Calling an album Good Times in this day and age immediately marks you out as either a hopeless optimist, a pranksterish pedlar of irony, or a deluded fool. After some consideration, I’ve come to the conclusion that Alexei Shishkin is a little bit of the first two. It takes a certain amount of optimism – not to mention some thick skin – just to exist in the creative marketplace. A songwriter is someone who bares his soul to the jaws of this marketplace. And Shishkin is a songwriter (and also a compulsive podcaster), both prolific and talented. Not to mention touched with the gift of irony, which is something you need if you want to thicken that sensitive artist’s skin.
Shishkin is a glutton for punishment. Good Times is his eleventh album in an eight-year recording career. 2024 alone saw three releases. His DIY work ethic makes this possible, but there has to be some kind of creative drive there too, some intense need to populate a void with words and music. And while he is most definitely a DIY artist (the album went from absolute zero to twelve fully realised tracks in the space of four days), Good Times sees him add a layer or two of expertise to his working methods. Recorded at Big Nice Studio with Bradford Krieger, these songs are chaotic and whimsical and loose, but they are also richly detailed, layered, and thematically varied.
Lead single Disco Elysium is a paean to the cult video game of the same name, and also an exploration of the very idea of selfhood. That’s the level we’re working at here: pop culture, poetics, psychology and philosophy are rolled into a surreal, lumpy ball and garnished with a palatable – and memorable – indie-pop melody. Disco Elysium is less than two minutes long, but it doesn’t feel incomplete. That’s because Shishkin doesn’t do things by halves; rather, he does them by multiplicities. He fills gaps with interesting and wry observations, and the shortness of his songs only serves to emphasise how much he manages to cram into them.
The same formula – brief tracks bursting with ideas – applies to much of Good Times. Nothing on here worries the three-minute mark. It works, and it’s refreshing. Variation comes in the form of the songs’ often unexpected subject matter. Ode to Carl Dennis uses the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet as a jumping-off point. Tiki Taka (2006), with its inexorable chord progression, pays homage to the great Barcelona team of the past while also managing to say something about human relationships. Impressively, this, and much of the album’s content, was improvised in the studio.
Variation is present in the musical content too. The beats in This Philosophy owe more to jazz and hip-hop than to rock and pop. Magpie marries a tight little rhythm to some winning bedroom slacker-pop melodies and a cool sax part from Ivan Rodriguez that recalls yacht rock, but only if the yacht was sinking. The Dan Bejar-influenced Tough (Ugly Ghosts) has a slight but irresistible piano progression and a chorus that exudes wobbly soul. Invincible is loveably chaotic, with Krieger’s dry percussion providing the framework for a combination of satisfying synths and scrunched-up guitars.
The near-instrumental I Like to Sit in the Cold is a winning guitar improvisation in which Shishkin and a Krieger trade guitar licks, one moment slick and soulful, the next slack and scuzzy, while What Magic Is sounds kinda like one of those unexpectedly catchy Pavement songs that Malkmus relegated to B-sides. Guitar hooks and sing-along choruses abound. It all adds up to a seriously fun listen. The idea of good times might seem fanciful to many people right now, but music like this reminds us that irreverence and spontaneity are valid creative responses. Despite Shishkin’s lo-fi beginnings and his continuing willingness to drink from the well of slacker aesthetics, Good Times is a bold and – dare we say it – polished artistic statement.
Good Times (September 5th, 2025) Rue Defense