Archive for September, 2011

Los Campesinos! "By Your Hand"

It's funny how the sound of five years ago always seems to feel a bit uncomfortable. Los Campesinos! are an extremely mid-00s band, essentially the U.K. answer to hyper-articulate, sharp-tongued emo-pop bands like Fall Out Boy and Say Anything. This song, the first single from their upcoming fourth album, weds that style to the overblown everyone-singing-at-once style that's just as much Alphabeat as it is the Arcade Fire or Bright Eyes. It's all basically the same, though: Overwhelming romance filtered through defensive cynicism. That feeling may well be out of place in the current cultural climate, but I don't think that will stop a lot of people from caring about this sort of thing. It's just that it won't be cool again for some time. I get the sense that a lot of people are a little embarrassed by these sort of huge, heart-on-sleeve tunes and have, in large part, moved on to artists who are more cerebral, aggressive or stoned into total abstraction. I hope bands like this stick to their guns instead of folding and coming back together when it's their time to get on the reunion circuit. Pre-order it from Los Campesinos!

St. Vincent "Dilettante"

St. Vincent's Annie Clark is very fixated on how we create a public facade. While Actor was focused on a struggle to hide inner turmoil from the outside world, Strange Mercy is more concerned with relationships and how the persona and image we project informs how we connect – or do not connect – with other people. A lot of the characters on the record possess some degree of confidence or charm, or at least sell people on the idea that they do. The anxiety in the music mainly comes out of a feeling that you're betraying yourself on some level for the sake of pragmatism and social advantage. The characters in "Dilettante" are slippery and emotionally distant; neither seems to be sure of where they stand with the other. There's a lot of implied sexual tension, but even more overt contempt. Clark's protagonist is undermining and dismissive, but in a sexy, cavalier sort of way. Most other St. Vincent songs convey some sense of angst and dread, but the arrangement of this number has a glamorous swagger to it, it seems to strut around imperiously with excellent posture. It's vaguely funky in its sway, her voice is lightly flirtatious even when uttering lines like "I have no patience for an estrangement." There's a touch of ugliness and discomfort along the way, but for the most part this is an incredibly well-drawn portrait of someone whose callousness has made them very attractive. Buy it from Amazon.

Wild Flag "Something Came Over Me"

Wild Flag is more surprising and interesting for me as a Mary Timony fan than as a Sleater-Kinney fan. Carrie Brownstein is very much in her element and her obvious thrill in playing energetic, fun rock music is one of the top selling points for the band in general. Even still, when she sings I can't help but hear the absence of Corin Tucker, who complemented Carrie's rock spirit with raw, visceral emotion. Timony's a very different foil, but even when she's singing lead on songs that boast her distinctive singsong and curling guitar melodies, I hear Brownstein's influence on her style and phrasing. It's not a bad thing, though – after a decade or so of solo records full of good ideas that didn't always translate into great music, it's exciting to hear Timony sound so focused and bold. She's never sounded so extroverted! "Something's Come Over Me" is the best of her lead vocal tracks – there's a flirty quality to it, as though she's revisited the sexuality of her early Helium material but replaced her early-20s coyness with a forthright, mature femininity. Buy it from Amazon.

The Weeknd "Life of the Party"

Rap and R&B songs weren't always about ostentatious wealth and the hedonistic yet rigid mating rituals of "the club," but after more than a decade of these ideas being the center of popular music, it's easy to feel like it was ever thus. The Weeknd belongs to this tradition, but with two caveats: He writes about entering this world as an ambivalent outsider, and he presents even the elements he enjoys as sorta grotesque and soul-deadening. Everything we're used to hearing as glamorous and sexy gets turned into a horror show. His two albums from this year are essentially the interior monologue of a guy who is trying to satisfy his desires and make use of his social capital while desperately trying to cling to his humanity, and the struggle can get pretty harrowing. This seems to be a thread in a lot of R&B and rap right now – you hear it in Kanye West, though he's pretty far gone down his crazy rabbit hole, and you definitely hear it in Drake, though he's so self-absorbed that he rarely includes the well-observed details of other characters and social dynamics that make The Weeknd's music so rich and compelling. Get it for free from The Weeknd.

The-Dream featuring Big Sean "Ghetto"

Most of The-Dream's 1977 – technically it's a mixtape, but it's as deliberately conceived and constructed as a proper album – finds the singer engaging in some rather bitter rants against his ex-wife. Most of the songs are like the musical equivalent of the crazy, gut-spilling emails you might find yourself writing in the middle of the night in a fit of intense emotion but should never ever ever ever actually send. The-Dream is consistently self-aggrandizing, but apparently has no concern for how he may be interpreted – one way or another, he's clearly brave enough to be willing to come off like a petty, horrible person on record, because oh boy does he ever. Some of the tracks are a bit too toxic for my liking, but I am very fond of "Ghetto," a track that grinds through a few different modes as the singer grapples with complicated, wildly conflicting emotions as he gets used to the idea of not having sex with his ex anymore. As on previous The-Dream songs, his excessive investment in his sexual prowess is fascinating – the bravado is so transparent, the raw desperation to assert his masculinity and eagerness to please is impossible to miss. Get it for free from Dat Piff.

Lindsey Buckingham "In Our Own Time"

The character of Lindsey Buckingham's music has changed a lot as he's aged. His best-known work from the Seventies and Eighties was always a bit high-strung and angst-ridden; he pretty much specialized in writing bitter break-up songs. In recent years, though, that's all gone away in favor of a more serene tone. The angst is still there, but it's focused on issues of mortality and buried beneath gorgeous, cascading finger-picked guitar parts. "In Our Own Time," from this latest record Seeds We Sow, merges this approach with elements of the bonkers studio-rat production style he developed on his first two solo albums in the Eighties. It's a fascinating mix of sounds and textures, with fluid, graceful parts set in odd contrast with synthetic keyboard and percussion parts. The best thing here is the way Buckingham treats his guitar, seemingly speeding up his parts to the point of making his arpeggios seem abstract and cartoonish. Buy it from Amazon. I wrote an entire week of Fluxblog entries about Lindsey Buckingham's body of work earlier this year. Here are links to all of those posts in case you missed it: • "The Ledge" / "It Was I" • "Monday Morning" / "Hold Me" • "What Makes You Think You're the One?" / "Walk a Thin Line" • "I Want You" / "Crying in the Night" • "Second Hand News" / "Time Precious Time"

Cass McCombs "The Same Thing"

"The Same Thing" sets up a lot of equivalences, with the logic that many seemingly opposite concepts and feelings are flip sides of the same coin. In the spirit of that, here's an idea: Though "The Same Thing" is rooted in rhythm and Sixties psychedelic pop and "County Line" (the excellent single from Cass McCombs' other 2011 album) is a delicate, nearly weightless 70s AM radio ballad, they feel remarkably similar. Both songs sprawl out, suggesting slow movement through a a vast, humbling space. They're both "road" songs, pieces of music that fill out the emotional space of the time you spend in transit, en route to some bigger experience. Pre-order it from Domino Records.

The Flaming Lips "The Gash" (Live in 2011)

Until I heard this live recording, I never noticed how much the keyboard part sounded like something John Lennon might have written – echoes of "Instant Karma" and "I Am the Walrus," for sure. The studio recording on The Soft Bulletin has an effective maximalist sound – drums that seem physically enormous, vocals multi-tracked into warbling choirs – but this rendition is pared down to the essential elements. To the band's credit, it still sounds rather epic. I think Wayne Coyne's vocals are more effective here, allowing his words to ring out with an even greater empathy as he attempts to sell a broken, defeated person on the concept of hope and faith. "The Gash" is a pep talk song that genuinely understands what it means to feel frustrated and despondent, but it demands the listener to rethink their reasons for wanting to drop out of life. The song's big moment is a rhetorical question: "Will the fight for our sanity be the fight of our lives now that we've lost all the reasons that we thought that we had?" It's a fight, it's always a fight. You gotta fight to win. Buy it from Amazon.