Well before the announcement that Billie Eilish’s next record would be titled Hit Me Hard and Soft, the phrase “heavy hitters” had been on my mind this entire year when it comes to a category Eilish most certainly is in: massive artists, and/or artists who have earned my own personal favoritism, releasing new albums in 2024.
In fact, I don’t remember a year quite like this one, in which so many big-time acts, interesting ones and personal favorites of mine have all flooded the release calendar with new full-lengths. It’s been so much, in fact, that my focus on the nominal bread and butter of this website — local music and local shows, whether played by local acts or visiting ones — has necessarily wandered a bit. There have just been so many new releases by major-label and indie acts from outside Austin to keep up with since the calendar turned to 2024 that local releases have taken a back seat for now. (But don’t worry, I’ll get around to Hovvdy’s new record and such.)
So, how’s abouts I catch up with some reviews? This will take a couple of posts — so more to come later — but to center my own assessment of music so far in 2024, it will be worth it. And, I hope, fun.
In case anyone’s forgotten, Ear Traffic uses a classic five- star scale for album reviews, with halvesies adding extra nuance in our evaluation. Five stars = fantastic, maybe even perfect or very close to it. Four is a strong achievement of a record. One is awful. And so forth. Star ratings are at the end of each review (***). Now, let’s dive in.
Charli XCX, BRAT — Already a meme-generating wellspring — thanks to the fairly genius marketing utility of a generic green cover you can slap any pithy phrase on — BRAT is a high-energy achievement of club-leaning mainstream pop. For indie-oriented fans, you could think of it as what Sylvan Esso or Hot Chip might give us if they hit the weight room a little more, offering muscular beats and Charli’s incisive commentary into about any kind of relationship. BRAT is 40-plus minutes of melodic, concise, electronic-driven magic, highlighted by the sharp, percolating edges of the likes of “Sympathy is a knife,” “Von dutch” and “365,” and the balladeer changeups of the likes of “I might say something stupid.” Overall, fantastic and invigorating. **** 1/2
Billie Eilish, Hit Me Hard and Soft — The talent and sonic adventurousness that Billie and brother/producer Finneas have always displayed is still in large evidence on this third album, as is the vulnerability that makes you feel like you’re watching now-22-year-old Billie’s evolution into fully formed adulthood in real time. And with the beaty midtempo banger “Lunch,” probably Eilish’s most direct and palpable song about same-sex attraction to date, and other top-notch soul-barers like “Skinny” and “Wildflower,” you get a few tracks up there with Billie’s best, or at least in the ballpark. Overall, though, Hit Me Hard and Soft is firmly but comfortably mid — I’ll call it mid-plus — owing to some moments that just crawl too slowly, and some mid-song gear shifts that tease but don’t quite deliver. Worth the listen, but not her best. ***
girl in red, I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! — Well, it was nice to be in on the ground floor with Marie Ullven for several years. A string of excellent, moody indie/dream-pop singles and the wonderful 2021 debut LP if i could make it go quiet, along with twice experiencing her endearing, digression-rich live goofiness, made me an early-career superfan. But here on sophomore record IDIAB!, all but gone are her moody mystique and the occasional punk-poppish drive of past gems like “You Stupid Bitch.” Instead, we’ve got a (mercifully) brief record with every last coat of pop polish, earnest attempts to crib Swift and Rodrigo, and a few moments that are just plain annoying. The sort of banter-ish asides that work well between songs in her stage show even make a cringe, out-of-place appearance with her spoken-word introduction of Sabrina Carpenter’s feature on “You Need Me Now?”: “You know what would be really fuckin’ cool on this? Sabrina. Like if we can get Sabrina on this — my god. Like, seriously.” It’s silly and arguably sinks the whole thing. Ditto for her spoken-word ending to the otherwise-OK, vaguely jazzy “Ugly Side.” Ullven still has chops as a lyricist, especially when it comes to general/romantic ennui, or in the case of solid opening track “I’m Back,” coming out of it. And the album improves in its second half, with “New Love” in particular sounding enticingly like (the weaker tracks of) the old Marie. But the overall suggestion here, sadly, is that that version of girl in red is gone for good. **1/2
Mannequin Pussy, I Got Heaven — When Mannequin Pussy stays out of the red on the noise-meter, I Got Heaven is awfully good and sometimes great. The straight indie-alt moves on “Nothing Like,” “Softly” and especially “Sometimes” are evocative rockers that make the most of Missy Dabice’s wide, soft-to-snotty vocal mood spectrum. But the hyperdriven, shouting punk of — just for clarity’s sake, this is a song title — “OK? OK! OK? OK!,” with bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford taking a rare turn on lead vocals, is for moshing addicts only. Moments like it and the furious interludes of the title track are the ear-testing missteps; however, the tremendous closing track “Split Me Open,” blends MP’s gift for mounting alt-rock balladry with just the right amount of bile, as Dabice snarls, “Nothing’s gonna change!” ***1/2
Kacey Musgraves, Deeper Well — So overwhelmingly, musically beautiful on first listen, Deeper Well might even have you thinking crazy initial thoughts about it being nearly on par with Golden Hour. One of the most longstanding, over-popular words with music critics, “pastoral,” nonetheless fits this stuffed and summer-y sixth LP from Kacey to a T. Musgraves’ tender, vulnerable voice is at the height of accessibility and melodic command. But then the more you dig in, you realize that not many of Kacey’s best lyrical efforts are here, with both the words themselves and thematic triteness occasionally marring things. You mileage will vary on whether the words of “Deeper Well,” for instance, lean more toward “relatable” or “mailing it in”: “I used to wake and bake/Roll out of bed, hit the gravity bong that I made/And start the day/For a while, it got me by/Everything I did seemed better when I was high/I don’t know why.” But there are also just great, mind-clearing vibes and picturesque sounds here, led by the wonderfully catchy “Cardinal” but also on relentlessly pretty deep cuts like “Jade Green” and “The Architect.” ****
Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us — It feels as though if you poll 10 different reviewers, you’d probably get at least five or six different opinions on the peak of Only God Was Above Us, a record that at least holds its own with the classic Modern Vampires of the City. For me, it’s the superbly poetic look at continual generational divides in the towering winner “Gen-X Cops” (“But in my time, you taught me how to see/Each generation makes its own apology”). But other standout candidates include “Capricorn,” “Classical” and the nearly eight-minute closer “Hope,” a perfect indie near-lullaby touching on political and societal strife and injustice while using the simple phrase “I hope you let it go” to staggeringly disarming effect as the music builds and swirls. The production throughout is VW at its usual late-Beatlesque level of perfect polish, with Ezra Koenig and Co. pulling off a new sonic trick or two, like the choir vocals of “Mary Boone.” There’s a whole treatise in my mind — which may come out in this blog sometime — about why five-star records are truly a rarity in this day and age. But this one feels deserving. So: *****