music is my medicine

this blog started with a review of one of those. and it is momentarily revitalized with:

this is not a review, but a reflection on how i talk about and listen to music. the review would be honestly quite boring. it's one of those albums that I instantly clicked with. I walked out of my apartment within seconds of finishing the album to find it on CD. Music like this is so special, because it's rare when music moves you, feels perfectly molded for your specific core and your ears SPECIFICALLY.

every single song when i listen to an album i tend to habitually express somehow with my body language or a comment to myself how i felt about it. if a track's kind of mid I'll do an "ehhhh" hand gesture to myself, or if it's bad I'll say "oh my god that sucks" or whatever.

For this album, for 95% of the tracks all I could muster was, a sort of "well yeah no of course i liked that it's a great song duh" it didn't like. knock my socks off or change my life. it just was a REALLY GOOD MUSIC LISTENING EXPERIENCE. every single song felt nice and fun to listen to and it was so empowering to listen to an album like that.

So why was one of my immediate responses to try to justify myself? To sit down and engage with other people's perspectives to either seek validation or get mad at someone for having a bad take. Am I not allowed to just click with an album without having a dissertation in my head as to why actually this album is just as good if not better than Melodrama? Even if it's not, it doesn't matter anyways!

the beautiful thing about music, and often the frustrating part of it, is that everyone's ear is tuned a certain way. certain things will resonate with someone while either flying under someone else's radar or even being a negative. It's how Imagine Dragons keeps charting while people like me sneer at them. It's how Drake continues having stans. Everybody's standards for what a "good song" is is different, even within the community of music freaks like me.

The older I get, the lower my tolerance for music discourse gets. People who base their entire life on listening to the best most critically acclaimed shit and sneer at anything that has any amount of flaw i honestly hate more than the types of people uncritically bumping the new ed sheeran album or whatever.

i lost my thread. there's a reason i stopped using this blog, beyond the fact its aesthetic no longer represents my music taste well. but perhaps as my opinion and perspective on music matures i should let go of the side of me that feels the need to justify why i love an album, and instead spend a little bit of time just loving the albums that give me that dopamine rush on first listen, like this album. I'm no better than anyone else.

i want to start using this blog for more things, so here's a quick and dirty post about my personal ranking of my favorite band, death cab for cutie, and their albums! so without further adieu! here we go! for the record this is going off my memory and feeling, i could potentially revisit this list in more depth, but I want to go primarily off my feelings and my thoughts without going through a deep study, so the bottom half might get a little muddy. For the record I think ALL Death Cab For Cutie records are INSANELY good, for the record. BUT. BUT BUT. Here we go.

#1: Transatlanticism

Need I say FUCKING more? I love this album so so much. It is the banner of this blog. This album is so good, so solid, and it stays so for the entire run time. Everything about this album is perfect. I love it so much.

Favorite Song: Title and Registration

#1: We Have The Facts And We're Voting Yes

It's my list! I can have a tie for number 1 if I want to! This album is a completely different vibe and reason why it's good compared to Transatlanticism, but honestly I come back to it an equal amount honestly. If not more. This one just feels like it speaks specifically to me and my soul. When I listened to it for the first time, I listened to it twice that day because I loved it so much. Depending on the day, I could say this is my favorite one. Easy recommendation.

Favorite Song: Company Calls

#2: The Photo Album

This album, to me, is the perfect middle between what we got with Transatlanticism and We Have The Facts. Like those two, absolutely no misses. If I were a bit more cheeky with this list, I would also tie this one for #1, but we gotta move on from #1 at some point :p. Nonstop bangers.

Favorite Song: I Was A Kaleidoscope

#3 Narrow Stairs

Okay so. This one is awesome. This one follows up "Plans" and is honestly a return to form for them I'll be honest. At a different time, I would've ranked this one below Plans, but honestly I've aged into this album excellently. I'm going to be honest. I fucking adore it nowadays. I Will Possess Your Heart is a complete classic and I can't imagine a single person who listens to it going "oh that song sucks" unless you have no patience or taste. It's a bit edgier but also very heartfelt.

Favorite Song: Cath...

#4: Asphalt Meadows

Late career BANGER. This album is so so close to being no skips, it's got a few 6s on the tracklist, but it never dips below a 6-7, I honestly am so excited for what they have in store for us. This album is so underrated I am going to be honest. This was such an overlooked album when it came out too. Maybe don't start with this one, but DON'T OVERLOOK IT.

Favorite Song: I Miss Strangers

#5: Plans

This is probably one everyone ELSE would rank way higher, and for good reason! It's an excellent EXCELLENT ALBUM. and it is super duper accessible. Quite frankly, if you start with anyone, this one. Do this one. But I think it's just that. Just the starter. This one has a lot of very classic songs and by no means is it bad, it just sort of... sits at the beginning of the middle of the pack for me. still a 10 or 9 out of 10

#6 Something About Airplanes

Okay. Well. Gotta explain myself here. This is their first record, and it is not THAT MUCH better than its predecessory, the demo tape "You Can Play These Songs With Chords" it has its issues and it's the first one I would not like, has flaws that bring it down a peg compared to the others. Now to be fair, I still love it lmao. It's an 8/10 or 9/10 for me but like, for the general public, idk. I would personally say don't listen to this one until you KNOW you love Death Cab haha.

Favorite Song: Fake Frowns

#7 You Can Play These Songs With Chords

This one's kind of disjointed. It has bangers. And a lot of them. But there's too many songs I just, can't fully latch onto. and a cover of this charming man. so. sorry i like something about airplanes more. i love you though, you can play these songs with chords, you are a lovely little demo tape <3

Favorite Song: TV Trays

#8: Codes and Keys

Last album of their pre-Asphalt Meadows flop era with Chris Walla and it kind of shows but ALSO it's better than it has any right to be. I have a soft spot for this one, and I revisit it a fair amount more than other 2010s Death Cab records. Don't have much else to say here.

Favorite Song: Monday Morning

#9: Thank You For Today

Ah. Yes. The canonical worst one. Yeah this one kind of blows compared to even the one I am going to rank below it. BUT i do appreciate it. it has a few BANGERS i am going to be honest. don't have much else to say

Favorite Song: Gold Rush

#10: Kintsugi

Don't take me putting this at 10th as an indication of quality. This album is still a fantastic album. I just. don't really listen to it. Never did. Haven't in a while. It didn't stick to me like the other did. Doesn't help that I can't find it ANYWHERE on CD. BUT! Yeah. Gimme a few years and this album will probably click and be a favorite.

Favorite Track: N/A, literally I don't have one off the top of my head. I guess Ghost Of Beverly Drive???? whatever sorry Kintsugi fans

if there's one thing i love it's when an album clicks immediately. i don't know if this is something everyone gets, but when I listen to an album or song that I love I know *ALMOST IMMEDIATELY*

this week I got the distinct pleasure of having that sensation yet again when my roommate put this album on in their car on our way to the grocery store, they predicted that I would really dig it and BOY were they right.

is this album an all-timer, i don't know. probably not! but i enjoy dumb fun catchy music and that's what this is! especially with fun instrumentation and catchy hooks to sink my teeth into.

i should probably go into a brief history of this album, for those who are interested. this is the debut studio album of edie brickell & new bohemians, a jangle pop band from the late 80s and early 90s.

the band apparently had a hit off this album called "what i am," which is the song I've linked to at the top of the review, and I think that song is a good representation of this album at its absolute highest.

i don't think jangle pop is for everybody, so I may have a pretty small audience for this recommendation but I am a big fan of jangly catchy music, I don't quite know why, but I suppose it could be in my DNA haha. but i think at the very least you will probably enjoy it. i think it's a bit undeniable!

my one real complaint is that the band's highs seem to be at the front end of the album, it sort of settles into a good solid 7/10 after the song "Beat The Time." doesn't detract from how good the tracks in the first half or so. but all the tracks leading up to and including Beat The Time are kind of bangers imo.

woah. just woah. leave it to Jack White to surprise me with some of his best work in YEARS. the man sounds like he's in his 20s as he approaches 50.

this is gen x rock at its absolute best. this album never wavers below a 7 out of 10 each track. i'm sitting here listening to this album considering this for album of the year contention and it just dropped on spotify.

leave it to Jack White to release an album that I immediately love more than any album. a lot of my favorite musical artists released albums this year. MGMT and The Decemberists most notably, but Jack White GENUINELY stole the show.

hi everyone. this is a review of brat.

there is not much for me to say about this one.

it is one of the best albums of the year. it's full of absolute bangers. favorite tracks? all of them. i think.

here's a real good song off of it:

i am going to break the format a bit and just talk about this album without going into specific songs. because I think I can use this album as a vessel to talk about my complicated relationship with country music.

this album is an album is an album i grabbed and "borrowed" (stole for my cd collection) from my father's CD collection, growing up country music was a massive part of my life, and as such I've always had a really strange complicated relationship with it. especially as i got more into exploring my identity as a teen.

i never listened to country music myself very much, but i grew up with it everywhere. sitting in the car, looking out the window on long car rides to my grandparent's house i'd be listening to country artists like lyle lovett, alison krauss, the early works by wilco, and of course the country artist classics. my dad liked a variety of music, but you can really tell country music was where he started. just like me and alternative rock.

as such i've always had a really soft spot for country music. it took me a lot of time to ultimately accept that, and it's been a slow process worthy of its own blog post. i think it's been difficult for me to process this music due to its general conservative undertones and i think that's what will forever will stop me from being fully into the genre.

but this is the first time in my life an album like this has come into my life and given me a slice of country i can really really dig into and claim as my own, which means so so much to me.

of course this album is no ingenue, her 1992 masterpiece. that album is one of my favorites of all time and i listened to it less than 6 months ago. but this album serves a different need to me.

as i heal and grow older, i've been trying my best to reconcile aspects of my background that are undeniable to me. be it my interest in country music, my enjoyment of sports, or my general tomboyish nature, as I get older and especially as I get deeper into my transition, I feel myself begin to understand the depths of which I differ from a lot of my fellow transgender women.

albums like this, to me, represent how even after transitioning, changing the core of who you are physically, you never really change. kd lang, to me, has been an important part of my acceptance of my girlhood and a reclamation of a genre I once thought I could never truly love.

thankfully she's a lesbian. and a really REALLY hot one at that.

Surprise surprise i follow up a Billie Eilish review with an album you've likely never heard of. Told you.

Meet Everything But The Girl, made up of Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn. They were a staple of 80s and 90s indie pop in Britain who never really did much here stateside until the late 90s. In 1995 they charted here with their hit "Missing," specifically a remix by Todd Terry, reaching number 2 on the Billboard charts here in the US.

Before this song, they were in a genre called "sophisti-pop," which quite frankly I am under-qualified to discuss and I encourage you if this album and songs and band sound interesting to you to explore on your own. I definitely plan to at some point.

Anyways, back to the 90s. Imagine you are EBTG. This is a band who was on the margins on the pop charts in Britain for more than a decade at that point. Suddenly you get a pop success off the coattails of a triphop remix of one of your acoustic songs off your 8th album. What would you follow up that album with?

If you said "with an electronic album," you were thinking just like they were. In 1996 they followed up their smash hit single with their first album departure from the more sophisti-pop style of their 80s and early 90s work to embrace the electronic scene of the time in Britain. This takes influence mostly from the trip hop and drum and bass scene.

This is where I enter the picture. For reasons I won't discuss, I've been trying to listen to more electronic music lately. Especially songs with a drum and bass or jungle vibe to them. I have a long history with electronic music, going back to the early 2010s with my interest in electronica, chiptune and dubstep music. But lately, since the turn of the 2020s, I've become more and more interested in late 90s early 2000s techno, jungle and drum and bass music. Or anything that would be classified as "Y2k" these days. Which this album definitely qualifies as.

Yesterday, I found this album at a Half Price Books while out with my girlfriend. I had known who they were before, but hadn't actually sat down to listen to a full album of theirs. And I'm definitely happy that I did. It's the kind of lowkey late 90s vibe that I am looking for right now.

Unlike the Billie review, I won't be dishing out the fawning praise that that album got. This album doesn't have the immediate punch you in the face quality to how good it is. And it's in a genre I'm not super familiar with. It's not a sweeping folk song nor is it a banger indie rock song, so I am a bit out of my depth. However, this album did really impress me and it felt like a natural album to give the spotlight on this blog.

I will say that it is a bit back loaded? The first half of this album kind of didn't really grab me, but the second half was really my style. And the first half is where the two big "hits" off that album are. Maybe my perspective on the album will change. Who knows? Here's my favorite song off the album:

This review feels a lot different than the last one. The Billie review came out of a need for me to unload about an album I thought was really good, but this review comes out more out of respect for this album and the artists behind it. I imagine this album isn't for everyone who follows this blog and reads this post, but I'm sure if you search their discography you might be able to find an album or song that does!

i started a music review blog just to review this album and i am as shocked as anyone that i did this. this year, i reintroduced myself to Billie Eilish, through her 2021 album "Happier Than Ever" which really resonated with me and is currently one of my top albums of the year. so, imagine my surprise when i read a month or so at work that there was a new Billie Eilish album coming out. i was cautiously hyped. not because i didn't trust Billie to deliver. i trusted her to deliver. but i still have this inherent distrust of pop music. maybe it's the hipster in me. this blog will be proof of that if anything.

i popped it on last night right before going to bed. boy. did she deliver... I am actually shocked at how incredible this album is. not only does it top "Happier Than Ever" by a fair margin, but it may actually be the best pop album i've heard in a long long time.

this album's cover is kind of apt because the depth displayed in this album is honestly SHOCKINGLY IMPRESSIVE and is something I would personally expect from a veteran act more than a decade into their career and not a pop star who is a year younger than me. Finneas's production elevates Billie's voice and her songwriting to another level and i was honestly FLOORED by how good this album sounded and how moved I was by every single movement and passage that was being presented to her.

not only that but this album has bangers. after bangers. after bangers. as the kids would say, this album has absolutely NO SKIPS. at least on initial listen. though to narrow down 3 favorites, i gotta go with LUNCH, BIRDS OF A FEATHER, and L'AMOUR DE A VIE.

i don't know if i will eventually look back at this review and go "pfff idk why i hyped this so much!" but this one feels genuinely like an album that i will carry with me for a long long long time. today, during my lunch break, i made a point to go out and get it on CD. i walked to barnes and noble and bought it. that is how much this album hit me. i have never bought an album on cd during its first week out.