OPE! Mixtape #26: Wet, wet, wet
Rain day.
Welcome to OPE!, the ranch dressing of music blogs, by Brady Gerber. OPE! is a daily blog, but this weekly newsletter includes more song reviews, my favorite links of the week, and exclusive essays. All typos are intentional.
Well, hello there. How are you?
This week is a little light due to my folks flying out to visit me for most of the week. We all had a lovely time. It also continues to rain in LA, which ironically makes for great writing weather when I have the time.
Anyway, let’s get to the dang thing. Here are this week’s links and songs.
MY FAVORITE LINKS OF THE WEEK
The new Vampire Weekend is wonderful; I reviewed one of the new singles for Pitchfork.
The argument over ABA therapy, the long-standing and divisive autism intervention. (ABA continues to be one of autism’s most touchy subjects among neurodiverse folks like me and the parents of neurodiverse folks. Often, this conversation turns into kids vs. parents. I didn’t cover ABA when I wrote about autism in media for Vulture a few years ago, but I think Jessica Winter did a great job here with her very accessible deep-dive.)
We… discovered a new magnet?
How the internet talks about the Oxford Comma. (Self-righteous nerds dying on hills most people didn’t ask for.)
The best game animation of 2023. (Sharing this video mostly because 1) I love the New Frame Plus channel 2) The first game animation example in this video, The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo, literally made my jaw drop. The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo is available now on Steam.)
THIS WEEK’S MIXTAPE
Asha Jefferies - “Brand New Bitch”
3.5/4
I’m a few weeks late on this Asha Jefferies song but better late than never. This is what boygenius sound like if they weren’t so aggressively mid-tempo. I like how “Brand New Bitch” grows; so much of modern indie rock seems to only start loud and stay loud, or still try to impersonate Billie “Let me whisper over cool beats that make Gen X record label creeps blush” Eillish. Jefferies understands a better sense of dynamics and mixing, though maybe at the expense of clear lyrics (my attention goes straight to the guitars and drums and not the vocals). The music video is great. This makes me miss that first Courtney Barnett album. Self-harmonizing is such an underrated skill.
Vampire Weekend - “Gen-X Cops”
3.5/4
I’m cheating here because I wrote the track review of “Gen-X Cops” for Pitchfork. Check out the link for my initial thoughts.
I really like “Gen-X Cops.” At first, I didn’t know what to think. Was this too much in my lane? Maybe because I’m one of those Vampire Weekend fans who love every album equally for different reasons. I’m at the perfect age where every Vampire Weekend album was the one I needed to hear at the time. Discovering Wes Anderson and “real” art as a Midwest high school freshman who was just getting into Pitchfork and being a snob and pretending that my inner life was richer and more sophisticated than it actually was (Vampire Weekend); reading enough music criticism to better understand the importance of beating the sophomore slump, becoming obsessed with music “narratives,” and that maybe Paul Simon was the most egregious musical thief of them all (Contra); looking upon my impending graduation from college and daydreaming of moving to New York to become a writer and imagining all the romance and romantic pain of being young (Modern Vampires of the City); and then daydreaming about one day leaving New York after all my writing dreams came true and still having to stare into the white-hot void of life while also getting over my hate for Phish (Father of the Bride). I’ll have more to say about Only God Was Above Us when it comes out, but this feels right at home for my current “now living in LA and living all its romance and romantic pain while better appreciating and accepting that I’m now too old to die young” era. It’s a good era.
Beyoncé - “Texas Hold ‘Em”
1/4
Beyoncé’s worst song in years and, as my friend Sam correctly points out, will be the song that finally wins her the Album of the Year Grammy. “Texas Hold ‘Em” feels like seven different songs competing against each other. I’ll now have to listen to this expensive mash potato of Anthropologie vibes in every gym and coffee shop for the rest of 2024. There’s no way the dive bar she’s singing about is not in Tribeca full of B-tier Raya losers. Have yelps ever sounded so boring? The one star is for Rhiannon Giddens. Not necessarily for Giddens’s banjo performance (it’s fine) but because more people will learn about her. Because Beyoncé records now feel like homework. Of course, she’s earned the right to be a musical archivist (she’s from Houston), as Nadine Smith describes in her Pitchfork track review, the same review that compares “Texas Hold ‘Em” to Lumineers car-commercial music. Also like Eli Schoop’s No Bells criticism of Renaissance, “Texas Hold ‘Em” continues Beyoncé’s trend of retelling history with the insight of an Instagram caption. She’s not wrong, but this could have been an email.
The Meteoroids - “Gimme Shimmy”
I haven’t heard a good new surf rock band like this in a while. I especially like the drummer.
And that’s it!
Until next Wednesday, as always.
With love and all the other good things,
-b
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Yesss Brady I live for your roasts