I lie about my height
2025 Mix 42: Monaleo's thrilling tonal whiplash, Maude Latour's parallel universe pop, plus shocking bodily fluids with less adventurous soundtracks and anesthetizing beauty (complimentary).
Hmph, I would never lie about my height. I’m pretty short and neither hide this nor celebrate it (no kings includes short kings).
I think I’ve gotten all of That Superstar out of my system. For the full sicko experience, I listened to every song for chromatic melody notes and posted about it in a comment—feel free to check my ears and/or math.
I suppose it’s about time to check in on all of those other albums floating around in the stream these days. Well, one anyway—Monaleo’s Who Did the Body.
This is another one that shot up my AOTY list. It’s funny, it’s heartfelt, it has a lot of different ideas and sounds. It has at least one thing that is ethically a minus even though it sounds like a plus: a really great Lizzo verse—sigh, the heel turn might take.
But mostly the album is about Monaleo, whose title “body” might be her own, or her friends’, or her enemies’. Very few bodies make it out unscathed, and despite its frequent humor, small apocalypses loom. She responds with biblical bristling, first against the idea of waiting in line at the Pearly Gates—whose heaven could that be?—and later against the Fall, saying, not unconvincingly, she’d have made a handbag and heels out of the Serpent.
There’s a little gospel, a little modal rap noodling, and two maybe three laugh riots, including what I’m guessing will remain the best rhyme of “will.i.am” with “mammogram.” She rips through one-liners and boasts and brand names and status symbols—Michelin, otoro, Cirque de Soleil, Murakami—until she hits another body.
In “Spare Change” she recounts the morbid fascination of encountering her first corpse, a man who was begging for change, and then imagines the social problem film that will unfold for his daughter in foster care. A few years later she’s seen enough of them to feel like an undertaker: “I see a lot of people. I see elders. I see babies.”
Later on “Dignified” she lets her mind wander down dark spirals of catastrophe, half anxiety dream and half PSA, ticking off friends like she’s introducing characters in the opening scenes of a horror movie: Kayla, TT, Jazz, Tamia. They go to the club, get drunk, pile into the car, and boom—rhymes with “doom.”
The expertly massaged tonal whiplash reminds me of my favorite album of 2017, 21 Savage’s Issa Album. I wrote this about it at the time:
21 Savage sounds shell-shocked most of the time, muttering in a low monotone phrases that occasionally strike a chorus but just as often trail off into something between exhaustion and madness. It hits: “in my bank account…in my bank account…in my bank account…” It misses: “Numb the pain with the money numb the pain with the money numb the pain with the money…”
21 Savage raps slowly, sloppily, not unartfully but certainly not impressively. He sounds like a guy who’s forgotten what it feels like to cry.
Nothing works. There’s not enough passion for anger. There’s not enough confidence for bravado. There’s not enough pride for braggadocio. To say 21 Savage doesn’t give a fuck drastically overrates his capacity to give. 21 Savage just doesn’t. Sometimes it seems like he just can’t.
I don’t think you could find a bigger contrast to the 21 Savage of Issa Album than the Monaleo of Who Did the Body: bright, vibrant, earnest, hilarious. But the whistling-past-the-graveyard feel is there, along with real laughs (21 Savage could never, though he did eventually bring Doja Cat in as a ringer—“ad lib!”) and more heart. Her snake-stomping monologue on “Open the Gates” is followed by a righteous prayer to all the girls she grew up with who now wait in line at whichever gate they ended up, each of them given a brief but affecting character sketch: “she would’ve loved ‘Whim Whamiee.’”
She’s not afraid to go nakedly confessional, either, though she has the sense to stick it at the end. Reflecting on being saddled with the responsibility of the eldest daughter: “‘You got a roof over your head, what more do you need?’ For the longest those words have been following me—so much so as an adult I forgot I had needs.”
That’s the song before a taunting playground chant closer, where she holds her own against Houston idol Bun B—who, he reminds you, is now old enough to have whupped your granddad’s ass. He’s watching out for this shit-talking firecracker young enough to be his daughter, the girl who grew up too fast and saw too much and appreciates the finer things and never passes up a good (or bad) boob joke and spends too much time with ghosts when the music stops.
1. Maude Latour: XOXO
US
Maude Latour, some other universe’s A-pop superstar, is not quite the right sort of nepo baby (dad’s the owner of Dow Jones & Company), but she sells the hell out of the material from a challenging position (budding perma-flop) and has more fun with an ex who makes you go oh than, say, [more popular A-pop superstar redacted]. I like an underdog with a silver spoon.
2. Wafia: Nosebleed
Australia
Iraqi-Syrian Australian singer has a Tyla chorus and post-Pantheress breakbeating, all served under glass, i.e. a windowpane. But it all smudges together just fine.
3. Saramalacara: Señal De Dios
Argentina
Video content warning (emetophobia)
Was a little disappointed that my excitement reading about Latin American up-and-comers in Rolling Stone—one of the few remaining outlets to put time and effort into documenting international scenes in a benevolent tour guide style—didn’t translate much into excitement listening to them, though I appreciated the feature on Cuban reparto. The essays are good, and there’s no accounting for taste, I guess, especially mine. I decided to let through hyperpopper Saramalacara, whose visuals go for shock value the music seems reluctant to rise and/or lower itself to.
4. Leyla Ebrahimi: Nobody Matters but You
US
Well, I suppose I can’t not mention Taylor Swift just this once to describe the bridge on this song, by Iranian-American NYC songwriter Leyla Ebrahimi, that I quite liked — a little ’paney, but with a brisk canter in the rhythm section. It’s weird for me to argue that Taylor Swift has had much more structural than sonic impact on the rest of pop music, but when I hear something that genuinely sounds like her it’s a little surprising.
5. Liz Cooper: New Day
US
I’m a sucker for indie rock by short people who struggle to make their beds when they’re not still in them. No idea why, really.
6. L.E.J: Daft Love
France
I really need a new thesaurus with a few extra entries for “feather-light.” I’d say I should learn French, as they must have more words for this, but I’d hate to invoke the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis even as a bit.
7. Moon Apple: Séance II - Earth Rabbit
Canada
More French-Canadian spreadsheet representation on a technicality (it’s an instrumental). I’ll take it!
8. Juana Molina: Siestas ahí
Argentina
This seems like a quiet way for Juana Molina to release what her Bandcamp says is her first new music in eight years. This seems less like a lead single and more like a bonus track experiment on a CD release in the 90s. (That’s a compliment.)
9. Sara Wakui: Beat Birds
Japan
A continuous waterslide ride of triplets from jazz pianist Sara Wakui. The rest of the band crashes around her without shifting the momentum, and she escapes like a crab scuttling down the shoreline.
10. Michelle Ullestad: 7305
Norway
Soft, minimal (not -ist) pop from Norway. The kick drum feels like it’s warming up for more of a beat to drop, but the percussion is subdued until the very end of the song, like you’re psyching yourself up to get up on stage to dance but decide to wait until the audience has filed off.
11. んoon: Hebitora
Japan
Pretty sure I’ve heard んoon (“hoon”) before [checking the archive—yep, April 2024, the last time I was writing too much about Taylor Swift!]—it’s one of those names I recognize but sounds nothing like what I’m expecting. Thought it would be alt-pop, which isn’t entirely inaccurate, but it’s much more of an omnivorous post-rock jam.
12. Sorry: Today Might Be the Hit
UK
Originally had the (better) 2022 “Key to the City” on here, but decided to swap in a more recent single. This one will do. Band seems too British for me to parse; you could tell me that they have one hit in a Cadbury commercial or that they’ve been nominated for the Mercury Prize eight times and I’d believe you either way.
13. Jiandro, ola.wav: Confess Your Love
US/UK
I imagine this lightly phonk-inflected tune (that just means that they dropped a sack of potatoes directly on the microphone in the beat) has never known a life outside of stems traded back and forth on a Discord server. Despite there likely being approximately a thousand of these sorts of songs put on the internet every five minutes, occasionally one does break through.
14. kitty ray: Cassadaga Fairy Garden
US
Oh, it’s that Kitty (nee Pryde, then just Kitty)! Feel like she’s been Kitty Ray for a while now—she changed her name when she got married in 2016—and that I should have, or maybe did at some point, know this already? I don’t think my memory is getting worse, but I’m definitely more aware of how bad it is. The other day I remarked on hearing a very “me” song for the first time and, upon fact-checking this claim, found that three separate people had emailed me to share this song between 2008 and 2024.
15. Jaydonclover: Bye Bye Bye
UK
Spends most of its time as a swirling, beatless wash of keyboard and guitar, with Jaydonclover multi-tracking little vocal lines peeking in from all corners to obscure what instrument is doing what. When the beat finally hits it just sounds like another layer of art&b collage.
16. NATE: Bądź głośno
Poland
A lot of pretty stuff on this mix, huh. I put it together a few weeks ago and am only now getting around to listening to some of the songs more intently. If you feel like you can’t keep up with these mixes, don’t worry—neither can I. Anyway, this is nice!
17. Jaime Rosso: Frames
UK
UK DJ lands just this side of global village chillout lounge screensaver, probably wouldn’t have made it on the mix without serving an important spackle role, but I’m always happy for someone to get an opportunity to shine as spackle.
18. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Urges
US
19. Domenique Dumont: Visages Visages
Latvia/France
20. Lucy Gooch: Our Relativity
UK
Ending with three recommendations from Tim Finney (technically there are four of his recs on the mix—I just now saw I got Moon Apple from him). I’ve lost track of him a bit in the gradual scattering of music-chat wanderers to various platforms, but I often return to his writing and ideas. He has two playlists of yearly picks worth checking out. Most of this mix came together after I sequenced these three songs and just stacked a bunch of other stuff on top, like narcotic blissout art-pop Jenga.
***
That’s it! Until next time, if you’re just going to pile stuff on top of other stuff, make sure it’s pretty.
—Dave Moore (the other one)
Title from Liz Cooper: New Day