Jackie Venson - Love Transcends
Jackie Venson opened for Gary Clark Jr. way back in the day, and I’ve paid somewhat attention to her growing career, and this is her first full length album in at least a couple years. This time, Love Transcends is a pure blues album that sounds like it could’ve come out generations ago. All the instruments are cleanly played, the songwriting is concise, and there’s plenty of solos to go around. There’s no overdubs, or any sound of technology anywhere on this album. It’s just a pure blues album, and a really good one at that. The songs know when to meander with plenty of solos like “Rollin’ On”, contain a million transition points like “See What You Want”, or to be a straightforward anthem like “‘Til This Pain Goes Away”. As with any good blues album, there’s a track where she goes at the powers that be, which is “Fall of the USA”. Even the length of the album is perfect at just over 30 minutes and only 9 songs. The main thing that holds me back right now is that her voice doesn’t have the power that a great blues singer normally has, but her instrumental playing more than makes up for it. Love Transcends is the sound I hope Jackie continues to stay in, and maybe her show in Madison will finally happen after two separate cancellations this summer.
James Blake - Friends That Break Your Heart
I knew this album was going to cut deep just from the title and lead single, and boy was I right. “Say What You Will” both set the tone for the album, and left a lot to the imagination with the full project. It’s a beautiful ballad about feeling inadequate when comparing yourself to other people in the same field, and the video is hilarious with James doing just that with Finneas. The rest of the ballads on here follow a similar sonic format, but most are about losing friends, whether it be because of an argument or just naturally drifting away. The final two tracks best exemplify this subject matter, each of which is heartbreaking lyrically and sonically. But even though the album starts and ends with ballads, the middle has a decent amount of upbeat tracks. JID and SwaVay are featured on the lighthearted “Frozen”, while Metro Boomin shows up for the experimental “Foot Forward”. Speaking of the features, both SZA and especially Monica Martin fit their duets with James perfectly. I have to mention the heavy electronic presence on “I’m So Blessed You’re Mine,” a beat he originally gave to Billie Eilish, but luckily James was able to get it back and do something special with it. Friends That Break Your Heart is another incredible addition to music from one of it’s best and most influential voices of the past decade.
Young Thug - Punk
Young Thug simultaneously forged his own path while sounding like nobody else at the time, to now influencing many of the biggest rappers in the world. His enigmatic presence is something that very few people attain, but he’s still captured the ears of people like Elton John and Kanye West. Punk, his newest album, is a change of direction for him. Most of the album is slower and more introspective, many times over bare guitar chords and no drums. It leads to much of the album feeling really samey, but there’s some really high highs. “Love You More” with Nate Ruess, Gunna, and Jeff Bhasker is one of my favorite tracks of the year, and I never would’ve expected Young Thug to have one of my favorite love songs of the year before now. The piano chords under Nate’s voice work perfectly, and the simple drums give Thug and Gunna ample room to operate. Post Malone and A$AP Rocky work perfectly over the guitar-led track “Livin It Up”, while Travis Scott and Drake both deliver over a bombastic banger of a beat on “Bubbly”. The final two tracks, “Hate the Game” and “Day Before” with Mac Miller both show what I think Young Thug was really going for this album perfectly, with one being a catchy song about love and the other an extremely emotional closer over nothing more than a guitar loop.
Maxo Kream - Weight of the World
Maxo somehow feels like a secret when it comes to hip hop. I almost never hear people talking about him, but it seems like every artist is a fan. Between this album and Brandon Banks, he’s had Tyler the Creator, Travis Scott, Megan Thee Stallion, A$AP Rocky, Freddie Gibbs, ScHoolboy Q, and more as features, each of those being a huge name. I’m not sure if Weight of the World matches Brandon Banks for my personal enjoyment, but it’s right there. As usual, many of these tracks feel more like diary entries than actual songs. The opener “Cripstian” may have the line, “Jesus Christ could walk on water, I’ma Crip walk on the sea,” but he also talks about his brother being murdered, cousin committing suicide, and having his grandmother in a coma due to COVID. His brother comes up again on the song “Trips”, which has Maxo detailing their entire life together and his brother’s death, including giving his brother CPR in his own living room while waiting for the paramedics. Even a song like “Worthless” shows Maxo talking about his addiction to lean and Adderall, but also his contradiction about getting off of them, explicitly starting off his verse saying that, “Life was better back when I took handlebars.” It’s a heartbreaking song to hear, but that’s what Maxo is best at. He’s even said that his family members are always angry at him for how personal his music is, but that they usually come around eventually. Weight of the World is another fantastic addition to Maxo’s catalogue and easily has some of the most personal hip hop songs I’ve heard all year.
JPEGMAFIA - LP!
There was a time last year where I felt pretty JPEGMAFIA-ed out. It just felt like I needed a break from his constant stream of content, and it paid off with how much I’m loving this album! He combined the crazed rapping of Veteran with the scatterbrain production and song structure of All My Heroes are Cornballs onto another great project. Before I talk about the music, it’s worth knowing that there are two versions, one on streaming and one on Bandcamp/Youtube that has all the samples and extra songs, so I’m talking about the Bandcamp version of the album. It’s available for a free download, so might as well download it for free. “Hazard Duty Pay” is easily one of his best songs in a long time and contains an incredible beat with an 80s/90s R&B sample. “End Credits” has this insane guitar sample that sounds perfect for a WWE introduction or a climactic fight scene. “Thot’s Prayer” shows Peggy going back to the melodic stylings of his last album, but they work perfectly. He also interpolates the Britney Spears classic “Baby One More Time” for the hook on this song. “Rebound” is easily one of the hardest and most mainstream songs Peggy has ever made, but it hits super hard. It’s still difficult to talk about a JPEGMAFIA album because everything is so interconnected and abstract that it can be hard to pull individual moments away from the full project. Either way, JPEGMAFIA continues his streak of great albums with LP!
Benji. - Smile, You’re Alive!
Benji became an impromptu member of the Spillage Village collective last year after the pandemic extended what was supposed to be a short visit with his cousin became a multiple month stay at the collective’s house at the time. After providing some amazing basslines and verse for Spilligion last year and a quality opening performance for Earthgang in 2019, I was curious to see how he would carry his own album. Turns out, Benji gave us one of the most uplifting albums of 2021 that still has a tinge of realness to it. It may sound corny at points, which is expected for something this positive and uplifting, but he shows you that it comes from a very real place. For example, on the track “Shake”, the entire track is about how Benji had many drug addictions in his past, including alcohol and cocaine. But for the most part, Smile, You’re Alive lives up to it’s positive name! Because Benji is a talented instrumentalist, it allows him to branch out more sonically than most artists as well. He can do an upbeat hip hop beat like on “East Side Bounce”, but then have it preceded by a guitar heavy explosion of sound like on “Shine”. I saw someone online call this the album that Chance the Rapper should’ve made, and I think that’s a perfect description. This is how you make an overly positive, uplifting body of work that’s not drowned in corniness or feeling faked at all.
Lady Gaga & Tony Bennett - Love For Sale
I just found out that Tony Bennett broke a world record for being the oldest person to release an album of newly recorded material at 95 years old! It’s crazy how long Tony’s not only been alive, but active and doing things. He doesn’t just remember WWII, he fought in it! His first number one hit was 70 years ago, and he’s still making new music, that’s a magical feat in itself! There’s a fantastic 60 minutes segment on his final performance and battle with Alzheimer's, and there’s some really tear-jerking moments between him and Gaga. Tony didn’t even remember his farewell performance just a couple days later. But for this album, it seems to be his farewell from touring and making music, and he brought on Lady Gaga once again after their 2014 album, Cheek to Cheek. I can’t really say Love For Sale surprises on any level, it’s just Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga singing a bunch of really old jazz songs. Some of them are really entertaining, like the tracks “I Get A Kick Out of You” and title track “Love For Sale”, but there’s also a lot of them that aren’t that entertaining outside of the context of the album. You’d have to really love this genre to love the album all the way through, but it’s still a good way to end the career of a legendary artist.
Paris Texas - Red Hand Akimbo
This is their second EP this year, and even though it’s half the length, it’s way more unique and cohesive than their previous release. Boy Anonymous felt like the group exploring every sound that they wanted to, but Red Hand Akimbo stays in their unique combination of rock and hip hop, which is unlike anyone else I’ve ever heard. They aren’t really singing on the tracks, but it’s not completely rapping either. The beats don’t really feel like rock instrumentals, but they certainly aren’t hip hop either with how many guitars are layered in here. Even their vocals are almost all put through some type of vocal processor that makes their voices blend into the background, almost like another instrument. But what I can say about it is that I’m really enjoying it! The energy is extremely high throughout the entire thing, and the short runtime allows the project to just be played on repeat to and from classes. I’m sure this isn’t the full extent that the duo can grow to, but it proves how unique Paris Texas really is, and I can’t wait to see what they can do on a full length release.
Don Toliver - Life Of A Don
Don’s voice is still one of the most unique I’ve heard in hip hop in a long time. It allowed him to have the best feature on an album with Frank Ocean, Drake, James Blake, 21 Savage, and many more. But his albums have always kind of escaped me as a whole. There’s always highlights, but they don’t feel as unique as his voice is, and Life of a Don is another example of the same. This time, Don takes a slower attitude to most of these songs, and it might be closer to an R&B album than a hip hop one. But even with the extra effort put into this album, it struggles to achieve anything better than good. The already released singles “What You Need” and “Drugs N Hella Melodies” with Kali Uchis were both really catchy singles, and hearing Kali is always a treat. Outside of those, the heaviness of a track like “Way Bigger” was really intriguing, and the beat for the Baby Keem collab was easily the weirdest thing on the album. Hopefully Don will branch out eventually and bring the full potential to a voice like that, but I’m growing less optimistic by the album.
Jesse McCartney - New Stage
Yeah, I’m not 100% sure why I decided to listen to this. I think it’s because I saw Jesse's Summerfest performance this year, and he actually exceeded my expectations. Granted, my expectations for a former Disney star were pretty low, but his set was enjoyable for the majority of the 70 minutes I saw, so I thought I’d give this album a chance. Objectively, it’s really not that bad. Sure, it sounds pretty outdated with all the electronic drops that dominated the radio in the mid-2010s, and yeah, the subject matter on the album is fairly plastic, but I didn’t hate listening to it. I do think the majority of that is because I recognized a majority of the tracks from his live performance, like the upbeat “Friends” and lovey-dovey “Yours”. But, this album also felt a whole lot longer than 28 minutes while listening to it, because it is so plastic. It feels so formulaic and by the numbers that it gets in the way of the music. But I guess, I wasn’t really expecting anything different.
Del Water Gap - Del Water Gap
The only reason I know of Del Water Gap is because he was on the Maggie Rogers compilation album last year, and his song him and Maggie made in college titled “New Song” was easily the best thing on there, so much so that I’ve been following and waiting for Del Water Gap to finally release a project so I can form my own opinion on his music. The album is clearly well assembled. The songs are all fairly catchy, his voice works well over them, and they instrumentally progress enough to keep them interesting throughout the runtime. Unfortunately, most of the songs felt a bit too plain for my personal taste. Just personally, this isn’t the type of music that I can just put on in album form whenever I want, there has to be a certain mood for most of this project. The slower songs and weirder songs do help the project a bit, but not enough to make me love it. While I’ll probably take songs like “It’s Not Fair” and “Hurting Kind” out of the album, it’s not entertaining enough to make me go through the entire album many times. But I do think a lot of people will enjoy this, and for it to be his debut album, I think he’s got a lot of potential to just get better with time.
Zack Fox - shut the fuck up talking to me
Normally a comedian, Zack Fox has had one high quality music career before this. His singles “Square Up”, “Jesus Is The One (I Have Depression)”, and “The Bean Kicked In” have gotten him lots of attention among hip hop fans, and he finally decided to drop a surprise project this month. The project is fairly scant at only 9 tracks and under 20 minutes long, but it’s jam packed with one-liners. Whether he’s beating someone purple like Grimace or being the Zone 6 McLovin, the project is full of hilarious bars, but a big surprise is how nice the production is. “Fafo” as a single should’ve let us know, as it’s a perfect homage to the Memphis classics of Three-6 Mafia and Project Pat, but most of the beats on here are fantastic. The final couple tracks being produced by Kenny Beats and The Alchemist help a lot, but tracks like “boy i’m on your ass” and “mind your business” have these insane beats that not any rapper can rap over. This is honestly a great project and I’m sure I’ll be playing it consistently for a while.
PinkPantheress - to hell with it
PinkPantheress released her first ever song this year, and already has 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify and had Coldplay recently cover her song! She’s the epitome of someone who’s not explicitly making music for TikTok, but who’s music is perfect for that platform. That doesn’t mean the music is bad though, just because it fits the platform perfectly doesn’t make it pandering or tasteless. Instead, PinkPantheress is taking old UK garage songs and blending it with dance pop and bedroom pop vocals into something nowhere currently in pop music. The single “Just For Me” is still clearly the standout on here with it’s infectious hook and production from Mura Masa. But even outside of that, there’s some really complete and entertaining tracks like “I Must Apologize” and “Passion”. “Reason” might have her best vocal performance, but her vocals don’t rise to much more than necessary for the production. Either way, to hell with it is a really solid start for someone who could be making chart topping hits very soon.
Remi Wolf - Juno
I really wanted to love this album. Remi just oozes positivity and lightheartedness, whether it be her appearance on Kenny Beat's show The Cave or just following her social media, everything is colorful and full of life. It’s not even that this album is bad, it’s not. It’s really good and fits her personality perfectly, but personally, this just isn’t connecting with me. I still think a lot of people should hear it though, because it is full of positivity and has a unique flair to it. Every song ends up being really groovy and the choruses pop on almost every track, but for some reason, it’s just not connecting. Maybe this is just too positive for me, as I tend to like most of my music a bit darker and more personal. Maybe I’m just not in the mood currently for something like this, with midterms nearing as I’m writing this, everything doesn’t feel this carefree. If you want something groovy, wacky, and guaranteed to keep you in a positive mood, Remi Wolf’s Juno is here for you.
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