July 2024 Music Recap
One of the things I miss most about Spotify is Wrapped. I always feel a pang of envy at the end of the year when people are sharing their Wrapped stats, to the point where I've thought about trying to hook into Tidal's underdeveloped API and create something similar for myself. Alas, maybe someday, it's about #5 on the project backlog.
In the meantime I make due with Tidal's monthly email of my most streamed artists. I love this and I rarely have the same artist appear on the top five two months in a row. I'd like to say I'm constantly seeking out new artists but more often than not my most streamed artists are dictated by a singular mood that may prevail for a week or even a day. Listening to a few albums in a single day can really shoot an artist towards the top of the personal chart.
Without further ado:
- Car Seat Headrest - 47 songs
- Mondo Cozmo - 38 songs
- Broken Bells - 35 songs
- Wet Leg - 30 songs
- The Decemberists - 29 songs
You can see even Car Seat Headrest represents the equivalent of about four albums from a prolific catalog, this isn't me sitting in my room for hours a day listening to an artist on repeat.
This month was mostly reliable listening, looking over my personal chart I wouldn't look at this list and say it's representative of my "favorites" but each one of these artists has something that really gets under my skin in the best way possible.
Car Seat Headrest
I only discovered this gem of a band a few years back. They present an odd mixture of DYI-kid-in-his-basement and anthemic pop hooks with a dash of Brand New style emo. While fans of the band have jumped down deep rabbit holes of mythology; frankly, I just like the music and the passion that Will Toledo manages to put into every word he sings. Call me basic but "Teens of Style" is my favorite album, I feel like it treads a fine line between their garage rock roots and their more avant-garde sounds.
Mondo Cozmo
Never on the heavy rotation, but in this day and age there is a rare quality about Mondo Cozmo: his albums feel extremely cohesive. He lacks the textures that I find in the early albums of, say, Bruce Springsteen but there aren't any filler tracks. The melodies are catchy, and some of the cheesy poetry of lyrics can be forgiven as the music drowns them out. "New Medicine" or "This is For the Barbarians" are his best.
Broken Bells
Broken Bells is one of my favorites and how could they not be? I'm a big fan of The Shins early work and Danger Mouse has long been one of my most reliable producers so a collaboration between James Mercer and Brian Burton couldn't go wrong. The first two albums ("Broken Bells" and "After The Disco") are, essentially equal in my eyes, with their latest effort "Into the Blue" taking a close third (second?). That may be due to the problem of time and place, our experience with a band is forever frozen in the formative years when we first discovered them, all later work will be compared to this gilded memory.
The third ingredient that makes the Broken Bells potion sizzle is veteran Cartoon Network artist and designer Jacob Escobedo who does phenomenal artwork for them.
Wet Leg
Catchy hooks, witty (and naughty) lyrics blend to make a very fun listening experience. Wet Leg writes about all the alt-rock standards; wanting someone who doesn't want you back, quarter-life crises, post breakup sex, and a general malaise of the human condition but they manage to just be a bit more witty than most. Chaise Lounge was their breakout single but almost any of the songs on 2022's "Wet Leg" could be singles. I'm interested to see what comes next.
The Demberists
Sometimes I think The Decemberists are rebels from the young America who somehow managed to time travel to our age. This may, in part, be due to their recording the hilarious Hamilton discard; "Ben Fanklin's Song". More likely it's the out of place nature of their music; it's very much 00s indie rock (you may notice a theme with me here) but neither the subject matter nor the heavy acoustics seem to quite fit with the genre. That's not to mention Colin Meloy's voice, which is unlike any of his contemporaries.
Unlike Broken Bells, Wet Leg or Mondo Cozmo, I find The Decemberists's catalog to be rather hit and miss. Every album has some standout songs, but every album also has a few that don't connect at all with me.
Lets see what happens in August! Maybe some repeats (in the process of writing this up I've been listening to a lot of these artists over).