suliman's blog

recent discoveries ii

It’s been exactly two months since writing my first recent discoveries i post so an update is long overdue. I’ve listened to quite a few new (to me!) albums in that time span that I want to talk about in this post. Here is the full list:

Erotica and Bedtime Stories are sister albums to me, with one sister being clearly the favorite: Erotica. I went into Bedtime Stories with the expectation that this album might contain a few experimental tracks, considering Björk co-produced some of them.1 It’s safe to say that I was disappointed in its mediocrity, although my disappointment was evened out by the unapologetic expression of sexuality on Erotica. This is up there for me with Confessions on a Dance Floor because it set out to do something and did it spectacularly well. The album is lewd, sexy, and empowering without using a single swear word or explicitly saying what is happening in the song. This peaks with the song Where Life Begins about dining out and the dining out is happening down below. She sings about how consumerism is pointless because all you could ever need is supplied by the human body. The most luxurious restaurant on the planet is the female genitalia: An all-you-can-eat buffet that doesn’t make you gain weight. The accompanying sex book which is not sold or easily available is stunning. I just hope everyone who participated in the pictures did so out of their free volition (meaning saying “no” didn’t jeopardize their access to basic necessities).

On a very similar note, Janet. by Janet Jackson employs a lot of subtle expressions of female sexuality and blends them with protest songs about gender and race. Janet Jackson sings about self-love and -care, about accepting oneself, about limitless love and bisexuality. This is a theme that is also present on Why’s It So Hard on Erotica, where Madonna wonders what she’s supposed to do to be enough, to have her person not attacked by a system, that treats the (female) body as a site for capital extraction, by virtue of existing, which is echoed in New Agenda on Janet.. As these R&B albums came out around the same time, this signals to me that the pop divas were sensing the general appeal for protest music in the early ‘90s and served us Nirvana or something2 in R&B.

Janet. already displays some early experiments with Hip-Hop which would bloom on The Velvet Rope later down the line. Where I didn’t appreciate R&B blended with Hip-Hop was on Mariah Carey’s Butterfly. I went into it expecting some solid R&B/Pop similar to Daydream, and she delivered on that. But the dreamy illusion was interrupted by the bits of Hip-Hop here and there which didn’t work well with her overall sound. As always, Mariah Carey sang with her once-in-a-lifetime voice and I loved every second of it until around the fifth track mark where the quality (not fidelity) dropped. It sounded like she ran out of ideas while her collaborators failed to deliver as well.

Leaving the ‘90s and returning to the present, I finally listened to PinkPantheress’ EP Fancy That and was majorly disappointed. It was a lot of the same fast-paced dance music and it got tiring after the 4th two-minute track. My expectations were shaped by my exposure to her on EUSEXUA Afterglow by FKA twigs where she sang a duet on Wild And Alone which blew me away. The only track that lived up to that first contact was Noises, which I found really cathartic to listen to. I was similarly disappointed by the Wuthering Heights soundtrack album. After hearing the lead single House featuring John Cale, I thought Charli was venturing into a new genre, but was greeted with bland synth-pop. I would’ve been more than fine with another club or hyperpop album, but not generic synth-pop. Considering it’s a soundtrack album, I’m going to collect myself and accept it for what it is: a project with a limited scope. Still weirded out by the fact they casted her of all people to make a soundtrack for a period drama or whatever the fuck Wuthering Heights is supposed to be.

Another disappointment, and I promise it’s the last, was Mitski’s latest album Nothing’s About to Happen to Me. I honestly wasn’t expecting her to have a comeback so soon since her last album’s tour was so successful. It’s a messy album—all over the place—with high highs and very low lows. I thought she’d be exhausted; which she clearly was judging by the output. It builds onto the folk-ish, more earth-y kind of sound she explored with The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We with tracks that clearly didn’t make the cut for the now three-year-old project. I loved I’ll Change for You and Lightning, but unfortunately the rest is just an extended release of I Love Me After You and My Love Mine All Mine, my least favorite tracks on The Land….

Positively surprised by The Butcher’s Ballroom, I craved more hard hitting rock music. Then I remembered Lingua Ignota whose music I used to be terrified of at the ripe age of 16. What Diablo Swing Orchestra and Lingua Ignota have in common is the kind of shrill, horror-esque church choir vibes I get from each of their vocals. While The Butcher’s Ballroom’s lead singer has a soprano, opera voice over electric guitars that makes the listening experience feel like a charity excursion to the quirky kids’ alt rock performance that leaves you envious of their talent to mix seemingly incompatible genres together, Lingua Ignota’s classically trained vibrato voice over organs, bass and electric guitars on Caligula feels like a trip to hell. Pressing play was like I pressed a button for the gates of hell to open. It’s a great album, one that I won’t be listening to that often, but I’m happy that I conquered one of my 16 year-old self’s monsters at last.

The remaining albums (or songs) I would like to check out in the near future are mostly recommendations by my friend mono and one by my IRL best friend. I’ll post another recent discoveries once I’ve conquered the ones below:

That’s it from me. Happy music listening :)

  1. I don’t know anymore which ones because I learned that piece of information when I was obsessed with Björk years ago.↩

  2. Sorry, I don’t like Grunge or the early ‘90s alt rock stuff so Nirvana might be the wrong band.↩

#discoveries