The Useless Critic 2.0

I went ahead and made my Best of 2021 playlist a little early this year. It's a work in progress, as you can imagine, but here's what I got so far: School of X (whom I will be writing about soon!) Lana (duh) Lil Nas X Lorde Normani and Cardi B. We Were Promised Jetpacks Will Stratton Twin Shadow Inhaler Keaton Henson Anna Akana Surfer Blood Bartees Strange  And many more! Here's the full playlist, which can also be found on Apple Music. Because I didn't feel up to writing a lot tonight, I did a mini-podcast as an experiment to describe the playlist and my thoughts on Lil Nas X, Jack Antonoff, the slow decline of one of my once favorite bands, and more! I learned from this experiment I need to not lean on "that being said" and "um" so much, so I apologize in advance. Britt Kemp · Useless Critic #1

Just released yesterday, Will Stratton's newest album "The Changing Wilderness" is the first cohesively excellent album for me from this year so far. It's pensive, somewhat melancholy, stripped down - but beautiful in a way that makes it hard to forget. Although Stratton describes himself as a "disciple of Nick Drake," I found that his seventh album called to mind the very best of Iron & Wine.  "The Changing Wilderness" may have had its debut in May, but it sounds like it might be better suited for the cooler air of autumn than the hopefulness of spring. Stratton is a singer-songwriter who, in the past, has thrived more off introspection than attempting to commune with the macro world outside himself. In "The Changing Wilderness," he set out to deviate from that pattern. No where in the stark 40 minutes the album lasts is this more apparent than "Infertile Air," which imagines the guilty conscious of an ICE agent.  But intro...

I'm not exactly sure how I never actually listened to the Nick Drake-influenced singer-songwriter Will Stratton before (which is especially strange considering his discography stretches six albums), but going forward I'm willing to correct that grievance on my part.  Only a few seconds into the lush, wistful, and absolutely gorgeous "Tokens" - calling to mind Iron & Wine at their best - hits the note Stratton was aiming for when composing it. Stratton recalls, "Tokens is a song addressed to the fraternal twins, the most frequent subjects of songs since songs were created: time and love. The afternoon that I was writing it, the weird weather we were having that summer was on my mind. I was thinking about how my perception of time is so tied to my perception of the changing seasons, and consequently, how my perception of time hasn't been quite as sharp as it once was. I was also thinking about the ending of one of my favorite movies, the 2014 Paul Thomas An...