My Week In Music: 6-10 May
A pair of album-of-the-year contenders from Big|Brave and St Vincent join solid releases from Iron & Wine, Melvins, Bad Schematics and Dua Lipa.
Monday
NEW: Melvins - Tarantula Heart (2024)
A few years ago, I heard comic Dave Attell referred to as a “comedians’ comedian” - a super talented guy who other comics love, and scene fans love, but who has never properly hit the big time.
I think of Melvins in the same way: led by Buzz Osbourne since 1983, joined by Dale Crocker since 1984, the group are beloved and named as an influence by pretty well every band that came up in the 1990s (Nirvana, Tool and Mr Bungle, with whom they toured this year, to name three) and, while never striking the same level of success as those who came after, they’ve been carried along by love, appreciation, and sheer talent.
Tarantula Heart is their 27th album and continues their dalliance with prog rock, it’s five tracks clocking in at 39 minutes total. (I don’t know why prog rock means long tracks, but it does; I don’t make the rules.)
Opener “Pain Equals Funny” takes up almost half the run time, it’s 19m 09s length more like a rock symphony, moving through a number of ideas, returning to familiar motifs, then rocking out hard for a solid two minutes near the end. Elsewhere, “Working The Ditch” treats us to the chunky post-grunge we’ve gotten used to from the group.
The album closes out with its two heaviest tracks, “Allergic To Food” and “Smiler”, a beautifully riotous way to end what is a (another) great album from the trio. I wish I’d gone to the concert now.
Tuesday
NEW: Bad Schematics - C O L L I D E (2024)
Hailing from Palmerston North, Bad Schematics formed at the end of 2021 as a duo before adding a drummer and a bassist on their way to releasing their debut album this month, presumably to coincide with NZ Music Month.
How to describe them? They're clearly pop-punk fans with a sneaky bit of metal on the side - think Blink-182 and Bring Me The Horizon thrown into a paint mixer. And the four members of Bad Schematics are artists: this is a slick, well-produced record that shows off the strengths of the band - songs like opener "Yours Forever" and highlight "Ghost" rock hard behind the guitar work of Tane Butler and a solid rhythm section.
Singer Caleb Williams is pitch perfect out front, singing his lungs out on every track and joined by a few friends (Finger Tight's Red Rogers is epic on "Paralyzed", another highlight). COLLIDE is a really good debut for a band that show a ton of promise - and I'm excited to see what they do next.
Tuesday
NEW: Big|Brave - A Chaos Of Flowers (2024)
Sometimes an album is gentle, the melody flowing in and around your being, the lyric seeming to speak directly into your heart, the act of listening more akin to a spiritual experience or a mellow drug trip.
A Chaos of Flowers, the seventh album from Canadian experi-metallers Big|Brave, is like that. Kinda. It is an experience, but rather than gentle melody, the group take to their platform with sledgehammers, using their guitars and drums and everything to create something akin to a sonic assault.
And it is fucking amazing.
Big|Brave, led by singer and guitarist Robin Wattie, start with something simple - a drum beat, a guitar riff, a sample - then carefully layer on the rest of their sound. The guitar and bass is loud and all-encompassing, the drums a thump to the head. You can’t listen and do anything else. It’s like you’re using more of your brain just to comprehend.
Lyrically, Wattie has drawn from late 19th/early 20th century feminist poetry, sometimes as inspiration, sometimes verbatim as in opener “I Felt A Funeral”, named for the Emily Dickinson poem ‘I Felt A Funeral, In My Head’ which provides the lyrics.
A remarkable album that has to be heard (experienced) to be believed.
Wednesday
NEW: Future & Metro Boomin - We Still Don't Trust You (2024)
Okay, so I came to this one hesitantly: you may recall that I reviewed the first part of this Future/Metro collab back in April, saying "the highs are high, but the lows just wear you down" - its just not really my cup of tea.
But I'm glad I gave this one a chance because, honestly, its a lot better than the first album. There are still some of the same pitfalls - its overlong (the version on streaming is a whopping 25 tracks for a total 88 minutes), and the songs do get a bit samey after a while, especially in the trap heavy second half. But the first half swells out into R&B and even a bit of synth-pop, backed as they are by Metro's trap beats.
Tracks like "Drink N Dance" and "Jealous" show that the pair are capable of a lot more than they seemed to be limiting themselves to on the first album and second half here. If you limit We Still to the first 10-12 tracks and this is a great hiphop record. Sadly it gets weighed down by its length.
Wednesday
NEW: Iron & Wine - Light Verse (2024)
Self-produced and released on the seminal indie label Subpop, this is the first solo album from Iron & Wine - the name used by singer-songwriter Sam Beam - since 2017, following a collaboration with Calexico in 2019.
My favourite thing about Iron & Wine is the feeling of optimism; so often, solo singer-songwriters go down the melancholy route, but Beam has a knack for making gorgeous acoustic music in major keys, sounding upbeat and positive despite some of the lyrical content, and despite what you might hear from most of his peers.
Opener "You Never Know" builds off a tambourine and an acoustic guitar, adding cello on its way to second track (and highlight) "Anyone's Game" and "All In Good Time", a gorgeous duet with Fiona Apple. "Taken By Surprise" is another highlight, stripping the sound back to guitar and piano.
A beautiful record, and one of the best solo albums I've heard this year.
Thursday
NEW: Pet Shop Boys - Nonetheless (2024)
If you told me at the start of the year that I'd be positively reviewing a critically acclaimed Pet Shop Boys record, I would have laughed in your face and said something snarky like "oh, sure, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood as well, I bet".
Yet here we are.
Nonetheless isn't a game-changing, genre-shifting piece of brilliance. But it is a really good pop record that utilises the melancholic vocal layering the duo - Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe - are famous for, under-pinning it with a variety of synth- and dance-pop that sounds remarkably prescient given what some of the more creative alt-pop acts are up to these days.
"Feel" is an early highlight, but I reckon this one pops best when the group slow down and rely more on strings: "New London Boy" and "A New Bohemia" are two standouts. A thoroughly enjoyable listen. And given how good it is, maybe Frankie should be coming out of retirement.
Thursday
NEW: St Vincent - All Born Screaming (2024)
The artist known as St Vincent - Annie Clark to her friends - has had something of a storied career: in the last decade or so that includes a collaboration album with David Byrne, flings with Cara Delevigne and Kristen Stewart, a custom guitar from Ernie Ball, a writing credit on a hit Taylor Swift single, and a well-received movie co-written with Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein.
Add to that a sequence of critically acclaimed albums, two of which won Grammy Awards, and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who had a more interesting few years. Now here she is with a self-produced album that might be among the year's best when all is said and done.
St Vincent is a helluva songwriter, flowing through various genres with ease, layering her tracks with just the right pops of instrumentation at just the right time, inviting guests (Josh Freese, Dave Grohl, Cate Le Bon, Stella Mozgawa, et al) who only add to what she is doing.
Opener "Hell Is Near" is haunting, the kind of track a late 90s Reznor would be proud of; Grohl lends his drumming to a pair of highlight rock tracks in "Broken Man" and "Flea"; "Violent Times" is like a big, beautiful Bowie-Portishead collab; "Sweetest Fruit" might be the best pop song of the year; and Clark's guitar work shines throughout.
A stunning piece of work and surely a contender for album of the year.
Friday
NEW: Dua Lipa - Radical Optimism (2024)
I mean, Dua Lipa was always going to have a hard time following up Future Nostalgia, one of the best pop albums of the last twenty years, and her tangential connection to 2023's biggest movie, Barbie.
Ignore the hype though, and you have a really very good pop album: at a scant 36 minutes, it flies by, leaning heavily on dance-pop, taking relatively few musical risks as it sits behind a great vocal performance even though, sure, okay, yes, its missing the creative spark that made Future Nostalgia such a transcendent record.
There are some great tracks here though. I lover opener "End Of An Era", and second single "Training Season" is among Lipa's best. Later in the album, "French Exit" takes one of the biggest swings here but it doesn't quite land, while closer "Happy For You" borrows heavily from alt-pop to create a strong finish.
As I say, if you ignore the hype, this an album you'll enjoy, and one that Dua can be proud of.
Thanks for reading this week, everyone.
Have a good weekend!
Much love, Chris