This is undoubtedly my #1 song of 2024. It’s already the top track on my Replay 2024, and I have no idea how anything could unseat it.

I’m not really a fan of Ty Segall, and I can’t say I even enjoy this album (Three Bells) very much, but this song (and one other, “My Best Friend”, paired with a video of Segall’s dachshunds) is a laser-guided missile directly into my id. I’ve listened to it at least 30 times, which is 2 solid hours of “My Room”, if you add it all up. So, yeah, I like this song a lot.

I love everything about how it’s structured, how the layers build and complement each other. I’ve been trying to make some of my own music this past year, and some part of my motivation is how insanely proud I would be of myself if I made a song of my own that I like as much as I like this song. It doesn’t have to sound like this song, I just want to like it as much.

I wonder if such a thing is possible? I feel like I’ve read so many interviews with artists who say they don’t watch or listen to their own work. (Are there authors who read their own books? Outside of when it is necessary?) On the other hand, I remember reading that one reason for the existence of The Dandy Warhols was that they wanted to make the kind of music they wanted to get drunk to.

I suppose it seems absurd, thinking about it more, the idea that some possible majority of people are making music that they don’t want to listen to themselves. You’d hope, since the act of creation is so deeply indebted to our influences (I, too, want to make the kind of music I want to get drunk to), that we’d always be appreciative of the outcome.

On the other hand, every time I hear my own voice singing, I am aghast, it does not remind me of any of my influences. But perhaps I have yet to discover the proverbial voice within me, that sounds unlike me even to myself, or at least that summons some reaction that causes me to call it “the voice” like Michael Stipe does. Oh, let’s set a low bar, shall we?

Anyway, I like this song a lot.

I’m a bit late to this one, as this album came out much earlier this year. I know about Rosie Tucker thanks to her very, very good 2021 release Sucker Supreme. I am pleased to say that her new release, Utopia Now!, is a suitable follow up and provides us with more of the same 90’s flavored indie rock, with whip-smart lyrics and a litany of “Rosie Tucker”-isms that permeate this very song. Major kudos to her and her collaborators (shout out to Wolfy), they’re consistently delivering albums that sound really, really good.

I don’t have much to say here. I can owe my fandom to Rosie Tucker to Cheekface’s Greg Katz, who promoted Sucker Supreme on Twitter all those years ago, so I consider Rosie Tucker part of the Cheekface extended universe, if such a thing existed.

I’m shocked, I’m shaken, and I’m confused that this Personal Trainer album (Still Willing) isn’t the hottest fucking thing across the entirety of the Pitchfork-reading crew of nearly-40-somethings that secretly run the internet. The YouTube videos for these songs have barely broken 1K in most cases, and how can that be?

Opener “Upper Ferntree Gully” sounds like a love song to every fantastic indie rock album I’ve listened to that predates 2010. It just makes me so happy, the shifts and turns, the pure musical adventure that the song goes through. It’s not too much, it’s just enough, and it sets the scene for an album that is so playful, earnest, inventive, and… I just don’t have enough superlative adjectives in my collection to really do it justice.

As soon as I heard it, I sent it to a friend of mine, offering it up as “like a modern Grandaddy or Pavement?” And that’s still the comparison I’d make, which seems apt as Willem Smit blatantly references Pavement, and maybe it’d be fair to accuse me of cheating–did I even think they sounded like Pavement? Or did I just hear the word “Pavement” and run with it?

Maybe I’m being too effusive. Truth be told, the album was a grower for me. I loved the opening track right away, but I haven’t listened to Grandaddy or Pavement in… nearly ever. I didn’t know how to feel about the second and third tracks, at first, because they’re not really like anything I’m currently listening to. But the fourth track, “Round”, felt good right away, with an infectious hook, a horn section, falsetto “ooh”ing, a singalong chorus–all things that I cannot live without, musical motifs that wormed into my brain and forced me to keep spinning the record again and again.

Spinning the what? You’ll learn, you’ll learn.

Yet, somehow, inexplicably, I am posting “New Bad Feeling”, which hits like a gut punch right after the jubilation of “Round”, perfectly capturing the feeling of sitting alone in your room with nothing but your regrets and the white noise in your head. The soundtrack to those moments where you’d cry, if you could, but it would be a lie, because your feelings can’t even rise to the occasion, they’re not gonna break, the feeling’s never gonna cease, and you’ll always just be the same you, in the same place you always end up.

And then the song breaks, it says no, maybe not, maybe there’s something else, someone else–someone else outside yourself that you can draw power from. Then the album slinkily slides into “Intangible”, a funky R&B groove that’d fit right in on an Yip Deceiver album.

Anyway, I don’t need to describe the whole album for you, just go and listen to it, it’s a lot of fun.

Well, it didn’t take long for me to start slacking on writing entries over here, did it? But that’s kind of just how I do things. I start them, then I abandon them for a while, and eventually I pay a little bit of attention to them again. So, here we are, the cycle continues.

Jade Hairpins was formed by two of the guys from the hardcore band Fucked Up, who I don’t listen to because I don’t listen to hardcore. But this band, this band, maybe specifically this album, I listen to. A lot. It was my main album for the past couple weeks, ensuring several tracks (if not the whole thing) will be in my Replay 2024 playlist.

The album is a hodgepodge of 70’s UK rock styles, all smushed together in such a wonderful way. I don’t really think I’ve heard anything quite like this before. Like any truly great album, my favorite song has shifted several times as I’ve been listening to it repeatedly. At first, it was obvious crowd pleaser “Drifting Superstition”, then “Lost in Song”, and finally this song, “My Feet On Your Ground”, a Talking Heads-esque foot stomper.

I don’t know how to review music anymore! Am I doing a good job? Can I get a head pat? I’m still recovering from the flu, so I deserve some credit for even doing this at all!