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Strange and Unproductive Listening
David Lynch – Crazy Clown Time
I love this. Some received it as a kind of WTF novelty, as if Lynch has time to boringly amuse us, but film directors don’t start making albums unless they feel they need to, and Crazy Clown Time is as essential as Lynch must have believed it to be while he was making it. If he shows his newness as a musician at times, that just means he hasn’t refined the sense of creation out of these songs. All artists should be so searching and wise, so young and so old.
Tennis – Young & Old
Album #2 offends deeply, again, with its major pop hooks!
Bettie Serveert – Dust Bunnies
“Rudder,” one of my happiest and least-probed memories of the 90s, melted my 2012 headache on impact. Only Bettie Serveert’s music industry critique could be a thing of such pure joy.
Ice Cube – AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted
Resolve the anger but renew the vitality. That’s what I would have time do to this record. Music this exciting should always be timely, but it’s heartless to demand it. There are plenty of ways to make the Bomb Squad‘s productions rattle modern air, but I guess I’m just saying that Most Wanted is primarily a time capsule. Or maybe it’s just not summer yet; dense music plummets in brittle winter air.
Eric B. & Rakim – Paid In Full
Was there ever a more perfect album?
Queen – Sheer Heart Attack
Well, maybe. I’ve heard it said that, statistically speaking, Queen was the greatest rock band to ever exist. The statistic refers to the high standard of quality they maintained until the early 80s, but I feel it could also refer to the great number of ways (i.e. Kinsey scale values) in which their music can be enjoyed.
Tom Waits – Bad As Me
As with R.E.M.‘s Collapse Into Now, I prefer this album’s ballads to its alive and kicking dangers, but I’ll make an exception for “Hell Broke Luce,” just unbelievably foul and Bad As Me‘s best moment.
Duran Duran – All You Need Is Now
The “80s pop stars back in top form with string arrangements by Owen Pallett“ is becoming an essential album category. This entry isn’t as great as Pet Shop Boys‘ 2009 Yes, but it has the force of its convictions, especially the one that turns the title track’s central melody into an album-spanning leitmotif.
The Wrens – Secaucus
The fracture of youth, I guess, I keep waiting for these songs to find emotional pivot points and combine into the mini-symphonies of The Meadowlands. If age yields synthesis, then maybe the next long-awaited Wrens album will be one epic track of various finely wrought transitions.
Frankie Rose – “Know Me”
There’s no music I warm to more naturally than the kind of Cure-isms on display here, and yet no music I’m more critical and suspicious of until it reveals what makes it essential. I’ll worship no false gods! Frankie Rose isn’t false, and she’s the rare woman to sing at the center of this kind of arrangement.
