My Half-Assed Reviews of Pitchfork's Top 10 Albums of 2021

[Kyle]

These are my half-assed reviews of Pitchfork's Top 10 Albums of 2021. I've decided to listen to them as I work in my remote office. Please understand that I'm not listening closely to these. They are playing on Spotify in the background while I do work. I might miss a song completely because I'm concentrating on something intently. So take my reviews for what they are- a lazy half-listen to music while I'm doing something else.

[poorpete]

Ooooh, looking forward to it. I haven't heard any of them all the way through, though I do like what I've heard from Mdou Moctar, who's on my music project on the music thread.

[Kyle]

Dry Cleaning: New Long Leg

One way to hear New Long Leg is as a cringe-tinged dramedy—like Fleabag or Girls—with Florence Shaw as the performer who knows exactly how to deliver her own script. This album is not the type to be nominated for a Grammy, but it really ought to get Emmys for writing and acting. The lyrics infest your brain with quotables that reverberate for days, but more than the words it’s Shaw’s intonation that’s so funny and so heartbreaking: the grudging cadences, the way she can inject an unreadable alloy of earnestness and irony into an inanity like “I can rebuild.” The self-portrait painted here is of a burned-out shell drifting numbly through a life that senselessly accumulates irritations, humiliations, discomforts, chores, and interpersonal skirmishes, offset by the tiny comforts of Twix bars and artisanal treats. There’s a personal dimension to the inner emptiness (a sapping break-up), but because New Long Leg’s release coincided with the depressive pall that swept over the world thanks to lockdown, Shaw’s interiority synced up perfectly with exterior conditions. It’s no coincidence that the most exciting rock record in years is about the inability to feel excitement. Within Shaw is a voice of a generation distilling how it feels to be alive right now: “Do everything and feel nothing.” –Simon Reynolds

So this is an indie-rock album where the lead singer, Florence Shaw, never sings but only speaks lyrics in her sultry British accent. I didn't really listen closely to the lyrics, but when I did, it was normally Shaw just saying emo, artsy quips that seemed like they were trying to hard. The music was actually something I would listen to if it had... you know... singing accompanying it. But it didn't, so there's that. However, it was great to do work to, because it wasn't compelling or annoying enough to distract me from my work.

Likelihood that I'll listen to it again: 0 Tines out of 5

Usefulness as background music while working: 3.5 Tines out of 5

Overall rating: 2 Tines out of 5

[Kyle]

Playboi Carti: Whole Lotta Red

Whole Lotta Red is an all-time heat check. Playboi Carti could have easily put out Die Lit 2, and everyone would have probably been fine with it. But that’s not how this Atlanta alien works. At just 25 years old, he has already reinvented his sound multiple times, from wavy plugg music to his baby voice era; whenever some SoundCloud copycats start to catch up, he jets toward new territory. On Whole Lotta Red, over blown-out beats that blend hypnotic melodies with drums that twitch and boom like a tweaked-out Godzilla, Carti yelps, shrieks, and croons as if he’s trying to exorcise a demon. Its meticulously layered-yet-effortless style will once again have all the wannabes scratching their heads for years. What a flex. –Alphonse Pierre

Oh boy. So going into this, I really wanted to like this album because my kids love it. Let me enumerate the reasons why I didn't. To start, and I know this makes me sound like an old man, but whenever Playboi Carti refers to women in his songs, it's always in a derogatory way. He only refers to them as "bitches" and when he refers to them, it's always about: (1) how he's going to fuck them; (2) how they're going to suck his dick; and (3) putting them in their place. I know that misogyny is rampant in popular music, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it. It's offensive and awful. In twenty years we're going to look back on the way women were treated in music and we're going to be ashamed. We should be ashamed now.

Okay, with that out of the way, let me talk about the music itself. Playboi Carti's vocals are all heavily autotuned with a fat warble and pitched high. When that goes over these kind of trippy beats, it just reminds me of those old commercials for the Crazy Frog ringtones. You know the ones:



It just doesn't appeal to me. And I found it annoying. There's nothing about this album that I liked. And worse yet, it was incredibly distracting while I was working.

Likelihood that I'll listen to it again: 0 Tines out of 5

Usefulness as background music while working: 0 Tines out of 5

Overall rating: 0 Tines out of 5

[Kyle]

Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime

Mdou Moctar first riveted listeners as a wedding performer in his home country of Niger; his live recordings circulated over shared SIM cards. Since then, he’s continued to find electrified approaches to the vernacular music of his Tuareg background with uninhibited guitar. On Afrique Victime, his first release for Matador, Moctar chases lively arrangements even further while excoriating the traumatic legacy of brutal French colonialism in Africa. His solos rip like lightning bolts across a storm of melody and rhythm, with Mikey Coltun’s bass roiling in ecstatic complement. The band charges through energetic and lightly psychedelic numbers (“Chismiten,” “Ya Habibti”), and find more knots to untangle in their quieter asides (“Asdikte Akal,” “Tala Tannam”). Its title track is a pure thrill, detonating as Moctar’s cohort locks into a churning groove from his sung invocation and only growing wilder from there. Reports of the death of rock have been greatly exaggerated: Afrique Victime is a uniquely vibrant and kinetic recording, one that proves that the future of rock music exists far beyond what any genre or geographic borders can define. –Allison Hussey

Do you like guitar? Because I fucking love guitar. One of the music highlights of the last few years for me was when I saw Guns N Roses at ACL. I almost didn't care enough about them to watch, but decided to check it out. I didn't realize Slash had rejoined the band. Holy shit. Y'all. Watching Slash live is one of the greatest things ever. He's amazing.

Okay, so I'm not saying Mdou Moctar is Slash- it's a different type of music, but he is amazing on the guitar. I can't understand any of the lyrics because they're not in English. But these songs almost all feature Moctar's electric guitar and it is the star of each song. You know how Santana would have someone on vocals but you didn't care because... Santana. So what's cool is that there's a completely foreign vibe to all the music (I'm guess it's African or northern African, but I'm not going to pretend to be able to recognize a regional sound), but the guitar is still so prominent and soulful. And the review above is dead on- the title track is awesome. The only problem with the album is that, as background music, I kept getting distracted from work by the guitar.

Likelihood that I'll listen to it again: 5 Tines out of 5

Usefulness as background music while working: 2.5 Tines out of 5

Overall rating: 4 Tines out of 5

[Kyle]

The Weather Station: Ignorance

A Canadian singer-songwriter with an aura of purposeful solitude, a gift for drawing insight and revelation from minute observations of relationships and environments, and an ear for melodies that dip, wind, and double back like trains of thought. After a few great albums, most of them sparse and muted, she assembles a band that can channel the exuberance of her era’s pop rhythms and twist them toward her own idiosyncratic ends. Far from dampening the music’s acuity and expressiveness, making them softly palatable, these new grooves accompany some of the sharpest songs of her career. Weather Station bandleader Tamara Lindeman might be tired of hearing Joni Mitchell comparisons at this point, but the resemblance is uncanny: Ignorance is something like her Court and Spark.

Not that it sounds much like Mitchell’s 1974 masterpiece. Where that album is warm and jazzy, Ignorance is single-mindedly propulsive, befitting songs concerned with the shrinking possibility of love on a planet hurtling toward collapse. Multiple percussionists provide an unflagging beat; strings, woodwinds, and electronic keyboards float above these girders like an iridescent sunset after a wildfire. Lindeman’s inimitable voice wanders the spaces between, taking in trees choked by buildings, birds alighting on rooftops, a world that hangs over her with the indifference of a secondhand jacket. Perhaps the comparison has more to do with the space Court and Spark opened in Joni’s canon, making room for the run of wonderful and profoundly strange albums that came next. After this, it seems, Tamara Lindeman can do anything. –Andy Cush

Soft pop rock. I wasn't feeling it. The lead singer has a beautiful voice, but it was just all too subdued for me. Like solo-Florence Welch or late-career Sarah McLachlan. It was pretty, and the piano was pretty and the vocals were pretty and it was all very mournful and haunting. But it really suffered from all sounding the same. On the bright side, it's the perfect easy-listening to work to. I got a lot done.

Likelihood that I'll listen to it again: 1.5 Tines out of 5

Usefulness as background music while working: 4.5 Tines out of 5

Overall rating: 2.5 Tines out of 5

[Kyle]

Turnstile: Glow On

After the world spent 18 months at home, the Baltimore band Turnstile unleashed Glow On unto a rapidly-growing audience that could not have possibly been better primed to receive its 34 minutes of nonstop feeling. Is this post-hardcore? Pop hardcore? Streetwear Fugazi? Do you “have to see it live to get it”? No matter how you square their multitudes, Turnstile know that hardcore is fundamentally interactive music—you don’t just listen; you participate; together—and Glow On facilitates it. This might mean screaming along to the tidal hooks of “Mystery” and “Holiday” to lock in with a kinetic crowd. It might mean having a moment of connected introspection with lyrics like “I just need to know I’m working for the big prize” or “Can’t be the only one” or “Thank you for letting me see myself” (just like those Turnstilemaniacs nodding along in the sublime Turnstile Love Connection film). Or maybe it means allowing Glow On’s hypercharged riffs and blast beats—its synth arpeggios, sing-rapping, Caribbean rhythms, and Dev Hynes harmonies—to fluidly eclipse your misfit soul, clarifying that it belongs here. –Jenn Pelly

I love power pop rock. And that's exactly what this is. Heavy guitars with good hooks. Loud vocals and an energy that makes you want to sing along even though you don't know the words. I loved this album. So much that I downloaded it to my phone to listen to on the regular. So good, but distracting to work to because I enjoyed it so much.

Likelihood that I'll listen to it again: 5 Tines out of 5

Usefulness as background music while working: 2.5 Tines out of 5

Overall rating: 4 Tines out of 5