Welcome to the first issue of Open Up and Read, the newsletter from music journalist Jason Brow. If you like what you read,  tell your friends and consider tossing a few dollars his way via Ko-Fi. Be kind to cats. Music is the best.

June is the cruelest month. These 30 days are collectively a well-manicured and perfectly tanned middle finger pressing the ON button to sweltering anxiety and dread. June is humid in both forecast and spirit, abated by a handful of shows and bars with air conditioning. We pray for our neighborhood drag performers during Pride, enduring this slog as they bank enough to cover their rent until September (we hope. Tip them well).

Musically, June kicks off the three-month finale of the corporate release calendar, the gold rush to the Grammy consideration cutoff date. It’s also when publications run their “Best Album (So Far)” lists. These aren’t prestigious rulings but content. These are general recaps disguised as a halftime break and it’s time to go live to the scoreboard to see who’s in the lead!”

But the points are made up, and the audience doesn’t care. These lists don’t generate contentious online reactions that end-of-the-year or “Of All Time” lists do. It doesn’t help that they’re rendered obsolete within weeks (or in this case, days since Charli XCX’s acclaimed Brat arrived on June’s first Friday.)

At best, we check these “So Far” lists to see if our personal favorites have found purchase in other people’s hearts. At worst, we ignore them. Does it matter? Being crowned No. 1 in June is nice but hollow; check back in December when we’re playing for keeps.

It’s slightly reductive to dismiss these lists as “easy content creation.” I mean, they are. That’s why I’m starting this newsletter with a list. 

[Which, by the way, thank you for subscribing and being one of the first people to support Open Up and Read.]

BUT! As James Rettig wrote in Stereogum’s mid-year list, despite how calorically void these pieces are, they’re best when they “champion what you love,” especially since our attention is overwhelmed thanks to our terminally plugged-in present. June is the halfway save point. Fill up the back half of the year (or, at least, the summer) with the albums you may have missed.

Treble, Exclaim, Spin, Uproxx, Consequence, Complex, and Stereogum published their lists in the first week of June. Pitchfork played the SEO game by keeping a running list they updated frequently. Similarly, Vulture and Esquire published lists in May with the “best-albums-2024” URL, an evergreen feature they will update in hopes of scooping competitors come November.

Further evidence of how insubstantial these lists are in the grand scheme of things is that both Billboard and Rolling Stone ran their lists without ranking them.

So far, the lists are mostly inoffensive. Complex’s Peter A. Berry took the bold step of defending Kanye “Ye” West and Ty Dolla $igns’ Vultures 1. Outside of RS and Billboard, Alan Light’s piece for Esquire was the only one to include The Tortured Poets Department. Even then, the praise was faint, with Light noting the common refrain of how it’s “too long, too messy, too melodramatic.” The lack of Swiftiean outrage tells that these lists don’t resonate.

Still, kudos to Light, a former Spin/Vibe editor-in-chief, for making the oddest list, putting Mdou Moctar, Sleater-Kinney and Sierra Ferrell alongside Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and that star-studded Talking Heads album no one listened to. It’s similar to how I included Fatboi Sharif, Iggy Pop and Shooter Jennings’ tribute to Warren Zevon in Us Weekly’s Best Albums of 2023 list.

I like a good list. Ever since 2020, I’ve kept a running ledger of all the new albums I’ve listened to that year. So, fuck it. Let’s start this newsletter off with a list of albums I’ve enjoyed this year.  

Notable mentions include Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven and Ekko Astral’s pink balloons, two excellent albums that have gotten kudos elsewhere. They’re brilliant and will be on plenty of end-year lists. I spoke with Ekko’s Jael Holzman for New Noise if you want more insight into the creation of one of the best punk albums of 2024.

Also — No Good With Secrets’s Another Side is the perfect soundtrack for your romantic punk summer. I spoke with Madison of No Good With Secrets/Ogbert the Nerd about camping on “Taylor Swift dot bandcamp dot com.”

So, without any further delay:

Blockhead, Luminous Rubble: Blockhead always sends me floating down an ethereal current with his instrumental hip-hop albums. While A.I. brings the dead back to life through the horrors of science, the way Blockhead works here—compiling an album by sampling KPM Library’s collection of 70 years' worth of music and sound designs made for television, film, and radio—is more organic, shamanic. It unveils an unseen world, a Garden of Eden, in a superfund site.

Bruiser Wolf, My Story Got Stories: Radiating with charisma, Bruiser Wolf’s second album showcases his unique rap delivery against a production distilled from a 1970s Tom Jung movie poster. His sprechgesang style of rapping comes off like a street corner sermon. It’s the kind of hip-hop album for those fans of Madlib and MF Doom (which, I imagine, means “middle-class white dudes.”) All I know is that the album slaps.

Ghost Funk Orchestra, A Trip To The Moon: The latest from Seth Applebaum’s Ghost Funk Orchestra is a funky, cosmic voyage. With audio from the Apollo moon missions, A Trip To The Moon travels through time on waves of exotica and psychedelia-influenced big band compositions. It’s happy hour on the dark side of the moon. This album is enchanting, full of space-age sex appeal mixed with the leftover wonder we had when a world beyond ours was just a dream.

Keefchamper, Vitality: Shoutout to Metal & Coffee for cluing me into this. I find that good metal obliterates all the rest of the nonsense in my brain and around my ears. Keefchamber achieves S-ranking at that with their debut full-length. Vitality swirls with elements of death metal, doom, stoner rock, and punk, the right ingredients for a tasty, sludge stew. There are heavy riffs, deep grooves, and near-indecipherable howling vocals. It’s magnificent.

Midnight, Hellish Expectations: I’ll admit it: I’m one of the last people in the world to learn about Midnight. Hellish Expectations was a great introduction. If you were to soak a battle vest in High Life, wring it out, and drink the residue of sweat, smoke, and stale beer, you would have the intoxicating thrill of the album. This is heavy metal at its core inception, pure and simple, done in a way that avoids parody or nostalgia. Timeless and effective, like an axe.

Pissed Jeans, Half Divorced: One of the best albums of the year. Pissed Jeans dialed back its noise for a more straightforward hardcore punk album, but it’s still a demolition derby of thoughts and sounds. If this is what the end sounds like, sign me up. It’s a cathartic release; group scream therapy about how fucked up things have gotten without falling into the trap of suggesting a solution. Can’t recommend it enough (my beleaguered friends will tell you that).

Shellac, To All Trains: On one hand, this album is perfect in that it doesn’t waste a single second, superbly succinct like an early Minutemen release. On the other hand, I wish it was three times as long since Steve Albini’s death before its release means we will never hear any more music like this. Though his passing looms over this album—reviews felt like eulogies and memorials—it deserves all the praise without the sorrow.

The Minneapolis Uranium Club Ban, Infants Under The Bulb: The finest abstract nerd punk band returned with an album that feels like a theatrical performance that is meant to bewilder and challenge. No easy digestible messages. It’s stark. (“Game Show” is rife with D. Boon-esque guitars, making me wonder if I should just listen to more Minutemen). It’s odd. It’s brilliant. It’s a bizarre statement of our division and alienation. It’s about 40 minutes long. God, I love this album.

Wandering Oak, Resilience: Last year’s Silhouettes of Disgust from Downfall of Gaia was my go-to album when I needed something louder than the din and distress of everyday life. So far, Wandering Oak’s Resilience has lifted my downtrodden spirits. Soaring power/heavy arias, blackened wails, and guttural death metal howls are set against music incorporating folk and heavy thrash. It’s an album that sets out to be epic and achieves its goal perfectly.

There you go. May the list give you one or two albums to help you preserve through the rest of the summer. 

I spoke with Serj Tankian of System of a Down about his new memoir, Down With the System. One part of that conversation was published at Treble, with remarks about how his memoir shows him in service to others and to ideals greater than him. You can find that here. 

Sadly, there won’t be a 2024 edition of The Sound of Pride for Hollywood Life. I ran the feature for two years, asking celebrities of the LGBTQ+ community to pick songs for a yearly Pride playlist. Check out what Margaret Cho, Alaska Thunderfuck, V Spehar, Chris Freeman, Bebe Zahara Benet, and wrestlers Dark Sheik, Effy, and Edith Surreal had to say about Pride 2023. 

Until next time,
Jason

Open Up and Read is the newsletter from music journalist Jason Brow. If you like what you read,  tell your friends and consider tossing a few dollars his way via Ko-Fi. Be kind to cats. Music is the best.