Nils Frahm – Paris: I had the privilege of seeing him in a beautiful concert hall with amazing sound, and I picked up Paris at the merch table. He opened both the recorded show and the show I saw with the haunting “Prolog” and the only thing the recording doesn’t capture is the excitement of watching him create it live.
Gloorp – Gloorp ‘Em Up: It’s 23 minutes long and I barely made it through, but some of that was my fault for listening in DC traffic after an 11-hour day. This is clearly supposed to be a fun record and that’s not a fun setting. Fun records aren’t really my thing, though, so this might be lost on me anyway. However, the beats are interesting and for how stripped down the production is, it caught my ear and made me pay attention more than a few times. It deserves another listen.
PinkPantheress – Fancy That: Shorter than Gloorp ‘Em Up and grabbed me harder. This is a club record with enough substance to hold up outside the club.
Charli XCX – Brat: On my first pass through Fancy That, I kept trying to find parallels with Brat so I revisited the green giant. The similarities I thought I heard mostly aren’t there (though they do share a sense of guarded vulnerability) but it was nice to hear this again.
Deradoorian – Ready for Heaven: The entire record made me feel like I was listening to an old electro single that I should like more than I actually do.
Emma-Jean Thackray – Yellow: “Mercury” is a great opener, but as I got deeper, I kept wondering why I was listening to this when I have a stack of Alice Coltrane and Kamasi Washington records that I haven’t listened to yet. Yellow isn’t bad, but the opportunity cost is too high for me to go back to it.
Kee Avil – Crease: I’m a firm believer that everything on Constellation Records is worth hearing at least once. My first listen to Crease reveals lots of minor keys and disjointed moans and jagged melody lines, which I find to be the laziest approach to experimental music. However, Vicky Mettler’s rhythms, guitar sounds, and lyrics give me hope that I’ll find more to like if I give it a second listen.
Jason Isbell – Here We Rest: “Alabama Pines” opens with such a bright light that I thought the album would get better and better from there. For me, it doesn’t. It’s a good album, but “Alabama Pines” promises something that the rest of the record doesn’t deliver.
Gracie Abrams – Good Riddance: I finally made it through the first record of the deluxe release. I can almost listen to it in the background, but inevitably I hear her voice catch and I stop what I’m doing and sit down and listen.
Grateful Dead –5/8/77 (Ithaca, NY): This was the week to celebrate the anniversary of a great show. I have no idea how they were so laid back and so fiery at the exact same time. I’m thankful to the guy in the Chinese restaurant on the Eastern Shore who first told me about it, back when I’d just gotten on the Grateful Dead bus.
Old friends who made it into rotation this week: Hania Rani: Ghosts; Japanese Breakfast: For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women)