When I was in elementary school I have a distinct memory of doing an art project in which we created a picture of a lion on one side of a paper plate and a lamb on the other to signify the mercurial nature of the month of March and its tendency to begin in predatory weather turmoil and end in fluffy spring peacefulness. We were learning about climate change caused by global warming even then, though only in theory and the name of it was “the greenhouse effect.” That phenomenon we learned about by making terrariums out of 2-liter soda bottles. They had those detachable black bases at the time. Do you remember those? I didn’t until the very second I wrote those words. I tried to find a picture but couldn’t find any that weren’t copyrighted, so here’s a link instead. Anyway the bottles, when left in a window after being filled with some soil and plant life, really did get hotter over time as light was converted to warmth and then trapped in that sweltering Diet Pepsi jungle. Now our Marches are all borked, with neither promises of introductory feline shenanigans or concluding ovine serenity. This year it has been a treat of an extra 29 days of January with a glimpse of sun once that was just long enough to make a tik tok that didn’t do very well.
I have no interest in fibbing to you, my little group of loyal paid subscribers, so I will be honest. March was a rough one. It feels sometimes like they’re all rough ones because every moment of every day we’re exposed to the whole of human tragedy on little electronic devices and that takes a toll. So I try my darnedest to separate world events I have no control over from the things that have tangible impacts on my day-to-day when answering the almost unanswerable question we relentlessly pepper each other with: “how are you doing?”
When faced with that question and pondering it appropriately, it’s almost impossible for me not to answer, “amazing.” “Just fantastic. Thrilling, actually. I cannot believe the confluence of positive events that have brought me to the point when you’re asking. I would not in my wildest dreams imagine that I would enjoy every aspect of my life this much, from family relationships to a fulfilling job to a comfortable home with kitties who happily sit on my lap almost every day.”
That’s all true but it’s also been stressful. So I was glad to have the music everyone recommended to help distract me from some ongoing anxiety associated with career, the normal hustle and (yes) even bustle of having busy teens and family visits. The bank collapses, the mass shootings (there were 25), the fascinating will-they/won’t-they tension between Donald Trump and jail cells, that all takes a toll, too. It’s OK to escape sometimes. Remember that our ancestors didn’t know what was going on in the world beyond their village and we have all the same genes they did. We’re not built for this and everyone is doing their best.
If I subjected, say, an arctic fox, to 16 hours of televised anger and explosions and gunfire a day and it got agitated, I would not chide the fox for curling up and covering its little face with its little tail for not caring about the world around it. I would say “this poor adorable creature did not evolve with the capacity to process the great global everything, and cannot be responsible for every one of its ills.” That cute fox is each of us. We are all foxy in that way (and also the other way, winky emoji). That’s why we need music.
Let’s get on with this.
TOP FIVE BANGERS
Anyway speaking of March, my favorite album this month was Punisher, by Phoebe Bridgers. You all, I sure like this musician. Stranger in the Alps was a contender for top album in January but that month was so stacked it got a little lost in the shuffle. If anything I liked Punisher more. By the time you read this boygenius’s The Record will be out, and I bet we’re all freaking out about it, and in that hubbub I highly recommend giving this one a few spins as well. I loved the lyrics. I loved this passage apparently inspired by an argument with her ex’s mom about Donald Trump in the grocery store: I hate your mom
I hate it when she opens her mouth
It's amazing to me how much you can say
When you don't know what you're talking about
Usually I work up to my favorite and the album I bought but I’m mixing things up. Here I am with it! Thank you!
I was listening to AWOLNATION’s Megalithic Symphony on my bike ride a couple of days ago because I give all of the albums I gave an A to another listen to whittle down and listen, some of the lyrics are pretty dumb. But this thing just sounds amazing. It’s an album teenage me would have loved and teenage me is still in adult me. This is borderline industrial. It’s big and noisy and sincere. It’s hard to pin down. I liked this review by Nikita Ramkissoon, who gave the album the rating of “Confused/10”:
Listening to the album, I’m still stumped. That doesn’t happen very often. It could be good, it could be bad, it could be downright disastrous, but Megalithic Symphony may be headed in the right direction, though I don’t know what direction that is.
I’ve listened to this 5 times by now, and I think I went through all of the emotions Nikita had. Here’s where I am today: darnit I love it. Especially the frankly thrilling 15-minute final track, “Knights of Shame.” The future’s bright and alarming.
Another impeccably produced album from this year is El-P’s Cancer 4 Cure. Even though I’ve listened to Run The Jewels’ entire output (including the weird stuff like Meow the Jewels and the latin-inspired remix album Cu4tro), I haven’t listened much to Michael Render or Jaime Meline’s individual acts. That was a mistake. All the roots are here, and it’s all great, but it’s also good in different ways. I just don’t think there’s anyone making beats like this. And yes, we do get a little glimpse of baby RTJ where Killer Mike and El-P join up and you can hear what’s coming. It’s dynamite.
When I posted about Jon Batiste’s We Are, I got many testimonials about how important it was to people and I totally get it now. This was the 2022 Grammy Album of the Year and I feel silly for not knowing it existed, let alone seeking it out. I’m going to try to do better at this. I can’t think of a better person to guide us through the turmoil of 2020; COVID, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, etc., because it comes from someone facing all that and still celebrating what it is to be a person. This music is joyful and fun and there are so many people on it who sound like they’re having the time of their life. Like I said in my intro; as a species, I don’t think we’re built to process all the stuff at once with words or by reading articles. I think we evolved to dance and sing our way through it. This is that.
Finishing up this section is the surprise of the month. I vaguely knew who REO Speedwagon was, but associated them with wordless rides home from my friends’ house while his dad played the worst music I’ve ever heard in my whole life. I realized decades later that it was almost exclusively Hall & Oates, but at the time I associated the entirety of early 80s rock with that ear poison. Nobody told me REO Speedwagon rocks! How was I supposed to know? How does an album called You Can Tune a Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish (YCTAPBYCTF) even get made? I had so much fun cooking to this but I was cooking on a plain old stove. I just know that I won’t truly unlock the potential until I grill to it.
HOWIE’S VAULT PICK (YES I KNOW I SAID I WOULD CHANGE THIS TITLE I AM WORKING ON IT)
So this one came in the mail today and looking through the art and track list and then putting it on to spin brought back so much. It’s Oingo Boingo’s Boingo Alive. I generally think greatest hits albums are a bad way to be introduced to an artist. It makes the purchase of future albums a less valuable proposition because you’ve already got some tracks each time. And I like albums. I like that they represent a finite period in an artist’s career and that there was (ideally) so much thought put into what tracks made it in and in what order. Often the tracks blend together, or there’s a running theme. It’s weird to me to hear Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall Part II” without the track before and after. It’s literally called “Part II” but it’s presented alone. It’s like opening a book to a random chapter and just reading that over and over. The whole impetus of this album a day experience was to find albums that specifically needed to work together in a cohesive package.
So why am I such a dirty stan for Boingo Alive? Well, there’s a rational explanation and there’s the emotional one. I’ll start with logic. For a decade, Oingo Boingo had been taking their studio songs on the road and over that time they’d taken on a new vibe and energy. As Danny Elfman said, "This is our 10th anniversary as a band and we wanted to present our songs in a way that our fans have grown accustomed to seeing us." So as opposed to most compilations where a track or two was grabbed from each record and just dropped into a new order (as is the case in the later Best o’ Boingo) these are all new recordings played back to back by a full band together over two days on a soundstage. It’s like a live show album but captured in perfect audio fidelity without all the annoying people I’m jealous of cheering in between.
The nostalgia angle is that this is one of the first CDs I ever bought and I bought it with Christmas money without having heard a single track. I just heard some kids at school talking about it and I wanted to have something in common to talk about. That’s how we found music sometimes. I remember my mom taking me on various other errands and looking through the album art and thinking, “these guys seem really weird.” And then I, a kid whose music taste progression consisted mostly of pop to movie soundtracks to broadway to grunge, was introduced to New Wave. I was never the same. I saw them live at 15 for their final show ever. It was good.
OK THAT’S IT! HERE’S THE ROUNDUP
March was nice because there were no turds. The lowest grade I gave out was B-. And even those were records that I thought were excellent, I just hated listening to them. Metallica is objectively good. It’s just that in my ears they are bad and that’s on me. Whoa and I just noticed that even though I pick each album randomly, somehow March was bookended by The Beatles. I don’t know what that means but it made me go “oh” when I noticed it.
Anyway thank you for being here. I’m going at a pace where I could probably fit a few more albums this year so if you made it this far and want me to add one to the list, comment below!
The new boygenius album was THE event yesterday for my 17 yo! We had an emotional stop at Target to buy the vinyl because the app said it was in stock only to find out THEY NEVER HAD IT AT ALL. We survived, but it was a trying mother-daughter 30 minutes!