First Thought Fridays is a (mostly) weekly column offering quick-hit takes on some of the albums released this week, serving up first impressions, favorite or least favorite songs, and whether or not they’re worth a second listen. Check back for more each Friday night or Saturday morning.
It’s Jason Green Christmas up in here: Sloan, Neko Case, and Jeff Tweedy are three of my absolute favorite artists, and not only do they all have new albums out, but all three albums are (spoiler alert!) really, really good. Oh yeah, and the Tweedy album is a triple LP. That plus two pleasant surprises makes for a pretty great week—so much good stuff that there were three other new releases (by Cate Le Bon, Amanda Shires, and the Cords) that I wanted to listen to but didn’t have the time. (I blame Jeff Tweedy.) Anyway, here are my thoughts on the new releases I checked out this week, in the order in which I listened to them:
Purity Ring, purity ring (the fellowship): A band that, up until now, I’ve never really been able to glom onto, Purity Ring levels up in a huge way with their self-titled fourth album, by far their best one yet. The Canadian electro-pop duo—singer Megan “mj” James and instrumentalist Corin Roddick—took inspiration from some of their favorite video games like NieR: Automata and Final Fantasy X and conjured up their own dream RPG soundtrack for a song cycle centered around two fictional avatars of the band trying to better a broken futuristic hellscape.
The result bears the mark of its inspirations, for sure, but to me it sounds most like Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Corin centers the music on skittering electronics, but pairs them with symphonic elements and organic instruments (like the acoustic guitar that propels “imanocean” or the pretty, plaintive solo piano instrumental piece “mj odyssey”) that, like the GitS:SAC soundtrack, feel like a beating human heart at the center of a cold cyborg construct. mj’s voice is more prominent in the mix this time out, sounding like Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry phoning home from the other end of the galaxy. This feels of a piece with last week’s Tron: Ares soundtrack, but being shorter and self-contained, it succeeds even more as a singular piece of work. Favorite songs: “many lives,” “part ii,” “place of my own,” “imanocean,” “between you and the shadows.” Will I listen again?: Absolutely.
Sloan, Based on the Best Seller (Yep Roc): When I put Sloan’s last album, Steady, on my best-of-2022 list, I said “The four singer-songwriters that make up Sloan offer up another dozen-tune variety pack of strutting rockers, crunchy Beatles-esque power poppers, swirling psychedelia, and even their first real foray into country,” and I’ll be damned if that isn’t an exact description of their brand new album Based on the Best Seller, too.
That said, album #14 is no mere retread, it’s Sloan doing what they do best, and dare I say it after just two spins but I think this is even better than the stellar Steady and just might be their best album since at least 2011’s The Double Cross. As usual, each member follows their muse in their own directions—Jay Ferguson kicks in two songs (“Capitol Cooler,” “Congratulations”) that are more rockin’ than he’s been in years, Andrew Scott channels Guided by Voices on “Baxter” while the psychedelic stomper “No Damn Fears” is one of the best songs he’s penned this century, Patrick Pentland offers up soaring, searing guitar leads on “So Far Down” and beautiful melodies on “Here We Go Again,” and Chris Murphy contributes strutting mid-tempo melodic rockers with cheeky lyrics like the Oasis sideswipe “Live Forever” and wonderful album closer “I Already Know.” I’m sure that all sounds like a lot, but it all hangs together wonderfully thanks to good sequencing, a persistent Kinks feel to many of the songs, and Murphy’s backing vocals throughout to tie it all together sonically. It’s a good day when a long-time favorite band releases a good new album, and this one is a great one. Will I listen again?: Absolutely
Neko Case, Neon Grey Midnight Green (Anti-): Neko Case’s 2009 album Middle Cyclone is one of my absolute favorite albums by anybody, but I admired the two albums Case put out since then for their ambition more than I actually enjoyed listening to them on a regular basis. I wasn’t sure what to expect on Neon Grey Midnight Green, Case’s first album in 7 years, but I purposefully avoided the singles, waiting to have the whole album hit me at once. I’m glad I did.
“Destination” starts the album out as if Neon Grey Midnight Green may just be a long-awaited return to alt-country form, but then things take an immediate left turn with “Tomboy Gold,” a trippy spoken-word poem over wailing free jazz saxophone. “Wreck” transitions out of that with Case’s voice floating over sparse instrumentation—a call back to the sound of “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” the stark centerpiece on 2013’s The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. It makes you wonder: will NGMG stay in that same weird vein? Nope: within just a few seconds, the acoustic guitars kick in and the song lurches back to alt-country territory as if saying, “Jus’ kiddin’. Here’s a catchy one for ya.”
Despite the poppy pleasures of tracks 1 and 3, NGMG is anything but a retrenchment to the more straightforward songcraft of Case’s earliest solo albums: as Case reminds us herself on “Rusty Mountain,” she’s “Just a two-fisted son-of-a-bitch/ With no sickening nostalgia for this…We all deserve better than some love song.” The sonic richness of Middle Cyclone is in full effect, with Case aided and abetted by longtime co-conspirators like guitarist/co-songwriter Paul Rigby, pedal steel player Jon Rauhouse, Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and engineer Tucker Martine plus new collaborators like Calexico drummer John Convertino and Arcade Fire multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry. The instrumentation and arrangements throughout are rich and varied, from the beautiful a capella intro and coda to “An Ice Age” to the baritone guitar that makes the title track dark and haunting and, at times, menacing. On “Baby I’m Not (A Werewolf),” instruments just pile and pile on top of each other causing the drama to amp up and up and up until they all drop out in an instant, leaving Case’s voice bare for just a moment before they start to surge back—what a moment! Possibly the sweetest song is “Little Gears,” a song as nature-minded as much of Middle Cyclone was, where Case watches a spider building a web and using it as a springboard to dissect human nature.
No matter where the music goes, the songs stay centered on Case’s amazingly ageless, ever-powerful vocals, clarion clear yet warm and inviting. Neon Grey Midnight Green is a real stunner of an album, as adventurous and ambitious as anything Case has ever done without ever losing its accessibility. Will I listen again?: Yes, yes, a million times yes.
Sam Prekop, Open Close (Thrill Jockey): Sam Prekop made his name as singer, guitarist, and bandleader of the Sea and Cake, the Chicago-based dream pop band that offered quiet hymns built off Prekop’s arpeggiated guitarwork and whispered vocals. As the Sea and Cake’s career went on, the band started to incorporate electronic elements like synthesizers and sequencers, but it was Prekop’s solo career where he really dove into the joys of the modular synthesizer. His latest, Open Close, is six wordless tracks over 36 minutes, with Prekop playing gentle synth melodies over multiple modular synth loops and patches that come and go and rise and fall—they don’t insist, but they propel the music forward just the same. Open Close is an unusual bird: ambient music, but in a way that’s best played loud. Will I listen again?: Probably? This seems like good readin’ music.
Jeff Tweedy, Twilight Override (dBpm Records): In a recent interview with the New York Times, Wilco frontman (and, of course, Belleville, IL native) Jeff Tweedy said the inspiration for Twilight Override came from a road trip with his sons that was long enough that he thought he’d introduce them to the Clash’s infamous triple-LP Sandinista! Now, I don’t know when the last time was that you listened to Sandinista!, but I’m here to tell you: it’s a slog, three arduous LPs with a single good one hiding in it somewhere, with a side 6 that is virtually unlistenable and includes a version of the song “Career Opportunities” sung by the keyboardist’s kids for…some reason, I guess? It’s a lot of things, but what it’s not is something so good that anyone should aspire to recreate it. And yet, here’s Jeff Tweedy, releasing his own “Sad-inista,” as he jokingly called it: 30 songs spread over 3 LPs totaling just shy of two full hours of music.
Now, I have listened to Twilight Override exactly one time from start to finish, so I’d be a fool if I thought I could adequately and thoroughly critique it, but I can tell you this: it’s really fuckin’ good, pretty much from start to finish. Which is insane to even contemplate, but Tweedy has been on a win-streak with everything he’s released since Wilco’s 2022 return-to-form Cruel Country so maybe it’s not too surprising. It makes sense that these songs are not Wilco songs: they’re sweet and simple, built around acoustic guitar strums, and none of them are desperately calling for additional layers or Glenn Kotche’s insane drum fills or any Nels Cline guitar freakouts. (The first and only modern-Wilco-esque spiky-guitar-freakout-over-krautrock-groove comes on “No One’s Moving On,” a whopping 19 tracks into the proceedings.) But they’re not just Tweedy and his acoustic guitar either—most songs feature his sons Spencer and Sammy Tweedy on subdued drums and synths respectively, plus accents of violin and piano throughout. They’re all fairly quiet and melancholy, though Tweedy does get his silly on with “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” and contributes just one good pop song, the project’s big single “Enough,” and he saves it for the final LP’s closer.
Two hours is a really long time, especially for songs that sound fairly similar, but other than dragging the tiniest little bit during side A of LP2, the album impressively holds your attention. LP3 may just be the strongest one of the trio, even after you’ve already heard 75 minutes of Tweedy. Favorite songs on this first listen: the spoken-word experiment “Parking Lot,” plus “Love Is For Love,” “Stray Cats in Spain,” “Ain’t It a Shame,” “This Is How It Ends,” “Cry Baby Cry,” “Enough.” So yes, a lot more to learn about this album, but I love what I’ve heard so far. Will I listen again?: Of course!
