An Acute Case: 18 November 2023
How and when did I get so zen?
The Baseball Project: Grand Salami Time!
Funny you should ask. I am top of my fantasy football league*. By a cool 59 points at that. And though it’s a different sport, it means I have a sufficient level of dork to appreciate what is, improbably, merely the second baseball album of 2023. Though not the first from this alt-rock super group. Their fourth in 15 years brings their career total to 59 songs/205 minutes of entirely baseball-themed music. Which’d be less impressive if there wasn’t still life in the material, so I’m pleased to report there’s plenty. Prior knowledge tells me "being different is weird like a yank with a beard" refers to the Yankees’ clean-shaven policy. “Disco Demolition” to the homophobic disco sucks vinyl-smashing debacle. “Educated cheddar, radio ball, pair of shoes, he gone" is surely a homerun. Uncle Charlie someone who throws weird (which, having read some Ring Lardner, I’m guessing just means a left-hander.) Vaseline, Brylcreem, and pine tar are all ‘stuff’ that can be applied to the ball for better(?) pitching. "Less four seams and more flakes" will remain a mystery until I give up and google it. So, yeah, esoterica abounds. But so too do hooks that, as well as giving structure to the blue riband boogie, lend a helping hand: “Journeyman”, “Erasable Man”, “All or Nothings”—concepts any fantasy sports dork can understand. A MINUS
CMAT: Crazymad, For Me
“Whatever’s Inconvenient” is how Ciara Mary Alice Thompson sums up a romantic history she can’t stop analysing even though she knows she should. But with her insights even sharper than last year’s marginally superior If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, I’m not sure I want her to. Back-to-back them and you’ll notice a few more differences besides: here, the best songs come in the middle rather than the start; she’s cashed in her Dubliner’s right to replace her ‘U’s with ‘O’s; and most tellingly, her hysteria isn’t as close to the surface. Before, the tone was borderline manic, with freakier vocals and not only sharper but more twisted tunes. This is softer, almost mellow, a move likely calculated to advance her pursuit of a stardom she deserves as much as she craves. After all, there’s no one like her. With an emotional range somewhere between the garish effusiveness of Lewis Capaldi and the comely nuance of Harry Styles (though she’s camper, funnier, and more self-deprecating than both), and a pop appetite consuming Vincent Kompany, Miranda Hobbes, Wagatha Christie, and the Gilmore Girls, modern audiences should find her eminently relatable. Whether they do to the extent she dreams of is out of her control. A MINUS
Fat Tony: I Will Make a Baby in this Damn Economy
Intelligent baritone rapper references James Corden, Kim Gordon, Orville Peck, Devo, and Squirtle on the opener alone, then follows up with "blow a kiss / make you orgasm" and "don't wanna live in Calabasas / my girlfriend about to get a masters." ** (“Loosen Up” “Make a Baby”)
The Go! Team: Get Up Sequences Part Two
Flash in the pan still going 20 years later. Mission statement (same as it ever was): “keepin’ on keepin’ on keepin’ on keepin’ on keepin’ on.” ** (“The Me Frequency” “Whammy-O”)
Ashley McBryde: The Devil I Know
Well, this was hard fucking work, which I know is 100% a me problem. It took over a dozen listens to lock into the powerhouse I knew was there, and though I’m over the hump now, I’m no closer to explaining my initial resistance to the overblown rawk guitars and belter vocals. Perhaps the country trope bonanza was a problem, except McBryde deploys them so precisely on the grunt work her finer details are too delicate for that even I don’t buy that. Anyway, we are where we are, which is in love with just about everything here. From the opener’s barrelling drums, spiked guitars, expeditious lyrics, and thunderous vocal to the bluegrass tricks of the beer/bar songs, potent precision of the good advice/bad behaviour songs, butt rock redemption of the title track, and John Prine redemption of the closer, this thing is almost too dynamic. I almost want to say it needs the soggy-ass whiskey song on the first half to slow it down, though I might feel differently about that if it wasn’t redeemed by the ass-showing whiskey song on the second half. Only marginally less of a concept album that last year’s Lindeville. But if anything, her gift for variety has grown. A
No-No Boy: Empire Electric
After the academic rigour of previous releases, the third album from Berklee-trained ethnomusicologist Julian Saporiti evokes as much as explains the particulars of time and place, which is no surprise once you know it was conceived during a stay at a Buddhist monastery. His soundscaping is so thoughtful you might not know when you’re hearing the kotos and baus, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be touched by their impressionistic gestalt. Fundamentally, though, he’s a writer, so it’s the stories that stick. On my favourite, a Nashville native meets Manila-born Kara Oki (geddit?) whose foreign perspective helps him reframe Gram’s jacket in the hall of fame and whose golden voice gives them a hit big enough to tour on but not big enough to sustain their love for the city. Other gems include a birdsong-accompanied romance between a Scotsman who makes funny sounds learning Japanese for his future wife and one about survivors of the Heart Mountain detention camp who start an onion farm in Oregon. Which is where Saporiti recently relocated to, subsequently finding out that its “discovery” by a 1603 voyage up the Californian coast included Asian sailors. Which is one more thread woven into the identity tapestry he’s made his life’s work. A MINUS
Meshell Ndegeocello: The Omnichord Real Book
Just when you think these exotic flutterings are too delicate to land more than a glancing blow, in come the basslines of “Omnipuss” and “Clear Water”. And soon go away again. * (“Omnipuss” “Clear Water”)
Bill Scorzari: The Crosswinds of Kansas (2022)
This venerably bearded ex-defence attorney had his professional fate sealed when his dad mock-enrolled him at his law school alma mater on the day he was born. Having swapped that career for the guitar he’s been playing unorthodoxly since he was 8, he’s become a dispenser of hippie wisdom without hippie pieties, singing in a conversations-with-myself ramble that would’ve got him kicked out of court but here feels elegantly imprecise. A songwriter’s songwriter but also a songwriter’s singer, each word is carefully weighed by a voice I’d call harsh and raspy if it wasn’t so gentle. The playing (supplemented by Prine, Lambert, and Emmylou hands during tidying-up sessions in Nashville) is exactly as considered as you’d expect from someone who commissioned two Navajo flutes (plus hand decorations and phonetic translations) for a single song. Over the hour, expect more questions than answers, and for the answers such as they are to be more concerned with how hard you try than how much you know. “I'm just waiting for the courage to accept what I can't change.” “With every confrontation that shakes me to my core / There comes a revelation that I seem to have had before." “I crawled down in a wishing well about as deep as I could go / And I find there's still no drawing water there without a bucket and a long rope / And then the thought occurred to me that I should've spent more time / On other things than wishing wells / Like learning how to climb.” And those are just the short ones. A MINUS
*Okay, I’m 2nd in the fantasy league and 1st in the draft league, but we all know which is the real quiz.