Consumer Guide: January, 2024
Brisk takedowns of Tucker Carlson and Jeff Bezos alongside shoplifting advice; hip-hop with undaunted flow and hip-hop with adult anxieties; and indomitable riffing courtesy of Detroit punks.
Bar Italia: The Twits (Matador) Murmuring, emoting, stumbling, and tiptoeing toward an adulthood with room for love if not necessarily stability in it (“My Little Tony,” “Twist”) ***
Blondshell: Blondshell (Partisan) NYC born‑and‑raised Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum is a queer‑identified singer‑songwriter disinclined to get too binary about it. As of this album she lives with a boyfriend in East L.A. and specializes in plain love songs chocked with unusual interpersonal details. In “Salad” she ponders poisoning an abuser. “The sex is almost always bad” in one called “Sepsis” but she can’t help loving him anyway. In “Sober Together” she hangs in there for a partner who’s falling off the wagon. In “Kiss City” her “kink is when you tell me you think I’m pretty.” Gets around, does Sabrina Mae. And thinks about it too. A MINUS
Bob Vylan: Bob Vylan Presents the Price of Life (Ghost Theatre) British‑Jamaican grime‑punk duo keep the tone militant and the groove hardcore whether rapping or rocking (“Wicked and Bad,” “He Sold Guns”) **
Danny Brown: Quaranta (Warp) For sheer artistic grace and reach—flow, clarity, character, presence, verbal wit, verbal command—long‑paroled 42‑year‑old ex‑dealer Brown has few true rivals anywhere in hip‑hop. But if you doubt he’s feeling not just his age but his existential limitations, ask yourself why he called his seventh album since 2010 “forty” (in Italian, not Spanish, where it would be “cuarenta”). Buried in this swift verbiage are the kind of adult anxieties hip‑hoppers never cop to, such as marriages floundering and two‑bedroom apartments going for three grand a month. The most revealing and also the cleverest is “Celibate”: “I used to sell a bit/But I don’t fuck around no more/ I’m celibate/Had me trapped in that cell a bit/Locked up with some pimps told me ‘Sell a bitch.’” Which I’m of course relieved he seems disinclined to do. A MINUS