ALBUM RECOMMENDATIONS |

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The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

The Folk Implosion

[#] Music for Kids (2023)

Reviewed August 2, 2024

Great in mood, less so in sequencing.

I was well-known for a time among my circles for my undying love for The Folk Implosion's "Natural One". "Natural One" occupies a uniquely dated position in 90s indie rock, a creepy, smoggy, loopy exhibition of nihilistic pride through sexual hedonism, something the movie it was attached to, Kids, explored in far more uncomfortable detail. It's become a little hard to find in recent years, though, with the soundtrack out of print and the song nowhere to be found on streaming (I have a CD, neener neener). Worse yet, that soundtrack neither included the entirety of the band's score nor all the licensed music from the movie. The recent reissue Music for Kids attempts to rectify at least the former situation, but it does so in a bit of a baffling way.

The score for Kids is a collection of mostly instrumental sonic collages fitted with crunchy 90s hip-hop percussion, detuned pianos, cheap analog synths, skronky horns, and samples of obscure German films, howling wolves, and the like. It crawls along, sizzled over the New York City streets, downright nocturnal in mindset--until it awkwardly cuts to a selection of songs from 1997's Dare to Be Surprised. As much as I adore Surprised and get the idea of including them because they do come from a similar sonic standpoint, the sudden focus on vocals and the jumbling of Surprised's excellent pacing (all the included songs have roughly the same tempo and structure) does not do them any justice at all. This is still a worthy disc to own for the score and remixes--the brickwall mastering for archive material is always an assy proposition though--but subtract the Surprised tracks and go listen to them in their proper context, please.