Kim Deal - Nobody Loves You More


Yippee! My copy of Nobody Loves You More, the new Kim Deal album, finally arrived. It took quite a journey from New York to Des Moines, then headed the wrong way over to Davenport, then back through Des Moines, and finally to me. It's fine, actually, i didn't have the new OS up and running properly until yesterday anyway. I somehow piped everything the wrong way and the volume control kept creating new audio sockets every time I raised or lowered it, eventually crashing everything. All fixed now, so bring on the quirky songs about loving me, or loving myself, or whoever it turns out loves whomever in a comparatively measurable way.

Kim Deal is of course famous as the bassist of Pixies and frontwoman of her own band The Breeders, but this is a solo album with 19 other random and not so random people. I kid, of course, but part of my brain wants a "solo album" to be literally solo. I know, I know, it's her first time, i should be gentle (please note that joke is neither sexist nor mysogynistic, it's merely in poor taste). Not even going to pretend for a second I didn't have a huge adolescent crush on Kim Deal. Probably still do in one of these bottles around here...

Like it or not, I'm a critic, and criticism, for me, is about using superfluous commas [snap] I mean openly confronting your own biases. I'm going to like this record no matter what it turns out to be, so it's my responsibility to describe what that IS is as objectively as possible. It's a serious contender against Kim Gordon's The Collective for Bottle Of Beef's Album of the year award (no prize, unfortunately).

K, well, i don't know how else to tell you this, but the album is a love letter/eulogy to Steve Albini. It probably almost certainly didn't start out that way, these songs are about all sorts of stuff and the earliest date back to 2011 or so, but as essentially a compilation album of songs without a prior home or context just released now, it's about Steve Albini. It's also fucking awesome. 

You get big night-club orchestra ballads, crunchy alt rock, a couple electro-trash experiments, and an overwhelmingly grounded approach to living life near the end of life. You know what it is? It's gorgeously mortal, and an amazing example of how putting songs together as an album adds up to something magically bigger than anything the individual songs are about. 

What more could you possibly ask for in an album? Listening to the album is a completely different experience from listening to the 11 songs on it. 

Magnifique.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

Image
This might be my longest  album review ever. But i swear a couple times, so it's worth the read ;) How could i possibly mention Jefferson Airplane, The 4 Seasons, and Frank Zappa in the same context? Zappa said "this is rediculous" and a few years later The 4 Seasons said "you know what, Frank is right. This IS ridiculous." To which Jefferson Airplane said, "Oh. Ok. Got it." The real question is: which one is the most transgressive? Zappa said stop fighting, you look like idiots. Jefferson Airplane said i guess if love and community is a bad thing, then sure we're criminals and we'd be happy to move out into the fields and live peaceful lives without your garbage, let us go already. The 4 Seasons said hold my champagne for a moment. In 1969, The 4 Seasons released the single most ironic, acidic, extravagant, and downright befuddling album ever created, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Zappa was accused of writing "shitty doo-w...
Read more

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho...
Read more

Muskets - Violent Paradise

Image
Ever since they formed in 2014, Muskets have faced the sad reality of being grunge when there's no such genre. Sure, comparison with Nirvana and Seether is unavoidable, they convincingly inhabit that sad, sloppy, sonic sink hole of Alt-Rock between Post-Punk and Shoegaze, but they're also from England, and that's not quite the kiss of death, more like the consolation hug of obscurity. They're never going to "make it," and that's actually a good thing. Muskets are really, really good. I definitely like them, and they could quickly become your favorite band. And yet, I think we can all agree that if you give these guys any sort of prime-time radio play, they'll quickly get overplayed, burn out, and disappear into obscurity anyway. Of course I want more, I want to mainline them into my bloodstream through my earballs and die a slow, sugary, opioid induced coma death, metaphorically speaking. I'll be blunt, what everybody calls "grunge," I he...
Read more