way.
The Planets (Gustav Holst + The Chicago Symphony)
D: If I ever do something super fuckin cool I’m gonna need that string section from Jupiter (y’all know the one) to play. Would’ve been a 10 if they included Pluto, even if it hadn’t been discovered at original time of writing.
E: The planets really do be like that.
<|º_º|> (Caravan Palace)
D: Electro-swing that has a non-dancer very close to dancing throughout.
E: Nostalgically fits right into the mid-2010s trend of contemporary dance music + roaring ‘20s swing.
Lines: Music for Waiting in Queues (Defunctland)
D: WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY.
E: Visit glorious Shapeland and be serenaded by a soundtrack that sounds like it’s being played on a Sega Genesis.
Eternal Sunshine (WHALES TALK)
D: I am living for the return of music that sounds like this more frequently, I miss it.
E: Good late 2010s radio power pop…released in 2023.
Lost In Translation (Valley)
D: Feels like the back half of the album gets… lost in translation.
E: The subject matter is pretty depressed throughout, but the production gets drearier as the runtime progresses.
RELAXER (alt-J)
D: Exploratory alternative that hits a lot of good pressure points for me.
E: The album is a misnomer but I enjoyed the songwriting for pulling off some creative ideas in a way that didn’t seem like they just wanted to be weird for the sake of it.
The Downward Spiral (Nine Inch Nails)
D: Industrial, grating, danceable, beautiful. Hard to reduce it to words, even harder to do so with numbers.
E: A supremely complex album with a supremely complicated legacy.
I See You (The xx)
D: The sort of emotional tale that stays with you no matter what your lived experience is.
E: Lyrically, a very emotional and vulnerable album that weirdly barely comes across that way in the music itself.
Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) (Jai Paul)
D: A glimpse of perfection, however brief it may be.
E: It’s hard to attribute the obvious errors to innovative musical genius when you know these songs were unintentionally leaked in an unfinished state, not that that’s Jai Paul’s fault.
And there you have it!
July 1st’s review will be along later today. Thanks, as always, for tuning in.