Last Month NOW (2024.1)

What is delicious, and what is omniscient?

Last Month NOW is a sequenced and annotated playlist of 30 tracks that I spent the prior month listening to, talking about and/or obsessing over. It’s also a list of the albums I liked from the previous month. And there’s probably some other things.

A Brief News Bulletin:

The Fall 2024 sabbatical semester has been GOTTEN:

I had a good feeling about it, but it’s nice to have official confirmation. Obviously more to come on this front. In the meantime, the sabbatical bibliography? She is growing.

Now…onto the Monthly Demonstration Of Taste:

Anytime I listen to something that grabs my attention for a good reason, I drag it to a year-themed playlist. That’s here. Then, once a month, I make a smaller playlist out of that one. That’s below. (Here’s the Apple Music version). I aim for flow as much as all-inclusiveness, and it’s definitely tailored to my individual tastes far more than general representativeness. So,

1. Bullion f. Carly Rae Jepsen, “Rare” Carly Rae Jepsen is the diminutive British Columbian theater kid who released one of the five or so greatest pop songs of the century thus far, but who also has an underappreciated knack for sultry Quiet Storm murmurs. Bullion is Nathan Jenkins, a Lisbon-based British songwriter/producer who has spent much of the last decade making foggy, psychedelic synth-pop on his own and with likeminded Blue Nile/Prefab Sprout fans. So it makes perfect sense that these two would collaborate and the result would sound like an uncanny-valley 1985 Alexander O’Neal/Cherelle collaboration. Easily the song I’ve listened to most this year.

2. 21 Savage, “all of me” Speaking of sultry, exquisitely produced R&B in new and exciting contexts, here’s this months’s biggest rapper in the world sampling Rose Royce’s “Wishing on a Star” (here’s another good RR sample if you’re interested) Also: the third word of the song, and its chorus, is “pescatarian.” Pangram-wave.

3. Julia Holter “Spinning” Julia Holter’s music always strikes me as the sounds made by someone who’s completely overwhelmed by a feeling and is trying to squeeze her body’s reaction into a pre-determined shape governed by traditional conventions of decorum. Emotions are squeezing out from all sides, and the joy of the music is listening to Holter trying to keep it all together.

4. Kali Uchis f. Peso Pluma, “Igual Que Un Àngel” Everything I like about the Bullion/CRJ track, down to the era-specific vibes. Uchis has charisma to spare, and I suspect the resources to do whatever she wants, so I’m really pleased that she went with “pregnant lounge singer” for the song’s video. It’s a great look, even with the weird Sprite sponcon. Peso Pluma also appears.

5. Say She She, “Astral Plane” Very cute Dr. Buzzard/Boney M/Jones Girls homage by a trio about which I have no further information at the moment.

6. Khruangbin, “A Love International” The three-person Numero Group neural net taps into their smooth side.

7. Mary Halvorson, “Desiderata” The one where the best guitarist fuck’n shreds.

8. Dog Unit, “When Do We Start Fighting?” The London instrumental four-piece shaved this tense, polyrhythmic punk-jazz ogre down from an hour of locked-in studio jamming. Reminds me of the post-Fugazi trio Messthetics.

9. The Smile, “Read the Room” Sounds like a Blonde Redhead song from the year OK Computer came out.

10. glass beach, “motions” Sounds like a Dismemberment Plan song from the year Emergency and I came out.

11. Prefuse 73, “A Lord Without Jewels” The first sniff of New Strategies For Modern Crime Vol. 1—the first LP in six years from early-00s glitch-hop O.G. Guillermo Scott Herren—is seven minutes of murky Euro-jazz (complimentary).

12. Youth Lagoon, “Football” Trevor Powers has evolved into the millennial Mark Linkous, making beautiful, wounded and delicate music that sounds sourced from an ancient curiosity shop. And “Football” is not only timely but…oh man, I’m going to need a minute: “We’re so distracted trying to earn love, worth and value that we forget it’s something we inherently already have. I wanted to play with this idea through the lens of sports ‘cuz, in a lot of ways, sports are the truest religion. When I was young, it was the only way I knew how to connect with my dad.”

13. serpentwithfeet, “Safe Word” A classically trained singer who has collaborated with Virgil Abloh, Grizzly Bear, Bjork, Rosalia and Ty Dolla Sign, Josiah Wise is releasing his third LP next week, led by this track, which leaves just a little to the imagination. “A penny saved is a penny earned / But save that freaky shit for later,” he requests—but once you learn the safe word, you’ll have no trouble obliging him.

14. Ms. Boogie, “Dazed & Confused” A whole song about riding on an elevator in the kind of building that has 50 floors. Ms. Boogie is preternaturally calm, just rattling off the floor numbers in relative anonymity, putting in work, and you get the sense that whatever they’re doing in that building is covered by an NDA. Come for the Quasimoto-style vocal refrain, stick around for the cliffhanger ending—does Ms. Boogie escape the stuck elevator?

15. Fredo Bang, “Free Melly” I don’t know a ton about this Baton Rouge-born rapper’s biography or discography except that he had a child with two lesbian influencers, which will do fine for the moment. But I do enjoy this track quite a bit: the slight country timbre of Fredo’s delivery and especially the Ant Banks-in-an-airport-lounge production.

16. Che Noir f. Ransom, “Peaches and Herb” Che Noir is a thoughtful, Griselda-affiliated (Noname-esque) rapper/producer who can flip a sample (it’s Gladys, not P&H) and twist syllables into gold: “crooked system we survive that trade power for dollars / kill our kids then feed us meat made out of powder and water.” Ransom is a veteran hardhead poet from Jersey (with an admirable fixation on Dude Movies) whose sharp edges make a good foil to Che’s soulful introspection. Next collaboration should definitely sample “Reunited” though.

17. Seafood Sam, “Saylo” About as positive and joyous a song about simply living and loving one’s family and friends as I’m comfortable allowing here.

18. Channel Tres, “Walked in the Room” The Compton-born producer/singer/dancer/rapper responsible for this slab of nth wave hip house had an early mentorship with Godmode (see also Shamir, JPEGMAFIA), and is likely, maybe, finally ready to release his first album? Maybe? RCA? I hope for the best.

19. Jayson Green and the Jerk, “Local Jerk” Chipper DFA disco that was not, as far as I know, created by the noted critic and author of the same name.

20. Ariana Grande, “yes, and?” Does our tiny diva use improv lingo to generate ideas out of pre-existing ones? Did the iterative impact of such a game spawn an album ostensibly named after a movie or a song based on another song whose singer says it with her chest and which, well, you get the point?

21. altrice, “‘ever do you want” You can re-do “Back to Life” however you do want to. This isn’t the (untouchable) peak of the Soul II Soul re-dos, but it’ll do. But next, someone desperately needs to flip this sound:

22. Joy Orbison, “flight fm” Apparently Peter O’Grady wrote this while waiting for a ride to a festival and then debuted it at said festival, where he performed as Joy Orbison. That is an incredibly baller move, only enhanced by the fact that this thing is a fucking heater.

23. Byron the Aquarius, “MF pOOCHIE” Bay Area DJ’s deep house cuts through the fog. Play this low in a separate tab to make your own remix.

24. Four Tet, “Loved” I can’t think of a single musician who has a higher batting average over a longer period this century than Kieran Hebden. With Fridge, as Four Tet, all of his incredible remixes (!!). All hitters, no quitters. He’s more press-averse than Tracy Chapman, but his gradual glow-up from the fin-de-siecle posterboy for “folktronica” (kill me) into the joyous co-host of ginormous Dudes Rock parties with Fred Again and Skrillex at Madison Square Garden has been an absolute thrill to watch. So it’s nice to hear him slip back into Y2K-era drag for a few minutes here—spectral New Age synth over the Beta Band Beat, a little “Roygbiv” action, it shimmers and glows and then shuts off. *The Ringer voice* He’s the Ichiro Suzuki of 20th century electronic music.

25. Helado Negro, “Best For You and Me” Wherein Roberto Carlos Lange once again demonstrates that he a master of balance—tonal, spiritual, generic. As Helado Negro, Lange generates a vibe that is impossibly good-natured and warm without ever tipping into treacle. He radiates cosmic spirituality—the refrain here features our narrator staring at the moon for a long time—but never gets woo-woo about it. His best-yet album (Phasor is out today, so we’ll see) was inspired by a story about an immigrant mother teaching her daughter through a series of life instructions that blur into aphorisms. Helado Negro’s music similarly floats between states: Lange came of age as a musician when DAWs and Winamp and messageboards drew music production and consumption and discourse onto The Computer and all of alternative rock started recombining and kind of sounding like Stereolab.

26. @, “Are You There God? It’s Me, @” Like if there was a 100 Gecs but for Feist. I’ve looked into it a little bit and they probably named their band after the classic representation of the “amin” (amen) formula in the Bulgarian of the Manasses Chronicle, c. 1345 (Google may be acting up again). They don’t have a lot of songs yet, but this is by far their best one—a miniature diptych in which songwriter Victoria Rose is in her Claro/choir-kid bag, and Stone Filipczak, if I’m doing the math right, is the skinny guy with the laptop making it all sound a bit Excepter, a bit Elephant 6.

27. Sheryl Crow, “Evolution” In this song’s first verse, Sheryl Crow sings about an out-of-body experience that we can all relate to: “turned on the radio, and there it was / a song that sounded like something I wrote.” I can’t even begin to tell you how many times that’s happened to me. Anyway, Crow spins that off into a riff on how we’re all just skin vessels for energy radiating through the cosmos or whatever. So I’m grooving on the vaguely proggish late 90s Big Rock thing going on here and I realize that between Crow’s slightly nasal vocal and the expensive-sounding modern rock production, this song itself sounds deadass like something someone else wrote: namely any number of tracks from the Cardigans’ triple platinum 1998 album Gran Turismo. I’m even willing to say that “Evolution” is the best Cardigans swaggerjack since Mitski meditated on “Lovefool” to manifest “Nobody.”

28. Vaughn, “Supernatural” I have no clue who this person/group/A.I. bot actually is (are). Are they supernatural? Did someone program them to do the “Right Down the Line” vibe, 3% slower with a Jim James impersonator on the vocal? Did Spotify’s “Pollen” playlist grow sentient and spawn this? Is this a SAULT mystery thing? I’m not complaining! But seriously. Drop the code in the chat.

29. Jane Penny, “Messages” Penny has been moving to the front of the brilliant Montreal indiepop band TOPS recently—here she is, daring you not to buy I Feel Alive—and she’s on her own here, only slightly moderating and simplifying the glimmering, synth-heavy hookfests that makes her band so great.

30. Dana Gavanski, “How To Feel Uncomfortable” Lead track from the Canadian singer-songwriter’s perfectly titled new LP Late Slap is all about shifting routines, embracing distress, with the end goal of personal growth. Not sure where the all-black contacts fit in there but they sure do look inconvenient.

Herewith are the January (and December) albums I enjoyed:

• 21 Savage, american dream (Slaughter Gang/Epic) Matthew Ritchie: “As 21’s status has shifted, he puts the realistic contradictions of his existence on display with a steely neutrality.” (“all of me,” “redrum”)

• Astrid Sonne, Great Doubt (Escho) Philip Sherburne: “Contrasts abound: canned string synths and real viola, booming 808s and acoustic drum kit, doomy pads and wistful harp-like plucks.” (“Do You Wanna,” “Boost”)

• Ethan Iverson, Technically Acceptable (Blue Note) When the erstwhile Bad Plus co-founder isn’t righteously shitting all over “Rhapsody in Blue” in the New York Times or jazz-‘stacking himself, he’s releasing his own music. Technically Acceptable is a great way to get to know Iverson’s reach as a composer and interpreter; it feels like a curated jazz program as much as an album. It opens with some cool-jazz originals, tmoves to a few covers (adding a ghostly theremin on “‘Round Midnight”) and of course finishes with a three-part sonata. I highly recommend reading this two-part interview with Iverson by the great Nate Chinen. (“Technically Acceptable,” “‘Round Midnight”)

• glass beach, plastic death (Run For Cover) Alfred Soto: “Mixing the prairie-like chordal expanses of good Animal Collective with the creamy studio manipulations of prime Clinic and the fascination with barking-mad dynamics of early Modest Mouse, Plastic Death demands concentration yet also works as a car stereo jam.” (“coelacanth,” “motions”)

• Jonathan Rado, For Who The Bell Tolls For (Western Vinyl) The Todd Rundgren of Foxygen issues his as-yet magnum opus. Stuart Berman: “For Who the Bell Tolls For feels like a proper coming-out party for Rado the artist/auteur, an opportunity to flex his elevated production chops on a set of songs that embody his cavalier boho spirit while striking a more personal chord.” (“For Who The Bell Tolls For,” “Yer Funeral”)

• Kali Uchis, Orquídeas (Geffen) Isabelia Herrera: “Much of Orquídeas reprises the shimmering daydreams Uchis is known for, luxuriating in background harmonies and synth arpeggios that feel like they’re enveloped in charmeuse fabrics.” Alfred Soto: “a collection of twitchy-gooey body talk bangers that hide no secrets.”

• Mary Halvorson, Cloudward (Nonesuch) Andy Cush: “There is something curiously absolute about Cloudward, whose eight pieces seem chiefly to express their own elegant systems of order and disorder, rather than reaching outside themselves to convey particular emotions or images.”

• Ms. Boogie, The Breakdown (self-released): Delilah Friedler: “Wield(s) the unflinching honesty of Brooklyn drill to depict a life that’s uniquely her own, yet intimately familiar to other trans women.”

• Rotem Sivan, Dream Louder (Sonder House) Exploratory, drum-and-bass-curious jazz guitarist writes an entire album about his new spouse. Classic wife-guy move. (“Dragon,” “Luc”)

• The Smile, Wall of Eyes (XL) More groovy, moody punkish para-prog from Thommy and Johnny’s side deal. (“Wall of Eyes,” “Read the Room”)

• Torres, What an enormous room (Merge) The sixth album from singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott. If it’s not her best of the six, it’s her best-sounding album yet. (“I got the fear,” “Wake to flowers”) (read Claire Shaffer at Pitchfork, whose opinion differs from mine)

RIP Aston “Family Man” Barrett