There really was no reason for me to sit on Brandi Carlile for so long. I had certainly known of her for a while, considering she’s been one of the Seattle area’s most beloved musical exports for the last decade or so. She’s even a frequent supporter of my favorite record store, while being the clear heir apparent to Neko Case, the Northwest’s other alt-country sort-of-superstar. But I suppose the alt-country space is a weird one to be in, as it’s an uphill battle trying to gain the more ardent country fans as well as those indie rock fans who will only occasionally listen to something with some twang in it. Yet somehow Carlile has managed to do both while racking up a slew of Grammys. Continue reading →

I’m still a fan of this album, but I feel like its moment came and went pretty quickly. Some of that may be due to the fact that Star-Crossed is decidedly one big bummer of an album, though I would argue it’s far more bittersweet than straight-up depressing. Also, the album kinda confirms that Kacey Musgraves has gotten to a level of cross-over success that few country singers get to, but she’s not Taylor Swift. She’s not using her cache as a singer-songwriter to invade the pop world with bangers that abandon the nuance and wit of her earlier work. Instead, she’s decided to use her strengths to use music as therapy to deconstruct the romance that led to her greatest achievement. Continue reading →

Like everything else in this bleak, mixed-up world, the year in music wasn’t quite as normal as we would’ve wanted. While 2021 didn’t see the kind of indefinite album postponements that marked last year, the year also had a weird imbalance in what music was released in 2021. Usually, the early Summer is the busiest time of year (at least for me) in terms of anticipated new albums coming out, and while there were a few of those this Summer, I actually found more music that I liked coming out in the other parts of the year.

The first half of 2021 wasn’t half bad, as I found plenty of albums enough to my liking worth writing about at the year’s mid-point. Meanwhile, there have been a flurry of albums to come out in the last month or two that I haven’t spent nearly as much time with. So once again, doing these short, stupidly-named yearly wrap-up reviews will hopefully give me more reason to catch up with some recent stand-outs while teeing us up for our end-of-year lists. Continue reading →

In two separate assessments of albums released earlier this year, I both raised the theory that making more than one album with Jack Antonoff producing might be a bad idea, and that Lorde’s Solar Power would be the deciding factor of whether his status as pop’s favorite producer has run its course. While I harbor no grudges against Antonoff, as he’s produced some albums that I love (including Lorde’s Melodrama), Solar Power makes it apparent that both these fears have been confirmed. While Antonoff was able to create fantastic results by teaming up with modern pop’s biggest female stars, including Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and St. Vincent, each of the follow-ups to those albums, which Antonoff also produced, have been less exciting. Granted, none of those albums were complete busts by any measure, but they all feel a little soulless, and Solar Power might be the most blatant example. Continue reading →

Here goes the third part of my look back at some of the music from 2021 as we (terrifyingly) have almost reached the halfway point of the year. These are the albums that came out in the past month or two, so I probably don’t have fully formed opinions on all of them. But at the very least, I’ve given them enough spins to know that I like them. Continue reading →