Quick Note: Unusual amount of news today. My “Underdog Pop” project RUSTBELT has a new EP out. It’s called “You Got Nowhere To Go But You’re Going There Tonight.” It feels like I wrote these songs in a fugue state, and now I don’t know what they mean, which is both exciting and terrifying. Also: The third edition of my column for the music platform Nina came out earlier this week. The column, in case you forgot, is called NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS WITH JOHN’S MUSIC BLOG. For the newest installment, I go clubbing—in one night, I see both The Dare and Flapjack The Kandi Kid—and I interview the great artist Annie Pearlman about her studio listening habits. Plus a bunch of other shit… And, if you live in Milwaukee, you probably know and love Joey Turbo. He’s having serious health issues and he needs your help.
David Nance & Mowed Sound “Mock the Hours”
The American music appreciation infrastructure continues to erode, but at least there’s new music from Omaha rock and roller David Nance. He does it Nebraska-style for all the long-haul truckers and the true believers. Heartland feeling—sometimes you need a bit of it in your life.
Here is a power ballad, SoundCloud style. The piano reminds me of The Fray? The vocal warble reminds me that it is 2024 and the beat goes on. If I had a radio show, I would play “i will parish” and then follow it up with a northern soul song.
Some of the woozier rap I have heard lately comes from Houston’s Guapo, alongside producers Mr. Made The Beat and Keyman. It’s the musical equivalent of taking four kahlua shots to the dome first thing in the morning while sailing on a smooth jazz cruise. I’m flying too close to the sun with this one, so I’m going to go ahead and apologize in advance, but I’m surprised that a rapper—a bad rapper—never wrote a song called “A Supposedly Dope Rhyme I’ll Never Spit Again.” Doing The Report every week has taken a toll on my mental wellbeing.
Hot Leather, The Dallas Cowboys, Best Fwends “Wet Hair”
Three micro-generations of synth punk collide and provide proof of Myspace’s sonic long tail. The result is a little more twee than I expected, actually: It’s “pop punk stickers on the Nalgene bottle” meets “blog band from 2011.” You know what I’m saying?
Fast Life Yungstaz “Auto-Pilot (Full Mixtape)”
Hundreds of thousands of rap mixtapes from the crucial datpiff.com library were recently saved by the Internet Archive. Nadine Smith just wrote a nice article about it for The Fader; in the piece, she highlights five crucial tapes, one of which is a 2010 drop from the legendary Fast Life Yungstaz, who are more than just “Swag Surfin,” that’s for sure. Really, as she says, the group was making timeless summertime Americana. It was the perfect music to go along with a fleeting period of optimism.
MIX OF THE WEEK: djscreendoor “what the world needs now is another idm mix”
If for whatever crazy reason you weren’t paying attention to underground electronic music in the late 1990s, IDM stands for intelligent dance music, which has to be the dumbest genre name of all time. As a style, it can be a pretty big tent, encompassing everything from ambient to glitch to acid to twisted takes on jungle. Screendoor presents two hours of the stuff, mixed on a slowly escalating BPM curve. It’s a go for the IDM curious and the “seasoned braindancer” alike.