Album Review: Weezer – Weezer (The White Album)

Posted on April 22, 2016 by bgibs122

Yes, it’s good.

In fact, while Weezer’s tenth album overall and fourth self-titled one–aka “the White Album“–is their third quality album in a row after Hurley in 2010 and 2014’s Everything Will Be Alright In the End, not only is it good, it’s good in a way that’s free of qualifiers and hedged expectations. The White Album is simply a half-hour plus of largely enjoyable power-pop with big guitars, quirky/”quirky” song-writing choices, and just enough heart to keep a listener invested. It is, in other words, what you’d expect from a Weezer album; a sign that whatever kept leading to mediocre records like Raditude has been worked out of frontman Rivers Cuomo’s system.

Weezer’s been on a course corrective for their last like, five albums, but for the sake of time, let’s look at what’s different between The White Album and Everything Will Be Alright In the End, since there’s only a year and a half between them, and these are the two people seem to agree work the best as correctives (Hurley, sadly, remains underrated). The two start in the same place as loosely conceptual pop rock albums, but they diverge in presentation. EWBAITE was devoted to appeasing Weezer diehards who’d been put off by the band’s most recent string of albums. This devotion wasn’t just part of the narrative tucked away in Rolling Stone profiles, though, it was literally the album’s creative thrust: lead single “Back to the Shack” states the band’s back to “Rocking out like it’s ’94” (“Back to the Shack” is also the album’s lousiest song). Cuomo is still actively mining his own back catalog on TWA, but in a way that feels more like a logical continuation of Weezer’s sound and less like a retread.

For example, The Beach Boys have been a Weezer influence since day one, but they’ve never done something like “(Girl We Got A) Good Thing.” The song starts with a polished guitar line, jingling bells, and a multi-tracked swooning melody all straight out of Pet Sounds, but there’s enough Weezer woven into the song’s explosive energy and dueling guitar hero solo that it doesn’t feel like pastiche, and instead is an album highlight. Elsewhere on other standout “King of the World,” the band’s able to flex some Maladroit-style riffing into a surprisingly endearing love song Cuomo wrote for his wife that succeeds in spite of the “Rivers, what the fuck?” lyric “Your mom locked you in a shed/And Uncle Sam dropped an atom bomb.” The White Album‘s best song, “LA Girlz” stays in the vintage Weezer lane musically, but the lyrical flip of this romance being uncertain and confusing is a nice inversion of a band whose lyrics usually spit venom or go for lobotomized happiness. And while I know it seems like a low bar to praise a band in their third damn decade for some sort of romantic nuance in their writing, considering Weezer’s pretty directly responsible for the “ugh, girls” branch of emo, it feels like progress.

In fact, The White Album works lyrically because so many of these songs have that melancholy or desperate edge to them. This is Weezer’s self-conscious “California beach music” album (just in case they fooled anyone with that cover art), but Cuomo also knows he’s 45 and married and famous for recording earnest records, so he can’t just sit back and rewrite “Island in the Sun” a bunch of times. Instead, he’s gone for a deliberately escapist record here where the worries and the woes are never truly out of the rearview; opener “California Kids” is about the joy of being up all night with those kids, but it also invokes sinking ships and rigor mortis. Meanwhile, “Do You Wannna Get High?” poses getting high by the beach as a threat more than a thrill. “Island in the Sun” eventually comes up when Cuomo repurposes those “Hey, hey”s for closer “Endless Bummer,” where our king of the beach protagonist, dejected because the girl he liked is over him and he left his headphones in her car, pleads for this summer to finally fucking end. The song still goes for a big rock band finish, but it’s less a big cathartic send-off than someone taking in the sights at the surf one last time before resigning themselves to leave.

That’s not to say The White Album isn’t without its problems, though. Like “Memories” from Hurley and “Back to the Shack” on EWBAITE, TWA’s lead single “Thank God For Girls” is a mostly terrible kinda-jokey-kinda-not single that seems to occur at least once per Weezer record since “Beverly Hills.” The album doesn’t exactly start firing on all cylinders right away, either: “California Kids” and “Wind In Our Sails” aren’t bad, but they’re largely uninteresting, by-numbers Weezer tunes, and the high of “(Girl We Got a) Good Thing” is canceled out immediately by “Thank God For Girls.” On one hand, the record’s brisk runtime means it doesn’t have time to lose its flavor, but it also doesn’t leave any room for filler. Cuomo still drops the occasionally stilted lyric, as well: there’s the aforementioned “atom bomb” lyric, and “Paranoid Android” gets a left-field name drop, among other bizarre choices. And, if Weezer’s brand of zonked out power-pop/alternative rock hasn’t won you over already, nothing here–save maybe the gleefully angsty piano and falsetto number “Jacked Up”– is going to change that. At this point, the band’s less concerned about making new fans than keeping the old ones.

But damn if The White Album isn’t a good argument to stick around. It’s a solidly enjoyable record of Weezer being Weezer (mostly) hang-up free. If Everything Will Be Alright In the End was the argument that Cuomo could make a good record with his back against the wall, The White Album is a statement of intent that he and the rest of the band are here to stay. And, for once, the fans may want them to.

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Radio Rant: Meghan Trainor – NO

Posted on April 13, 2016 by bgibs122

Hello, and welcome to Radio Rants. Oh no.

I’ve never been adept at picking who’ll have a long career or not, but I did not expect that Meghan Trainor would become such a Thing so quickly. Lorde, Charli XCX, and Carly Rae Jepsen didn’t latch onto the charts after their initial impacts, but square-as-hell Meghan Trainor has a top 10 hit off her second album already. To understand how she’s done so well, you almost have to look at Trainor’s music last, because her strongest talent isn’t her pen or her voice: it’s her sense of timing. She fired off the Title EP just as “All About That Bass” really hit its stride, and that momentum dovetailed into the January 2015 release of her debut album, and she spent most of last year as a constant presence. And, as a young, loosely classicist songwriter who sells quite well in broad demographics, she has a lot of backing in the music industry, culminating in a Best New Artist win at this year’s Grammys (#JusticeForCourtney). I thought “All About That Bass” was a viral one-off, but Trainor’s so far proven to be a capable careerist.

But oh, to have the career built on stronger material. You could square “All About That Bass” away under “catchy and well-meaning, if flawed” but she somehow seemed to falter with every new single. “Lips Are Movin'” and “Like I’m Gonna Lose You” were filler at best, and “Dear Future Husband” actually caused me to walk back the nice things I’d said about her before. Evening setting aside the “yikes” content of something like “Dear Future Husband,” her songs were unsatisfying once you figured out she was playing a musical shell game with doo-wop, R&B, and girl group era soul; all fun elements, but they made for an incredibly narrow sonic pallet. She was going to have to do something different for Album 2.

And “NO” is absolutely different. Is it better? Well…that’s where it gets complicated.

See, the first thing that “NO” and Trainor’s new style remind me of are Mumford & Sons as a case study in how to not evolve well. Last year, (in)famous be-vested folkies Mumford & Sons divested from their vests and banjos for Wilder Mind, and picked up electric guitars and leather jackets. That album didn’t do well. That album didn’t take off because, well, the songs weren’t very good, but also because Mumford & Sons replaced the sort of generic thing they made theirs (old timey folk band) with an infinitely more generic thing without a shred of identity (Imagine Dragons, but lamer). Trainor’s done something similar here: you didn’t have to like her loosely vintage, #TargetStyle aesthetic (I mostly didn’t), but at least it worked for her better than the generic pop star look she now has for her generic pop song. Because like Wilder Mind‘s lead single “Believe”, “NO” does not inspire confidence in Thank You.

Which feels weird because on its face, “NO” should solve all of Trainor’s problems: its sound exists entirely outside “All About That Bass,” and has a winning message. But it’s just not a good song. Trainor has a good voice; I don’t know why she keeps insisting on doing this weird, ineffectual rap that sounds like the corniest thing imaginable. And, if she wanted to keep that voice to the verses like she has in the past, then fine, but on the chorus for “NO,” she sounds like she’s powering through a bad Drake impression while she has the flu. I’d call it a momentum killer, but the first time you hear it in the song is after the a capella intro and clumsy beat drop; there’s not even enough time to gather momentum first.

Yes, you read that right: there’s a beat drop because Meghan Trainor has officially left the sounds of the 1950s and 1960s for those of the late 90s and early 2000s. Musically, “NO” is almost irritatingly percussion-heavy: one repetitive beat pattern anchors the whole thing, and its synths seem designed beat to you over the head more than anything else. “NO” gets its 90’s teen pop flavor from leaning heavily on that loud, descending piano riff ‘N Sync loved so much, and in the way Trainor’s vocals are layered here: I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone so desperately wanting to be all 3 members of Destiny’s Child at once. This in itself isn’t a wrong decision (who among us wouldn’t want to be Beyonce?), but Trainor flat-out doesn’t have the charisma or sneer to pull it off. The beat overall is fine, I guess for what it is, but you can tell it was made by a man who unironically calls himself Wallpaper.

There’s not much to gripe about with “NO”‘s message, though. The world can always use a song whose entire premise is telling a dude to fuck off. Honestly, my favorite part of the whole song (low bar, but still) might be just imagining some basic bro getting completely shut down for trying to be slick here. Trainor runs through enough common pick up lines (“What’s your name/number/sign?”, “You’re beautiful”, “You’re not like other girls”, “Do you want to dance?”) that I have to believe she’s heard all of these before. There are still a few stumbles in the lyrics–Meghan Trainor singing “It’s [men] never my priority” is like Bruno Mars’ singing that he’s never tried to woo a woman–but still, solid message.

That’s the only definitive nice thing I can say about “NO” though. The first time I heard it, I thought it’d stay in the top 20 or so and stall out around number 8, but as of writing this, the song’s on an upward trajectory at number 3, and has a chance at being number 1. There’s nothing truly hate-worthy about “NO”, but there’s not much there to like, either; it passes in one ear and out the other both less pleasantly and less irritatingly than Trainor’s previous work. If you like it, great, but is this my thing? Nah. I’m gonna let it go.

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Album Review: Young Thug – Slime Season 3

Posted on April 5, 2016 by bgibs122

You might have heard of Young Thug. You might not have heard of Young Thug. Either way, you’re here because you’re curious about his new mixtape Slime Season 3, and why you keep seeing his name in iTunes or Spotify or wherever constantly in the “New Release” section. This is all understandable because it’s time to pay attention to Young Thug, and I’m here with a handy-dandy Q&A about him, and Slime Season 3. So, let’s start.

Who is Young Thug?
Young Thug is Jeffery Lamar Williams.

That’s not super helpful.
Good point. Young Thug is an Atlanta rapper whose been kinda breaking out over the last year and a half since Rich Gang’s “Lifestyle.” He had three mixtapes in 2015, and so far Slime Season 3 is his second release of 2016. Each of these tapes have nudged his profile slowly upward; right now, he’s the internet’s favorite rapper.

Why do you say he’s “the internet’s favorite rapper”?
Well, a couple of reasons:
-Just as a rapper, Thug has a truly fascinating style that I’ll get to which makes him super exciting for internet rap nerds to talk about at length. And, because of his ridiculous output clip, they can do that often, giving the guy a massive presence in any corner of Rap Twitter or any major music site.
-He was also involved with (and quite frankly won) the drama around Lil Wayne and Cash Money by leveraging that controversy to promote Barter 6 last year, and damn if the internet doesn’t love a good narrative.
-Thug’s also just a cool as shit human. He makes any “Young Thug wears dresses!” outrage/controversy sound stupid without really trying. He showed up to Kanye West’s Madison Square Garden show half-awake and still caused buzz. He rode a horse in Atlanta to advertise a tour. In short: he’s fun to write about.

He’s also the internet’s favorite rapper in the sense that his online hype doesn’t translate into high sales or charting. His two biggest selling projects still landed outside the top twenty on the sales chart (I’m Up debuted at #22 the same week fellow ATLien Future debuted at #1), and for how much he’s talked about as rap’s bleeding edge, he gets outdone in airplay by Yo Gotti and Jeremih.

So critics and his fans love him, but he can’t gain traction besides?
Yeah, he’s pretty much the rap version of The Americans.

Would I know him from anything?
I mean, “Lifestyle” wasn’t exactly inescapable, but it was still a hit. Depending on what circles you roll in, you might have heard him on Rae Sremmurd’s “Throw Sum Mo” or more recently his solo joint “Best Friend.” Other than that, probably not.

Really? Even with all those mixtapes? What about him breaking through?
The thing to understand about mixtapes is they’re usually kind of scattershot, and only the windup to the following album’s pitch, like Wayne’s mixtapes leading up to Tha Carter III, or Future into DS2. Thug’s mixtapes have all been good, but they lack a signature performance, and tend to run long. They’re not what I’d call user-friendly, nor do they punch out singles.

So, er, does Young Thug have an album coming out?
Ish? His debut album is one of those “when it happens” deals.

Then why review yet another mixtape of his?
Because I like this one plenty, and it solves a few of his problems, for one. And, well, do you mind if I get all Music Blog insider baseball for a second?

I mean, I guess not.
Cool, just stay with me for a moment. I promise it won’t be a thing. Music writing on the internet gets echo chamber-y at the best of times, and I feel like with Thug in particular, it’s getting stale seeing the same people write about each of his releases in the same ways (not to put to fine a point on the man’s output, but he’s done four mixtapes in six months). What’s more, sites write about Young Thug in a way that assumes everyone just knows who he is already, when that’s not the case, and that sort of insularity irritates me because I feel like music writing is at its best when it’s accessible, hence this kinda silly Q&A format, an–hey, quick checking Twitter!

Sorry.
It’s fine, I got wound up.

You still haven’t described what Young Thug sounds like.
Honestly, just listening to him rap on something like “Best Friend” is going to be more fun than me explaining it, but if we’re gonna do this in writing, here’s what I’d say: the way Young Thug raps borders expressionist. Imagine starting with the frantic, occasionally melodious sort of flow that Lil Wayne had during his Tha Carter III era, or the loosely free-association, switched up cadences Drake or Future dabble in, run that through Andre 3000’s nasally urgency and penchant for verbal tics and yips, and then gut the whole thing down to the words that matter and sing the rest (then add a dozen wet blankets bitching about not understanding him).

But even that seems like the boring way to describe him. Young Thug raps the way you sing or rap along to a song without knowing the words because you’re just so excited to hear it. Or the way that you and your best friend will just talk with each other, and the words matter way less than the fact that you two are communicating. He raps almost like he’s just happy singing along to the beat. Here’s how Shea Serrano describes Thug’s rapping in The Rap Year Book: “Imagine if you could hug your own happiness. Imagine if you took both of your feet and stuck them in a bucket full of warm mud and wiggled your toes around, except that the mud isn’t mud, it’s your soul. That’s how Young Thug raps” (It’s worth mentioning this description is got me to give Thug a listen in the first place). Young Thug is the sort of dude who was known to draw pictures and shapes to write a verse, and I don’t doubt that for a second.

And Slime Season 3?
Oh, right. Slime Season 3 is great. What I meant when I said it solves Thug’s problems is that his formless style tends to get less interesting as a tape goes on, and SS3 sidesteps that by cramming 8 tracks into 28 minutes. And in those tracks, you have workouts like “With Them” and “Digits”, where both the production and Thug sound clearer but no less off the wall than they ever have. “Worth It” is your hypnotic rap warbler here not too far from some of Future’s less belligerent work, while “Slime Shit” has the only guests on the tape. Overall, the whole thing’s slick and accessible; if you’re gonna start anywhere with Thug, SS3 is your best time.

Okay, what’s your favorite s–
“Drippin'”, no question. Thug is absolutely freeflowing here, going between stuttering growls and yips to AutTune stretched lines to manic, down the middle raps all while staying entirely in the beat. Half of his second verse comes out as this bark that bounces perfectly between the ping-pong synth, and after a few seconds it hits you that this isn’t some ad-lib, this is how Thug is gonna do this verse. And then he pivots right out of it into another flow like it’s nothing. Really, the whole song’s a rush because you feel like it shouldn’t work but it does.

That covers Slime Season 3, but when’s the next mixtape out?
No one really knows. SS3 is the last in this series, maybe the album will be next. This is why catching up with Young Thug now is such a great idea, it’s like getting in on the ground. Of another planet.

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Radio Rant: Lukas Graham – “7 Years”

Posted on March 31, 2016 by bgibs122

Hello, and welcome to Radio Rants. This is gonna hurt.

I’ll just be straight with y’all: there was a long stretch where Radio Rants were fueled almost entirely be me being a hater. It probably wasn’t fair to like, C-grade Katy Perry singles, but it’s how life was. As I’ve done this longer and gained some perspective, I’d like to think I’ve gotten more even-handed; something like “Same Old Love” might not move me, but it doesn’t bring the knives out, either. Everything deserves a chance, you know?

Then you get “7 Years,” and you just have to escalate the hate.

“7 Years” is by Danish band Lukas Graham, which is not where I expected that sentence to end before I researched it. The “Danish” part sounds about right since Scandinavians own 20% of the Top Ten at all times, but “band”? Turns out, Lukas Graham is a band consisting of  Lukas Graham Forchammer and some other dudes, so it’s like if Joseph Gordon-Levitt started a band name Joseph Gordon, only not at all, because JGL would probably debut them on Jimmy Fallon and it would be charming instead of insipid. But the buried lede here is that this man’s last name is Forchammer, and why is that not your band name? “Forchammer” is a killer band name. With a name like that, you could release a song as terrible as “7 Years,” and still be cool.

Okay, let me attempt some measure of fairness here. As a composition, “7 Years” is…acceptable. It’s anchored in that lightly soulful piano-pop sound that OneRepublic made big, and even has some Ryan Tedder-y sing-song melodicism that I guess isn’t entirely awful during the verses. It will probably be slow danced to during prom season, and might mean something to someone because of that, which is something any songwriter should be proud of. It won’t cause your headphones to catch on fire, always a plus.

It’s really hard for me to say nice things about “7 Years,” for reasons that aren’t entirely its fault. Don’t get me wrong: the song is cloying, oversung, and limply produced; by most objective measures it is not a good thing. Neither is Meghan Trainor’s “No,” but “No” doesn’t piss me off the same way. When I first heard “7 Years,” I said I was allergic to it, and I mean that almost literally; this is a song made up of the tropes I hate in pop music. It has that same crushing self-seriousness behind dopey twee that A Great Big World and Passenger had. Forchammer’s voice is an unholy combination of Nate Ruess’ pompous yelp and Tyler Joseph’s whiny, wild emoting, and lyrically, he lacks fun./Twenty One Pilots’ ability to turn a phrase while doubling down on their overwrought songwriting; he’s at Macklemore levels of earnest but without his necessary humility. “7 Years” fails just as a listen because it seems to be made by people who wanted a song by OneRepublic or The Fray, but without all that rambunctiousness. Put all this together, and it’s enough to make me break out in hives.

I didn’t think “7 Years” was by a Danish band whose leader is older than I am, I thought Lukas Graham was one of those YouTube youngins that fluked into a hit. The song has that sterile production you hear in YouTube artist’s work (that these guys don’t run in the same circles as Shawn Mendes astounds me), complete with pushing the vocals all the way to the front. More than that, “7 Years” reeks of the performative sincerity you find on YouTube. Put it this way: you know those comments you see on almost every hit song’s video that are like “This song is so REAL, and [artist] is so honest. Music is my life and my passion and I’d love it if you could check out my cover of this song or any of my originals on my channel because I’m just trying to make it. Peace and love”? “7 Years” feels like the original song you click over on, listen to for a minute, and put entirely out of mind.

“Once I was 7 years old, my mama told me/Go make yourself some friends or you’ll be lonely” Dude, your mom probably wanted you to go play with someone so she could have a minute to herself after the last 7 years, not because she wanted you to have peer attachment issues. I hope.

“By eleven smoking herb and drinking burning liquor” This seems like the kind of thing you could base a whole song around and not just a throwaway line in the first verse. Also, Forchammer has this super adolescent voice, so I thought being eleven for him might have been like five years ago.

“I started writing songs, I started writing stories” Again, YouTube comment begging for views: “I’m inspired to not just write songs, but stories. Check my channel for more.”

“Something about that glory just always seemed to bore me.” Liar.

“I only see my goals, I don’t believe in failure.” I promise you, someone you know has or will post this exact lyric as a meme on Facebook.

“Soon, we’ll be 30 years old, our songs have been sold/We’ve traveled around the world and we’re still roaming” Okay, so I know there’s a real chance that English isn’t Forchammer or whichever member’s first language, but you’ve gotta see this song’s Genius annotations. The one for this line is about how some people’s fire enables them to escape the solar system, and I can only wager this means Lukas Graham are working on a higher level than the rest of us.

I could keep bagging on the lyrics here, but I feel my throat closing up. “7 Years” is about growing up and wanting to do something with your life (#MillennialAngst, we meet again), but it’s such a hollow, chintzy sounding song that I can’t take it seriously, especially when the strings start working overtime at the bridge like it wants to be dramatic and shit. In terms of “pop soul,” Lukas Graham make Maroon 5 look like James Brown. Forchammer is an unimaginative writer and an overly chirpy vocalist; I feel kinda bad for hating on a dude who’s just trying to live his nearly 30-year-old life, but then I remember that “7 Years” starts and ends with the sound of a fucking movie projector and nope, it’s the worst again. I don’t want to remember “7 Years” in 7 years. I barely want to remember it in 7 days. Thankfully, it’s dull enough that I might get my wish.

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