Goodshit #1 Playlist Stream (Summer Jellies 2024)
The first New Music + Old Music mixtape stream: a 7+ hour, 100+ song, ever-growing stealth Best Of The Year so far, with annotations (for both Apple & Spotify users)
A quick hit this week, as we approach peak summering. Please enjoy Goodshit #1 Playlist Stream (links below) — the first in a series of New Music + Old Music mixtapes surveying fresh releases & relevant flashbacks with annotations for deeper digging. It doubles as a best of 2024 so far cheat sheet. FYI, I’ll definitely be going deeper on many of these artists/groups/labels right here in this Substack in coming weeks.
So these have been my summer jams, but as the mood is chilled and loose, let’s go with “summer jellies.” I’m perpetually hungry for well-matched covers; the lovely Anglo-American-primitive acoustic guitar unspooling of Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” by James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg, and the live “Space Oddity” by Jeff Tweedy, tick both boxes. Continuing the Chicago theme is Adrianne Lenker’s “No Machine,” used beautifully behind a Carmy & Claire montage in season 3 of The Bear. (Lenker’s solo album, another side venture between Big Thief LPs, is so very good — it’s high up in my early-draft top 10 for 2024).
SML are an LA jazz-funk-fusion crew whose debut Small Medium Large was just released on International Anthem, the Chicago-raised jazz-funk-soul-latin-neo-classical-experimental-whatsit label that after a decade or so has established itself (imho) as the most consistently interesting and ambitious “jazz label” in the world. SML features bassist Anna Butterss (Jason Isbell, Phoebe Bridgers, Makaya McCraven) and synth player Jeremiah Chiu, who has another new IA record this year. The duo of Ibelisse Guardia-Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly — a Bolivian-Brazilian-Puerto Rican-Amsterdam-Chicago project — also dropped their IA debut this year, MESTIZX, a deep and gorgeous set. The imprint is fire this year; I’ll definitely be writing more on them in the near future.
If you’re using Apple Music for your playlists, click here. Spotify users click below:
Prominent in this mix, you will notice, is Reyna Tropical. That’s the recording moniker of Fabi Reyna, more or less a solo project at this point, a mix of programmed beats and sweet guitars, with Colombian, Congolese and Peruvian colors. Her latest, Malegría, is a clubbier imagining of what Guardia-Ferragutti and Rosaly are up to on MESTIZX. I bought Malegría on vinyl a few months back, before even hearing it, the way I used to buy albums pre-internet — because I loved the cover and figured it had to be great. It’s found its way into every vinyl DJ set I’ve done since. FYI she’s got North American dates coming up; heads up Toronto, Chicago, Philly, Nashville, NYC. More info below.
Elsewhere you’ll find This Is The Kit, aka: Kate Stables and friends, a project that consistently delights me. Stables was on my radar before her star-turn-of-a-sort on the National’s I Am Easy To Find, a beautiful gut-punch of an album. But that certainly sealed the deal. Her Canterbury Scene meets 21st-century indie folk sensibility really hits my sweet spot, and all her records are worth spending time with. Abigail Lapell is Canadian, and she’s in the same wheelhouse, kinda. I don’t know much about her, but her work is really good, her latest song is great, and her cover of her Toronto neighbor The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” was one of those rewinds that makes you wholly rethink a hit whose cultural omnipresence made it feel alternately invisible and irritating.
I’ve listened to the Vampire Weekend LP as much as any this year — in fact, while driving solo up to and back from the Adirondack Mountains this spring to witness the eclipse in a zone of totality, I locked into Sirius XMU, which was in Vampire Weekend Radio mode, playing nothing but music by the band around the clock, plus interview clips, and occasional songs by their musical influences (big English Beat fans, unsurprisingly) — and I didn’t get sick of it for a shocking amount of time. I spoke to Ezra Koenig earlier this year for a piece I did on the album for the UK magazine Uncut, and we realized we somehow had never spoken before, though I’ve been writing about the band from jump, and recall taking my daughter to see them play at an outdoor gig in East River Park back in the late ‘00s when she was 7. (She graduated University of Edinburgh earlier this month.) Koenig is younger than I am, but we definitely share an outer-borough NYC record nerd sensibility, and it was fun chatting with him. Here’s what I wrote about the song “Mary Boone,” probably my favorite from Only God Was Above Us, if I had to choose:
Flashbacks get conjured everywhere on the album, quite cannily. Koenig admires the late 80s/early ‘90s masters of sample surgery, particularly those with NYC pedigrees: RZA’s Wu Tang Clan work, Paul’s Boutique-era Beastie Boys. Here, abetted by producer and defacto fourth bandmember Ariel Reichstag (Haim, Charli XCX, etc), the band fold old-school allusions into a sort of OCD indie rock hyperpop […]This approach reaches its peak on “Mary Boone,” cheekily named for the New York City gallery owner who superstar-ed downtown artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel in the ‘80s. Koenig sketches a bridge-and-tunnel wannabe watching from the sidelines while art-scene money get printed, while the arrangement samples Soul II Soul’s indelibly elegant “Back To Life” groove, re-modeling the original’s string-section ambiance and adding a choir a la “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” just for the hell of it. It would all be so much smarty-pants show-horsing if the narrative ache Koenig displays wasn’t so palpable, and the craft wasn’t so meticulous. These guys listen hard, sometimes applying different processing effects on each word, even syllable. It’s clear why they’ve begun taking roughly 5 years between albums.
Anyway, I hope you’ll discover some new faves and rabbit holes in this mix, and don’t need to skip around too much. I’ve been working on a feature about my longtime faves (and upstate NY homies) Mercury Rev, who have a brilliant new album due this fall; “Patterns” is a taste of it. The Waxahatchee album might be might by favorite LP of 2024 so far, and “Right Back To It” is definitely my most-listened to song (I was even compelled to work it out on guitar, in my crude way, and figure out how to thread the lyrics through the chords using Katie Crutchfield’s odd and brilliant sense of rhythm. The Talking Heads tribute LP that dropped earlier this year was kinda overlooked, seems to me, in the (justified) hubbub around the restoration of the film Stop Making Sense that occasioned it, and the screenings that brought the band together for interviews for the first time in a long time. The tribute LP has some great moments; I really like the version of the early gem “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel” by Blondshell, whose Sabrina Teitelbaum teases out new meanings and emo nuances in the lyrics, as good interpreters do; her debut was one of last year’s best rock albums.
I’m really intrigued by the English band Ebbb, whose lead singer Will Rowland makes me think of Yes’s Jon Anderson if he’d been grown up listening to Kid A. The group just dropped their debut EP via the long-running and ever-reliable Ninja Tune label. Little Simz and Sampha are two of the greatest minds in UK music, so it was cool to see them team up on a new single. I’m gearing up to write about some of the many great artists coming out of South Africa’s current jazz scene, and Nduduzu Makhathini, who just dropped a new one on Blue Note, is definitely among them. Meanwhile, there’s a big reissue project coming this year involving the back catalog of 1970s Nigerian legends The Lijadu Sisters. Shoutout to my Rolling Stone colleague Mankaprr Conteh, who spent time with Taiwo Lijadu in Harlem earlier this year and wrote a great feature about their importance in the history of Afropop and modern Afrobeats. One choice quote:
“They were rock & roll as fuck,” says Ghanaian American singer Amaarae, who was gifted the Sisters’ 1976 LP, Danger, on vinyl by a man who sells vintage records in Accra, Ghana. “In the time where [Ghanaian guitarist] Ebo Taylor, Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, and [Black British Afro-rock band] Osibisa were all having the opportunity to be outwardly expressive in that way, I want to say the Lijadu Sisters were the only ones that were as balls-to-the-wall.”
The Lijadus made me think about the centuries-old circuit of musical influence between Africa and America, which of course made me think of the Dixie Cups eternal 1965 single “Iko Iko,” its 1953 predecessor, and all its tributaries. As an irredeemable college radio DJ, I’m always mindful of segues (the playlist here begins with Nathan Salsburg & ends with his partner, the exquisitely talented Joan Shelley, who I wrote about in Rolling Stone a while back.) But if you put it on shuffle-mix, I’m sure interesting new patterns & connections will appear… Enjoy, and I’ll catch you next week.