Ranking Lana Del Rey gets much more interesting once you stop asking which album has the best aesthetic and start asking where the writing feels most alive inside the aesthetic. Because the early Lana construction was powerful for a reason. Born to Die didn’t just introduce a singer. It introduced one of the strongest pop…
A lot of people hear the phrase experimental music and immediately brace themselves. I get it. It sounds like homework. It sounds like you’re about to be handed a reading list and a warning that this next part is “challenging but important.” It can sound less like music you fall in love with and more…
The trick with ranking The Cure is that you are never ranking just one band. You are ranking at least two bands that keep haunting each other. There’s the Cure of empty rooms, slow dread, cold air, spiritual depletion, mascara running through the wallpaper. The Cure who can make despair sound architectural. The Cure people…
Hard bop is one of those jazz labels that can sound a little dutiful until you actually put the records on. On paper, it risks looking like a genre term for people who enjoy diagrams. A sub-style. A historical chapter. The kind of thing you’re supposed to know if you want to nod at the…
Ranking Elton John is fun for exactly the same reason it’s difficult: there isn’t just one Elton John. There’s the absurdly gifted early-70s Elton who seemed capable of tossing off masterpieces before lunch. There’s the country-and-Americana dreamer of Tumbleweed Connection. There’s the maximal pop star. The bruised, sprawling auteur. The 80s survivor. The late-career craftsman…
Dev Hynes does not make the kind of catalog where one album is obviously broken, another is obviously overpraised, and the whole thing can be stacked neatly by “quality” as if we were ranking kitchen appliances. Blood Orange records tend to arrive more slyly than that. They drift in. They stain the room. They leave…
From a distance, jazz fusion can look like one giant, slightly stressful pile of 1970s virtuosity: long solos, very serious facial expressions, five-minute stretches where everyone seems to be winning a private contest, and at least one person on a keyboard making sounds that suggest the future happened in a basement. That version of fusion…
Ranking Cocteau Twins is difficult for a slightly strange reason. It’s not because the catalog is huge, and it’s not because there are embarrassing late-career detours to sort through. The hard part is that Cocteau Twins albums don’t divide neatly into masterpieces and misfires. They divide into different kinds of sonic weather. One record is…
Neo-soul is one of those genre labels people use while also looking slightly suspicious of it. That suspicion is fair. “Neo-soul” can sound like a record-store tag that got promoted into a worldview. It can group together artists who are doing very different things with soul, jazz, hip-hop, etc. And a lot of the musicians…
This post is part four of a Melodic Margin series for people who do not quite hear themselves as country listeners yet. It takes the scenic route through the genre until the music starts sounding bigger and more alive than the stereotype allows. If I had started this whole series here, the pre-album period with…