Singer-songwriter and all-around cool guy Joe Jackson has released his first new album in four years. Titled Fool, the record is receiving some of his best reviews in years.
I was actually surprised to see Jackson has been relatively prolific over the past couple of decades. Fool is his sixth release of the 2000s, which isn’t exactly a torrid pace but more than I would have guessed, likely due to a lack of publicity.
I spent all of my year-end energy on the movies the past couple of months, so I never got around to counting down my favorite songs of 2018.
Had I done so, much of my focus would have been on seven albums that really knocked my socks off last year: Elvis Costello’s Look Now, Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, Josh Rouse’s Love in the Modern Age, Pistol Annies’ Interstate Gospel, Camila Cabello’s Camila, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, and Brandi Carlile’s By the Way, I Forgive You.
I asked my 16-year-old daughter if she’d heard the new Dua Lipa song and she said “yeah” with a shrug, then followed up with “she’s not really relevant anymore.”
It seems like less than a year ago that Lipa was the hottest thing going — an insanely beautiful woman with next-level vocal chops and a stellar debut album under her belt. She had superstar written all over.
Yes, queen! New music from Vampire Weekend! What a lovely and welcome surprise. It’s been six years since the band’s last album, Modern Vampires of the City, which topped my list of the best albums of 2013. That’s a friggin’ lifetime.
Last week the band dropped two tracks from their upcoming album, Father of the Bride. Both are unmistakably Vampire Weekend, which is a relief given the departure of key member Rostam Batmanglij.
‘Simple Things’ is the penultimate track on Belle & Sebastian’s 1998 album The Boy With the Arab Strap.
I was going to write that I consider this one of their top three albums but when I checked their discography to be sure, I realized I might have to amend that to one of their top five. Maybe six. And they’ve released only nine full-length albums. The moral being that God damn, Belle & Sebastian are a great band and I should dive back into their catalog soon instead of trying to understand what critics liked about the Cardi B album.
Meet Me In Montauk 