Pointed Reviews: Music in 2021

The following is a collection of reviews of albums I wrote in 2021 that I consider to be “pointed” pieces of criticism. These are reviews that tend to operate with a specific thesis or angle in their critique. Some of them have been edited slightly. These were all posted on Rate Your Music. You can follow me there to see these reviews and more by clicking here.

I have very mixed feelings on music criticism in general. But I figured it was a good exercise to try writing thoughts on music out. Please take it all with the knowledge in mind that I think you can and should enjoy whatever you damn well please! If you’d like to read some reviews of games from 2021, click here, and if you’re interested in movie reviews from 2021, click here.

Up (2002) — Peter Gabriel

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. And yeah, you shouldn’t. But I can’t help but notice things like this.

Peter Gabriel’s first three albums have a theme of sorts on their covers. They feature Peter Gabriel’s face in monochrome distorted or obscured in some way. For Car, he’s sitting behind the windshield of a car covered in rain. For Scratch, he peers out between white tears on the cover. And for Melt, his face has been melted like paint in the rain. Security broke this trend. And after that, So and Us featured much more traditional covers, while Passion’s in between those two was understandably abstract.

Why do I say all this? Well, I can’t help but notice there’s a bit of a correlation between the albums’ sounds and their respective covers. Peter Gabriel’s first three albums are in more of a rock style, but with distinctive flairs of progressive rock with unique production and composition. Around his fourth album, the darkness present in the previous album was amplified with a heavily synthetic sound. This is also where Gabriel started to bring in more world music influences, which came to full maturity with So’s more poppy sound, and Us, which is practically worldbeat.

10 years later, Up comes out. Its cover harkens back to decades ago: Peter Gabriel’s face is blurred nearly beyond recognition, and put in the foreground is a line of floating water droplets. And with it, we see a return to the dark, brooding moods of early Gabriel that mix so well with more traditional rock and pop sounds.

That of course is not to say that Up sounds like “an old school PG album”. Far from it in more ways than one. It certainly has world music influences; hell, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is featured on it! It’s also funky and energetic quite often; in fact, it sounds quite a lot like Us in a lot of ways. And it certainly doesn’t sound, production-wise, like it’s from the late 70s or early 80s. Sonically, it’s dense, technological, and distinctly contemporary. Peter Gabriel as always is an incredible vocal talent, but with age, his voice has deepened and changed, which adds a maturity and a gravel to this album.

Rather, I perceive a sensibility and a bleakness that was missing from the Us and So. I mean, the first song is literally called “Darkness”, which opens quiet but then explodes into distorted blasts. That sets the tone for the album. The lyrics constantly reference death and dying, and layered with depression and anxiety. But again, that’s not to say there isn’t energy within this album. If anything, it’s constantly ping-ponging between sinisterly moody, energetically funky, and somber sweetness. Within a single song, you might experience all three of those.

So… maybe it sounds like I really like this album. But… I mean, I really like parts of it. Most of the songs are fine, even quite good. Songs like “More Than This” and “Growing Up” manage to engage me. But there’s just something… missing. The pieces are in place, but it just doesn’t come together for me. For example, “The Barry Williams Show”, while a bit edgy, on-the-nose and definitely dated, is one of the best songs on the album, but it feels so completely out of place to the degree that I’m surprised if it’s even on here. “Darkness” is probably my favorite song on the album; it’s dark, dynamic, but moves into a romantic yet eerie chorus. “Signal to Noise” is also a contender, a dramatic penultimate song with a cataclysmic eminence, along with the uneasy “My Head Sounds Like That”. However two songs, “Sky Blue” and “I Grieve” I find utterly soporific both in tone and in enjoyment. The former is just a momentary valley in the album, while the latter is the worst song on the album. While I respect what “I Grieve” is trying to say, and enjoy the lyrics, it is ultimately an unbearably corny and awkward song. Being so dull is something I’ve never had to deal with in Gabriel’s career. Not since “Don’t Give Up”, at least.

Tracks like these show the potential for this chapter of Peter Gabriel’s work that just wasn’t totally fulfilled. It certainly partially fulfills it, but in the valleys of this album, I find myself often unable to keep my interest. Those moments lack sharpness, lack the wit and ambition that is present at its peaks. I try to review and critique media on its own merits, but it’s difficult not to look at Up, since it seems like it will be Peter Gabriel’s final album of original material, within its context as a part of his over his decades-long solo career. It’s undoubtedly a good album, with some high highs, but it just never quite comes together for me as a whole, and never quite fulfills its enormous potential.

Roman Songs (2021) — John Linnell

As a State Songs stan, learning that Linnell was releasing a new solo album had me incredibly excited. I adore his solo work. House of Mayors, his solo EP, is an experimental pop album themed around mayors of New York City. State Songs is a weird little concept album loosely themed around U.S. states (while in reality typically only borrowing their names) featuring the hallmark features of Linnell’s music: wit, bleakness, unreliable narrators, energetic bops, accordion, all that. It’s easily one of my all-time favorites. Needless to say, I was pumped to hear Roman Songs was on the way. But upon hearing the lead single, “Haec qvoqve est res”, I felt a bit uncertain. The music was funky and strange, which was great, but it was then that I realized what it being sung entirely in Latin actually entailed.

The music here is cool and catchy and strange, with all the hallmarks of classic Linnell bops; I have no complaints. The problem is that, for me, half the pleasure of John Linnell’s music is his ever clever lyrics. I sincerely believe he’s one of the greatest songwriters of the English language. Apparently, Linnell initially intended to write these lyrics in Latin himself, but upon discovering how little he was capable of expressing after a remedial course, he asked a friend, a classics professor, to translate lyrics he wrote in English. (One of these tracks’ lyrics, “Tecvm circvmambvlare nolo”, is just a translation of a Ramones’ song.) When I look at the lyrics in English, they’re exactly the kind of thing you would expect from Linnell: slightly cryptic, silly, poetic. When he’s singing in Latin, you lose all that. I have to lean over and check out a translated lyrics sheet. It’s interesting and ambitious, but you won’t find me singing along.

Give It To Me (2017) — Miya Folick

I’m sure I could come up with some well-reasoned and maybe even convincing explanation as to why I think Give It To Me is an incredible EP. But it would just be a posthoc rationalization. Because this is in the body.

I have a tendency to want to engage with art in a manner that strives towards some invisible, unknown ideal of intellectuality. It often suits me. But sometimes it’s a bit dishonest, and I think that’s one of the reasons I find most art criticism (even the good stuff) to inspire in me a visceral repulsion. Because there’s nothing rational about this stuff sometimes.

So Give It To Me is a sensation, many sensations, a wall of sensations. In one word, it is raw. Maybe that’s cliche. But that’s how I feel it. The fuzzy guitar tones, the sleepy drums, and most of all, Miya Folick’s voice. She is an incredible vocalist. Again, I’m sure I could try to come up with reasons as to just why I think her voice is great. But again… posthoc. It just works for me.

I don’t want to go song by song (for the reasons I’ve just gotten into), but I do want to address the title track, “Give It To Me”. It’s a powerful song with a megaton of energy. She has stated that she can’t really sing this song live anymore because it is too taxing on her voice. That’s what I mean when I emphasize the word “raw”. It’s a sound that is so intense and physical that it’s almost too much.

Miya Folick has gone in more of a synth-pop direction, and I think that stuff is phenomenal, too. (I have a deep fondness for Premonitions.) But the indie rock fuzziness pairing with her distinct singing voice is something I adore, too. Again, it’s in the body; that’s where I feel it. And that’s everything that matters sometimes.

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (1974) — Genesis

When I break The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway into its individual parts, I find a lot to enjoy. It’s got a wide range of sounds, pep, aggression, angst, all that good stuff. There are some phenomenal moments in here that stick with me. I could pick out the majority of these tracks as good, and a few brilliant songs. But when taken as a whole, the album is so bloated, going on for over 90 minutes, that it all descends into this mush that I can’t quite remember. I get why people love it; it's a pop-prog coming-of-age concept album. That’s wonderfully grandiose and all, but that isn’t intrinsically good. By the end, the whole album is a haze, perhaps fittingly, considering its lyrics’ hypnagogic imagery. But I struggle to latch onto much with Lamb, as much as I want to; the whole experience becomes indistinct and fuzzy, muddying the sharpness of its constituent strengths.

Classics in the Key of G (1999) — Kenny G

Contrary to how people talk about Kenny G, the problem is not that he can’t play. There’s a meme I’m sure we’ve all seen of Kenny G attempting a “one note solo” (failing if he was attempting a mid-century homage) and this clip is labeled “Kenny G plays Giant Steps”. But you know, there actually are some clips of Kenny G playing Coltrane’s solos, and he blisters through the sheets. The reality is that Kenny G is actually a pretty sharp performer, careening through licks with confidence.

No, the problem is not that Kenny G is unskilled. The problem is that Kenny G is flashy.

See, that “Kenny G plays Giant Steps” meme? He’s actually standing up and walking around the theater as he’s doing that, walking down the aisles, handshaking with audience members. He’s showing off. With the magic of circular breathing, Kenny G manages to hold one note for well over a minute. And this kind of flamboyance is all over Kenny G’s work, with a kind of “sexy” sound oozing out of every measure. His saxophone tone is notoriously unctuous and saccharine. It’s the musical equivalent of a sportscar. For many, this vibe is the opposite of what we want in jazz. Nuance, zeal, verve, sorrow, mirth, but rarely “flashiness”. Instead, we get pornographic showboating. I have no idea what he’s like in real life, but based on his music, you would probably think he’s got the ego the size of a dirigible, with the hot air in his head, to boot.

Kenny G isn’t untalented, but his music is all style, and his style kinda sucks. It’s, in a word, soulless. Never is this more clear when he’s attempting to send up jazz standards as he is here. The record musters nothing of note and nothing of beauty. Nothing on this record is too offensive to the ears, sure. That’s the whole point of it: there’s nothing abrasive, so no one is pushed away, and as a result, virtually nothing to hold onto. There’s no invention or creativity. He manages to play a whole lot without adding anything. That’s not an accident; that’s the goal. That’s the cardinal sin of Kenny G: an empty, sonic vanity that evokes, at best, an eye roll.

The Boy with the Arab Strap (1998) — Belle and Sebastian

Sorry folks, I get the appeal, but I’m not a fan. Murdoch’s feathered vocals grate on me, and the overbearing softness makes me understand why people use “twee” with derision. That said, I’m able to find more to appreciate with this album than with the previous, If You’re Feeling Sinister, which was so overwhelmingly tepid that I struggle to remember anything about it, as I’m able to name at least a few songs on here that I find to be good. There are some decent choruses throughout. There’s even a run of tracks in the mid-to-back half where it actually appears that the album is going to start getting good, and I would actually go as far as to say is songs I actively enjoy listening to. But it’s only a passing moment before the album slips back into the grand mush of lukewarm that that glimpse of ingenuity is submerged in.

Again, I get why people like it. It’s easy, bittersweet, a bit lush, even a little charming. The lyrics, when I could muster the interest to listen to them, seem clever enough. There are flashes of brightness, but I can never make it out through the fog of twee. Maybe if I was born earlier, and had grown up through the grunge era, there would be something novel about their sound. Instead, it’s instantly recognizable as the soundtrack of a TV commercial.

Emanon (2018) — The Wayne Shorter Quartet

It’s undeniably beautiful, but I can’t help but think it would have faired better as three separate albums rather than one big one. After all, many of the songs are repeated, and I don’t think there’s a new composition on here. I get the sense that Shorter is getting grandiose in his later years, increasingly bending towards a Third Stream revival. He’s entitled to. Go on, Wayne, write that opera, release this triple album monstrosity that comes with a graphic novel. Go for it. Why not? But I’m not sure that it will result in his best work. This could have been one great record and two great live albums. Instead, it’s an enormous and incongruous beast, buckling under its own weight. Is it still good? Oh, totally.

Sing to God (1996) — Cardiacs

Cardiacs is an uncompromising group. From the beginning, they seemed hellbent on alienating people. They didn’t dress like drunken clowns by the time Sing to God came out, but that didn’t stop them from being creepy in new ways. But even more than their aesthetics, it’s their music that upsets people probably the most. For every elated fan, there’s at least one disgusted hater. I believe this is due in no small part to how they sound. Sure, their often atonal compositions punctuated by their signature rapidly shifting odd rhythms aren’t exactly approachable. But there is a reason Tim Smith (Rest in Peace) considered his group to be pop. Despite the complexity of their harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic structures, these songs are just as often gratifying and exciting in the way you would want from a radio hit. There is a universe where Cardiacs were a progressive pop juggernaut. But instead, all that is performed in a carnivalistic and aggressive blitz to the senses. Saxophones, electric organs, Smith’s zany vocals, these complicate the music to your ears. Throughout their history, their production has been abrasive and dense, almost impenetrable in conjunction with their music.

This is no doubt true of Sing to God. While their releases of the 1980s were characterized by an erratic post-punk flavor, the 1990s saw Cardiacs embrace a grander and more rollicking sound, but it’s not just the typical thrash of hard rock. The wild melodic runs and the jerky rhythms are still here, but now there’s even more to put you off. The guitars are louder, more distorted, bigger. The drums are faster, the keyboards are noisier, the lyrics are just as esoteric and even a bit frightening. There are these constant waves of sparkling noises. The hallmark sound of Sing to God is a warbling cacophony. The melodies almost always have this intense phasing or tremolo effect over them. That, or there’s a sharply pitch-shifted chorus under. Hell, a lot of the time it’s both. It’s pretty immediately off-putting. Some people are gonna love it, but a lot of people are going to just immediately stop listening.

Which is a shame, because, underneath all that, Sing to God is full of beauty and energy. Listen closely, and it’s hard to deny that Tim Smith was some kind of genius. The way these chord progressions move in and out of themselves, the way the melodies never go quite where you expect them to, it’s often stunning. There is a way tension manages to transform rather than build throughout some of these songs that is profound. Even out of that, too, there are just songs on here that simply whip. There’s pop jams, punkish anthems, spastic rhapsodies, cataclysmic odes. There are songs here that make me want to jump out of my seat screaming, and not in fear. I think, if you peel away all that unease, there is a song for most people somewhere on this album. There is real beauty here. But it takes listening past or even growing appreciation for the twinkling and the warbling to find it. And that’s going to be too big an ask for most people. It’s too big for me, sometimes. But I’ll be damned if Sing to God doesn’t shine bright, too.

All images have been taken from Rate Your Music.