The Daily Spin: Volume 6
Warning: contains toxic levels of theater kid music
Welcome back to The Daily Spin, hosted by David Peterson of The Low Major. Each day, David picks an album (from reader suggestions, new releases, or his own personal favorites) and reviews it, alongside fellow TLM writer Eli Powell and myself. Today, we’re looking back at the month of June, both here and over there!
Note: albums with gold dates were recommended by me.
Best Album
Nominees: Holst: The Planets (9.6), Over the Garden Wall: Original Television Soundtrack (9.4), The Normal Album (9.3), The Visitors (Deluxe Edition) (9.3), Depression Cherry (9.1)
My favorite albums are the absolute peak of their genre. Music runs such a wide spectrum, and it’s so wonderful to me that such excellence exists in so many different forms. To me, In Rainbows is the platonic ideal of a soft electronic art rock album—and it’s my favorite album ever—but its peers aren’t slightly worse electronic art rock albums, they’re other works from across the spectrum of music. Collapsed in Sunbeams and Currents and The Normal Album and Everything I Know About Love can all be independently brilliant (to my taste) without sharing much in common, aside from that they’re all generally music. In Colour might not be in a genre that I particularly love—RYM lists “UK Bass”, “Future Garage”, and “Deep House” as its top matches, which I’ve barely even heard of—but that doesn’t take away from its brilliance. It is the absolute best at what it sets out to be, and it’s magnificent. The core of its excellence isn’t in the particulars of how it gets there, with gentle melodies and steady, driving rhythms; it’s the simple beauty of what they create. David’s review put plenty of emphasis on how good the pure vibes of this album are, and I can’t help but agree wholeheartedly.
Worst Album
Nominees: Bunny (7.0), The Age of Pleasure (7.0), Being So Normal (7.1), Weathervanes (7.3), Lost in Translation (7.3)
My review of this album was one sentence begging the universe to put something worse in the following three weeks, because the prospect of having to write a full paragraph about it here was just exhausting. It’s not even bad, really, it’s just lifeless and dull, and it was also the third album by Peach Pit we’d listened to, all of which sounded more or less the same. (You’ll notice the second, Being So Normal, up there in the list of nominees.) Skimming through it now, I wonder if I might have been just a little too harsh, but…well, Peach Pit have been doing the same thing for over half a decade now. It’s gotta get old sooner or later.
Personal Favorite
Nominees: A Picture Perfect Hollywood Heartbreak (8.7/+1.7), Holst: The Planets (9.6/+1.4), The Visitors (Deluxe Edition) (9.3/+1.3)
I mentioned Fish in a Birdcage briefly during my Finch in the Pantry review, and not just because of the conveniently similar nominative structure. They’ve got a very similar style down pat—it feels less like listening to performed music and more like sitting down by a couple buskers on a quiet city street and listening for a while. Lead singer Dusty Townsend has an almost lackadaisical delivery that goes very well with the free-spirited instrumentation, and while certainly not as prominent as the vocalists on the preceding pair of albums, he goes a long way to giving Fish in a Birdcage its particular voice. Long story short, it’s just a good time, and it finds enough variety to avoid getting old, at least to me. Guess that’s something else it’s got in common with Finch in the Pantry, huh?
Not for Me
Nominees: Eternal Sunshine (8.0/-0.6), Strange Trails (8.3/-0.5), Wildflower (8.6/-0.4)
David and Eli didn’t see all that much in Bunny, but I still don’t know what they did see in it. To me it just came off as meandering, generic, and instantly forgettable, the exact median slow indie rock album. The lyrics and vocals might as well not even be there and while the instrumentation is good, it’s not enough to warrant being basically the entire focus of the tracklist. My average song rating here came out to a flat 7.0, and this is one of those times when that felt exactly right.
Best Lyrics and Vocals
Nominees: Carrie & Lowell, recently, A Picture Perfect Hollywood Heartbreak
You often love the first album you hear by an artist most, even if it’s not the best. It took a long time for The Normal Album to overtake “In case I make it,” as my favorite of Will Wood’s four major records, but it’s objectively his tightest and sharpest work. “In case I make it,” has some great tracks, but also a ton of filler and a fairly loose central theme—by Will’s own admission, it’s mostly just a collection of songs he’d been working on for a while and wanted to release before he took his current, indefinite hiatus. The Normal Album, by contrast, is a much clearer, more concise artistic product (though it still has a fair bit of digression and a few tracks where the lyrics may as well be randomly generated).
The Normal Album is, in short, an album about trying to be normal. This is clearest on the opening track, “Suburbia Overture”, and the two that effectively serve as the penultimate track and closer, “Marsha, Thankk You” and “Love, Me Normally”. The first is a biting, pointed critique of the modern western façade covering up the predatory nature of society; the second a deeply convoluted assessment of the way medication helps “abnormal” people fit into society; and the third the final thesis statement of the album, the most explicit explication of its themes.
The way I’m inclined to enthuse about this album might give the impression that I think it’s perfect, but it isn’t. It’s the most concise Will Wood record, yes, but it still has “Outliars and Hyppocrates” and “BlackBoxWarrior”, both of which slip back into his early-career mess-of-words style and don't really advance the central theme much. (There's also “Memento Mori”, but that feels more like a bonus track, and besides, it’s a ton of fun.) The overall style can generally get a bit grating as well if you don't like it—although, especially given the lyrics on “Marsha, Thankk You”, that feels almost intentional, like Will is daring the listener to complain about his music being weird and obnoxious. Every song on this album can be a 10 for me when I'm in the mood, but it can also fall to an 8 because of one or two little irritating details, like that squealing chorus on “Suburbia Overture” or the complete unwillingness of “2econd-2ight-2eer” to take a break at any point ever.
That all being said, I love this album. How could I not? It’s insane, theatrical, overdramatized, and it’s a piercing look into how ridiculous it is that neurodivergent people have to conform to the eccentricities of neurotypical society. This album was made for me. It may not have been the first of Will Wood’s that I listened to, but there’s no doubt now that it’s my favorite.
Best Instrumentation
Nominees: RELAXER, Over the Garden Wall (Original Television Soundtrack), The Little Prince (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
The highlight of Waterfall, as much as I enjoy its vocals, is obviously the instrumentation. This album is peppered with so many lovely little touches, many from the cello that underscores Fish in a Birdcage’s sound, but from countless other instruments that come into play. The jangly, ragtime piano on “Rule #15 — Four Aces”, the noodling synth on “Rule #18 — Lion”, and the punchy strings on “Rule #21 — Momento Mori” set the tone magnificently for a little teasing of the bounds of their genre. They also just have this way of getting everything to fall into a soothing, pleasing rhythm, one that carries you along easily from track to track. Like I said before…it’s just a lot of fun, isn’t it?
Best Album Art
Nominees: Eternal Sunshine, The Normal Album, Strange Trails
No artistic rule is universal, but it would be fair to say that most great album art is deceptively simple. The cover for The Visitors, ABBA’s final album until nearly four decades later, certainly qualifies. It’s obvious, almost unimaginative, on the face of it: the four members of the band, standing and sitting in a room. But the little details—the almost-infernal red lighting, the physical distance between the four figures, their small size in the composition beneath a heavily color-shifted painting of Eros—call out to the imminence of ABBA’s breakup, and to the themes of The Visitors, their magnificent swan song. It’s stuck with me for a long time as one of my favorite albums, and this ominously brilliant cover art is part of the reason why.
In Short
The Visitors (Deluxe Edition) (ABBA): The wistful end of an era, showing everything ABBA was capable of at their finest.
Wildflower (The Avalanches): Best as a complete tapestry, 64 minutes of carefully interwoven summertime ambience and occasional instrumentals.
Being So Normal (Peach Pit): This album is so normal.
Over the Garden Wall (Original Television Soundtrack) (The Blasting Company): “Soundtrack” is a misnomer—this is Over the Garden Wall, at its core.
Bunny (Beach Fossils): Oh, right, we listened to this, I guess.
The Little Prince (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (Hans Zimmer and Richard Harvey): Notes of classical orchestra, Joe Hisaishi, and French jazz hit just right for one of 2015’s most underrated films.
You and Your Friends (Peach Pit): RateYourMusic put this a few spots over Lizzy McAlpine and Max Richter albums in its year, for some reason.
Carrie & Lowell (Sufjan Stevens): Sure, those he is half my soul, as the poets say YouTube mixes are nice enough.
The Bones of What You Believe (CHVRCHES): A superb album in 2013, still great in 2023.
Strange Trails (Lord Huron): The floor is low, the ceiling is…pretty high but never exceptional, y’know?
Purple Rain (Soundtrack) (Prince and the Revolution): An ‘'80s album that sent such a massive shockwave through musical culture that it feels like a ‘90s album.
Weathervanes (Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit): They put together 40 minutes of good music and then just sorta…kept going for 20 more minutes.
A Picture Perfect Hollywood Heartbreak (Zach Callison): Way over the top, and I love it.
The Normal Album (Will Wood): As Eli succinctly put it: “I listen to this album and I think ‘wow, the world seems like a really obnoxious place to live from the perspective of the performer’, and then I think ‘wow, the world is a really obnoxious place to live’”.
Waterfall (Fish in a Birdcage): Less like playing performed music, more like sitting down by a couple buskers on a quiet city street and listening for a while.
In Return (ODESZA): Trying to review this feels like an injustice to David’s excellent writeup; go read that.
In Colour (Jamie xx): It doesn’t particularly matter that this isn’t in my usual genres—it’s just a damn good album.
Depression Cherry (Beach House): A delicate balancing act of soothing melodies over a steady, gentle rhythm.
The Age of Pleasure (Janelle Monáe): The average track length on this album was less than half Depression Cherry’s and they still managed to drag more.
recently (Liana Flores): Everything’s going to be all right, I think.
Adventure (Lydian Collective): A nice little jazz album that I always like throwing on while I work.
Holst: The Planets (Chicago Symphony Orchestra): Artists were still taking cues from Purple Rain a decade later…well, how about a work artists are still taking cues from a century later?
<|º_º|> (Caravan Palace): This is the album “Lone Digger” is from, and that’s about everything you need to know, really.
Lines: Music for Waiting in Queues or Learning About Them (Defunctland): It’s fine, but it mostly just makes me want to listen to really exceptional synthpop albums.
Eternal Sunshine (WHALES•TALK): A rather fitting name for an album I can’t quite recall after a week, though that chord progression on “Sleepless in LA” is definitely sticking with me.
Lost in Translation (Valley): Sort of the opposite of Weathervanes—it takes a while to hit its stride, but picks up well when it does.
RELAXER (alt-J): Pitchfork’s review of this album amounted to “how dare you try to make music that’s slow and uses traditional instrumentation”, which is just pathetic stuff from the world’s most prominent music review site, frankly.
The Downward Spiral (Nine Inch Nails): It feels weird to rate this as music when there’s so much to say about its place in cultural history, doesn’t it?
I See You (The xx): A sea of pleasing soft indietronica from which nothing particularly stands out.
Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones) (Jai Paul): A leaked album that’s still unfinished a decade later…and never really needed to be finished, because it’s still exceptional, too.