Monday Mixtape, Vol. 120

We’re getting close to the end of the year, and per usual, I am super excited to make my Top 25 Albums of the Year and Top 100 Song of the Year lists. It’s a musical timestamp, and these playlists are not only a blast to curate, but I love looking back the many years (I’ve been doing these lists since 2012!).

ANYWAYS, this week’s mixtape has some new contenders to make the Top 100 list, and features one band I’ve really started digging recently, Maribou State. I saw that their 2018 album was on a list of Best of the Year (So Far), and the review mentioned their “masterpiece” of an album from 2015. so I started there. These guys are awesome and GREAT background music for studying, writing, etc. Their new album is pretty good too but definitely start with their 2015 release.

Speaking of great background music and new bands recently discovered, Bayonne released a new bouncy track from what I hope is on an upcoming album. Their 2017 Fallss was such a great album.

Oh, Robyn. Maybe the best pop artist out there. She released a new album, and my favorite track is the sultry lullaby, “Baby Forgive Me,” a track I have been playing on repeat.

A couple other tunes for you to discover and love on your own. Enjoy the week!

Monday Mixtape, Vol. 115

The surprise of the weekend was seeing that Hippo Campus released their sophomore album, Bambi, on Friday. And what an album! The lead singer reminds me of Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, but their melodies are a bit more out there, I’m not really sure they sound like anyone else. Their second album shows some subtleties in songwriting that show the band’s growth. This is an album that flows from front to back with slow jams bookending the albums intersected by waves of rhythms and tempos. What I’m trying to say is just listen to it!

My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel released his second album and this “Wished Out” track immediately reminded me of The Allman Brothers Band. Never a bad thing.

I’ve gotten on a bit of a Jeff Tweedy kick recently, one because he’s such a great lyricist, two because he’s in one the best (and most underrated) bands of the past two decades, and three because his solo album of acoustic Wilco tracks is phenomenal (it’s called Together at Last - check it out!). Tweedy has a voice that finds a place in the hollows of the acoustic guitar. This is his most recent solo effort.

Speaking of voices I love, Thom Yorke released a track from what I hope is an upcoming solo album, and Bright Light Social Hour (whose vocalist’s solo album I had on last week’s mixtape) released a new track for all to hear, the spacey “Trip with Lola.”

Finally, the killer three-piece jazz band, BADBADNOTGOOD, who do a ton tracks with rappers and bands, have just released a track with Little Dragon, and it’s a “raise your lighters” type of jam.

That’s all I got folks, enjoy!

Monday Mixtape, Vol. 96

Natalie Prass is back! And boy is she ever with this knockout catchy jam, a departure from her more subtle and delicate (and amazing) debut album (that I talked incessant about back in 2015 and was my #2 Album of 2015 - so yeah, check it out!). I just love this song, and I can't imagine not bopping your head to that beat! 

The remainder is a hodge podge of artists, some of whom I've recently discovered and really been digging their albums (particularly Dega and Surf Harp) and others who have been on the mixtape before (Wye Oak and Little Dragon).

Regardless, it's an "indie music" (yeah yeah, whatever that means, right?) kinda feel to the mixtape. Enjoy!

Monday Mixtape, Vol. 73

Oh man, oh man. Kendrick. Let's start off with the fact that he released one of my favorite songs of the year, The Heart Part 4:

A song with three different beats that Kendrick destroys with a confidence and abandon that no other rapper alive could think of doing. This man KNOWS he is the greatest rapper alive. "Don't tell a lie on me, I won't tell the truth bout you," he threatens to all the shit talking rappers with little to back up against Lamar. 

This track was released prior to Lamar's album, DAMN. released on Friday. Because of the quality of The Heart Part 4, I was amazed by its absence on his new album. I thought, "Ruhroh. Either's he gone mad to not include something this good or his new album is so great he doesn't even need this track." 

So yeah, it's the latter. 

DAMN. is the astonishment of everyone hearing this album for the first time. DAMN. is the thought when Lamar announces on the first real track, DNA, aside the bass rattling, "I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA. Cocaine quarter piece, War and Peace inside my DNA." DAMN. is the realization that Lamar is now one of the best rappers of all time. There are too many damns that you almost stop giving a damn. But, really, DAMN!

I'm going to try to do an album review sometime soon of DAMN. because it's an astonishing piece of art. It's already getting crazy love on the interwebs, and as I am typing this, I am counting down the minutes until Kendrick headlines Coachella which can be watched (and almost all of Coachella, for that matter) for free on YouTube (God Bless America)! 

There's so much other great stuff going on in music right now, some of it included on this mixtape. Little Dragon released a pretty great album, Spoon released a quality album (they just don't make bad records - I don't like this one as much as They Want My Soul - probably because it doesn't have a track like Inside Out, but it's still a damn good listed), John Mayer released his best album since Continuum (more on this next week though I've written a ton about most of the songs on the album already since they were released in EPs before the whole album - this is some new gimmick thanks to Spotify and all the other streaming companies), Joey Bada$$ released a damn good sophomore album, and Father John Misty released an album which starts great but quickly falls off a boring ass cliff of regurgitated songs from his last two (great) albums. 

So this is a good one. Enjoy!