Ladys Album Of The Week

On Bandcamp.

Despite an album cover which depicts Dorota Szuta eating watermelon in a swimsuit in a lake, Notions is one of those albums I turn to in November, when the days get long and the nights get cold. It is a theme which recurs in the lyrics: « Stock the cupboards out for winter; we got months til new things start to grow », she sings on “Breathe”; « stock up on the timber; feed the pine nuts to the passing crows ».

The acoustic sound and excellent rhythms of Heavy Gus makes Notions an easy album to listen to, but the lyrical depth and imagery reward more considered thought. This is an album I wasn¦t expecting to keep coming back to when it released in 2022—a year that also furnished us with King Hannah¦s I¦m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me and Horsegirl¦s Versions of Modern Performance—but which just kept growing on me, especially as the year wore on and the nights grew longer.

Favourite track: “Scattered” is a good song to sit with, I think.

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On Bandcamp. On MusicBrainz.

This album is the perfect hiphop album and there will never be a better one.

This is a contentious take, so I want to be clear: Bayani Redux does not have the most interesting composition (Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp A Butterfly), the best flow (RA Scion & Gifted Youngstaz: TRUE||FORM: Genuflexion EP), the most skillful storytelling (Noname: Telefone), or the most affecting narrative (Nujabes f‍t Shing02: Luv(sic) Hexology).

But every single track in this album knows exactly what it is doing, and does exactly what it needs to do to achieve it. There are no duds. Like all good rap, it is geographically and temporally situated; it doesn¦t take itself too seriously but it takes itself seriously enough. Geo describes it well in the final lines of “Second Chapter”: « To survivors of economic and natural disasters, living for the right here and not the here·after: a handful of tracks, each a snapshot to capture the trials, and tribulations, and smiles. »

Bayani Redux is exactly that. Each track is a snapshot in time, somewhere and someplace between Honolulu, 1980 and Seattle, 2009. It describes the joy, struggle, infighting, and kinship of being a young West Coast communist in a time when the War on Terror was in full swing, police departments were militarizing, the Great Recession was looming, and the spirit of radicalism seemed to have collapsed into dust.

« Things happen for a reason, they say, but I say there¦s a reason things happen. » Our collective amnesia about the Bush years does us no favours in trying to understand the present or where we can go from here. Bayani Redux offers a bit of an antidote, not by transcending hiphops potential as an artform, but by perfectly enacting it.

Favourite track: All of them; this album has no duds. But, okay, “Morning of America”.

#AlbumOfTheWeek

On MusicBrainz.

I am young enough that most of my parents music collection was in C·D format, altho they did keep a small number of cassettes. I first encountered No Need To Argue in this latter collection, long after my parents had mostly transitioned to exclusively playing from their C·D cabinet. I went many years without listening to it during the iPod era (not having a digital copy), but I returned to it with newfound appreciation once I finally secured a digital version in college. While my parents did have Stars: The Best Of 1992–2002 on C·D, I honestly didn¦t listen to it much; No Need To Argue is The Cranberries¦s best album, and it is best listened to as an album, so the greatest‐hits collection always left me feeling disappointed (not that it doesn¦t have some bangers).

After the cover art, which definitely ranks among the top 20 album covers from the 90s in my opinion, what attracted me most as a kid in the early naughts was the albums opening track, “Ode To My Family”. While it is normally not trivial to cue up individual tracks on cassette, the leading track on the tape is the exception to this rule, and I definitely did rewind and replay it multiple times in my childhood. I was enamoured with the way Dolores O¦Riordan pronounced “mother” and “father”, and I was mystified by the content—my naïve expectations regarding an “ode” were of positive emotions, and yet it confronted me repeatedly with the phrase « Does anyone care? ». At that time in my life, I had been taught to think of swearing as rude and hostile, but the line « Where¦s when I was young, and we didn¦t give a damn? » felt sweet, melancholic, and longing. I didn¦t know how to resolve these tensions as a young child, but I was fascinated by them.

It is incredibly difficult to describe the complicated feelings associated with a break·up in terms that an 8‐year‐old, unable to fathom dating, can understand, but I think O¦Riordan managed it in “I Can¦t Be With You” with « I wanted to be the mother of your child, and now it¦s just farewell », a line which will never be topped despite not even coming from the best break·up song on the album. Motherhood is a concept that artists tend to shy away from, and when artists do depict it, it usually takes on a privatizing manifestation—songs written to or about ones own children, divorced from society at‐large. In contrast, motherhood saturates No Need To Argue unapologetically, socially, and almost virginally: “I Can¦t Be With You” mourns the loss of possibility of being a mother; “The Icicle Melts” empathizes with other mothers after their children suffer violence; “Dreaming My Dreams” portrays the perspective of falling in love with some·one who already has a child. These tracks collectively form the basis of a different kind of ethic than one traditionally finds in punk scenes, and a different conception of love than is typically found in pop. It is profoundly and intimately feminine with·out depending on recourse to either patriarchal tropes or bio·essentialism; this is a fount of motherhood that all women can draw upon, regardless of whether they personally have carried a child to term.

Most of the remaining tracks exhibit a similar fusion of intensely personal emotion and a social awareness, and conscious social positioning, which is broad, feminine, and coalition‐building. Altho some of these songs do make good singles (nothing more needs to be said about “Zombie”), I¦m of the opinion that they all land their hardest in and with the context of the greater whole.

Favourite track: In the context of the album, I think the final track, “No Need To Argue”, is perfect in its minimalism. “Daffodil Lament” stands a bit better on its own.

#AlbumOfTheWeek

On Bandcamp. On MusicBrainz.

A core concept in Freudian psychoanalysis is that of Eros, or “love”. Despite the translation, Eros is not love as you or I would think of it; rather, it is heterosexual love, which is to say, the drive to reproduction. Reproduction can be social in addition to sexual: People care for themselves and each other, form families, build societies, plan for and enact their futures, raise children, and, of course, fuck, all because they have an innate psychosexual drive to reproduce themselves—according to Freud.

But people are not purely social, and nor are they entirely heterosexual. Some find the confines of straight, structured, suburban life to be chafing. Some find the futures that they have built for themselves do not match who “they” “really” are. Some get tired of being nice and just want to go ape shitt. And some (queerly) view sex as something other than just reproduction, and choose their partners accordingly.

To explain why people are more complex than ants in an anthill, Freud came up with a second innate drive which must power us: Thanatos, the death drive. Because humans form identities, there is ever the chance that our inner lives, our identities, and the social expectations upon us don¦t “line up”. This is, to Freud, an uncomfortable situation to be in. When this happens, we are compelled to destroy our lives, our identities, or society. We would rather live in a state of disorder than live in a state of order that is wrong.

Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other:

a surname a sexual dyad a legal unit based on state‐regulated marriage a circuit of blood relationships a system of companionship and succor a building a proscenium between “private” and “public” an economic unit of earning and taxation the prime site of economic consumption the prime site of cultural consumption a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations a daily routine a unit in a community of worship a site of patriotic formation

and of course the list could go on. Looking at my own life, I see that—probably like most people—I have valued and pursued these various elements of family identity to quite differing degrees (e.g., no use at all for worship, much need for companionship). But what’s been consistent in this particular life is an interest in not letting very many of these dimensions line up directly with each other at one time. I see it’s been a ruling intuition for me that the most productive strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to disarticulate them from one another, to disengage them—the bonds of blood, of law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and succor—from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called “family”.

— Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer And Now” (1993).

In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman argued that homosexuals should lean into their role as vanguards of Thanatos and try to bring about the end of reproductive society. Edelman argued that futurity itself is a heterosexual concept that gays needn¦t be burdened with; after all, if you aren¦t going to have kids, why worry about survival of the human race? He was subsequently roasted by lesbian moms everywhere, who have had no problem being simultaneously reproductive and gay, and by all people of culture, who unlike sub·urbanites actually saw some advantages to keeping this whole social thing going. Probably, they wrote, Lee Edelman just didn¦t want to pay property taxes funding his local school district.

But it is important to recognize that, no matter how much of an edgy fuckboy Edelman might have been, he was really only accepting a role that Freudian psychoanalysis had already laid out for him. Why be gay, Freud might ask, when straights are happier, healthier, and more accepted? Why love the same sex, when sexual reproduction is predicated on heterosexuality? What does it mean to stand for these things, if not an embrace of death?

For people who aren¦t Lee Edelman and think these questions have a genuine, positive answer… what is it?

Blood Bitch is an album about lesbian vampires, and it is an exploration of queerness and the death drive as something other than just the end of society as we know it. Jenny Hval begins the album lost, struggling to make sense of the world, struggling for her own identity, and struggling in the name of Eros—love. « I need to keep writing, » she sings in “The Great Undressing”, « because everything else is death. I’m selfsufficient, mad, and endlessly producing; I don’t need money, I just need your love, or your approval, anything. » But Eros is “like capitalism”, forever exploitative, unable to satisfy her desire because it cares only for sustaining itself.

Over the course of the album, the classic formula becomes inverted, and the endless production of Eros becomes itself a source of death. Instead, it is Thanatos, emblematized by vampiric desire, which becomes life‐affirming: « It¦s exchanging one drive for another drive. There comes a certain point in our lives when we more·or·less desperately want to be bad. And we gladly exchange the good things just, for a short moment, to feel alive » (“Secret Touch”). Thru·out the album, the image of period blood—of failed reproduction—recurs, as a font of identity, and an asocial symbol of individuation which springs unbidden and cannot be ignored. Far from the romanticized Freudian notion of reproduction as life, the risks and dangers associated with pregnancy cannot go unstated; menstruation, birth “kept under control”, the drawing of blood and the pursuit of selfdestruction: these things, these symbols of Thanatos, become absolutely necessary for survival.

When you say I love you—staying right here, close to you, close to me—you’re saying I love myself. You don’t need to wait for it to be given back; neither do I. We don’t owe each other anything. That “I love you” is neither gift nor debt. You “give” me nothing when you touch yourself, touch me, when you touch yourself again through me. You don’t give yourself. What would I do with you, with myself, wrapped up like a gift?

— Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together” (1977; translated by Catherine Porter 1985).

This is not all Blood Bitch is about, but it is hopefully enough context to begin to appreciate what it is going for. Sonically, it is the perfect Halloween album, relying heavily on noise, spoken word recordings, and a vocal style which seems calculated to make the kind of guy who complains about womens voices immediately tune out. I encourage you not to be this kind of guy.

Favourite track: The pair of “Secret Touch” and “Lorna” (and, in particular, the transition between them) cannot be beat. But “Untamed Region” deserves an honourable mention for its spoken word prowess.

#AlbumOfTheWeek

On Bandcamp. On MusicBrainz.

The Mariners sadly did not manage to make it to the World Series, but game 7 of the A·L·C·S is still pretty damn close—todays recommendation is here to represent for all of the Seattle fans. The Unplanned Mixtape is, as its name suggests, an informal release of five (or, in some cases, ten) tracks which represent some of Macklemore¦s finest early work. The five principal tracks are all solid in my book :⁠—

• “The Town” is easily the best track on the album and (i·m·o) one of Macklemore¦s best songs ever for its ability to capture the place, mood, and community of Seattle. There are a tonne of references that you may not get if you aren¦t up on the scene, but here are a few of the important ones :⁠—

  • The name of the track is itself a reference to the Seattle hiphop community, which locally referred to itself as the Town.

  • My Philosophy was a hiphop column in The Stranger, a Seattle newspaper. Many Seattle hiphop acts of this era will make reference to The Stranger and its column as a sign of “making it” in the Seattle scene.

  • “Mr Mayor, why would you enforce an ordinance?” is a reference to the Teen Dance Ordinance in Seattle, which effectively banned all nonschool dance events for teenagers in the city from 1985 to 2002. People who aren¦t from Seattle tend to think of it as a haven of grunge and indie rock, but fail to understand that these genres only succeeded because they targeted older audiences and thus were unaffected by the ordinance. In contrast, newer music scenes like that of hiphop strongly depended on youth participation and were severely damaged. As all Seattle hiphop acts in the 90s and 00s knew, the reason that the northwest was absent from national conversations around hiphop was because of legislation like this making it very difficult to build a scene.

  I recommend watching the music video for “The Town” as it provides imagery of the faces and streets that characterized Seattle hiphop at this time. See also the Sabzi remix. And, for what is hopping in Seattle hiphop more recently, take a listen to Grynch, Greg Cypher, RA Scion & Gifted Youngstaz in “Rebuild”.

• “Church” is a fairly unassuming but competent track glorifying hiphop which is boosted by the appearance of Geologic from the Blue Scholars. Blue Scholars are another classic Seattle hiphop act who will definitely be covered in more depth on this blog in the future.

• “American” is a satire piece cautioning Seattle liberals against feeling too cosy after Obama¦s victory in the 2008 election because the underlying cultural issues of the Bush era did not vanish in the aftermath. How well it lands for you will probably depend on how well you remember the early years of the War on Terror and how much tolerance you have for white dudes satirizing the homophobia, Islamophobia, and anti·immigrant sentiments of other white dudes. For clarity, “Aberdeen, Washington” is the name of a town a few hours south of Seattle. The fact that the protagonist of the song roots for the Dallas Cowboys is not intended to indicate that he is from Texas, despite what commentators on Genius might try to tell you.

• “Fallin” is an angst track. Macklemore is pretty good at these, which you might not realize if you only know him from his bangers; he is less corny than usual when talking about heavy shit and the structure, flow, and production are all competent and well‐executed on this one.

• “And We Danced” is a fun party song, produced by Ryan Lewis, of the kind Macklemore became famous for. There¦s not much to say about this one, but it makes a nice closer and a good contrast after the more sombre tones of the previous track.

If you click the Bandcamp link above, you¦ll notice an additional five tracks on top of the five mentioned above. “At The Party” and “The Club” are, in my opinion, skippable, but the others are solid :⁠—

• “North By Northwest” is actually a Blue Scholars song, remixed here by Jake One and featuring new bars by Chev, Geologic, Macklemore, Nissim Black, and Thig Natural; this is an ensemble piece showcasing some of what the Town is known for.

• I think Macklemore¦s performance is a bit disappointing on “Keep Marchin” and “Letterhead”, but they succeed on the strength of their features: Xperience, Sapient & Illmaculate. It¦s worth mentioning that The Long March is the name of a classic 2005 Blue Scholars album.

Of course one cannot mention Macklemore and Seattle sports with·out acknowledging that they all made motions of cutting ties with him after he shouted “fuck America” at a pro‐Palestinian rally. This is, of course, after his release of the amazing “Hinds Hall” and “Hinds Hall 2”, which you should definitely drop everything to listen to if you haven¦t already.

“We are aware of the incident and agree with the other teams in town: Sports and music should connect, not divide us,” Mariners vice president of communication Tim Hevly reportedly said in a statement to the station. “We continue to monitor and research latest developments.”

Sure, sports and music should bring people together, but the Yankees still have a ballteam, so I¦m with Mack on this one. (See also: “Fucked Up”.)

Favourite track: “The Town”. I swear I tear up like every time I watch that music video. Music, man.

#AlbumOfTheWeek

On Bandcamp. On MusicBrainz.

This post goes up a bit late because I have been busy playing Pokémon Legends: Z‐A, which is set in the Pokémon version of Paris. I don¦t have any Parisian music to recommend, but Vagabon is Cameroonian and fluent in French, so maybe that helps?

Sorry I Haven¦t Called is Vagabon¦s follow·up to her self‐titled second album (and Nonesuch Records debut), which was quite well‐received critically. In comparison, Sorry I Haven¦t Called is a bit less conceptual and a bit poppier, which makes it easier to listen to and, in my opinion, a little more cohesive in terms of sound. This is a great album to put on and just chill to in the background, but it is still sonically interesting enough to reward careful listening.

Favourite track: “You Know How”. I love how minimalist this song starts, and the trancey synthy vibes of its chorus. This is a great song to put on all of your lesbian shipping playlists.

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On MusicBrainz.

When I was very small, I received a Sony CFD‐E75 boombox as a Christmas present. Alongside it—or shortly there·after—I received what would be the first C·D¦s I ever owned: Béla Fleck: Live At The Quick and Don Ross: Robot Monster. For this first album recommendation, it seemed fitting to choose one or the other.

Not to disparage Béla Fleck, but Robot Monster is ultimately the album which stuck with me more. This is partially because of its versatility: As a kid, I loved the rhythmic feel of “Dracula and Friends, Part 1”, and as I grew older I grew to love the more mellow tones of “Fader Jones” and “Goodbye Kelly Goodbye”. This was the music that characterized my summers in elementary and middle school as I kept cool in my room and tried to make something out of Lego.

Favourite track: “I Think Of You”. As a track meant to evoke nostalgia—and one that I have been listening to for more than two decades—this one never gets old.

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