SONG.REVIEWSReview major chart performers from the previous week. Not necessarily praise them — ask whether the popularity is deserved.
Negative reviews, disappointments, overrated songs, disastrous experiments, irritating trends.
Weird music, novelty tracks, AI music, bizarre production, strange genre combinations, internet phenomena, emerging edge cases.
Historical retrospective. One short review per major genre, deliberately jumping through different decades and eras.
The week's substantial centerpiece: one song gets the full treatment rather than a capsule review.
Independent/self-released/small-label artists and very small acts that normally don't receive significant music-press coverage.
Christian, gospel, worship, hymns, sacred classical, spirituals, and potentially other religious musical traditions.
'His Eye Is on the Sparrow' covered across nearly sixty years by Ethel Waters, Lauryn Hill and Tanya Blount, and Whitney Houston, plus three new songs that each hand a grief or a testimony to someone you wouldn't expect to be carrying it.
The Lemoine Point is the debut LP from Blind Yeo, a lockdown-born Cornish collective who record wherever they can find room -- out now on the tiny Geneva label Bongo Joe Records, and drawing real comparisons to Stereolab and Gong from critics who found it before most of the industry did.
Sam Fender wrote 'Rein Me In' as a solo album track. It only became a duet because Olivia Dean joined him on stage and the crowd wouldn't let it go back to being anything else -- and it went on to break a UK chart record that had survived since 1953.
From a 1946 bluegrass waltz to a 1992 Tejano standard, this week's six-genre, six-decade run keeps turning up the same twist: the songwriter, the session player, or the credit line wasn't who the record made famous.
Thorn Wych carves her own instruments out of tree branches in her Lancashire backyard and records them alone at home -- and Aesthesis, freshly repressed and back in Bandcamp Daily's Essential Releases, sounds so deliberately ancient that the only thing that gives it away as a 2025 record is the effects pedal.
Suno ran an ad of Mary J. Blige seemingly endorsing its AI music platform, then admitted she never approved it -- days after a federal lawsuit accused the same company of encoding artists' identities into its model without consent. Neither is a one-off.
Ella Langley's 'Choosin' Texas' logs a 20th week at No. 1, moving past a tie into sole possession of the longest non-holiday reign in Hot 100 history -- while the rest of the top 10 is the same chart this column already reviewed, with only Dracula and I Can't Love You Anymore swapping two spots.
'It Is Well with My Soul' covered three ways across nearly sixty years, plus three new religious songs each carrying real, documented weight behind the writing.
Love Aggregates is Asher White's second Joyful Noise Recordings album of 2026 -- a breakup record that moves from threadbare folk to horn-charted power-pop to string writing that owes more to contemporary classical music than to the singer-songwriter tradition.
A 30th-anniversary reissue of Ben Folds Five's self-titled debut pairs the album everyone knows with Shelved First Attempt, a scrapped early session Ben Folds found on his own forgotten DATs -- and 'Underground' is the one song that survives both takes.
Six genres, six decades, one shared trait: every record here hits an even 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, or 80 years old in 2026.
Engelbert Humperdinck's Faithfully turns KISS, Journey, the Beatles, Aerosmith, and Ozzy Osbourne into orchestral supper-club numbers -- with several of the original songwriters and players guesting on their own material.
$TARFACE isn't terrible because Tyga used AI -- it's terrible because the record itself, by every account including some sympathetic ones, doesn't hold up, and he told everyone why before the reviews even ran.
Ella Langley's 'Choosin' Texas' hits 19 weeks at No. 1, tying the longest run in Hot 100 history -- while the rest of the top 10 is nearly identical to last week's, with Stella Lefty's 'Boston' the only real mover.
'How Great Thou Art' covered three ways across sixty years, plus three new religious songs that each broke through a different way -- a viral TV moment, a TikTok trend nobody planned, and plain vocal craft.
Primate House's self-titled LP started as sessions in 2016, sat unfinished through a years-long hiatus, and got mixed into existence this year by the band's own bassist -- and it's genuinely one of the sharpest-sounding indie rock records of the year.
ANOTR and 54 Ultra's 'Talk to You' was already a real dance-chart hit before John Stones pranked Thomas Tuchel to it in a World Cup dressing room -- now it's a Song of Summer contender that neither act built for a football tournament.
Six genres, six decades, one theme: a piece of gear that could have stayed a gimmick, and instead became the reason each of these records is still remembered.
River Cain isn't a person -- and the fabricated act got real iTunes chart placements on the back of AGT audition footage that never happened.
Slayr's Vocaloid-sampling single was a real win — until part of the reaction to it turned into exactly the kind of racism the vocaloid fandom keeps failing to deal with.
Launching Mega Monday with the full Billboard Hot 100 top 10 for the week of August 22, 2026 — where the chart and the criticism agree, and the three specific places they don't.
Launching Sacred Sunday's standing format: two different artists covering one well-known hymn, and two new religious songs about the gap between the room a song is written in and the room it ends up filling.
Softcult's debut LP is self-written, self-recorded, self-produced, and self-engineered by two Ontario siblings in a home studio — and the record is genuinely good on its own merits.
Ella Langley's 'Choosin' Texas' has spent 18 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 with no gimmick, no feature, and no sample — just a dance-hall breakup song and one very specific idea.
Launching Throwback Thursday with ten records across ten genres and fifty-four years — each one famous for a call that very nearly went differently.
Launching Wack Wednesday with two AI-music charting hits that took opposite paths on disclosure — one got caught, one never hid anything.