Cruise Ship in the Hudson

10/28/2021

1. Holly Mother - Reymour
   There’s some serious range on display in Reymour’s protean new LP. A ton of rich imaginative lodes being mined. The effect is carnivalesque, a big-tent tumult of ideas, Tilt-a-Whirling wildly between disparate moods and palettes. Holly Mother scans as a kind of debauched nursery rhyme—a kiddie coaster rumbling perilously along its rusted track, taking its dips a little too fast, its chain lift crunching a little too violently as it drags you up a hill that seems taller now than it looked from the ring-toss stand.

2. Caribbean Cruise - Three Bars ft. Nicky Roberts
   A punchy tiki bar cocktail for your ear canals. The kind that comes in a serving bowl with multiple straws so the whole table can catch a buzz; the kind that contains six different types of alcohol whose resultant admixture sparkles inexplicably like Caribbean sapphire; the kind that’s served to you set on fire, so that you’re forced to navigate the crowded bar racked with the certainty that one unfortunate jostle could send the entire fucking place up in rum-drunk flames.

3. Danceland (Come With Me) - The Garrys
   I have unlimited time for The Garry’s nautical wives’ tale, black lagoon take on surf rock. The whole complexion of the genre changes when you replace blue skies for gauzy starlight, sunrays for moonbeams, endless summer for wintry oceanside chill. It’s a pretty straightforward subversion that unlocks an entire universe of narrative and thematic possibilities.

4. Off Shore - Santo & Johnny
   Rounding out this fun little tropical excursion with a tune that keens like a funeral dirge for a sea-swallowed island. Also, some discernable “Christmas in Hawai’i” overtones in this one, which comports with the song’s elegiac quality because most all Christmas music really is just tinseled and twinkle-lit melancholia.

5. Pace - Moses Boyd Remix - Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd
   Moses Boyd recasts Nubya Garcia’s uninhibited sax against a canvas of hard-charging live and electronic percussion, inducing the psychophysiological sensation of being in a quickly escalating argument with someone while driving 95 mph down a crowded highway.

6. Never Was Ah Hoe - DJ Manny
   There’s a lot you can say about the Czar, and there’s hardly any dig you can land on him that he hasn’t already landed with brutalizing fixation on himself. But he never was ah hoe. Never! Was! Ah! Hoe!

7. Sarra - Gary Davenport
   Sarra’s POV narrator is in the extremely unenviable position of having to plead their case to a romantic paramour who, if the narrator’s palpable desperation is any indication, has already kind of checked out of the relationship. A tough, tough spot. Feeling that need to rationalize your emotional panic and make a cogent case to someone whose heart just ain’t in it. Seeing it slip away and having to decide whether or not you’re willing to fully debase yourself by appealing to your lover’s pity, to fully supplicate yourself, to grovel, to mark yourself with a stain of pathetic indignity that time nor deed nor OxiClean will ever wash away. Not where you want to be.

8. 1:2 - Cindy
   Cindy’s pleasantly gentle pop tunes hit the bloodstream like microdosed narcotics. Like they were written and recorded in light stage sleep, all things slightly slower, slightly less resolved than they would be if the brain wasn’t well on its way to REM.

9. Gd Tym - W.H. Lung
   W.H. Lung, on the other hand, attack every one of their tracks with maximalist zeal. With less adept hands on the rudder, it might be dangerous to steer every song away from subtlety and toward the anthemic, but the effervescent Mancs have a steady grip on their instincts for excess.

10. thankyou - Foghornleghornn, 454
    I’m in the tank big time for 454. I love him! He invented pitch shifted vocals! He invented rapping! ThankYOU, 454!

⛺