I don't host parties, so I restarted my music newsletter
Three years after my last post, here's some of what's been clanging in my music brain since we last met
My tastes these days are so well suited for playing for more than two or three people. I realized that after posting on IG constantly, that what I really wanted to do was write some stuff down.
What prompted me to write my first newsletter post in over three years, out of the blue on a Sunday Monday after midnight? Well, I felt like I heard one of the best songs of the year randomly.
I don’t know the first thing about Jonah Yano, but BADBADNOTGOOD have been putting out hits for years now, so if they’re on it, I know it’s gonna be legit. This struck me as weird because it was not the sort of jazz I normally like, but for whatever reason the melodies hit the spot. The entire album from Yano, portrait of a dog is really good and he sings some. Even if melodic jazz isn’t your scene, I feel like it’s just a really good record, extremely listenable and not boring but also not loud.
Albums of the Year (So Far)
It’s been such a weird year. Normally, I don’t find anything that really strikes my fancy until around March, this year, it happened way later than that. Still, I’ve been able to carve out some records that I can’t stop listening to. I’m using Spotify links (sorry) but you can find them in your preferred music app of choice. It’s just easier for embedding.
Varnish La Piscine
I sent this record to my brother, my adult kid & shouted THIS IS THE FRENCH TYLER THE CREATOR, meant entirely as a compliment. It’s very strange, it’s also breezy as hell coming in at 7 songs and less than an hour. It’s probably a Maxi EP not an LP (or whatever a mixtape is…) but it’s really fun as a summer record, whether you speak French or not.
Dina Ögon - Oas
Keeping things firmly planted overseas, this 2023 release from Turkish-Swedish band Dina Ögon, this soul-stirring set of jams serve purposefully both as background noise to your next dinner party, or simply road trip music as head to the beach this summer. I don’t know how else to explain it, but Oas is a vibe. If you liked what Khruangbin have been up to the last few years, you’ll understand this band even if you don’t know the words. I think Dina is a bit different and I prefer their sound more because the vibe is less abstract to me.
Navy Blue - Ways of Knowing
Weirdly, I haven’t listened to this in a few months. But it’s a soulful, lyrics-forward hip-hop record without veering too far into the backpack territory. It’s probably one of the best 5 rap albums put out this year so far, if you need additional endorsements.
Yves Tumor - Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
Don’t ask me to explain what “genre” Yves Tumor is. Liminally, it’s in the rock genre but it’s way more spaced out than that. It veers towards electronic, but doesn’t remotely live there. It’s bombastic without being too abrasive. I just know that he’s one of those artists that is always interesting. Maybe the best parallel is the closest thing to anyone doing whatever Bjork was doing in the 90s right now, which is hella high praise.
Other really good albums
Here are some others that I really liked from this year (so far) and you really ought to check out! But I want to finish this post before the coffee shop closes. We’ll revisit them when I do my annual list later in the year, as many of them are some of my true favorites of 2023!
Lonnie Liston Smith - Jazz Is Dead 017
SZA - SOS
Unknown Mortal Orchestra - V
Jonah Yano - portrait of a dog
Joesef - Permanent Damage
Domi & JD Beck - Not Tight
Shana Cleveland - Manzanita
Lil Yachty - Let’s Start Here
Rozi Plain - Prize
Shame - Food For Worms
Tennis - Pollen
Playlist of the Month
Since the last time I wrote this thing, I can say my tastes are different. I like listening to whole albums versus individual songs, but I am also very much into waves where I’ll play a lot of stuff from a particular genre for a while. I still dabble across the map — driving with me an assault on the ears at times — but I find when I’m by myself that I tend to tune myself like a DJ would, trying to capture the vibe at the moment versus just “playing some songs" that I want to hear.
I have been sharing my omnibus 2023 playlist that covers anything I add to it, including stuff from not released this year, but the more digestible playlist might be just subscribing to my Spotify Discover Weekly, because it’ll mostly encompass the random array of genres I’m tuning into at any given time.
Once I get back into a cadence of writing here more regularly, I’ll start making monthly playlists again.
Bjork Appreciation Section
I don’t really revisit a lot of the music I listened to in high school. If you talk to me a lot, you might recall me talking about how I had “bad” taste back then, which doesn’t really mean anything. It’s also not entirely true. I recall vividly times in high school where I’d deliberately try to broaden my tastes, even to stuff I don’t know anyone else liked. MTV, radio & random people would help with this, but my tastes didn’t really expand until I joined the Air Force and made friends who were also expanding their own music tastes.
I feel like there’s so much stuff I rejected that I grew up adjacent to, but didn’t listen to, that I have nostalgia for stuff that I never thought I would like my grandparents music, my parents 80s contemporary r&b, and random other subgenres like synthy post-wave stuff. In an alternate universe, I went to shows and rocked out and had a lot more fun than I actually did in those days. Who knows how I would’ve turned out?
Anyway, back to Bjork. I love Bjork’s early records. Human Behaviour was such a weird video and MTV played it like crazy for some reason, which helped her blow up here.
Despite the melodic weirdness of debut, I love everything about Post, which is so experimental that I can hardly stand it and does really neat things with club and electronic music that all stand up today. You hear it now and it’s hard to imagine someone being able to make a commercial viable studio record that off-kilter, much less get radio play (or whatever passes for radio placement these days.)
The wildest thing about the album is learning today that “It’s Oh So Quiet” was actually a faithful cover of a 1951 song sung by Betty Hutton that was originally written in German and translated. I can’t imagine how her forebears must’ve felt to hear her song getting spins after all that time, but Bjork really did it justice.
I stopped listening to her stuff about Homogenic, the third album of her discographic canon though I’ve heard the ones after are good in their own way. Still, I’ve always appreciated how she’s marched to the beat of her own drum and musically, never tried to sound like anyone else and made that work for way longer than it seemed commercial viable to do so.
I think Post is still my favorite Bjork record, but there’s just nothing that’s out now that sounds anything like her first three albums.