Ooh boy Julys are weird for me. They used to be epic. It’s my birthday month and in Utah we have two firework holidays, it’s when my extended family has a big camping trip, and I love summer. As a kid growing up it seemed like too much amazing stuff crammed into one month, especially one where I didn’t have school. Julys were one big pie and I was Little Jack Horner pulling out plums by the thumbful and with a purple-stained face proclaiming what a good boy I was.
As a 40-something (that something is four now) I find myself less enamored with the month. A handful of little whoopsies have taken the shine off of the plum. For example, one whoopsy is that July 2023 was not just the hottest month in recorded history for this one and only earth upon which all life depends, but it’s the hottest in what experts convincingly estimate is 120,000 years. As a wildlife biologist I have fallen profoundly out of love with fireworks; I worry about all the little birds and mammals in their nests and burrows. I genuinely don’t understand why we as a civilized society continue with the whole thing. Additionally, I often spend the month thinking about how old I am compared to how old I will manage to get as I confront the compounding health issues associated with kidney disease. This isn’t helped when for reasons that confound both me and my nephrologist, my July numbers are always the worst. It adds up and brings me down.
And yet friends I come before you to tell you that even in spite of two gout attacks, I had a wonderful July. That’s for lots of reasons and one is—and yeah maybe it’s small and maybe it’s silly—the fact that the albums you all recommended were so flippin’ good this month. May and June were a little rough music-wise and I really struggled to find even five albums to call favorites. This month was the opposite problem. I gave out 16 A’s and an additional 6 A-’s. These jams, like so many poptart fillings, were just too tasty. The emotional labor of confronting near-constant evidence of dread, mass extinction, and personal mortality was a bit more tolerable what with the be-bopping and air guitar I could not resist while listening to these nasty bops.
So how did I narrow 16 A’s down to five? Oh, I didn’t. I picked seven. How did I justify this? That’s easy. I do what I want.
Here we go.
The Top Five (ish)
Jet Plane and Oxbow, Shearwater
A couple of these can be kind of combined, like Jet Plane and Oxbow, by Shearwater; and Film School’s Self-titled record. Both these bands are hanging out in the New Wave/80s stadium rock part of the high school cafeteria. This is where I hung out as a kid, too. A 90s kid being into 80s was a little tricky. The 80s weren’t old enough yet to be cool. The modern equivalent is hard to dial down because it doesn’t feel like we have distinct decades anymore. Is there a uniquely 2010s look? Sound? I don’t know. It would be if you knew a 15-year-old who was really into Drake, Bruno Mars, and Twenty-One Pilots, I guess. You’d be like, “those guys?”
Anyway Jet Plane and Oxbow opens with a strong Depeche Mode vibe. It’s got some U2 in there, too. And like virtually every band I’ve ever listened to this whole year somehow, there’s some Bruce Springsteen in there. This band has a huge sound. I don’t think you’d be too far off if you said it’s like the first time you heard Muse. It’s good. The vocals are cool. And the band is named after a bird and its main founder studied ornithological geography. That rules.
Film School, Film School
And Film School feels kind of 80s, too. My first vibe was that they sounded like The Cure but noisier. Even though The Cure can get really noisy. I just relistened to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me after getting it on vinyl, for example, and was surprised at these massive crunchy epic guitar parts that I don’t normally associate with The Cure. This is where some of the musical ignorance that started this whole thing creeps in, because apparently Film School is shoegaze? Which Wikipedia calls an “ethereal mixture of obscured vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume.” That’s really something.
It’s hard to talk about music without making comparisons. And I think most of us wouldn’t know what a band sounds like if you call it “shoegaze,” or “ethereal.” But maybe they would understand if you said it was heavily influenced by The Cure, The Velvet Underground, and Souixsie and the Banshees. Would you listen to a band that had those influences without any other information? I would. But that doesn’t mean they’re not doing their own thing, too. Cause they are. This was one of my favorite albums of the month and I wouldn’t say that if they only sounded like other bands.
In On the Kill Taker, Fugazi
Speaking of stuff that doesn’t sound like anything else: have you all heard Fugazi? I don’t have a good excuse for why I hadn’t. Every actual 90s band I listened to in the 90s has listed Fugazi as an influence and I just never gave them a try. Like an idiot. I don’t even know why other than they were just a tiny bit too messy for me, and not as accessible with a big old radio hit. I learn now that this was all by design. Fugazi turned down huge contracts. They didn’t play Lollapalooza. They just made tunes they liked and if other people liked them too, well bully for them. And maybe the ironic thing is that all the radio hits were the ones I stopped liking from all those bands and the weird messy stuff ended up what I loved the most. So Fugazi should have been my jam and it wasn’t and it is now.
Delicious Rock Noises, Radkey
On the other hand, relative newcomers Radkey are a band that I would have been obsessed with at 16 and am obsessed with at 40 something (that something is four). They’re great. Delicious Rock Noises is a phenomenal album from top to bottom. I love punk, and I love punk that sounds like punk. I think that’s hard to do nowadays, because there are so many bands and there have been so many bands that to be immediately recognizable as punk and also be fresh and new seems near impossible. And yet Radkey does it. The vocals are good. The lyrics are good. The music flippin owns. If their records weren’t rare and expensive, I would have bought this one. It’s my favorite album of June.
The Empty Northern Hemisphere, Gregory Alan Isakov
It wouldn’t be a summer month if Gregory Alan Isakov wasn’t in the top five (seven) again, and I since I just checked and it’s 90 degrees outside it must be time to talk about Gregory Alan Isakov again. This time it’s The Empty Northern Hemisphere. I’d never even heard of this guy two months ago, and now I’m returning to you all on a monthly basis to tell you how great he is. This also happened with Brandi Carlile, which makes sense because she sings duets with Isakov on this album and those are the best parts. I love music and it’s because of people like this dude.
Tapestry, Carole King
And there would be no this dude if there wasn’t a Carole King first. I don’t know if I need to tell any of you all about Tapestry, but I guess someone needed to tell me about it so for other ignorant people I’ll just say this: you’ve already heard Tapestry, you just don’t know it yet. This is one of the most prolific hit-makers in music history at the height of her powers. I simply cannot believe that one person created this much music. I bought this record.
Blue, Joni Mitchell
I bought it because it was at the record store whose website said they had Joni Mitchell’s Blue but when I got there they didn’t. It probably would have been a coin flip, except that because it’s not on Spotify, I’ll have to own it to listen to it regularly. Blue is a masterpiece and again probably you don’t need me to tell you that. But someone needed to tell me and I’m happy to pass along the favor.
Recommendation from the Vault
Apollo 18, They Might Be Giants
I just got TMBGs first two albums on vinyl and each one I listened to I was like, “oh this is my favorite They Might Be Giants album actually.” I was blown away by their debut self-titled. Then I listened to Lincoln and realized no, that’s the one. Then Flood. Dangit that one is also amazing. The only reason I’m talking about Apollo 18 because that’s how far I got into this by the time of this writing. This band is so good that whatever album I just heard from them is the best one they ever recorded.
Apollo 18 is the first of their albums I owned, and almost certainly the one I’ve listened to the most. I would play it at the movie theater I worked at and the “Fingertips” suite may have almost gotten me fired. It’s a 4:33 epic consisting of 21 songs, ranging in run time from 4 seconds to 61. With Apollo 18 in the 5-CD changer on shuffle, a random Fingertips track was a jarring delight for me and a deeply disruptive consternation to my old coworkers (the oldest I think was 25). An especially fine and delicious treat is watching the band play the entirety of it live, switching genres, instruments, and voices quickly through a series of tracks never meant for such a thing.
People with a passing knowledge of They Might Be Giants wouldn’t call them dark, because they don’t sound dark. But their lyrics, paired with the general silliness of the musical arrangements, are sometimes achingly bleak. A perfect example is “The Statue Got Me High,” in which the main character finds himself ultimately vaporized. Or “Turn Around,” where an Edgar Allen Poe type is haunted by his murder victim. “She’s Actual Size,” is a perfect example of a love song that is infinitely re-listenable without resorting to cheese or sentimentality.
This was the last album they made as a duo backed by synthesizers. While touring for this album, they introduced the full band that would back them for the rest of their ongoing career. This decisions was apparently so controversial that fans tried to boycott shows, and even apparently stood out in front of venues to try to dissuade other fans from attending. That, as far as I can tell, is the worst controversy TMBG has ever weathered. Stay strong, you unproblematic kings.
Here’s the Full List, Besties
I forgot to add the top row with the column titles. The first Y/N column is “Have I heard of them?” and the second is “Have I ever listened to this album?” What a month.