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User
Reviews 17
Approval 96%
Soundoffs 16
News Articles 2
Band Edits + Tags 5
Album Edits 3
Album Ratings 1
Last Active 12-30-21 6:41 pm
Joined 11-22-05
Review Comments 2,167
| Listening to the entire 2024 Staff List - Part 1
It's been several years since I've done this... well, that's not true. I always listen to the whole staff list, but it's been a while since I've bothered to share my thoughts here. It's fun and gets my out of my normal listening patterns once a year, and while basing your taste on the staff of a dying website is ill-advised, I find that in general Sput does a better job than most at including a good blend of the expected with the dark horses, and I usually find something new that I listen to in perpetuity.
Rules: I try not to re-visit each album after I've listened to it once, because to me this is about first impressions and not a review. I hate scoring music as it finds that it ruins my enjoyment of things, but this time I thought I'd grade the experience of listening to it for the first time unless, of course, I had already heard it. Also no skipping albums. Part of the point is exposure to things I'd never try on my own. Now watch as I break all of these self-imposed rules. | | 20 |  | Cindy Lee
Diamond Jubilee
Starting out on kind of a rough note here, and I feel like reacting to this album is a reaction to both the pretention of the work itself and the snobbery of the hype around it (Pitchfork in particular has written some of their most cringeworthy material about this). In short, this album is way too long. I get what it’s trying to do and I actually like it quite a bit. I love how it somehow manages to create an unnerving, creepy atmosphere with its straightforward aesthetics, and I love how it never tries to craft a tracklist-defining earworm and presents its homogenous sound as what it is. There’s just no way that that could ever have filled 90 minutes of time worth filling.
First impression score: B-
Desire to re-listen: low | | 19 |  | Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey
Compassion
This is the most unchallenging jazz album I’ve ever heard (out of all five of them), and I mean that in the best possible way. It never lingers on any one idea for too long, remaining fresh in its instrumental makeup between and within tracks, and the tapestries upon which the musicians all imprint their improvisational contributions are all breezy and inherently listenable. I was absolutely blissed out listening to this.
First impression score: A
Desire to re-listen: high | | 18 |  | Domestic Terminal
Sanctuary
Absolutely gorgeous album. Nostalgic and hopeful all at once, this band has the exceedingly rare quality in pop-adjacent music to directly and earnestly connect with me while remaining musically interesting. That Jimmy Eat World innocence transposed onto a high-school-band-that-became-adults palette, with some surprisingly dense instrumentation for good measure make a package that really works for me in a genre that I usually couldn’t care less about.|
First impression score: A+
Desire to re-listen: high | | 17 |  | Thou
Umbilical
I listened to this once around its release and it didn’t really grab me, but gave it another shot during this project and suddenly found it firing on all cylinders. Who knew that the best way for Thou to refresh their schtick was to once again strip it back down to basics? Discarding the lusher, more intellectual sonic tricks of their more recent albums and focusing solely on making you headbang turns out to be just the ticket, and as the tracklist progresses, Umbilical drags you down into its oppressive, angry morass like nothing the band has done in recent memory.
First impression score: N/A
Desire to re-listen: high | | 16 |  | Midas Fall
Cold Waves Divide Us
This band makes absolutely no impression on me. I feel exactly the same about this as I did about Evaporate a few years back: pretty but to what end? I don’t know, they’re just missing something, and while I appreciate their reticence to defaulting to huge, corny post-rock explosions, it wouldn’t hurt to try and make the listener feel something along the way.
First impression score: C
Desire to re-listen: low | | 15 |  | Kamasi Washington
Fearless Movement
Within the oddly specific context of this list, this album is the alter ego to Compassion: challenging in its diversity and its demands from the listener. While I do feel like I should have had a little more fun listening to such a wild smorgasbord of genres and influences, I didn’t feel its 86 minutes as painfully as Diamond Jubilee and didn’t necessarily feel like I was doing homework by immersing myself in a work that is clearly a labor of love for all the musical threads tied up here. Clearly first impressions are unfair for an album like this, so for now it’s enough to say that I feel inspired to dig deeper.
First impression score: B+
Desire to re-listen: moderate | | 14 |  | ScHoolboy Q
Blue Lips
My hip hop knowledge is basically “whatever sput tells me to listen to” and at my age that isn’t likely to change. That said, this is decidedly not the kind of rap music I’d intentionally seek out, being much more inclined towards the chilled-out, barely audible variety. So it’s a true strength that Blue Lips managed to suck me into the degree it did. The lyrics… again, not my cup of tea, but the bombastic music and beats underneath them do a ton of heavy lifting for me away from the obligatory misogyny and self aggrandizing.
First impression score: B+
Desire to re-listen: moderate/high | | 13 |  | Beth Gibbons
Lives Outgrown
Let’s be clear here: I enjoy making this “staff review” end of year list, but I’d enjoy them much, much more if they weren’t padded out with virtually identical sad-girl/folk/singer-songwriter albums. This album manages to rise above a lot of my problems with that stereotype, mostly thanks to the strong instrumental arrangements, and the closer is unironically one of my favorite single tracks on this list. I’m not sold on the rest and… well, if I’m going to do an obligatory spin of one of these folk-clones once in a while I probably need more.
First impression score: B
Desire to re-listen: low/moderate | | 12 |  | Ariana Grande
Eternal Sunshine
A completely serviceable pop album with some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard. Pleasant, but I’m not sure it belongs here. Also, I have a personal nitpick with Grande’s voice, which is so technically pristine that to me it just sounds fake and robotic, like a Vocaloid. Intellectually knowing that that’s not the case doesn’t help me like it more, and Ariana doesn’t help matters by expecting me to take her seriously when she croons that she’s been played like an Atari.
First impression score: B-
Desire to re-listen: low | | 11 |  | Arooj Aftab
Night Reign
Enchanting and intoxicating, this was both a complete surprise (I was expecting more standard-issue girl-folk) and a high contender for my personal top 10 of the year. This makes me want to disappear into the woods at night and stare at the stars while listening to its completely singular blend of influences. The vocals are dreamy, the songs manage to be JUST the right amount of weird while remaining completely accessible and captivating, and the light jazziness is the perfect seasoning on top. Excellent.
First impression score: A+
Desire to re-listen: already done | | 10 |  | Brodequin
Harbinger of Woe
This album tells you exactly what it is in the first 5 seconds and then keeps doing that thing over the next half hour. Either you like it or you don’t (I do) and there’s absolutely nothing here to nudge you in either direction. I do crave a little more inventiveness from heavy music in particular, but I’ll never turn up my nose at a perfectly (very?) good DM album.
First impression score: B+
Desire to re-listen: moderate | | 9 |  | Iglooghost
Tidal Memory Exo
I -hated-, repeat HATED this guy’s first release or two. It embodied all the parts of electronic that I dislike and amplified those traits to an unbearable degree. Somehow this weird kid has grown up, taken that sense of noisy, obnoxious chaos, and masterfully refined it into a completely awesome album here. The addition of the faux MC vocals help give it a lot of anchoring momentum, but more than that, the controlled bursts of noise interspersed with liquid smoothness makes for an exhilarating listening experience that is hard to come by with this level of craftsmanship. A complete subversion of expectations for me.
First impression score: A-
Desire to re-listen: high | | 8 |  | Waxahatchee
Tigers Blood
I don’t hate Waxahatchee, and she doesn’t fall into that anathema bucket I alluded to a few entries back, but this is certainly the best album on this list that I’ll never listen to again. This kind of twangy Americana just needs a little bit more ambition to strike my fancy a la something like Preacher’s Daughter, and while everything here is completely fine, it just is what it is.
First impression score: B
Desire to re-listen: low | | 7 |  | Slift
Ilion
I’m a certified space rock/metal groupie and while that aesthetic is certainly tired, it need not clear a very high bar to pique my interest in the first place. So while I was fully expecting this album to surpass that low standard, I truly think this might be a genre-busting cult classic. Slift show us how to do the metal for astronauts thing without conforming to many of the cliches you’d expect to hear, and this album seems to stand on its own as a huge and mesmerizing work. I think I’ll be listening to this a lot in the near future.
First impression score: A
Desire to re-listen: high | | 6 |  | Mike and Tony Seltzer
Pinball
Last year’s Burning Desire is a fascinating enigma to me; I know I like it but man, I can’t tell what Mike’s saying and the tracks all blend together in a pleasant but blurry milieu. This immediately strikes me as sharper and more energetic, which is good, but it still has that impressionistic feel that I love. It’s pretty rare for me to return to a rap album off these lists, but it helps that it’s 20 minutes long.
First impression score: B-
Desire to re-listen: moderate | | 5 |  | gyrofield
A Faint Glow of Bravery
This did absolutely nothing for me, but I suspect that that’s par for the course here. I have a strong preference for the genre so I’m willing to give it more grace than other albums that failed to leave a mark, but I’m wary that I can’t tell you a single thing about it even though I heard it within the past week.
First impression score: C
Desire to re-listen: moderate/high | | 4 |  | Magdalena Bay
Imaginal Disk
Call me a basic bitch, but this is everything I want from a pop album. Give me those pounding synthtracks, those choruses with those weird chord progressions, and even those ambient interlude tracks. In a world where pop more or less all sounds the same to me, this is such a standout and I fully support the hype.
First impression score: A-
Desire to re-listen: high | | 3 |  | Skee Mask
Resort
This brand of electronic is the equivalent of music candy for me: I can consume it easily, thoughtlessly, and more or less endlessly. It helps that it’s masterfully produced, especially with some of the things he’s doing on the bass end of the equalizer, but in general I don’t even think about how much I love this. I could swim in this spacey, chilled out goodness for hours (and have done already).
First impression score: A
Desire to re-listen: already done | | 2 |  | Julia Holter
Something in the Room She Moves
I count myself as an Aviary enjoyer, and while it’s unfair to hold Julia to that titanic standard, this fell a lot further short than I was anticipating. I know enough about her schtick to know that one listen through on not enough sleep and shitty headphones is completely unfair, and maybe I’m forgetting at what point Aviary truly started to wow me with its bizarre inventiveness, but I do find myself wanting to listen to that album instead of this one again.
First impression score: C by Julia Holter standards, maybe B+ if this was my first album by her
Desire to re-listen: high | | 1 |  | Opeth
The Last Will and Testament
It speaks volumes about how my interest in Opeth has cratered over the last two decades I’ve been listening to them that this is the first time I’ve bothered to hear this. And like I did with In Cauda Vernum, my reaction is more or less “Hey, this is actually pretty good. Why haven’t I listened to this yet?” Hearing Mikael growl again is kind of like being wrapped in a warm, familiar blanket and it’s actually shocking how much of an anchoring presence that has on (what is now) Opeth’s core sound. You can hear the cracks; those long, repetitive sections don’t serve their dad-rock nearly as well as they did their death/doom sound, but we’ve known that for 10 years now. This is good Opeth, and that’s cause to celebrate.
First impression score: B+
Desire to re-listen: high | |
JohnnyoftheWell
01.29.25 | it is happening
again
mostly excellent takes so far, though Gyrofield at the bottom of this pile has me scratching the ol head | NOTINTHEFACE
01.29.25 | Yeah just needed a *checks watch* 3 year hiatus, tbd.
If there's one "low score" that you shouldn't be concerned about it's that one, because I'm certain that it's just me and I'll 100% be going back to it. It was just completely ephemeral to me the first go round. | Bilbodabag
01.30.25 | Hey thanks for the very kind words on Domestic Terminal :) glad you enjoyed it | YoYoMancuso
01.30.25 | ^^^ so glad you liked it! | Demon of the Fall
01.30.25 | nice Skee, nice Arooj and yeah, defo check Gyrofield again
Some interesting thoughts | RunOfTheMill
01.30.25 | ohhh this is great, I think I will try to follow along with you. Nice write-ups.
Regarding Diamond Jubilee, I feel very similarly to you. I’ve listened to it a ton in the past few months frankly as background music. It’s nice when it’s one but too long for its own good. | MiloRuggles
01.31.25 | Oh sweet, love your work! Hard subscribe, looking forward to more
Check this out for some more sweet Vijay Iyer: https://www.sputnikmusic.com/soundoff.php?albumid=103467 | NOTINTHEFACE
01.31.25 | @the DomTerminal boys: You guys have made something to be proud of here, and you deserve every bit of praise you get for my money.
@Milo: Yeah I'll definitely be delving further into that particular jazz clique for sure. I even saw some collabs with Arooj Aftab that sound right up my alley. Thanks!
Part 2 is up if you're following along! | FowlKrietzsche
01.31.25 | Lovely blurbs, great effortpost, fuck yeah 9! |
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