#13 on the 2024 Bacon Top 31 — Vulfmon

January 19, 2025 by Royal Stuart in Top 31, 2024

It feels good to write a blog. It feels good to write a blog. It feels good to write a, write a blog. Yeah!

This is going to be one hell of a rambling, wandering review, because I’ve unexpectedly fallen into a sprawling world that was previously unknown to me called Vulfmon. Hopefully by the end you (and I) will have been able to make some sense of it all.

Vulfmon’s out-of-left-field 2024 album Dot came to me as a recommendation from my friend Ryan just over a month ago, on December 10. Everything in my life up to that date shall now be known as BV (before Vulfmon) and we are currently living in the AV (after Vulfmon) timeline. Let’s talk about the album without any other context, as I first heard it on that fateful day. This album will catch you off guard. These songs are really, really good. But they also sound of another era, as if this is a movie soundtrack or compilation from the 60s/70s that I am only now hearing, made up of all sorts of acts I recognize but can’t quite place. “The Beatles” are on this album (“Little Thunder”). As are “The Jackson 5.” There’s funk, there’s disco, there’s more than one sax solo (see “Hit the Target (Vulfmix feat. Eddie Barbash)”). And there’s actually a legit Beach Boys cover of “Surfer Girl” that lends to the legitimacy of the other soundalike-but-not-the-real-deal songs.

So there’s the angle that these are songs made to sound like other songs, other eras of songs. And then there’s the humor. The collection of people working with Vulfmon on this album were clearly having a blast. Songs like “It Feels Good to Write a Song” and “Too Hot in L.A. (Vulfmix)” are so over the top silly but yet infinitely catchy, you’ll be humming them to yourself long after you’ve put the album down for the day. This isn’t “Weird” Al parody, it’s more along the lines of Reggie Watts’ “Fuck Shit Stack.” Notice I didn’t even mention “Disco Snails,” (featuring vocals from Zachary Barker) which is the video featured above, and not to be missed. “The simple answer is they’re dancers.”

This is a great album. Vulfmon has figured out the formula that hits the right spot in my brain. But what the hell is going on, how did it get made, why does it exist, and who is this Vulfmon? Vulfmon is the mononym of Jack Stratton, from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and he’s been making music since he picked up two drum sticks when he was a kid. He is one of four founding members of the band Vulfpeck, who formed in Ann Arbor, Michigan when Stratton (keyboards, drums and guitar) started an “imagined German version of the U.S. session musicians of the 1960s” band with his U-M friends Theo Katzman (guitar, drums and vocals), Woody Goss (keyboards), and Joe Dart (bass). Vulfpeck has been making music together since 2011, and have released six studio albums since then.

You may have heard of Vulfpeck’s work, but would have potentially dismissed it as “legend” or “folklore.” Back in 2014, the band came up with a scheme to take advantage of Spotify’s royalty structure to then turn any royalties they received into an admission-free tour. They created an “album” called Sleepify that had ten tracks of literal silence and no actual music on it, and encouraged their listeners to stream the album on repeat while they slept. The album flew under the radar on Spotify, gaining thousands of plays while listeners streamed the album on replay overnight, until Spotify caught on and pulled it down two months later. The ploy exposed a loophole in Spotify’s royalty calculation, and it cost the company a total of $20,755, with which Vulfpeck made good on their free-of-charge tour in September 2014. I know I’ve heard some flavor of this story over the years, and I’m glad to now have a real world reason to get back to it.

Dot is Stratton’s third solo release in three years. “Solo” is a bit of a misnomer, because most if not all of these songs were created with like-minded individuals. The most prevalent collaborator is Jacob Jeffries, who appears on four songs and is now a touring member of Vulfpeck. Jeffries’ sings backing vocals on those songs, except for the Jackson 5-esque song, “Nice To You (Little Yacov Version),” where he takes the lead. But for that song, his voice has been run through an AI filter to sound like young Michael Jackson, to great effect.

Another frequent collaborator on the album is Evangeline Barrosse who appears on three songs: “Got To Be Mine,” “Letting Things Go,” and “Tokyo Night feat. Evangeline.“ They are all fantastic, and her voice fits the vibe perfectly.

In addition to everything above about Vulfmon, Vulfpeck, and the many facets of their music, there’s even more that contributes to the amazingness of this man and this band. Vulfpeck.com is a well-designed, very bare-bones website, currently offering links to buy tickets to the band’s two upcoming shows at Red Rocks and Madison Square Garden (these guys have a major following). The website also has a link to the Vulf Compressor – Stratton’s own digital compression tool for making instruments sound old or sampled, used widely on songs you’ve definitely heard before (such as on HAIM’s 2020 album _Women In Music Pt. III, #19 in 2020). Additionally, there’s a link to the Vulf Conservatory, where Stratton offers a Masterclass in Mixing for $250. And there’s a link to their two fonts, Vulf Mono and Vulf Sans. Yes, I said fonts. Mind-blowing.

I’m sure I could keep digging and producing weirder and more endearing shit, but I think I’ll stop there. I’m hooked. Vulfmon and Vulfpeck, you have my attention (and I’m aware I’m late to the party by a lot of people’s standards, as I watch their 2023 performance on the Bonnaroo main stage). I know there are a lot of links in the post above – if you’ve not been able to click on any of them, I recommend you skip them all and just watch all the videos in one go with the 30-minute “Full Visual Album” of Vulfmon’s Dot. I predict you’ll be as blown away as I have been. I’ll be sure to ping you when the next batch of craziness gets released.

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#8 on the 2019 Bacon Top 31 — Elbow

January 24, 2020 by Royal Stuart

Giants of All Sizes by Elbow

From one former #1 (Bon Iver, just seen at #9) to another, this time the venerable British masters Elbow. Unlike Bon Iver, I did not learn about Elbow until well into their musical careers, picking them up on the heels of their fantastic fourth album, 2008’s The Seldom Seen Kid. Every album they’ve released since then has appeared on the Top 31. Even though this new one, their eighth, is appearing in the lofty slot of #8 in this year’s Top 31, that represents a downward slide from all previous Top 31 appearances: Build a Rocket Boys! was #5 in 2011, The Takeoff and Landing of Everything just missed being #1 in 2014, and they quickly recovered with their #1 album Little Fictions in 2017. An outstanding showing overall.

Giants of All Sizes is a bit different from previous efforts, and that may account for their slip here in 2019. Little Fictions took the #1 spot based on its connection to my personal life that year. It featured songs that felt like they were speaking directly to me. Giants of All Sizes evokes a wide variety of new styles and influences for the band, but it doesn’t have that same feeling of connectedness for me. The first time you hear Elbow, your instinct is to compare them to Peter Gabriel, as lead singer Guy Garvey’s voice is Gabriel’s vocal doppelgänger. On top of that, the band’s production sits squarely in the same neighborhood as Gabriel’s later work (1986’s So and after). Outside of that, Giants sounds a bit like The Beatles at times (check out “”).

The lyrics of this album are decidedly darker than past albums — a purposeful slant, as three key figures in the band’s orbit all died during the production of the album (including Garvey’s father). But that doesn’t diminish the sweeping orchestral arrangements and slow builds, which have become Elbow’s signature over their 23 years of existence. If you’ve not listened to Elbow in the past, pick a spot anywhere and dive in. Giants is a perfectly fine spot to get your first taste, but be sure to move onto any of the last three albums. Elbow is consistently great, something that’s surprisingly hard to say about a lot of artists these days.

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9. i,i by Bon Iver
10. Kiwanuka by Michael Kiwanuka
11. The Destroyer (Parts 1 + 2) by TR/ST
12. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? by Billie Eilish
13. Cheap Queen by King Princess
14. Anima by Thom Yorke
15. Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Parts 1 + 2 by Foals
16. Gallipoli by Beirut
17. My Finest Work Yet by Andrew Bird
18. Four of Arrows by Great Grandpa
19. Designer by Aldous Harding
20. Norman Fucking Rockwell! by Lana Del Rey
21. Our Pathetic Age by DJ Shadow
22. Juice B Crypts by Battles
23. Pony by Orville Peck
24. Hyperspace by Beck
25. Eraserland by Strand of Oaks
26. Dogrel by Fontaines DC
27. You’re the Man by Marvin Gaye
28. Big Wows by Stealing Sheep
29. 1000 gecs by 100 gecs
30. In the Morse Code of Brake Lights by The New Pornographers
31. Radiant Dawn by Operators

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September 14, 2013 by Royal Stuart

This is mind blowing. I consider the medley from Abbey Road to be the single most phenomenal passage of music in all of recorded time. And I say that without hyperbole.

Here we have, through some fancy use of technology, the isolated vocals for the entire passage (except for a lone tambourine and piano that somehow crept in during “Mean Mr. Mustard”)

It’s amazing how much the music makes these famously disjointed parts feel of a family. Stripped down like this, the disparate nature of the song bits is painfully obvious.

Jaw, floor.

/via kotkke.org