Friday Thoughts (September 21st, 2018)

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Another week is in the books. The weather continues to get colder out here on the west coast, but it’s once again reminded me just how much I love this time of the year. Everything feels refreshing and beautiful.

This week’s roundup has my ranking of Blink-182’s discography, some first thoughts on the new EP from William Ryan Key, my usual weekly media diet of music, movies, and TV shows, and a playlist of ten songs I loved this week. The Q&A post can be found here for supporters.

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Elephant Jake – “Kjerstin” (Song Premiere)

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Today we’re excited to bring you New York indie rock band Elephant Jake’s newest single “Kjerstin.” If you’re a fan of bands like Modern Baseball or Nervous Dater, you’ll want to check out this ear worm of a track. Guitarist/vocalist Sal Fratto had this today about the song:

The song’s about the melancholic feelings associated with a troubled relationship. Disagreements, distance, and dissension take a toll on both parties, and both must move forward with a positive mindset and aspirations for the future. I needed a two syllable name for the chorus, and thought of a woman I consider to be another mother to me, Kjerstin. She is the mother of my high school best friends, my mother’s best friend, and the amount of love that she spreads is incomparable. Thank you for everything that you do for me. I realized that the song expresses a sense of distaste and anger, but those are the opposite of what anyone can feel toward Kjerstin. I think that’s funny.

Check it out below.

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Review: Metric – Art of Doubt

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Metric

Metric’s seventh full-length album has a curious title in Art of Doubt, as there is little doubt that this Canadian four-piece band is as confident as they’ve ever been. The first song released on this effort, “Dark Saturday,” gets the brooding tones and dark atmosphere going early on this fantastic record. Lead singer, Emily Haines, shows a ton of composure on this LP, as she swaggers through the first track and “picks her spots” on when to belt it out and when to whisper. Metric have found their late-career masterpiece in Art of Doubt, as it encompasses all of the sounds that the band has tinkered with since their formation in 1998, into an outstanding work of art.

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A Brief Inquiry Into The 1975

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Dan Stubbs, writing for NME:

A Cole Porter-like jazz song sounds like a standard and has the killer lyric “I fight crime online sometimes”; a new wave pop song is outwardly about love but is not so subtly an ode to heroin (“I’ve got a 20-stone monkey on my back”), there’s a fragile, beautiful ballad about guilt, one song employs the kind of plastic piano sound last heard on Glenn Medeiros’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You’; a ‘90s-style alt-rock track, ‘I Always Wanna Die Sometimes’, is a stirringly moving song about depression; a spoken word piece, voiced by Siri, skewers our relationship with the internet in a modern parable. And even in this jumbled up state, it sounds like a masterpiece, a game-changer, a bar-raiser. An absolute stone cold legend masterpiece. It sounds like they’ve done what Matty said all that time ago: they’ve made ‘OK Computer’ for a new generation of kids – ’Snowflake Computer’, if you will.

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Streaming Accounts for 75% of Music Industry Revenue

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The RIAA have released their mid-year revenue report for the music industry. Patricia Hernandez, writing at The Verge, has a good rundown:

Turns out, streaming makes more money than physical CDs, digital downloads, and licensing deals combined.

Streaming in this context includes paid subscriptions to services such as Spotify and Tidal, but also digital radio broadcasts and video streaming services such as VEVO. It’s a broad category that nonetheless has made $3.4 billion dollars in 2018 so far, a total that amounts to 75 percent of overall revenue for the record industry.

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