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As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the 2020 NBA Draft is not well regarded for its star potential. There will be useful players in this class, but the top end of the lottery is as bereft of surefire stars going in as any year in recent memory. More than one bad team will probably opt to take the perceived safe pick, when in reality, they should swing for the fences. This is in part because what constitutes a “safe pick” in this class is up for debate.

Enter Serbian teenager Aleksej Pokuševski. The first thing you notice about Poku is his incredible fluidity and coordination for someone his size at his age. He’s listed at 7-feet, though there is some anecdotal evidence that he’s a little taller than that now, and given that he turns 19 after Christmas, he’s the youngest player in the entire class. Poku does not have the pedigree or the base statistical profile one would generally associate with a top-10 pick. Only playing in 12 total games in the low-level Greek Second League, Poku was not the dominant scorer in Europe that current superstars Luka Dončić and Nikola Jokić were, averaging only 9.9 points, 7.2 rebounds, and 2.8 assists per game. His profile is closer to something like what Kristaps Porziņģis’ was, albeit against lesser competition.

As you can probably tell, a more thorough examination of the numbers is where Poku shines. His Per 36 numbers this season are quite good — he averaged 16.7 points, 12.2 rebounds, 4.7 assists, 1.9 steals, and 2.8 blocks. I shouldn’t have to note how uncommon it is for a younger seven footer to average almost five assists per 36, never mind those rebounding and steal/block numbers. The way he gets those assists is even more remarkable, functioning as a legitimate ball handler in transition and in the pick-and-roll. In case you think these numbers are a fluke, bear in mind that they similar to the numbers he had last summer in the Under-18 European Championships: 21.6 points, 9.6 rebounds, 3.5 assists, 3.1 steals, and 4.8 blocks per 36.

Not to get too numbers heavy but, a 17/18-year-old tallying 57 steals and blocks in about 350 minutes is superhumanly good. The same player also having 117 rebounds, 43 assists, and 27 made threes in that period of time is almost unheard of. Across all of 2019, Poku went for 18.1 points, 11.6 boards, 4.3 assists, 2.3 steals, and 3.4 blocks per 36 minutes. He also had a positive assist-to-turnover ratio and a 27-for-73 (.369) mark from deep. It’s not entirely out of the question to ask if any other recent 7-foot prospect has put up numbers like these, so I figured I’d check.

With apologies to Marvin Bagley, here’s everyone ever called a “unicorn” and what their Per 36 numbers looked like in the year before entering the NBA Draft.

What really stands out here is Poku’s rebounding, passing, and defensive playmaking (as well as his miserable overall field goal percentage, which we’ll get into). It’s really not a stretch to say he’s the most multi-faceted big man in recent Draft history. I included Giannis less as a direct comp and more because he’s the only one of these players to also play in the Greek Second League, although Poku was younger.

Is all of this to say Poku will be as good as any of these players in the NBA? Of course not, and that’s especially true with Embiid, Giannis, or Jokic, who are all incredibly strong and well-built players. The biggest reason for that poor field goal percentage inside the arc is Poku’s complete lack of strength in his upper and lower body — he’s listed at a paltry 201 pounds.

Thankfully, Poku has the potential shooting versatility that all these players, save Jackson and Towns, lack. He comes off screens, shoots stepbacks, pulls up in transition, and shoots from either end of a pick and roll. That last one is a particularly rare skill, even in the three and PnR heavy NBA. Here he is isolating at the top of the key, moving to his right, and firing off a contested three. On shots like this, it almost doesn’t matter if it misses, because this sort of thing puts fear into any defense.

Here is Poku spotting up in transition with a quick hitter. This is something you’re likely to see from Seth Curry or Troy Daniels, not a seven footer playing in his first international tournament.

That’s an even more terrifying pull-up. These are just three isolated shot attempts from Poku and only scratch the surface of all the things he can do on the court. Connecting on 37.5 percent of his threes and 77.1 of his free throws are legitimate shooter’s numbers at any age. This isn’t a big man like Deandre Ayton or Embiid taking some open shots at the top of the key. There are questions about Poku playing the 5 in the NBA, but if he’s ever physically able to do so and he takes shots like this, he’s going to break defenses.

That’s really the biggest question about Poku at this point, whether or not he’s ever going to be able to withstand any amount of physicality. Defensively, he’s generally able to use his length and timing to absorb contact from smaller drivers, but even then, against someone like Russell Westbrook, he’ll be toast. The positive is that he’s not afraid of contact, it’s just going to take time. Toni Kukoč or Lamar Odom might be good comparison points for Poku’s NBA future. Kukoč in particular was not physically dominant at all, but was still a matchup nightmare for NBA forwards for the better part of a decade and was one of the best FIBA players of the ’90s as a whole.

A potentially positive trend is Poku’s shot chart at Olympiacos B this season. While his two-point percentage is still pretty miserable (I’d say mostly because of his aggressive shot selection), his percentage at the rim is greatly improved from his FIBA play last summer.

While 20-for-32 isn’t terrific, it at least points to Poku’s good natural touch and, perhaps, a growing sense of propriety in the paint. It would be a good step forward for him to be able to determine when he should and shouldn’t be attacking players that are likely much stronger than he is.

The best evidence I have for Poku being a success in the NBA is his obvious work ethic. He’s been preparing himself to play in the NBA, having learned English and played professional basketball away from his home for years. Comparing his numbers to Giannis’ earlier wasn’t meant to suggest he could ever become the dominant force that the NBA MVP has become. Very few people in human history have had the maniacal drive and work ethic Giannis possesses, but if Poku has even half of the desire to succeed, then it’s hard to argue against him becoming a star in this league.

He’ll likely have to spend a lot of time in whatever the 2020-21 version of the G League looks like, but if you could guarantee me that Aleksej will gain 15 pounds of legitimate muscle, I would probably take him third overall in this draft and take my chances.

Pharrell Williams is set to curate a package of Time magazine cover stories called “The New American Revolution” and will release a new track with Jay-Z in conjunction with it. The cover stories feature a conversation between young athletes Mikey Williams and Naomi Osaka, Kenya Barris in conversation with Tyler The Creator, a 21 Savage essay on financial literacy, and a whole fleet of Black luminaries (including Angela Davis, Barbara Lee, and more) speaking to the issues that most concern America’s future. Time provided a teaser of the song, which releases Friday at midnight.

Pharrell says of the new track, “The intention for a song was all about how tough it is to be an entrepreneur in our country to begin with — especially as someone of color. There’s a lot of systemic disadvantages and purposeful blockages. How can you get a fire started, or even the hope of an ember to start a fire, when you’re starting at disadvantages with regards to health care, education, and representation?”

He also criticizes how those differences have kept Black Americans hamstrung in their pursuit of the same goals as the white majority. “They keep saying the American Dream is about the house and picket fence, the wife and two kids. Come on—let’s be honest. It’s always boiled down to money and an opportunity.”

Time also shared a quote from Jay’s verse, in which he again advocates for supporting Black businesses and critiques the exploitation of Black people’s creativity by mainstream establishments. “Black Twitter, what’s that? When Jack gets paid, do you? / For every one Gucci, support two FUBU’s.”

Listen to a preview of the new track above and stream it in full 8/21 at midnight.

Sylvan Esso, the duo composed working couple Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn, are gearing up for their third release, Free Love. Since the band is issuing an album rollout in an unprecedented time, amidst a global pandemic, they have to come up with innovative ways to keep fans excited for their music. Sylvan Esso was tapped to perform on Full Frontal With Samantha Bee and used a moving pickup truck as their unconventional stage.

Performing their recent single “Ferris Wheel,” Meath and Sanborn hopped in a pickup truck and drove through a meadow. Even though she was jostled around in the car’s moving bed, Meath managed to deliver each lyric from their single with gusto. To conclude the performance with energy, the truck arrived in a clearing surrounded by bursting fireworks.

Ahead of the group’s Full Frontal performance, Sylvan Esso discussed the themes around their upcoming third release:

“It’s a record about being increasingly terrified of the world around you and looking inward to remember all the times when loving other people seemed so easy, so that you can find your way back to that place. This first single, ‘Ferris Wheel,’ is about discovering your power and awkwardly figuring out how to wield it. It’s for the summer, it’s for you, we hope you like it.”

Watch Sylvan Esso perform “Ferris Wheel” on Full Frontal above.

Free Love is out 9/25 via Loma Vista. Pre-order it here.

Miley Cyrus is fresh off the release of a new single, “Midnight Sky.” It’s been a few years since Cyrus’ last full-length album, 2017’s Younger Now, so naturally, amid this flurry of activity, fans are wondering when her next album will come. Well, it looks like it could be a while, as she doesn’t want to put out her new album until she can perform live shows and properly tour behind it.

Cyrus said in a recent interview, “I feel like in this time, this record that I’ve made so far — [for] which I’ve written probably like 20 songs already — […] I really think that the record I made is meant for festivals, for shows, for touring. So for me, I really want to wait until I can perform… my live performances really drive my music. That’s where I thrive: Me and the band. That’s what I would love to see happen in the near future, and I’m a patient person; Even though it may not seem that way, I am pretty patient, so I think I would like to wait until we can get connected to release a whole body of work.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean the well of new music from Cyrus will run dry, though. In a recent interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, she said she likes dropping singles: “I really have always enjoyed dropping singles, rather than the full body of work, because it allows you to talk to your fans in real time. It’s like I feel something. I experience it. I write it. I release it. When you write a record, a lot of the time, you’re writing your experiences, and then by the time the record comes out, you’ve evolved past that experience.”

I was excited when PGA Tour 2K21 was announced, but also a touch skeptical. I haven’t owned a golf video game since the last year of EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour title, in part because there was a monotony to golf gaming — and an ease to playing them — that made it hard to want to go back to them over and over.

Golf is a sport that is, inherently, frustrating and imperfect. You return to the golf course because of moments of brilliance the stick in your head, making you believe that maybe you could replicate the good shots more often than the bad. But no matter what, the perfect round of golf is impossible and there is no final form to your golf game. Golf is a journey, a constant quest to be better, as evidenced by the likes of Tiger Woods constantly tinkering with their swing in hopes of finding something more to unlock in their game, even at the pinnacle of the sport. That’s a hard thing to capture in a video game.

There is a fine line between making a golf game that becomes no fun because you shoot in the 50s every round, and a golf game that’s no fun because it is impossible. A middle ground is hard to achieve, but I’m pleased to report that PGA Tour 2K21 does just that through its extensive difficulty settings that allow you to make the game right for you. You can tinker with the settings to find a way to make the game challenging, but not impossible; scoreable, but not so easy it feels like cheating.

My first advice to anyone picking up the game is to spend a good bit of time in the training mode, practicing your swing tempo and, most especially, getting a feel on the greens. I rushed through the training section and hustled my way to the career mode, assuming that I’ve played plenty of golf games in the past and this one will come to me quickly.

Wrong.

I missed the cut on my first three efforts at Korn Ferry Tour Q School on “Pro” difficulty (the fourth hardest of six possible presets, with plenty of customization available on top of that). My swing tempo was not consistent, leading to a number of hooks and slices off the tee, and my putting was truly a disaster. The putting mechanics in the game are extremely delicate and the first few rounds, if you decide to start on too hard of a difficulty, will lead you to occasionally blast a putt so far past the hole that you end up off the green. It’s incredibly frustrating, but as you play more your right thumb will steadily get better at gently pulling back on the joystick and then striking through at the right time to hit the correct power.

Reading putts is like every other golf game you’ve ever played, with a grid on the green and dashes moving at different speeds showing you how much slope the green has, both side to side and up or downhill. That was intuitive for me, but everything else about this game took some learning since I have never played on The Golf Club engine and I wish I’d spent more time on the virtual range dialing all of that in. After dropping back to “Pro-Am” to make life easier while I figured out my swing and putt timing, I was able to make it through Q School and onto the Korn Ferry Tour (which is like the PGA Tour’s version of AAA baseball).

I rolled through the Korn Ferry Tour season and earned my PGA Tour card, but swiftly realized that I had swung too far to the easy side and the game was quickly becoming not fun, so I returned to “Pro” mode. It’s there that I still reside, in the midst of my first PGA Tour season and have found the sweet spot, for now, where I still have my arduous rounds in the 70s, but when I play well, I’m capable of winning tournaments. There are still loose swings and bad putts and times where I get incredibly frustrated, but that’s golf and it is genuinely impressive how well they capture that essence.

This isn’t to say it’s a perfect simulation of real world golf, and I do have some gripes about some things. Distance is a real problem that I hope they find a way to tinker with, particularly when you end up on some of these longer PGA Tour courses in the 7,700 yard range. There are no attributes in the game, so you don’t get better at things as you go. You can add to your distance with certain clubs if you’re willing to sacrifice on forgiveness and swing plane (which dictates how perfect your joystick motion has to be to keep things straight), and while that’s understandable, the base distances just seem off. Your driver goes about 270 yards, with a 3-wood that goes 230 and a 5-wood that goes 210. I am a 5-handicap golfer in the real world, so I’m solid but far from a PGA Tour pro. I carry a 4-iron 210 without trouble and my 3-wood carries 250-plus.

I understand not wanting to make the game into a pitch-and-putt where you hit it 350 off of the tee, but I think they dialed things back too much in the interests of keeping it from being an arcade game. You could add 10-15 yards to each club and still keep that same realism, while not forcing me to launch fairway woods into half of the par 3s on Tour, when no Tour pro is pulling more than 5-iron in real life.

My other main gameplay gripe is how it is impossible to hit anything long out of the rough. Again, their heart is in the right place to make things realistic and not let you just hit whatever out of the rough with no penalty, but every course’s rough in the game plays like a U.S. Open at Bethpage Black. The longest club you can hit out of heavy rough is an iron, and your 4-iron will only carry about 145-150 yards. I have no doubts that making the rough play like real rough is an impossible task, but this is a swing too far in the direction of making it difficult. I can promise you, you can take a full cut with a long iron or hybrid out of the rough at TPC Sawgrass and still advance it pretty close to your normal distance.

Still, even with those complaints, the gameplay is terrific. The reality of the importance of swing tempo and the shot shaping/angle of attack controlling spin (rather than a spin button while the ball’s in the air) makes for a really fun experience that, once you really get a hang of it, allows you to play a lot of different shot types and make the ball do what you want.

Now, as for presentation, it stumbles in some of the same ways many sports video games do. Despite their best efforts, the commentary can often be redundant and offered little in the way of enhancing the game for me. I highly suggest that once you reach the Tour you go to settings and turn off the live updates because they happen way too often and, to me anyway, were obnoxious. I don’t play sports games because I want them to look like a sports television broadcast, I want them to feel like I’m playing the sport. They achieve the latter with the gameplay, but I don’t get why so many games get so caught up on the former. Make the game look good and play good and please spare me trying to make it some viewing experience by showing me what other players are doing on the course. I really don’t need fake highlights from other golfers.

The career mode arc is fine. They do a great job with the 15 courses they scanned into the game as well as the created courses that fill out the 30-event season. The rivalries have done little for me thus far, as the first few I’ve just rolled through and there’s no interaction with the challenges, you just have to beat them in tournaments in different areas. The same goes for the sponsor challenges. They’re a nice additional benchmark to occasionally think about while you’re playing, but I personally don’t care too much about getting more gear for my MyPlayer, so a lot of the apparel sponsors aren’t super appealing to me.

Beyond the career mode, the star of the game for me thus far is the Course Designer. It is a fully immersive experience that gives you the keys to create a golf course from scratch or, if you’d like, from templates. As someone who played high school golf at a mediocre home course, we would often talk about how we’d change things if we ever had lots of money and resources to redesign it. So, when I got this game, one of my primary goals was try to recreate Honey Creek Golf Club in Conyers, Georgia, but in my vision.

To build a course from scratch takes a lot of time — it was, like, 8 hours total I think and even then I wasn’t going very crazy with things — but it is, without a doubt, the thing that’ll keep me coming back to the game to create different courses and try out different designs. I had a few difficulties, like I couldn’t get it to add rough in places I wanted (I had no problems adding fairway or beefing up greens, just rough), and that might’ve just been a me problem. Also adding water features takes a lot of effort at first as you have to raise and lower the land where you want a pond or creek, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes easier. Overall the designer was terrific and the options for adjusting slopes, customizing the landscape, and adding objects, bunkers, and trees are very extensive.

I was highly impressed with PGA Tour 2K21, even with some of its flaws, and think it’s a terrific re-entry by the Tour to the gaming space — and that’s without really being able to dive into the flagship mode of The Golf Club games and join or start an online society with friends (or random people from the golf community). The career mode isn’t the most dynamic or immersive and there’s room for improvement, but the gameplay and course designer make it not just a worthwhile game to go out and get but something you’ll want to keep coming back to, because just like real golf, there will always be another level to try to master.

The Office reached a new level of popularity when it was added to Netflix, but if you’ve only watched the workplace sitcom on the streaming service, you’re missing out.

Office Ladies podcast hosts Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey recently discussed the season three episode “Traveling Salesman” (featuring the introduction of the term “Schruted”), although, as they discovered, they didn’t watch the same “Traveling Salesman”: the Netflix cut is different from the version included on the DVDs and what aired on NBC. “Angela and I were so confused, because we were trying to outline this episode and there were all these scenes that Angela was talking about that I remembered shooting…but that weren’t in the version I was watching,” Fischer said, via Mashable. Basically, “Traveling Salesman” and the following episode “The Return” aired on January 11 and January 18, 2011, but NBC combined them into an hour-long episode when they were re-aired as a “newpeat” months later in March, as part of sweeps week.

Kinsey broke down what you won’t see on Netflix, including a touching scene where Pam tells Angela that she won $100 from an art contest (a sixth grade elementary school art contest, but still!). “Jenna, we have one of those classic over-the-partition Angela and Pam scenes. And she tells Angela, and Angela has all this good favor in her heart towards Pam right now, you know?” she explained. “They’ve gone and got coffee, they’ve bonded. And so Angela goes, ‘Congratulations’ and then she says, ‘I really like having these little moments with you.’” The bond between the co-workers is quickly broken, however, when Pam declines Angela’s offer to take home a kitten. “[Angela] instantly goes back to just being this cold, snarky person to Pam. That’s it. Their friendship’s over,” Kinsey said. “It was so fleeting.”

Also fleeting: the number of days before The Office moves from Netflix to Peacock. The constant maneuvering of shows and movies between streaming services is, along with the bonus scenes, yet another reason why you shouldn’t give up on physical media. You never know when The Office might end up on Quibi in seven-minute chunks. Not ideal.

Another difference between Netflix vs. DVDs: “Traveling Salesman” on Netflix begins with Michael and Harvey, his talking computer, but on the DVD, the cold open is relegated to the deleted scenes. You know who sucks more than Jim? Whoever decided to leave out Harvey.

(Via Mashable)

Ah, the power of social media. It can make overnight stars of just about anyone with some gumption and a WiFi connection — which is exactly what happened to Georgia teacher Audrianna Williams earlier this week when her rap video welcoming students of Monroe Comprehensive High School to the instrumental from Jack Harlow’s hit song “What’s Poppin” went viral. Williams uploaded the video to Instagram along with fellow Monroe educator Callie Evans, it quickly garnered over 300,000 views and jumped to Twitter, where users expressed admiration for the teachers’ lyrical skills.

Even Jack Harlow himself was impressed and surprised the teachers during an appearance on Good Morning America today, telling them that they “made my song better” and “killed it.” Harlow shared how committed instructors had made an impact in his life and then surprised the teachers with a gift: Gift cards worth $1,000 toward whatever the two wanted. “I grew up with teachers that had a huge influence on me my whole life,” Harlow said. “What y’all provide to society is invaluable. I can’t thank you enough for doing the job you guys do, so just as a small token of my appreciation I wanted to give both of you two thousand dollar gift cards to treat yourselves to whatever you want. I really appreciate y’all doing what you do.”

Evans and Williams say that they’ve collaborated on multiple videos over the years, coming up with the idea four years ago. They have produced an end-of-the-school-year rap for each year since then. And while there are those who would love to see the teachers pursue music full-time, it appears that they are focusing on the upcoming school year, saying, “This video was created to calm the fears and nerves of all involved and encourage them to strive for excellence this school term regardless of the online instructional model that we are in.”

Watch the video and the teachers’ encounter with Jack Harlow above.

Jack Harlow is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It was reported recently that Britney Spears told a court that she is “strongly opposed” to having her father, Jamie Spears, be her sole conservator (as he has been) and requested that her situation “be changed substantially in order to reflect the major changes in her current lifestyle and her stated wishes.” It appears, however, that Spears’ wish has not been granted.

Reuters reports that Spears asked for her care manager to replace her father as sole conservator, but a court document reveals that her father will retain control over Spears’ business and personal affairs until at least February 2021.

Spears’ father recently declared #FreeBritney “a joke,” saying, “All these conspiracy theorists don’t know anything. The world don’t have a clue. It’s up to the court of California to decide what’s best for my daughter. It’s no one else’s business. […] People are being stalked and targeted with death threats. It’s horrible. We don’t want those kinds of fans. I love my daughter. I love all my kids. But this is our business. It’s private.”

Yesterday, meanwhile, Spears received a message of support from the ACLU, who tweeted, “People with disabilities have a right to lead self-directed lives and retain their civil rights. If Britney Spears wants to regain her civil liberties and get out of her conservatorship, we are here to help her.”

Read our recent recap of the #FreeBritney situation here.

Is Bright Eyes a band or a nom de plume for Conor Oberst? The band members insist it’s the former, especially in light of Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was, their first album in nine years. In interviews promoting the reunion album, Oberst and his bandmates Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott have made sure to assert, time and again, that this is their most collaborative effort yet. You sense that, perhaps, they’re protesting too much. Because, no matter what, Bright Eyes will likely always be viewed through the lens of Oberst’s life and point of view.

Consider it the burden of being one of the most intensely loved and scrutinized singer-songwriters of the last 25 years. For the most die-hard Conor-ologists, the past five years have offered plenty of raw data to hash out and psychoanalyze. The 2014 rape accusation, later retracted, kicked off an extended period of personal problems for Oberst that also include health issues, the end of his marriage, and the death of his brother. Understandably, he has largely retreated to the comfort of bands, which has put him in close proximity to trusted friends and confidants and also lessened the pressure on him to serve as the focal point. Before reuniting Bright Eyes, he recorded a different reunion album, 2015’s Payola, with his aughts-era political punk band Desaparacidos, and formed Better Oblivion Community Center with Phoebe Bridgers, putting out a self-titled record in 2019. (In BOCC, Oberst arguably wasn’t even the biggest star, at least for millennial and zoomer audiences.)

Generally, those bands allowed Oberst to work inside of a leaner-than-usual operation, with lower stakes both personal and artistic. Contrast that with 2016’s Ruminations, his best album of this period, an unsparing and brutally austere acoustic work that laid his pain and anger bare. Compared with the tuneful indie pop of the BOCC album, Ruminations is a grueling howl of despair that digs deeper than any of his other recent records, while also dramatically paring back the grandiose arrangements he’s come to favor in his post-I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning work. (Oberst eventually released an album of greatly elaborated versions of the Ruminations material, 2017’s Salutations, that greatly dulled their original impact.)

On Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was, Oberst — in collaboration with Mogis and Walcott, as we’re required to duly note — is back to working on a huge canvas. Whereas Ruminations was unrelentingly spare, these songs are overstuffed with Walcott’s signature orchestral flourishes and a bevy of Mogis’ instrumental overdubs. Meanwhile Oberst is once again drawn to many of his pet themes: the suffocation of fame, the certainty of apocalypse (be it universal or his own personal demise), his desire to mature and achieve wisdom while also being wary of aging and the accompanying decay. (He sings in one of the album’s best songs, the self-explanatory “Forced Convalescence,” about “catastrophizing” turning 40. Though, really, he has also catastrophized every other age.)

All the while, a lingering question persists: Why did Bright Eyes come back? Did this album really need to exist? These are crucial riddles that Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was never quite resolves.

For the average Conor Oberst fan — the person who assumes that Oberst alone is synonymous with Bright Eyes — having this specific vehicle for his songs no longer really matters beyond the nostalgic power of the brand. But for Oberst himself, the idea to reunite his famous project seems to have been borne out of a spontaneous sentimental (and drunken) impulse. According to Billboard, Oberst brought it up while at a Christmas party with Walcott in 2017, after which “they immediately huddled in a bathroom to FaceTime Mogis, which they now recall with laughter due to how ‘festive’ they were.” Since the reunion was pursued in secret, they could proceed at their own pace, without any of the external pressure that might normally be part of a Bright Eyes album.

You can hear the time that was spent imagining these expansive soundscapes. Songs like “Just Once In The World” — a spiky waltz that unfolds with layers upon layers of guitars, drums, and strings — or the self-aware film-score sweep of “Stairwell Song” are lush sonic worlds upon themselves. But it still has the shape of a “typical” Bright Eyes record, right down to the spoken-word interlude that inevitably opens the album. Aesthetically, it feels like the album that might have followed 2007’s cult-obsessed country-rock fantasia Cassadaga had Bright Eyes reconsidered putting out 2011’s maligned (though sort of underrated) The People’s Key. Like Cassadaga, Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was unfolds as a series of epic Americana mini-symphonies, each one more grand and big-sounding than the last.

All that’s missing, unfortunately, is the most essential ingredient — the do-or-die tension that distinguishes the best of Bright Eyes, as well as Oberst on his own. This band’s greatest albums have an operatic, almost hysterical quality that pushes them to the brink of collapse. It is the opposite of low-stakes music — they are performed as if the room the band is playing in might fall into the Earth at any moment. Obviously, that kind of heightened emotional pitch is harder to replicate in middle age. It’s not even all that preferable once you’ve exited those ill-advised drama-hunting years in your teens and 20s. But Ruminations showed that Oberst could walk that tightrope in a more muted kind of way, as a grounded but no less haunted grown-up. On that album, his resigned sigh registered with the intensity of a scream.

There are no such moments on Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was. As impressive as is it as a production and (again) as a collaboration of musicians who each bring a unique set of skills to the table, it all feels a little remote. Songs come and go, usually at a stately pace, and as the record unfolds over 14 tracks — at least four too many — it all begins to fade into a samey, torturously mid-tempo, bombastic haze. Because the necessary conviction just isn’t there, the album never achieves the cathartic excess of an album like Lifted or even Cassadaga. It merely feels bloated.

If all art is ultimately a self-indulgent exercise, then Oberst was certainly justified in reuniting with his old friends Walcott and Mogis and making music that rekindled their bonds and soothed his troubled soul. For the listener, however, Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was is an initially frustrating, and then dull experience. Hopefully, it was better as a studio hang than it is as an album.

Frank Ocean very much does things at his own pace. Endless and Blonded came within a day of each other, four years after Channel Orange. Now, though, he may have something else in the works, and his collaborator is waiting on him to get it finished.

The New York Times‘ Kyle Buchanan spoke with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino for a yet-to-be-published interview, but he offered a preview of it on Twitter yesterday. He tweeted that the director said he and Ocean worked together on a “secret project,” and that he continued, “We were collaborating on a music video that never happened. I use the Times to launch an appeal to Frank: Frank, let’s do that video. Come on.”

In response to his tweet, a Twitter user asked Buchanan if Guadagnino had any updates on his feature film adaptation of Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood On The Tracks, which was announced back in 2018. It appears that project will no longer be happening, or at least Guadagnino isn’t working on it any longer, as Buchanan noted, “He wasn’t able to get the budget he wanted for it.”

Ocean has expressed his appreciation of Call Me By Your Name on multiple occasions, including when he spoke with its star, Timothée Chalamet.