Tag: My Idea

Favourite “New” Music – December 2022

So, in the great tradition of starting a new year by looking back at the one just ended, I can say that 2022 sort of blew. This isn’t hindsight: I was very aware of its high degree of suckage while I was in the middle of it. It began with my wife and I both having COVID (mild and unenduring cases, thankfully, but even the weaker forms of this malevolent virus can kick your ass hard), and went down from there. We dealt with other medical challenges over the year, both personally and in others who we love, and those, at least in my own case, gave my mental health a ginormous pantsing. My work performance was well below what I expect from myself, I took suboptimal care of the aspects of my health over which I had some control, and I generally was largely unmotivated for big chunks of the calendar.

The good news is that, my health now restored, I am feeling pretty good about 2023. Yes, the world is still a cesspool and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. But you can often (not always – all piles of shit are not equal) choose to only go in up to your knees instead of to your neck. And you can choose to focus on the things that matter to you – the people you love, the relationships that sustain you, the pursuits that give you joy – instead of those that don’t. Trying to do just that is my sole resolution for the year ahead.

As always, while travelling the 365 days of the metaphysical Sodom and Gomorrah just ended, there was music. I offer below a list of new songs that sustained me with repeated plays over 2022. If any of them were hits, that will be news to me: they (mostly) came to my attention as album tracks that stood out from their neighbours. What they have in common is that they triggered a response: to dance, to smile, to grimly contemplate the contours of my existence. But, mostly, hearing them just made me happy, in that inexplicable way that our favourite art does, and that’s more than enough.

  • Arcade Fire – Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole) (The Art vs the Artist debate comes up here, of course. But Win Butler isn’t the only member of Arcade Fire, and I loved this hypnotic record.)
  • Caracara – Ohio (My favourite lyric of the year – “I remember playing your favourite song / hoping you’d hum along” – has that air of love mixed with despair that guts me every time.)
  • Charlotte Adigery & Bolis Pupul – Ceci n’est pas un cliché
  • Flo Milli featuring Rico Nasty – Payday (I don’t know if they are objectively “better” at rapping, but females are almost always a lot more fun to listen to than males.)
  • Mallrat – Teeth
  • midwxst – riddle
  • MØ – New Moon
  • Mura Masa with Leilah – prada (i like it) (Probably my favourite song of the year.)
  • My Idea – Popstar
  • Nilufer Yanya – stabilise
  • Omar Apollo – Talk 
  • Santigold – Fall First
  • Say Sue Me – Around You
  • Sobs – Burn Book
  • Spoon – Wild 
  • The Juliana Theory – Less Talk
  • The Linda Lindas – Oh!
  • The Wombats – Everything I Love is Going to Die
  • Years & Years – Starstruck
  • Young Guv – Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried

And, of course, here’s the usual roundup of my favourite albums of the past month.

  • The Cure – Seventeen Seconds (1980)
  • Lester Young – In Washington, D.C. 1956, Volume One (1980) (I still know next to nothing about jazz, but when a song like “D.B. Blues” gets you strutting around your kitchen at 6:00 a.m. like you’re Mack the Knife, you know you’ve stumbled onto something magical even if you don’t really understand it.)
  • The Jam – The Gift (1982)
  • Teenage Fanclub – Bandwagonesque (1991)
  • Yellowcard – Ocean Avenue (2003) (The title track is an all-time favourite, so the failure to play the whole album before now is inexcusable.)
  • The Cribs – The Cribs (2004)
  • Ben Kweller – Ben Kweller (2006)
  • Remington Super 60 – Go System Go (2006) 
  • Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts (2018) (Kanye is always brilliant, even on throwaway side projects, but it is really hard to play his stuff these days and not feel queasy.)
  • 100 gecs – 1000 gecs (2019) (So, so weird.)
  • Chinese Kitty – Kitty Bandz (2019) (See the comment on Flo Milli above.)
  • Wild Honey – Ruinas Futuras (2021) 
  • Sobs – Air Guitar (2022) (My new favourite band, this album just guarantees me 32 minutes of happiness.)
  • Disq – Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet (2022)
  • Cola – Deep in View (2022)
  • Billy Woods – Aethiopes (2022)
  • Alex G – God Save the Animals (2022)
  • Asake – Mr. Money with the Vibe (2022)
  • Rich Aucoin – Synthetic: Season One (2022) (Maritimers: I hope you are supporting this guy. I hadn’t heard anything from him since 2011’s “We’re All Dying to Live” (the video for “It” is a delight), but he was just off making deliciously odd records like this one.)
  • Ari Lennox – age/sex/location (2022)

Favourite “New” Music – October 2022

I think it’s important to know what kind of nerd you are. Nerddom can be very arcane, a subculture with shared codes that is impenetrable to those not in the know, or more expansive, a mass culture experience that brings together people whose only commonality is, say, a love of manga or “Lord of the Rings” or old Sub Pop cassettes. (I made that last one up, but I bet it exists.) And while I have my attachments to the broader nerd world – music, of course, but also superhero movies – what I really am is a data nerd.

So, what does that mean? Well, I love numbers. I am in thrall to things with a quantifiable value. That means, of course, that I have a Fitbit, and have at times been obsessive about hitting my targets. I can get lost in sports reference books and websites – basically long lists of numbers detached from context. I have similarly wasted considerable time reviewing movie box office receipts and television ratings.

In music terms, it means I have a serious attachment to where songs rank on the hit charts. I bought RPM regularly in the ‘70s and ‘80s and Billboard in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and it was totally for the weekly charts, not the articles. The pleasure I got from seeing how long a song was on the chart, or what was rising with a bullet, or if a favourite song entered the chart, is inexplicable, and, yes, kind of weird. But I have always loved numbers and their cold objectivity.

The ultimate music data nerd was Joel Whitburn, who passed away in June 2022 at the age of 82. Whitburn started analyzing Billboard’s charts in college, then put his knowledge to work at RCA in the ‘60s before starting his own company, Record Research, in 1970. Since then, Record Research, through a deal with Billboard, has published a seemingly endless series of books for other music data nerds telling us what is in those charts.

When I started this blog, I quickly realized that if I was going to reference chart performance by a song, I needed a better source than Wikipedia, and naturally thought of Whitburn. I had owned one of his books forever ago, a compilation of Top 40 singles through 1984, and it was heavily thumbed until it finally fell apart and was discarded. There are lots of his books available in stores or from places like Amazon, but for a true nerdgasm, you need to order from the company directly, and pay a serious premium to get the 1,200-page monstrosity pictured above shipped to your home. It’s been worth every penny. Browsing its pages, I see the names of bands and songs that I had long forgotten, and it’s been a joy to revisit oddities like the whispy soft-core pop of Christopher Atkins’ “How Can I Live Without Her” from “The Pirate Movie” soundtrack. It is not a good record, but I liked it enough in the summer of 1982 to record it off CJCB for a mixtape, and was so very glad to experience its horribleness again. Only a true music nerd, a Joel Whitburn, would understand.

And with that, here are my favourite “new” albums from last month:

  • Faces – A Nod Is as Good as a Wink … to a Blind Horse (1971) (I am yet to have a bad experience listening to a Rod Stewart record, and, yes, that includes “Blondes Have More Fun”.)
  • Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1976) (Yeah, I know – I should’ve listened to this decades ago.)
  • Nick Lowe – Labour of Lust (1979) (See Tom Petty, above.)
  • Steve Miller Band – Abracadabra (1982) (I have always disliked the title song, but the album is a soaring meeting of power pop and new wave that feels like the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, which is high praise in my book.)
  • The Three O’Clock – Sixteen Tambourines (1983) (1960s Britpop/psychedelica filtered through an indie pop sensibility.)
  • Public Image Ltd. – This Is What You Want … This Is what You Get (1984) (I think the widespread dislike of this record is about the audience’s expectations for what John Lydon would give them instead of a comment on the great brooding pop record that he delivered.)
  • The Screaming Blue Messiahs – Bikini Red (1987)
  • The Posies – Frosting on the Beater (1993)
  • Nerf Herder – Nerf Herder (1996) (This is the band that would result if first cousins Bowling for Soup and blink-182 had a baby.)
  • Sloan – Action Pact (2003)
  • Ratboys – Happy Birthday, Ratboy (2021) (A strange blend of folk/country-tinged pop and early ‘90s female-fronted indie rock.)
  • Julia Jacklin – PRE PLEASURE (2022)
  • Sofie Royer – Harlequin (2022)
  • Sudan Archives – Natural Brown Prom Queen (2022)
  • Melt Yourself Down – Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In (2022) (Jazz-funk with elements of Afrobeat, punk and hyperdriven ‘90s indie pop.)
  • My Idea – CRY MFER (2022) (Lily Konigsberg can do no wrong in my eyes.)
  • Shygirl – Nymph (2022)
  • BODEGA – Broken Equipment (2022)
  • Steve Lacy – Gemini Rights (2022) (Neo soul smashes up against psych pop and comes out the other side as its own distinct thing.)
  • Sorry – Anywhere But Here (2022)