5 new releases we love: Waxahatchee goes vintage, Pearl Jam returns, and more
Music Features A-Sides
There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on our Spotify playlist, and if you like what you hear, we encourage you to purchase featured artists’ music directly at the links provided below.
Waxahatchee, Saint Cloud
[Merge Records, March 27]
There’s always been a twang buried in the vocals of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, a lilt that gave heft and personality to the stormy grunge of releases like 2015’s Ivy Tripp and 2017’s Out In The Storm. Having flexed her rock bona fides, Crutchfield put away her pedals and climbed behind a piano for 2018’s Great Thunder, an EP one could call a precursor to Saint Cloud’s clean, relaxed songcraft. “Can’t Do Much” and “Lilacs,” with their bright strums and swelling choruses, cut like wind through fresh-cut grass, while “Hell,” a standout cut influenced by Dolly Parton, pairs piercing lyrics—“I hover above like a deity, but you don’t worship me”—with the record’s most emphatic vocal performance. The disco rhythm of “Fire” and the vivid synths of “Ruby Falls” ground Saint Cloud in the here and now, but there’s still a vintage air to many of these songs, the sensation that, once upon a time, you heard them spinning on your parents’ record player. [Randall Colburn]
Pearl Jam, Gigaton
[Monkeywrench Records, March 27]
“Part of what makes Gigaton fascinating is the way these sonic departures actually fuse in unexpected ways with some of the band’s traditional four-on-the-floor stompers. Alternating between classic guitar riffage, sputtering ’80s-style new wave, epic layers of vocal collage, and awkward fusions of the three, the record tries to be all things to all people, a crowd-pleasing delivery of rock ’n’ roll interwoven with art-damaged aspirations of something more, akin at times to the group’s landmark Vitalogy. It sometimes fails, but longtime Pearl Jam fans know better than to expect a steady consistency of quality across an entire album. If some of the band’s ’90s output can make the case for being front-to-back masterpieces, the 21st century has demonstrated that every subsequent album contains at least one or two duds. It’s a small price to pay to enjoy such a longstanding creatively relevant act.”
Read our featured review of Gigaton here.
Half Waif, The Caretaker
[Anti-, March 27]
What began as an unassuming music outlet for Nandi Rose Plunkett has, over the past few years, blossomed into the deeply moving project Half Waif, and The Caretaker—her major-label debut under the moniker—is poised to become her breakout album. Rose has always exuded refreshing confidence and unexpected creativity within her music. But now, there’s a sense of curiosity driving her songs, too, and it results in numbers, like “Ordinary Talk,” “My Best Self,” and “Blinking Light,” that dance with nontraditional rhythms and lush vocal patterns. This glow-up places Half Waif somewhere between Weyes Blood and Perfume Genius, what with their acrobatic singing and aquatic-like ambiance. Rose credits it to the fact that The Caretaker caught her in a time when she was searching for strength. Perhaps that’s why there’s the question of “What if?” lingering at the album’s core, pushing her to explore what Half Waif could become—and embracing her new form with a thrilling sense of disbelief when it works out. [Nina Corcoran]
Deeper, Auto-Pain
[Fire Talk, March 27]
Deeper feels the pain of everything. On Auto-Pain, the Chicago-based band’s second album, tuning into the panic and manic anxiety is the point. It had to be after the departure, then suicide, of guitarist Michael Clawson, whose work appears on some tracks here. Auto-Pain is the band’s weapon, an army of songs combatting the tragedy head-on. The Gang Of Four-like guitars squeak in and out; Drew McBride’s bass lines provide a steady punch; and drummer Shiraz Bhatti’s beats burst with precision. Singer-guitarist Nic Gohl gathers what emotion he can to get through disaster. On “Willing,” he confronts attitudes toward depression, repeating the line, “It’s the willingness to ignore it.” “The Knife” sounds like a conversation between someone blatantly admitting guilt for self-harm and another who offers comfort with a simple nod in the lyric “Nonsense, come here.” With or without the backstory in mind, Auto-Pain is a captivating dose of catharsis—something we could all use right now. [Matt Sigur]
Basia Bulat, Are You In Love?
[Secret City Records, March 27]
Over the past 15 years, Canadian singer-songwriter Basia Bulat has steadily attracted listeners around the globe with her rich alto, poetic lyrics, and ability to play seemingly any instrument (including autoharp and charango). Her fifth album, Are You In Love?, takes the best of her retro folk-, soul-, and R&B-influenced sound and turns the dial way up for a widescreen scope that deftly showcases her tales of love and loss. Produced largely in Joshua Tree by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James during a time of great personal change for Bulat (including getting married and the passing of her father), Are You In Love? is the sound of an artist coming fully into her own. From the burnished waltz of the title track to the ’60s girl-group sway of lead single “Your Girl,” Bulat’s arresting vibrato and emotive imagery underscore her wide range and peerless knack for melody. Prior to starting the album, Bulat wrote to James saying she wanted to “write a beautiful record about compassion.” Are You In Love? meets that bar and then some. [Tabassum Siddiqui]
26 Comments
I’m personally all here for the new Dua Lipa album. This slick Euro-disco vibe brings up all the best memories of Kylie Minogue, Robyn, etc. The title Future Nostalgia is very fitting.
I’d like to know how the items for these features are chosen. Gigaton has been available to stream for over a week. Meanwhile, Dua Lipa just released the album of 2020, Childish Gambino surprise released a noteworthy (albeit boring & confused) album this week, NIN released new shit, and Nico Jaar graced us with yet another stellar album today. At least they mentioned the Wax album, which is great.I’ve said it before and I’ll say it once more – the current music coverage on this site is embarrassing, which is depressing because it used to be so great and you could depend on the comments for lively discourse. No more.
There’s also The Weeknd from last Friday, another strong contender for Album of the Year if you ask me.
that Weeknd album is fantastic.
As someone who has never liked the Weeknd I agree! Been listening non stop.
To be fair, it’s not just this site – music journalism died somewhere around the time Spotify ascended and everybody online went from being amateur music critics to amateur TV and political critics. On the one hand it’s kind of nice because obscure musical knowledge dick measuring contests between hipsters have drastically gone down since the start of the last decade and it feels like everybody’s chill with everybody else having their own musical taste. On the other hand, it would have been nice to at least get 5 separate reviews for these albums rather than a bunch of barely descriptive blurbs.Optimistically, there’s new critics with new ideas out there somewhere, and in another five years we’ll be complaining about how all the TV coverage has gone downhill.
It’s releases the writers love, not the Best New Albums or anything. And besides, I’d rather hear about new shit than albums I’ve already read write-ups for. Nothing embarrassing at all about this one.I’ll agree with you about the site overall and the comments, especially though. Hasn’t been the same since it got Kinja’d,
Interesting. It used to be that, while the reviews themselves were subjective (as they should be), it was generally agreed upon that what was being reviewed was worth the trouble, sometimes even irrespective of what kind of publication you were reading. Now, we’re at a point where what makes the damn list is subjective, meaning I have follow a bunch of different reviewers now.Oh well… back to Friday’s programming of Dua Lipa and Little Dragon.
Exactly! Thank you. I am bummed that some of the responses here appear to suggest that I am arguing that my musical tastes are more important than AVC’s. Maybe I could have been more precise in my complaint.
This feature is weird. Most of the picks just…routinely aren’t very good, like we’re supposed to grade on a curve for indie-adjacent artists. Then again, popular music is in a really weird place right now.
Dam have you considered not commenting? just an idea if youre so above all the commentary anyways have a good life elsewhere
Oof. What a frivolous response to my post! I am ruing the lack of commentary, which has obviously reduced substantially since the arrival of Kinja and the change in AVC’s music coverage. It is entirely possible that you were not a regular visitor to this site before that time, in which case I can better understand your silliness here.
Gigaton was released today, March 27.
The end of year list for AV Club is always a clusterfuck. One recent year at least two of the albums in the top 10 only had two people who reviewed them and one person who liked them, but that person overloaded their points to give it a bump, it had no point of view and no consistency. The most common defense the reviewers give for that is that the grade they gave on the AV Club is not the “A.V. Club’s grade.” Even though that is how everybody on the planet thinks about Rolling Stone giving that shitty U2 album best of the year, not that it was only one reviewer, or only one dictate from the owner, they think of it as an institutionally bestowed grade (your psych professor didn’t give you a B+, your university did). Instead of investing in a more dependable core of reviewers who don’t do stupid things like give a good Neko Case album a C (still not over that one), they went the other way and barely review anything, only having a “here is some stuff we like” each week. That way they can get around to things later without it being dereliction, because they’re removed from themselves any duty. hehe duty. The upshot is if you want to read actual music criticism read Pitchfork. And the new Weeknd is really good.
I only occasionally dip into the music side of things and I’m just a freelancer, but I can say with some degree of confidence that these reviews aren’t structured in order to provide cover for later best-of lists.I can say more broadly that people who get SUPER up in arms about how a list needs to be CONSISTENT with what some individual critic said about a particular movie/album/whatever tend to be searching for a kind of mathematical certainty that will always elude them in the field of criticism.
eh, I think there is a LOT of daylight between consistency and certainty, and those lists could be adjusted to achieve more consensus while avoiding the scylla of a boring choice that was nobody’s favorite and the charybdis of single reviewers intentionally loading up one album nobody else liked that much to get it higher. The site averages less than 3 music reviews per month. They used to give more grades here, now they pointedly do five blurb reviews without grades…is that instead because they don’t want bad reviews to affect access? (I remember every time somebody did an interview their movie got a C) Is it a conspiracy theory to speculate that there may have been a motivation behind the change?
It’s not a conspiracy theory, but I would say most of the potential motivations armchair analysts offer (including “because reviews will affect accecss!!!”) tend to come off like shots in the dark. It’s much less fun than speculation about trying to square year-end lists or massage talent [for music-related interviews that the site doesn’t publish very many of] but my guess is most of these types of questions can typically be answered by “editorial budgets are not infinite, especially in 2020.” I want to stress that this isn’t any kind of official statement. Just my sense from the freelance side of things—and not just here, of course. I should probably stay out of it altogether, but for whatever reason it rankles me when people (and it’s not just you; it’s very, very common) have such confident ideas about how publishing works!
Well, none of your selections were good.
I blame the corporate overlords for stripping the site.
I mean it’s just a subjective thing, I don’t know why that needs to be spelled out for you. People probably already know about the big releases like Dua Lipa and Childish Gambino, and maybe the writers just weren’t enjoying NIN or whoever the hell Nico Jaar is as much as these five albums. I don’t understand people who need to see their own tastes reflected in lists like this, if you like a thing that’s not mentioned then just put it in the comments rather than complaining about how the list is bad because it doesn’t have a thing you think should be on it.
I’m afraid you’ve missed the point I was trying to make. Let me clarify for you. Of course music taste/criticism is a purely subjective affair; I did not suggest otherwise. What is lacking here is informed discussion of major releases. I struggle with a website that advertises itself as providing commentary on pop culture and then neglecting to provide commentary on major releases in music, which surely would qualify as appropriate subject matter for a website such as this one. In years past, AVC had a more aggressive approach for discussing major music releases, and would provide lengthy, thoughtful reviews of same and the commentary from the AVC community was often quite lively and enjoyable. Maybe you did not visit this site then. I do not know. In any event, that is what I am missing nowadays. Also, I am not arguing that my tastes are more important than anyone else’s, only that I wish I had a source to go and discuss big releases, and certainly the albums I mentioned would qualify as such.
YES!! That debut album from Deeper is really something. One of the best debuts I’ve heard in a long time. Makes me feel like the first time I heard Bloc Party.
Er … second album! Who knew
I’m really enjoying the singles from the Waxahatchee album. Can’t Do Much in particular is a really sweet, mellow song.
She did some good instagram live sessions with Kevin Morby recently.
Though Pearl Jam has sold hundred million billion albums, think they are still under-rated.Had sorta cool dream last night*. After leaving very nice modernist glass hotel, (room two floors up & basically same layout as one staying in but next to outdoor roof swimming pool — will book it next time promised self) was suddendly hitchhiking on adjacent corner outside. Stephen Malkmus was driving an old late-model lg American vehicle, maybe bulky station wagon. Malkmus saw me but waved me off & immediately turned turned left into spiral parking garage. Of course was disappointed but in dream wondered whether & what it would be like to be a friend of his. In life reality, once hung out backstage drinking beer w/him after Jicks gig in Austin 15-20 years ago. Very nice guy 🙂 Humourous thing was, Joanna Bolme, female bassplayer, was very concerned & asked whether thought band played good that night. Yes – very tight, truthful response ie Malkmus & Jicks put on great show that night. Have seen ‘em a coupla times since & they’ve never disappointed :-)*Enjoy when celebs make cameo appearances.