Welcome to December. I have three albums that came out all the way back in the first half of 2021! Better late than never, I always say. I ALWAYS say it. You know me.

Genesis Owusu – Smiling with No Teeth
(March 5, 2021)

I’ve been wanting to write this one up for a while, but it’s been intimidating. I don’t think I can do this record justice it deserves. Kofi Owusu-Ansah is Genesis Owusu; he was born in Ghana and moved to Australia as a toddler. Let Genesis Owusu be the first Ghanian-Australian hip-hop artist I review on this site. Here’s to many more!

Hip-hop, though, just scratches the surface. Genesis Owusu’s debut, Smiling with No Teeth, is a stunning tapestry of colorful styles. “Drown”, for instance, is basically a bouncy new wave tune with bubbly synths and a catchy chorus. Think Duran Duran, only…uh, less nasally. The first group I think of with “The Other Black Dog” is That Handsome Devil: an odd mixture of rap, scuzzy rockabilly bar rock, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins-style horror blues. “Gold Chain” is straight soul/R’n’B EXCEPT for the thin layer of experimental breakbeat power electronics. “Black Dogs!” is nothing but a good, fast-paced alt rock song. And there’s oh-so-much more. At 54 minutes it tends toward overlong, but I think the pacing and sequencing keep things interesting throughout. Everything is delightfully eccentric, and you can’t turn a corner without bumping into a fuckin’ hook! Hooks! Hooks everywhere! Don’t be a fish and listen to this album!

Speaking of fish, this album mentions black dogs a lot. Sorry, bad segue. During an interview with Atwood Magazine, Owusu-Ansah explains that Smiling with No Teeth is split into two conceptual halves: the first, upbeat half “deals with the internal black dog, the depression”, and the second black dog, a more confrontational black dog, “deals with the brunt of racism and oppression and it’s angry”.

Aren’t we all depressed and angry, deep down? I sure am! This album is fantastic, take out your your dentures and listen to it as intended.

Early Verdict:

Part Chimp – Drool
(June 4, 2021)

I used to get Part Chimp mixed up with Chimp Spanner, which is dumb and unfair because Chimp Spanner is a vastly different space-y jazzy prog metal djent project and Part Chimp just knocks their dicks against chunks of concrete and records the results. I like Part Chimp better! Didn’t see that one coming, did you? You don’t know me well enough yet.

Yes, I’ll never get the two mixed up anymore because I finally listened to Part Chimp proper this year with their sixth album Drool. This is my kind of pure post-hardcore with no frills, no modern toned-down indie rock sensibilities, just slabs upon sludgy slabs of distorted, down-tuned guitars, noisy electronic buzzing, dirgy dense riffing, and vocals low in the mix, buried under 15 feet of rubble. It’s the kind of record you show people as proof that rock music can be heavier than the heaviest of heavy metals! This is the real stuff, the stuff that evokes strong memories of the salad days of heavy post-hardcore groups: Jesus Lizard/Scratch Acid, Shellac, Unwound, Unsane, Polvo, early Butthole Surfers, early Melvins. All that and more, baby. Throw some other stuff in there too! Swans. Neurosis, occasionally. The first half of “Dirty Birdy” sounds just like the sparse black hole of unsettling tension you would hear from Confusion is Sex-era Sonic Youth.

Now, Part Chimp has been around SINCE the ’90s, or at least prior fledging incarnations have existed since the ’90s, so this ain’t throwback music. From what I’m gathering, reading about the rest of their history, the band has kept their formula since their inception. That’s good news for me, because the formula isn’t very formulaic anyway. It just means that they spend a lot of time between albums making things right. Go ahead and listen, in between all the dumb loudness there are plenty of layers and careful nuance. That kind of attention to detail is my heroin.

Anyway, while I’m not totally gaga over Drool right now, I suspect I’ll be singing many high, out-of-tune praises for Part Chimp twenty years too late once I get a few more of their albums under my belt. EARLY VERDIT: SMILE!

Early Verdict:

Julien Baker – Little Oblivions
(February 26, 2021)

Julien Baker initially caught my attention a couple years back because she’s a cute-looking dork with cool tattoos. Her first two albums didn’t grab me because, typically, I’m a hard sell for slow, mostly acoustic, sorrowful, singer-songwriter indie rock in any case. Old, young, man, woman, it’s tough for me to connect with it unless the vocalist is super distinctive (John Darnielle, the Mountain Goats) or the subject matter is super acerbic and pointed, coming from a place of anger or exasperation (Stella Donnelly). For someone like Julien Baker, I need to actually pay full attention to the lyrics. Shocking, I know. Lyrics are, like, half of music, man.

And yes, Baker’s strength is in her lyrics. Little Oblivions is peppered with musical surprises: the lazy, twangy guitar of “Heatwave”; the melancholy, yet strong, power chords of “Ringside”; the military march snare-driven progression of “Faith Healer”. It’s all nice, but the real raison d’être of Baker’s music is the intensely distressing, emotional agony of the subject matter and the presentation. I mean, you don’t really hear it in her voice, but lyrically, painful topics like drug addiction, depression, and self-loathing are handled with naked honesty. She’s the tragic character in her own story. “Five days out from the initial event/It takes two kinds of pills to unclench my fists/It’s too kind of you to say you can help/But there’s no one around who can save me from myself“. You know, that kind of thing!

So what makes her stand out? It’s the combination of everything. Sad-sack folk blues lyrics, dissonance with the somewhat cheerful melodies and vocal delivery, the pretty arrangements and instruments, the catchy chords, she’s not doing anything particularly unique if you isolate the components. But put it all together, and the fact that her storytelling is hella captivating, it’s a winning combination. She’s good at what she does.

Little Oblivions expands the instrumental color palette further than Julian Baker’s first two studio albums. If you’re looking to dig in, this is a fantastic place to start before working backwards.

Early Verdict: