Music journalism is going to the wall, and places for sensible, well-informed, nuanced takes on the latest releases are dwindling. So we thought we might as well put the final nail in the coffin.
Read this month’s album reviews here and here.
Beabadoobee,
Pylon
Dirty Hit
Like many Beabadoobee fans, my entry point came through label-mate / The 1975 frontman Matty Healy’s considerable efforts to promote her yearning grunge-pop. Unlike many of those fans, my first exposure came while listening to The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast.
I’ve always imagined that, during this interview, the great Gen X novelist suffered something I call a “Reverse Hoobastank”—the revelation that there’s an artist called Beabadoobee, sparking the realization that your mind is “clearly degraded,” that you’re an old man, and that you’re dying. Maybe I’m just projecting, but the unhinged enthusiasm with which Matty pronounced the word “Beabadoobee” became a personal meme, encapsulating the sense of the world moving on and leaving me behind.
I actually held out on listening to her for the longest time because of this. That was my loss: Bea’s music has a raw personality that is both timeless and distinct, and Pylon (which finds her at roughly the same age I was when the aforementioned podcast dropped) is the clearest expression of this yet.
This record slings an electrical cable from jaded ’80s AOR to fuzzy ’90s disaffection, stretching it taut over a frame of Gen Z bedroom confessionalism. It explores how it feels when the “certitude” of your early twenties gives way to a “chasm of confusion and indecision”—aka the rest of your life. The whole record buzzes with a single-minded drive to keep pushing on into the void—the only thing to do when you find yourself crawling in the dark through your own past.
The phrase “You can say what you like about him, but…” may as well have been invented for Matty Healy, who has great taste (the same is true of Bret Easton Ellis). Honestly, that’s the only thing that matters in the world—and, unlike your age, it can’t be faked. And now it’s looking more than ever like he was right about Beabadoobee.
8/10
DONNA FARTT
Actress
Radical Frame
Ninja Tune
I won’t say “rest in peace” given the circumstances, but Richard Wagner would’ve loved Radical Frame by Actress (if the legendary German composer hadn’t been such an abhorrent racist). This black avant-garde record offers a prismatic glimpse of what will be understood as classical music a thousand years from now, with Darren Cunningham conducting a 5D orchestra from a score made up of glyphs written across a grid of light. The opera singers? CASISDEAD and Rainy Miller. Forget the Ring Cycle, it’s this that’ll be blasting in the ears of the drone pilot as the unmanned attackcopter dumps white phosphorus onto a desolate beach. I love the smell of dystopia in the morning.
10/10
VALKYRIE KATONA
Boy Harsher
Get Mean
Atlantic
I don’t talk to any of my exes, but now I’m thinking that, if we’d stayed in touch, we could’ve written some bittersweet, euphoric songs of pain together. All my relationships have ended in a cacophony of pathetic screaming, ugly crying, and failed makeup sex. So I’ve got no idea how a breakup could result in any kind of record, let alone one as coherent and affecting as Get Mean (like, not being funny, but I’d be worried about having a drink thrown in my face while playing around with the arpeggiator settings on my synthesizer). Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller are obviously more mature than me; they’ve turned their loss into a profoundly danceable meditation on love, loss, and survival, whereas I’m still finding excuses to avoid the final session to laser away what’s left from my half of this matching tattoo.
8/10
CANDICRUSH STATON
Emma Ruth Rundle,
These Killing Times
Errant Child
British TV drama Adolescence is compulsory viewing in schools around the world, and yet we don’t seem any closer to solving the problem of Andrew Tate. So how about rounding up each and every incel doing push-ups outside FDC Miami, strapping them into the chair from A Clockwork Orange, and forcing them to listen to this fearsome, righteous new Emma Ruth Rundle record? This might sound like an unsound method, but it’s bound to get us closer to realizing the American singer-songwriter’s desire for the “demolition of Western hegemony”—one more power chord and the system’s done for.
6/10
DJ LUDOVICO TECHNICS
Jawdropped
Secret to Spare
Transgressive
Glamour, dissolution, the occult! We’re never going to reach a consensus on the meaning of Los Angeles, but one thing everyone can agree on is that you have to drive everywhere, which is probably why the city seems more deranged than ever as an increasing number of motorists won’t make so much as a five-point turn without a podcast for company. Your life might feel as though it makes more sense when you’re deep into the latest monologue on the decline of Western civilization from some newly divorced TRT sauna enthusiast. You’d be just as well listening to the sweaty, hormonal rush of LA band Jawdropped’s debut LP, a record that goes a little way toward reconciling the “surface-level sunniness” of their home city with its “slightly seedier, grimier underbelly.” But by this point, freeway traffic jams have probably left you so comprehensively radicalized by men with USB microphones that you need to be locked in a room with nothing but West Coast power pop for company until you’re thoroughly deprogrammed.
6/10
XOPHER NOLAN
Perennial,
Modernism
Suburban Home
I work from home, which obviously means that I just sit around in the same sweat-stained, semen-encrusted athleisure fit I’ve been sporting for days, watching videos about how the suit is dying because we no longer live in a dignity culture, and instead, we’re trapped in a state of stagnation between the impulse to conserve and the impulse to deconstruct, which makes it impossible to create anything new. But after getting a shakedown from the retro rush of Perennial’s new record, I’ve booked an appointment with a tailor. I’m getting fitted for a three-piece suit, which I’ll wear in the pit the next time these so-called mods are in town. I’ll be moshing until my jacket splits at the seams and these fitted pants are thoroughly soiled. Dignity be damned.
6/10
JEET TOWNSHEND
Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi
The post VICE Album Reviews, September 18: Beabadoobee, Boy Harsher, Actress, and More appeared first on VICE.
