A Direct Trip to Hell (and Five Others)
Pharrell Williams and N.E.R.D. were inescapable during a specific stretch of my early teens, which means The Best Of works on me the way all greatest-hits compilations work on people with the right nostalgia wiring: it makes you feel something while also reminding you that compilations are inherently lazy. She Wants to Move and Lap Dance still do what they always did—that specific friction between rock and R&B that felt genuinely strange in 2001 and now sounds like a very particular historical moment. Worth revisiting. Probably not worth owning.
JJ’s Kills is more atmosphere than song, which is either its strength or its flaw depending on your patience. The Swedish duo—Joakim’s production, Elin’s voice doing most of the heavy lifting—build something deliberately impressionistic, all haze and texture with the melodies half-submerged. Not technically accomplished in any conventional sense. More convincing through feeling than craft. I put it on and don’t reach for anything else, which is not nothing.
Damon Albarn made The Fall entirely on an iPad during Gorillaz’s North American tour and released it free on Christmas Day, and it sounds like both of those facts. Sixteen tracks of ambient lo-fi drift, no single moment that approaches Clint Eastwood or Feel Good Inc. or even Dirty Harry. Interesting as a document of transit and boredom. Not compelling as an album. The free release earns it more patience than it would otherwise deserve.
Chromeo’s Business Casual is Dave 1—the guy with the enormous beard—and his considerably nerdier partner P-Thugg making extremely horny retro-synth pop with full awareness of what they’re doing. Night by Night is a perfect piece of shameless groove and I’ve played it in settings where I should have been embarrassed and wasn’t. The album sustains that energy for about half its runtime, then coasts. Still the most fun record in this batch for most situations. Just not all situations.
Salem’s King Night is the one I keep returning to. The Michigan trio’s particular flavor of witch house—pitched-down vocals dragged through distortion, tempos that feel like being pulled underwater, that specific dread that doesn’t belong to industrial or hip-hop or any labeled genre—gets somewhere genuinely uncomfortable and stays there. Not an easy listen. Wasn’t designed to be. The title track alone is worth whatever the rest of the album costs you, and what it costs you is the rest of your evening.
Peach Kelli Pop—Allie Hanlon recording lo-fi bubblegum under a name that tells you everything—made a self-titled debut that has no technical right to work as well as it does. The songs are slight, the production is deliberately undercooked, the whole thing sounds like a crush that hasn’t been acted on yet. No must-have. But there’s something in there I keep coming back to without being able to explain why, which might be the most honest thing you can say about any record.