Hey did you read my Ethel Cain post yesterday? No? Well, then I’ve got bad news for you.
Hello, it’s me
Did you miss me?
Just take this piece
The best of me
But quit living in the past, man!! Quiet those things in your memory holding on for dear life!! Less of the recalling of the sting of all the tears when Ethel was gone!! There is never redemption, any fool can regret yesterday!! We are very much talking, as Quentin Leo Cook was in 1999, about the here and now!!
And few artists are more irrefutably now than Brittney Denise Parks. I’d say that Susan Archives are the sound of the future, but… I would never be that naively optimistic. You think the future is going to sound as exciting and as lifeafirming as this?? Mate, the way things are going we’ll all be working 22 hour days due to new sleep-nullifying technology in order to feed data into a free app that lets you draw funny faces onto your own night terrors and that makes money for precisely four people in the world*. The good news is that now you get to watch one European Super League match for free each month, and that Netflix purchased the concept of ‘shelter’ in 2047, so you actually now get a roof over your head included in your subscription. It’s fucking, grim, bro, I don’t want to damn poor Ms. Archives by association.
(*the descendants of Elon Musk, Peter Tiel, Erika Kirk and – this one’s admittedly a little harder to get your head around – Ivan Toney. Listen, sometimes bets really pay out, OK?)
It’s actually a little flattering to dumb old reality to even call Sudan Archives the sound of now: ain’t nothing else that sounds like this. Brittney Parks is the sound of what music/life could be, she makes the sound of a reality that we should aspire to. This could be us, she says, but you keep playing [with imperialist bullshit and AI slop]. Because as well as being a certified musical genius (she learned violin by ear, the freaking nerd), Parks is also a fiercely intelligent scholar of musical history (she studied ethnomusicology at college, the freaking nerd). The album’s in conceptualised around ‘Gadget Girl’ – some tech augmented superior version of a human – is very fitting, as Parks herself is almost a living parody of a large language model: if you were to feed an AI every musical evolution of the past century or so – especially black music and especially especially 80’s Chicago house and 90’s Detroit techno – then it would absolutely not come up with anything like ‘THE BPM’… but it would at least try. And, erm, probably say the N word on multiple occasions… Because ‘THE BPM’ may be an imitation of excessive technology, but it is actually a product of elite level human invention, that AI is never going to be able to replicate.
OK, so maybe AI will be able to replicate it in the future, but not until like 2028 or something, so we’re good until then.
I absolutely adored Sudan Archives’ previous album ‘Natural Brown Prom Queen‘ in 2022, but… my admiration for it was always 70% brain and 30% heart. I always appreciated what an extraordinarily well produced and cerebral record it was rather than it making my blood pump furiously with impassioned enthusiasm ‘THE BPM’ manages to capture my heart, my spleen and – most importantly – my groin completely, and Parks has produced a career best work that I love with every part of my existence without any caveats.
Yeah, happy enough with this post, don’t think I’ll be striking it al out tomorrow 👍.
2022 #5 (-1 Whaaaaaaaa…? #2025Tax), 2019 #2, 2018 #61
Oh, what’s that, Brittney? Three full length albums now? All on Necessary Evil countdowns? Welcome to the club, kid)
The users only give it 79, because they have fucking lettuce for ears!!!
Necessary Evil 