This is a collection of album "reviews" I wrote from 2022 to 2023, in the order I wrote them. The date listed here is when they were initially published to moonrabbithaven.com, as "Death by 100+ Cuts", but various excerpts have also been re-written for The Tonearm, my dad's independent arts journal. The best versions are all here, and they vary in length and quality. I think there's some good stuff, but you have to do some digging. Maybe skim the album vibe and try something new. Thanks for looking around back here!


Wet Land – Hiroshi Yoshimura (1993)

Damn Hiroshi Yoshimura really chills me the hell out. Wet Land's got super good rainy January vibes, and I listened to this a lot looking out the window in the library at school. It's about that time of year again, so this might be re-entering my rotation soon. I associate a lot of music with specific times of year, now that I think about it... I'll keep that in mind over the course of this list. Hey also, the title track reminds me of The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess a lot, do you hear it? Might be that dark choir sound. “Chill, primordial solitude” vibe


Outer Peace – Toro y Moi (2019)

Outer Peace is, um, my least favorite of Chaz Bear's canon. I don't know about this one guys! Outer Peace has been described by my dad (and this blog's Supreme Leader) as "silly", "goofy", and "not really grabbing me." Maybe he just doesn't get it. I'm willing to accept the Supreme Wizard's judgment as fallible, and I do think the album grew on me. But because I'm not particularly rebellious, I gotta agree it's inconsistent and maybe even... patchy. Which my dad's also been described as. I do like all ten tracks on Outer Peace (its brevity also helps contribute to it feeling underwhelming), but whiplash from its rapid-clip vibe-switches stops a real steady mood from setting in, and the shorter tracks make my ears start to glaze over. I don't know if that's something ears can do, or what it would look like if they could, but "Laws of the Universe" to "Miss Me" is still brutal. And "Baby Drive It Down" is boring. Nine out of ten tracks here are good. At least the production stays squishy, and I dig the ways Chaz changes up his vocal tricks. If Soul Trash gets a pass for being all over the place and MAHAL actually pulls it together, Outer Peace is carried juuust enough by its manic-depressive energy to not be a miss. I guess. My closing Toro y Moi take is that Outer Peace is, uh, pretty good. Cool. Another week in the cabin might have helped. “Caring too much about not caring” vibe


Bar Slut – Crack Sabbath (2004)

I saw a Crack Sabbath show with my dad in February and I still stand by their Milestones cover vs Miles Davis's. The original sorta drags in comparison, I think! Crack Sabbath's only studio outing is a highly Gen X album, and so fun to see in person. “Biker club book club” vibe


Rabbit Songs – Hem (2002)

Maybe it's just cause I got to see my friend's dad play their music as a kid, but Hem is deeply soothing to my rabbit brain. For years, my mom would put on their album Departure and Farewell to get my brother to stop crying. I could be associating their sound with that sweet relief, too. Whatever the explanation, this stuff has special properties. “Brooklyn, nearly winter” vibe


MAHAL – Toro y Moi (2022)

Alright, after much deliberating, my mind's made up. Underneath The Pine is my favorite Toro y Moi joint, not MAHAL. Sure, getting into him right at the start of this album cycle made it more special, it's closer sonically to the Mattson 2 one, and... No, I like Underneath The Pine better. Stop. The reason I'm writing about MAHAL here's because the album turns one year old this week! That's wild. Compared to his previous efforts, MAHAL falls towards the rock end of Chaz Bear's sound continuum, but things aren't played as straight as they are on What For?. If that album's sound is maybe more consistent, for better or worse, MAHAL really experiments, which doesn't always come with the commitment to fleshing things out. "Mississippi," a minute and a half plus Jeepney noise, blooms within its interlude-y scope (and resembles Soul Trash's opening track, which I'll talk about soon). I don't think it needed to be longer, but could it have been? "Postman" calls back to Outer Peace's sometimes uninspired nonchalance (see: "I don't / Give a / F**k"), and it does feel a little demo-y. Bouncing but flat, with an awkward bridge, that bassline feels like the main idea on display. Then take "The Loop": one of my favorites, with a verse dropping off abruptly at "Damn!", followed by wandering bass fill. Mr. Bear said somewhere he writes his lyrics last, and I gotta say they can feel like afterthoughts. However! I think that's part of the vision. Toro y Moi always brings the vibes, and the breezy quality of what he's saying (or not saying) serves a unified vision of chillness. It could be cool to hear something dense in the future, but for now I think Chaz has crafted some damn good car music, which is something I swear he said he was going for with the new album. Somewhere. I can't find it. Source: trust. My favorite album from 2022 vibe!


Vince Staples – Vince Staples (2021)

A good formal introduction to Vince Staples, and I missed it last year. I was familiar through his features, but his features made me really familiar... cause... like his face is smushed onto the album cover... um. This is good commute music, I think. The bus kind of bums me out and I had to take it to school last year, and this was about as long as the ride to school. It's low-key mad at the world, appropriate for a shitty morning. “I gotta get out of here” vibe


Ray Barbee Meets The Mattson 2 (2009)

Here is another album that really chills me out. Lots of Mattson 2 on this blog. I think the best, most cultured way to describe the sound here is... those big band Mario 3D World tracks but for an entire album. I don't know enough about music to know what kind this actually is, other than that it was maybe in The Incredibles, too. Is that just 50s swing? I don't listen to that stuff dude I have no idea. My main take is that if you liked the music from the Mario level where they're going up the cake with the double cherries, but played by a super skilled jazz trio, you might want to give Ray Barbee Meets The Mattson 2 a listen. “Golden Sunday morning” vibe


Soul Trash – Toro y Moi (2019)

More Toro y Moi. Thought I'd dish out some Soul Trash after MAHAL, while he's got the blog's attention. In retrospect, the mixtape's a strange sonic bridge between MAHAL and the very different, less good, Outer Peace. MAHAL was in the works before and after the Outer Peace and Soul Trash log cabin sessions and some of its sound crops up, in interludes and a chilled out closer, amid these otherwise hip hop-y demos. Singles with the then-unreleased "Drip" (Soul Trash) and "Way Too Hot" (MAHAL) were peddled during Toro's Outer Peace tour (you can still buy them here), and I think it's cool to see how that dance-y/disappointing album could've turned out, as well as hints of the project's acoustic side pushing up against the electronic. The B-sides off my least favorite Toro y Moi release almost nail down a better vibe, and if you really dig the Chaz Bear Doesn't Care schtick there's a very bizarre Soul Trash companion video waiting for you, too. Thanks for coming dumpster diving. “Dizzy melting universe” vibe


Mattson 2 Play “A Love Supreme” – The Mattson 2 (2018)

I like this rendition of A Love Supreme a lot, even if it sometimes feels a little like watching the live action remake of a classic Disney movie. Like the Lion King one where the cast was stacked with actors you liked but the original was still gonna be better, obviously, cause it's animated (played by John Coltrane). This is still a really nice cover album though– I feel like we don't get these often for entire recordings. The Mattson 2's sound welcomes Coltrane with open arms. A worthy, smooth tribute, I say. “I need to listen to A Love Supreme but I only have 24 minutes, not 32…” vibe


Vaults of Eternity: Japan – The Mattson 2 (2018)

Vaults Of Eternity: Japan (joining another recent favorite, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez as the first and last installments in their respective prospective album series) is a weird one. If that sentence is confusing you, you're ready for this journey. This release is only available on YouTube (and in my Google Drive HMU for the link), probably because it consists nearly entirely of covers of Japanese pop standards... although the two original compositions here did crop up again on last year's Bohsheekwo. Which you can stream. Being a Mattson 2 fan ain't simple. Between YouTube-only albums buried in the far recesses of their website, separate streaming profiles obscuring each new collaborative project, stealth drops with zero promotion (I only found out Bohsheekwo existed a few months ago because I got deep into the new releases tab on Spotify in the bathtub), and albums sequestered away on untranslated Japanese websites linking to region-blocked Apple Music pages (see Chocolat and Akito Meets The Mattson 2), the deeper you dig, the more there is to find with these guys. Vaults Of Eternity: Japan echoes The Mattson 2 catalog's hidden-gem quality over the course of its wild tracklist. Despite the heavy lifting required to find some of this stuff, the duo's buttery sound is always accessible and makes for a damn good time. Thanks for reading. “Guided tour through a musical alternate reality” vibe


RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART – Vince Staples (2022)

It's more Vince Staples, sounding like Vince Staples (the album), but a little less exciting over the course of 40 minutes. After an intro track I really liked, our guy Vince settles back into more of the same since 2021, expanding upon the same style and themes, for better or worse. For my money, his self-titled work checks RAMONA PARK's boxes faster, and with less fat, so it's what I default to when I want to hear this sound, but at the end of the day if you liked one you'll like the other. Or at the beginning of the day, on the bus, I dunno. I heard he's cooking up something Chappelle's Show-style at Netflix. 60/40 chance it actually happens, 50/50 chance it's good, and pasty white basement-dwelling YouTube video essayists will 100% weigh in. Guess I'm being summoned. “California ghost story” vibe


Painting With John Soundtrack – John Lurie (2022)

This barely, borderline, counts as just one album, for my money, but it was my introduction to John Lurie so I'd like to bring it up. Spanning past soundtrack work to Marvin Pontiac, back to reworked soundtracks under the John Lurie National Orchestra, watching the show or any of his other associated projects is as good a place as any to sample this weird ass jazz. Included here are:
Shit, a line break. Dunno if those're allowed or not. Feels like a dangerous precedent to set, what with these only being a paragraph and all...Right, just this once.
African Swim and Manny & Lo, which I'm still getting around to watching. I can't vouch for their source materials in the way I can Painting With John, but if you're set on hearing these tracks through your TV with my explicit approval, Fishing With John is another good option. Some African Swim and Manny & Lo makes it in.
The Invention Of Animals, sort of a "Best Of John Lurie" record, pulling from original tracks written for Fishing With John. That show's a classic, and the genesis of the off-beat, meditative TV genre as far as I'm concerned. (See also: How To with John Wilson and Chillin Island.) As per usual, John Lurie's soundtrack stands up on its own. The lushest of the lush of his work, The Invention Of Animals makes you feel like you're the subject of your very own nature documentary, and that's cool.
“A John Lurie tour, guided by John Lurie” vibe


Machine Dreams – Little Dragon (2009)

If you liked Gorillaz' Plastic Beach, check this out. I remember hearing somewhere Little Dragon had no idea who Damon Albarn was when he reached out to collaborate on the album, and didn't really care. Damon must have been a fan though because I think Plastic Beach takes a lot of cues from Machine Dreams, especially noting their shared dearth of synthetic, clicky synths. Did I really just use "dearth" right? “'Puter party” vibe


Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers – Kendrick Lamar (2022)

Mr. Morale is maybe the purest Kendrick Lamar concept album yet. The striking new production direction is here, the bars and the songwriting are here, the narrative arc is here. And we've even been treated to another helping of controversy, for flavor. I think what we got this time around was great, and a gratifying send-off to Kendrick's TDE canon. Mr. Morale ties up a lot of these albums' themes nicely, and fits snugly in my record crate next to them. That said, I think this is the last time a project like this, from Kendrick, is gonna work. At least all the way, because for as much growth as Mr. Morale shows, it's also clearly laid out some of the boundaries of the K.Dot schtick. If that makes sense. This album has the provocative, moody, opener, the hard to listen to but narratively crucial closer(s), that one weird ass track that pushes it but ends up being fire... all the ups and downs we've come to expect from his formula. I feel like I'm describing something invisible here, but hopefully you can see it a little. I'm starting to see the trappings of such cinematic works as these, and I hope this new era at pgLang sees something looser, and less harshly defined, than what we're used to from the king. I think we're ready, judging by this album's lack of staying power in the hip-hop conversation. Does Mr. Morale really fall back into a well worn groove, placing Kendrick's most exciting work behind him? I don't know, but I'm down for the ride either way. “A hall of mirrors, abstracting and reinterpreting an artist” vibe

From Henry

My older writing about music...

Song of the week (2021 - 2023)

My favorite music of 2021

Henry's Obligatory Year End Post (2020)