Photo of runo plum courtesy of Winspear
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.
Let’s keep this short and sweet…I’ve got movie reviews to write! Going into this week, I didn’t have a lot that I was really excited to dig into, but one listen to runo plum’s excellent new album turned things around immediately, and the rest of the week’s entries, while not the embarrassment of riches that have come with some previous weeks, were all solid, interesting, and worth a listen. Also, not reviewed but worth noting: Blondshell dropped Another Picture today, the expanded edition of her album If You Asked for a Picture from earlier this year, and pretty much everything Sabrina Teitelbaum does is worth a listen. Catch her next Tuesday, November 18, at Delmar Hall! The Arts STL will be there, so keep an eye out for our review and photo gallery soon after.
runo plum, patching (Winspear): It’s a wonder I reviewed any other albums this week, because I really just wanted to listen to this runo plum album over and over again. A singer-songwriter from Minneapolis, plum has released a handful of bedroom-recorded singles and EPs, but patching marks her first foray into the studio and first full-length album. And what an album it is, a breakup album that’s as much about the healing as the heartbreak featuring 12 tracks built on plum’s breathy sigh of a voice and jangly acoustic guitar strums. Big Thief is an obvious touchstone for this album’s sound, but then I hear a little Hurray for the Riff Raff in the banjo-backed “Elephant” and “Pond” plays like Lucy Dacus delivered with a sigh. Favorite track: the downright gorgeous “The Quiet One.” Will I Listen Again?: Absolutely. I’ve already spun it five, maybe six times? I’m already anticipating plum’s stop at Off Broadway on March 10 of next year.
AVTT/PTTN, AVTT/PTTN (Ramseur Records/Ipecac): A collaborative album between the Avett Brothers, a band of wistful, sincere North Carolina folkies, and Mike Patton, the lead bellower for Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, and a variety of other weird and abrasive bands? Sure, why not! It’s a bit of an odd fit on the songs that stick to the Avetts’ gentle folk template, which is most of them: the Avetts trade in earnestness, but Patton is pretty much incapable of delivering a sincere lyric without an ironic wink. Better are the songs “Heaven’s Breath” and “The Ox Driver’s Song” that conjure up some fire and brimstone, or ones like “Received” where Patton doesn’t take lead but rather adds his rich lower register to the Avetts’ heavenly choir. Will I Listen Again?: Maybe.
Cheap Trick, All Washed Up (BMG): It had been a long time since I had checked in with the Avett Brothers or Mike Patton, but even longer since I’ve heard anything new from Cheap Trick. Three decades? Maybe longer? So I wasn’t sure what to expect when I hit play on this thing, and was a little surprised by the first few songs, where Rick Nielsen’s guitars were in distorted, muscular hard rock territory. “All Wrong Long Gone” plays like an AC/DC song, with its heavy groove and Robin Zander singing firmly in a high, raspy register, while “Bet It All” has a dark, doomy guitar riff to it that encroaches on Black Sabbath territory. A far cry from “Dream Police”!
It takes until the fifth track for the band to work up some of that old school energy on the power ballad “The Best Thing,” a song that’s kinda cheesy but kinda affecting anyway. But that song marks a shift away from a hard rock sound that doesn’t quite suit the band and the power pop that is their bread and butter: from the shimmery single “Twelve Gates” through the rollicking, Ringo-esque closer “Wham Boom Bang,” the rest of the album is just Cheap Trick being Cheap Trick, which after 55 years and 21 albums, you will not be surprised to learn they are very, very good at. Will I Listen Again?: This is exactly the kind of album that I’d probably never seek out to listen to in its entirety but I would never be disappointed if I came across a song from it in the wild. In a just world, KSHE 95 would add three or four of these songs onto their regular rotation. But we do not live in a just world, so I’ll have to settle for adding all of side B into my streaming library so I can stumble upon them when I least expect it.
Ramonda Hammer, Wake Up, Play Nice (self-released): On their first major release since 2019, L.A.-based trio Ramonda Hammer sound like a blend of the modern aggro-alt-rock of Mannequin Pussy with the very ‘90s dark, ominous vibes of Stabbing Westward. The band are clearly students of loud-soft dynamics, with the heavy churn of big distorted guitars and cascading drums shifting up and down in energy and intensity along with singer Devin Davis’ voice, which alternates between a defeated murmur and a cathartic wail. She spends the first three songs dissecting the end of a relationship while the last track, “Quite Lovely,” flips the script, finding hope as it starts in quiet mode and builds to an explosive finale. It’s only four songs and 17 minutes, but it’s a very promising 17 minutes. Will I Listen Again?: Yes. | Jason Green
