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Anyone else a little sick of Charli xcx? I mean, we’re happy for her and all, but we’ve heard enough from the ‘it girl’ of the DNC. We at the Music Beat have had a very different kind of summer: digging up hidden gems, discovering new frontiers and returning to old flames. We’ve listened to everything from Babe Haven to birdsong — anything but that dreaded four-letter b-word.
It’s time to dismantle the brat-ocracy. These are our alternatives.
— Nina Smith, Senior Arts Editor and Amina Cattaui, Music Beat Editor
Country Girl Summer
For those of us who spent our precious three months of vacation sweating it out in the forest instead of the club, anything folk or country was a much more apt summer soundtrack than the high-tech pinging of brat. After a semester crowded in busy, European cobblestones, I couldn’t wait to return to the wide-open meadowland of my summer camp, to the dirt and the tall pines. Driving my beat-up camp car on windy dirt roads up and down the San Bernardino mountains, it only felt right to put on country radio, and — if I was lucky enough to have an aux cord — Zach Bryan.
Released (almost too perfectly) on July 4, Bryan’s The Great American Bar Scene is a true ode to the heartland, complete with a feature from The Boss himself. The album’s lyricism is eloquent and emotional, and Bryan delivers it with gruff feeling. Over simple acoustic guitars and a subtle, sentimental fiddle on my personal favorite track “28,” Brian’s lilting melodies chronicle love, death, god and fishing against the grassy backdrop of an ever-changing America. Do all the songs sound a little bit the same? Sure, but they’re also exactly what I wanted to hear as the sunlit dust came in through the open car window.
Senior Music Editor Nina Smith can be reached at ninsmith@umich.edu.
Sludge Summer
It’s not that I hate the brat thing — I love the idea of people welcoming chaos and imperfection while covering themselves in neon green or tattooing Arial on themselves or whatever. Brat Summer reminds me of the Riot grrrl movement, in a way; it seems like an invitation for women specifically to show a side of their personalities that mainstream culture usually deems unattractive. Brat is a new type of femininity for a modern casual rebel — it just isn’t my femininity.
As much as I appreciate Brat Summer inviting women to show off their capricious, extravagant sides, I prefer my subculture to curate a much angrier environment. It’s part of why Babe Haven’s Nuisance has not released its death grip on my psyche for the last three months. There’s something about vocalist Lillie Della Penna’s confidence when she threatens patriarchal tropes that makes me excited to embrace this aggressive version of femininity. There’s nothing new about a punk band having a political agenda, but Nuisance features a femme vocalist who jokes about things that would make an etiquette teacher’s head melt. The album calls to act violent, obscene and (predictably) like a nuisance, all at a break-neck pace that relentlessly shoves thrash instrumentals in your face. Whatever mutation of nu-metal, femme-punk, and straight-up chaos Babe Haven managed on this album colored my summer and ensured my neighbors hated the volume of my speakers. Nuisance, while not the slime-green emblem of positivity Charli xcx gave to the mainstream, still acted as the femme confidence boost my summer needed.
Daily Arts Writer Mivick Smith can be reached at rmontsmi@umich.edu.
New Detroit Summer
My summer was defined by getting out of the slow scene of Ann Arbor and diving into a scene that never slows: Detroit. While the music of the Motor City goes beyond a single genre, the Detroit DJ scene is one that put my brat summer on the back burner.
Everybody is a DJ nowadays (so it seems in Ann Arbor, at least), so my trips to Detroit offered a breath of fresh air from the prototypical house-playing DJs-in-training of Ann Arbor.
My first not-so-fresh breath of air was in the hazy, dimly lit atmosphere of Trumbullplex, a housing collective in Woodbridge. The scene was chaotic: Jack Marlow coming over the booming speakers, a few vendors selling their fashionably baggy, logo-bearing clothes, the backdrop of the turntables set up with an upside down playthrough of Super Mario Galaxy. It was extremely overstimulating, but I never felt too overwhelmed. I thought to myself, “If nobody got me, Mario’s got me.”
I was embracing the chaos to watch Groove Pill, the dynamic, Detroit-based DJ duo consisting of PrdShogun and cdubwav. They were the third act of the night, which caused issues for them when a cord integral to their set was lost amidst the rowdy crowd and a DJ switch. The group, along with their special guest, Lelo, are the self-proclaimed “New Detroit”: A genre that fuses elements of ghettotech, Detroit techno and rap. Once the show started, it was evident why the city embraced their “New Detroit” title. Hard-hitting bass, fast-paced hi-hats and Lelo’s punchy delivery instantly sent the crowd into a frenzy — just one of many successful summer nights for the hometown heroes.
Daily Arts Writer Nick Holcomb can be reached at nickholc@umich.edu.
Steely Dan Summer
So this past June I succumbed to the brat wave. It sort of swallowed every part of my life until I was left reeling in the sweaty dance floor haze of the album’s “OONTS OONTS OONTS” and speaker cone quakes and dizzying electronics. It got so bad that, to appease the elitist contrarian in me, I am currently trying to dispel my lingering fear of “Von dutch” becoming my “nuuumber ooone” most-played song of 2024 on my Spotify Wrapped by diluting my playlists with random songs I heard on a whim and liked maybe. But in July, my brother and Steely Dan saved my life.
I had known about Steely Dan from the horn riff on “Peg” and the infamous “Reeling In the Sheaves” video clip, but before July, I had always thought they were the quintessential smooth jazz act every elevator in the world has tried to pin down. That is, until I heard their entire discography: I can safely say that their music isn’t like that (except the uber-sanitized, ultra-fine-tuned Gaucho — a record that confirms the Hygiene Hypothesis.
First there was Can’t Buy a Thrill and its gauntlet of early ’70s jazz fusion classics; their cynical optimism rooted itself firmly into my head like a brain-eating amoeba. Then there’s Countdown to Ecstasy — my ruling favorite of theirs — where the songs grew longer and featured more snarky delivery over jazz-rock epics that juxtapose brat so perfectly. Their shorter, singsongy Pretzel Logic kicks off with a four-track run so legendary that the rest of the album, though still great, fails to deliver the same quality. Subsequently came Katy Lied: an album plagued with mixing and mastering mishaps — though they went unnoticed during my listening experience. Katy Lied is currently tied with Countdown to Ecstasy in the S-tier. I typically don’t return to The Royal Scam all that often, and the fan-favorite Aja wore itself out on me after one too many listens.
I’m so glad to have fallen in love with them over a summer, whether I’m at the Indiana Dunes, at a pool sipping cocktails, in Guadalajara, with The Hoops McCann Band, or dying behind the wheel because I learned to work the saxophone and play it just how I feel, or trying to convince my therapist that “Kid Charlemagne” is actually about me. Even Cathy Berberian knows there’s one band she can’t deny, and that’s Steely Dan. Sorry.
Thank you for making it this far. If you haven’t already, join the steelydancirclejerk subreddit. Toodle-oo!
Daily Arts Writer Zachary Taglia can be reached at ztaglia@umich.edu.
Sumbuck Summer
Sumbuck is folky, simple and sweet: my ideal soundtrack to summer. Caamp frontman Taylor Meier provides soft vocals and delicate guitar under his solo project Sumbuck, notable in albums Lucky and Oh Sweet Cafe Racer. These songs from the Midwest, and arguably for the Midwest, helped welcome me to the calm of Northern Michigan.
I devoted the later months of summer to slowing down in my little hometown; I became comfortable doing things for myself and by myself. Meier’s independent work embraces nostalgia; its homesick nature offered solace as I settled in. Whether I was taking on the challenge of swimming in Lake Michigan every day (I only failed twice) or visiting the local farmers market on Thursdays, I played Sumbuck. I listened to “Sugar Song” as I walked my childhood dog down familiar sidewalks, her gray face smiling back at me. Gentle acoustics from “Change is Fine” rang out from the open windows of my car while I drove past tired farm fields. The slightly somber chorus of “Kissing Days (On the Pier)” repeated as sunshine freckled my nose. As I prioritized little acts for the first time in a while, Sumbuck narrated the quiet content of my summer.
Daily Arts Contributor Carly Anderson can be reached at carlyand@umich.edu.
Silent Summer
In April, I got in a van and drove to a place without music. It took over thirteen hours.
This was the location of the New England Literature Program, the infamous writer’s retreat-cum-Transcendentalist social experiment. As part of its anti-technology creed, there was no radio at NELP, no record player. There was only sound.
Loons crying in the mist; wind rustling through foaming beech trees; cicadas whirring, though not enough. This is a dying music, lost to insecticide and fungal rot. The trees, I’m told, are suffering a blight that inflicts the opposite of decimation: only one in ten are left alive. The perimeter of Lake Winnipesaukee is a world in coda, a rest held for so long it begins to sound like silence.
And I adjusted to that silence. The meters of the modern world floated away like sunspots. I wouldn’t check the calendar or clock. I lost the ability to tune a guitar; notes didn’t mean anything to me anymore. I could forget everything. But I still recall — like an overturned stone yielding slugs — the songs of Laura Marling, [quantized and autotuned, fresh as the day I first heard her.
I couldn’t stop hearing her singing. It scared the thoughts away like skittish deer.
As writer Dayten Rose points out for Dirt Magazine, descriptions of heaven usually reference perpetual music. Now it fills the grocery store; now it fills our heads, all the time, because we cannot have silence — because we fear the foreign entity that might fill it. Music is reduced to a way of killing unwanted noise; a sanitizer of the natural world, like RAID or DDT.
So there. I am asking you for silence. A bird is crying outside my house now. Maybe I will go and listen.
Music Beat Editor Amina Cattaui can be reached at aminacat@umich.edu.
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