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Chappell Roan, The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess

She won me over on “Femininomenon,” when she asked: “Um, can you play a song with a fucking beat?”

Charli XCX, brat

I admit that I actually didn’t like brat on my first few listens. It didn’t have the same ebb and flow as The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess, which is probably not a fair comparison. It just felt limited.

Which is exactly the point. And it took a version of the album redone in Mario Paint Composer to confirm these limitations and also transcend them.

brat succeeds because it spins an epic out of the barest of material.

sungazer, Against the Darkness of Night

I could make a joke that sungazer is what happens when music theory becomes a real boy, but Adam Neely and Shawn Crowder are too good at what they do to make that snark stick. In a video preceding the album’s release, Neely pointed out that Perihelion, the band’s first full-length album, didn’t translate as well in a live setting. So for this second album, they set out to make music to get people moving. Of course, they couldn’t just leave a 4/4 time signature well enough alone. All the rhythmic sorcery of the first album returns, but mission accomplished, guys — this album moves.

SYML, LIVE AT HANGAR 30

I just like hearing Brian Fennell sing.

Johnny Blue Skies, Passage du Desir

Sturgill Simpson the person killed Sturgill Simpson the brand, so to continue making music, Johnny Blue Skies was born. In yet another shift, Simpson has entered his Gram Parsons era, lacking only Emmylou Harris to complement this set of 70s-influenced country rock.

Boredoms, Chocolate Synthesizer

Yamantaka Eye is so tightly coupled with Naked City in my mind that I almost thought this album would sound just like Naked City. Nope. There’s still a lot of noise-making, but it actually feels less chaotic than Naked City.

Material Issue, International Pop Overthrow

I remember seeing this album all over the place in my early college days, but I didn’t feel compelled to check it out. But somehow, it’s managed to exist in the periphery, showing up regularly in thrift shops and used CD bins as years wore on. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and yeah, younger me was a dolt for not following up way back in the early 1990s. But then I wouldn’t have avoided news of singer Jim Ellison’s death by the decade’s midpoint.

Death Waits, Burn Everything
Xenakis Minor, XM1

Meta launched Threads in 2023 to fill a void left by the site formerly known as Twitter, and early adopters of the service quickly formed a tight-knit group of independent musicians. Followers of the Music Threads tag will probably encounter posts by Xenakis Minor (@xenakisminor) and Death Waits (@666death_waits666) at some point.

Death Waits is a raucous band that could easily fill the void departed by Torche. Burn Everything, in fact, reminds me a lot of Torche’s final album Restarter. Xenakis Minor, on the other hand, proposes a reality where piano, not guitar, is the main driver for prog rock. XM1 is billed as an EP, but with a running time of 41 minutes over the course of three tracks, that’s just trolling.

Tags: boredoms, chappell roan, charli xcx, death waits, johnny blue skies, material issue, picks, purchase log, sungazer, syml, xenakis minor