Adventures in Listening, March 24, 2023: Stranded in Paradise
Miley Cyrus in purgatory. Plus: 100 gecs starts making sense. And, the incredible jazz guitar of Julian Lage.
Miley Cyrus - Endless Summer Vacation
At first glance, the title Endless Summer Vacation might conjure a spirit of permanent childhood, perpetually arrested development. It’s not an inapt premise for a Miley Cyrus album, given how much her music is perceived— perhaps unfairly— as a prolonged response to her days as a teenage Disney star. But you only have to listen to a song or two before you realize that the album in question is anything but an extended adolescent revelry. Conflicted, moody, and fraught, Endless Summer Vacation is a divorce album through and through, its lyrics rummaging through the pieces of Cyrus’ broken union with the actor Liam Hemsworth. Naturally, there is recrimination: “Flowers,” the album’s disco-lite first single, finds Cyrus dismissing her ex’s failed efforts at affection in favor of her own self-love. But there are also admissions of culpability. Funnily enough, a song called “Wildcard” finds Cyrus wrestling with her ambivalent feelings about settling down— not to be confused with the Miranda Lambert album Wildcard, which also wrestles with ambivalent feelings about “Settling Down.” If Endless Summer Vacation has a thesis statement, it’s in “Island,” where Cyrus confronts the downsides of being unencumbered, realizing there’s a fine line between freedom and isolation: “Am I stranded on an island/ Or have I landed in paradise?” Turns out having an endless summer vacation feels a lot like being banished to purgatory. This is thoughtful, grown-up material, and Cyrus handles it with confidence and candor.
The album sounds professional, slick, and appealing, and it’s a credit to Cyrus’ producers— including Harry’s House architects Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson— that it pulls together so many disparate sounds, from swooning R&B ballads to smooth electro-pop, into something seamless. If anything, it’s a little too seamless: “Thousand Miles” sounds airbrushed and bland, rendering the should-be-distinctive voice of Brandi Carlile as mere texture. By contrast, I can appreciate the florid spoken word piece “Handstand,” if only for injecting a bit of artsy-fartsy weirdness into the album’s sluggish center. I’m similarly fond of “Muddy Feet,” a bruising Sia collaboration that provides the album with a palette-cleansing burst of swagger, setting up a helpful contrast with the effortless gleam of “River”— one of Miley’s best pure pop songs— and, yes, the roséwave groove of “Flowers.” Most satisfying of all is “Jaded,” a cathartic alt-rock ballad where Cyrus channels her inner Alanis Morissette, proving again that her husky voice is one of the most expressive instruments in pop today. (And, that apart from Olivia Rodrigo, she’s peerless in carrying the torch for rock and roll.) Here she sings with clarity about a relationship beyond repair: “We went to Hell, but we never came back,” the chorus goes— as if even purgatory would be an improvement.
100 gecs - 10,000 gecs
How’s this for an ethos: "“I’m smarter than I look, I’m the dumbest girl alive.” That line shows up early in the new 100 gecs album, and it’s a pretty apt description of the entire gecs project: Obnoxiously big, loud, and stupid, yet deeper and more carefully considered than it first seems. I confess that I’ve always written them off for their stridently ugly aesthetic, for their aggravatingly manic energy, and for their obsessive need to cram maximum stimulation into every second of their music. None of that’s changed. 10,000 gecs— yes, even their album-naming conventions are hideous— offers 26 minutes of slamming guitar riffs, speaker-rattling beats, liberal use of autotune, narratives peppered with in-jokes and non-sequiturs, and conceits that sound like they were spawned by online meme generators. It’s assaultive, but it isn’t senseless: On songs like “Hollywood Baby” and “Dumbest Girl Alive,” they’ve harnessed their hyperactivity into a compelling facsimile of pop-punk, albeit pop-punk reimagined for the TikTok age. In fact, the entire album feels like an episode of I Love the 90s as interpreted by Gen Z: Silly sing-alongs like “Frog on the Floor” recall Weird Al at his most nonsensical, They Might Be Giants at their dorkiest, or any number of classic Nicktoons theme songs all thrown into a blender. “Doritos & Fritos” exalts junk food over a hair metal guitar solo, evoking self-confident nerds like Weezer and big-hearted slackers like Green Day (Dookie era, anyway). I’m not sure what to make of “757,” except that its chirpy symphony of processed vocals and boisterous beats ought to be irritating, yet it’s so tunefully and skillfully crafted that it has the effect of a pure sugar rush. And as for the rambunctious Novocaine jam “I Got My Tooth Removed,” did somebody say ska revival? If I wanted to be highfalutin, I could say that the gecs are doing what Beck did on Odelay, both simulating the feeling of information overload while also trying to impose some order on it. But maybe I should just say that this album is a rowdy and mischievous treat from a band that’s smarter than they seem. And also, so, so dumb.
Kali Uchis - Red Moon in Venus
On her third album— just the second to be sung primarily in English— the Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis focuses entirely on sensual slow jams, extolling the seductive power of feminine sexuality across a series of breathy, ballad-tempo tracks, each one sounding impeccable. She is unquestionably great at this sort of thing: A singer of unerring precision and control, and a record-maker who knows how to create and sustain a mood without lapsing into homogeneity. My biggest problem is that, on her first album, she sounded like she was great at everything. Isolation remains a globetrotting, genre-spanning, pancultural thrill, one of the most colorful and kaleidoscopic pop albums of the past 10 years. By contrast, Red Moon in Venus can rightly be praised as a deepening and a narrowing of Uchis’ craft, the point when she becomes a specialist rather than a generalist. Me, I can’t help but hear it as a little bit of a loss, even if it’s hard to resist on its own particular terms. If you want to sample something, I recommend “Moonlight,” a deep album cut that’s suitably alluring.
Julian Lage - The Layers
With a quartet that includes ace drummer Dave King, stalwart bassist Jorge Roeder, and jazz/Americana legend Bill Frissell, the guitarist Julian Lage has struck a rich creative vein— so rich, in fact, that the quartet’s 2022 album View with a Room has already spawned this “prequel,” six songs recorded at the same sessions and featuring a similar vibe. I might actually prefer the music on The Layers; while it doesn’t offer anything with the galloping energy of “Chavez,” my favorite cut from the previous record, it does unspool rich and resonant small-group music, simultaneously lush and elegant, capturing the warm interplay of jazz combined with the clean, simple melodies of the American folk tradition. Give it a listen, and for further exploration, check Frissell’s album Four, which also came out last year and features a similar fusion of folksiness and improvisation.