Robyn makes her second appearance on the Pazz & Jop poll, tied for the #18 spot. ‘Missing U’ was the first single released from her album Honey.
This track sums up what’s great about Robyn. It’s a danceable electro pop song that also brings the feels. She lends a vulnerability to her songs that you usually find in more traditional balladry, but dresses it with a techno sheen.
Lana Del Rey ties for #18 on Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll with ‘Venice Bitch,’ the second single from her upcoming album, Norman Fucking Rockwell.
My two most-anticipated albums of 2019 are Vampire Weekend’s Father of the Bride and Del Rey’s newest. She has been relatively prolific (her last album, Lust For Life, came out in the summer of 2017) but she has also yet to disappoint and I know any new material will be rewarding.
The third song tied for 15th on the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll is another Kacey Musgraves tune. She clearly hit a nerve with Golden Hour, at least critically. It hasn’t been a runaway commercial hit, at least not yet.
‘Space Cowboy’ was on of the album’s early singles and one of its standout tracks. Musgraves does a nice job mining the cowboy metaphor throughout, and the misdirection of “space cowboy” actually being “space, cowboy” is nifty.
Three songs tied for the 15th spot on Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop poll. One of those is ‘Shallow,’ the one element of A Star is Born that will definitely win an Oscar later this month.
Then comes ‘Slow Burn,’ the lead-off track from Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, which I already noted was the poll’s #1 album overall.
This is Michael Penn’s first appearance on the blog in three and a half years, when I named his sophomore album Free-For-All my second-favorite of 1992. Today’s song comes from the same album.
I have a theory on why Penn never became a bigger star. I think his lyrics are just too inscrutable. His one hit, ‘No Myth,’ was easy enough to decipher. “What if I were Romeo in black jeans?” is a great, memorable line that doesn’t make you scratch your head like so many of this later songs.
Meet Me In Montauk 