Album Reviews I
I've decided to start writing mini reviews of my favorite albums, a few at a time! There's not really a "theme" to this one, but in my head I've been calling it the sexy summer edition. Enjoy!
Raise the Dead, Phantom Planet
When I was touring colleges as a prospective student, my parents and I found a Raise the Dead CD in a plastic tub of other disks outside our AirBNB, and we took the whole thing home with us. That was my introduction to what is honestly a pretty normie indie pop-rock band, but because of that they'll always have a little bit of a mysterious aura to me.
You might know Phantom Planet as the band behind the theme song to The O.C. or as Jason Schwartzman's old band. This is a post-Schwartzman album, and I think it's their most sophisticated. It's a retro-pop occult concept album about a demonic apocalypse; at first blush, it's an odd choice for the Gossip Girl soundtrack, which featured "Raise the Dead" and "Do the Panic." The latter's shoo-be-doo-be chorus plays as the teenage characters panic while studying for the SATs. The lighter songs on Raise the Dead work well in that kind of ironic context, especially with lead singer Alex Greenwald giving a sarcastic-sincere vocal performance reminiscent of CAKE's John McCrea.
There's also another side to Raise the Dead in songs like "Quarantine," "Demon Daughters," and "Geronimo." The first two are darker takes on the apocalypse scenario, while the latter is an exploration of the line between fighting and fucking that's cerebral rather than sexy. Taken together, the album paints a picture of an appropriately dumb, 2000s-Californian pop-glam doomsday.
Recommended if you like: House of Leaves, CAKE, imagining what it would be like if the Beach Boys did a Halloween album
If you listen to one track, make it: Demon Daughters
That! Feels Good!, Jessie Ware
My album of the summer is a sexy, sweaty disco dream. I'm not a Jessie Ware devotee, but I understand she's huge in the UK. That makes sense; I feel like things over there usually have less of a corporate-Hollywood polish. That! Feels Good! came to me via Helena Fitzgerald's Griefbacon newsletter, where she used it as a springboard to talk about the FOMO-inflected jealousy everyone feels for the cool clubs and parties that previous generations got to experience. I feel that same jealousy for pre-COVID me, whose favorite college bars are either closed or just not quite as good as they were. The DJs aren't quite as skilled at timing their transitions. It's just not the same. The title track opens the album by dropping you into a breathy chorus of voices moaning "That feels good…do it again" before the boogie beat hits and Ware sings, "I get a little bit of entertainment / in your arms." Nothing has ever been that sexy, that straightforward, and that cool, but it's fun to pretend. This album hits the sweet spot if you miss having a little bit of sexy chaos in your life, but it won't make you feel like you're missing out.
"Begin Again," my favorite track, embraces the angst of living for the weekend over a groovy disco backing track, but this time horns and synths feel like they're spiraling upward and downward at the same time in a trick of auditory illusion. The effect is extra disorienting and exhilarating coming off the previous track, "Hello Love," which is a dreamy, swoony torch song about running into a former love. It's a more coy version of Adele's "Someone Like You" - instead of "I hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited / But I couldn't stay away, couldn't fight it," Ware sings, "Hello love, all dressed up / Whatchu doin' ‘round here? I didn't expect to see ya / Hello love, I got both hands up / Yeah, you got me, you got me, you got me."
Recommended if you like: Chaka Khan, boogie intimacy, accidentally smashing your mason jar of vodka lemonade because you dropped it on the dance floor
If you listen to one track, make it: Begin Again
No Blues, Los Campesinos!
If I keep doing these album review posts, I'm going to have to carefully mete out how many LC! albums I do, and in what order. No Blues was not among the first LC! I ever heard, but it came out around the time I first discovered the band (on an 8tracks playlist!!!). It's painful to read most reviews of LC! albums, like reading reviews of Bojack Horseman was all the way through its run – both are gimmicky and just outside the mainstream enough that every piece of coverage has to go through the routine of joking around about it.[1] "It's a cartoon about talking animals, but it's actually about depression!" "There are so many football references on this album!" Et cetera. The idiosyncrasy of the lyrics make LC! songs stand out as much as their early tweecore sound did, but those aren't tactics to get attention. They're the outcome of the specific people, times, and perspectives that make up the band.
No Blues is certainly more lush and polished than their earlier work. Despite this evolution, the heart is still the same – a particular eye for experiences and images that loves body parts, bathrooms, religious and mythological references, mundane brand names, death, weather, poetry, crows, bones, etc. The elaborate lyricism doesn't always work ("A Portrait Of The Trequartista As A Young Man" quotes its title in full, which other bands famous for overstuffed song titles tend not to do), but I can forgive the cornier lyrics for the gestalt impact. A lot of the songs are breathlessly buoyant, like "What Death Leaves Behind," which captures the giddy energy that comes when something has ended, whether or not you've accepted it. There's a similar urgency on "Cemetery Gaits," whose bassline gallops under lyrics that describe mentally undressing someone at a funeral. Death, sex, and love are bound together.
Recommended if you like: Football (non-American), embarrassing heartbreak, music, love, life, happiness, sadness, the formerly good website known as 8tracks, socialism, dive bars
If you listen to one song, make it: "Avocado Baby"
[1] Also like Bojack Horseman, LC! was a massive influence on my 15-year-old psyche and probably should have been regulated away from me along with drugs and alcohol.