Odds & Ends 150
Pantaloon-busting anniversary edition!
Reminder 1: Final day to vote in our 2025 poll! Vote now or forever hold your Geese!
Little Simz: Lotus
Years of me begging for more variety in her flow and beats got me punk and Moonchild Sanelly and one where you expect someone to starting shouting “Parklife”—never be careful what you wish for (“Flood”, “Young”, “Blood”)
Lily Allen: West End Girl
The music’s professional and there are at least two characters more interesting than the narrator, so I can suppress my urge to ask if this is as lively as her early albums until she forces the comparison by recycling “it’s not me, it’s you” (“Pussy Palace”, “Sleepwalking”, “Madeline”)
Willi Carlisle: Winged Victory
As he’s a left-populist, that one of the two most poetic lyrics is by “an unknown proletarian” won’t bother him; as I’m a pop leftist, that the other one is about a gigantic nonbinary ass makes me go ah-OOOOGa (“Big Butt Billy”, “We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years”, “Beeswing”)
Jim Legxacy: Black British Music (2025)
Rapper-producer with a fetching quavering flow commemorates those who inspired his album title, from Snow to Will Ospreay (“’06 Wayne Rooney”, “Stick”, “d.b.a.b”)
Jade: That’s Showbiz Baby!
I’m so slow with prog-pop that I only just recognized “Angel of My Dreams” as a masterpiece; remind me thus in a year to double-check my belief that nothing else on this consistently emo-torvating album comes close (“Angel of My Dreams”, “FUFN (Fuck You for Now)”, “Fantasy”)
Feels minor to me, though I thought Plains felt minor and didn’t you love that one; in any case, irregular familiar pleasures, like old friends in a new town, shouldn’t be taken for granted (“Brand New City”, “Heathcliff”, “Over Our Heads”)
Water from Your Eyes: It’s a Beautiful Place
Guitar work that’s intricate without sustaining higher expression, choruses that, when they exist, aren’t up to the verse: maybe what they need to fill the existential void is not belief in God but in classical songform, which I admit is a larger leap of faith for their generation (“Born 2”, “Life Signs”, “Playing Classics”)
Nourished by Time: The Passionate Ones
Savory, though if he was going to skirt cheesiness, I wish he’d gone the full 64 slices (“Max Potential”, “9 2 5”, “Tossed Away”)
It’s some consolation that he’ll never write a song as good as “Outfit” again, while she might well write one as good as “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (“Can’t Hold Your Breath”, “The Details”, “Piece of Mind”)
’90s throwback chords-over-tunes indie by Horsegirl’s brother’s guitarist, who wasn’t alive in the ’90s; the vocals aren’t too buried, and I don’t regret the moderate effort of making them out (“Lorelei”, “You Have a Way”, “You Don’t Live Here Anymore”)
Bill Scorzari: Sidereal Days (Day 1)
Less odometer-taxing than The Crosswinds of Kansas, meaning it’s closer to your standard well-constructed, roughly sung Americana record, with the odd big chorus you bet took as many takes as necessary to make sound nice (“Endgame”, “And So (Deep Into the Dark)”, “Grace”)
Marina: Princess of Power
Cunty rather than cuntissima, but Carly associate CJ Baran’s production suits her open-mouthed delivery, and her willingness to interrogate her incomplete development, as maudlin as it sometimes gets, prevents her feminism from ossifying (“Cuntissimo”, “Cupid’s Girl”, “Everybody Knows I’m Sad”)
Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love
Still builds a verse like few can, but after a decade in this funk you’ve gotta consider regulating weed (“Tourmaline”, “Forge”)
Amaarae: Black Star
Tate McRae has my favorite “SEX! Now that I’ve got your attention, SEX!” album of the year and I didn’t even bring myself to A-list that one, which doesn’t mean this doesn’t have its amusements, like PinkPantheress picturing a beau in a suit leading one to wonder what Amaarae’s imagining him in (“S.M.O.”, ‘Kiss Me Thru the Phone pt 2”)
My name is beige and I’m really glad to meet you (“ICT”, “Harvest Sky”)
Their refusal to emote does make more sense once you learn one of their dads ran NATO until last year (“Feisty”, “Imagine This”)
Jason Isbell: Foxes in the Snow
An acoustic post-divorce album so neatly shaped, you might wonder if he ever let love knock him on his ass (“Graveweed”, “Don’t Be Tough”)
So irrepressible she turns dick comparison into class consciousness, so shameless she does it over beats you’d think a South African would send straight to recycling (“Boom”, “In My Kitchen”)
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Reminder 2: You can now pay me money to access midweek posts (like my ten favorite African songs of the 2010s) and so that I can pay people to write guest posts, the first of which will appear on Wednesday. (I should probably inform the writer.)
Killer roundup with the Marina take being especially sharp. That point about her willingness to interrogate incomplete development preventing feminist ossification is exactly what seperates self-awareness from self-pity in pop lyrics. I've been burned by too many albums where the introspection stays surface-level and just cycles through feelings without examining them, which makes the whole confessional thing feel kinda hollow. The Water from Your Eyes classical songform critique hits too, those choruses really don'tcarry their weight.