January 2022: listening report
In which I suggest Lori McKenna is Morgan Wade's mum and am only half joking
And so ends month one of Operation: Catch Up On What I Missed In 2021. Six albums from yesteryear make my A-list. I’ve got a few words on the nearly-rans, too. All told, that means I’ve got too many words.
Having been promised the most sexually explicit country album ever, I initially resisted Morgan Wade’s Reckless because it didn’t include ‘Country WAP’. Presumably, because “wet ass protestant” has too many syllables. But then I got hooked by the less salacious quality of her tenderness. Plaintive, a little roughened, and wilting at the end of her lines, she sounds like Lori McKenna’s wayward daughter come home. Writes like her, too. Indulge that fantasy and suddenly all her songs sound like Lori’s advice to her fifteen-year-old daughter come true: “You’ll be broken-hearted but you’ll do it anyway”. That’s from ‘Hail Mary’, on Lori’s Christmas Is Here EP. It’s like Lori wrote it for Morgan twelve years ago, then waited until she’d learnt from her mistakes and turned them into songs before releasing it. Anyway, back to the real world. Wade’s songs detail failed relationships and the edges of addiction. But not too much detail—this isn’t just country, it’s pop-country. I also missed that initially. Swooping hooks, multi-tracked vocals, bold guitars high in the mix, and stadium-sized drums give lines like, “I don’t want you to be over yet / Won’t you be my last cigarette?” and “Lose yourself and break your heart / It’s a beautiful thing to fall apart” the emotional force they need to fill the arenas Wade’s surely got her eye on. Some of that is also reminiscent of Lori… but let’s not go there again.
In a less wholesome corner of country, I spent some time with Morgan Wallen. Whattaguy. After ploughing into Luke Combs’ 23-song double (triple? quadruple?) album this time last year, I thought I should raise the stakes. With seven songs and sixteen minutes on Luke, Wallen makes it clear on Dangerous: The Double (lol) Album that he’s got a hubris problem. A repetition problem, too. There are consecutive songs addressed to a bartender, the gag “one shot, two shot, three shot, more” is used twice, and in a run of four songs, three have ‘Country’ in the title (Somethin’ Country, Country A$$ Shit, and Whatcha Think of Country Now—the odd one out is about, er, a bar). None of which stops Dangerous from being the most sonically progressive country album of last year. It’s got an intoxicating gauziness and is rich in woozy guitars. Wallen’s voice, which shows just a few flecks of autotune, somehow sounds more fucked up from the night before with each song. With over thirty of them, that’s a lot of heavy nights. It’s an atmosphere more familiar to druggy, melodic rappers who overwhelm you with their inability to say “enough”. Cloying, oppressive, deeply flawed—but also kind of gorgeous.
While we’re in Nashville, let’s visit Mark Fredson. But tread softly, he’s probably nursing a hangover. Every time I catch whiff of a session musician on one of his songs, I feel for his wallet. The guy seems in bad shape. Or maybe he’s just a convincing storyteller. Probably both. Specialising in keyboard schlock, hard luck stories, and squeezed-bollocks-plus-a-head-cold vocals, he works your pathos and irony in equal measure. He opens Nothing But Night with typical understatement (“So I had a couple late nights”) and carries on with similar economy. There’s the mismatched relationship he makes work ‘Until It Don’t’, a vow to let nothing stop him from doing as he likes (starts with him “drinking red wine on the terrace” with an “heiress” in “Paris”, ends with him a weekend dad sleeping on his friend’s couch), and a spiky apology song in which he retracts his commiserations to a bested suitor: “Sorry Johnny, don’t take it so hard / Take it from me for future reference / People ain’t possessions / And come to think of it: I ain’t that sorry, Jonny.” Fredson wears his references on his sleeve because, well, what’s a bush-league schlockmeister got to lose? Steely Dan get name-checked in song and the press material, he slips a “hungry heart” and big Bruce count-in to ‘You Gotta Be Kiddin me’, and on ‘Drag Me Away’ borrows a tune from Dylan’s ‘Man In Me’. The somewhere-between-inspirational-and-despondent motto on that one: “Long as I've got credit cards, I'll keep chasing the applause / Just an aging hipster on one of many last hurrahs”.
And now to En-ger-land. While I weigh up the possibility that Black Country, New Road are bellends, I’m thrilled to have Squid as an alternative. Key differences: i) they didn’t go to Cambridge, so get less British press attention. ii) they have virtually no interest in palatability. In fact, I’m sure they go out of their way to stick in your craw. Given the band name, maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. Talented multi-instrumentalists, they melt between clangy, clamorous, springy, and spongey. Sometimes they’re funky, sometimes they’re setting sail on a four-minute drone freakout. It’s all in keeping with the droll, obtuse edginess that runs through the current post-punk revival. But they’re also sympathetic. I feel for Oli Judge’s inability to locate his disenfranchisement beyond, “What’s your favourite war on TV?” or “As the sun sets on the Glaxo Kline / It’s the only way I can tell the time”. You can picture him, fingernails pressed into palms as he struggles to spit it out. And so those freakouts are a relief. The best comes in ‘Narrator’, when guest Martha Skye Murphy starts as sedate, disembodied voice, and finishes a shrieking nightmare. The emotion she and Squid are trying to express falls somewhere between those two extremes.
While we’re talking freakouts, weirdo Geordie folkie Richard Dawson has collaborated with weirdo Finnish death metallers Circle. The result is weird. It also makes me burst out laughing. I suppose in a gallows humour kind of way, but I may also be laughing at them. Dawson is just so audaciously prosaic. “There was one gentleman / Walked on by, smile beaming / Though I knew him gravely ill / Confined to bed / I'd soon learn he was, in fact, hours dead”. That should have absolutely no poetry, but stick on ‘Ivy’ and see for yourself. If you do, please let me know if Henki really does prove that metal and folk are made of the same stuff, just played at different speeds, or if Dawson & Circle are pulling my leg. The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die should have an entry in this section, but I used half my word quota writing their name, and all my patience enduring two fifteen plus minute songs. So tough luck. And then there’s Tori Amos. More parent-friendly than the other two, she makes the weirdo division because Ocean to Ocean sounds like the soundtrack to a combination of Everdell and Catan (Seafarers expansion).
From folk-metal weirdos to venture capitalist-cum-hobbyist rappers.
Prestige or lounge rap—apparently, it’s a bad thing. Except when Nas (who reportedly made $40m when his company sold its stake in Ring to Amazon) leans back in Hit-Boy’s ultra-confident production, I don’t hear it that way. Investment playbook rap may not be what I expected from rappers pushing fifty. It may not even be what I want. But it’s what I’ve got. Whether he’s adding his chapter on the East coast/West coast feud to hip-hop history or playing lifestyle adviser on ‘Brunch on Sundays’, I’m listening. Like the song says, he’s in rare form, reasserting his all-timers skills on the first five or six tracks. He’s cogent enough at reconciling how to “keep it thuggin’” now he’s a suit, too: “TECs in the dresser, money off tech, pushing a Tesla / Rolled up a fresh one, it's one IPO to the next one.” But it’s in the middle section that King’s Disease II comes alive. He glides over the beat like it’s just another trip on his PJ, verses dripping with detail: “Colours of lightbulbs change through voice command / Flew over Antigua, made the choice to land / Set my feet on a private island, house come with a staff / Chef know how to cook with no salt and low fat.” Yet for all that, the highlight is still a guest feature. Trotting out Lauryn Hill for a 34-bar verse? That’s don status.
And finally, a quiz! Q: What is Benny the Butcher doing with these Meatloaf beats? (Answer at the end). Before Pyrex Picasso, he was the last rapper I would have expected to come sashaying in surrounded by, frankly, some very silly piano bashing and chipmunked vocals. Yet ‘Flood the Block’ is irresistible. So is the camp-gothic ‘The Iron Curtain’, which until the internet proves me wrong I’m assuming samples Kane’s late-90’s entrance music. Other than ‘73’, which is strongly reminiscent of the production on Daytona, the four other songs are more typical of Griselda, though less menacing. That’s in keeping with Benny’s stance in general. He’s merely surveying the causes, effects, and facts of his life as a violent lawbreaker, not threatening you with them. In ths way, he puts me in mind of a criminal defence lawyer. A camp, pro wrestler-sized criminal defence lawyer. What an elevator pitch!
(A: Making the best music of his career—what I’ve heard of it, anyway)
Morgan Wade: Reckless (Grade: A)
Lori McKenna: Christmas Is Right Here (Grade: A minus)
Mark Fredson: Nothing But Night (Grade: A minus)
Nas: King’s Disease II (Grade: A minus)
Squid: Bright Green Field (Grade: A minus)
Benny The Butcher - Pyrex Picasso (Grade: A minus)
Morgan Wallen: Dangerous: The Double Album (Grade: B plus)
Honourable mentions
Richard Dawson & Cricle: Henki (2021)
The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die: Illusory Walls (2021)
Tori Amos: Ocean to Ocean (2021)
Babes Wodumo: Crown (2021)
Cimafunk: El Alimento (2021)
Sturgill Simpson: The Ballad of Dood & Juanita (2021)
"I suppose in a gallows humour kind of way, but I may also be laughing at them." It's for lines like this that I pay the subscription fee. Love it. More please!