Joy Division - Unknown pleasures
Happy 42nd birthday my love!

Moby Grape - Moby Grape

CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST by TYLER, THE CREATOR (2021)

New Tyler! I was pretty excited going into this, seeing as his last two albums have been borderline modern classics and certainly contenders for the best album of their respective years. It was also pretty intriguing to hear him going back to a more rap-based sound after IGOR, and I liked the teaser tracks we got. And in the end, I have mixed thoughts, though mostly positive. The production is unique and layered as you've come to expect from Tyler, from jazzy dirges to noisy bangers to his usual pastel-coloured pop-synth aesthetic. The whole thing feels luxurious and confident. I think his rapping is strong, too, although it feels like more of a laid-back victory lap where he brags about being the weirdo who made it than the intense introspection of his last two albums. In fact, laid-back is a good way to describe the whole thing, for better and for worse. The song structures are kept loose, free to range from two-minute blasts to nine-minute epics - it's less perfectly designed than his recent work, more free-form, and that's both good and bad. It's more a Tyler record to throw on in the sun rather than dive into. It's not a classic and it's not Album of the Year. But it's unique and charismatic, and I overall like it. 

Time Flies

Wheatus - Wheatus. I'm not even sorry. It's a great record from when "pop" music was listenable.

Teenage fuckin dirtbag.

See also : the New Radicals - Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too

why ?

SMILING WITH NO TEETH by GENESIS OWUSU (2021)

Great debut record out of Australia from earlier in the year - blends hip-hop, soul, pop, rock, and r'n'b together in a way that never feels anything but natural, and the charisma of it is great. The whole album has this recurring image of depression as a "black dog" following the narrator, but it's never edgy or self-pitying. There's a bouncy sense of playfulness to it that makes it much more engaging than most other records with the same themes. With his melodic chops and zany personality, I'm calling it now that Genesis will be on the next Gorillaz album. 

Travis - the man who
With the Beatles
Kinks - Lola vs powerman

Neil young - after the gold rush
Neil young - road rock vol 1 (somewhat characteristically, vol 2 never came out!)
Sloan - the double cross (one of their best, if you know them)

this album is so good.
RIP Amy, I can't believe it's been 10 years already

REASONABLE DOUBT by JAY-Z (1996)

Realised this week that most (or all?) of Jay's discography is finally on Apple Music, so started my journey going back through his albums from the start. And this debut, yeah, it's good. What I took away from it is how Jay doesn't have the same braggadocio here as he would develop on albums like The Blueprint - if anything, it's almost the mirror image of 4:44, with that melancholic and reflective tone dominating the sound. It's like the album is his therapist's chair; there's a mix of a hard-headed determination to make it out of the hellish world of crime that he was born into, with a genuinely reflective realisation of what he would have to do to make that happen. Criticisms would be is that the influence of Illmatic looms a little large, and the chorus of the Foxy Brown track is horrific, but overall, I see why this is considered a classic. Smooth, compelling, nineties hip-hop.