No time for a fancy intro here. We've got new music to hear!
Local Picks
Full playlist here
The shortest, bleakest month of the year is behind us now, but Siri Undlin’s placid, housebound perspective still resonates. Catching snowflakes on your tongue, scouring your fridge for food, hoping your man is OK on the road—these are winter universals. And there’ll be a February next year too, you know.
Uh oh, this is really threatening to become a late-winter playlist, isn’t it? The versatile Doomtree producer has completed his quartet of seasonal EPs with For Storms, and the lead track is evocative as its title, with a sweet, wordless chorale its most distinctive feature. As always with Lazerbeak’s instrumental, there’s too much going on to call it ambient, and I mean that as a compliment.
“I made this two days ago,” Bobby Kabeya wrote when he posted this track on Bandcamp last Friday, and you’ve gotta love the internet for that. I can hear why he was eager to get it out there: This is dense, pretty stuff, with vocals and acoustic guitar chopped into serviceable bits over a beat I'll generalize just a bit to call "trap soukous." And it builds up to some genuinely grand synths.
Last year’s Picked to Click silver medalist offers a hushed and melodic track from her EP Bloom Again, due in May. “Sulking, milking, shivering/I think part of me loves the pain” is more self-psychologizing insight than you get from a lot of sad girls. A (Mazzy) star is born.
D’Allen White feat. Medium Zach, “Change for the Better”
South Minneapolis MC teams up with superbusy south Minneapolis superproducer, who provides an expansive feel, with a sprinkling keyboard cut and a climatic cymbal pattern. No kid, White still sounds hungry—for change in particular. Like he says, “I don’t need nothing else.”
Non-Local Picks
Full playlist here
Afroman, "Randy Walters Is a Son of a Bitch"
ICYMI, Joseph Foreman, better known as Afroman, won a defamation suit last week brought by several Adams County, Ohio, cops who were sad that he'd mocked them in song. They deserved it (and by "it" I mean the mockery and the resulting sadness). In 2022, those same cops trashed Foreman's home as part of a kidnapping and drug investigation and found zilch. Foreman fought back against this home invasion with satirical videos using security-camera footage and some straight-up bangers.
I appreciate the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"-jacking "Batteram Hymn of the Police Whistle Blower" ("My proof's on the in-ter-net"). But this is the one. With its haywire voice box and shoulder-shifting bass, the track is like Zapp gone wild. And lyrically—well, the next best thing to ending qualified immunity is being able to write a song about how you fucked a cop's wife. Also, no shade to any Randys (Randies?) out there, but “Randy Walters” is a cop name if I ever heard one.
The Femcels, “Please Don’t Stab Yourself (Like Elliott Smith)”
We live in strange times, where two silly British girls who claim they don’t get laid and make Wet Leg sound like FKA Twigs joined forces to create… a Bran Van 3000 record? Of the three parenthetically titled songs on their loopy debut, I Have to Get Hotter, I rank this just ahead of “You’re Gay And You’re In Love With Me (Please Let Me Touch Your Boobs)” over “No One Will Fuck Me When I Wear Two Different Shoes (One Jordan, One Gucci Flip Flop).” Rowan Miles and Gabriella Turton start by taking a date to the fish shop and telling him it’s an aquarium and end by singing the praises of JavaScript. On a scale from one to 100 I rate this a solid 89 gecs. Bonus fun: When you search for this song on YouTube it offers you the suicide hotline number.
Horse Lords, “Brain of the Firm”
The jittery Baltimore experimentalists are back, and they’re no longer purely instrumental. Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor now contribute abstract vocal sounds to the mix. Adding a bass clarinetist and a trombonist on top of that is the avant-garde equivalent of tossing a juggler a couple extra chainsaws. Is this a rhythm shift midway? Like you even have to ask. There’s a new album, Demand to Be Taken To Heaven Alive!, due in June, and they’re coming to the Cedar in July.
Ms. Miyawaki really is shaping up to be the Emily Dickinson of indie on her latest, Nothing's Going to Happen to Me, though as always we have to take her unreliably narrative word for it that under her pretty, brilliant, well-heeled exterior is a cruel, morbid, unruly monster. “I just want my mind to be a clear glass/Clear glass with nothing in my head,” she sings, but she'll settle for BLEEPing a hole into tomorrow all night long, as she boasts with comically censored carnality.
After 11 months of not getting any (pfft, amateur numbers), Kacey enters her own femcel era. She's feeling “lonely with a capital H, if you know what I mean” and picking up good vibrations from the washing machine over a heavy-breathing shuffle of a track that, fittingly, simmers without, you know, bubbling over. After a few albums of confessional introspection, I’m glad she’s got jokes again.
Worst New Song
Harry Styles, "Are You Listening Yet"
Because I approve of male pop stars who play nice with their fanbase, I've generally viewed Harry Styles's solo career as a benign growth that I needn't investigate too closely. His latest, Kiss All The Time Disco, is easy-listening for grown 1D girlies, festooned with just enough alt-pop flourishes so they can assure themselves that haven't yet turned into their moms. But it turns gruesome on “Are You Listening Yet?,” in which Our Harry accounts for his personal shortcomings and intones nonsense like “If you must join a movement, make sure there’s dancing," in a voice that suggests Alex Turner trying to be James Murphy over a Reflektor outtake. Losing his edge? Him? He just wants to make something real. He wants to make a 1975 record.
Wanna get a local song considered for the playlist? To make things easy on both of us, email keith@racketmn.com with MONDAY PLAYLIST in the subject header. (Don’t, as in do NOT, DM or text: If I’m in a good mood, I’ll just ask you to send an email; if I’m in a bad mood I’ll just ignore it.)
