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Sabrina Carpenter's 'Man's Best Friend': Five Takeaways
Music

Sabrina Carpenter ‘Man’s Best Friend’ Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

It’s not easy to be a convincing humorist in pop music. By design, lyrics are always meant to be a little quirky but few pop stars have mastered the art of hamming it up quite like Sabrina Carpenter. On Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter is in break-up mode the only way she could be: sad but still horny and altogether self-aware.

Just a year out from her blockbuster breakthrough Short n’ Sweet, the singer’s seventh album was created with a tight crew who had been integral to her previous release: Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen and John Ryan. Together with Carpenter’s innuendo-laden wit at the helm, the album zeroes in on the updated Seventies pastiche that worked so well on her biggest hits. She’s a little bit ABBA and a lotta bit Dolly: the Pennsylvania-native hits a charming Southern twang over swathes of synths, airy guitar riffs, and funky nü-disco beats. Her new songs are united in their grooviness as Carpenter’s heartbreak and disappointment in her male options takes her on a thoroughly modern tour of what dating, embracing, and then flipping the script on the humiliation ritual that is being a woman who dates men. 

From the opening “Oh, boy” on “Manchild,” Carpenter spends the entire album dishing out tough love for her lovers, unrelenting in listing out her grievances. On “Tears,” she only “gets wet at the thought” of him “being a responsible guy.” On both “My Man on Willpower” and “Nobody’s Son,” she’s exhausted by her lover’s selective control. On the former, they’re together but he’s not as touchy and clingy and feral for her as he used to be. On the latter, they’ve broken up and he hasn’t caved on calling her yet.

Carpenter has few peers these days when it comes to turning some of the most uncomfortable or even painful feelings when you’re crying over an ex into giggle-worthy treats. “Never Getting Laid” stands out. The slow burning, sexy song has her wishing the best for her ex — so long as he stays in his house and never looks or touches another woman again. She drinks the pain away on “Go Go Juice,” running through the numbers on her phone over a two-steppin’ beat that belongs in your local honky tonk.

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The two standouts on the album are when Carpenter is at her flirtiest and her wit is at its quickest. The funky “When Did You Get Hot?” has her encountering a long time acquaintance who she didn’t remember looking so cute. “You were an ugly kid, but you’re a sexy man,” she comments, in a line that can only work with her winking delivery. “House Tour,” a coulda-been Song of the Summer contender if only it had come out a month earlier, is bold enough to have made 1983 Madonna seethe with jealousy. She’s beckoning a new lover to come see her house because she’s “just so proud of [her] design.” On the chorus she assures “I just want you to come inside/But never enter through the back door.

It may have taken Carpenter six albums to finally find the right formula that works for her as a budding pop diva, but now it’s clear there’s no looking back. If Short n’ Sweet solidified her stardom, Man’s Best Friend plates her status in gold.

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The Tragically Hip: Fully Completely Album Review
Music

The Tragically Hip: Fully Completely Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Maybe Downie was just drawing a parallel between the inexperienced Henry Hudson, who piloted the ill-fated flight that went down with Barilko, and the neophyte pilots of the Allied Air Forces. But it’s difficult to ignore the imperfections in this image of elite military pilots, these dashing and supposedly unquestionable heroes. Some of them were just kids. Some of them weren’t heroes at all—at least not yet. They were working it in. And if that image of Canadian history could be complicated so quickly, as a chaser to a story about a vanished hockey player, everything was questionable.

Elsewhere the lyrics were more directly adversarial. “Wheat Kings” was torn straight from the headlines, an acoustic track about David Milgaard, a 17-year-old wrongly convicted of a brutal rape and murder in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Milgaard served 23 years in prison before being released earlier that summer of 1992, and eventually fully exonerated. The song begins in a watercolor image of rural Canada, Downie singing of “sundown in the Paris of the Prairies,” but the veil is quickly pulled back to reveal the nightmare in Milgaard’s mind, “where the walls are lined all yellow, grey and sinister/Hung with pictures of our parents’ prime ministers.” Five of them had served in the time it took Milgaard to be convicted, suffer behind bars, and find freedom.

Most urgent of all was “Looking for a Place to Happen,” which told the bloody and bitter story of European annexation of Native land from two perspectives. First, Downie gave voice to French explorer Jacques Cartier, who callously wanted “To find a place, an ancient race/The kind you’d like to gamble with,” before shifting the focus to an indigenous person fleeing for their life: “I’ll paint a scene, from memory/So I’d know who murdered me.” The Hip were not telling the story of a harmonious country. Everywhere on Fully Completely, there seemed to be injustice and death, a beautiful-seeming facade melting away to reveal something grotesque and disturbing.

Fully Completely exploded upon release in Canada, selling 200,000 copies in its five weeks. In the States, it performed so poorly that MCA pulled their marketing budget for it just a fortnight after its release. “Two weeks before the record comes out, all the record company is saying is, ‘It’s gonna be big boys, look out!’ Then the week after, no one returns our calls,” Sinclair said. “That’s the way it is.”

By July 1993, the band’s own optimism had curdled. In an interview with the Calgary Herald, drummer Gord Sinclair put it down to an attitude south of the border. “I think Americans have this weird thing about Canada,” he said. “They look north and figure it’s just the 52nd state. Being from Canada really does not have much of an impact for them. They just sort of assume that you’re a second-class American or American with a funny accent or French.”

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5 Takeaways From Sabrina Carpenter’s New Album Man’s Best Friend
Music

5 Takeaways From Sabrina Carpenter’s New Album Man’s Best Friend

by jummy84
written by jummy84

After years toiling in the post-Disney-star pop ecosystem, Sabrina Carpenter finally broke through last year with Short n’ Sweet, her sixth album, which rode to pop ubiquity (and strong Grammys recognition) off the back of “Espresso,” “Please Please Please” and “Taste” its three catchy, sharply written megahit singles. Since then, she’s staged a gigantic global arena tour and, somehow, found time to record a follow-up: Man’s Best Friend, which once again finds her working with Jack Antonoff, John Ryan, and the songwriter Amy Allen.

Like its predecessor, Man’s Best Friend positions Carpenter as a kind of TikTok-era Mae West: a sex symbol who’s in on the joke, and who can flick between sweet and savage in milliseconds. This time around, there’s a little more sadness and frustration in the mix—Short n’ Sweet might have made frequent reference to the irresistible nature of Carpenter, but this record pokes some holes in that self-confidence as she sings about men who are disinterested, rude, or just plain annoying. Here are five key takeaways.

Provocation with Purpose

Man’s Best Friend was already a media sensation before it even came out, thanks to its vaguely provocative cover—Carpenter, on all fours, with a man in a suit grabbing her hair—and its title, which some fans assumed was being presented literally and uncritically. In truth, the presentation of the album makes a lot of sense when you listen to it: Many of these songs, like “My Man on Willpower” and “We Almost Broke Up Again,” center on Carpenter’s inability to cut herself off from men who trifle with her emotions or make her feel undervalued. (On her being treated, in other words, like a dog.)

Euro Swag

One of the songs on Sabrina Carpenter’s pre-show playlist is ABBA’s “If It Wasn’t For The Nights,” an underrated and relatively obscure from 1979’s Voulez-Vous, written by Björn Ulvaeus about how his own sense of workaholism was the only thing getting him through his divorce from Agnetha Faltskog. Carpenter’s ABBA standom comes into full bloom on Man’s Best Friend, which draws distinct influence from the lush white European pop of the ’70s and ’80s. There are shades of “I’ve Been Waiting For You” on “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night,” while “Nobody’s Son” plays like a love letter to the Swedish pop industry, somehow nodding to “One of Us,” Ace of Base’s “The Sign” and Jens Lekman’s “The Opposite of Hallelujah” in equal measure.

Then there’s “Goodbye,” the album’s triumphantly acerbic closer, which channels “Voulez-Vous” and the hearty chug of “Take a Chance on Me.” If Carpenter wants to stay in this lane for a while, there’s still plenty of weird ABBA music from which to mine inspiration: personally, I’d love to hear her take on “Visitors”-esque paranoid coldwave.

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Haruomi Hosono: Tropical Dandy Album Review
Music

Haruomi Hosono: Tropical Dandy Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

This displacement of time and style is at the core of Hosono’s music, and is an extension of what appeals to him about exotica. (“It’s fun how it feels phony,” he said in 2020.) But beyond a giddy penchant for experimentation, he repeatedly complicates simple authentic/inauthentic dichotomies and notions of directional influence. “Hurricane Dorothy” is named after John Ford’s 1937 adventure film The Hurricane—about a Polynesian sailor who gets imprisoned—and its lead actress Dorothy Lamour. He sings about the woman’s qualities as simultaneously Caribbean, Arabian, and Slavic, recognizing that false representation is easy to swallow when it stays in the realm of desire. Musically, it’s an updated take on Denny’s own exotica, but it also stands as a continuation of Hosono’s work in Happy End and Caramel Mama (later known as Tin Pan Alley). This was no longer just Hollywood nostalgia, but Japan’s own utopic artificiality.

Hosono wasn’t the only one making music like this in Japan. Makoto Kubota, who appears on the album and inspired its title (he called Hosono the titular phrase), released Hawaii Champroo in 1975. The LP was co-produced by Hosono and maintained a seamless, tonally consistent blend of Hawaiian, American, and Okinawan music. And while Tropical Dandy is purposeful in its genre-blending, it can feel like a novelty with songs like “Peking Duck,” which features a Brazilian rhythm, spurts of pentatonic melodies, and lyrics about Yokohama’s Chinatown and Singin’ in the Rain. Hosono’s music is a little miracle in this way, honoring the fact that ideas—musical and otherwise—are always circulating, mutating, and inevitably rendered as approximations. When the Peking Opera-style singing appears on the otherwise folk-rock song “Kinukaido,” it feels less like a mocking insult—compare it with Mighty Sparrow’s take the year prior—than an exaltation of the gap between the real and fraudulent. This isn’t because Hosono is shamelessly ignorant, but because he knows that music is inherently personal, and that one’s own experiences are a prism for everyone else’s—why try to hide that?

The most gorgeous track on Tropical Dandy thrives on such transparency. The spare, gentle samba rhythm on “Honey Moon” is dotted with tender hints of steel pan. Hosono’s band uses synths and guitars to simulate the instrument’s timbre, but it’s not quite right—and better for it. Getting a mere taste of these bright, chiming sounds leaves a craving for the genuine thing, which always feels within reach. But as he sings about swaying hair and relishing the twilight, the metallic sounds start to crumble. Hosono understands that exotica is all about dangling the impossibly, ostensibly real in front of you, creating a longing for something you’ve never known. He says as much on the gorgeously straightforward “Sanji no Komori Uta,” where he talks about putting on an old record and singing a song—a routine that serves as his lullaby. That’s all music ever is: a gateway to your dreams.

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Luis R Conriquez Breaks Out of Corridos With Album 'Meneo'
Music

Luis R Conriquez Breaks Out of Corridos With Album ‘Meneo’

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Luis R Conriquez has been itching to make a rap and reggaeton album for a long time. Sure, he’s a corridos artist at heart, but he’d always wondered if other genres could work, too. “With everything going on with corridos,” he tells Rolling Stone over Zoom, “it made eve more sense to do this. We were already changing things up.”

In recent months, several corridos stars, including Conriquez, have stepped back from the genre as the spotlight on narco-themed music has grown. A few months ago, Conriquez even had to cut a show short after fans expressed frustration over his decision not to play corridos at the show in Mexico. But now, he’s ready to pivot and roll with the punches in the changing landscape.

On Friday, the Mexican star dropped Meneo, a nine-track record experimenting with reggaeton, EDM-cumbia, and raps sounds. He taps reggaeton heavy hitters like El Alfa and Anuel AA, and also Mexican artists Gabito Ballesteros and Fuerza Regida, to explore new musical territory.

The shift isn’t that far-fetched for Conriquez. He previously joined Tito Double P and Joel De La P on “Dembow Bélico,” a track that pushed all three Mexican singers outside their corrido comfort zones, back in 2023. And it became an instant hit. On Meneo, he includes “De Fresa y Coco,” a reggaeton mexa track he released in 2023 with Los Dareyes de la Sierra and Edgardo Nuñez, which has no traditional Mexican instrumentation. Since its release, the song has become a nightclub staple, racking up more than 155 million streams on Spotify.

“I have people’s acceptance despite being someone who sings corridos,” Conriquez says. “I said, ‘I’m going to try to change my music a little. I’m going to try an album with different styles — whether reggaeton, rap.’”

He’s especially proud to expand into new genres while collaborating with reggaeton heavyweights like Ryan Castro, who will appear on the second part of Meneo, which is set to drop next month. The album cover itself nods to reggaeton’s roots, showing Conriquez looking over a city with the flags of Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia flying high.

“Like the Colombians want to sing corridos, we want to sing reggaeton too. It’s fucking cool to see more Mexicans singing reggaeton. We all gotta unite,” he says. “The album is a two-part puzzle, and I love it.”

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Even as he explores reggaeton and other sounds, Conriquez promises his corrido identity stays intact. On Meneo, even includes a rap track, “Mexicano Soy,” blending trumpet and 808 beats, where he raps about his Mexican roots and reflects on his upbringing.

“Luis R will always be Luis R,” he says. “I hope people will support this new version of me.”

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‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Is 2025's Longest Reigning Album
Music

‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Is 2025’s Longest Reigning Album

by jummy84
written by jummy84

It’s the most popular show of them all on Nexflix, and now KPop Demon Hunters can claim to be most popular album in Australia for 2025.

The soundtrack for KPop Demon Hunters clocks up seven consecutive weeks at the top of the ARIA Albums Chart, for the longest reign by any album for the year.

Over on the ARIA Singles Chart, soundtrack hit “Golden” retains top spot for the fifth straight a row, and is one of KPop Demon Hunters songs in the top 10.

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Earlier this week, Netflix announced the animated action/musical had accumulated more than 236 million views since its June 20 premiere, good enough to beat Red Notice and into first place on the streaming platform’s all-time rankings for English-language films.

Laufey leads the new arrivals on the ARIA Chart, published Friday, Aug. 29, as A Matter of Time clocks up a No. 2 debut, the classical-adjacent artist’s career best in Australia.

Deftones complete the podium with Private Music, their 10th studio album. It’s new at No. 3 for the alternative rock heavyweight’s sixth ARIA Top 20 appearance.

Meanwhile, Royel Otis enjoy a second consecutive top 10, as Hickey, their sophomore collection, opens its account at No. 5. That’s a career best for the Sydney duo of Royel Maddell and Otis Pavlovic, after the No. 10 peak for 2024’s Pratts & Pain, winner of four ARIA Awards, including best rock album and best group.

Hickey houses “Moody,” which last month reached No. 1 on Adult Alternative Airplay chart, their first leader on a Billboard chart. “Moody” bested the No. 2 peak of the indie-rock act’s cover of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor,” which hit No. 2 on Alternative Airplay in July 2024.

Another act with an Australian connection, Stray Kids debut at No. 4 with Karma, for the K-pop boyband’s sixth top 10 appearance in Australia. That tally includes Maxident (No. 4 in 2022), 5-Star (No. 2 in 2023), Rock-Star (No. 2 in 2023), Ate (No. 2 in 2024) and Hop (No. 4 in 2024). Band mate Felix was born and raised in Sydney, while Bang Chan was born in Seoul but also grew up in Sydney.

US country artist Lainey Wilson lassos a new chart peak with Whirlwind, which enters at No. 8 following the release of a deluxe edition. Whirlwind reached No. 19 in August 2024.

Tyler, The Creator’s CHERRY BOMB blows up for a new chart peak of No. 10, eclipsing its best of No. 13 in 2015. Tyler is currently working his way across Australia and New Zealand on the domestic leg of his Chromakopia tour, produced by Frontier Touring, and on Friday opened the flagship GOLF store in Sydney.

Further down the list, British indie rock outfit Wolf Alice snag a No. 14 debut with Clearing, their fourth album, while Bleak Squad, the Melbourne-based “super group” comprising Mick Turner (Dirty Three, Mess Esque), Mick Harvey (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, The Birthday Party), Adalita (Magic Dirt) and Marty Brown (Art of Fighting) are new at No. 40 with Strange Love, their first album.

Finally, the top debut on the ARIA Singles Chart belongs to Doja Cat, whose “Jealous Type” leaps in at No. 28. “Jealous Type” is Doja’s 16th top 50 hit as a solo or featured artist on the ARIA Chart, including “Paint The Town Red,” which logged 10 weeks at No. 1 in 2023.

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Paramore’s Hayley Williams Officially Releases New Album Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party: Listen
Music

Paramore’s Hayley Williams Officially Releases New Album Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party: Listen

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Hayley Williams of Paramore has released a new solo album comprised of the 17 tracks shared earlier this summer and the new bonus song “Parachute.” Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party is out now on streaming services, with physical releases arriving on November 7 via Post Atlantic—Williams’ own label, started after her 20-year contract with Atlantic ended—and distributed by Secretly Distribution. Listen to the new album below.

Since granting the title track with a music video, Williams has also shared a visual for “Glum,” directed by AJ Gibboney and Zac Farro, which you can watch below. Williams and Daniel James wrote, played, and recorded most instruments on Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, with additional help longtime collaborators Brian Robert Jones and Joey Howard. Jim-E Stack also contributed to “True Believer.”

Back in 2020, Williams made her solo debut with the full-length album Petals for Armor. She followed it up with the three-track Petals for Armor: Self-Serenades EP that same year and Flowers for Vases / Descansos in 2021. She described the latter LP as “a prequel, or some sort of detour between parts 1 and 2 of Petals.” Afterward, Paramore wrote and released their fifth studio album as a band, This Is Why, in 2023.

Read the interview “Hayley Williams Breaks Down Every Song on Her Deeply Personal Solo Album, Petals for Armor.”

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Hayley Williams: Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

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Cardi B Jokes That She's Struggling While Asking Fans To Purchase Her Upcoming Album [AUDIO]
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Cardi B Jokes That She’s Struggling While Asking Fans To Purchase Her Upcoming Album [AUDIO]

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Cardi B Jokes That She’s Struggling While Asking Fans To Purchase Her Upcoming Album [AUDIO]

 

Cardi B took to X to poke fun at her recent struggles.

The rapper joked about the negative reactions to her single Imaginary Playerz, being labeled fatphobic, rumors that she’s facing eviction from her mansion, and even allegations of her Lamborghinis getting repossessed. Cardi then urged fans to help by purchasing her upcoming album.

Her new album, Am I The Drama, is set to drop September 19.

Thoughts?


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Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love Album Review
Music

Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

If IDLSIDGO became known as the Earl is sad album, there might be a tendency to label Live Laugh Love the Earl is happy now album, but it’s more complex than that. His excitement for marriage and fatherhood has the all too real fear of What if I fuck it all up? and yet, with the comic timing of a long-winded standup, he gets out of his own head with jokes. On “exhaust,” that comes in the form of taking a break from all of the personal meditations with a play on an old 2 Chainz hook: “Ya love stank bitches that’s your fuckin’ problem.” While on “Crisco,” Earl digs into the childhood anger that’s still affecting him to this day, but just before that, he declares, “Get these white girls out my home like Babyfather.” Dr. Umar would be proud.

The way his flow has become a lot more loose and unpredictable helps him draw out certain emotions, too. In the final few moments of “Static,” the disgusted pause he takes before he says “It didn’t shock me” turns some seemingly ordinary shit talk into a devastatingly funny lecture, in a DOOM kind of way. Speaking of DOOM, Earl still has a splash of the masked villain in his cadence, but mixed in with so many contemporary references done with his own flavor. When he spouts out, “Affogato cream and coffee, wally walker out the bottle drinkin’, I never got on LinkedIn” on “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!,” the sensible gibberish reminds me of California street rap, specifically the first few bars of WhoHeem’s “Dum Hands.” Also, “Live,” where over a Black Noi$e beat that is like haunted Backwoodz vibes meets sputtering StepTeam drums, Earl slurs his words almost as hard as Veeze. And not for no reason, that flow makes the song sound so deeply insular.

It’s a lot. Live Laugh Love is equal parts heart and style, and is as much about Earl the grown man as Earl the hip-hop head. Earl shouts out friends, blots the album with relationship details that maybe only a few other people in the world would fully comprehend, and brings up his emotional bond with his son. These are his touchpoints, so it makes sense that everything else—the word-association marathons, the flowery punchlines—seems like an inconsequential blur. There are a few moments that ground it all even further: the dream he mentions on “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!” that he had years before his son was born, in which the baby was walking on the ceiling; on “Tourmaline,” the best song on the album, when in a romantically woozy rap-sing he goes, “She found me on the streets, she vowin’ to keep my feet grounded for my sweet child” so earnestly. There’s so much musical and personal inspiration colliding at once, you can feel the passion even when you can’t quite crack it all.

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Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love

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