Record Collection and the Tragedy of Good Enough
Three albums in one week, and the dominant feeling across all three was of potential handled carefully—not squandered exactly, just kept at a safe distance from anything risky.
Mark Ronson’s Record Collection is the clearest case. "Bang Bang Bang" and "Lose It" announced an album that was going to matter—the kind of singles that promise a British super-producer at the peak of his powers had figured out what contemporary pop could sound like if it actually reached for something. The record itself is perfectly fine. Good songs, clean beats, collaborations that work. Not a bad track on it. The problem is it adds up to less than its own singles, which is a specific kind of disappointment: nothing to point at, just a vague deflation when you reach the end. "The Bike Song" and "Hey Boy" are the moments worth returning to.
Deine Jugend are a three-piece club-pop band from Mannheim, Germany—the name translates as "Your Youth"—and they don’t have the good-enough problem yet. They have the opposite: the gap between where they are and where they’re clearly going still feels like forward motion. Laura’s voice over those hard melodic edges works especially well live, but Wir Sind Deine Jugend carries it reasonably well on record too. "Deine Maske" and "Mama Geht Jetzt Steil" are the entry points. This band is going to get bigger.
Die Antwoord’s $o$ is the most self-aware of the three, which is either what saves it or what limits it depending on the day. Ninja and Yo-Landi and DJ Hi-Tek built this thing to be experienced through a screen—"Enter The Ninja" and "Beat Boy" work because the visuals are unhinged and Yo-Landi’s tits are doing half the conceptual heavy lifting. Strip the videos away and a lot of these tracks deflate; the horniness doesn’t survive the journey to pure audio. The good news is they’re clearly not serious about any of it, which means the failure mode is just "less fun than the video" rather than "pretension collapsing under its own weight," and that’s a comfortable place to be. "In Your Face" holds up better than most.
Three records. One that fell short of its own promise, one that’s building toward something, one that was always only partly about the music. Some weeks that’s the full range right there.