Green Day – Saviors: Hit me with power chords before you lay me dead.

Artist: Green Day
Album: Saviors
Year: 2024
Grade: B

In Brief: On the one hand, Saviors is a sonic walk down memory lane – what many might consider a “return to form” after its thoroughly forgettable predecessor. On the other hand, it’s not written with the intent of reliving the glory days. Sure, their inner teenagers might come out here and there for a bit of irreverent humor, but it’s the frustrated commentary on the turmoil of American life in the 2020s and the honest confessions of what it means to be an aging rock star still fighting off old demons that keep me coming back. I won’t pretend that I’m the biggest Green Day fan out there – not by a long shot. But it’s nice to have a version of Green Day back that seems to truly give a damn.

What Am I Listening To? – January 2024

It’s January, which means I’m playing catch-up on some of the lower priority releases I didn’t get around to squeezing in while it was still 2023, as well as a few recommendations from the year-end best-of lists made by friends and colleagues. Here are my thoughts on the latest from Mitski, Slowdive, Blondshell, The Killers, Porcupine Tree, Good NightOwl, Boygenius, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Sleater-Kinney, Green Day, and (swear I’m not joking here) the Barbie soundtrack.

The Best of the Ought Nots Revisited, Part III: 41-60

The halfway point of this list is where we start to get into the truly excellent, A-grade stuff. I’m fairly stingy about giving out A’s, so it’s actually a little surprising that I gave that distinction to just over 50 albums over the course of the decade (and retroactively, in a few cases), averaging about five such records per year.

As I did with my “Best of the Tenny Tweens” list, I thought it’d be interesting to break this list down by geographic location, and see which places the artists represented most commonly come from. Here’s what I came up with.

Obsessive Year-End List Fest 2020: Dishonorable Mentions

2020 really sucked for pretty much everyone, so I guess it’s not surprising that there was plenty of music in 2020 that also kinda sucked. For all that I bagged on 2019 when I noted my disappointment over its dearth of truly great records, I couldn’t come up with very many horrible ones at the end of it, either. 2020 certainly rose (sunk?) to that challenge. And honestly, I can’t even blame the pandemic for most of this crap (with one notable exception – a trilogy of exceptions, technically speaking). These were full-length, professionally recorded and released, bona-fide LPs that each artist took the time and care to put together, with the bulk of the work either being done before the pandemic, or finished remotely in such a way that the change in recording process was transparent to me as a listener. It’s just that they put most of that time and effort into making music that I found off-putting, or at the very least a dreadful bore. Some of the artists on this list have been boring me for several albums now, of course… but there are a few here whose work I’ve genuinely enjoyed in the past, and I certainly would have expected better from them. Despite all the sucky things in 2020 that I’d like to point the finger at Covid-19 and our petulant toddler of a President for, I can honestly say that neither are to blame for most of the bad albums I’m about to discuss.

The rules for this list are that each entry must be a full-length LP released in 2020 – no EPs, compilations, remix albums, etc. Some of these artists certainly tested the definition of how much material comprises an “album” – and if they’re going to put in a lackadaisical amount of effort and still call it that, I’m going to rate it accordingly. (To be fair, there are even some short entries on my Favorites list, so length alone isn’t necessarily why I’m criticizing those projects – it has more to do with the sense that they came up woefully short on interesting ideas.) In some cases there are songs from these records that I did genuinely enjoy, and I’ll embed examples where relevant, but you’ll note that I completely gave up on this midway through the list when things started getting really bad.

And with that, let’s get this masochistic train rolling!

What Am I Listening To? – February 2020

A combination of new releases that dropped in February, and entries from some of my colleagues’ 2019 best-of lists that I wanted to check out, has expanded my new music column to a whopping sixteen albums this month. Whew! It might be a few months out before I actually get around to fully reviewing any of this stuff, but for now…

Here are my first impressions of the latest from (deep breath…) Tall Tall Trees, Drive-By Truckers, Bruce Hornsby, black midi, Cage the Elephant, Caroline Polachek, Weyes Blood, The Lone Bellow, Green Day, Holden Days, Tennis, Tame Impala, Tyson Motsenbocker, John Reuben, Derek Webb, and The Secret Sisters.

Obsessive Year-End List Fest 2017: Favorite Songs

It’s that time of year again where I run through the list of songs that inspired me, entertained me, or just plain got stuck in my head for amusing reasons, more than any other songs in the last 12 months. Most of these were released in 2017. Some came out in 2016 and I either didn’t hear them until this year or didn’t come to fully appreciate them in time for last year’s list. I’ve given brief explanations and YouTube links for the Top 30. For the rest… just check the reviews where they’re linked, if you’re curious.

And as always, many of these songs (limit one per artist) are collected in my 2017 in a Nutshell playlist over on Spotify.

What Am I Listening To? – December 2017

Here are my first impressions of the latest releases from U2, The Lone Bellow, Green Day, Maroon 5, and Christine Denté.

Obsessive Year-End List Fest 2016: Favorite Albums (and Honorable Mentions)

This is the music I’ll remember the most when I think back on 2016. Not just the great singles (though these albums have plenty of those) or the dark horse picks buried deep in the track listings (tons of those too, though), but the way these records all flow from song to song, creating a continuous listening experience that makes spending nearly an hour of time with each artist (or more, in a few cases) worthwhile. On my most cynical days, I’d say that thanks to both terrestrial radio doing its thing and the ephemeral lifecycle of most songs and artists that go “viral” on social media, the single is a much more easily digestible and obtainable format for popular music nowadays, putting the album in danger of becoming a lost art. But from the very obscure to the decidedly mainstream, every record on this list would be here to prove me wrong.

Obsessive Year-End List Fest 2016: Favorite Songs

The final days of 2016 are upon us, and that can only mean one thing – it’s time for some long lists that try (perhaps in vain) to sum up the best music I was listening to this year. As always, I’ll start with the individual songs that stood out to me the most. The in-depth reasons why I love these songs so much are mostly spelled out in the album reviews I’ve linked to from here, but in addition to the usual video evidence, I’ve also included a quick blurb for each of the Top 30 entries, just to keep it from being a long list with no explanation whatsoever, I guess.

I’ve also made a Spotify playlist that collects a lot of these highlights, if you’d like to spend a few hours following along. (That one’s ordered more as I discovered the songs, not so much how I’d rank them now, and it’s limited to one track per artist.)

Green Day – Revolution Radio: I put the “riot” in patriot.

Artist: Green Day
Album: Revolution Radio
Year: 2016
Grade: B

In Brief: While it’s not as ambitious as American Idiot or 21st Century Breakdown, I appreciate the return to writing songs in that vein, and the result is a far more listenable record than their 2012 trilogy. While the subject matter is a mixed bag, I’m finding most of the songs to be quite cathartic in the midst of a post-election malaise.