on the pulse - 2020 - week 29 - no pressure for miles

This week feels odd to me - a surprise release that I already covered pretty much overshadowed an already busy week, so while I still wound up with plenty to say, I’m under no illusions the collection covered here will attract the same attention… but that doesn’t mean I won’t try for it, so this is On The Pulse!

Taylor Swift - folklore - I already talked about this one for longer than I expected I would in a solo review, but to go through this briefly: it’s a really damn good project that features some of her best songs to date, but can feel scattered in its themes, languid in its pacing, over-long, a little derivative in its production style, and ultimately a tougher album to revisit than her more inconsistent but hook-ready projects. I am convinced this’ll probably wind up sticking with me courtesy of its best songs, and if she can push this specific tone of indie music into the mainstream… yeah, I’m onboard. Strong 7/10, and if somehow you haven’t heard it, it’s worth a few listens.

Blu & Exile - Miles - I’ve talked a decent amount about Blu on my channel - considering how much work he puts out, I’m generally accepting of how I’m not going to get everything. But one project that tends to hang over his catalog is 2007’s Below The Heavens with Exile, widely considered one of the best rap albums of the 2000s and one of those debuts I can tell Blu has long stopped trying to chase, especially after his follow-up with Exile in 2012 didn’t quite stick the landing. But after compiling a bunch of their material and touring together and dropping an EP last year, a return collaboration was on the horizon and thus with it now here… it’s strange that a project so sprawling can feel so oddly thin, where I found myself relishing the touches of vintage hip-hop and jazz and soul and African music that’s sampled and blended really well by Exile - and his verses scattered across this project are really damn solid, as are those from Choosey and Aceyalone. And most of the hooks are really damn good too courtesy of Miguel and Ishe and C.S. Armstrong and even Fashawn - I may have preferred a verse from him, but he was fine! And yet for clocking over an hour and a half, it’s more than a little frustrating that Blu himself might be the most underwhelming part of this project. Yeah, there are moments where the outros of songs run long, but I prefer it to when Blu will just drop into an extended list of names where connections to any central theme can start to feel tenuous, and that’s not helped by Blu casually dropping the rhyme scheme or rhyming words with themselves that might start as charmingly slapdash but can start to compromise the flow the further you get in. More to the point, as much as there might seem to be an arc of Blu’s life, from where he began in music to becoming an underground rapper and chasing success and then finding some greater aspirational stage of enlightenment, as much as I might admire the great kickback moments where the bars flow freely with a lot of optimism, I’d like to hope they would amount to a heavier theme that just doesn’t coalesce the deeper you get in - even the aspirational focus starts feeling more wishful thinking, and considering how often he challenges dreams, I’m a little surprised he doesn’t examine those on moments like ‘Dear Lord’. Now there are great individual moments - ‘You Ain’t Never Been Blue’ is a great downer moment that restores some hard reality, and I really liked the interweaving parallel with Miles Davis’ life on ‘All The Blues’ - but I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s jarring in the extreme to conclude the project with ‘The End’, a hard swerve into more violent subject matter that shatters the atmosphere and isn’t really foreshadowed, especially as the darker moments were nearly a dozen songs earlier! More often I’m reminded of a project that just loses track of its own ideas and can feel like it’s looking to fill time, make those ‘miles’ really linger for the audience, and that can be a very mixed blessing here… which is frustrating because as a whole, I really do like a lot of the vibe. This is an album I feel is one really good edit away from being excellent - as it is, strong 7/10, very good, more than a few standouts, a little tougher to recommend as a whole, that’s all.

Neck Deep - All Distortions Are Intentional - This is the sort of band built for On The Pulse - a solid pop punk act that wins me over if the writing or hooks punch above their weight class, but for the most part can be summarized by ‘well, if you like this sound you’ve heard hundreds of times before, you’ll probably like this’. Granted, ‘19 Seventy Somethin’ wound up as a deceptively killer pop punk ballad and one of my favourite songs of 2017, so I was open to this being really good… but I’m not surprised that it wound being pretty forgettable. I mean, can I even give them credit for polishing the production when they still shove in unnecessary drum machines and seem to forget what a bass frequency even is - pop punk can be kind of hit-and-miss in this department as it is, but way to leech so many of your songs of their greatest impact, not helped by a particularly snotty Ben Barlow who only sounds thinner here! And keep in mind that Neck Deep are still writing painfully rote pop punk melodies that you’ve heard repeated countless times over the past twenty years… which means it might blow your mind when I tell you that this was apparently written as a concept album with a narrative. You’d be forgiven for not noticing that at all, because said story is a very basic ‘love-in-time-of-vague-dystopia’ - and incidentally, their bouncy major key pop punk cannot create this mood whatsoever - and the songs are painfully basic in sketching any sort of disaffected love story. It’s extremely thin and when Neck Deep decides to end the album with a ‘well, we’ve figured out the formula, we’re all going to die anyway, screw your politics and everything else’, I’m inclined to take the word ‘punk’ away from this group until they actually realize what it used to mean! Empty, formless nihilism to think you’re above the politics is the definition of privilege, and this band is not interesting enough to earn that escape hatch. Light 5/10, more flatly competent than outright, you will forget this exists by the end of 2020.

Courtney Marie Andrews - Old Flowers - Oh, I was worried about this one. I remember catching Honest Life in late 2016 and finding a few brilliant choice cuts, and then having my mind blown when in 2018 she expanded the lush richness of her production on May Your Kindness Remain to fit her huge expressive voice that always seemed to infuse seemingly simple songs with so much more depth. That album wound up as one of my favourites of that year, but I also knew exactly how delicate that alchemy was, and that stripping back the production to a more minimalist arrangement might expose how her writing and compositions weren’t quite as distinct from the field… and I think that wound up as half-true here. Yes, Old Flowers is a step back across the board on production - the tones are more spare, the mix doesn’t have the same richness or warmth, especially in the low-end, even Courtney Marie Andrews’ vocal pickups sound clunkier and not as well-blended, going for more of a live mix which is about the last thing you want; why diminish your central star’s biggest strength? More than that, usually when we get percussion they are these clunky, somewhat unstable snare drums that echo and seem louder of the mix - they remind me of similar attempts at instability that I’ve heard from Sharon Van Etten and Fiona Apple recently, but Courtney Marie Andrews’ delivery is too liquid and full to bounce off them well. And all of that is a goddamn shame, because across the board, the songwriting is flat out excellent! The ‘old flowers’ she refers to are the remnants of past relationships, good or ill, real or imagined, and it’s such perfect subject matter for how well she can convey so much detail just on delivery alone, and the emotional nuance she wrings out of so many unspoken moments is genuinely impressive, especially when the barriers of time or other relationships will mean the true love isn’t meant to happen, like on ‘Guilty’ or ‘How You Get Hurt’, my two major standouts on this project, although ‘Together Or Alone’ also fits the bill. And hell, when the mix fills out a little more like on ‘It Must Be Somebody Else’s Fault’, it’s a great slice of willful denial that was a real bright spot on a record that otherwise can feel very slow and heavy. In other words, I’m convinced these songs could well be great with a different arrangement or even just production that didn’t feel so barren and cluky, which is why I’m giving this a solid 7/10 and instead of a recommendation, a desperate plea to the universe that somehow this album gets rerecorded or at some point we get new versions. This is really good, but it should have been amazing, and I want to hear the versions of these songs where they are.

The Naked And Famous - Recover - Now getting to indie pop here… I’ll be honest, did anyone ever really care much about The Naked And Famous? I’ve heard about the band in passing on a smattering of singles that soundtracked a few commercials, especially off a reasonably well-received debut, but they never stuck out much from the field in a slurry of buzzed out mixes, flat percussion, and increasingly underwhelming writing, not helped by a bizarre, singer-songwriter attempt in 2018 that I don’t think anyone liked. But hey, they were looking for a slightly more expansive indie pop project here that was calling back to that debut, and… well, I’m a bit conflicted, because while this is probably the most energetic and interesting thing The Naked And Famous have done in a while, the more listens I gave this album the more I was convinced they did so by picking up the textures and sounds of other acts for their particular dilution of the pop rock formula. There’s a lot of The 1975 here, a smattering of CHVRCHES as well, as well as so many of the recent subset of 80s-inspired indie pop updated with blocky but faded effects but rarely able to capture the sense of bigness or supercharged groove that made the best of the new wave of that era, and the Naked And Famous are among the most blocky and overproduced of the group. And all of that would be fine if they had the hooks or writing to back it up… but very quickly you realize the songs are pretty basic love and breakup songs with a few scattered musings on death and depression, with one cute song inspired by the frontwoman’s dog. I think my larger issue is that once you realize the only trick they have when writing a hook is to stack the vocal leads and rely on blunt repetition, they just stop being memorable, especially on an album that loses all its steam on the back half. I guess my overall opinion is that it’s pleasant enough - it’ll probably get the commercial soundtracks they want - but even giving this an extremely light 6/10 is not enough to redeem how I’m going to forget this exists beyond fragments of the title track and ‘Everybody Knows’… just saying.

Neon Trees - I Can Feel You Forgetting Me - And on the topic of pop rock flagrantly imitating The 1975 and frankly doing it better than they did… look, I’ve always been a bigger fan of Neon Trees than many self-respecting critics would ever admit, especially coming out of the 2010s. Habits was stacked to the gills with obvious splashy pulls from The Killers, but that didn’t make it any less insanely catchy, and expanding their sound on Picture Show made for an act that had a ton of promise… and then Pop Psychology wound up a desaturated and mostly forgettable project and the band vanished from view for years as their frontman put out a solo efffort in 2016, and I was thoroughly disappointed. But now six year later and on their own indie label, they’re looking to roar back with the sort of sly self-awareness that’s always been lurking within their lyrics… and it wound up pretty damn good, if a little derivative in swapping out its obvious influence points as I already mentioned. But what’s also worth bringing up is how it’s not like The 1975 are making great dynamic pop rock right now, and frontman Tyler Glenn is not about to step out of the spotlight this time. And I cite that as a major positive - leaning into the manic, horny energy exploding through every angle of this project lets Neon Trees embrace the technicolour ‘bigness’ of the best 80s new wave - stark splashy synths, thick grooves, a punchy blur of gated drums and drum machines, and enough guitar texture to not feel completely synthetic, even in the more faded synthwave moments. Granted, once you get past the truly killer hooks that are frontloaded onto this album, all the flash can start to lose its punch, which would be where I’d go to the content… and here’s where I’ll give Glenn a lot of credit. In grounding the majority of these songs in what calls ‘modern ghosting culture’, he’s not afraid to frame most of these songs as a little too desperate and reckless in their clingy desire for connection and hookup, where none of it is healthy but he’s embracing the flailing melodrama of it. Hell, I almost appreciate how much Tyler Glenn will try to live within the frustration of this modern love with all the willful deflection in the world rather than ranting about it, and there’s a wild charm to that! Honestly, this album was so much fun and such an unexpected treat that I’m honestly a bit surprised how much I liked it, and thus… extremely light 8/10, this was the Neon Trees return I’m so happy we finally got - you should check it out!

Lori McKenna - The Balladeer - At this point, I’ve reviewed Lori McKenna twice already and her sound is comfortably entrenched: fantastic production courtesy of Dave Cobb, the sort of deceptively devastating lyrics and thematic colour that places her among my favourite writers in modern music, she’s the maternal powerhouse of modern singer-songwriters across country and folk… but if I were to be critical, I did think The Tree in 2018 was a tad sleepy and was starting to default to the sedate ‘mother knows best’ wisdom where the charm could start to wear thin, and I was curious to see if Dave Cobb would eventually encourage her to take some instrumental chances… and in a way it does, because the arrangements here certainly feel a bit more layered and lush, or at the very least less dry than previous projects. The one thing I noticed is that the mix seems to emphasize more vocal depth, either through adding some multi-tracking or a little more reverb, which accentuates her performance really effectively, and the harmonies contributed from the women of Little Big Town and her fellow Love Junkies members Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsay are a really nice touch, especially in accentuating the natural organic warmth here. So okay, a richer, well-balanced mix with better performances overall and a slightly more upbeat approach, with ‘The Dream’ even featuring an expansive and beautiful outro, this should be a slam dunk, right? Well, here’s the thing: I’m not sure the songs themselves rise to the absolute best of what I know Lori McKenna is capable, and it goes from both lyrical construction where there are some dropped rhymes in verses that feel a little odd from McKenna, to some of the content. Part of this might be age - I said that some of the more domestic notes of The Tree would probably resonate way more with an older audience, and there are absolutely cuts like ‘When You’re My Age’ and ‘Till You’re Grown’ that could I see working incredibly well for my mom, or even for me in thirty years… but that album still had ‘The Lot Behind St. Mary’s’, which along with her best cuts from The Bird And The Rifle and Lorraine had the specific cutting, borderline transgressive detail but a resonance that felt universal. And here… I dunno, I’m not sure I’m hearing that added cutting piece in the same way. Yes, songs like ‘This Town Is A Woman’ and the title track have a lot of powerful detail and are absolutely highlights, and when McKenna can trace the wistful hypotheticals coaxed through family life on ‘The Dream’ or ‘When You’re My Age’ or even ‘Till You’re Grown’, which could come across as an obvious ‘mom advice’ song if some of it wasn’t rooted in real experience. But at the same time, songs like ‘Uphill’ and ‘Good Fight’ feel a little closer to lukewarm platitudes and ‘Stuck In High School’ feels like ‘We Were Cool’ but more slapdash and with a weaker hook. As a whole… don’t get me wrong, this is still pretty great, but it feels like this album is very much in her comfort zone in terms of content, and thus it did fall a bit short for me. Strong 8/10, absolutely worth hearing, but it’s not among her best, even if I really wish it was.

Logic - No Pressure - I’m normally pretty skeptical whenever an artist tries to say they’re retiring - normally it’s just a factor of them taking a break, they’ll be back to releasing projects sooner rather than later. But listening to this Logic album… if there is someone who is retiring not just on something of a high note, but also because he’s out of things he wants to say - and it doesn’t hurt he got handed an obscene amount of money on Twitch to chase something different - I’d accept that coming out of Logic. It certainly has the feel of him being out of ideas and just mining his own brief moment of legacy to crystallize something to send it all off, getting No I.D. back on some production, sketching a quasi-recursive narrative with Under Pressure, which to me remains his best project… and it’s probably not a good sign that once again, there’s a lot of his flow and cadence that is strikingly reminiscent of J. Cole, Kanye, and Kendrick and leaves me thinking for a technician MC who is nevertheless so derivative, why didn’t he drill into the few moments of distinctive originality that made Under Pressure’s best moments? Granted, a lot of that came through on his concluded Young Sinatra series with a showmanship of which you can tell he’s kind of tired, but when his idol Eminem brag-complained about the pressures of fame and money not always making you happy, there was a wry flair or intensity to it that Logic once again tries to frame as deeper than it actually is… nor does it allow you to overlook some rampant hypocrisy. No, Logic, you did not continuously go against the grain, especially in the past five years, that’s how you got all that money that’s giving you the platform to say none of it made you happy in the first place! Or to put it another way, when the most striking commentary comes from a few Orson Welles samples, the final moment ending on an excellent monologue from a legend, it leaves me really questioning what Logic has really contributed that cuts more deeply, especially as he also tries to use this album to wrap up parts of the storyline in The Incredible True Story, and somehow it has even less impact than he was referencing it on multiple albums the past few years! And I can say that while acknowledging this is probably his most consistent and otherwise likable project in years, a lot of this aided by some textured, soulful samples and dusty percussion - I’ve said in the past I don’t want to hear Logic on trap beats, and this album is proof he’s better over something more old-school and less trend-chasing. Hell, I could even appreciate most of the callbacks, but by the end of the album I was left on a note of anticlimax. So yeah, this is a strong 6/10 to end things out - Logic may have moved on, but I do question how much what he’s brought to the game will stick, or if in five years he’ll be missed.