Jack Antonoff of Bleachers, courtesy of the artist’s Facebook page
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.
Since I just finished the last First Thought Fridays column and its eight (!) reviews on Wednesday, you’ll forgive me for not going overboard on the holiday weekend, won’t you? Good stuff this week that I had more to say about than I first expected when I started writing each one, so let’s dive in, shall we? Here’s what I listened to this week in the order in which I listened to ‘em:
Bleachers, everyone for ten minutes (Dirty Hit): I first got into Jack Antonoff way back in the Steel Train days (even saw them headline an afternoon show at the Creepy Crawl!) and enjoyed Fun. quite a bit; his solo releases as Bleachers have never quite grabbed me in the same way, but I also have only listened to the radio singles and had never given a full album a shot until now. Everyone for ten minutes is sort of split into three movements, one of which hit more of a sweet spot for me than the other two.
The first half of the album is the maximalist pop you expect from Bleachers, and is mostly pretty good, although the Autotune scattered throughout is as unnecessary as it is off-putting. The best from this section are “we should talk” with its insistent beat and circling guitar figure and “dirty wedding dress,” which plays like a little Dylan, a little Mellencamp, and a lotta Springsteen. Despite the sunny music in this section, Antonoff’s lyrics are surprisingly aggrieved—against haters, against fake people, against the users and parasites he encounters in the music industry—and some of it can come off a bit like *heavy sigh* Famous People Problems. Things get quieter, more intimate, and a bit melancholy in the album’s B side, with grief soaking into songs like “i can’t believe you’re gone” and “dancing,” with the highlight here being the Minnesota-soaked folk of “she’s from before.” (I invoke Minnesota because this feels to me like a blend of the shambling solo work of Paul Westerberg and ex-Jayhawk Mark Olson.) Then, as if out of nowhere, “upstairs at els” wraps up the album with a single, seemingly out-of-nowhere ‘80s-ish track that makes rooftop parties at Electric Lady Studios sound as natural and relatable as suckin’ on Chilly Dogs outside the Tastee-Freeze. On balance, the slower stuff connected a bit more than the other stuff, but the whole thing landed a bit better than I expected. I look forward to getting to know it better. Will I Listen Again?: Probably.
Dua Lipa, Live from Mexico (Warner Records): On Friday, Dua Lipa dropped a new concert film that you can watch for free on YouTube. I haven’t had a chance to watch the video version yet, but she was nice enough to release an audio version as well (on streaming now, with physical 2-CD and 2-LP releases next month). The album was recorded during Lipa’s recent three-night stint performing in front of nearly 200,000 fans at Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City just before wrapping up her epic tour in support of 2024’s Radical Optimism.
Astute readers may note that Dua Lipa has already released a live album from this touring cycle, last year’s Live from the Royal Albert Hall. I would usually be first in line to say two live albums from one tour is pretty egregious if you’re not a band like, say, Pearl Jam or Phish or the Grateful Dead that changes setlists every night, and even more so when you only have three albums. But even though the two shows feature many of the same tracks, the vibe is totally different: the Albert Hall show was performed in an intimate, legendary theater backed by a symphony, and Lipa adjusted to a more sophisticated approach to suit her surroundings. (This is not a knock on Live from the Royal Albert Hall, which I love. Just want to put out into the universe again that I’d loooove a Blu-Ray release of the entire concert…) Live from Mexico, though, is just a giant dance party and it really leans into the danciest side of her disco-inspired electro-pop: there are only three ballads, and the first one doesn’t show up until 15 songs into the 21-song setlist.
The setlist shows her faith in Radical Optimism, even though its predecessor Future Nostalgia was a bigger hit: 10 of Optimism’s 11 tracks appear (all but “French Exit”), but only six from Future Nostalgia and just two from her self-titled debut. To amp up the danciness, she dips into two techno singles she guested on, “One Kiss” with Calvin Harris and “Electricity,” a song she performed for the Mark Ronson and Diplo side project Silk City. And there is one special surprise guest: Fher Olvera of the Mexican group Maná comes out to duet with Lipa on his band’s “Oye Mi Amor” and the crowd loses its ever-loving mind.
The size and scope of the show is really what sets this apart from the Albert Hall release. This is a crowd so big that when they sing along with Lipa on “Be the One,” the timing is off by a split second because the sound of Lipa singing has to travel all the way to the back of the stadium, and their response has to travel all the way back to the mics. Lipa doesn’t do a ton of chatting between songs and most of her crowdwork is of the “thank you Mexico City!” and “can you get louder?” variety, but she does address the crowd in fluent Spanish at one point and the response is quite appreciative.
My favorite parts of the show: “Physical” cheekily opens with about a minute-and-a-half of Dua Lipa acting like she’s kicking off an ‘80s workout video, and the one-two-three punch of the dancefloor bangers “Hallucinate” and “Illusion” with the aching love song “Falling Forever.” “Illusion,” in particular, sounds massive, with symphonic elements that dwarf even the epic Albert Hall arrangement. Given the high energy of the show, the ballads feel less like a chance to breathe and more like interruptions to the action, particularly “Anything for Love,” which is performed in the same solo piano arrangement as at Albert Hall but instead of achieving full flight it just kind of peters out at the end. The only other disappointment is that Lipa’s Barbie banger “Dance the Night” doesn’t get a full performance but instead serves as a one-minute outro to “New Rules,” a song from her debut that also feels a little out of place. It’s followed by the perfection that is “Don’t Start Now,” though, so all is forgiven. Will I Listen Again?: Yes. I mean, you can probably tell I’m kind of a big fan, but these are great performances that offer something different from both the studio versions and the previous symphonic live renditions. If you’re a newbie I’d stick with the album versions first, but if you’re at all a fan of Lipa, the live versions are definitely worth a spin.
Ed O’Brien, Blue Morpho (Transgressive Records): When you hear the phrase “solo album,” it’s easy to think “ah, this is the one where they strip it down to just vocals and an acoustic guitar, isn’t it?” Ed O’Brien plays with that expectation on Blue Morpho, his second solo album; his first, Earth, dropped in 2020 under the name EOB (though, full disclosure, I haven’t listened to that one). “Incantations” opens the album in full “solo” mode, with earnest voice and gentle string plucking. But the song then goes on some weird, wild detours as it stretches through its seven-and-a-half-minute runtime, and as the atmospheric layers build and those haunting, ethereal vocal harmonies appear, you think “Ah, yes…this is definitely the guitarist from Radiohead.”
That sort of acoustic-beginning, slowly-building-into-a-Radiohead-song format works as a template for the first three songs, all of which are great. The songs otherwise aren’t particularly structured—there aren’t really choruses to speak of—but man, do they create a mood. That mood shifts on the fourth track, “Teachers,” which starts at a faster clip and sports a more agitated drumbeat that gradually devolves into glorious squeals of distorted guitar. After the lengthier opening songs, tracks 5 and 6 (“Solfeggio” and “Thin Places”) are basically just interludes, two-minute ambient new age pieces that are in Pure Moods territory. While those two songs are slight, they’re followed by the best song on the album: “Obrigado,” a nearly 10-minute excursion through Latin percussion, spacy vocals, and samples that is constantly shifting and transforming in fascinating new ways. It takes a lot to get me to enjoy a 10-minute song, but I love this one, and its worldly sound is more like something you’d hear from the Luaka Bop label than anything you’d ever hear on a Radiohead record. What a revelation. Who knows if we’ll ever hear another Radiohead record, but if its members keep putting out albums as adventurous as this (or the stuff Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have put out as The Smile), then we should still consider ourselves lucky. Will I Listen Again?: Absolutely.
* Completely unrelated, but the title Blue Morpho just reminded me that we’ll never get closure on the mystery of the Blue Morpho machine on the delightfully weird Apple TV show The Big Door Prize, which was unceremoniously canceled after two seasons, and that gives me a sad. | Jason Green
