Hey everybody it’s the first one of these! So let’s get this out of the way. I am very self-conscious that you had to pay for this. I hope it’s good and fun and that you talk a little in the comments or the chat and everyone feels like they’ve gotten $3 out of this. People on tv are like, “that’s just the price of a cup of coffee,” as if that’s something not worth spending $3 on. Friends. Those beans were grown in very specific conditions in Chiapas, harvested, removed from their surrounding coffee cherries, shipped across thousands of miles, and roasted at my coffee shop by the most pleasant gentleman, whereas these words are just typed on a computer by some guy.
I’m not worried that the preceding paragraph will make you cancel, ‘cause too late! Just about everyone reading this picked the annual option so you’re in for the long haul. I should be chill but that just makes me feel more pressure. “Twelve of these?” you’re thinking. “From this goofball? What have I done?” In complete and honest sincerity, thank you!
This is a mega-edition because it captures a little of December. We’re talking about 38 albums here. That’s too many! I listened to all of them except for two twice (I only listened to Drake once because ick and Joanna Newsome once because that album is 2 hours long and only on Youtube so it had commercials frowny face emoji). I listened to some of them many times. I wanted to end up with a top five so I gave the final ten or so contenders an extra listen yesterday and today before coming up with a list I felt good about.
Albums I was already pretty familiar with won’t make the list, though I’m still happy to give them a revisit and a grade. In this case these were Preacher’s Daughter, by Ethel Cain; Sing the Sorrow, by AFI; and Digable Planets’ Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). All are phenomenal, in my opinion. They’re on the list of vinyl I’ll keep an eye out for, though two of them cost hundreds of dollars because they haven’t had a reprint and they haven’t frickin’ pressed Preacher’s Daughter yet like what? I’m hoping there’s an STS reprint for the 25th (!!) anniversary, but hope is something that Davey Havok associates with suffering, so I will prepare myself to do just that.
TOP FIVE BANGERS
I’m just going to come right out and say it. Lemonade is the best album I’ve heard this year so far and it might be the best album I’ve listened to in a decade. All of the superlatives apply here. “A generational masterpiece” is what I think I called it on my spreadsheet. It spans genres but doesn’t feel disjointed. It oozes style and emotion and it’s so big and loud and soft and gut-wrenching and beautiful. You don’t need 43 year old white guy Howie to tell you what a force Queen Bee is, and you certainly don’t need to pay $3 dollars for that experience, but you did and now you have.
The remaining four all-time, must-own, must-listen bangers are a little all over the map. Three of them came out of nowhere for me. I’d never heard of the artists, hadn’t heard a single track from them, and now feel like my life was emptier before and fuller now that I have them in my ears and brain. I think this is going to happen a lot this year and I am so excited omg.
One second into Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising and I was glad I came up with this experiment. Her voice destroys me. The lyrics destroy me. The album pulls me apart and puts me together and then hacks off a couple of pieces and then says “you didn’t need those pieces anyway.” And darnit I believe her. Give me more of this. I am agog.
Two of these you could kind of lump together because I think they could work in a lineup: Mewithoutyou’s Pale Horse and So Many Dynamos’ The Loud Wars. Both are wild from start to finish, Pale Horse is perhaps deeper lyrically and there’s more hardcore screaming DNA there, and SMD’s musical complexity is dizzying and thrilling. I listened to them today while making spicy fried chicken and folks, I was dancing whilst frying. It was, frankly, unsafe.
It all turned out, but imagine if it didn’t. Pretty bad, right?
ANYWAYS LOOK WHAT YOU GOT ME!
Speaking of safety, the safest choice on this list as far as maintaining my reputation as a guy with taste (already this is debatable given some of the responses I’ve gotten so far on my instagram album reviews) is Neil Young’s Harvest. Friends, I needed this album when the random number generator presented it. Picture it. It’s after Christmas. I’m visiting family and we’re kind of in that post holiday haze where we don’t know when we’ll see each other again and it all went by so fast. I’m sleeping in my sister’s childhood bedroom and wake up at 3 AM and can’t fall back asleep. The nightmare. Awake in the middle of the night in someone else’s house. So I sit in a recliner with headphones and bliss out to Harvest. When it’s dark and silent and you’re absorbing every little guitar squeak of that serendipitous, miraculous, bizarre album, well it’s something else.
The audacity, friends. The sheer anatomically sensitive appendages of this man to sing lyrics like “A man needs a maaaaaaiiiiiidddd” in front of the weighty entirety of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I revel in the mental image of Young and the recently passed David Crosby sitting in lawn chairs on Young’s ranch while the album is being mixed on a PA system in his barn on one channel, inside a recording studio on the other, and the two yelling, “More barn!”
This is the physical record I purchased and it was for two main reasons: it recently was repressed and is everywhere and affordable, and it’s not on Spotify, so physical media was a must. I can listen to Lemonade everywhere, and will, which in fact I am doing as I write this. That one I will own one day. Harvest is the one I own today.
That’s the record you bought! Is that weird to say? Like my dilemma with Neil Young, we’ve all gotten a little too comfortable getting our media for free or near free. I spend hours on these, especially considering all the time I spent listening to music that–let’s be honest–some of which I did not enjoy, and those hours are valuable. I spend lots of additional hours with goofy videos enriching giant social media corporations, also for free. Do I enjoy the notifications and followers and friendships? I do. But at my very core I think we should be supporting each other in our cool little endeavors and being a bit more aware of how our time and money builds entities that may or may not be healthy for this pretty planet. Shade-grown coffee from nice people in Mexico. A record a month for your pal on the internet.
This is something I do a lot. I tell people that their mistakes aren’t that big of a deal and we all make them, but I do not allow that in myself. Everyone deserves love but Howie. Howie earns it. It will be withdrawn at the slightest infraction. I delight in the success friends enjoy while selling their art or pottery or baked goods. But my tortured sentences? These word salads? I’m lucky if someone reads them for free.
Anyway, look how happy I am with my new record. Thank you.
HOWIE’S VAULT PICK (ALL OF THESE SECTION TITLES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE BECAUSE THEY ARE BAD) - editor. Help?
My hope here is to think of an album I love that ties to maybe an overall vibe of the month’s albums as well as events that occurred in the last 30 days or so. With that in mind I picked Kesha’s Rainbow. Like Lemonade, and come to think of it like Shakira’s “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” and Miley Cyrus’s new “Flowers”--huh it’s almost like a trend here–it’s an anthem in response to a crappy dude. I don’t think we need crappy dudes hurting women to create art, but when a smart powerful woman’s complete domination of the earth is momentarily sidelined by another mediocre guy, it’s pretty cathartic to listen to the response.
Rainbow came about after Kesha left rehab and emerged from a long legal battle against her former producer, Dr. Luke, who she accused of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. The songs range from absolute rage to empowerment to… a duet with Dolly Parton? and another one with Ben Folds? “Boogie Feet” sounds like an unhinged follow up to the Monster Mash. “Rainbow” makes me cry. “Woman” had me shouting along in the car the night Kavanaugh was sworn in. It is not a song about me or for me. I am not a “motherfucking woman,” for example. But I screamed it nonetheless and it made me feel a little better.
I have another story about that day but I don’t think this is the place for it. Ask me about it sometime, though.
Anyway the last two tracks, “Godzilla” and “Spaceship” are kind of twee and indie and I could take them or leave them but they’re not even that bad just not my scene. Both tracks are more than made up for by “Hunt You Down,” a track that fits squarely alongside murder ballads like “Goodbye Earl,” “Before He Cheats,” and “no body, no crime.”
THE MONTHLY ROUNDUP
Here’s the final tally. Did I give out a lot of A’s? You know I did. I want to like stuff. I’m too old to be picky and I’m not a critic. These aren’t objective grades based on how many key shifts there are or timing changes or whatever. I’m not educated on this stuff enough to know why I like it or don’t. If I dunked on your fave, please don’t take it personally. I hope you had fun this month because even though it had some rough bits personally, I certainly did. And music helped a lot.
I love seeing albums you had never heard of before getting As! What a gift you gave yourself with this project.