Sharon Van Etten – We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong: Hearing this for the first time made me feel the same way The Bends made me feel 30 years ago. The anthemic choruses, the melancholy chord progressions, the glimpses of light in the darkness (or maybe they’re glimpses of shadows in the light) … it’s all here. I can’t quite make sense of the lyrics, but I hear in them the struggles that come with growing older but still feeling the fire of being young.
Geese – Getting Killed: I only listened to the first track, “Trinidad,” which started like a throwback to odd ‘90s artists like Soul Coughing and ended with a roar that left my mouth open and my brain wondering, “What IS this?!?!” I hope the rest of the album punches me in the head the way the opener did.
Lightspeed Champion – Falling Off the Lavender Bridge: Another weird album, this one almost 20 years old. As with Getting Killed, I don’t quite know what I heard but I’m excited to go back and listen more.
Gracie Abrams – The Secret of Us Live from Radio City Music Hall: I picture live shows on a 2×2 graph, where the x-axis is the spontaneity of the music and the y-axis is the spontaneity of the stage show. Most pop artists end up in the quadrant of very little spontaneity in either area, because they tend to be highly choreographed performances with strict arrangements. I expected Live from Radio City Music Hall to fall into this category, so I’m surprised to hear some spontaneity, some risks in how the arrangements and tempos differ from the album versions. It’s not a live album for the ages, but it is an exciting document of a young artist who is both enchanted and humbled by her newfound level of success.
Sarah McLachlan – Better Broken: The title song held my attention and she still has a magical voice, but I started to drift by the second song and nothing pulled me back in. Even though her first three albums were hugely influential for me, the creativity I loved in her early music isn’t here.
Kolsch – I Talk to Water: I listened to this when it came out and was unimpressed. I revisited it this week and it still feels dull. I hate to think Fabric Presents Kolsch was a one-off, but I’m coming to realize that’s his only album I like.
Taylor Swift – Taylor Swift: Even though I embraced my love for TS ten years ago, I’m not sure I’ve ever gone back to her first album. There’s nothing wrong with it, but she took giant leaps between each of her first five albums and she hadn’t yet developed the things I love about her music. Taylor Swift is interesting in an academic way to see where she started, and the songs are certainly solid, but I don’t think I will ever find myself falling for this record.
Grateful Dead – Dick’s Picks Vol. Eight (Harpur College, Binghamton NY, 5/2/70): Their rendition of “It’s a Man’s World” is filled with grit, longing, and suffering, and to backpedal on a good moment I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, it leads into a lifeless version of “Dancing in the Streets.” But for me, the Dead are less about hearing a show that is amazing front-to-back and more about finding the moments of fire that exist in nearly every show. Some of those moments are brief sparks, but at shows like this one, the flames sustain through almost the whole show.
Old friends who made it into rotation this week: Turnstile: Never Enough; Modeselektor: DJ-Kicks; Led Zeppelin: Physical Graffiti; Gracie Abrams: The Secret of Us
Record store finds this week: Somebody must have sold the “Br” section of their 12” singles collection, because I found gems by Diana Brown, Jocelyn Brown, and the Brand New Heavies at my local shop. No other similar singles in the “just arrived” bin, just eight “Br” singles.