Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

While it’s still an album I’m pretty fond of, it’s still a little strange to me that Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview on Phenomenal Nature ended up being my number 1 album of 2021. Not only because it was also Sean’s number 1 album, which was a rarity despite us having a lot of new music overlap, but also because it just doesn’t reek of Album of Year status for me. But, chalk it up to 2021 being a pretty weird year, full of stops and starts and unwanted meditation, which matched the vibe of that album pretty nicely. Three years later, Jenkins returned this year with My Light, My Destroyer, an album that retains the peculiar, phenomenal nature of that album while building on the disparate sounds that Jenkins is bent on pulling together into one collection of songs. Continue reading →

Illuminati Hotties – Power

Power by Illuminati Hotties felt like the most familiar album of the year for me, and I haven’t been entirely sure what to make of that. This isn’t to say that Sara Tudzin’s project is merely (ahem) regurgitating the sounds of the past in ways that bring few surprises. While I would say her lane of breezy indie-pop mixed with the occasional bratty punk freakout does bear a lot of lineage to various forms of rock music that have been popular the past 20 years, there’s still something fresh about her music. Maybe this familiarity more lies in the fact that her songs are just very catchy, so much so that after just a few listens, they feel like songs that’ve been around for years. Continue reading →

Nilüfer Yanya – My Method Actor

For a long time, music publications releasing their Best of the Year lists has long driven the music conversation this time of year (or at least if you’re as nerdy about this stuff as we are at this blog). But now, that conversation has been swiftly supplanted by the populism of Spotify’s Wrapped arrival each December, and to a lesser extent Apple Music’s Yearly Replay. One artist that showed up pretty heavily on my Apple Replay this year was Nilüfer Yanya, who I’m pretty sure made a similar showing the last year she released an album, despite the fact that I rarely think of her as one of my favorite current artists. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that her albums have been “growers” for me, to the point where I thought she kind of whiffed with a real snoozer when My Method Actor first came out. Yet over time with many more listens, I’ve been proven to be so, so wrong. Continue reading →

Kacey Musgraves – Deeper Well

From Vampire Weekend to Bruce Springsteen to Waxahatchee, I went to some great concerts in 2024. I would say Kacey Musgraves at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn was also a memorable one, if kind of a weird one. First, it was a concert that was long overdue, since after missing out on Kacey’s Golden Hour tour I ended up skipping her Star-Crossed tour due to it coinciding with the peak of the Omicron wave of Covid, despite buying tickets for it. I’m assuming the Deeper Well tour was the same way for many of the people there who had similarly fallen in love with Golden Hour but things had gotten in the way of them seeing those songs live. Continue reading →

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Well, we’ve almost made it through another stupid year and it’s time to look back at the pop culture that got us through it all. As for writing about music, I definitely didn’t do that a ton this year, but hey, that’s what these short year-end reviews are for – catching up a bit before we head into posting our Top 10s. I’ll try to fit a few of these reviews in the next couple weeks, but as always, the hustle and bustle of the holidays and the end of the year may prevent me from writing as many of them as I’d like. Anyways, I haven’t written about new music since the summer, so what better place to start than an album that brought some strong late summer vibes, but through its sturdy songwriting has stuck with me into these colder months. Continue reading →