30 Days in 60 Minutes: March 2024

Featuring Helado Negro, Kim Gordon, old Grimes, "Grimes Without Grimes," and the return of Altered Zones-core (?)

Promise I’ll be back up and running in the near future - in the meantime, playing catchup with March and (hopefully sooner rather than later, April). Unfortunately, can’t do a Spotify list since a few songs aren’t on streaming.

Hot Chip - “Out at the Pictures”

Maybe next year, I’ll create a Screen Time widget that solely tracks how many hours I’ve dedicated to reading NFL Draft coverage. I don’t see myself as a huge NFL guy and yet I can’t get enough of this shit, at least as a time killer when nothing interesting is happening on Twitter. With each passing year, the descriptors get more vivid and outwardly homoerotic - “oily hips,” “field-tilting,” “can take the top off a defense,” “sudden motor,” things of that nature. But beyond that, I appreciate how the Draft offers up a more quantifiable and morally acceptable version of music’s “RIYLs,” in the form of past player comparisons…and how they seem to be weirdly pragmatic in a way that contradicts the spirit of spending hours upon hours speculating on the future.

For example, JJ McCarthy was pegged for the top five while being likened to “a combination of Kirk Cousins and Brock Purdy,” edge-of-the-first-round QB prospects like Michael Penix, Jr. and Bo Nix were compared to Geno Smith and Alex Smith, the true wildcard (Spencer Rattler) is the new Jake Plummer. Now, think about this for a second…on the one hand, if you’re a Giants or Broncos fan, are you stoked that your probable QB of the future has the ceiling of Geno Smith? Are you stoked that the answer is…you probably should be stoked? This happens way more often in basketball nowadays, where you could spend the entire year watching the most miserable Hornets or Raptors team knowing that they might draft a guy at the top of the lottery being compared to Jonathan Isaac or Goran Dragic or Markelle Fultz. Useful players! But how are you supposed to have that go down and not wish for another year of tanking or even two?

Now, I know most self-serious music critics hate doing something similar with bands because it reminds them too much of sports and how normal people like to talk about music (see also, list-making). Me? I think it’s harmless fun, but ultimately futile because it’s so much more difficult to adjust to scale; 20 points per game is more or less what it was in 1994, but “popular” or “critically acclaimed” in 1994 has almost no real modern analog. There were levels of fame in the 20th century that have simply disappeared. For example, St. Vincent might really be what her biggest critical backers say, the modern answer to Talking Heads or even David Bowie and maybe that’s true based on vibes. There really might not be a better choice. But in terms of ubiquity, are you hearing her songs in the wild the same way you do with “Wild Wild Life” or “Once in a Lifetime” or, like, 40 Bowie songs? On a similar level, I’ve seen Hot Chip described as the modern day Pet Shop Boys and it sorta makes sense…vibe-wise. But in the sort of places where I’d hear Pet Shop Boys songs growing up, I’m not hearing Hot Chip songs (the grocery store, the mall). I’m still hearing Pet Shop Boys songs. 

That said, I think that the biggest similarity between these two is that Hot Chip never really nailed an entire album imo (The Warning is probably the closest they got), but for a good while, they could absolutely kill it for about 75% of an album before fading towards the end. Made in the Dark truly falls off a fucking cliff, but man, does this song go hard. 

Hercules & Love Affair - “Hercules Theme”

We’re on a 2008 kick here! And I’m reminded of being at some kind of non-descript daylong festival in LA when I ran into a prominent, 40 or 50-something music writer who was complaining about them booking Cut Copy and Hercules & Love Affair because “they play synthesizers,” man was a walking Rage Against the Machine liner notes. Anyways, I don’t really have much qualification to discuss disco, but I guess I can talk about the way music writers such as myself have ginned up a “disco revival” thing that’s been ongoing since the pandemic. And I think my issue with so much of it is that it always feels…too tasteful? I realize why so many people feel inclined to prop disco up in the modern day, but isn’t far to say that some of it was also kinda intentionally silly as shit? Hercules & Love Affair was a serious album in some ways, but also the silliest one that will ever feature ANOHNI on multiple tracks. And this is the goofiest song of the bunch and it still rules.

Kali Uchis - “Igual Que Un Angel”

Heard a couple Kali Uchis songs in passing over the past half decade or so, and I have to agree with Larry Fitzmaurice that I found them a little too Little Dragon for my taste (but also, that probably says a lot about my lack of engagement with modern day R&B). I did like this new album though, way more reverb than I expected and I can’t really understand the vocals, so this is basically a dream-pop song to me.

Erika de Casier - “Lucky”

I think it’s fair to say at this point that “left-of-center R&B” has been the true north for music criticism for the past 15 years and maybe even longer than that. But what I’ve always wondered is…will there come a point where Timbaland and Aaliyah and The Velvet Rope are deemed “critic-bait” in the same way that Sonic Youth or the Clash or whatnot are, something that people generally agree is good, but isn’t all that exciting as an influence anymore? So shout to Chal Ravens for actually taking it there with their review of this album:

From a wide angle it all adds up to a modern R&B version of “record collection rock”—in which the meticulous reproduction of vintage attributes becomes self-congratulatory catnip for the nerdiest listeners, and/or fans who remember it from the first time round.

I guess it’s a matter of standards, since I can actively enjoy music that evokes alt-rock and emo that I was listening to in 1999, but if it’s going to evoke, like, Da Real World or “Trippin’”...I mean, you gotta remind me what it was like to get my shit blown back so thoroughly that I was willing to spend $18 I totally didn’t have multiple times on Timbaland & Magoo albums. RIP Magoo and all. 

Grimes - “Weregild”

A lot of people try to clown 2010s critics list by pointing out how highly “Round and Round” and Benji and “Oblivion” scored on them, but I’ll tell you what…you could talk to a lot of bands off the record about how much they listen to Sun Kil Moon and Ariel Pink on private, or you can just look at the thirst for “Grimes Without Grimes” that still exists (I think it’s fair to say that Yeule has done an admirable job here). Perhaps the stink is too strong to revisit Art Angels and Visions, but there’s always value in revisiting “the album before the album” - I’d say Grimes has two of those. And if Halfaxa doesn’t hold up quite as well as what came after, it’s still stunning to hear in 2024 if you aren’t already familiar - it still seems like an alien transmission, an indication that Grimes really did see the future, just not all of it. 

Chanel Beads - “Police Scanner”

Even as seemingly a dozen Pitchfork retrospectives came and went, I felt like they gave short shrift to Altered Zones - for those of y’all who weren’t super online in 2010-2011, this was a short-lived, prescient and quixotic Pitchfork vertical, a “team of 14 music blogs dedicated to exploring these emerging musical worlds, traversing genres from psych and drone to electronic and underground pop.” Click on the hyperlink, a lot of these people are still in the game! And for the most part, they were on the money about Grimes and Oneohtrix Point Never and Caretaker and James Ferraro, even if, like, Rangers and Sun Araw didn’t become household names. I didn’t get super deep into that music, but I do strongly associate Altered Zones with a time in my life where “the Sunday scaries” were a legitimate thing and I’d be up at 2 or 3 AM listening to early Autre Ne Veut and How to Dress Well cuts. I’ve often wondered if that wave of music - dissociative R&B or whatever - had much of an impact outside of people who were active musicians at the time, and I’m glad to see that Chanel Beads is repping for this era, even if all the Dimes Square talk positions them as 2024’s Model/Actriz, i.e., a band that, through no fault of their own, I like less every time someone from New York writes about them. 

Nailah Hunter - “Finding Mirrors”

Just because it sounds like the sort of thing an astute consumer of pop culture should do, I’ve dedicated myself to reading at least 25 fiction books per year - which means my bookshelf is easily the most imposing piece of furniture in my office and it is filled with titles that I dutifully read and forgot about completely less than a week after I finished. I know that TV adaptations of books take liberties with the source material but I read The Sympathizer not one month ago, completely unaware that it would be a MAX show. And multiple times during the first episode, I’m thinking, “I sorta remember that?”  

Meanwhile, I can recall stuff I read in a 1996 Guitar World with frightening clarity, to the point where my brain should probably be studied for science. For example, an interview with Blues Traveler where John Popper talked about how insulting it was when people compared his harmonica playing to Bob Dylan or Neil Young - in the parlance of Guitar World at the time, it was like telling John Petrucci he was a lot like Billie Joe, but of course that would never happen because people can think of hundreds of other guys who play guitar, but very few know more than one harmonica player. And they definitely don’t know anyone who plays only the harmonica, let alone at such a virtuosic level.

Anyways, this got me thinking about Joanna Newsom and how true harpists assess her instrumental skills. I don’t believe for a second that Joanna Newsom is the Billie Joe of harpists, but does one exist? Do real harpists hate on Joanna Newsom? Is it even possible to be a professional musician with a harp and be kinda “C-G-D chords only” with it? So, yeah - Nailah Hunter, she plays harp and does so in the kind of post-Twigs, spooky trip-hop R&B sorta vein. I like this song, can’t remember much of the album though I will say it’s got a lot of “the next one could really pop off” potential. 

Helado Negro - “Out There”

Generally speaking, I like Helado Negro. A lot of people do and, most of the time, it’s wrapped up in “I know the guy and he’s super authentic and nice” and “listening to this album makes me want to be a better person.” Of course, those two qualities tend to bring out an immediate revulsion within me, a person who’s advocated for “shittiness” as an essential quality for great music. But then again, I just wrote a Hovvdy review that more or less went into the same things, so I guess the difference is that Helado Negro might serve that purpose for people who might go to Big Ears whereas Hovvdy is for people who talk about the NBA on Twitter. I still don’t think he’s made a record that’s gripped me from front to back, but every one has at least one amazing song and this is the one from PHASOR.

DJ Sprinkles - “The Occasional Feel-Good”

Steve and I ran afoul of the guy who posted the “eight albums to get to know me” Twitter prompt, for having the nerve to suggest that music writers might be using it in a performative, bad faith way - that you’re not really seeing “eight albums to get to know me,” so much as “here’s eight albums that represent how I want people to see me.” Not the same thing!

I saw quite a few people include DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues in their personal lists and rightfully so, because it might be one of the most philosophically unimpeachable albums of the past 20 years (that also isn’t seriously overexposed to the point where namedropping it has the opposite effect) - on one level, it’s a lush house album beloved by people who seriously know house and it’s also not available on streaming and probably never will be. That is, in part, due to the reason that you’ll see Midtown 120 Blues hyped up in this sort of context more often than, say, Moodymann or Booka Shade or whatever - it basically has the politics of a Soul Glo album and it puts it right in the songs. Like, actually spoken word pieces about how Madonna is a colonizing piece of shit. Midtown 120 Blues is so bulletproof that even the Baffler piece that went scorched earth on the entire premise of projecting political power onto dance music used it as an example of what people should be doing. 

Of course, since these mixes are things I listen to with other people in the car, I chose an instrumental with this kind of title and no ostensibly politics - I think you have to get to know me before I let music speak for me, you know?

Four Tet - “Daydream Repeat”

I didn’t think an artist of Four Tet’s ilk could do something like this but Three has a real “their best album since Achtung Baby!” feel to it, no? In this scenario, There is Love in You is their Achtung Baby (I’m not sure what this makes Rounds). I don’t think “fell off” is really the operative term here, since a lot of the work they’ve done since 2010 has been good on a singles level and not entirely compelling on an album-scale, which is probably an unfair metric to evaluate an electronic artist. Moreover, this dude is hanging with Fred Again… and Skrillex and whatnot, so even if he’s bringing his B-game to this record, maybe he’s got a Good News For People Who Love Bad News on his hands. 

The KLF - “Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard”

There are two things I remember from hearing “3 AM Eternal” on the radio as an 11-year old - 1) it scared the living shit out of me and 2) I spent at least the next decade assuming The KLF was along the same lines as, like, C&C Music Factory or Technotronic. 30 years later, I finally got around to hearing Chill Out and, much like The Orb, it’s music that makes me want to buy a Simon Reynolds book to find out what critics were saying about ambient house in real time.  

Kim Gordon - “I Don’t Miss My Mind”

I like Sonic Youth. Or, at the very least, I admire Sonic Youth. Scratch that, at the very least, I can appreciate what Sonic Youth did for the game. Okay fine, I like bands inspired by Sonic Youth but jettison of the New York exceptionalism and condescension that tends to come with Sonic Youth fandom (I don’t care if it’s “wrong,” the 0.0 Pitchfork gave to NYC Ghosts and Flowers was one of the most validating pieces of criticism I’ve ever read, coward shit to take it down). 

I like Playboi Carti. Or, at the very least, I admire how Playboi Carti’s albums tend to signal a shift in hip-hop. Okay fine, I like the concept of rage-rap or whatever you want to call it, but I find myself losing interest after ten minutes of any Playboi Carti album (or Ken Carson or Yeat, etc.). I know that shouldn’t be the case given my distaste for that whole wave of post-Earl, drumless, insular “pots and pans” rap that otherwise dominates the critical discussion in between the occasional Playboi Carti album. 

So when I got word that Kim Gordon was making music that sounds like Ken Carson on her new album, I had to be skeptical about that because so much of the critical conversation around Kim Gordon boils down to she’s so cool, and there tends to be a real low bar for “older artist is aware that new rap exists.” And yet! I actually like this album more than just about anything else Kim or Thurston or Justin Raisen has been involved with in the past decade or so. 

Blur - “Death of a Party”

In many ways, I feel like I’ve gotten dumber with time. Okay, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I’ve become less susceptible to shaping my persona around music that makes me seem smart. My relationship with the giants of 1990s British rock music tends to drive that point home. I liked Oasis and the Verve and whatever else would be viewed as the lizard brain stuff of that era, but I made it a real point to be a Pulp and Blur guy in high school. You might ask, why the fuck did an 18-year old Jewish kid from suburban Philly think being able to relate to “He Thought of Cars” or “Dishes” is aspirational? Because an 18-year old Jewish kid from suburban Philly isn’t supposed to! There must be something special about this guy’s view of the world! 

And yet, having reached an age where I can understand This is Hardcore on a more literal level, I can’t remember when I listened to it last, whereas I rarely go a week without an urge to jam “D’You Know What I Mean?” or “The Rolling People.” That said, I still really enjoy revisiting Blur’s catalog because I’ve been convinced at some point that each one of their Imperial Era albums is my favorite. It was Parklife when I was starting to parrot the canon verbatim and for a while I loved The Great Escape because there was a British counselor at summer camp who explained to me what a “quango” was. 13 was an album that I set aside for a while because it was like 75 minutes long and had William Orbit on production and was thus the most 1999 shit imaginable. But apparently, like most American critics, it’s the one I like the most now because it’s the most emo Blur album. But from, say, 2003-2008, I would’ve rode for Think Tank in the same way that I get spicy and vouch for the Cure’s The Top, which is an opinion I developed when I was doing a comparative amount of drugs to the Cure and/or Blur at their peak. 

Blur’s self-titled somehow always got lost in the mix; I never really cared for “Song 2” as a song itself, and my experience with Blur was almost certainly impacted by never owning it on CD, just as a dubbed cassette (the 1997 equivalent of only getting a stream as a promo rather than a download). And if “Blur makes a Pavement album” didn’t move me in 1997 (before I had grown to resent each band’s impact on music criticism), it certainly wasn’t going to decades later. 

Which is to say that this song is here because I watched All of Us Strangers, one of the very, very few Oscar nominees from 2023 that I really felt justified the hype.