Semipop Life: Sensual, not sexy

Public Enemy, Messa, ARTMS, plus special section: Countrypop Life 3!

Public Enemy: Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025

The people are sick, the world is sick, this song is sick, RIP Jules Feiffer. Chuck D too has diagnosed the degeneracy of millions of the nation for decades, and he isn’t getting wronger even if he’s a shitlib with breakbeats now. Slinging his trademark authoritative irony (I don’t think Carlton Ridenhour thinks ageism is worse than racism, except in the sense that White people die too), he’s grateful that unlike many Black intellectuals, whether or not they ever really had a gun, he’s made it to Social Security without succumbing to the “fingers of Black Death/hypertension, diabetes, cancer, stress” etc. As always, Flavor humanizes him. On “C’mon Get Down”, Flav shows off his abiding knowledge of low culture—“You voted for wrong, that’s treason/I’m buzzing the streets like Tommy Egan”—and while those of us without premium cable are looking that one up, Chuck recounts the Seventies years when the Yankees decamped to Shea and the Bronx was so pissed they took up rap instead. Producers including soul recycler Felony Muzik, aging modernist C-Doc, and Chuck himself keep things varied and moving with beat change-ups and the occasional badd guitar solo. PE’s most incisive since Pedro was a Met.

Grade: A MINUS (“Siick”, “C’mon Get Down”, “The Hits Just Keep on Comin”)

Messa: The Spin

Doomers from the Veneto who for much of this album veer close to conventional, if Gothy, heavy rock. It helps them a lot to have actual singer Sara Bianchin, who has the range to do some spooky stuff in her upper register, as well as, brace yourself metal fans, some subtlety. She understands dynamics well enough to sell Romantic symbolism and questionable animal similes, and almost well enough to sell two and a half minutes of piano balladeering on “Immolation” before the drop. That one aside, they build robust tracks that pass through distinct sections with some kind of destination in mind—even the eight minute “The Dress”, complete with sensual-not-sexy sax, sustains interest. Drummer Rocco Toaldo leads the band through extreme tempo changes, bassist Marco Zanin keeps the heaviness knob twiddling between seven and eleven, and tune-first blooze-second lead guitarist Alberto Piccolo (a name so anti-metal that it’s metal) takes his time constructing note-bending solos. Highlights include the snare-whacking medium-burn climax of “Fire on the Roof” and when “At Races” finally gets fast again.

Grade: A MINUS (“Fire on the Roof”, “At Races”, “Reveal”)

ARTMS: Club Icarus EP

These five ex-Loona members didn’t fully convince me with last year’s acclaimed DALL, but the five songs after this mini’s mood-setting initial minute make it hard to deny they’re at the vanguard of progressive K-pop. “Icarus”, like most of their work, isn’t optimized for a singalong: it’s all about textures and frills. Having multiple singers with real range allows vocal arrangements that are prettier and more complex than the norm, no matter how much the studio quantizes them. Like every K-pop group to date, they find strength in speed, as on “Obsessed”, which combines now de rigueur post-Pantheress sonics with the coolness of their old collective. The syncopated repetition in “jeomjeom jeomjeom jeomjeom jeomjeom deo” (“a bit more”) approaches funk. “Goddess” is just as catchy, and stranger—a club track without a real chorus that relies on a two-note synthesized hook and breezes by like a night you can’t remember/a night you can’t forget. “Verified Beauty” has the biggest chorus and yet or thus feels a touch slight. The closing “Burn” begins “You can see me when I punch your face”, and I respect them for not blindsiding me.

Grade: A MINUS (“Goddess”, “Obsessed”, “Burn”)

Sadness/Soulless: Burning as the First Light

Atmospherics, screaming, tons of SSRIs: blackgaze? Gothic post-something-or-other? Let’s call what these two bands do “emo metal” and be done with it. Sadness is Mexico-born, Chicagoland-based genre pioneer Damián Ojeda. While “Watching Treeflowers from My Window” tips over the edge into rococo cheesiness, I gasped a little when the synth arpeggios kicked in seven minutes into “Every Edge of Your Name, Burning”, so I can see why he took the risk. Soulless is Indonesia’s Rivanka, who achieves the grandeur of Deafheaven without their above-it-all sense. However tasteful his shrieks, you get the sense that he means it—maybe not as much as Ojeda does, and maybe that’s healthier. “Candles” is spacious and melodic; “Altar” uses heaviness strategically, keeping despair contained through the weight of flying buttresses of beauty. Despite not having the right brain chemistry to live in this, I admire it like it’s a ruined abbey.

Grade: B PLUS (“Altar”, “Candles”, “Every Edge of Your Name, Burning”)

Stray Kids: Hop

The most lucrative boyband of the last couple of years is easy to root for: the core members are the main writers and co-producers of their material, and they’ve shown genuine interest in contemporary music, though this hasn’t guaranteed good albums. This mixtape from last Christmas isn’t a paragon of consistency, but it’s the most I’ve enjoyed them. The first four tracks (repeating “Walkin on Water” for some reason) are hip-hop in the Limp Bizkit sense, loud and energetic like before BTS met Coolio. The real fun is in each of the eight members getting a solo cut. Credible rappers Changbin and Han get to stretch out without dead weight, and leader Bang Chan gets to be serious like Robert Pattinson in Twilight. You also get Felix, in the group to give Bang Chan another Australian to talk to, croak “My life is so unfair/Everyone sees me as if I’m the beast out there/My dreams become nightmares” and steal the record. A Tom Waits-themed mixtape next time, please.

Grade: B PLUS (“Unfair”, “Bounce Back”, “Hold My Hand”)

TXAI Band EP

Brazilians Paulo Novaes and Luiz Gabriel Lopes bring their cavaquinhos and laptops into the Herzogian depths of the Amazon to record the Huni Kuin locals and play with the kids. There are four proper songs, two folkloric, two poppier, all with intrigue. The traditionalist tracks are “Txai Puke Ruaken”, with Tuyn Kaya singing with an appealing sleepiness (about what, all but the few thousand speakers of the local dialect won’t know), and “Nai Mãpu Yubekã”, a minor key prayer sung and strummed by Mística Samany with the gravitas of a chief’s daughter. “Tamani” is proficient soft samba with heavy contributions by urban collaborators. “Buni Bimi” is world radio-friendly alt-MPB with some pleasant dinkiness, thanks in part to pipsqueak multi-instrumentalist Maspã Huni Kuin, showstealer in the YouTube docu-promo that’s only five minutes shorter than the EP.

Grade: B PLUS (“Nai Mãpu Yubekã”, “Buni Bimi”, “Txai Puke Ruaken”)

Countrypop Life 3: The magic number

Kane Brown: The High Road

He’s been a star for a near-decade, yet above-replacement work was rare until 2023’s Phil Collins rip “I Can Feel It”. Direct references to the racism he experienced growing up biracial in Tennessee have dried up; now he claims “I’m just like you” on “Fiddle in the Band”, our alleged commonality derived from iHeartRadio’s finite playlists. His meat-and-three-veg omnivorousness makes him Marshmello’s favorite Nashvillian, and if “Miles on It” is an atrocity, it’s atypical. Though Brown breaks out trap hi-hats and guitar solos for Jelly Roll, he’s more convincing on mainline cornball classic “3”—the kind of song where once you find out his high school jersey number, you know how many kids he’ll have before he does—and his pitch-corrected baritone suffices to make his simple sentiments feel just like (some of) yours. And unlike wife guy role model Brad Paisley, he puts his spouse on the record to get horny enough together to mortify a trio of kids one day.

Grade: B (“I Can Feel It”, “3”, “Fiddle in the Band”)

Hailey Whitters: Corn Queen

After Raised’s “Everything She Ain’t” became a slow-burn success, her return plays it safe, not least prophylactically. “Shotgun Wedding Baby” recounts her tipsy conception without giving the sense that her half of a 12-pack decades later might result in anything that’d require a blue state to take care of. The one time she thinks she might do something she might regret, she goes home, which you’ve gotta admit is sensible. Ignoring maudlin sync-bait “Casseroles”, the likeliest hit is “I Don’t Want You”, on which she takes pains to emphasize that she does, indeed, want him, and relies on the starpower of one Charles Wesley Godwin for a streaming boost. She’s rowdier when her writing sets up a nail that her singing can hammer with enthusiasm. “Wholesome”’s southern soul might signify the southern part of the Cedar Rapids metro area, but when she slurs the title pun, you can believe her buttermilk shake brings a certain type of lactose-tolerant boy to the yard.

Grade: B PLUS (“Wholesome”, “The Nail”, “Shotgun Wedding Baby”)

Morgan Wallen: I’m the Problem

As always, you don’t have to listen to this, and you definitely don’t have to listen to it all at once. The most interesting contiguous half runs from pop radio bid “What I Want” to inoffensive streaming juggernaut “Love Somebody”; tack on the “Miami” remix, on which he flies south to find anonymity, Lil Wayne, and Rick Ross, who think he’s the guy from The Righteous Gemstones. There are few other risks, but he continues to improve as a singer. If you listen to What Not To by his clone Tucker Wetmore (which you super-duper don’t have to), you can hear in comparison how Wallen’s worked on his upper register to not be so fjucking whiny, not to mention Morgan has heard a rap song in his life. The peak of I’m the Problem starts with “Kick Myself”, as in “kicked the bottle… but I just can’t kick myself”, and before you volunteer a foot, a 8-bit bomb synth descends, which Wallen adeptly dodges. Following that is “20 Cigarettes”, which has an unusual harmonic progression towards a mid-chorus release, and the best quantification of time through vices since “Beers Ago”. Things soon go south, with exurban pride and male ressentiment that you can penalize as many notches as you want for, though note that the HARDY duet “Come Back as a Redneck” urges the successful to check their privilege with as much vehemence as any Tumblr post. Wallen’s closer than ever to a proper good album, and continues to have no incentive to make one.

Grade: B PLUS (“20 Cigarettes”, “Kick Myself”, “Number 3 and Number 7”)

Eric Church: Evangeline vs. the Machine

Whether or not he wanted his comeback from a four-year hiatus to be dramatic, Jay Joyce makes it so. The producer takes a Salvation Army of brass, including emphatic trumpet stabs and a French fjucking horn, and engineers them to note-perfection. Church battles nostalgia, threats to his integrity, and Joyce to make this a singer’s record. “Bleed on Paper” extends him with sudden jumps to falsetto then back to growl, and he does his job with as much feeling as the soul choir in dialogue with him. On the opening line of “Darkest Hour”, he yowls “if you were down in a gutter” in a way that allows no doubt he’s made contact with a gutter before, even if it’s from picking the leaves out of the one by his downpipe. If he doesn’t quite fit as a theater kid, in an era of bad or bland male singers, Church’s ability to do tension and release without yelling at us is such a relief that I’ll let him throw in a Tom Waits cover at the end.

Grade: A MINUS (“Bleed on Paper”, “Hands of Time”, “Darkest Hour”)

Morgan Wade: The Party Is Over (Recovered)

A sort of prequel, recounting her wilder, if more closeted, days. No co-writes, so you get full doses of her writing tics and tropes—you can bet there’s at least one change of hair color. Each verse of “Let Us Down” repeats its first line at the end to put it in a different light (a trick you may recall from the magnificent “Phantom Feelings”), so that when you hear “you don’t look too happy but who am I to judge”, you brace yourself for a heavy biographical couplet. The main subject is her alcoholism, which, although it’s killing her, she in the Lou Reed tradition lets you know the thrill of. On “Candy from Strangers”, producer Clint Wells rocks the bar while Wade takes pride in someone else paying for her drinks, and I worry about her, however retrospectively. The ending, a flash-forward to a negative pregnancy test, isn’t an altogether happy one, save that she’s now made four wide-release albums (with four classic album covers) since hitting bottom. Nothing here attempts the maturity of “Wilder Days” and “Phantom Feelings”, yet this might be her most grown-up set.

Grade: A MINUS (“Candy from Strangers”, “Let Us Down”, “Parking Garage”)

Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter

Can’t say Rick Rubin would’ve been my first choice to produce this, but his psych-outs aren’t incompetent, which is what it would’ve taken to prevent Childers from confirming himself as country’s current finest singer-songwriter. For the singer part, check the opening of mature woman appreciation anthem “Oneida” and listen to how weirdly he approaches each phrase, with huge variations in dynamics and flecks of falsetto conveying uncertainty. The writer part is apparent with any close listening or reading. Of his ex-drinking buddies, he asks “Do their livers scream for water? Are their brains about to swell?” If you think he’s waxing too poetic, he starts the next one with “To put it plain, I just don’t like you”, and if he doesn’t state who he’s chewing out, that he played “Long Violent History” in LA during the June protests has implications. More than ever, he’s wrestling with how his Appalachian upbringing is an inextricable part of him—the tradition of the snipe hunt is very funny and kind of messed up if you think about it—and how he needs more, which maybe he’ll get from the Ganges and maybe won’t. If that’s too much, man, there’s one about how kangaroos will fuck you up.

Grade: A (“Getting to the Bottom”, “Tirtha Yatra”, “Down Under”)