The Useless Critic 2.0

I felt like at first - encountering Tuxedo - that I had run into a photocopy of Chromeo. I guess you could call them that, and seeing Mayer has done a lot of work with the guys from Chromeo, it might even be an apt comparison.  (Despite the semi-disparaging title of this blog post, I actually don't think they're that bad! And that's not because I'm a Mayer Hawthorne fan).  Tuxedo is half Mayer, half Jake One (a celebrated producer in his own right). They make very, very, VERY '80s-heavy funk. They released their debut self-titled album last month.  "Do It" is a pretty strong single, and "Number One" is fairly decent, even if it's kind of sickeningly cheesy at times. I feel like you'd expect to hear "Number One" at someone's wedding in 1987, after everyone has drank way too much Schnapps and Grandma has started grinding with the priest.  My major takeaway from my crash course through their album is Tuxedo had the r...

I accidentally stumbled upon Sufjan Stevens' lush new album, Carrie and Lowell , while actively seeking ways to ignore its existence. I loooooooooooved 2010's Age of Adz , but it's been about five years and he's not done much for me lately (to paraphrase Miss Jackson). I think what happened with Sufjan and me is that, frankly, he got much too big for me to keep up with. I am now going to sound very pretentious, but: For a group of people in the early-to-mid 2000s, Sufjan was very important and precious. I won't say "figurehead," but I doubt his popularity couldn't have helped usher in acts like Bon Iver and the like.  When he became more - well - ubiquitous in a manner of speaking, some of that value/novelty for me (and perhaps others, I don't know, I haven't asked anyone!) disappeared. And when became a little more outrageously experimental, I was intrigued at first. Then, I backed away, distracted by other musical going-ons of the t...