July Music Review

-

The xx
I See You (2017)


 I get chills
Heart's rate multiplies
I'm on a different kind of high
A rush of blood is not enough
I need my feelings set on fire

I had a review of this album mostly composed in my head six weeks ago. It was going to be about how I wasn't that impressed, how the brilliance of The xx may have faded in inverse proportion to their age and maturity. I was going to say that the album's only gem "Replica" was a bit ironic, given that the album was failing after all to replicate the success of Coexist and xx.

And then I listened one more time. And then another and one after that, and concluded this is an outstanding piece of work. It's at once more profound and more reserved than the earlier work. I've heard people say I See You is a transition from indie electronic to a more mainstream indie pop, but I don't buy it. Pop music doesn't revolve around lyrics this subtle and haunting. Check out the very awkward performance of "I Dare You" and see for yourself -- these are not pop stars (are indie downtempo triphop stars a thing yet?). Five stars.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
The Nashville Sound (2017)

You were born on a hot late summer day
We turned you loose and tried to stay out of your way
Don't quite recognize the world you call home
Just find what makes you happy girl and do it 'til you're gone

I don't know if this album will hold up long term, but it's music we need now. And it's surely not insightful to notice that Isbell has been wildly effected by current politics, or Zeitgeist, or whatever. What is insightful is Isbell's easy way of speaking to the dissolution of his own (mis)conceptions, to the anxiety of today, and to hope for the future. Though much of this work is slower and more personal than most of the music that draws me in, it's working for me. Check out "Hope the High Road" as the album's power tune. Then listen to "Something to Love", the album's closer, and let the depth sink in. Four stars.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Acrobat "design", part 1

-
Image
 Adobe's "design" of Acrobat is even worse than Microsoft's Word!  The above is clip of the error you get when trying to run OCR on a signed document. One would think that Acrobat could tell you the specific problem (a signature) rather than some generic warning of "not permitted".  It's also completely unclear why low memory/disk space would cause an operation to be "not permitted". Not possible, maybe, but not "not permitted". Also of particular note is that checking the box to "Ignore future errors" does *not* work. Meaning, if you try to run OCR on a large signed document, you'll be clicking on the OK button from the error message for *each page in the document.* Force close it is. SaaS is a bad joke.
Read more

OneDrive isn't good

-
Image
I'm going to start posting about tech junk, and I'll start with this observation. Microsoft's OneDrive is pretty terrible. I tried to move a large number of files to the cloud (I have 1TB OneDrive storage), and it has proven basically impossible to accomplish. The OneDrive app crashes my network, and it's not even clear what it's doing in the background because the UI is garbage. It's constantly reporting different file numbers and total file size to be synced to the cloud, but the two numbers don't seem to work in concert with what's actually on my physical SSD.  Also, you can't upload files from an external drive, that doesn't work. So if you have a 500GB SSD in your ultrabook, it's essentially impossible to use your full 1TB on the cloud. Yes, technically you can probably move a block of files from the external drive to your local drive, sync those up to the cloud, set the files to stream on demand rather than be stored locally, delete the
Read more

Microsoft "design", part 1

-
Image
There are many things I don't understand about Microsoft's Windows design/implementation. One is security. Why does Windows warn me that a scan is due, rather than ... just performing the scan?  As built, a user needs to A. notice the small triangle exclamation point in the notification area, B. click on the notification to open "Security at a glance", C. note what the actual error is (here, "Quick scan due"), D. click on <Scan now>, E. finally, click the <Quick scan> button.   This flow is nonsense. The only good thing that arose from this blog post was buried deep in the flow, where I noticed:   Same thing. What the hell, Microsoft? I'm connected to the internet. Update the protection definitions already, in the background, without user input. Then do the quick scan, without user input. This isn't hard.   Update 1 : I ran the quick scan. Interesting. Windows claimed the scan would take around 15 seconds. The timer clicked down to about
Read more