Vinylworthy

    When I was a kid, the concept of music as an enjoyable thing kind of escaped me for a long time. My parents would put on classical music albums and go on about how timeless and moving those pieces were. To me, it was of course stuffy, snooty, and overall quite life draining. I knew I liked music, I just didn't have the money to buy music, the patience to listen to radio, or the command of the TV to put on music videos; the result was a childhood assuming I knew what good music was, and acted like I liked it too. As I grew up, they put more of their era music on, opening my eyes to rock. Again, I went along with it, having no other frame of reference. Music had peaked, for all I knew, long before my time; the stuff I actually liked I had to admit to myself was not actually good. Then I listened to Grizzly Bear's Shields . Finally, I had stuffy, snooty, life draining music from my era that could stand against all the music foisted upon me in my childhood. Music that had ever...

  It's somewhat surprising that Bambi came out in 2018, sounding so 2005. Listening to the emo-pop affectations more than 10 years after Death Cab broke into the zeitgeist emphasizes how hard it is to pinpoint what rock has done to grow since the turn of the century. It's no wonder so many outlets talk about the death of rock at the hand of rap; what left is there to innovate upon? It's been novel, angry, glamorous, introspective, pretentious, sad, aloof, futuristic. The blending of genres is where the innovation continues to thrive, but even that's not new anymore. I've heard country rap albums, and if that doesn't spell apocalypse, I don't know what does. In some ways, this is a sad moment of stagnation for music if you allow your brain to cling to alarmism. If you ask me, it's a beautiful moment of era-superposition. There's not much value in deriding Hippo Campus for chasing the trends they like here. If you like smooth, brassy-but-delicate voc...

  I'm going to suggest an odd thing to anyone who hasn't listened to Kishi Bashi before: listen to Kantos first, and work your way backwards through his discography. For the most part, each album will get a little better until you reach his utterly sublime 151a . Ledes are fully visible here--I don't even have a shovel. Kantos is a fine, fun album with many songs you'll hum for a few days. It's a lot better than a lot of stuff I generally praise. But it's his worst album. In the past and especially on his first two albums, Kishi was an unfocused "mess" of light, color, texture, and theme. None of that has changed here. We have city pop, South American-style beats, Jungle-esque 70s loops, progressive rock, early 10s arena rock, and eastern-inspired tunes. Some of this isn't new, but the mix is definitely more focused on the newcomers to Kishi's stable of sounds. The one sound that will always be given more attention than you'd assume (and...