Music I Missed
Looking back on music I missed (or neglected) from '22-23
The year stumbles toward its clumsy conclusion, and we would all like to get very drunk.
In the meantime, there will be music. Plenty of good music was released this year, but for now I want to look back at 2022 and 2023 to recognize a handful of albums I either missed or never got around to writing about.
Black Country, New Road, Ants From Up There
If I was being snarky, I might describe New Country, Black Road as “post-punk for people who went to theater camp,” or “Neutral Milk Hotel with a pinch of humor,” or “Mumford & Sons — but good.” While I was listening to Ants From Up There the other day, my wife walked in the room and asked if it was Dave Matthews.
Enough, though! Listen to this album start to finish. It’s very, very good! We should be so lucky to have musicians that are as technically gifted as they are unabashedly ambitious, from operatic leitmotifs, to a sonata for saxophone, to lead singer Isaac Wood’s booming, crooning baritone.
But of course — we are not so lucky. Wood quit the music industry just before this album released and works in a cake shop now. Can you blame him? Nothing gold can stay.
Geist, Hurricane Gold
I stumbled across Geist last fall, in part intrigued by a brief Ted Gioia recommendation, but mostly because I liked the album art, with its profile of a solemn cowboy in Dia De Los Muertos face paint. I wrote about Geist and Hurricane Gold in last year’s music roundup:
... Just some guys with day jobs who recorded this in their living room in Vancouver. Imagine if a Radiohead side project recorded an alt country concept album loosely based on someone’s grandmother.
A year later, Hurricane Gold is still surprisingly good. I wholeheartedly commend it to you. At the same time, I think an interrogation is necessary. Why do I like this album? Because it’s good? Or because next-to-nobody has ever heard of Hurricane Gold? Geist has 67 monthly listeners on Spotify. Black Country, New Road has nearly 560,000. Do I like Geist in order to tell people I like Geist?
Probably not. I tend to talk more about things that I don’t like than things that I do (not a great personality trait!). Still I will admit to admiring Geist’s apparent indifference to “building an audience,” as they say. It’s hard to find anything about them online. They don’t promote much. I assume they’re content to simply make stuff in a way that’s less heroically obscure than happily anonymous. Is that the future of culture? Are we moving away from the Romantic cult of the artist and back toward the largely pre-Romantic, or at least pre-modern, focus on art itself? Or am I only projecting? And how much do I really like Geist?
MSPAINT, Post-American
The premise of MSPAINT is something like, “what if Linkin Park was actually sick?” They’re synth-heavy, guitar-free, and very loud, ricocheting between hip hop and hardcore. Of all places, they’re from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
“Delete It” is a good single to start with, but the album’s most pointed song is the title track, whose chorus I like to bob my head to in the early evenings while walking my Bernese Mountain Dog around our single-family home neighborhood.
Burn all the flags and the symbols of man
Burn all the flags and the symbols of man
Burn all the flags and the symbols of man
Now you’re living out the dream
Post-American
Militarie Gun, Life Under the Gun
You’ll note that “Delete It” features Militarie Gun, another band worth exploring if you’re into aughts-inspired pop rock. Militarie Gun isn’t as goofy as Blink-182, but they’re just as emo.
Wilco, Cruel Country
I’ve never figured out Wilco. The albums I’m supposed to like I’m indifferent to; the albums I’m supposed to dismiss I really enjoy. If you’re a Gen X white guy of a certain stripe, you can choose Wilco or Pavement as your preferred cultural avatar, but you can’t choose both. I’m not Gen X, but I am a white guy of a certain insufferable stripe, and for better or worse I prefer Pavement. (Of course you can also be a Ween guy, but you won’t have many friends and the friends you do have won’t trust you.)
Cruel Country is Wilco at their best, in my opinion: straightforward dad rock backed by acoustic guitars and a pedal steel. With a couple exceptions, the album could’ve easily been released in 1975. The title track sounds like something off of American Beauty; the album art looks like a nod to that record, as well.
Anyway, because nothing new is going on here, I think Cruel Country has been a little overlooked. It shouldn’t be. In addition to catchy melodies, Jeff Tweedy shows off some first-rate writing. “Hint” begins with a riddle.
Do you remember when we would forget
When we were, I guess, an empty continent?
But the refrain is simple.
There is no middle when the other side
Would rather kill than compromise
Still I’ve repeatedly come back to “Ambulance,” a parable of addiction that starts in one direction —
I’d slap the cuffs right on my wrists
I’d get so high I’d arrest myself
For honeysuckle on a buckle
Broken teeth biting on my belt
— before taking a surprising swerve.
Trying not to laugh
They pronounced me dead at half past
And that priest, he pissed his pants
When he heard me start to say hello
The chorus interprets the parable.
Everything can shine
Even the devil sometimes
While I was busy dying
My Lord, she made some other plan
Such is the bizarre character of grace.
Happy Thanksgiving! I leave you with “Glad,” the opening song to Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die. For reasons I can’t explain, I hold this to be the quintessential Thanksgiving album.
I am placing this button here because Substack encouraged me to. I don’t expect anyone to gift a subscription this holiday season, but wouldn’t it be a funny gag if you did? Imagine the recipient’s confusion. “What?” “Why?” “I don’t want that.” “I don’t need that.” “That sucks.” “You suck.” “But it’s also just…free?”
I can’t think of a better way to express ironic disdain for someone. “I love you, lol.” Lol.