The 2022 Album Challenge: Week 1
I'm trying to develop some sustainable music listening habits. Enter the 2022 Album Challenge.
(If you don’t care about the backstory/details of this challenge and just want to read my Week 1 album reviews, scroll to the headline “The 2022 Album Challenge: Week 1”)
I really enjoy listening to music and writing about it, but I’m terrible at listening to music and even fucking worse at writing about it.
For the past few years, I’ve mostly stuck to only following new releases by the same relatively small handful of artists between January and November. This has usually only been supplemented by album or two outside of this bubble per year that get enough buzz that I give them a listen to see what everyone is talking about.
Then December comes, and I want to make a bespoke “Top X Albums of (Year)” list. Having listened to only a handful of new albums throughout the year, I quickly realize that my list will be quite short unless I listen to more music. Cue a month of trying to listen to as many new albums as possible and trying to create a list of my favourites. I usually end up getting burnt out and give up on the idea of publishing a list.
As I’ve been repeating this process over the last month, 1 I started thinking about how I could establish sustainable music listening and reviewing habits, ideally at the same time. I’ve long since realized that setting wide-eyed lofty goals is a really quick way to set myself up for failure, so I wanted to set some very achievable goals.
Enter the 2022 Album Challenge.
The point of the challenge is to listen to three albums every week and write a review of any length for each album. The reviews will be published every Sunday (or potentially Monday, this IS me we're talking about!) and will feature a new release, a new-to-me album, and a re-visitation.
The “new releases” category will be pretty self-explanatory: reviews of albums released within the last week. I’m hoping that reviewing one new release per week will help me get better at following new music!
The “new-to-me” category will feature reviews of albums that aren’t new releases, but that I’ve never heard in full before. Any album that I haven’t heard in full is allowed under this category with two limitations:
Any album that’s a new release that week CANNOT be reviewed under this category
I can listen to a maximum of two albums released in the same year during this challenge (e.g. Since my new-to-me pick this week was released in 2015, I can only review one other new-to-me 2015 album for the remainder of the challenge.)
The “new-to-me” review category is my way of addressing my longstanding problem of only discovering new artists via my annual December binge of albums. I also plan on using this category to explore genres that I’m less familiar with, such as hip-hop and country.
The “re-visitations” category will feature reviews of albums that I have heard in full, but haven’t listened to for at least five years. ANY album that I have listened to in full but haven’t heard since at least 2017 is eligible for a re-visitation, regardless of my original opinion of the album. Does a deeply influential classic from my high school years hold up? Was that album I hated in my undergrad really THAT bad? We’re going to find out! Why? Because I think it will be fun!
I should mention that my reviews will be as short or as long as I feel they should be. Sometimes, a review might just be a sentence or two. Sometimes, it might be a whole-ass essay. The point of this challenge is to get me listening to and writing about music on a regular basis, whatever that ends up looking like.
My reviews won’t have any alphabetical/numerical scores attached to them. I personally think that the actual points that critics make in their reviews of albums are often overshadowed by the letter/numerical score they give the album. (What do you hear about more: the scores Pitchfork/Fantano/whoever give the albums they review or the actual content of said reviews?) I also strongly believe that music is deeply subjective and that reducing our experiences and interactions with a given piece of music to a simple number or letter grade often does a great disservice to both the music itself and our relationships with it.
(Note: This isn’t a critique of any music critics/fans who do give scores to the music they review. How we interact with music is very personal, and if assigning scores to albums is an important part of your music listening experience, that’s cool! I’m just personally not a fan of them, which is why I’m not doing them for this challenge.)
Okay, I think that’s it! Without further ado…
The 2022 Album Challenge: Week 1
New Release: The Weeknd - Dawn FM
This week was very light on new releases, and I originally thought I might have to review a late 2021 release. Thankfully, The Weeknd came through for me by dropping his new album on Friday, four days after announcing it.
In my opinion, Dawn FM is by far the best album of The Weeknd’s career. Abel Tesfaye, along with a stacked line-up of co-producers including Oneohtrix Point Never, Swedish House Mafia, and Max Martin expertly blend dark, 80s-inspired synthpop with disco and R&B to create an album packed with infectious hooks.
The framing of the album is being stuck in a traffic-jam-like purgatory with only a radio station, 103.5 Dawn FM to keep you company. Radio segments (narrated by Jim Carrey) are interspersed between songs featuring The Weeknd’s trademark themes of existential horror and mournful hedonism. I think the concept is a really interesting one, and it works well at points, particularly in the latter half of the album (eg. “Every Angel is Terrifying” and especially the final track “Phantom Regret by Jim”). However, the segments often threw off the momentum of the album for me. I will give the segments points for capturing the specific energy of listening to the radio while stuck in traffic incredibly well, though!
I also really appreciate that Dawn FM is an actual album. A lot of Big Releases™ these days are just bloated collections of songs thrown on Spotify with no attention paid to things like sequencing or rewarding listeners for listening the album in order. Dawn FM, was obviously created to be experienced as an album. We love to see it!
Even if the overarching concept is sometimes ham-fisted or overdone, Dawn FM is still a massive accomplishment for The Weeknd.
Favourite Songs: “Gasoline”; “How Do I Make You Love Me?”; “Take My Breath”; “Best Friends”
New-to-Me: Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
Yes, this album was indeed new-to-me. Yes, I am deeply ashamed to admit this.
For most people reading this, this album needs no introduction: To Pimp a Butterfly is a modern hip-hop classic that is widely regarded as one of the best albums of the 2010s (if not THE best album of the decade). It also cemented Kendrick Lamar’s status as one of the best rappers alive.
…and I had never listened to it until a few days ago. I like I said, this is a source of deep shame for me.
You don’t need me to tell you that this album is absolutely stellar. People who know far more than I do about both hip-hop and Black resilience have been extensively discussing the impact of this album on hip-hop (and Black music more broadly) and the broader culture since To Pimp a Butterfly’s release almost seven years ago. There is nothing I can say about To Pimp a Butterfly that other people haven’t already said better than I ever could.
One thing I will say: Until I listened to this album, I had never heard music that captured the experience of having uncontrollable, depression-fueled spiraling thoughts as vividly and viscerally as “u” does. It makes the song incredibly hard to listen to, but it’s also a testament to how immensely talented Kendrick Lamar truly is.
Favourite Songs: “King Kunta”; “These Walls”; “u”; “Alright”; and “How Much A Dollar Cost”. Every song on this album is excellent, though!
Re-visitation: The Cure - Disintegration (1989)
While Disintegration DOES technically qualify for a re-visitation under the challenge rules, I still feel like I’m cheating here. You see, Disintegration is one of my favourite albums of all time, and has been since I was in high school. Even if I haven’t listened to it in full for a while, I still know it inside and out. But since it DOES indeed qualify for a re-visitation, I’m giving it one! My challenge, my decision, baby!
Because Disintegration is the magnum opus of arguably the most well-known goth rock band in history, the album has a reputation for being incredibly dark. And yes, there is plenty of darkness to be found on Disintegration and it is indeed an excellent brooding soundtrack. (I speak from experience on that!) However, I prefer to describe Disintegration as “life-affirming” rather than as uniformly dark. The album masterfully explores both the dark aspects of life like sadness and anger as well as the lighter aspects, particularly love. (“Pictures of You” and “Lovesong” were both written for/about Robert Smith’s wife, who he is still married to!) Whatever emotion you happen to be feeling, the opening of “Plainsong” will make it feel massive and all-consuming. (If you’re Teenage Me, it makes staring wistfully out your bedroom window in small-town Ontario feel deeply Meaningful and Important.)
That’s what I find so compelling about Disintegration: there is so much emotion on the album, and it’s all dialed up to the max. The music and Smith’s vocals only add to the bombast, and the production is gorgeous. Disintegration also masterfully combines the darkness of much The Cure’s early output with the more accessible and pop-oriented sensibilities of albums like The Head on the Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.
TL;DR: Yes, Disintegration does indeed hold up, and remains one of my favourite albums ever.
Favourite Songs: LITERALLY ALL OF THEM. This is one of my favourite albums ever, after all! If I absolutely must pick favourites: “Plainsong”; “Lullaby”; “Fascination Street”; “Prayers for Rain”; and “Disintegration”
If you have suggestions for albums that I should listen to for this challenge, particularly upcoming new releases or suggestions for new-to-me albums to check out, please let me know! I’m particularly interested in reviewing albums by artists from outside the US/UK/Canada/western Europe.
I’m going to publish my 2021 albums list…soon…
very cool idea! I should probably do this, but I am also terrible at listening to new music. Getting into spotify kinda helped with that a little bit, but after going on a spotify bender for a few weeks, I have barely listened to anything for the last week (mainly been busy, not as many tasks that make sense to passively listen to music during). But I have discovered a new artist who is decidedly not my usual style and I feel compelled to write about her music from that standpoint. You may have inspired me in part. When I get a chance I'll see about writing a draft.