@@@ Ego Ella May: Give a Little (UpperRoom, 2020) These listens are from last week’s Line of Best Fit email. It opens up super trippy and lo fi before a beat comes underneath and Ms. May starts with the vocalizing. I like her singing and the beat much better than the guitar sounds which I find a bit disorienting, though I do like the contrast of her vocal sweetness when she builds out the tracks against the sound of the janky ass guitars. Someboy put in a super flavorful horn melody that comes and goes but leaves an impression. It’s an atypical track with a bunch of nice elements to it.
@@@ Raleigh Ritchie: Sadboi (Alacran Records, 2020) Cathartic, infectious r&b — that’s how this record is blurbed on Apple Music. I hear a musician that took bouncy early ’60s pre black power r&b and modernized the sounds, glitched it up here and there and kept the vocal stacking and sophistication of the original style. I like the skittering drum machine with the saccharine singing and the fat fat bass. That’s double fat for those reading closely.
@@@ JP Saxe: Hey Stupid, I Love You (Arista, 2020) Sensitive white boy loverboy electro business. Very tasty half puffy/half marimba-y synth parts and while many might like Saxe’s supersmooth delivery I don’t. As I often type here I like contrast in my music the way folks like it in food. A little crunch with the sweetness, a bit of tang to the whatever flavor. This is all white chocolate pudding which is nice but some pistachios or some other business, naimsayin’?
@@@ Kelly Lee Owens: On (Smalltown Supersound, 2020) A pre-release track on a label I dig. Owen’s voice is framed as dreamy and echoed in the keyboard part with a distantly percolating beat. I was with it til the background vocals came in and then I was not with it as much. There’s a little panned sonic nymph like sound bouncing back and forth at the bottom of the mix which I dig but I feel like there could have been a lot fewer vocal tracks here — it just gets too New Age-y and again the concept of contrast could have worked here. This is so pillowy it makes the track above seem mad crunched out which it wasn’t. A rougher beat, some more distortion, something in that part of town.
YTD recordings listened to: 512
Good music, not list worthy: 256
Not good music: 227
Best: 0
Honorable Mentions: 0
Possibles: Retox, Defeater, Jonwayne, Okkyung Lee, Slidhr, The Chewers, Susie Iberra/Roberto Rodriguez, The Coral, T.O.M.B., Lozen, Erase Errata, Mastery, Hartley C. White, Weed, Cold Water, Luther Dickinson, Graeme Barrett, Fast Asleep, Goldlink, Cavanaugh, Satoko Fuji, Moken, Juan Atkins, Lantern, Twin Peaks, Djelimady Tounkara, The Oh Sees, Denny Zeitlin, MILF, Unfun, De La Soul, Carl Sagan’s Skate Shoes, Noname, Klara Lewis, Krullur, The Lowest Form, Hard Proof, Yotoco, Jungle Fire, Sandoz, Oddisee, RAM, Fiver, Succumb Succumb, Gloom, Priests, Propaganda, This is the Kit, Roberto Gonzalez, Integrity, Tuba Skinny, The Expanders, Criolo, Billy Strings, Flowers of Sulphur, Portal, Lawaii, Etran De L’Air, Ruby Karinto, Elysia Crampton, Parquet Courts, Moskus, Kendl Winter, Tkay Maidza, Barro, Daniel Khan, Tallawit Timbouctou, Sumac, Tropical Fuck Storm, Harriet Tubman, Ammar 808, Anais Maviel, Chaka Khan, Pom Poko, Fried Egg, Tarek Atoui, Saicobab, General Purv, Shipping News, Big Thief, Mariachi El Bronx, Pour Me a Grog, Sudan Archives, Lakou Mizik, Moodymann, Pharmakon, Alefa Madagascar, Janjao, Luge, Wiki, Mick Jenkins, Jeremiah Jae, Fera, Gambian Griot Kora Duets, Drama, Beatrice Dillon, Mass Worship, mmmonika, Les Deuxluxes, Tony Allen, Fra Fra, Nihiloxica, Hailu Mergia, Pokey LaFarge, Nico Gomez, Nohe and Sus Santos, schroothoop, Tiny Bit of Giant’s Blood, Pole, Naeem, Mekons, Santrofi
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