February Album Festival
Every one of these titles is going to be alliterative. Every one will make you groan.
The Intro
Hey, we’re 1/6th of the way through the year already. I’m now marking all time by how many albums I’ve listened to and how many are left. As of this writing I’ve reviewed 65 albums but we’ve only been in 2023 for 59 days. I got too excited about this project and started early and will be annoyed by the incongruity for the rest of the year.
Since I started doing this I’ve had people reach out that they’re doing their own versions. One is listening to the top 500 albums according to Rolling Stone Magazine from 1 to 500, which to me is a wild way to go because by definition everything is going to get progressively worse, but I’m only the boss of me and at that a pretty lazy supervisor. Another is going through the somewhat morbidly named book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. It makes me think that if I listened to all of them except for number 1001, I would have cheated Death himself, an immortal wanderer until I accidentally hear enough snippets of Get Behind me Satan by The White Stripes bleeding through headphones on the train or in tinny grocery store speakers before finally turning to dust and blowing away in the middle of Albertson’s.
This makes me think that at any given time, many people are all embarking on their own daily album listening experiment, yet somehow they have not made it their whole personality. So what makes me so special that I insist on documenting every stage of it? The answer is this: nuthin’. It’s special because I decided to make it special and one of the weirdest things about being a person is trying to predict what other people will care about. The other weirdest part is being a species for 200,000 years or so and still not being able to figure out how to drink water and breathe without getting the two mixed up.
Before we get to the top five, I hope this month was good for you. I’ve been especially pleased to be seeing signs of spring already this year, as it’s been a massive snow season with a lot of cold. We need the precipitation but of course it’s hard to get through a winter like this with mental health intact. There’s a western screech owl who occupies a little tree hollow on our daily walk that has been popping up again, making himself seen for his mate when she decides to come around. Our pair of Cooper’s hawks are staking out nest sites and doing courtship displays. I attended a meeting where the year’s Utah prairie dog field season was planned. We think they’re going to really like all this snow and rain. I was told that the prairie dogs are so fat, they look like groundhogs. I always depend on these small signs to remind myself that there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t care about Twitter arguments or Sam Smith’s Grammy performance. All they care about is makin’ new lil’ birds & pups. Good on them.
The Top 5
I know it’s only February, but this time of year is when I would be gearing up to work another field season in the desert back when I was a field biologist. Maybe that’s why I gravitated so much to Calexico’s Feast of Wire. For lack of a better descriptor, it sounds like the desert. It’s dusty and warm and it takes a minute to embrace it and find its beauty. It feels like a road trip album to listen to while heading out to a remote area with a GPS and binoculars. My favorite track is “Woven Birds,” a song about a dying desert town being reborn. The mission bells ringing once more.
Mission bells ring on The Highwomen’s song “Wheels of Laredo,” too. They echo across the Rio Grande where a young woman dreams of turning into a white-crowned sparrow and flying across the border. There are a lot of stories like that on this album. Women who were Freedom Riders, or refugees, or just exhausted moms who need a break. The Highwomen are a modern equivalent of The Highwaymen supergroup from the late 80s/early 90s that formed as a response to the decline in radio play that women in country music have experienced over the past twenty years. This would be a pleasant story if the music was only so-so, but the music is wonderful. One of the true joys of starting this was finding The Highwomen.
I don’t have a good segue for the next two, so let’s just enjoy how good that last one was before just jumping right into Lady Gaga’s Artpop. As part of this experiment I’ve been cobbling together increasingly better ways to listen to all these albums and give them as good of a listening experience as possible. I’ve put together a nice little living room stereo, a good system plugged into my work computer, and some high end headphones. And wow did that pay off with Artpop. Gaga is fun and her voice is lovely but the showstoppers on this album are THEZE BEATZ. I’m told this isn’t even her best album. It gets better than this?
Speaking of beats (editor’s note: c’mon) the biggest surprise of the month and maybe the year so far is Genesis Owusu. Missing Molars is the "deluxe” version of his debut 2021 album Smiling With No Teeth. One of the minor annoyances of listening to all of these albums is the often self-indulgent deluxe album. It feels like lots of times it’s an excuse to sell a special two-disc version to people who already own the original by adding a couple of live tracks or a remix or some b-sides. I’ll always give the whole thing one listen, but if the bonus tracks do nothing for me, listen two will stop where the original record did. This was not the case on Missing Molars. Every song is good. Every song is great, actually. Revolutionary. This is what I dreamed of when I asked for top to bottom perfect albums.
How did I listen to these four previous albums and still find one that is so easily and clearly number one? Well that’s easy. It’s because I have a little monster inside of me that decides I’m obsessed with something and that little monster answers only to itself. In the past it has focused on boots, and yo-yos, and watches, it has sent me down deep dives of the most obscure topics. For a certain personality, it makes me one of the most interesting people to go on a road trip with or eat lunch with during a conference because I know a little about every single thing. For another, it makes me the most insufferable pedant they can imagine. It’s a lot of, “you know what’s interesting about…” while I regurgitate fourteen articles I read about the subject in 1999.
I don’t make music, and aside from a few years playing clarinet in junior high band, can barely read music. I didn’t know why The Cars were interesting until my wife pointed out that they use polyrhythm. I’ve never successfully identified a key change. So Metric’s Art of Doubt may not be the most technically perfect album I listened to in February, 2023 (it may be! I don’t know!), but it was the one the monster can’t stop consuming. It is extremely my jam.
Because I wear hipster glasses but don’t drink craft beer and barely tolerate disc golf, I’m legally obligated to be into record collecting. That’s what started this whole thing. And thanks to the people reading this, I have earned enough to buy one album per year for the whole year! Wow! I thought vinyl was annoying until I got a turntable and now it’s not annoying. It may be annoying to you. If so, I understand. But if you get it, you’ll know how pleased I am to slide a massive plastic slab out of a cardboard sleeve, turn up the volume, and let this thing wash over me. You all. It sounds good. It sounds real good.
The Awkward Selfie
Do you think there’s like a cute way to pose with a record? Maybe I’ll figure it out after doing it 12 times
Howie’s album rec:
You all gave me such amazing recommendations this month and I want to pay it forward. Listening to Metric’s Emily Haines on Dressed to Suppress I can’t help but hear a little bit of Andrea Zollo from the brief but supernova-bright period when Pretty Girls Make Graves were a band. You see, in 2003 the main way to find new music your friends hadn’t heard yet was to walk into a record store and ask them what’s good. That’s what I did at Gray Whale CD in Riverdale, and bless that almost-certainly very tattooed staff member, I walked out with New Romance.
I couldn’t capture a better snapshot of the era when New Romance came out better than the various documentaries about Woodstock ‘99. Disaffected white guys with nothing to complain about other than the fact that culture was starting to acknowledge that other people exist needed to Break Stuff. And the only way to express white guy rage was to combine metal with rap. Meanwhile the coffee shop version of disaffected white guys who were also mad about maybe losing 1 percent of all of the world’s power but were sensitive about it were hitting Coldplay like they were Tuco trying Walter White’s meth for the first time.
From this came the second or third or fourth wave of post-punk revival (sources disagree). A lot of the authentic, ragged sound we associate with all those bands whose name start with The (Hives, Strokes, White Stripes, National) came as a response to rap metal being inane and Coldplay being so boring they needed to be saved by Beyonce and Bruno Mars having a dance battle in the middle of their Super Bowl performance. Enter Pretty Girls Make Graves, named after a song by first wave post-punk(ish) legends The Smiths.
We’ll not talk about Morrissey, who single-handedly proves that cancel culture should exist and that it also doesn’t exist. But we will talk about one of the most perfect albums of all time and my very first choice if someone had asked me the same question I asked you all. I would say New Romance so fast.
And listen, I’ll be honest. Even after reading the whole wikipedia article about it, I still don’t know what post-punk revival means. I saw The Hives live and was utterly captivated by every second they were on stage, but they sound like punk throwback to me. The Strokes sound like The Rolling Stones. Pretty Girls Make Graves sound like if you mixed sugar and heroin and shaped it into an ear suppository. At times it sounds like all those crashing instruments you hear at the beginning of The Cure’s Disintegration. Barely contained chaos.
“A Certain Cemetery” is my favorite song of all time. And somehow it’s not even the best track on the album. You know in the Seinfeld episode where Elaine is dating a guy who can’t talk or do anything else when “Desperado” comes on? That’s the level we’re talking about. I have to take it off of playlists because I’m afraid it’s going to come on while I’m evading zombies in the inevitable apocalypse and I’m going to give away my position for playing air guitar too hard.
But you know what? I can think of worse things than shambling around post-bite transition while my headphones play these absolute bops on repeat until my ears fall off, the sickest(!) Z in the shopping mall.
The Summary
Anyway here’s the month’s albums and letter grades. Special shout out to runner-up Christine and the Queens. I cleaned my house to it this weekend and then just let Spotify keep giving me more of his songs forever. Because I’ve made this so album-centric, it means sometimes the best artists aren’t recognized. Just know there’s a very strong case for Christine and the Queens as best musician I’ve found so far.