Noo Outlet 1: (Pilot)
Pronounced "NOH-uh OUT-let" (or "NU OUT-let"—whatever)
Introduction
“Welcome welcome!”, I say to my empty living room full of theoretical newsletter readers. Hope you like chunes, because the central point of this thing is to just put some endorsements of good music out into the world (and maybe receive some in return). This may, as things go, begin to involve other endorsements of other good things—let’s hope so.
Some things to expect for sure:
Album Recommendations
Other things I might go in on:
Brushes of Note
Weekly Playlist
Urbanism/Planning Stuff
Style Feature
Bikes of Berkely Bowl
Trip/Ride Reports
Book Nods
“This is a Cool Word”
Nutrition Tings
Denk Veg Recipes
Tin Foil Beret Waves
(Bay Area) Concert Cal
Alright? Let’s jump in.
Album Recommendations
I love music reviews, and I distinctly remember how much it felt the music world opened up to me around 2006, when I started browsing the incredible resource that was Pitchfork.com. And is! Pitchfork isn’t dead, and the writers they still have are some of the absolute best in the business… but it’s different now, in a way a lot of people aren’t really much into.
Unlike Pitchfork, I’m only going to post albums I personally like and think that other people should check out. They’re not getting critiqued. This isn’t a comprehensive survey of the entire landscape of new music. This is just me backing some strong discs of vibey chunes—get with it! If you’re not into these… stay chuned.
Ducks Ltd. — Harm’s Way (2024)
Tags: {pop} {uk} {indie} {c86} {indie} {jangle pop} {sarah records} {Toronto}
This is going to become pretty clear the more albums I review here, but I have long loved jangle pop. The downcast but high-energy stylings of Ontario’s Ducks Ltd. have been on strong repeat for me here these last couple of years since Carpark reissued *Get Bleak* in 2021, followed (very) shortly afterward by the pretty-much-perfect *Modern Fiction* LP.
The new album feels more fleshed out, with stronger vocal arrangements, faster tempos, and denser textures, while still boasting adorning emotional poignancy with many memorable hooks and a breezy, bookish attitude. Pull on your anorak and give it a spin.
**(RIYL = Recommended if You Like)**
RIYL: Dehd, Television Personalities, The Umbrellas, Orange Juice, The Cure
Rec’d tracks: “On Our Way To the Rave”, “Hollowed Out”, “Train Full of Gasoline”
Label: Carpark
Headache — The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth (2023)
Tags: {electronic} {London}
How to explain this? It’s fitting that Headache started their NTS show with “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)”, the pre-viral-era viral hit spoken word instructional jam, because it was the only reference I had in mind hearing *The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth* the first time. There’s something mildly astonishing about coaxing a deeply human connection out of an AI voice over electronic music, but that’s the power of a proper partnership between the brain and soul, the person and the machine, and apparently the production & mixing of Vegyn and the lyrics written by Francis Hornsby Clark.
Big thankya to Isadora for this recommendation.
RIYL: self-help, self-destruction, horoscopes, Majical Cloudz
Rec’d tracks: “Truisms 4 Dummies”, “The Pavement is My Pillow Talk”, “The Party That Never Ends”
Label: Plz Make It Ruins
Worlds Worst — Worlds Worst (2023)
Tags: {punk} {rock} {emo} {grunge} {salt-lake-city} {shoegaze} {Salt Lake City}
It’s a cool move to give your project a distinctly difficult-to-Google name while you’re still mostly unknown. It’s not necessarily that you never want to be famous, but you sure aren’t optimizing for doing it the easy way. Salt Lake City’s Worlds Worst comes out of the gate here with a very strong case for why they’ll make it big anyway.
This self-titled debut full-length is focused and strong, with no skippers among the 10 solid tracks they play in just a hair under a half hour of run time. They have a great sense of dynamics, balancing hooks and melody with driving rhythms and a bit of a plodding, low-key vocal style I think I can most succinctly relate to slacker rock. Sure, the 90s have *been* back, but there’s still plenty that feels fresh and contemporary to me in these songs.
RIYL: Pardoner, Hotline TNT, Built to Spill, Title Fight, melodic post-hardcore guitar rock things
Rec’d tracks: “Rhino”, “Knockout”, “Gate”
Label: Smoking Room
~Bonus: a pick from my top ten favorite albums from 2023~
Billy Woods & Kenny Segal — Maps (2023)
{hip-hop/rap} {intellectual} {intelligent} {progressive} {underground} {New York}
Maps is my favorite rap album I’ve heard in years. Woods, Kenny Segal, and a cadre of esteemed collaborators come through with a big record here, and they get to it from the first track, laying out many of the motifs to come: a blownout drum machine, a syncopated and dissonant sample, visions of decay, general paranoia, eating a good meal (“skate wing, brown butter, and capers, sprigs of thyme, every pour is a natural wine”), and a dark ending. Clouds have silver linings and silver linings have clouds. Sweetness is bitter, bitterness is sweet.
Tales of home life and tour travels, music business and economic winds, mental toil and quietly beautiful moments, all nourished by consistent current of weed and food. The storytelling here is the centerpiece for me, but even if you don’t listen for the lyrics, the beats and flow are absolute heat from start to finish. There are a million reasons to love this disc, but you gotta say there’s some real clickbait to a music blog nerd like me in seeing Danny Brown and (Future Islands’s) Samuel T. Herring both listed on the features list. Those appearances are good, but well overshadowed for me by cameo verses from underground rap vets Quelle Chris, E L U C I D, and Aesop Rock. It’s a testament to the gravitational pull that woods and Segal have going on this album, being able to pull together all these personalities around a sound and narrative universe that’s so expansive and still cohesive.
RIYL: Earl Sweatshirt (MIKE, Navy Blue, etc.), Alchemist-produced projects
Rec’d tracks: “Soundcheck”, “Soft Landing”, “The Layover”, “Rapper Weed”
Label: Backwoodz Studioz; Fat Possum
Sampler Playlist
As much as I insist each of the albums I endorse in Noo Outlet is good start-to-finish... here's the round-up of my top 3 tracks from each. It's not meant to be a well-crafted and dynamic playlist, just a collection of those songs!
(Bay Area) Concert Cal
In-person performance is treasure. See you there?
SF: Molly Nilsson at the Rickshaw Stop, April 7
Fun fact: Molly Nilsson was my most-listened-to artist of 2023, despite her not releasing a new album in that year. She came on my radar with the release of “1995”, the knockout single from her 2016 album Zenith . It would be a few years after that before I learned that “Hey Moon”, John Maus’s most famous track, was actually a pretty faithful cover of a 2008 Molly original.
She has several stellar records, but I’ll just leave you with the one I’ve probably played through the most of all. I’ll put together a First Time on Molly playlist for the next edition of Noo Outlet.
Molly Nilsson — Twenty Twenty (2018)
What’s the name about?
“noo”, pronounced either 1. kinda like the name “Noah” or 2. like “new” is a prefix for “relating to mind, thought, and perception”. Seems cool. Then we just add “outlet” for obvious and fun reasons.
So much good—on bikes, in art, and in life—lie beyond the signs that aim to tell you there’s nothing more for you past that point. Noo Outlet was originally dreamed up as being about entering the parts of your world, your life, and your mind, that reveal their charms with deeper exploration. But then I just kinda thought the name was fun, and still think so at least a few months later, so I’m going with it in general.
Thanks—til next time!