Music update, August 2023.

Back on schedule as I crawl out of my writing hole (by which I mean a place where I have not done much writing). August saw quite a few album releases of note, including Blur, Genesis Owusu, Burna Boy, Ratboys, Be Your Own Pet, Slowdive, Noname, and more, but I think it was a little lighter on singles. Friday saw another big batch of albums and singles, but since that was the first day of September I’ve pushed all of those songs to a new playlist for that month. As always, you can access the playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

Speedy Ortiz – Ghostwriter. Sadie Dupuis & company released their fourth album, Rabbit Rabbit, on her own label on Friday, and the album seems to have a slightly harder edge to the music without losing the off-kilter melodies and perhaps even amping up some of the harmonies in the choruses across the record.

Cory Wong feat. Dodie – Call Me Wild. I’m pretty clearly a Cory Wong fan, although I’m very late to the party. He does funk guitar so effortlessly, unsurprising for someone who grew up in Minneapolis, and you can also hear a ton of Primus (one of his stated influences) on this new album, The Lucky One, which has more famous guest appearances than Asteroid City.

BLOXX – Modern Day. I think this is the best song of the smattering BLOXX has released since their one full-length LP, Lie Out Loud, came out three years ago, and really deserves a lot more attention than it’s received – this is the pinnacle of this sort of indie-pop, and why a song like this gets overlooked while garbage like Imagine Dragons gets played to death is just beyond my limited comprehension.

The Julies – My Heaven is a Dance Floor. So this is an interesting one – the Julies released two EPs in 1994 and 1996, and then … nothing for twenty-seven years, until they released two singles as well as an EP of lost mixes from their earlier work. That’s probably why this band sounds so good to me, as they’re still channeling that early ‘90s alternative vibe, with elements of shoegaze (Ride) and dream-pop (Cocteau Twins).

Slowdive – the slab. Speaking of shoegaze, Slowdive returned on Friday with their second album since they reunited in 2014, the follow-up to 2017’s self-titled LP, and it’s a mix of some classic shoegaze like this pulsating track, “kisses,” and “alife,” and some slower songs like “skin in the game.”

Seablite – Melancholy Molly. If you played this for me and told me it was a lost track from Lush’s 1992 album Spooky, I’d believe you. It’s a spot-on rendition of that strand of early shoegaze with female vocalists, going for airy or dreamy vocals over highly textured guitars and keyboards that made it hard to pick out individual instruments. Seablite’s second album, Lemon Lights, is due out on the 29^th.

Jorja Smith – GO GO GO. Smith continues to carve out her own musical path, moving away from R&B and smooth jazz here with an acoustic guitar backing that wouldn’t be out of place on pop radio. She’ll release the long-overdue follow-up to Lost & Found, which made my top 18 albums of 2018, on September 29^th with Falling or Flying.

Noname feat. Common & Ayoni – Noname retired from the music industry briefly in 2020, resurfaced last year, and then came back with this surprise sophomore album Sundial last month – and it’s one of the best albums of the year, easily, with strong beats and the kind of smart, well-delivered rhymes we heard on her first album. However, she chose to platform Jay Electronica, a rapper who has a history of antisemitic commentary, even within his songs, with frequent reference to the “Rothschilds,” a popular dogwhistle among antisemites. Even in his contribution here to “Balloon,” he says he needs to “saw the Roth’ family in half to get my clout back” and makes several references to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Noname’s response to the controversy was extremely disappointing, as she took no responsibility, threatened to scrap the album (after she scrapped a previous one, Factory Baby) and then deleted her Twitter account entirely rather than deal with the backlash she created. The real lesson is that you shouldn’t platform an antisemite, and if you do so unknowingly, be accountable for your actions.

Danger Mouse with Jemini the Gifted One – Brooklyn Bazquiat. These two artists worked together on Danger Mouse’s 2003 album Ghetto Pop Life, then recorded a second album Born Again the following year, but that latter LP never saw the light of day until last week. Nineteen years have seen the music scene evolve to the point where this record sounds like a throwback to the alternative hip-hop movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, and it holds up exceptionally well as an example of that style of music.

Jungle – Us Against the World. Volcano dropped last month and I think it’s my least favorite Jungle album, with fewer standout singles than most of their LPs and some nods to more current trends in electronic music that my older ears find kind of annoying. “Candle Flame,” which was on my March playlist, is the best song on the album, and a huge reason why is the guest vocals from rapper Erick the Architect.

Girl Ray – Tell Me. Prestige, the third album from this London-based electropop trio, came out on August 4^th, and it’s full of catchy, danceable tracks like this one.

San Cisco – Under the Light. A subtle but still very catchy single from this Australian band, whose first hit single “Awkward” came out eleven years ago. I’m thrilled they’ve still got it, but jesus does that make me feel old.

Genesis Owusu – Stay Blessed. Owusu’s second album, STRUGGLER, came out last month, and the Ghanaian-Australian singer has taken a short story he wrote about a character called the Roach, based on the same existential authors who inspired Chris Cornell thirty-plus years ago, and loosely turned it into a concept album that spans all sorts of genres, with an electronic bass line opening the album on “Leaving the Light,” some R&B/funk on “Tied Up!” and garage-rock inspirations on “Freak Boy.”

The Kills – New York. I assumed the Kills had hung it up, with no new music from the duo since 2016’s Ash & Ice, which had the single “Doing It to Death,” but they released this two-sided single in August and another track on Friday in advance of the October 27^th release of their sixth album, God Games. This track is no “Sour Cherry” but otherwise fits in with their better stuff.

Kula Shaker – Waves. I didn’t realize these Britpop stars, who were either twenty years ahead of their time in incorporating Indian music into mainstream rock or guilty of some sort of cultural appropriation for the same thing, had put out a new album last year, which was itself their first album since 2016. This new track, ahead of an untitled seventh album, is full of the same peace and love and good happiness stuff lyrics as their other stuff but has one of the best hooks they’ve found since the 1990s.

English Teacher – The World’s Biggest Paving Slab. It takes some stones – pun intended – to write a song called “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” and then have that phrase in the very first line, but English Teacher, who’ve gone from very credible post-punk to something harder to pin down, with lyrics that would fit on an Arctic Monkeys album, wry delivery, and elements of dream-pop and indie rock along with those post-punk leanings.

The Hives – Two Kinds of Trouble. The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, the Hives’ first album in eleven years, dropped on August 11^th, and to their great credit, they haven’t changed much of anything. This is good-time garage rock, and they’re not sorry.

The Linda Lindas – Resolution/Revolution. I know there was a big novelty factor around this quartet when they first showed up in the 2019 film Moxie, with all the band members at the time aged 15 or younger, but they’re just a good punk-pop band now and everyone, myself included, should probably just stop talking about how young they are except to say that it’s astonishing how good and how polished they are for their ages.

Public Image Ltd – End of the World. PiL released their eleventh album, End of World, in August, a very inconsistent affair highlighted by this track, which has Lu Edmonds (the guitarist from Happy and 9, perhaps their two best albums) delivering a searing guitar riff over which Lydon can caterwaul to his heart’s content.

Horrendous – Aurora Neoterica. An instrumental track off Ontological Mysterium that highlights a lot of what I like about this metal band, with ambitious and weird guitar riffs and some highly technical fretwork. The album as a whole is better than 2018’s Idol and probably on par with Ecdysis, although I still found it uneven and I don’t need to hear the death-metal screeching without the music to sort of drown it out. Anyway, this track feels more like something you might have heard from peak Rush, and it’s good to hear this band stretch out a little bit away from the trappings of their main genre.