Turn It Up - 7/15/2025

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

Jul 15, 2025

New Public Enemy, revisiting Britney, rewarding Dallas Ugly and a PoS POTUS with what they deserve, and more.

Akil the MC – “Tax Liability” (from Taxes, 2025)

Akil the MC’s Dress Rehearsal is one of my favorite albums of the year so far. It includes “What You Sayin’,” one of my favorite singles this year as is his not-on-the-album “Can the Church Say Amen.” Did you know that in addition to all that, Akil has also released another 34 “singles” in 2025? You read that right: 34, at least. Can’t stop, won’t stop, so now he’s just released a four-cut ep, Taxes. My favorite on that one is called “Tax Liability.” Working with his old group Jurassic 5, as he has on almost-but-not-quite-all this work, Akil drops old-school rhymes about being “broke as a joke.” He “couldn’t pay attention let alone a car note,” is “tryna stay off my mama’s couch,” and ends up namechecking Big Daddy Kane’s “Mr. Welfare.” The track’s funky, sneaky, nagging his ass. Bills, bills, bills and the end of the month’s a longways off. He'll probably still figure a way to drop another album or two by then. –DC

Shinyribs – “Leavin’ Louisiana Blues” (from Leaving Time, 2025)

The first cut I heard off Shinyribs’ new album, Leaving Time, was “Shitty Music.” It’s got a groove, but its refrain really rubbed me wrong: “I don’t wanna hang out with anyone listens to shitty music” is self-congratulatory both to frontman Kevin Russell and to the folks who pay to up show up and sing along with him and is sung seemingly by someone intent upon willfully forgetting what it’s like to be in a family or to have a job or to share a country. The second new Shinyribs cut I heard was “Leaving Louisiana Blues.” Frontman Russell has described it as “about having to leave someplace you love because the people you love want you to” and, encountered on the heels of “Shitty Music,” I found it difficult not to hear the song as describing what happens when those loved ones finally just get sick of your snobby ass. “You can’t fix other people,” Russell sings, his voice as always delightfully splitting the downhome difference between John Hiatt and Levon Helm. A time may come for necessary interventions in relationships, of course, but at least when it comes to telling people you think they have shitty taste, maybe just leave it alone. – DC

Ron Williams – “Maybe Love Will Save the Day” (from Foolproof, 2013)

Saw Leona Williams play a gig here in Kansas City the other night. She’s had an impressive and important career as a country solo artist since the late 1960s, wrote major hits for second husband, Merle Haggard, in the day and, at age 82, still sounded awesome even backed by a local pickup band assembled only hours (per the sound man) ahead of the show. If you ever get a chance to see her, do it—especially if her opening act is, as it was for us, Leona’s son Ron Williams. I’d never heard Ron before but was impressed by his comfortable stage presence and his easy baritone twang. He’s had at least five albums this century, including what I think is his most recent, Foolproof, from a decade or so back. On that one, I especially dig his keening and unexpectedly muscular cover of “Nadine” and his version of a Dave Lindsey song “Maybe Love Will Save the Day.” Charley Pride cut a nice version of the song in 2011, but Williams’ version is better. The piano and twin fiddles arrangement sounds like it could have been a hit for George Strait or Alan Jackson back in the 90s and the sympathetic high harmonies are courtesy his mom. Ron is asking a lover to spend one more night together to maybe save their relationship. He sounds so lonesome doing it, though, that I really don’t like their chances. – DC

Maná – “Vivir Sin Aire (Version Regional)” (from Noches de Cantina, 2025)

Maná, recently nominated for the Rock & Hall of Fame (I voted for them and so did Charles) have cut “Vivir Sin Aire” a couple of times over the years: The first time as a moody pop rock ballad off their second album, ¿Dónde Jugarán los Niños? in 1992, and on their MTV Unplugged album in 1999, they extended the song with solos and chamber strings. This new version is off their last album regional project where the band revisits their catalog in duets with a series of Latine and Spanish stars. The official video version of the band’s collaboration with Mexican singer-songwriter Carin León is longer and slower than the album version. The riveting video leans into the heaviness of the song’s opening lines (in English they translate as, “How much I’d like to be able to live without air / how much I’d like to live without water”) to envision a climate dystopia that’s harrowing and trippy. The sparer album version includes sprightly acoustic guitar lines and an up-tempo and danceable traditional chorus, missing from earlier renditions, that reinforces the dream of love at the heart of the song. Mana’s front person, Fher Olvera, has a comfortable husky voice that’s now a bit worn by age but if anything sounds wiser, warmer, and more soulful. The entire album, I’m guessing, will become one of my favorites of the year. – DC

Public Enemy – “The Hits Just Keep on Comin’” (from Black Sky over the Projects: Apartment 2025, 2025)

Hit me! As Project 2025 darkens the American sky, Public Enemy drops a lifeline of a new album. (Pick your price and download it at Bandcamp.) I’m still digesting it, but for hooks and beats and righteous anger, it is scratching that “Fight the Power” itch. Shaking their heads and their fists, Chuck and Flav embrace their roles as elders throughout. “I’m 6-4, Not in height it’s the age and stage I fight…,” Chuck booms in “Ageism,” for example. “That’s why I’m spitting these old-ass rhymes!” And Flavor Flav seconds the emotion, with gratitude: “Y’all lucky if you get here.” I already Turned Up pre-release cut “March Madness,” but so far, the track I keep playing repeatedly and loud, for its John Lewis sample (“Wake up, America! Wake up!”) and for its impossible not to join title chorus, is “The Hits Just Keep on Comin’.” Because they have this year, haven’t they? And because it’s going to be a long hot summer. PE’s response is to pump up the volume and your resolve: “Whatcha got? You gotta do somethin’!” – DC

Britney Spears – “Radar” (from Blackout, 2007)

Jeff Weiss’ fantastic new book Waiting for Britney Spears not only assesses 2000s celebrity culture in a manner both piercing and deeply generous, but it contains some of the best writing on the music of its title subject that I’ve ever read. For example, here’s Weiss on Spears’ 2007 album Blackout:

“At times, it sounds like Kraftwerk at a candy rave. At others, it sounds like Giorgio Moroder scoring an Ibiza Girls Gone Wild. There is a push and pull between automaton perfection and messy human soul that recalls OK Computer if the computer’s homepage was Pornhub. Blackout glows with a glossy hypermodernity that sounds like the digital age becoming a disruptive reality. This isn’t the 3D glasses and shiny space suits of utopian dreams, but the bleak chill of a post-industrialized algorithmic mind virus. Lost futures only imagined as a collection of pixels.”

This passage in particular sent me back to Blackout, an album to which I never paid sufficient attention. Weiss (like the album’s other champions) is right: It is a strange and compelling record that both captures its moment and somehow transgresses it. “Radar,” a careening sex jam that winks at the emergent culture of digital surveillance, finds Spears bouncing between the thin precision of her higher voice and a fried-out chorus that lends the song the Panopticon creep that it requires. Bloodshy and Avant’s icy production and the glitchy electronic buzzes that burble through the beat are a perfect setting for Spears to address the “disruptive reality” that Weiss notes, both for herself and for a culture just about to crash out from the buzz of the early 2000s. I’m so glad that Weiss made me listen to this album, because I don’t know that I’ll ever let it fall out of rotation again. – CH

Fishbone – “Racist Piece of Shit” (from Stockholm Syndrome, 2025)

I’m glad that Fishbone is still doing their Fishbone shit in 2025, especially when they do it as effectively as on the new Stockholm Syndrome. They’ve lost neither their edge nor their commitment to the punk-funk party, as evidenced by “Racist Piece of Shit,” a song written by co-founder Christopher Dowd, which they released in late 2024. They mean our PoS POTUS, of course, but they’re aiming more specifically for the people who follow him to enact their bigoted fantasies. “You’re not a Proud Boy,” sings Angelo Moore, “you’re just a fuckboy,” following “the mad orange king” with Tiki torches and bad intentions. (Kid Rock catches a well-deserved stray too.) Now that we’re stuck with Trump and his various fuckboys for a while, songs like “Racist Piece of Shit” are just what I need to keep the fire burning. Long live Fishbone – turn this one all the way up. – CH

Willi Carlisle – “Work Is Work” (from Winged Victory, 2025)

The new album from Willi Carlisle is another fine collection of new-era folk music with a deep conscience and a unique writing voice that takes class, place, sexuality, and the natural world seriously without losing the humor or spirit needed to confront an often-nasty present and future. (For more on the album, see NFR friend Steacy Easton’s great review for Bluegrass Situation.) “Work Is Work” is a typical Carlisle magic trick: He calls it “an apocalyptic bluegrass song,” a meditation on a post-climate change place where folks try to build lives among the rich tourists who cared little about the place before it was washed away. Sung to a returning local, “Work Is Work” doesn’t settle for either all-is-lost nihilism or we-can-make-it happy talk. Instead, in this impressionistic vision of a too-near future, Carlisle finds the roots of both struggle and persistence in that which has come before. As with most of his music, it’s layered and nuanced stuff, but – again, as with most of his music – it’s carried forward by a propulsive acoustic groove and a soaring melody. An unforgettable, enigmatic track from an excellent album. – CH

Ian Noe – “Born in the U.S.A.” (single, 2025)

Kentucky’s Ian Noe finds the mournful prayer that was always lurking in the Bruce Springsteen classic. Whereas Springsteen has always foregrounded the anger in the story of the returning Vietnam veteran, both in the rumbling rockabilly of his early demo and the pounding fire of the released version, Noe alters the melody and turns its oft-misunderstood chorus into a lament that loses none of the passion but reframes it as woeful recognition of a country that continues to let him down. (Noe says that he adapted it from, of all things, Rod Stewart’s “Tonight I’m Yours.”) Noe’s been playing this version live for several years, and this release couldn’t have come at a better time, both in terms of 2025’s Bruce Springsteen moment and what’s happening in the country that he remains committed to trying to make good on its promises. – CH

Dallas Ugly – “Out of Sight” (from See Me Now, 2025)

A mea culpa: When I put together my “Best of 2025 so far” for our post last week, I somehow completely blanked on what is one of my very favorites of the year. So, as a make-up, I’ve both updated the best-of post to include them and wanted to shine a light on another of the album’s many highlights. (I’ve already written about “Best Behavior.”) “Out of Sight” features bassist Eli Broxham as he explores the reality of what happens when (as Nick Lowe put it) the bygones won’t go. Over a bubbling electronic drum and the low ache of Libby Weitnauer’s fiddle, Broxham somehow both whispers and screams, and Broxham guitarist Owen Burton harmonize on a climaxing chorus. Like basically all of See Me Now, it hits several of my favorite sounds at once and manages to recombine them in a way I’ve never quite heard before. I damn sure won’t forget this one when it’s time to revisit 2025 at the end of the year. – CH

Turn It Up - 7/15/2025

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

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