Artist Title Album Plays
1 Petrol Girls Sick & Tired Baby 7
2 Destroy Boys Drink Open Mouth, Open Heart 5
3 Petrol Girls Bones Baby 5
4 Lucy Dacus Timefighter Historian 4
5 Julien Baker Sprained Ankle Sprained Ankle 4
6 Japanese Breakfast Paprika Jubilee 4
7 Japanese Breakfast Be Sweet Jubilee 4
8 Petrol Girls Violent by Design Baby 3
9 Petrol Girls Unsettle Baby 3
10 Tiny Moving Parts The Midwest Sky Breathe 3

I’ve been running to the Petrol Girls’s Baby as a replacement for Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come for high-tempo music with sufficient ire behind it to help me push through the fact that I hate moving my body in this way. It’s been a worthy change: Ren Aldridge’s vocals have a grit that Dennis Lyxzén’s just lack and the instrumentation - while not as genre-deviating as the introduction to Tannhäuser/Derivè, as an example - has its moments that stave off any potential motonomy, with the incredibly bouncy verse riff in Preachers being set at odds with the slower and somewhat syncopated rhythms of Unsettle. The only really offputting thing about the album is the switching between a ’long a’ and ‘short a’ vowel sound in the pronunciation of ‘bath’ in Bones, which as someone who speaks English correctly bothers me (‘short a’ only, there’s no ‘r’ in the word).

Timefighter is a song ultimately about the futility of efforts in the face of forces of nature - but there’s a little thread in there about the sorts of tiny transgressions that make life a little ore interesting. ‘You talk like you don’t know the walls are thin/And I don’t mind if you don’t mind me listening’ is sung with an energy that is somewhat lacking from the resigned vocal delivery of the rest of the song that I just enjoy: it’s a little bit cheeky and playful. In a lot of ways, it’s a blues-inspired song by numbers, but that one section of the song really elevates it for me.

The fact that Julien Baker’s Sprained Ankle is an album of songs that are just her voice, her guitar and a loop pedal (and some percussion here and there) is what endears it so much to me: while singer-songwriter stereotype, it leads to a product that is minimal and sparse in a way that accentuates each of the few parts that are there. Simple melodies provide scaffolding for more complex ones played atop them; Baker’s control of her voice being shown in the interplay between it and the guitar underneath. The title track is just probably the most pure demonstration of this on the album.

I have no idea what the midwest is. Any map I look at appears to define it differently and there are a load of midwest emo bands from California and New York: maybe it just exists as an idea of ennui or a liminal space that can be wherever one is. Tiny Moving Parts appear to believe that Minnesota is part of the midwest and their lyrics constantly reiterate that the towns they are from are kind of nothing places that have nothing going on in them except failed relationships of varying kinds, so either the geographic definition or the inner-world theory could work for their music being lumped in with the midwest emo moniker, though certainly on the pop-punkier side of that definition - like if any member of blink-182 had read a book, I guess. Dylan Mattheisen’s ability to play relatively complex two-handed tapping riffs while putting on very enthusiastic performances is something that I can just only dream about dreaming about.

Follow-up: The table was generated by some code that I wrote rather than by hand this time. I hate doing Markdown tables and I feel good about actually following through on something that I said I’d do for myself. It’s bad code at the moment but maybe I’ll fix it up a little.