Discologist

With Control, Janet Jackson became a household name, but it wasn't until her 1989 album Rhythm Nation 1814 that she ascended to the status of music legend. 

Buttressed by pop hits and jam-packed with hooks set loose from some future utopia, Nation was a not-so-subtle exploration of racism, sexism, love, and social responsibility that sought to elevate our humanity by any means necessary...

To say Julien Baker wears her heart on her sleeve would be an understatement. On Turn Out The Lights, the Memphis, Tennessee native (now based in Nashville) turns up the feels on an emotional roller coaster of an album that drags the listener down to the bottom and doesn't offer a clear way back from the depths.

Kevin, Eduardo, and Marcus are spending some time with this elegiac powerhouse of an album and considering the truth in "downerism" and if it's OK to feel oh-so-not-OK...

Atlanta's Curtis Harding has been steeped in soul music his entire life. From singing in church with his family in Michigan as a child to being one of Cee Lo Green's star backup singers, Harding is a true veteran of the scene. On his second full length Face Your Fear, he's playing with is self-proclaimed "garage soul" formula again, this time enlisting the help of uber-producer Danger Mouse to drag a dying art form screaming into the future...

With six albums under her belt, Taylor Swift has built a career that has made her one of the biggest pop-stars in the world. So how is it that her latest album, Reputation is such a complete, million unit selling failure?

Kevin and Marcus K. Dowling - both avowed Swift fans - are taking one for the team and attempting to navigate the depths the most narcissistic, cultural appropriating, and, to be clear, worst album of 2017. 

Yea.....

After the surprise success of their thoroughly weird and seismic shift in their sound on their 1992 Grammy-winning LP Out Of Time, Athens, Georgia's R.E.M., promised a loud, raucous follow up. What they delivered instead was a monument to the joys of melancholy, loss, and the never-ending quest for beauty in the world...

Mavis Staples, one of the greatest voices of this generation, or any, is back with a powerful new LP If All I Was Was Black. Continuing in her collaboration with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy in the production chair, the civil-rights icon is going back to her Chicago blues roots and delivering a powerful statement on racism in America in 2017...

Over the course of nine LP's Langhorne Slim (real name Sean Scolnick) has been crafting folk-pop gems that have taken him from small, backroom shows to the stages of the legendary Newport Folk Festival.

On his latest effort, Lost At Last, Vol. 1, having grown weary of the usual recording cycle and the daily pressures of always being connected, the singer/songwriter and his band ".....

In 2017, Country was king, and there was no more significant player than Chris Stapleton. For the follow up to his Grammy-winning 2015 album Traveller, Stapleton teamed up again with producer Dave Cobb - the new proprietor of the historic Studio A in Nashville - to craft a record that was worthy of that room's history. 

The result was a two-part LP that represents the scope of Stapleton's musical identity...

It's likely that we'll look back at 2017 as the year almost everything fell apart, downerism ruled the land, and we came very close to being broken as a people. 

But we didn't break. We made it. And on this final installment of ChunkyGlasses: The Podcast for 2017, we're discussing the music that lifted us up, dropped us down, and sometimes even showed us the way, but never, ever let us down.

Thanks for tuning in all year. We'll see you soon...

It's likely that we'll look back at 2017 as the year almost everything fell apart, downerism ruled the land, and we came very close to being broken as a people. 

But we didn't break. We made it. And on this final installment of ChunkyGlasses: The Podcast for 2017, we're discussing the music that lifted us up, dropped us down, and sometimes even showed us the way, but never, ever let us down.

Thanks for tuning in all year. We'll see you soon...