The Music Dispatch: September 20, 2022
Inside: Kelela, Björk, Rina Sawayama, NCT 127, Weyes Blood, eminently pleasant music, and ADHD to K-Pop. Also catching up with: d4vd!
Welcome to The Music Dispatch! This is a weekly part of this Substack where I shortly review every new(-ish) release I listened to. Out every Tuesday. All mentioned songs are available on your streaming platform of choice unless stated otherwise. Is there an album you want to recommend me? @ me on Twitter or head on over to the Retrospring!
Music isn’t just a way to denote time, but a way to capture it. Recently, I think it was because I was trying to make a point about Austria’s very white and boring charts, I looked at the top singles of the 2010s. Year by year, I was hit with a sudden memory of hearing that song — just once, even though if you’ve grown up with the radio, you’ve likely heard it a million times. Ai Se Eu Te Pego is one such example. I was in high school when that song blew up, and my friends in class would dance along to it. It was a pretty stupid dance, honestly. Nowadays, radio doesn’t reflect what the youth listens to: outside my window, I see girls dance along to Blackpink. Over and over, they start and restart that song to get the dance moves right, it’s kind of cute. Anyhow, as soon as I started working, the memories are just gone. No clue what’s on the radio, and honestly, I couldn’t care less. There’s enough music as it is! The only chart that matters is my chart!
EPs and Albums
NIKI — Nicole
Indonesian singer NIKI’s third album is pleasant and inoffensive, the kind of background music that you’ll encounter at a boba store. It doesn’t do anything original and nothing new — although admittedly, High School In Jakarta kind of tried with the diary songwriting style, and NIKI is an okay singer.
Kenny Beats — LOUIE
For the first half of the record, LOUIE almost manages what The Avalanches’ third record We Will Always Love You set itself out to do: a record about pain becomes so warm as to become a hand stretched out to life — and even beyond. The beats are warm and the guest rappers fade in and out, lyrics often unintelligible (besides JPEGMAFIA’s verse on Still, God bless Peggy). The second half is a trip down to memory lane with Kenny Beats and his father, a former radio DJ, very sweet but not as transcendent. If you enjoy Nujabes, you’ll enjoy this one too. Whoa Kenny!
Fletcher — Girl of my Dreams
I have yet to understand the drama that involved Fletcher’s lead single to this album, Becky’s So Hot, but good for her — it definitely caught people’s attention. Girl of my Dreams combines hard-hitting, night-drive electro pop music with softer melodies, sketching out love and heartbreak in equal measure. The results are honestly really good, eschewing a lot of the typical, formulaic trappings for something more sincere.
Rina Sawayama — Hold The Girl
The self-help journey to mending the inner child falters most with the singles — even in an album context, they don’t bloom. (Can’t, because besides Phantom, they follow one another.) However, the middle section, which turns increasingly angry and culminates in the one-two punch of the NIN-indebted Your Age and the electric Frankenstein, makes for an immensely compelling listen and satisfyingly concludes with Phantom. The album’s overarching concept works, but I’m still left wondering as to why the singles are the singles. Better than SAWAYAMA? Hmm, I’ll tell you in a month. I haven’t revisited SAWAYAMA in ages.
Maggie Lindemann — SUCKERPUNCH
When it’s not formulaic pop punk music, Lindemann takes heavily from Evanescence for this record. Lindemann’s edge is that she’s a woman into women, which I highly appreciate, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that you’ve likely encountered this before. Some highlights are i’m so lonely with you, novocaine, and lead single take me to nowhere. It’s a good step into the right direction, just needs that bit of an edge to truly become interesting.
NCT 127 — 2 Baddies
STICKER hopped to and fro with genres, which is a staple of SM albums since circa Pink Tape, but fourth album 2 Baddies leads to a much older tradition, that of the banger and the mellow rnb tracks filling out the rest of the record. The production quality on these are sky-high, and the songwriting is okay, but honestly more for fans of NCT than for casual fans, where it just sounds SM-eque. I still enjoyed Crash Landing, Black Clouds, and Tasty, as well as the opener Faster. Overall, the album is just not something I’d think of with a car-related concept. 2 Baddies itself — 2 baddies 2 baddies 1 Porsche… this is the most accessible NCT 127 has been since Touch sometime 2018, it’s a straight-up hip-hop song with a lot of lovely production flourishes and a very sticky hook. NCT 127 are extremely capable performers at their A-game throughout. But it’s no Sticker, and no Kick It, and no Cherry Bomb… also, no Punch… But still really fun!
Whitney — SPARK
(Not related to Whitney Houston) The white guys plucking at their guitar switch things up a little with SPARK, combining surf rock with contemporary r’n’b flourishes. The results? Mall music. It’s eminently pleasant, but possesses no wow-factor.
Death Cab For Cutie — Asphalt Meadows
Death Cab For Cutie’s tenth record also changes things up, to utterly incredible effect. John Congleton’s clean-cutting production provides a solid rock template for frontman Ben Gibbard’s bell-like vocals and melancholy lyrics. There’s light in the songs that show how deep the shadows go, and a certain anger, almost, that the compositions lend to the resigned words sung. Ten albums is nothing to scoff at for any band, but DCFC sound revitalized, in no way content to just become a legacy act.
Blackpink — Born Pink
Shut Down is the kind of phoned-in homework that you bring in when you know it won’t affect your grade. Horrible violin, bored vocal performances, no discernible difference between verses and chorus — say what you like about Pink Venom, as have I, but at least there were notable differences from one moment to the next. The rest of the album either veers to filler or manages something actually interesting, like highlight Yeah Yeah Yeah with its shimmering verses and Eurodance-leaning chorus, and Rosé’s solo Hard To Love.
Michelle Branch — The Trouble With Fever
On a first listen, it struck me how autumnal and emotional this was, far more introverted and eclectic than the country-pop offering that was The Spirit Room. There’s a lot more room for the music here than the vocals. If the name wasn’t attached to it, you’d think at points that it was somebody vaguely related to Angel Olsen and Sharon van Etten. It’s very competent, and I suspect I’m not quite done with this record.
Singles
Weyes Blood — It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody
Album comes out in November, I suppose we’ll get two more singles, both more devastating than the last one.
Kelela — Washed Away
It’s real! It’s happening! It’s… an… album opener? Very ethereal, very pretty, but that just sounds like an opener or interlude, sort of like Jupiter last album. But man, Kelela is back! Bangers are coming!
Björk — Ovule
Björk brought reggaeton to the forest. I wonder if she met Rosalía there?
Carly Rae Jepsen — Talking To Yourself
Carly Rae Jepsen brought EMOTION to TikTok lengths. No, but why is this clocking in at under three minutes? Again? We could’ve gotten a bridge there!
NMIXX — Entwurf
NMIXX brings ADHD to K-pop. Their potpourri style means either all parts are catchy or some, but none of it is coherent. That is by design. Dice sounds better than O.O to me, although maybe that’s because O.O was utterly overshadowed by the excellent B-side Tank. Dice’s B-side is called Cool (Your Rainbow), interpolates Bach’s Air, and sounds like a Red Velvet song. Eh…
Catching Up With… d4vd
Imagine you are a Fortnite streamer. You want to accompany your plays with music, but copyright laws exist, so you can’t really play stuff… unless? d4vd is 17 years old and the story of how he turned to making music absolutely baffles my mind. He has a bunch of singles out and I haven’t gotten to all of it, but here’s four that I enjoyed:
Decide: The washed out vocals lean this one closer to emo territory, although it relies too much on the constant vocals in that case, rather than the strength of the guitar.
Dirty Secrets: The quick bass sells this one. Much like PinkPantheress before him, the fake-dated quality of the song gives away how recent it sounds.
Fly Away: 00s rock stuff for girls ten years younger than you. The vocals remind me so much of Parannoul somehow, but clearer (and better, sorry king)
Romantic Homicide: The newest one also blew up on TikTok and is a surprisingly solid emo song about a breakup with similarly affected vocals throughout.
I don’t know how this type of music fits into games?? But I really like this. This is stare-out-of-the-window-during-a-commute music. The kids are alright, I think. I’ll be keeping an eye out for him!
I should invite this person to my next Music Dispatch:
Good moves! If The Music Dispatch was a Youtube video, I’d really invite them to dance to the songs. They got moves!