Semipop Life: Globalization and its discontents
Blackpink, Homeboy Sandman, BTS, Todd Snider, and more!
Blackpink: Born Pink
Their Born This Way where 2020’s The Album was The Fame Monster: imperial ambitions are realized, and while there are some signs of overstuffing, nothing’s burst yet. The opening “Pink Venom” sees superproducer Teddy Park, his protege 24, and as always a platoon of collaborators blending pop thrills with WTF sonics: there’s a geomungo, but it sounds Arabic! “Shut Down” is in 6/8, hearkening back to a more innocent time (the mid 2000s) when popular rap was fun and one could be sure Kanye’s spaceship talk was figurative. There’s a couple of tracks of safe, polished megapop before token Australian Rosé introduces the F-bomb to mainstream K-pop in the context of “I just fuck it up”. Within a couple of tracks she has the whole group claiming “I say fuck it when I feel like.” Not sure where they have left to go from here, but Tony Bennett is still alive.
Grade: A MINUS (“Pink Venom”, “Hard to Love”, “Shut Down”)
Homeboy Sandman: I Can’t Sell These
The start-to-finish record I’ve waited (does subtraction; oh shit) fourteen years for him to make. He lets his ears run wild, crate-digging material ranging from airplane-born Ángel Rada's ’70s synth-noodles to Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Rust Belt pastoral ’00s synth-noodles to create a psychedelic wonderland where rhyme and chat and good vibes rule. He’s cringe enough to bust over the Parks & Rec theme (and I remind you this is a pro-cringe newsletter), remains judgmental about, say, whether his relative’s listening habits justify euthanasia, and it’s not like he’s stopped being a left-libertarian-vegan crank. For once all this only adds to the charm of a Queens king who’ll know his city’s bus map well before he starts rapping. When he de-kitschifies Israeli rock band the Churchills’ hippie-era goof on Bach’s “Wachet Auf” (itself a no-samples-cleared fantasia on a German hymn based on Matthew 25), he, like his borough, recapitulates the history of the world.
Grade: A MINUS (“Aural for Young Lovers”, “Omnipresent”, “The Queens English”)
BTS: Proof disc 1
Devotee to due diligence that I am, I played disc 2 (subgroup deep cuts, almost all from 2018 onwards, better than their average this era but what’s the point) and disc 3 (one song on streaming, my due diligence only goes so far.) Discard those and focus on the chronological hits disc, which maps out their trajectory and their, I’m sorry, historical importance. In their first phase, at least three of them were trying to be serious hip-hoppers (the opening track is a J Cole remake) with weird success despite at least three of them being musical dead weight at the time—Dark & Wild, which I A-listed in 2014 so give me an A&R job already, remains their only unimpeachable studio album. Then, quite suddenly, their label and/or they realized the uncanny attractiveness of the majority of the group meant there was a ton of money on the table. So they accepted mainline K-pop structures and EDM sonics, with rap for color, and though they sacrificed consistency on their full-lengths, the run of singles starting from “Run” is glorious, showing that all of them (yes, even V) were talented vocalists in their own way, while pushing the envelope for what a modern boy band should sound like. The culmination of this era was “Fake Love”, their first US top ten hit and one of the most consequential singles of the yadda yadda, as conquering the world was now a live possibility. So came phase three, chasing the American market and no longer bothering to put out excessively excellent music. Superduperstardom came with the midtown funk of “Dynamite”, the worst thing here. Other hits that seemed dubious on the radio, however, are revealed here as positive-utility blockbuster entertainment. They could’ve been the best. But this comp shows you how they became the one.
Grade: A MINUS (“Fake Love”, “Danger”, “Run”)
STAYC: Young-Luv.com/We Need Love
A cheat, but put this EP and maxi-single on one playlist and you have 2022’s second-strongest half-hour of K-pop, and maybe its most likable. Delegating all the hard bits to second-generation belter Sieun lets the rest of them be that rare modern girl group that sounds, if not girlish, then at least like young women who have other concerns in their lives besides mere music, especially when contralto J delivers some of the genre’s most nonchalant raps. Their bosses Black Eyed Pilseung plus flunky Jeon Goon chance upon two classic teen tunes to rival their “Touch My Body” for Sistar, albeit at an earlier stage of adolescence. On “Young Luv”, Sieun is sorry for her young love, while the rest of the band put heart stickers all over their apology notes. “Beautiful Monster” is deeper: “Love is ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, love is ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh.”
Grade: A MINUS (“Beautiful Monster”, “Young Luv”, “Run 2U”)
Todd Snider: Live: Return of the Storyteller
If, for whatever reason, you’re looking for a coherent theory of Todd or at least a clear explanation of which dickish rich guys are alright guys by him and which aren’t (I suspect it has less to do with Crocs and more to do with weed) you won’t find it here. Unlike on his 2011 live album, this time the songs feel like ways to space out the stories, which, as it turns out, is fine, because he’s in decent voice and they’re still good songs. The result is funnier than the first Storyteller: listen to the one about [SPOILER] and the one about the time he [REDACTED] and the tribute to [JOHN PRINE]. It doesn’t seem like he's going to run out of tall tales, and as long as he’s this charming and high-functioning, I’d still go to his show even if he did.
Grade: A MINUS (“Free Bird”, “John Prine”, “Being Outdoors”)
Built to Spill: When the Wind Forgets Your Name
Doug Martsch starts up the Guitar Demigod Album Generator for the first time in seven years, and everything just hits, even the one called “Rocksteady”. No new ground is broken unless pretending to be the Cloud Nothings for a song counts, but the riffs that are supposed to be chunky go on for bars, while the elegiac ones mourn if not a genre then a subculture. His Brazilian rhythm section (who’ve since moved on to pursue their own psychedelic interests) deftly handles a wider range of tempos than Martsch’s usual. Groove is attained, waltzes are danced, “Never Alright” is followed by “Alright”, Martsch sings “I never wanted to be so lame” on the closer and makes lameness a condition to aspire to.
Grade: A MINUS (“Gonna Lose”, “Never Alright”, “Elements”)
Sarah Mary Chadwick: Flipped It EP
More of the same, which is what I want musically if not spiritually right now from the expat New Zealand keyboardist with a recent history of drawing blood via vocal fry. “Flipped It”, from the Me and Ennui sessions, would’ve been one of the better songs on that one—perhaps its open ending was too scary. The older songs show she’s been thinking about death, and about sex as a way to stop thinking about death, for a while. The thing about staying alive is you don’t get closure: maybe there are parts of your life that are over, but even if you move to Melbourne you can never exclude the possibility of running into a familiar face. In turn, that makes it impossible to close off thinking about what might’ve been, what might be. Whatever, closure’s for pussies.
Grade: A MINUS (“Flipped It”, “All Those Things We’ll Never Do”, “People Shouldn’t Set You Up”)
Bruno Berle: No Reino Dos Afetos
This feels simple without being simple. The chord progressions are jazz-tricky and Batata Boy’s production/mixing/programming adds some glitchy scenery, yet the another-caipirinha-please vibe is as straightforward and intimate as a familiar caress. The lyrics reflect this, with auto-translations suggesting the common Brazilian sadly-happy and vice versa. Those of us brainwashed by old Village Voices or pro wrestling or whatever into expecting art to have some heft to it might spend the middle stretch of the album wondering if this is going to add up to any more than sophisticated light entertainment. Eventually it does: sophisticated light entertainment with drums, that’ll do.
Grade: B PLUS (“Quero Dizer”, “É Preciso Ter Amor”, “Arraiada”)
Seulgi: 28 Reasons mini-album
Red Velvet’s second banana’s first solo effort is more grown-up than the group’s recent output, and while she submits to fashionable murmur-and-bleep once or twice (on “Los Angeles”, she doesn’t stay up late enough to credibly claim lostness in its glow of KTV and late-night chicken joints), most of the six tracks here provide something different from the K-pop norm. She’s best when she goes R&B and invites competent rapper Be’o around for a spot of hot-and-cold hanky panky (“you always act like Wi-Fi that disconnects”, Color Coded Lyrics translates.) On “Dead Man Runnin’” she shows off her pipes for the record; more often she let a whole European Union of topliners come through for her. Fine work that does imply her group coasts more than they should.
Grade: B PLUS (“Bad Boy, Sad Girl”, “Dead Man Running”, “Crown”)