Albums, 2022

10. DJ Taye Ghost
Sketches more rewarding than most full-lengths

9. Natalia Lafourcade De Todas las Flores
Mesmerizing

8. Zeelooperz Get WeT.Radio
I miss the days when you could download something like this off Audiomack and say like “Zeelooperz got the best mixtape out”

7. The 1975 Being Funny in a Foreign Language
It’s nice when a band does exactly what they should do: they followed the “difficult” album with a slim record weird on the fringes but not so merely pleasant much it slips into easy listening VH1-core

6. Alex G God Save the Animals
Even straightforward rockers like “Runner” operate on a mystical subterranean structure, lulling you toward a sense of security yet leaving you rife with anxiety, a tension that’s fueled his best music

5. Animal Collective Time Skiffs/Panda Bear & Sonic Boom Reset
“Best album since Merriweather,” “favorite album since Tomboy,” the most apt appraisals, it is what it is

4. Kendrick Lamar Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers
When all the Kanye/Kyrie stuff went down I saw a tweet that said something to the effect of “Kendrick believes the same stuff they do but he’s quiet about it” and it gave me pause. There is a towering Dumb Guy canon of podcasts, YouTubers, rappers, writers, and TikTok-tier “truth”-tellers that all draw from the same well. What makes this album work, and why it’s my favorite of his since good kid, is he doesn’t tie its quality to his provocations. He’s writing confessional songs that resonate, reflecting generational curses, revisiting and reupholstering old-fashioned worldviews and filtering it through all kinds of sources—religion, new age self-help, therapy, aforementioned Dumb Guy shit—saying at the Grammys he wants to provoke but turning “I choose me” into a slogan that speaks directly to his personhood

3. SZA SOS
A hit parade; the singles and moments of brilliance carry water for stuff that’s not perfect, but that SZA was magnanimous enough to offer this gigantic sprawl makes any near-misses somehow rewarding and deepens its impact

2. Cash Cobain/Chow Lee 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy (Deluxe)
An album so ahead of its time it might not make sense until five years from now

1. Momma Household Name
On Household Name Momma make a persuasive argument that for people born after the seventies—Gen X, millennials, zoomers—the nineties are the sound of perpetual youth. The sixties, even when I was a teenager, sounded like eternal youth, or an idealized version of it. Didn’t matter I wasn’t there, or that my parents didn’t listen to that music so I didn't grow up around it. It never sounded dated—everything from the Beach Boys, the Stones, Motown, to James Brown is youth music to me, a timeless, endless summer on wax.

Guitar distortion was perfected in the nineties; live drumming, away from the immediately dated sound of eighties percussion and before the pristine Loudness War of the CD era sucked all the life, space, and dirtiness from drums, was perfected in the nineties; voices—whether it was Cobain's “yeah yeah yeah,” post-lingual shoegaze vocals, crisp R&B singing not fine-tuned to hell (this is a pro-AutoTunes space) or the spit of consonants bouncing off the mic in rap—were perfected in the nineties. It was a time of technological realization, when needs were met, before they were bastardized into mere pleasures or worse, luxuries. Everything that’s happened since 9/11 has frozen the nineties precariously in time, which is why we’re so drawn to it, but the novelty of being like “Jay Leno said WHATTT???!” wore off pretty quickly seven years ago. (The definitive document of the nineties is the five-part O.J. Simpson 30 for 30 which arrived early to the party in 2016. Everything else is superfluous.)

Household Name sounds like the nineties, which means it sounds like my youth, which is incredible from three musicians nearly a decade younger than me. But they don’t carry the frivolity of precociousness or the zeal of “wunderkind.” There’s not a lot of effort, which is the easiest way to demonstrate bonafides for the young, impressionable, and insecure. The record is organic, like something that’s always existed, but it doesn’t sound like an artifact or an exercise in sentimentality. It's current, new, and exciting, and the things it does on the edges that are more than “do you remember the DGC Rarities comp” are contemporary, like the pop hook on “Brave,” the psych-lite beat on "Tall Home," or the self-awareness of yearning for fame on “Rockstar.”

Everyone convinces themselves the decade they lived before they hit double digits is the era of perpetual good feelings, but even the most skeptical among us would acknowledge the vibe shifted after the millennium and the nineties hit different. Household Name is no mere vintage concert tee. I’m sure Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman love the artists that most sound like what this record sounds like: The Breeders, Juliana Hatfield, Nirvana. They also love Built to Spill, R.E.M., and “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia. They appreciate both arcs of Liz Phair's career. They love Pavement and Smashing Pumpkins, which, as everyone who’s at least 33 will note, is “hilarious” when you consider the once-relevant animus between the two bands. I spent a few hundred words explaining why I liked a Beabadobee song that sounded like the summer of 2000 a year ago then she dropped the album and it was kind of a snooze. The songwriting is there on Household Name, and so are the vibes, and, importantly, so is the iconography.

It’s corny and over-talked about but mythology does tap into primordial, archetypal, and universal needs—the emotional beats of fairy tales and epic poetry, the over-the-top catharsis of soap operas, a popstar recognizable by silhouette. Traditions validate the human experience (not the worship of ashes etc). Rock bands that try to play up a mythos often feel inauthentic at best, pathologically corny at worst—the genre was invented in the fifties, perfected in the sixties, destroyed and rebuilt brick-by-brick in the decades since—the bands I do like often sit at the intersection of “these people enjoy playing music together” and “they have mystique.” This is where Momma lives. All the videos they shot for singles from this record are iconic to me.

As someone who sometimes judges music for money on its own terms, merits, and qualities, I am also drawn to the mysterious ways it works. I am a child of the nineties so videos, physical media, and living with music, instead of passively using a small computer to thoughtlessly consume it, is in me. I’ve always doted on magazines, their tangibility, their feverish collage of images, prose, paper, heft. I get lost in stories. This obsession with being mired in art, jewel cases, record sleeves, music mags, and iconography maybe doesn't carry meaning for a lot of people anymore. But that stuff trained me to look deeper, harder, to fall in love fully. Momma are so engaging because they provide, through stories, videos, liner notes, raw live shows, their charmingly low-stakes but sincere social media presence, a fully formed picture of a band as larger-than-life folklore, a kind of dream that redeems the teenaged through headphones and car stereos in perpetuity.

There's nothing particularly deep about the lyrics but they can turn a phrase: "burning rubber fanfare" is evocative; "I can keep my body small 'til it's big enough for you to fight" is unnerving. The yearning in "Motorbike" is so desperate it aches. "Medicine" is sweet but manically so, a crush triple-texting after the faintest line of mutual affection has been established. "Lucky" is straightforward in its romantic awe, but cut with fatalism, suggesting they know the spark will fade. I listened to "Speeding 72" (the anthem!!) more than any other song this year.

What's draining about youth culture—the feeling of "we almost had it"—afflicts all crumbs of nostalgia. We almost had perpetual freedom; we almost had everlasting innocence; we lived so perfectly for such a short time. There should be other ways to grow up than view age/experience as life's grand trade. There is weariness in their lyrics that hints at their impending fear of losing this impermanent state. They don't write in air quotes. They use the template of alt-rock to lay a foundation: "Gold Soundz" isn't a song in their universe, it's a sacrament. Stephen Malkmus is a god even if you think Pavement sucks. He represents an archetype of bookishly handsome sardonic guy that will draw young people to his music until rising sea levels destroy us all or the Cascadia subduction zone gives way.

If I've spent all these words saying anything it's that being cool (a youthful endeavor) is above all other things. If Momma existed in 1994, they'd be on 120 Minutes. If they existed in 2014, they'd be on Tumblr. They exist now, and they reside in the waves of rock mythology, where the stakes are improbably high merely to gauge whether things are cool or wack. You've gotta be down to clown with Momma.

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50 Songs I Liked in 2022

Glorilla "FNF" / Bandmanrill "Real Hips" / iayze "556 (green tip)" / Flo Milli "No Face" / 42 Dugg & EST Gee "Thump Shit" / Stunnaman02 & Drew Banga & Lil Kayla "Roll Wit It" / Kenzo B "The Realest" / Ice Spice "Munch" / Peezy "2 Million Up" / Babyface Ray "Sincerely Face"

Chief Keef "Bitch Where" / Lil Yachty "Poland" / Quavo & Takeoff "Nothing Changed" / Lil Baby "In a Minute" / Youngboy Never Broke Again "Shotta Soul" / Young Nudy "Lunch Meat" / P-Lo & Larry June "Good" / Luh Tyler "Back Flippin" / Veeze "Let it Fly" / Vince Staples & Mustard "Magic"

CEO Trayle "Song Cry" / DaBoii & Young SloBe "Cole Bennett" / Nardo Wick "Demon Mode" / Homixide Gang "Lifestyle" / Jackboy "Pursue My Dreams" / Baby Bash & Paul Wall & GT Garza "I Stay High" / Doeman "Nothin 2 Somethin" / KenTheMan "Not My N****" / Z-Ro "Roll 1 Deep" / Sauce Walka "First Testament"

Hook "Different" / Certified Trapper "All Night Flights" / Valee "Alpina Beama" / MIKE & Sister Nancy "Stop Worry" / Earl Sweatshirt "2010" / Billy Woods "Asylum" / $ilkMoney "One Glazed and One with the Jelly Filled Nucleus" / Cookiee Kawaii "Is U Mad?" / Sunny Galactic & The Sophomores & TisaKorean "WTW" / Quelle Chris "Alive Ain't Always Living"

Mouse on tha Track "Big Blossom" / Westside Boogie & D.R.A.M. "Aight" / NoCap "Choppas and Ferraris" / Drake "Flight's Booked" / Diddy & Bryson Tiller "Gotta Move On" / Jacquees & Dreezy "Ya Body" / Lucky Daye "Magic" / Jim Lxgacy "Dj" / jaydes "Hateinterlude" / Yaya Bey "Reprise"

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Found Me Volume Two out now. Peruse our website here; buy a copy here. Thank you, as always, for reading.