Following Up with Record Club Alumni: Part 10

Every week, we add another artist to the Record Club roster. Many of those artists are still alive, and still making music. Eventually, it will become too unwieldy of a task to keep up with everyone. But that time is not now. Here are three albums released by Record Club alumni this year.

Mentor by Annika Norlin

Released: January 21, 2022

Follow-up to: CORRESPONDENCE, Week 16

My only experience with Annika Norlin was via the Record Club album that featured six utterly charming acoustic folk story-songs from Norlin, so that's where my expectations were set for her follow-up solo album. Well, no, I guess "expectations" is the wrong word. It's not like I was going into Mentor thinking that I was going to get another dozen of the same kind of songs. That was a one-off bit. So call it more of a baseline, I guess. Where was Norlin going to go from here, when she is freed from the constraints of a concept album about letter writing?

The sound has expanded in two ways. The first is the most obvious—there's a lot more instrumentation on Mentor than just her guitar. I like most of it. There's some choirs in the first couple songs, which set the scene, but I'll cast my lot behind "Tonight," which starts with a breakbeat, and ends with a cool combo of luscious strings and bouncy bongos. Maybe it's confirmation bias, but this sounds like something Jens Lekman would do on his solo work. Thumbs up.

The second sonic surprise is the fact that Annika Norlin switches to her native tongue, Swedish, for the whole second half of the album. It sounds counterintuitive—because I was so enthralled with Norlin's way with words on CORRESPONDENCE—but it still works. She's relying on the music to capture the attention of her English-speaking fans. Count me in, especially for songs like "Vita frun," which goes hard and legitimately sounds like a Belle & Sebastian song.

So no, this is not what I expected. I both miss what I heard from Norlin previously and also love this direction she has taken her music when she's out on her own. Is it an improvement? I wouldn't use that word. It's incomparable. I like both sounds just as much. And that's impressive, because that means Annika Norlin can do it all.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5 (no change from previous review)

Vestli by Spielbergs

Released: August 19, 2022

Follow-up to: This Is Not the End, Week 4

I think there is value in someone like Annika Norlin being able to do many different sounds and do all of them pretty well. I think there is also value is a band like Spielbergs doing one thing and doing that one thing perfectly. Their debut album, This Is Not the End, was a barrage of guitar bangers, a sort of spiritual sibling to Japandroids, and I loved it. There is more of that on Vestli.

In the tenth-anniversary piece for Japandroids' Celebration Rock, Ian Cohen defined the term "dudes rock" as "non-toxic masculinity" with a "constant chorus of whoas, yeahs, high-fives, and bear hugs." That's Spielbergs too. When Cohen also claimed that he hasn't seen many bands to be influenced by Japandroids, he missed a pretty clear example of one. This is it.

There was room for improvement on This Is Not the End. I didn't love the post-rock instrumentals that littered the album. Good news, all that has mostly been eschewed on Vestli. There's still one instrumental, "Goodbye," but it works pretty well in context. Because there's also a song called "There Is No Way Out" that is fucking wild, like wilder and harder than anything Spielbergs have done before, and so "Goodbye" functions as a pretty nice breather after that. So really, that's two improvements—the loud is louder, and the quiet is minimized.

And the fact that there wasn't really much to improve in the first place, and yet Spielbergs went ahead and did it anyway, means that Vestli is one special album.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5 (+0.5 from previous review)

Surrender by Maggie Rogers

Released: July 29, 2022

Follow-up to: Heard It in a Past Life, Week 1

Way back in February 2019, which seems like several lifetimes ago at this point, I asked whether Maggie Rogers would ever be able to reach her full potential. The tools seemed to be there, but there was also a tendency on her part to kind of fall into the same patterns that many of her peers were doing. Was Maggie Rogers going to do something new with pop music? She hinted that she could in quirky songs like "Alaska." But other songs felt like they were written by committee.

So over three years later, we finally have a follow-up album, and it's... probably even less creative than the debut. There are some hooks, some catchy choruses, some songs that push the boundaries slightly, there are other songs that exist to fill out the album. In other words, it's a pop album in 2022. This doesn't mean that I hate it. I like most of it. But this also doesn't mean that I'm necessarily excited about it, especially due to the fact that Rogers seemed like the type of pop artist that could put something revolutionary out there if she wanted to.

I cannot deny that Maggie Rogers is a talent. Listen to "Anywhere You Go" on this album. It fucking goes hard. Listen to "Shatter." Goddamn. That is a legitimately memorable song. Might even show up in an end-of-year list. But it's a good song because Maggie Rogers goes nuts on it, and that's good. It's not a good song because no one else could've sang it. Literally any other popular pop star could've done the same song. I'm glad Maggie Rogers did a great job with it, but no matter how much she pushes the song into greatness, she's still not standing out.

Eh, whatever. It's a crowded field. And I'll probably always have a bit of a soft spot for Maggie Rogers, seeing as how she was the very first Record Club artist covered in this now 190-week-long endeavor.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5 (no change from previous review)

NEXT TIME: Cheekface, the Beths, and Erasure, maybe!!!