While this year’s new releases have been a bit underwhelming, I did manage to discover one album I really love — a record released in mid-2014 that has picked up steam this summer due to its infectious lead single.
That album is WALK THE MOON’s Talking is Hard, a modern pop juggernaut packed with 12 inventive, hummable gems. The one you’ve no doubt heard is ‘Shut Up and Dance’ but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Kacey Musgraves’ sophomore release, Pageant Material, didn’t disappoint me the way the other albums featured this week did, but it doesn’t quite live up to her excellent debut.
Musgraves has been hailed as country’s biggest blend of artistic talent and commercial appeal since Miranda Lambert, so expectations for this album were high. And she smartly side-stepped them, delivering a more low-key, traditional album rather than aiming for some sort of statement record.
Between 1997 and 2003, Stew released six albums (half under his own name and half under the moniker The Negro Problem). Every one of them is excellent — in fact, his first two solo albums were named as the best of their respective year by Entertainment Weekly.
Then he disappeared.
Well, that’s not exactly true. Fans of the New York theater scene might have caught him performing a couple of autobiographical musicals during the past decade, winning awards and eventually performing both on Broadway and in a filmed performance directed by Spike Lee.
I’m catching up with a few new releases this week. I’ve bought nine albums in 2015 and posted songs from six of them, so here come the remaining three.
Unfortunately, the trend so far this year is disappointment, or at least new albums that don’t live up to their predecessors.
That’s certainly the case with My Morning Jacket’s Thee Waterfall, the band’s first album since 2011.
Last week I featured a couple of debut or sophomore albums that propelled artists to fame in the early 70s.
Today’s Random Weekend track comes from a debut album released in 2001 that seemed poised to do the same.
But Pete Yorn, whose Musicforthemorningafter was one of the best examples of the alt-rock genre from the turn of the millennium, never reached the heights this record promised.
Meet Me In Montauk 