The Daily Spin: Volume 7
Get your story straight
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 July, both here and over there!
Note: albums with gold dates were recommended by me. Albums with purple dates are from Saturday Nights at the Club, suggestions made by a group of friends on Discord.
Best Album
Nominees: In the End It Always Does (9.7), songs written for piano (9.0), Living on a Planet Full of Empty Life (8.9), EGO (8.9), Lingua d’argento (8.8)
My favorite album of all time, Radiohead’s In Rainbows, holds that honor in part because of how it manages to touch on every aspect on the human experience while still retaining a clear, connected sound. It’s an album about life, love, loss, and everything in between, but in practical terms it’s an art rock/electronic record with a heavy emphasis on rhythm and gentle vocals. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is right behind it in my eyes, and it’s for much the same reason—no matter how different it looks on the surface, it has the same masterful ability to range far afield without losing itself. A sixteen-track odyssey sprinkled with connected skits, features, and musings on love and betrayal, it’s all tied together with a very particular, unique, instantly recognizable sound that still stands out 25 years later.
Worst Album
Nominees: Talon of the Hawk (5.9), John Henry (6.6), Business Is Business (6.9), Brothers (7.0), SILLY.BUS (7.0)
July had a bit of a recurring problem with albums that have interesting ideas, but spread them out too much over bloated track and overall runtimes. Enter the Slasher House is the worst offender, spreading a pretty uniform sound across nearly 50 minutes and its individual musical ideas across an average of over four and a half minutes per song. With the surprising exception of “The Outlaw”, one of the longest songs on the album, just about everything here felt like it had exhausted its interest with at least a minute or two in its length to spare. You get why the overall concept could be interesting, but it just doesn’t pack enough punch to keep your attention for long.
Personal Favorite
Nominees: Moenie and Kitchi (8.0/+1.0), Titanic Rising (8.7/+0.7), Winter High!! - Best of Kohmi’s Party (7.7/+0.7)
The reasoning given above is my case for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill being an objectively strong album1, but there are also subjective reasons it earned my third 10/10 in this series. It may actually be the first album I ever listened to front to back, and I have it to credit for my introduction to a lot of genres and musical ideas I’d rarely heard before. If you’re the sort of person who’s caught snatches of soul, R&B, reggae, hip-hop, or rap in the past and decided it’s not really your thing, I’d recommend this album with the highest of praise. A quarter-century on from its release, it remains a delicate combination of styles that I’ve never quite heard again, still capturing my imagination a generation later, and close to a decade after I first listened to it.
Not for Me
Nominees: Enter the Slasher House (5.7/-1.1), Glitterbug (Deluxe Edition) (7.3/-0.7), FutureSex/LoveSounds (8.4/-0.6)
The vocals on this album remind me of what Eli said of those on P4's Presto from a few months back—they sound like a cartoon dad hamming up his performance. Talon of the Hawk already wasn't really drawing me in anyway; with the exception of Brian Sella's voice, they sound just like every other indie rock outfit out there, with maybe one or two memorable riffs across the 42 minutes of the tracklist. (Acknowledging your shortcomings as a musical act, as I've said before and as they do in "Lone Star", doesn't absolve you of them.) Add in those awful, screechy vocals and a mediocre, monotonous album becomes downright painful in places. The biggest point in its favor is that, at times, it manages to be merely boring instead of actively annoying.
Best Lyrics and Vocals
Nominees: Moenie and Kitchi, In the End It Always Does, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Eli succinctly described this album as “an incredibly sadgirl vibe that seems more intent on showing off the artist's songwriting abilities than much of any dynamic musicality.” That places it firmly in my wheelhouse, and the superb songwriting on songs written for piano has kept me coming back to it time after time when I need that sort of album. It’s delivered with the gorgeous vocals of University of Edinburgh student Katie Gregson-MacLeod, who broke out in mid-2022 with a clip from the then-unreleased track “Complex” and then released an album where every other track is even better.
Best Instrumentation
Nominees: An Awesome Wave, Titanic Rising, Lingua d’argento
The critical scene largely passed over In the End It Always Does, and I think part of the reason is that they expected something very different in terms of instrumentation. The Japanese House’s previous full-length, Good at Falling, was on the opposite end of indie pop, an active, electronic/R&B album that set expectations which this release didn’t deliver on. That’s hardly a deal-breaker, though, because what In the End It Always Does did instead was utterly magnificent. It's incredible how far every little touch goes, the relatively sparse use of primarily soft piano and strings creating this tight sonic space in which this album exists, tender and intimate in a way rarely approached by even the very best bedroom pop.
Best Album Art
Nominees: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Business Is Business, Moenie and Kitchi
I could explain what Somewhere City is all about, but why not let Origami Angel do it themselves? From the album’s official description on Bandcamp:
When you arrive in Somewhere City, you’re bound to notice a few things. There’s a drive-thru window open all hours of the night, and Dr. Pepper runneth over in all its water cups. A nearby amusement park is busiest on Sunday—that’s when visitors get most thrilled. There’s Danny Phantom playing from an infinite Nicktoons feed. It’s a place governed by caffeine, eternal youth, and the promise of escape. You’re not gonna be the same once you leave.
Plenty of albums we looked at this month tried to build a cohesive narrative running through them, often supported by the cover art as much as the music itself. Somewhere City did so the very best.
In Short
West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum (Kasabian): A good time from start to finish, leaning hard on its instrumentation and usually not needing the forgettable vocals.
Living on a Planet Full of Empty Life (Linus Alberg): Modern classical beauty that invites comparisons to Nils Frahm and Max Richter, artists whose audiences are larger by a factor of thousands.
Business Is Business (Young Thug): I like music that says something, and I don’t really know what this is trying to say.
SILLY.BUS (OfF.Brand): I genuinely think this album, by a couple friends making music for fun, has better writing than Business Is Business, which is really something.
FutureSex/LoveSounds (Justin Timberlake): An album that’s had a big enough shockwave in pop music that it sort of has to lean on its phenomenal production now that everything else sounds like it.
Enter The Slasher House (Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks): The slasher house vibe is sort of there, as long as you don’t get bored halfway through, which you probably will.
Djesse Vol. 1 (Jacob Collier): There are so many things I love in music that Collier has since become a master at, but was still learning to perfect here.
Brothers (The Black Keys): Solid blues rock that bleeds together over 55 minutes and doesn’t have any huge standout moments.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Lauryn Hill): My second-favorite album of all time, for too many reasons to count.
In the End It Always Does (The Japanese House): Utterly magnificent soft pop that is clearly recognizable as such if you leave your expectations at the door.
Lingua d'argento (Alberto Baldan Bembo): A lovely little half-hour drawing on funk, lounge, and jazz music with some really strong, broad grooves.
Talon of the Hawk (The Front Bottoms): Way too much Brian Sella.
Titanic Rising (Weyes Blood): Magical instrumentation that soars from exhilarating highs to somber, forlorn lows.
Glitterbug (Deluxe Edition) (The Wombats): Tracks short enough not to overstay their welcome, but that doesn’t matter quite as much when they’re all so samey.
John Henry (They Might Be Giants): An album that can’t help but sound a bit boring nearly thirty years later, which is hardly fair to it, but what can you do?
Swimming (Mac Miller): Tied together well enough that I don't really mind the length; if anything, it gets better as it approaches the end, soaring higher with hopeful ambition and never coming back down.
Time Will Wait for No One (Local Natives): This is a nice enough album that Apple Music lists in the “alternative” genre, which is very generous of them.
Woodland (The Paper Kites): Firmly Leahcore (complimentary).
Shipwreck (Shayfer James): It’s a delicate balancing act for this sort of music not to feel fake and corny, but it manages to stay fun more often than not.
Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum (Tally Hall): It's hard to give high marks to something that feels so plainly incomplete, especially in comparison to all Tally Hall's members have done in the eighteen years since.
An Awesome Wave (alt-J): I keep wondering how little you have to understand musical history not to understand the comparisons between alt-J and Radiohead. C’mon, Pitchfork.
Somewhere City (Origami Angel): Relentlessly uplifting and energetic, and almost impossible for me not to whistle or hum along to.
Moenie and Kitchi (Gregory and the Hawk): Tiptoeing on the line between “simply and gently lovely” and “dull and lifeless” for half an hour.
Feed the Beast (Kim Petras): This is a music review series and Kim Petras’ personal controversies are a separate matter, so I'll just say I think this album does a fine enough job at matching exactly the sound it wants to match.
Hunky Dory (David Bowie): It’s not bad, but Bowie’s later emergence as a genre-defying artist led to a lot of retroactive justification for this not being mostly bland ‘60s-’70s British rock.
songs written for piano (Katie Gregson-MacLeod): I just really like sadgirl music, okay?
Winter High!! - Best of Kohmi's Party (Kohmi Hirose): I just really like ‘90s J-pop, okay?
EGO (RAC): An album that continually surprised me with how quickly it breezed by for a record just shy of an hour in length.
Thunder, Lightning, Strike (The Go! Team): Most of the tracks on this album bring one musical idea to the table, lay it out pretty quickly, and riff on it for a few minutes.
Changing Colours (Babe Rainbow): I’ve got to give it points for a really strong start and especially for "Zeitgeist", a killer opener to vibe to, but the momentum just falls away in the back half as it turns into pretty bland surf rock.
Starcatcher (Greta Van Fleet): For an album that came out in July 2023, it sure sounds like it could’ve come out in July 1973.
Though, admittedly, your mileage may definitely vary on how one-note or preachy its lyrics are. I’m the only one of us three that didn’t consider that a problem, and I’m not about to sit here and say I know music better than David and Eli combined.