If I Could Change Then I Wouldn’t Be Here
MGMT, Brittany Howard, Little Kid, Joanna Sternberg, and more music recommendations from February
We all know January is not a serious month. January is for nursing holiday hangovers and abandoning resolutions. It is the year’s false start. Album-wise, we got some nice gems out of the month, and that’s basically found money. But February is when we start cooking. Some of the year’s most-anticipated albums were dropped this month, and I listened to a whole bunch of ‘em. So let’s talk new music!
Before we get to the reviews, I wanted to tell you about some live music I had the pleasure of seeing last month. Live music is the best and I love it, so I’ll probably throw in a little blurb from time to time about a cool show I saw. Like this!
On Leap Day the freak folk artist Joanna Sternberg stopped into the historic Bob Baker Marionette Theater for a night of music, puppets, and revelry. This was my first time at the Baker, though I’ve wanted to go for years. I feel like you can have a mustache, or you can be an adult who goes to a puppet theater, but you probably shouldn’t do both. So, this seemed like a good excuse to check it out without being creepy.
Sternberg’s music has a playful whimsy to it, in the vein of The Moldy Peaches or Jonathan Richman, so it felt like the perfect soundtrack to watch dapper penguins, ballerina flowers, and tap-dancing cats waltz around the stage and into the audience. Sternberg seemed alternately baffled and delighted, though both they and opener Johanna Samuels admitted to having a fear of puppets. Oops!
All in all, it was a one-of-a-kind evening, and I hope I get to go see more live music in odd places.
MGMT might have the least typical rock band biopic story that would make the best rock band biopic. Their debut album Oracular Spectacular launched them to instant, voice-of-a-generation fame (to paraphrase Brian Eno, it only sold 600,000 copies, but everyone who bought it also bought a graphic tee at Urban Outfitters). But after flying so close to the sun so quickly, the band took a step back, purposefully going weirder and less accessible with their next few records in an attempt to distance themselves from the masses. It worked, and somehow over the past decade or so MGMT has become one of indie rock’s more underrated artists.
Their fifth album Loss of Life finds the band drawing inspiration from strange—and strangely familiar—sources. Lead single “Mother Nature” is a lava lamp-lit psychedelic ballad, “Bubblegum Dog” has a theatrical glam rock shuffle that sounds like it could have come from Bowie’s Hunky Dory era, and “Dancing in Babylon” is pure 80s power balladry, complete with a music video that finds lead singer Andrew VanWyngarden doing his best impression of Amy Mann circa Talk Talk. Further lending to a sense of time-hopping, the album ends with the title track mission statement “Loss of Life” and begins with the reprise “Loss of Life (Part 2).” The one-time voice of their generation has become unstuck in time.
On their biggest hit, “Time Pretend,” the band used the rise-and-fall story of a rock band forced to sell their soul as a metaphor for millennials’ reluctance to take on the mantle of adulthood. It was a real called-shot for a song from a band’s debut album. Seventeen years later, the band hits us with “Nothing Changes,” a song about how life ends up feeling pretty much the same no matter how you try to grow and evolve. The lyrics read like an attempt to reach back in time and tell their younger self not to worry too much about what the future holds while recognizing that they wouldn’t have listened anyway. “Maybe you'd have heard if you'd stopped fucking around,” sings VanWyngarden, “when it was time to stop pretending.” Oh! That seems pointed!
We’ll never know what MGMT’s career would have looked like if they had tried to ride the success of their debut to greater heights. I, for one, don’t think it would have made them any more culturally relevant, and I definitely don’t think the music would have been as fun. This band has been a joy to have around, in whatever form they decide to take, and if you haven’t checked in on them for a while I think you’ll find something in their music that will speak to you on a surprisingly personal level.
One thing about me is that I really like video games but I’m generally very bad at them. I can hang with baby brain games like Animal Crossing and Mario Kart, but as soon as you task me with intuiting how something works on my own, I start floundering. But I really want to like the big, open-world games I hear about people getting into, with their eye-popping graphics and hard-won narrative arcs. So, once or twice a year I shell out forty or fifty bucks on one that I end up abandoning after a week.
That’s the line of thinking that brought me to Outer Wilds recently, a game where you’re an alien astronaut searching the galaxy for signs of life. I am not good at this game and I don’t think I will be, but there’s one part I can’t stop thinking about. One of your character’s tools is called the signalscope, and it’s a cross between a telescope and signal receiver that allows you to navigate to a new planet by honing in on the planet’s sound frequency. It’s an awesome device, and my favorite part of the game, and a surprisingly good metaphor for listening to Brittany Howard’s new album What Now.
Howard has been candidly exploring her influences and interests since the great (and probably last) Alabama Shakes album Sound and Colour, when she exploded out of the band’s comfortable roots rock formula to try on new moods and styles. Ever since then, it feels like Howard has too much going on in her brain to settle on one genre, and her music jumps from soul to psych to funk to jazz with gleeful abandon. This trend continues on What Now, where the eclectic songs are stitched together with interstitials of wind chimes and singing bowls, giving the listener the feeling of scanning through a great cosmic radio, picking up signals from different planets and dimensions. Songs burble up out of the static and settle back in as we scan for new signs of life.
“I Don’t” is a groovy sockhop soul track that glides along at the steady pace of a disco ball, while “Patience” builds from a swamp rock beat to an effect-drenched rock ballad, and “Power to Undo” is a twitchy, funky song about asserting your independence while acknowledging your vulnerability.
Artists who like to change genres on the regular can often face obstacles when they run out of genres to hop to and find themselves stranded. So far in her career, Howard has approached her own wide-ranging interests as an experiment that she invites the listener to join her in. She doesn’t slip on a new genre like a costume, but instead allows us to look over her shoulder as she plays with new styles and finds herself within them. Howard isn’t presenting genres like performance art, she’s sharing them with us so that we can look for ourselves within them, right alongside her. We’re lucky we get to be on the same planet as Brittany Howard.
Little Kid
A Million Easy Payments
Stumbling onto Little Kid this month made for one of my favorite music discovery experiences: finding a band with seven albums under their belt that I’ve never listened to. That’s so much new music for me! The Toronto band recorded the songs on A Million Easy Payments largely in a single take, with overdubs added after the fact. At first glance, this makes sense given the jangly, jammy, folk rock that dominates the record. But this approach becomes more impressive when you hear the more experimental tracks, which push the boundaries of genre and runtime.
Album standout, the Kraut-rock-meets-folk stunner “Bad Energy” is a jittery seven-minute journey into religious trauma and paranoia. The song rides a steady wave of acoustic guitar and piano and doesn’t build so much as it fights off interference from other instruments and voices. Each verse tells a short, slice-of-life story about someone experiencing paranoia or trauma linked to religion—a Lutheran priest offers to watch the child of a single mother while she works nights, a diner at a restaurant sees the number of the beast in their receipt. The stories always end before anything truly terrible can happen, but they leave the listener with a queasy sense of dread. It feels like a song about abandoning the religion of your upbringing, but not before internalizing all the doom and shame that will distort every experience you have going forward.
Closer “What Qualifies as Silence” is a nearly ten-minute ballad exploring the moments in a person’s life when the quiet gets overwhelmingly loud. The song finds subtle and powerful ways to build and evolve over its run time, with honeyed strings swelling and piano keys providing a gorgeous melody. The song reaches its chorus only three times in ten minutes, but every time it feels like drinking a cool glass of water in the middle of the night.
To hear music from those albums and more from the month of February, check out the Adult Contemporary playlist on Spotify. I update this playlist monthly, so save it to get cool new tunes you can act like you discovered on your own (I won’t tell).
Here are the albums I’m most excited to hear in March:
Mannequin Pussy I Got Heaven. The Philly hardcore band is back with their first full-length album since 2019’s excellent release Patience. Back in my day, Weezer went five years between putting out new albums and everyone acted like they had come back from the dead. But it doesn’t feel like that in 2024, does it? Different times. Better times? Not for all.
Faye Webster Underdressed at the Symphony. On the other hand, it feels like Faye Webster is constantly promoting new music, which is great for me because I love Faye Webster. Lead single “Lego Ring” is a duet with Webster’s childhood friend, Atlanta rapper-turned-psych-rock-guru Lil Yachty.
Adrianne Lenker Bright Future. The Big Thief singer and songwriter follows up her contemplative 2020 double album songs / instrumentals with a more straightforward folk album. Lenker and Big Thief have exploded in popularity with younger crowds on social media in recent years, and I’m interested to hear where this new release finds her.
Waxahatchee Tigers Blood. Katie Crutchfield’s last album as Waxahatchee Saint Cloud was my favorite release of 2020. The album perfectly synthesized the early 90s radio country I grew up on into something relevant to the 21st Century. Lead single “Right Back to It” is a duet with likeminded alt-country guitarist MJ Lenderman, and reminds me of the superstar country collaborations of my youth.
That’s it for February! I hope you found some cool new tunes, and I’ll see you later in March.
XOXOX