20. Yves Tumor, Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
According to my Spotify “Wrapped” for this year, my favorite genre was “Art Pop”; thus, it seems right to kick this countdown off with something fully of that description, near Fiona Apple-length LP title and all. I highlighted effusive single “Echolalia” in my mid-year report, but Sean Lee Bowie’s fifth album under this moniker is often as catchy as it weird, spiced with vintage samples, shape-shifting song structures and in “Operator”, a cheerleader chant previously adopted/rendered demented by Faith No More three decades ago (and in this artist’s hands, just as effectively today.)
19. Meg Baird, Furling
I felt moved to hear this after Dusted Magazine praised it mid-year and opener “Ashes, Ashes” registered with me in no time. A languorous six-minute comedown of wordless sighs over a piano-and-rhythm-with-vibes vamp, it’s a perfect mood-setter for this gentle, gauzy, occasionally devastating folk opus. Like The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler, Baird’s breathiness and cheery but sustaining high tone contrast skillfully with the minor chord progressions and pastoral acoustic settings. An affable companion to my top album of last year, Beth Orton’s Weather Alive.
18. Paul Simon, Seven Psalms
Five years into his retirement from touring, octogenarian Simon made an unexpected return with a record unlike anything else he’s done: a 33-minute song cycle inspired by the Book of Psalms featuring seven movements and released both physically and digitally as one unbroken track. Potentially a challenging listen for those looking for another addition to the man’s voluminous songbook, it’s also a reminder of his innate talent, with both words and music continually revealing nuance and something approaching enlightenment on each listen. If this proves his final word, it’s one of his most profound.
17. The National, Laugh Track
I am among those wondering why these Dad Rock Gods opted to put out two albums six months apart this year instead one killer release. First Two Pages of Frankenstein hit my honorable mentions list (“Tropic Morning News” might end up their deserved legacy hit) but I’ve come to prefer Laugh Track for being a bit roomier and also a whole lot more ambitious. The seven-minute “Space Invader” with its thunderous coda is the peak, but diversions on either side of it (a Bon Iver duet; scrappy, improvised closer “Smoke Detector”) make the case that these are much better than mere leftovers.
16. Meshell Ndegeocello, The Omnichord Real Book
Thirty years on from her debut album (and nearly ten since her last set of original songs), Ndegeocello returns with a lengthy, typically genre-averse collection. Although the titular electronic instrument is present throughout, it is but one ingredient in a blend of soul, funk, jazz, folk and rock that no matter how spacy or boundary pushing rarely drifts off into the ether or loses focus. She’s endured as an artist not only for her capacity to explore but also for her ability to connect, a distinction that often separates a legend from a flash-in-the-pan.
Regarding my favorite music this year, I’m counting down a Top 20 Albums list (instead of my usual Top 10 or 15) over the next few days. I wouldn’t say that I was necessarily more engaged with new music compared to past years, but I can’t deny the effort I put into looking for it. Spotify provides numerous paths towards finding it (particularly through its personalized “Discover Weekly” playlists) and naturally not everything clicks (I made it one-and-a-half songs through that much-praised Wednesday album before moving on.) To stumble upon a great new song/album or for longtime artists to seemingly emerge with one out of the blue is what keeps me stimulated and also motivated in the pursuit of more.
Here are some albums that didn’t make my Top 20 but are still worth further delving into (with a few footnotes):
Boygenius, The Record
Caroline Polachek, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
The Coral, Sea of Mirrors*
Depeche Mode, Memento Mori**
Fever Ray, Radical Romantics
Jake Shears, Last Man Dancing
Jungle, Volcano
Kara Jackson, Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?*
Kate NV, WOW
Kylie Minogue, Tension
MAN ON MAN, Provincetown
Metric, Formentera II
The National, First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Peter Gabriel, i/o***
PJ Harvey, I Inside The Old Year Dying
Shamir, Homo Anxietatem
Troye Sivan, Something To Give Each Other
US Girls, Bless This Mess
*Seriously considered placing these two in the Top 20.
**Entirely, unexpectedly their best in over two decades for what it’s worth.
***This came out on 12/1, so I may need more time to absorb it (even if it was released track-by-track throughout the year.)
In midlife, I find myself more receptive to aesthetics I would have deemed inconceivable in my youth: adventurous cuisines and libations (the twenty-year-old me would’ve shuddered at a sushi dinner or a glass of rye whiskey), facial hair as an attractive feature (though not necessarily on myself) and most of all, music deemed seriously unhip by my peers. I mean, at 21, I listened to Dionne Warwick as often as I did Blur or XTC but in the past few years, I’ve had a newfound craving for mid-20th century instrumental Lounge and Exotica, not to mention that terminal scourge of a genre, Easy Listening.
I wonder if it’s an attempt to return to early childhood. At that impressionable age, I’d often find solace in WEZW (“E-Z 104 FM” (actually 103.7)), Milwaukee’s own easy listening station. A few years back, I came across a recording from it circa June 1980 on YouTube and with it, a flood of long-dormant memories. My parents would play it in the car (not as often as their beloved “Mix” station WMYX, which unlike WEZW is still on the air) and I’d occasionally hear it out in the wild (mostly at barber shops, doctors’ waiting rooms, even in the principal’s office once when I was sick in fourth grade.) It was practically a staple all through December when it would (mostly) switch over to a holiday music format.
Last year, I began compiling a Spotify playlist called “Elevator to Bliss”, generally adding tracks via the app’s “Let’s Find Something For Your Playlist” algorithm. Whittled down from 50-odd tracks and retitled to fit its space-age vibes (in many senses of the term), some of the thirty selections below might’ve appeared on WEZW back in the day, but not all. As one digs deeper into the notion of “Elevator Music” (Joseph Lanza’s book of the same name is an enlightening resource), one excavates genres upon subgenres. Often, what separates the (mildly) stimulating from the merely soothing comes down to a matter of personal taste; this is the sort of playlist that is also effective when left on shuffle. However, I’ve attempted a trajectory of sorts, beginning and ending with different versions of the same tune, exhibiting how easily an instrumental shlock hit can be gently repurposed as sci-fi camp (by Mr. Spock, no less!)
In between those alternate-world bookends sits a cornucopia of film music from renown masters (John Barry, Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin) and more cultish figures (Riz Ortolani, Sven Liabek, Carlos Rustichelli) along with a few selections from the early 70s (themes from Airport and Klute) that anticipate primetime soap opera scores from later in that decade. Cool Jazz is also represented with vibraphonist Cal Tjader rubbing shoulders against Bossa Nova king Antonio Carlos Jobin and flautist Herbie Mann. If we’re including the 70s, we have to make room for some instrumental funk (Charles Stepney) and such genre-bending oddities as Michel Polnareff’s “Voyages” and Alain Tew’s spare but sex-x-y “The Fence”.
I turn to this playlist when I want to zone out to instrumental music, whether while writing, working, walking or drifting off to sleep. Still, it’s not exactly the same as background or ambient noise. I no longer believe in “guilty pleasures”—all that matters to me these days is how pleasing I find the music; this playlist does the job.
Twenty summers ago, I made my last ever mixtape—that is, a music mix on a C-90 cassette as opposed to a blank compact disc. A few months earlier, I had acquired my very first laptop computer (dude, I got a Dell) which allowed me to make the move from analog to digital.
By late July 2003, I had a few mix CDs under my belt but circumstance gave me an excuse to make one more mixtape. In my hometown of Milwaukee, I met up with my parents (who then lived in Iowa) for three nights; then, I spent another six nights with my friend Laura, a Chicago native whom I met as a student at Marquette University some years before. I’d moved to Boston shortly after graduation but she stayed on. Between her job at a nursery and other family commitments, I was left alone roughly half of that time to apartment-sit, see other old friends and explore the city I’d left behind. Laura lived on the East Side just off Oakland Ave and I had a blast visiting all the old haunts, from the Oriental and Downer Theatres to Bradford Beach, Atomic Records and even Klode Park out in Whitefish Bay.
With ample time on my hands, I curated a mixtape for Laura as a thankful gesture for putting me up. I had brought an entire Case Logic 128-capacity CD wallet with me stuffed with all-time faves, recent purchases and a few discs I had to review for Splendid!, a music website I wrote for at the time; I may have also schlepped a blank tape with me purposely for this task. Laura was (and continues to be) a friend I make mixes for on an annual basis, going all the way back to our senior year at MU when we first bonded as friends and I crafted her a tape she dubbed the “Kriofske Mix” (a moniker I lent to two of my (now former) blogs.)
Revisiting this mix two decades on, I feel transported back to my late 20’s, an primordial era where I apparently thought nothing of including two songs by Ani DiFranco, two tracks from the Punch-Drunk Love soundtrack, an album cut from The White Stripes’ then-new Elephant (my #2 album of that year, I haven’t listened to it in at least 15) and the gauzy opener from Blur’s then-new Think Thank (also not heard in full in a long, long time.) I had also recently gotten into The Go-Betweens, The New Pornographers and Mary Lou Lord—hearing what I selected from each again reminds me what it was like to discover an artist one connected with so instantly you’d rush out and devour their back catalog piece by piece depending on what you could find in (for me, mostly used) record stores.
Among these twenty tracks, six are from albums I reviewed for Splendid! Required to write about everything from obnoxious prog-rock to near-ambient mood music, they’re scattered across that range: Paul Brill’s genre-expanding take on Americana, Natacha Atlas doing the same for world music (and sounding entirely different), Northern State (a clever and disarmingly low-fi distaff Beastie Boys), two cuts from a compilation for a record label helmed by a member of the Cocteau Twins (including the title track above) and an a capella cover of a Pixies song on TV On The Radio’s debut EP, so new-sounding and exceptional I wasn’t surprised by the mass-acclaim their second LP Return To Cookie Mountain received three years later.
True to titular form, there’s a loose and fairly obvious summer theme going on here. My favorite section is the last five songs—“You Had Time” sets the pensive, reflective mood (much better than the other DiFranco selection, anyway) and Jeff Buckley’s dreamy, ethereal cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (which I listened to about 100 times that summer) runs with it, sustained by another old-school Stuart Murdoch reverie. Somehow, the contrasting tones of Shelley Duvall and Tunde Adebimpe just fit right in. I often cringe at mixes I made decades ago, but at least the last quarter of this one hit nicely when I revisited it a few weeks back, walking under the overgrow trees of the Commonwealth Mall on an idyllic mid-summer late afternoon.
In midsummer, as the humidity surfaces like a dense soup infiltrating all in its wake, I turn to music that’s languorous and laid back but not prosaic or aural wallpaper. In the mid-90’s, a genre dubbed “Trip-Hop” pleasantly attained this sweet spot: bands such as Massive Attack, Morcheeba, Portishead and the lesser-known-but-just-as-worthy Mono all blended loping beats and samples with chill female vocals into tunes like intoxicating smoothies that at best transcended the “mood/bedroom music for stoners” tag that was often bestowed upon them.
This is not entirely a trip-hop mix despite its title coming from a track off of what remains arguably the genre’s furthest-reaching masterpiece, Tricky’s Maxinquaye (1995). Actually, it began as an overview of modern-day songs in the same spirit (if not quite sound): Lana Del Rey’s groove earworm “Peppers”, The Clientele’s incorporation of breakbeats into their ever-distinct chamber pop, vibrant new songs from artists who were there in the 90’s (an evocative highlight of Everything But The Girl’s reunion album Fuse; Slowdive’s first single from their forthcoming release.) Then, Christine and the Queens’ “Tears Can Be So Soft” ended up successfully emulating/updating that sound, so it was no short leap to include stuff from both eras (among others.)
Since trip-hop could be such a nebulous genre, some songs that don’t really fit there still find their place here. “Love Nobody”, indie singer Jenn Champion’s collab with electropop artist Oyster Kids is a track I rediscovered after saving it to an ongoing folder of new music heard on my Spotify-curated “Discover Weekly” playlist two years ago—more 21st century 80’s (an accidental genre that could warrant its own mix) but an affable entry point into what follows. Speaking of the 80’s, Yacht Rock could be trip-hop’s sideway equivalent of that era, and U.S. Girls’ “Only Daedalus” and Emm Gryner’s “Loose Wig” are nothing if not 21st century yacht rock (and so Steely Dan-influenced I couldn’t help but place one of their old songs in between.) As usual, a vibe mix is more a journey than a destination (Del Rey next to Bill Withers next to Air!) even if it concludes with Stars’ Amy Millan blissfully considering the value of being here now.
Below you’ll find many of the usual suspects when it comes to my favorite albums of the year (so far): Jessie Ware’s looser, wilder (and perhaps slapdash by design) follow-up to the best album of 2020, Robert Forster’s song cycle about aging and resilience, Emm Gryner’s triumphant yacht rock-influenced return and Alex Lahey’s long-awaited third full-length. Others I couldn’t have predicted a year ago: Sparks’ most compelling release since 2006’s Hello Young Lovers, Jake Shears back in action with a second solo album that nearly ranks with the best of his former band Scissor Sisters, supergroup Boygenius reemerging with a record that sounds better with each spin and most of all, a reformed Everything But The Girl, 24 years on from Temperamental and it’s like they haven’t missed a day (or a beat.)
New to me is Yves Tumor’s unclassifiable art-pop, their laboriously-titled fifth album stuffed with vivid neo-psychedelia and chewy (if twisted) hooks (see onomatopoeic earworm “Echolalia”.) Nowhere near ready to claim a favorite of these twelve yet, but Christine and the Queens’ ultra-recent triple(!) album is the one I feel has the most room for exploration and growth.
Favorite 2023 Albums So Far (in alphabetical order by artist):
Alex Lahey, The Answer Is Always Yes
Boygenius, The Record
Christine and The Queens, Paranoia, Angels, True Love
Emm Gryner, Business & Pleasure
Everything But The Girl, Fuse
Fever Ray, Radical Romantics
Jake Shears, Last Man Dancing
Jessie Ware, That! Feels Good!
The National, First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Robert Forster, The Candle and The Flame
Sparks, The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte
Yves Tumor, Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
Rye Lane
So many movies I have yet to see (Asteroid City and Past Lives among them) and a good chunk below are technically 2022 titles that didn’t play Boston or hit streaming until this year (Laura Poitras’ best film to date and Jafar Panahi’s most accomplished in years) or titles I saw at IFF Boston (watch out for Christian Petzold’s amazing Afire.) Perhaps the most obscure title below, Give Me Pity! is the one I’d most encourage people to see, although British rom-com Rye Lane is right there on Hulu and a exquisite way to spend 82 minutes.
Favorite 2023 Films So Far (Alphabetical by title):
When I was young, my parents weren’t particularly fancy in regard to what they drank (at least before I got them into vodka martinis in my mid-late 20s.) After work, my dad often enjoyed a bottle of Michelob poured into the tall, narrow glass while on holidays and other special occasions, my mom favored an inexpensive table wine—most often, Lancers Rosé, a Portuguese variety which came in an opaque, slightly chunky, burgundy-colored bottle. I recall this as a ubiquitous presence in our house up through the ‘90s when I was considered old enough to imbibe along with my folks. Still, given its classic design, Lancers felt more like a 1970s remnant; I suspect it accompanied many a fondue pot or a helping of Steak Diane sautéedin an electric skillet.
This mix could provide the soundtrack for a Lancers-soaked dinner party my parents or their friends might’ve thrown in the years immediately before my birth. Roughly spanning 1967 to 1973, it conjures a comfortably bourgeoisie, non-rock (or at least soft rock) vibe—unhip, if you’re less charitable, if not positively square. Without fully lapsing into Muzak territory, some of these smooth sounds are directly from my parents’ record collection of the time: Sergio Mendes and Brasil ‘66 (crafting a magic carpet ride out of a Simon and Garfunkel folk-rock standard), The Fifth Dimension (somewhat forgotten gem “Last Night I Didn’t Get To Sleep At All”) and of course Burt Bacharach, both as a solo artist (“Pacific Coast Highway”) and on tunes written with Hal David and made famous by Dusty Springfield (“The Look of Love”), Herb Alpert (“This Guy’s In Love With You”) and Dionne Warwick (“Amanda” from The Love Machine soundtrack is a bit of a deep cut but its arrangement is Burt at his baroque best.)
Other selections I remember hearing on the radio (in particular, Milwaukee’s still-on-the-air WMYX-FM), albeit a decade or so after their heyday include Mason Williams’ groovy symphonic rock instrumental “Classical Gas”; Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” (the classiest singer-songwriter crossover hit this side of vocal-soundalike Carole King); “We’ve Only Just Begun”, arguably The Carpenters’ best, most melodically complex single (written by 1970s mascot Paul Williams); The Spinners’ syncopated-yet-still-like-buttah “I’ll Be Around”.
The title references a lyric in Peggy Lee’s novelty hit “Is That All There Is” which I do not recall hearing in my youth; other selections fit the overall vibe but were likely too quirky (Julie London’s unlikely Ohio Express cover, Minnie Riperton’s psychedelic folk hymn), obscure (Harry Nilsson pre-“Everybody’s Talkin’”, Laura Nyro’s original version of an eventual hit for The Fifth Dimension) or ephemeral (Lalo Schifrin’s soundtrack music) to encounter in the wild back then. By the mid-70s, sophistication of this sort was quickly becoming passe in pop music—Barry White’s breakthrough single “I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More Baby” is the pivot, anticipating disco excess but not above lacing its seven-minute-long seduction suite with flutes and harpsichord. It’s placed near the end of this mix, late in the evening after the Lancers ran out with a mysterious glass bowl of all the guests’ keyrings perhaps surfacing (though not at one of my parents’ gatherings as far as I know.)
Haunted Jukebox Mix #4: Let’s Break Out The Lancers!
Debut albums come in all flavors. Some barely hint at the artistry to come; others are solid first salvos only to be eclipsed by stronger and/or further refined efforts. Below, I’ve chosen perhaps that rarest breed: the fully-formed release that kicked off careers both fleeting and venerable and were also arguably never topped by anything else the artist would make. To be eligible, they must have recorded at least more than one follow-up. Here are ten favorites in chronological order:
Probably this list’s most contentious choice given I’m Your Man (1988), the first Cohen I ever heard (and loved) is its equal and fully holds up despite radically different and deliberately dinky period production. Alas, this debut plays more like a greatest hits compilation than the one he’d release seven years later: credit the three songs later brilliantly used in McCabe & Ms. Miller, but there’s also “Suzanne”, “Master Song”, “So Long Marianne”, “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye”—even Lenny’s off-key bleating at the end of “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” still charms me.
Violent Femmes, Violent Femmes (1983)
Maybe the most obvious choice here but this is a textbook example of a debut so definitive, so iconic that Gordon Gano and co. arguably haven’t tried to top it. I don’t know how many officially released singles there were from this, but at least five of its ten tracks are undeniable standards (“Blister In the Sun”, “Kiss Off”, “Add It Up”, “Prove My Love”, “Gone Daddy Gone”) and most nonfans would likely struggle to name more than two or three songs from the rest of their catalog.
Deee-Lite, World Clique (1990)
“Groove Is In The Heart” remains one of a handful of songs I wholly fell in love with on first listen and it’s aged beautifully compared to most hits of its era. To a lesser extent, one could say the same of its parent album. Whether skewed towards Italo-house (“Good Beat”, “Power of Love”) retro-funk (“Who Was That?”, “Try Me On, I’m Very You”) or electro-pop (“What Is Love”, “E.S.P.”), World Clique is exuberant party music with substance that also doesn’t take itself too seriously (unlike their next two albums.)
An eighteen-track manifesto seemingly untouched by the outside world, it’s a pure distillation of Phair’s raw talent. Few first albums have expressed such palpable perspective, much less a feminine one so unapologetically, frankly sexual and forthcoming. It either came out at exactly the right time or it ended up shaping the times even if it didn’t trouble the monoculture much. When Phair did exactly that on Whip-Smart (1994) and the much-maligned Liz Phair (2003), the effect wasn’t as novel or powerful.
A truly strange band that could’ve only ended up on a major label at the height of alt-rock, Soul Coughing’s mélange of beat poetry-derived vocals, jazz rhythm section and sample-heavy soundscapes was both instantly recognizable and really like nothing else. So inspired was their debut that it gave off the impression they could be the 90s answer to Talking Heads. Instead, they ran out of gas after three increasingly conventional albums, suggesting such a notion was too good to be true even if for a brief shining moment it might have been.
Whereas most 90s singer-songwriters took inspiration from John Lennon or Neil Young, breathy-voiced Matthews learned his stuff from Burt Bacharach and The Zombies’ Colin Blunstone, crafting intricate, opaque chamber-pop miniatures with guitars as prominent as the trumpet solos, cathedral organ, string quartets, etc. Call it an anachronism, but perhaps Matthews was (however unwittingly) playing the long game as, nearly thirty years on, this debut sounds as out-of-time as it ever did and also as fresh, brimming with little details and nuances ripe for discovery.
The breaking point where “trip-hop” was not yet a genre to emulate but more of a happy accident, a sound stumbled upon when a DJ, a blues guitarist and a one-of-a-kind vocalist with a sweet but alluringly hazy tone all came together and their seemingly disparate contributions somehow gelled like smoothed-out alchemy. From the catchy, loping “Trigger Hippie” to the somber, hypnotic title track, it’s overall more of a sustained groove than a collection of discernible songs—a potency that they only intermittently recaptured when they later mostly eschewed grooves for songs.
Speaking of DJs and sampling, it took nearly sixteen years for this Australian collective to record a second album and a relatively scant four more years to release a third; whenever I listen to the first one, I can fathom why—a triumph of plunderphonics and fin de siècle attitude of “here’s where we’ve been, and here’s what’s next”, Since I Left You remains a singular point continually reverberating and a miracle of reappropriation so far-reaching it feels impossible to improve on—I don’t listen to it as much, but it’s still my favorite album of the 00’s.
This “delightful nutcase” (as a friend once correctly described her) released a debut so audacious, precocious, declarative and altogether stunning that I suspected it would be her Bottle Rocket or Reservoir Dogs (a great first effort in a career full of ‘em); unfortunately it ended up more of a Donnie Darko—one great glimpse of promise, followed by weird left turns and outright disappointments to the point where she’s settled for interpreting other people’s work, which she’s often gifted at doing. But I remember how much potential she once had.
Talk about the voice of a generation—Florence Welch, then in her early twenties made that very rare accomplishment of coming off as a *star* from the get-go with excellent tunes (“Dog Days Are Over”, “Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)”) and an arresting, bold sound entirely worthy of and complimentary to that voice. Welch remains the most promising heir apparent to succeeding Kate Bush at the High Alter of Eccentric Female Divas, even if none of her subsequent work startles or transcends like Lungs (although 2015’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful comes close.)
Celebrating her latest album Business and Pleasure (which comes out this week), here’s a CD-length playlist of some of my favorite songs from Canadian singer-songwriter Emm Gryner. Despite the easy rhyme afforded by her last name, it is very much a primer—proceeding chronologically, it kicks off with two tracks from Public (1998), her third album and major label debut on Mercury Records. Had they appeared two or three years earlier, perhaps “Summerlong” or “Hello Aquarius” might’ve become modern rock radio staples; however, by then, female artists were struggling to get airplay in that format. With that in mind and Universal Music’s acquisition of Mercury, Gryner was dropped from the label shortly after Public came out.
In the 20-odd years since, she has put out 20-odd albums and EPs via her own label, Dead Daisy Records (not to mention a stint in David Bowie’s touring band.) One-third of my selections overlap with her best-of compilation from 2012, including “Summerlong” and the regal, soaring “Almighty Love”, a track a figure no less titanic than Bono cited in a magazine article as a song he wished he had written. I’m surprised there wasn’t more crossover between the two track listings since one of Gryner’s greatest strengths is a knack for glorious, anthemic pop. “Symphonic”, “Young As The Night”, “Black-Eyed Blue Sky”, “Ciao Monday” (the last one’s from 2011’s Northern Gospel)—all of them are alternate world number one singles lifted by ringing guitars, effervescent melodies and Gryner’s endearingly bright and deeply emotive voice.
She’s such a talented, underheard songwriter that I was only going to include her own compositions, but it wouldn’t be fully representative to not highlight her interpretative skills. I first heard of her via Girl Versions (2001) a set of stripped-down covers of songs originally popularized by men including her radical reworking of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” (which at the time received ample airplay on WERS, a college radio station in Boston.) Later, she recorded Songs of Love and Death (2005), another covers collection, this time of Irish artists in tribute to her paternal heritage (her mother’s family is Filipino)—likely what tipped Bono off to her. It’s represented here by a gorgeous version of “Forget Georgia” originally by late 80s/early 90s Dublin outfit Something Happens. There’s also She’s Gone, a 2012 EP of Hall and Oates covers, of which the title track (a lovingly chill rendition that gets bonus points for not changing the lyrics to “He’s Gone”) is a highlight.
In recent years, she’s moved from spare balladry (“The Race”) to heavenly psych-pop (“Imagination”) to even fist-pumping EDM (how does “All The Love All The Time” only have 2K streams on Spotify?) Appearing after an extended hiatus, “Valencia”, the lead single from Business and Pleasure makes good on Gryner’s aim to craft a yacht-rock record complete with a Doobie Brothers bounce and horns sympathetic to those on Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues”. Fortunately, it’s not a simulation or a pastiche, just a sincere, finely honed tune brimming with personality and hooks for days like any other track on this playlist.
No overarching theme here, just some songs I’ve been listening to lately that are split nearly evenly between old and new. Most mixes I’ve made for other people tend to follow this non-format with selections I think they’d like to hear; this one, however, is for me.
Much of the new-ish stuff has a retro-disco tint that is always welcome; we’re so many decades past the “disco sucks” era (it arguably vanished once Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is In The Heart” hit in 1990) that such a notion now looks not only misinformed but positively quaint. Not that it’s suddenly fashionable, give or take a Dua Lipa or Lady Gaga, but just the idea of wistful, joyous, throw-all-caution-to-the-wind dance music endures whether it’s an unlikely duet between Carly Rae Jepsen and Rufus Wainwright, a kaleidoscopic anthem from former Savage Garden vocalist Darren Hayes, or an unlikely but euphoric ode to formalwear from U.S. Girls’ just-released album Bless This Mess. A choice cut from Pet Shop Boys’ best LP of the 21st century, 2013’s Electric, fits right in with these glitterball newbies.
And yet, I reiterate this isn’t a thematic mix since most of the other new songs aren’t danceable at all. Former Go-Betweens member Robert Forster takes stock of a thirty-year relationship and the profound meaning it has given his life, Yves Tumor crafts an itchy, rhythmic, onomatopoetic earworm, the onomatopoetically named beabadoobee pays inspired tribute to a similarly-titled classic by The Cure and The National ascends towards dad-rock heaven on their latest (and maybe best?) single. Listen as they all complement older tunes such as Blossom Dearie elegantly essaying another standard, Richard and Linda Thompson exhibiting fine defiance and drollness and Sky Ferreira constructing 21st century 1980s music out of such time-honored tools as melody and urgency.
The new song that kicks the mix off and gives it a title is a musical reunion for a duo who has recorded separately since the year 2000. I always wondered if Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt would ever work together again since they’ve remained a couple all this time; the first released track from the forthcoming album Fuse seems to almost pick up where they left off on 1999’s Temperamental with its electronic fervor, chill breakbeats and Thorn’s diva-like croon. But she sounds intriguingly deeper and wearier than she did just five years ago on her own great Record. “Kiss me while the world decays / Kiss me while the music plays” she repeats near the end and for sure, Everything But The Girl are firmly standing in 2023.
Haunted Jukebox 