The Random iTunes Fairy has a thing for Elliott Smith. Today’s SOTD is the seventh Smith tune to pop up on Random Weekends, and the third from the double album New Moon.
I don’t know how that stacks up against other artists. I’ve long regretted that I never kept detailed stats of Random Weekends so I could do exactly the kind of analysis I’m wondering about now. But my gut tells me Smith is better represented than most.
The Random iTunes Fairy is getting cute again, serving up a Miranda Lambert track the day after I posted the latest from Pistol Annies.
‘Babies Makin’ Babies’ is a cut from Lambert’s 2014 album Platinum, one of her most successful critically and commercially. The album ranked #12 on the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll and topped the Billboard 200 album chart. Esteemed critic Robert Christgau praised it as “apolitical de facto feminism at its countriest” (I love that line).
Few musical announcements excite me more than word of new material from Miranda Lambert. Lambert is one of the few artists I follow who has yet to release an album that’s less than excellent.
2016’s double album The Weight of These Wings was her best work yet, and that’s saying something given that her previous two records showed up in my top five albums of the first half of the 2010s.
Lana Del Rey is sticking to her pace of a new album every other year, with her next release (amusingly titled Norman Fucking Rockwell) due in early 2019. As a preview, she recently dropped a couple of new tracks on an EP.
‘Mariners Apartment Complex’ and ‘Venice Bitch‘ are both vintage Lana Del Rey, though the latter goes in some trippy new directions, including a meandering space-synth solo that stretches the track’s running time to more than 10 minutes. That sounds horrible on paper but the song is hypnotizing and beautiful, like everything Del Rey touches.
This will go down as the year NetFlix jumped fully into the major motion picture game, releasing films by top-tier directors Alfonso Cuaron and the Coen Brothers. A Martin Scorsese film is due in early 2019.
A lesser-known but very promising talent, Jeremy Saulnier, has also released his latest film on the streaming network. Saulnier, whose Blue Ruin and Green Room were exhilarating, harrowing revenge thrillers, is back with Hold the Dark, a film that is dark and chilling both metaphorically and literally.
