Take a Beat w/ the Best Albums of 2024 So Far
Anything I'd rather muse about than a good album? Probably not
There may be no collection of media in this world more sacred to me than the collection of albums that I can listen to front-to-back. The criteria is, at its core, straightforward: I must enjoy listening to the album from the beginning of the first song through the end of the last. But the defining characteristics of that rare breed of album are much more amorphous, subject to the whims of the mysterious ways my ears and neurons interact, the ways the music reflects, refracts, and challenges some combination of my heart/mind/body/soul.
Ultimately, the music needs to ignite something in me, something powerful enough to resist extinguishment. My favorite albums share the characteristics of a good friendship: we grow together, we allow each other to have our seasons of bounty and our seasons of withdrawal, and at our core is a cosmic connection founded on undefinable and undeniable chemistry.
So far this year I have made 6 new musical friends, and for each one I am already grateful for the short journey we’ve been on together and the long journey we have ahead.
Here are those 6 albums, listed alphabetically:
All Born Screaming by St. Vincent
The world is ending. But, by definition, when anything - the world, you, me - is born, is it not then already on its trajectory toward an inevitable end? With age we bear witness to more and more of these natural (and unnatural) extinguishments, and on All Born Screaming, Annie Clark is making herself comfortable in the ever-growing piles of ash that surround her. And this comfort is hard fought! We behold Clark on her journey as she gives in to her basest instincts (“Flea”), survives traumatizing world events (“The Power’s Out”), and searches for a place that finally feels like home (“So Many Planets”). She looks death straight in the socket on “Reckless”, and with her pounding bass guitar and drum machine motorcade she parades toward a hard-earned peace. On “Broken Man” she throws a public, pulverizing arena-sized fit - one at which she DARES us to continue staring. It’s a rapturous trainwreck, and as the saying goes, I dare NOT look away. And sometimes the world is so damn damning that all you can do is LAUGH at the contradictions, as evidenced by St. Vincent’s playful, metronomic wood blocks and loopy, scuzzy electric guitar melodies on “Big Time Nothing”, where she finds absolutely (you guessed it) nothing at her center with which to steady herself. Each song is an episode on the way to the revelatory title: We ARE all, in fact, born screaming - or at least, that is a sign we have been born healthily… so cheers to the screams we are lucky enough to have scrempt!
LIYL: Your beauty with a side of decay; the symmetry of a funeral procession; when rock is combined with the {{fill in the blank here}} music genre; laughing at the exact wrong times; The White Stripes; Prince
Brat by Charli XCX
Brat. To be messy, to be hot, to be a bitch, to be sad, to be a girl, to be… you name it. I’m Brat, you’re Brat, we’re all Brat. Such is the power of Charli XCX’s 8th LP, Brat: Thanks to a daring, bombastic, fun as fuck rollout complete with 4 exquisite singles, and brought home by what is shaping up to be an instant classic of an album, the lexicon for the girls and gays (and those admirable few well-cultured straights) has been changed forever. Brat. While every Charli XCX album is a culmination of something (resentment for the industry, loneliness in COVID, amassing a killer lineup of indie pop friends, to name a few), Brat is the culmination of everything Charli XCX has learned and represented in her prolific decade plus career as a pop starlet: how to be a pioneering force, how to leverage the geniuses of PC Music, how to be fucking cool. Brat. Besides the errant piano bridge (“Mean Girls”) or the odd flute/harp/strings combo (“Everything is romantic”), both of which play, Charli sticks to her and the PC Music crew’s super powers: Building songs out of every flavor of blustering, bouncy, blown out SYNTH. And here we have songs built out of gas leaks that slay (“Von Dutch”), radioactive basketballs bouncing on a hot pink Teflon court (“Mean Girls”), twinkly power ups from the likes of Animal Crossing (“Girl, so confusing”), and gooey blasts from Barbarella’s laser gun (“B2b”). But these songs are also built with Charli’s most plainspoken, diaristic, and profound lyrics ever. It is a groundbreaking and undeniable fusion of frank emotionality and avant garde pop that only Charli XCX could deliver. BRAT!!!!!
LIYL: The website www.twitter.com; pop music; taking yourself too seriously then not seriously at all (and repeat); romanticizing club drugs; saying “I’ve been a fan of theirs for years”; The Real World; putting on a persona; the website www.twitter.com (yes, twice)
I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy
Innovating in rock in 2024 is HARD. And just like how "innovation" in this day-and-age likely conjures up images of AI moving through glossy high-powered circuit boards, innovating in rock is often linked to tech as well: using electronics to distort, supplement, or even recreate the classic guitar/drums/bass/vocals that comprise canonical "rock music". So how does a band that largely sticks to the guitar, bass, drums, and vocals of rock yore synthesize those sounds into a diamond that can penetrate the marble obelisk of rock music history? They welcome the bone-crushing conflicts of the modern world into the studio with them, only to maim those perpetrators with their explosive punk rock majesty. I Got Heaven is an emotional bloodletting for Mannequin Pussy, as they both explore their own faults (“Nothing Like”, “Softly”) and gnash and snarl and lacerate the faults of others (basically every other song). The diamond that is Mannequin Pussy is forged in the red-hot intersection of their emotions and their instruments, in a highly efficient fusion that creates a previously undiscovered punk rock compound. So if you want to stay ahead of the curve in this fast-paced rat race of a world, you better add I Got Heaven to your store of resources.
LIYL: Violent Nat Geo wildlife documentaries; the Book of Revelation; when a woman whips you; stepping on a juicy bug; screaming into your pillow; being on the right (as in “correct”) side of history; DMX
Orquideas by Kali Uchis
With her fourth album Orquideas, Kali Uchis has gifted us mortals with yet another magisterial piece of art, an album floated down to us neanderthals of the corporeal world on a fluffy, 1000-thread count cumulus cloud. As is the Kali Uchis modus operandi, she continues to subsume the necessary evils of the material world with her divine femininity until it is impossible to tell where the various worldly motifs of Orquideas begin and where Kali Uchis’ otherworldly mastery of them ends (and it may not). She sings of making loads of money, seducing everything in her sprawling kingdom, and delicious, consummate romance with such transcendent authority that you wonder if things like “late stage capitalism” and “FOMO” and “depression”, things that haunt us earthlings daily, even apply to her. Are the 7 deadly sins even sinful if they are deployed with such grace and in pursuit of something so divine? Kali Uchis delivers an irresistible ~*no <3*~. With Orquideas Kali Uchis blesses us with yet another fantastical model of existence, one that is unachievable for you and for me, but when every little taste of the ephemeral is that delectable, we’ll savor whatever we can get.
LIYL: Generational artists; exquisite vocal runs that soothe the soul; unlikely yet perfect features (see: JT of City Girls); a perfectly balanced entree; immense inner power manifesting in a giggle; SZA
Only God Was Above Us by Vampire Weekend
Time comes for us all, even the famously privileged Columbia grads of Vampire Weekend, whose whimsically maximalist approach to music has only rarely touched on somber topics (see “Hudson”, “Taxi Cab”, “Hold You Now” and… not much else). But on Only God Was Above Us, these nerdy white boys are PONDERING: the political landscape of the U.S, (“Hope”), generational mis-wisdom and privilege (“Gen-X Cops”, “Prep School Gangsters”), and most heavy of all - possibly leaving their beloved New York (on “Connect”, “Pravda”) —how can this BE??!? It’s challenging taking any of this solemnity seriously, however, when it is buried beneath VW’s penchant for big vocab words and the most delightfully poppy musical arrangements known to humankind. And those arrangements are downright symphonic on OGWAU. There’s arpeggios of cascading keys, foregrounded strings, and thumping cello plucks opening, bridging, and closing many songs on the record. BUT they have introduced crunchy guitar reverb, and several of the songs end with one (1) downbeat — AND THAT’S ON INTERNAL CONFLICT, BABY. So, yeah, Ezra Koenig has found displeasure in his MSNBC viewing, and, yeah, he’s butthurt that there are bullies at Ivy League schools, but you know what hasn’t really changed with time? Vampire Weekend’s ability to release fantastic albums that, themselves, stand the tests of time, and I expect Only God Was Above Us will join those ranks.
LIYL: Romanticizing the past/despairing the future; going to the symphony; low stakes existentialism; belabored metaphors; songs where the title is the first and last name of a woman; lyrics that include “balalaika”, “Maharajahs”, “whirling dervishes”, to name a few
Wall of Eyes by The Smile
By now Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have secured their rightful place in rock-and-roll history many times over, yet they continue to hunger for musical innovation, moving from Radiohead projects to film scores (There Will Be Blood, The Power of the Dog, Suspiria) to their latest project, The Smile, where they have teamed up with drummer Tom Skinner. All three members impart their years of hard-earned wisdom, both artistic and worldly, to Wall of Eyes, and it is safe to say they are weary of what they have seen. Across the album Yorke sings of natural disasters, violence, espionage, theft, burial, and plummeting from various high surfaces while walls of sound comprised of all families of acoustic instruments and otherworldly electronics cascade in and out of earshot. This array of instrumentation sometimes barrels in like an avalanche, sometimes flows by like a burbling creek, with Yorke’s signature anguished vocals as the guide and one consistency among the turbulent beauty. For The Smile, the only comfort to be found is in knowing your paranoia is founded in truth, and with Wall of Eyes they remind us that sometimes art, in its nebulous, abstract forms, can serve as a brief respite from the very real, concrete deception, destruction, and decay taking place everywhere we look.
LIYL: In Rainbows; songs-as-cinematic-experiences; romanticizing vehicular suicide; going to the symphony; conspiracy theories; David Lynch; uttering a single, quiet “wow” after a song; post-rock
And don’t forget to check out the official Take a Beat June ‘24 playlist!
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