Indiecast - The Brat Summer/Kamala Harris Convergence + New Albums By Jack White And Childish Gambino

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Today's episode begins with an extended rant from Steven about a big pet peeve: The conflation of music taste with personal morality and/or ideology. This came up multiple times this week, first with Charli XCX's apparent endorsement of Kamala Harris and the deep investigation into JD Vance's Spotify playlists (2:17). After Steven's rant, Ian shares his review of EA Sports College Football 25 and how it might impact his music writing career (17:40).The guys then talk about new albums from Jack White and Childish Gambino, and the diverging paths both artists are taking in 2024 (22:20). They also discuss two records that turned 10 this week, Joyce Manor's Never Hungover Again and Alvvays' Alvvays, and the value of song power over short-term cultural relevancy (35:45). In the mailbag, a listener asks Steven and Ian to recount their biggest musical disagreements (45:40).In Recommendation Corner, Ian talks up the latest from Ben Seratan and Sinai Vessel while Steven stumps for Wand and American Aquarium (54:45).New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 199 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [e-mail], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Indycast is presented by Uprocks' indie mixtape. Hello everyone and welcome to Indycast. On this show, we talk about the biggest indie news of the week, we review albums, and we hash out trends. In this episode, we talked about the intersection of politics and Brat Summer, or Brought Summer, as we call it on this show, as well as new albums by Jack White and Childish Gambino. My name is Stephen Hayden, and I'm joined by my friend and co-host.

He's definitely voting for Kamala Harris now after that Charlie XX tweet. Ian Cohen, Ian, how are you? Yeah, it's not real until I hear Tim Walz talk about the Cindy Lee album. You know, like, we're, has Tim, has Andy Bashir gotten to the end of that record? What does, you know, Roy Cooper think of mannequin pussy? Like, I need to know, like, I need to get, like, recommendation corner from all of my favorite politicians. I mean, I mean, I got a Spotify playlist here. We're going to, like, do some investigative reporting on, like,

like who's streaming what? Like are you listening to, you know, if you listen to Cowboy Carter, a sufficient number of times for me to vote for you, we need to know this. We need to know like what right wing politicians are listening to so we know what not to listen to. You know,

this is very important stuff. Yeah. I mean, I did see today that we actually did talk on this, you know, our mid-year about how there's, no everything now or daddy's home type album rollout cycle where we just get like new awesome material every single day and it's just impossible to keep up and I think that we are like slowly shifting to politics cast because you know we did have the Kamala tweet and then we had JD Vance like his Spotify playlist leak and now like in the time in between us doing the outline recording

There's a whole bunch of did J.D. Vance fuck a couch. It's really giving us a lot of gold. I have no idea why we're even talking about actual music anymore. Well, let's leave the couch thing aside here. I don't want to get into that. There is musical aspects to these other stories. And for those who don't know, we'll just briefly go over it. I think this was over the weekend last weekend.

Charlie XX tweeted out, Kamala is brat. And this is, of course, after Joe Biden drops out of the election last weekend. Kamala Harris is in immediately. I mean, it's like the end of the godfather, like this week. Joe Biden gets taken out. A bunch of people are just simultaneously executed. And Kamala has just ascended to the throne here at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Charlie XX putting her two cents in. And of course, the population of 37-year-old media professionals went crazy, when Charlie XX inserted herself into the election, just made people feel so cool that they can spot this reference when they're talking about politics. So you had that going on. And then you have this other story where, I don't know who did this. Someone went into J.D. Vance's Spotify account and identified all. all of his playlist. JD Vance, of course, the vice presidential candidate running with Donald Trump. This is from Stereogum, The Account, which features a profile of Vance and his father

at a Trump rally. That's the profile pick. It includes a playlist called Making Dinner, running number one, Soul Plus. There are also two Vance made a playlist named after songs, Morning is Broken by Cat Stevens, and gold on the ceiling by the Black Keys. course. He also has saved two playlist. He didn't create a Spotify compilation of acoustic covers and

Rocked by Baby, a nearly 21-hour playlist of lullaby versions of classic rock and pop songs. I guess he has three kids, so that would make sense. The gold on the ceiling playlist features artists ranging from Death Cab for cutie, Chris Rastey-Chap for Cutie. Chris Rastrycey Chapman to One Direction to Conway Twitty. Hell yeah. You ever listen to Conway Twitty? All of his songs are about, like,

blinking. Yeah, slow hand, baby. Slow hand. He's like the horniest man in country music. I don't know what is going on with that, but at any rate. Many of the artists on Vance's playlist have vigorously criticized his running mate, only one. Travis Tritt is explicitly pro-Trump, but that's to be expected.

Not many people are building playlists out of Kid Rock and Ted Nugent. Chris Walla, the former guitar player for Death Cab for Cutie, he posted a tweet about this about appearing on a J.D. Vance playlist. He says, So many songs on the J.D. Vance playlist Center on Connection and Longing and the Fear or Pain of Loss.

Their empathetic and open that J.D. Vance can't or wouldn't work to pay that empathy forward in policy terms openly to every person as the artist do in song is so sad. Okay. I'm going to go off on a little rant here, Ian, if you'll indulge me and then you can respond to it.

This is hitting on two pet peeves of mine. Actually, it's one pet peeve, but there's another thing kind of related to it that I want to talk about in a minute. But it's this idea that music taste can be conflated with personal morality or ideology. You know, this idea that like, oh, because I listen to these artists,

that says something about who I am as a person. So if I'm listening to this sort of righteous artist or they make righteous music, I'm putting righteous in quote marks, that means that I am also a righteous person or I'm also a progressive person because this person is making music that seems to conform with that. Anyone who believes that, I want to point them to a great documentary that came out in 2008. It's called Boogie Man. And it's about this guy named Lee Atwater. He's a political consultant.

He passed away many years ago. but he became famous for working with Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s. And he was basically a guy who was very deft at using what has been called the Southern Strategy, which is basically coded racism to Southern voters to get them to vote for Republicans. And the most infamous example of that is the Willie Horton ad. I don't know if you remember this in 1980. Oh, absolutely, yeah. is basically an ad about this guy who's on parole

who went out and I think he killed and he raped and he killed somebody I think he committed a horrible crime and he was a black man and this ad was roundly criticized for basically again using racism to appeal to voters or to scare voters into voting for Republicans. This Lee Atwater guy you know what his music taste was? He was a huge fan of blues and R&B music music Like he played guitar, he was friends with many musicians. There's a really weird video.

Actually, it was released on DVD of the 1989 presidential inauguration for George Bush that Lee Atwater organized. And it's like Bo Didley, Willie Dixon, Percy Sledge, Sam Moore of Sam and Dave, like all of these great blues and R&B legends. This is the same guy who uses racism to get his candidates into office. It just shows, like, I mean, that's kind of a more sort of obvious example, but it just shows that people all the time listen to music that doesn't conform to what they believe. You know, so like Chris Walla, I understand it might be, it might bum you out that, like, Donald Trump's running mate, like, likes your band. But let me assuage you of any sort of bad feelings here.

Him liking your band has nothing to do with what he believes politically. It's totally disconnected. So don't feel bad about it. It has nothing to do with you. It's not a reflection on you. It has nothing to do with you, like how he feels about your band. So don't feel bad about that. The other thing I want to say quick, and I know I'm ranting here for a long time,

I'm going to give you the floor here in a minute. People on the left aren't a kill. I'm going to say our because I align with the non-Trump side, okay? I don't want to turn this into, I don't want to be too partisan on the show. But I'll just say I align with the non-Trump side. But people on the left, we have a vanity to us about being affiliated with cool people. Like, that is our Achilles heel. We love to feel like, oh, the cool people are on our side.

And when it comes to politics, we feel like, oh, it's so great that, like, Charlie X, CX is on our side. Or pop star X, Y, and Z is on our side. And I just want to say, like, do you guys remember 2016? do you remember Hillary Clinton going on Broad City? Do you remember that? Do you remember like... I do. Broad City, this great show, cultural phenomenon.

Hillary Clinton goes on and it like basically tanks the show. Like when people talk about that show now, they always bring up Hillary Clinton going on. They always talk about how embarrassing that was and how like worshipful that show was to her. And the thing is that like when people see this sort of thing, Even if, like, Kamala Harris, I don't know if she had anything to do with Charlie X, Thex, tweeting that. But when people see that, whether you're on the right or the left, they see it rightly for what it is, which is pandering.

It looks like pandering. And when you try to make a politician cool, no matter what politician that is, it always fails. And it always is transparent. And I'll just say to my brothers and sisters on the left, affiliating with cool people is not a predictor of whether you, actually win elections or not. And if you look at recent history, it seems like the opposite is true. So I just want to pump the brakes on this a little bit, like where people get so excited about this sort of thing, because I really think it ends up being self-defeating in the long run. And that's the end of my rant, Ian. I'm going to let you go. I talk for way too long. What do you

have to say about this? Yeah, I think this is the most you've ever talked about Death Cap for Cudy. But yeah, this just reminds me of this classic Onion article from 2000. A fluent white man enjoys, comma, causes the blues. And you can also see Anthony Blinken playing covers of Hootie Coochee, man, I think, in Ukraine. So, yeah, look, man, as far as, like, J.D., like Chris Walla, and look, man, I do wonder what Chris Wallet would say if J.D. Vance was like, yeah, Death Cap fell to fuck off after Kinsugi. but this idea that someone like J.D. Vance can't relate to their music. I'm going to just kind of go off on my little rant here. Like, J.D. Vance, someone also unearthed a dude's live journal from 2005 when he was in law school.

And boy, I've never felt more seen. Like, this dude's just like me for real, for real. But, you know, look, I mean, I'm thinking about, like, you know, the whole Paul Ryan Rage Against the Machine thing where it's like, how could a right-wing politician listen to a band as overt in their politics as Rays Against Machine and it's like, I don't know, the riffs are fucking awesome. And it hits at these underlying emotions that have little or nothing at all to do with, you know, whether or not you read France, Fanon or whatever. But, you know, Death Cat for Cutty. I know me some Death Cat for Cutty. And I think about guys like J.D.

Vance, like he's a deeply weird person. Don't get me wrong. But he is a very familiar archetype to me. Like, you meet a lot. lot of guys like this in the law who are like they would call themselves libertarians or free thinkers or whatever but in reality they're just like grievance based right wing politics but they still want to keep their options open with like dating liberal women because they're like too socially awkward to like fit into fraternities and sororities and so what are death cap for cutie songs like really about are they about empathy and connection and fear and longing and loss like chris while era death cap songs are about like fronting like you're a nice guy but like really being a dick

like 405 tiny vessels company calls even a lot of the shin songs i know jd vans was posting about garden state um look i don't think that there's a straight line between relating to for what reason and being anti-immigration but these hit at like human feelings that like everyone has despite whatever politics they may have like i'm bummed i would be bummed too you know like I feel uncomfortable when quote unquote the wrong people retweet stuff I write so um I guess this just all makes me look I'm glad that Joe Biden dropped out but I'm going to miss someone who who's who's who's music taste basically cuts off like a Martin Scorsese movie like in Joe and Joe Biden's mind like street gangs are still duop groups you know what I mean like he has not updated himself since then and also

Donald Trump. Like, he likes Kid Rock and Ted Newton. Like, he has them at the rallies, but his musical taste is like straight up Stephen Sonheim and like fan out of the opera and cats. He's like a really weird dude with his taste. He's like a bitchy 70-year-old grandma in Florida. I'm going to kind of miss that because from this point forward, it's going to be, it's going to be nothing but like, you know, brat summer.

And I also love how, you know, now that Charlie XX is the present of pop rather than the future. People are like, no, you're listening to her wrong as if it's like Metallica in 1991. Yeah, is there like conversation? I feel like I've seen a little bit of this lately where there's a segment of her fan base that's upset that she's finally had like a real mainstream breakthrough. Is that happening? I really think it is. I mean, look, I don't think people are mad so much about Kamala's brat as it was when Eric Adams tried to make a post.

I mean, look, politicians using Brat Summer. That has the short, you knew that was going to be like a cooked meme from the start. And now, I mean, what does it mean to have a Brat Summer? Like you said, being a 37-year-old media professional being online. So I don't understand how the Kamala campaign didn't understand the assignment here. You know, they did it just like they did. And, you know, it just, it's like, it's so funny how now there's, I mean, rock like pop optimism really is the new rock and rock isn't like it's like you we're treating like

pop stars like when they get too popular making pop music like i don't know man like you're listening i think you're listening to this the wrong way man yeah i don't know it's gonna be an annoying summer though i definitely feel like we are reverting to 2016 a little bit in this election cycle i i I really think the way that pop culture and politics engaged that year, which I think just plays into Trump's hands, really. Like, when people on the left do this, I wish we wouldn't do this because it's so annoying. It's even annoying to me, and I'm on your side. I mean, the thing with Republicans is that, like, no one is ever on their side in terms of pop culture. So, like, they don't care about this stuff.

Like, they have a resistance to it. They're like people from Siberia who don't notice when it's like 10 below zero. You know? Not necessarily. A lot of, a lot of Republican, like, operators and influencers are, like, failed Hollywood people. There's, like, a really odd history of, like, people who make, like, I can't remember what Ben Shapiro's media company is, but they, like, make movies and they're so supremely weird. Like, they care.

It's like with date events. It's, like, people who, like, want to be cool, but they're, like, so socially awkward, so they kind of funnel like their awkwardness through social grievance and blame like, I don't know, DEI or wokeness for it. The mentality of it is absolutely fascinating. But that being said, I mean, look, I remember 2016 as well. And look, we could be wrong. Maybe Charlie XX is extremely popular amongst, you know, non-college educated whites in the Midwest.

And we won't repeat, you know, the stuff that was covered so thoroughly. And that book shattered about like how Hillary Clinton never. visited in Wisconsin. Yeah, I don't know. I just feel like, you know, when we make fun of Republicans, when Hulk Hogan shows up at the RNC, like Charlie X-C-X is our Hulk Hogan, I think. You know, so just, just meditate on that a little bit. So anyway, politics cast.

Let's end it. That's it right there. Before we get to Jack White and Childish Cambino, we have to ask, how is college football all 25 doing. We need a review from you. Have you been playing this all week? No, I've been so, I've been like really, I've been under an avalanche of so many deadlines. Like, I've totally let them build up. But I did get everything done by Monday. So Tuesday, I started my dynasty with Virginia, of course. And in that hour, I listened to new shoegays promos from bands called Wishy and Gift. And both of them sound like stuff I reviewed in the C-slide at Pitchfork in 2012. So I'm fucking back, baby.

Like, we are, you're going to see me publish in two reviews a week. You know, I feel as if I am back in 2012, except the graphics are way better. It's a great fucking game. Also, I don't play enough to notice the glitches and the, you know, the cheat plays that everyone else does. And I don't play online either. So, I'm happy about my purchase. Recommendation, corner is going to go five times as long now because I actually will be listening to more than two records a week. So yeah, full full on 100% uh highly recommended best new video game best new console. Okay. So you've only played for an hour though so far. I played it for I played it for like a couple hours like a little bit this weekend when I just could not listen to a transcript of my

own uh when I couldn't listen to a transcript of my own interviews for any fucking longer. Uh, I'm not like one of the people who I've read about who like worry about the consistency of their family or like whether they'll hold a job or I've watched quite a few YouTube videos of people playing this game though just because the RPO, the run play option, run pass option is like so fucking confusing as far as it's as far as it's how you use the controls. I've not played it a lot only because the hustle, the grind come first. and that included the, you know, the Loz Campesinos review I did, something else that we're going to talk about. Like I, but now I'm like, my deck is cleared. I ain't got shit going on. So you're going to, you're going to see me get to at least year three of Virginia,

maybe winning eight games. Wow. Okay. Well, I'm excited to hear more about this. By the way, you do your own transcribing when you do an interview? No, I did. I use cockatoo. We are also not in the pocket of big cockatoo.

I use it to transcribe it. The problem is this interview I did was at a fucking bowling alley. So it was impossible to hear anything. So the transcript of that was 32 pages long. And I just had to listen to the audio and just try to pick out usable quotes. Never again. I'm lucky that my employer pays for Rev.com. That's where I do my transcribing.

So have you ever used rev.com? I've used cockatoo, which is kind of the same thing. But I'll look into it. I mean, it does a good job. The problem is that the audio I have was just such trash. So now I'm like, yeah, we can like, in 2020, I'm like, Zoom, I don't want to do that. I got to meet this person in person so I can talk about what they're having for lunch. Nowadays, it's just like, yeah, we're doing Zoom.

Don't give a shit. You could live two minutes from me. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I love rev.com. I cannot transcribe my own interviews. I did it back in the day.

It is literally like the worst thing about this job. So it's like even when I have to pay for it myself, I will bite the bullet and pay for it because not having to listen to myself. Ask questions is worth the money. I'll pay the money every time. Yeah. When I was, when I got the job as like a associate writer at Pitchfork and I found out that they have interns who will transcribe my interviews. This was like 2012 when I was doing an interview just about every week.

It felt like I was handed the keys to a corporate jet. Yeah, it's great. And the person who transcribed your interview, they're probably running a wing of Condé Nass at this point. Or like Charlie, or Kamala Harris's, you know, a political campaign. Yeah, it could be that. All right, end of transcription cast. We'll cut it off there.

Let's get to these new albums by Jack White and Childish Gambino, two mainstays of both of our lives for various reasons. Let's talk about Jack White first. I wrote about this record for Uprox this week. And for those who don't know, last Friday at third man record stores in Nashville, Detroit, and London, shoppers there were. slipped a free 12-inch vinyl record that had no song titles, no album cover, no official title, it just had no name stamped on the vinyl packaging. And it turned out that this was a new

Jack White record. Word quickly leaked online by the following day. The album was appearing on YouTube. Someone actually emailed me a Google Drive link of downloadable files. They had ripped the audio from the vinyl record. It's kind of cool because you can actually hear the soft fuzz of the vinyl between songs on the record. So anyway, this album comes out. I remember I heard about this record

and I wasn't really that interested in it the first I heard about it. And I'm saying that as like one of the few critics who has like written a lot about recent Jack White albums. I feel like most critics either don't care about these records or they don't like them. But I've written about Fear of the Dawn. I wrote about boarding house reach.

I didn't write about entering Heaven Alive, which is the most recent record, but that I'm familiar with the album. But even I, one of the few Jack White defenders left standing. I didn't really care about this album. But then someone said it to me and I listened to it, and I was very pleasantly surprised. I know people laugh when you say things like this, but it really is true. Like, this feels like a comeback for Jack White. This is his best album in years.

It's his best album since Blood on the Tracks. That's a joke. You gotta say automatic for the people or rock tongue baby. Well, no, because the big, I feel like the big clichés with Bob Dylan. People would always say that about every new Bob Dylan record that it's this best since blood on the tracks. So, anyway, that was a rock.

But he's actually making great records. Well, yeah, exactly. This was, yeah, this is like kind of pre-love and theft and all that stuff. Okay. Anyway, it's Jack White in a room with his band. It sounds like it was recorded live. It sounds like the songs were like bashed out pretty quickly without a whole lot of sort of calculation, which is really different from his recent records, which have been very convoluted.

You know, like a lot of different things going on. He's like bringing in Q-tip. Yeah. And he's like rapping on songs. He's doing all these sort of wacky things, trying to shake it up. Really kind of felt like he was going through like a midlife crisis musically on his recent records. Like a guy in his 40s who feels like I'm a blues guitarist in like a streaming world.

Like where do I fit? And I think he was trying to negotiate that for a long time. And on this record, he's just doing Jack White stuff. He's like, you know what? No one is writing songs with riffs anymore. like the riff has completely disappeared, at least from like mainstream rock music, but even like metal bands, like they're not writing Enner Sandman anymore. They're writing, you know, songs designed for metal fans, not songs that really cross over

to like a pop audience. This is Jack White's being like, I write riffs, this is what I do, I'm great at it, and I'm just going to write a bunch of cool riffs. I'm going to sound a lot like Led Zeppelin on a lot of songs, and I'm going to let it rip, and it's a really enjoyable record. and I wrote this review of it If you haven't checked it out You can go on YouTube

And just put Jack White no name And you can find the album pretty easily Really recommend you do it Have you heard this album yet? Nah, he's on his Cindy Lee shit apparently No, I've not heard it yet But you've gotten me interested in it Because look

The entire time where you were talking about All these Jack White albums I'm thinking to myself Which was the one that Q-Tip was on Like that's how I differentiate that record from the other. Fear of the dawn. Fear of the dawn is that one, yeah. Gotcha. And so, but I think the point that, uh, you brought up in the piece you wrote about

the white stripes being under or at least underappreciated, if not underrated, I was shocked to find out that elephant was like not on the Apple music list and somewhere in the 400s in a recent Rolling Stone best album of timeless, best album of time list because, I mean, we, we, I know that like Jack White doesn't do himself a lot of favors with his kind of public image. But we have like Meg White was actually an amazing drummer, Twitter threads like every single year. So you figured that would keep elephant, you know, in the good graces of list makers. But are they underappreciated now?

Like every now and again, I'll like revisit white blood cells and elephant. And like, man, this is this is fucking amazing. Yeah. They are. these are, this is like a, the songwriting is fucking good. Like, it's interesting. And I have a similar experience with, um, you know, the Queens of the Stone Age albums that came around around that time, like rated R and songs for the death. Um, like, yeah, we were fucking spoiled, man. Yeah, I, I mean, I think the first, at least four West Stripes records are, like, amazing. And I,

and even like, like, get behind me, Satan and. Oh, I like that one, too, yeah. I think are really good records. Yeah, I mean, I do think the white stripes are underrated at this point. When you talk about those turn of the century rock bands, it feels like the strokes are like the canonized band from that era. Like, if you look at these lists, like, is this it? It's on the Apple 100 list. And like, look, I know that's like, that's not a great metric. It's a pretty flawed list. We've talked about it on the show. But it is a list that was very visible. A lot of people talk about it and it's something that I think like normal people would look at as being like oh this is a list of like classic records and on that rolling stone list from 2022 like elephant came in at

449 so it's a top 500 list so they kind of squeaked in that was a five star album that they gave that album five stars right and like is this it by the strokes it's like kind of I think it's around 100 on that same list so much higher up and look is this it that's a great record too and I love the strokes, but I do feel like in the moment, the white stripes were looked at as like the best band in America. I really think if you polled music critics in 2003, they would have taken the white stripes over the strokes, and it has flipped over time. And the only explanation I have for it is mystique, that the strokes for whatever reason have a mystique that the white stripes don't. And maybe it's just a matter of

reminding people that like this band is amazing. And Jack White, yeah, like, he takes your phone away at shows and like he's building furniture all the time and he can be kind of a scold and all blah, blah, blah. In his prime, at his best, he is a great songwriter, an amazing guitar player. He makes really, like, excellent rock records. And this album, I don't want to be. I don't want to be able to,

want to overrate it too much? I'm not saying it's the second coming of elephant or white blood cells, but it's the closest he's come to reminding people of what he does well in a long time. And it does come back to riffs. No one writes riffs, really, anymore. It's all about like plucking an acoustic guitar, having a synth line, or having a bunch of strings, or whatever the case may be. He's just writing Jimmy Page riffs over and over again, and it sounds great. It was refreshing. It was refreshing, to me actually to listen to this album and and hear him do that like I was excited about that so it's a really fun record good summertime record definitely recommend checking it out um I think with uh I think it just comes down to the strokes having a cooler logo but um you know the bigger question is

would Lee Atwater like these riffs he would I think he would although he might feel like jack white isn't racist enough, even though it's named is Jack White. White is in his name, but he would be upset that he wasn't racist enough. Let's talk about Childish Gambino. He put out a record, I guess that came out last Friday, same day as the Jack White record, called Bando Stone in the New World. And this is supposedly his last album, as Childish Gambino. Childish Gambino and Japan droids going out in the same year with Farewell Records. I'm just going to say, I have not listened to this record, and I'm probably not going to listen to this record. I still want to talk about it, because I think Childish Gambino to me, and I'll just say Donald Glover, because I don't really care about Childish Gambino, but I do like Donald Glover.

And I do think that he's an incredibly charismatic actor, and he's a really talented writer and creator of television shows. And like if there's like a new TV show that he's in or a new movie, I'm like, oh, I like Donald Glover. I want to see him. I have no interest in his music at all. And I've never really had any interest in it. I just don't think he's that good at it personally. To me, the best thing he's ever done as Childish Gambino is the video for This Is America. And it has nothing to do with the song, because I can't even remember the song.

It's just because of the video. And it's because of him. And it goes back to him being like a. really charismatic performer. I like to see him perform. I don't really care about him rapping or making music. I'm trying to figure out, like, when people listen to Chalice Gambino, are they listening to him because they love him as a musician, or is it just sort of like a side effect of his celebrity? Like, I want to go see him play live because I love Donald Glover, and I just want to be in sort of the presence of this famous person. I mean, I know that's true for me with him.

But I do know that there is a generation of people who look at him as being an important musician. I think because the internet, that album in particular, I see that album get referenced a lot by listeners of like a certain sort of generational cohort. But I don't know. I just feel like his music to me is like, it feels like such a side effect of this other career that he has that I think is much more important. Yeah. even to the degree that people in my circle, you know, will hear Redbone and be like, oh, that's a great, great song.

They'll always kind of couch it within. Donald Quatt, he's just so talented in so many things. And the assumption that the talent that he shows as part of Atlanta, like transfers in equal amounts to music and every single movie he makes. And I mean, it's, it's, you're right in that, like, because the internet, I've seen that reference a lot as like, you know, this was the first album I bought off iTunes or that my mom let me buy off iTunes. And, you know, every time there is a kind of retrospective of Childish Gambino comes,

that coming around, like I kind of like grit my teeth through it because, look, I know that the review I wrote was, you know, it's not my best work. I would have changed some things. But I always appreciate how even the super fans of Childish Gampinoff, being of the people who want to describe his import on pop culture will say like yeah he was massively influential to so many teens and yeah that camp review had some problems but yeah that album actually really did suck that bad you know i think that people haven't really moved on that one it's sort of like with kid cuddy like of all the things i've said in my lifetime as a music

writer um for some reason uh yeah kid cuddy and camp those are the two i will always get shit for because the sort of people who grew up, like, reading Complex Magazine, listening to every odd future project, like, those are important records. And, yeah, I reviewed them on the content rather than, like, how they might influence people. But the funny part is, like, John Glover sounds so disinterested in Childish Camp, you know, even when he's, like, in the process of promoting an album. So, but I don't know, maybe since I got NCAA 20, now, you know, I need some material to give me a soundtrack.

Maybe I'll fuck around and play some of this stuff. Apparently, there's one song that sounds like Weezer on there. Oh, my God. I don't know if that makes me want to listen to it or even makes me not want to listen to it even stronger than I did before. I think I'm leaning towards the ladder on that one. But you can tell me that. You slap it on your Virginia victory march here,

and you can let me know whether that sounds any good. All right, well, one thing I wanted to ask you about transitioning away from Gambino and Jack White here, we just talked about two new albums. I want to talk about two old albums with you for a minute. Two albums that are celebrating 10th anniversaries, I guess, this week. The first is Joyce Manor, never hung over again, which you wrote about for the Ringer. You wrote a great piece for them about that. The other one is the self-titled debut by Always.

that is also turning 10 this week. And it's interesting thinking about these records because they're not really similar in any way except one, which is that they're both records that in the moment when they came out in 2014, they got good reviews, but like not ecstatic reviews. I think generally people felt like,

oh, yeah, these are good records, but they weren't albums that people thought of as like, this is the best album of the year, this is an album that is important, to our lives in the moment. They're really records that develop their reputations over time. And now, 10 years later, people look back on them

and they're like, wow, that's maybe my favorite record of that year. And maybe one of my favorite records of all time. And it just made me think of something that Glenn Frye of the Eagles once referred to as song power. And what he meant by that was, in the Eagles, it was all about the songs. It doesn't matter who's singing it. It doesn't matter who wrote it. If the song works, that's the most important thing. And I feel like with music critics, song power is like weirdly undervalued when we assess albums in the moment or songs in the moment. There is such a premium put on cultural relevancy or contemporary relevancy. Is this album commenting on the world as it is right now? Is the production of this record of,

of the moment, or is it seen as like pushing music forward in some way? And records that just have like really great songwriting, they tend to get dismissed in a weird way by like very unimaginative critics as like musical comfort food. And I've already ranted about that phrase and how much I hate it when I see it in a review because it's always used to describe a certain kind of like guitar band that doesn't do anything flashy but just writes really great songs. And in some way that's kind of looked at as like being lesser than some other kind of record that is like taking a big swing in terms of like commenting on politics or on bodies and spaces or whatever the thing may be.

And I really feel like in the moment, yeah, like you can praise these records. But those records often don't age very well. The records that age well that like people like bring into their lives because they listen to them all the time or they want to revisit them. you know, like maybe once or twice a year. It's the song power records. It's the records that have like just songs that you want to play over and over again. Like I just think of like Archie Merry Me from the Always record. That's like a perfect song.

And I know people love that song in 2014. I remember seeing it on song lists and people raved about it. But I don't know. I just feel like the ability to like write a song that you can play over and over again. it's not something that is often recognized in the moment. And maybe it's hard to recognize that in the moment. Maybe you need 10 years of perspective for it. But I just feel like these albums are,

they make a great case for song power type albums. Like, again, like, because they weren't flashy in 2014. But you're not going back to the flashy records, really, from that year. You're going back to these records. So to me, that's what links these two otherwise very different. albums. Yeah, I mean, you got to tell me where I can watch Glenn Fry talking about song power. I'm just like having this visual in my mind. History of Eagles. Yeah. History of Eagles. One of the great documentaries of all time. Yeah, I can picture it completely in

my mind's eye and also maybe having Don Henley in the other side of the room rolling his fucking eyes because, you know, they can't make, or Glenn Frye and Don Henley, they can't stand each other, right? I think they came into sort of like an understanding that we can make a shit ton of money together. So let's just put aside our differences. I think that's what the Eagles were always about more so than the songs. Oh yeah. They were cold-hearted, capitalist pragmatists, you know. So they're not going to let some, you know, fighting over, you know, who gets to do the first line of cocaine type arguments.

They're not going to let that sally a good thing. terms of making a shit ton of money yeah i mean i do think about like how these albums were received contemporarily um in the process of doing my never hungover again peace i interviewed breck gerwitz the guy who um you know found it a bad religion guitarist who founded epithaith records and yeah you better believe he gave me shit for giving that album in a 7.8 in 2014 uh and i give my shelf shit for that all the time I mean, but of course, that was like the album that started the 7.8 is the emo score joke. So, you know, influential very much so in its own way. Yeah, with always like that album, you know, in the moment, I'm like, this is a good album, you know, kind of sort of thing you expect from like polyvinyl records.

And then by 2015, 20% or more of my inbox sounded exactly like weaker versions of always. And I think that came, you know, that explains like why in 2022 Blue Rev was so anticipated. By that point, it was just undeniable that what always did is extremely valuable and extremely difficult to replicate. Whereas never hung over again, it's tougher for me to assess its influence per se. But, God, that record's so fucking good. It's like really hard to hyperboize how good it is. And I think a lot of that has to do with how short it is. is. When I got to know that album in 2014, like the first time I heard, I'm like, oh, this is pretty

good. You know, I was excited about it. And then I would have these hour long commutes back from work on the 405 from like Santa Monica to Glendale. And I would listen to Never Hung Over Again, like three consecutive times. Like, you can do that. It's like 18 minutes long. And it is really hard to make an 18 minute record that's like not like Screamo or like, you know, black metal or whatever. And like have it feel like a journey. Yeah, just the structure and the songwriting and like the way Barry Johnson writes lyrics is so hard to imitate. I don't know how his mind works.

And I think if I had to choose like which one, look, I like never hungover again, more if we're talking emo versus indie pop, you know what's going to win for me. But I think with this as far as like which one has the more important legacy, I think it's tougher to say. I think that always arguably made better records after this one. Joyce Manor, I love Cody, but you know, never hung over against the peak. But yeah, it's just so funny

how like much time during that year, I was like, yeah, man, white lung, they're really fucking changing the game here. And like, those are my own fucking words. So, just kind of goes to show for like all the time we spent trying to like shape the narrative in real time. For the most part, we always get it wrong.

Well, I think both of these records to me when you hear them the first time, it sounds like what they're doing isn't that difficult. You know, because formally, there are precedence for Joyce Manor and for always.

Like, they're not necessarily, like, reinventing the wheel, at least superficially. But once you dig into the records and you live with them for a while and you also hear bands that are maybe trying to do something similar, I mean, you would know better than me, I guess, Joyce Manor's legacy. But I do feel like there are a lot of bands

that love Joyce Manor that are probably trying to pull something from what they love about that band in terms of the songwriting or in terms of how Joyce Manor is able to combine emo and punk with like a power pop and indie rock sensibility.

I mean like I know like when I interviewed Barry Johnson we just talked about guided by voices a lot of the time and I feel like probably in 2014 there weren't like a ton of emo bands referencing guided by voices and like I feel like that happens more now than it was, you know, like 10 years ago. So that feels like a Joyce Manor influence,

perhaps on like future or the bands that came after them. But anyway, like you listen to those records and you feel like, oh yeah, they're just making nice guitar pop and what's complicated about that. But then you hear other people try to do it and they can replicate maybe a certain sound or production choice, but they're not as good at writing songs. Like it just goes back to the songwriting. Like sometimes the songs are what matter, and it doesn't matter the sort of formal experimentation or like how you're

breaking the you know, the sort of like typical way of record is made. Sometimes you can just do a straightforward guitar pop record, but you just do it extremely well, and that matters and it should be rewarded as such. And maybe it just takes

the perspective of time for that to happen. Yeah, I mean, Riffs, songs like we're very much pro these things at indecas yes exactly all let's get to our mailbag segment thank you all for writing in it's always great to hear from our listeners uh if you want to hit us up we're at indicass mailbag at gmail dot com uh ian you want to read this uh email yes so this comes to us from brett from tampa florida 6 4 weighing in at a smooth 235 pounds i'm i'm assuming brett's trying to kind of do a wrestling introduction thing.

Yes. Yeah, when I first read it, I'm like, why is he telling us this? But now I sort of get it. You know, everything is wrestling. So, you know, a smooth 235 pounds. That's right. Yeah, me too. Used to be good at sports.

Thank you. I'm a rough. I'm not going to say how much I weigh, but it's very rough. It's not smooth at all. So good job, Brett. All right. So Brett is 6'4 wing. Canada smooth 235 used to be good at sports haven't played video games since FIFA 2006 and that is oh my God the soundtrack of that.

We're talking helicopter by block party. Daph Punk is playing at my house. Welcome to Jamrock. Lila by Oasis. Oh, that's a good one. You know what? Not to, I don't want a quick just segue here. You know what band I was thinking of the other day?

Wolfmother. Oh, yeah. Yeah, fucking... I hear that song a lot. Whatever that song is called. It sounds like a restaurant, the name of that song. What's it called? Isn't there a song called, like, Dimension?

Like another dimension? Joker and the Thief. Joker and the Thief, that's the one. Okay. Anyway. I'm thinking of Turkey and the Wolf in New Orleans. Best sandwich I've ever had in my life. Yeah, they do have a song called Dimension.

Just looked it up. Okay, so I didn't get that wrong. Anyway, okay, back to Brett. Yeah, back to Brett. Okay, first off, I just had the fanboy on Ian's review of the Los Campesinos record. Thank you. He distilled my visceral thoughts quite perfectly. This is an indelible record, my favorite of the year so far.

Cool. Next letter. I'm just kidding. Anyway, my question, I think the question all indie cast listeners want to, but are afraid to, ask is what is your biggest music disagreement? We love the fact you guys talk each other up and recommend corner and we also know you generally have the same taste but there has to be something where either side won't budge and is ready to throw the dukes up what is it love you guys brett all right

so we actually kept our disagreements to ourselves here so we could surprise ourselves on the podcast so we normally would write down in the outline what the disagreements are uh i don't think I mean, our tastes are like fairly similar, but like when you get into like the weeds of it, it diverges significantly. Like, I like, I like some emo stuff, but if I go deep into it, I get turned off at some point just because there was a moment, and this might have been during the Indycast era, where I got broken in terms of like the emo guy voice. Oh, yeah.

Like, I have, I used to have much more tolerance. for it, but there was one band in particular, and I don't want to say who they are, that broke me. And I'm like, I can't, I can't take this shit anymore. So that kind of limited my appeal there. And like, on your side, I think you appreciate like some sort of like all countryish type stuff. But if you go too deep into it, I think you get turned off like pretty quickly. Am I, am I right in saying that? Yeah, I think that our recommendation corner, I mean, there's, there are obvious overlap bands, you know, like Wild Pink or Young Jesus or things like that.

But a lot of times our recommendation corner is like me recommending some sort of like hardcore or like I think back to C-U space cowboy, which is like a SaaS core record. I'm like I know Steve's not going to listen to this. And then, you know, sometimes you'll like bring up like a, like something deep in the jam band weeds or something that's like way more country. So it's funny because you recommend he mentioned recommendation corner. I feel like that's where our taste diverge most. of all. Like the body of the episode is where we find our agreements and like where people, you know,

recognize like war on drugs, Japan droids. Like, yeah, that's, that's the stuff they get down with. But yeah, exactly. When you get into the specifics, that's where it really starts to break down. But one thing that came to mind, one specific instance where I did feel like legitimately like yelling at you about this because I was like, I think you're like, your take is bothering me that much. This was early on in the show where I was talking about rough and ruddy ways, the Bob Dylan record from 2020, and I was saying it's one of my favorite albums of the year. And you said something like, is it really that good? Because you can't lift weights to this. You can't go to the gym and listen to this. You're using that as like a barometer of quality. And I was like, what are you

talking about? So I think gym music might be an area of contention for. I'm not anti-gym music, but like using that to say a record isn't as good, that was a point of contention. So that's a specific instance I can think of where we had like real beef. How about you? Like what came to mind for you? Well, now that like I have a, 2021 or whenever that record came out, I think it was 2020, you know, that was when like my gym time was as sacred as possible because that was when gyms were sort of kind of. kind of opened up.

Like I had the, God, I remember there was so, there was like a couple of months where like 24 hour fitness had an outdoor thing you could work out at. And I remember very specifically

the albums I was listening to at that time. But yeah, now that I have, EA college football 25, I can, you know, listen to albums that maybe not necessarily in the gym.

But I think you pointed out where our, maybe our differences are most pronounced, which is when I see you post a, list of like Neil Young or like Bob Dylan, it just kind of blows my mind how much information you're able to keep in your brain.

Because I've written lists like that for bright eyes and death tones. And I'm like, this is the fucking hardest thing I've ever done. Like this much writing. I think Neil Young is where we kind of diverge. Or Tom Waits or, you know, classic rock artists where my online takes have kind of calcified. I'm like not willing to budge. You know, because I'll hear something that's like influenced by Neil Young and I'm like, yeah, I don't need to listen to that or, you know, Tom Waits or like Bob Dylan.

Yeah, I think the biggest, I think this gets like the biggest disagreement we have, which is that, you know, to put it bluntly, I don't think music existed before 1993. Right. Yeah, that would be a big one. I'll say for you, you know, you say you marvel at me, like if you really, like a Neil Young. I'm writing about like 100 Neil Young songs. For me, I marvel at you because you're able to like recall like an indie record from like 2017 or, you know, or 2007 or whatever that like no one remembers and you can like name the album and like several songs from it.

So like that is your superpower, I think. You're not, it's not consolidated on specific artists. It's like a certain year or something. Like you can just pull random albums out of the ether. You are remembering some guys, Savant. I think you're definitely, you definitely remember more guys than I do. I can go maybe deeper on certain artists, but you remember like a broad spectrum of guys. I think our best bit, and we probably should bring this one back because it was so much fun, which is when you, I think this is when, like, pitchfork had, you know, made the transition to GQ, where you just, like, named albums that I may or may not have reviewed from the 2010s.

and I had to remember whether or not I did it. Yeah, I think that's a good. I think that's a bit we can get a lot of, we can get a lot out of that one in the future in weeks where we just don't have shit. Yeah, we gotta do that again. You know, because I was just remembering, I wrote about because the internet for Grantland.

So I wrote like a long column about that when that came out. And I remember Reddit people coming after me for that. So that's like a low key version of what you went through with camp. Like not nearly as intense as your camp. backlash, but I had a little bit of a because of the internet backlash back in the day. Yeah, I would say that, like, to their credit, like, childish Gambino fans, or, you know, with the exception of a guest Donald Glover himself, which he might not even be a childish Gambino fan at this point.

Like, they're a lot more reasonable than Kid Cuddy fans. I will tell you that. We've now reached the part of our episode that we call Recommendation Corner where we talk about stuff that we're into. Ian, why don't you go first? All right. So, you know, to go off the last letter. or this is stuff I know, Steve will like. So I'm sorry for disappointing Ben with our convergence of

taste. But yeah, this is like kind of a low-key big day for stuff I like. You know, there's a new Ogbert the nerd album, respire, if you like the heavier slash emo stuff. But I'm going to bring up both the new Ben Serratin and Sinai Vessel records. They kind of operate in similar lanes. Ben's on tiny engines. Sinai Vessel used to be on tiny engines. And they both write a lot of lot about growing up super religious. Like that's what I can interview bands about in 2024. I can interview them about sobriety, about religious trauma, and basketball. I did a piece on Ben for Stereo gum. You can go and read that. But the new record, O'Lora, he describes this insane Italy album. It's a really fascinating story behind it.

But as far as what it sounds like, the first single sounded a lot like Kid Smoke. And the other singles have a kind of like a big tent mid aughts indie rock style to it like you know you might hear some arcade fire you might hear some uh big thief in there and just everything in between just great songwriting riffs solos uh but also some kind of freak folk vocals that um it really meshes well together and sinai vessel like this was like a real deal emo band until like 2017 or so and they're shifting to more of a singer-songwriter project. The name of the record is called I Sing. And it's out on keeled scales,

which is a record, it's a record label that shows up in Steve's recommendation corner a lot. They put out the Good Looks record from this year. It's got like more, if we need to put it in the emo space. I'm thinking like Pedro the Lion and like the lighter side of death cab, but more fulky and reserved. Really great record.

I really hope it gets. the attention it deserves. And also, Caleb from Sinai Vessel wrote the bio for Ben's album. So that's why I pair them together. If you like one, you'll probably like the other, and you should listen to both. So I haven't heard the Sinai Vessel record yet, but I really, really like that Ben Saritan record. So I'm going to double recommend that album. Yeah, the Ghost is born echoes throughout that record are very strong and obviously that's going to appeal to me. So yeah, really good record. Double recommendation for the song. that one. In my recommendation corner, I probably would recommend the new WAND album that's out today.

However, the publicist didn't respond to my emails. So I haven't heard the record yet. So I'm going to give that sort of like a presumptive recommendation because I like that band. And Corey Hansen, he put out a great solo record last year called Western Come, one of my favorite albums of 23. So that's, I'm expecting to really like that album. but I haven't actually heard it yet. So I'm going to also talk about a record called The Fear of Standing Still. It's by a band called American Aquarium, another Wilco nod, I guess, in the name of that band. This band's been around for a while pretty popular in like Alt Country Americana Circles.

And again, here I am talking about Alt Country in Recommendation Corner. But definitely operating like an adjacent Isbell drive-bill drive-bush. truckers type lane. Actually, like the last time I saw American Aquarium, they were opening for drive by truckers, so there you go. But, you know, a band that is definitely, you know, writing about like Southern Identity from like a progressive perspective. This new record was produced by Shooter Jennings, Whalen Sun, and I feel like you can hear his influence on the record by just how rocking this album is. I feel like it rocks harder than like other American Aquarium. albums. There's almost like a gaslight anthem vibe to some of the songs. So like a real kind of like

kind of like anthemic feel to this record. And that definitely appeals to me. I like it when this band kind of goes more like in a rock direction as opposed to like maybe like a folkier type thing. I feel like this side of the band for me personally I respond to most of all. So if you like that kind of stuff, if you like Jason Isbell, drive by truckers, if you like, the shooter Jennings records, especially his more rocking records, you're going to like this album. It's called The Fear of Standing Still. The band is American Aquarium.

So check it out. Yeah, I like the mention of the Gaslight Anthem, because they are touring with Joyce Manor in the next month or so. Oh, that's right. Yeah, a real unification of recommendation corner right there. That's it, man. That's Indycast all the way. I'm going to go see that tour next month.

so I'm excited about that. That about does it for this episode of Indycast. We'll be back with more news reviews and hashing out trends next week. And if you're looking for more music recommendations, sign up for the Indie Mix Tate newsletter. You can go to uprocks.com backslash indie, and I recommend five albums per week, and we'll send it directly to your email box.