May 16th, 2024 8:57pm
“From the Fire” is a gorgeous piece of music that’s all the more impressive when you take into account that it’s very much a work of auteurism – Audrey Powne is the composer, the arranger, the producer, the lyricist, the singer, and the trumpet player, and she excels in all of those roles. I’m particularly into the keyboard chords and the trumpet solo, which she openly credits to her love of Herbie Hancock and Roy Hargrove. The lyrics were inspired by the bushfires in Australia back in 2019 and evoke the notion of a cleansing fire and rebirth. With this in mind, the music feels like watching a phoenix slowly emerge from the ashes and then take flight.
“Together” is something of an outlier in the Kamasi Washington body of work – not an instrumental jazz piece, not a psychedelic epic, and in the context of his new record Fearless Movement, not a rap-adjacent party track. The song, composed by Ryan Porter, is a contemplative R&B ballad with lyrics by Washington and vocalist BJ the Chicago Kid that positions both singing and romantic love as a sort of ongoing spiritual practice. The tone is grey and drowsy but the implied scale of the music feels cosmic, like the music is illustrating the lyric’s notion of “our hearts whirling’ through time and space.” Or more likely, the other way around.
May 14th, 2024 9:31pm
“Maybe Next Time” opens Andra Day’s second album with a message to the listener: “Now I wish I could write you an album full of love songs but I can’t seem to get one.” And then she explains herself by getting into her problems with a guy who she describes as being very insecure and defensive. (Her language is more vivid than that.) Her vocal phrasing is smooth even in the busiest parts of the melody – it doesn’t seem like a stretch to guess that Erykah Badu is a formative influence here, it’s a similar flow and tone – and conveys a nuanced blend of irritation, bitterness, relief, and most of all, resignation. Once she’s done airing her grievances midway through the song, she circles back to addressing her audience. Or maybe at that point it’s really just psyching herself up – “maybe next time will be the right time,” and she’ll have all those love songs ready to go.
May 9th, 2024 7:54pm
Here in the Pitch is one of the best sounding new records I’ve encountered from the past few years. It’s like the audio equivalent of very beautiful black and white photography printed on matte paper so the blacks are especially deep and the grey tones are rich and nuanced. It’s an album where the tonal palette is so carefully selected and the reverb is so precisely calibrated that elements as ordinary as the human voice, an acoustic guitar, or a vintage organ get nudged into painterly abstraction without losing form and function. There’s a poetry to this sound Jessica Pratt and Al Carson have devised that’s very intuitive and in some ways nostalgic but difficult to put into words without resorting to purple prose.
“Get Your Head Out” captivates me in large part because it’s an evocative sensory experience that’s just outside my capacity to describe it. A lot about it feels familiar, but just as much about the recording is either uncanny or triggers a deja-vu effect. Pratt’s composition and vocal performance is clearly rooted in mid-20th century easy listening and I’m pretty sure she and Carson were deliberately aiming for the odd cosmic tonality of mid-century reverb. But despite this old timey quality, the song doesn’t register as a retro pastiche to me. It’s more like reaching back to the music of the past to create an overwhelming romantic atmosphere beyond the boundaries of contemporary fashion, and that’s just as much in the sound of the recording as it is in Pratt’s gorgeous and low-key jazzy vocal melody.
The most mesmerizing element of “Get Your Head Out” is Carson’s organ and mellotron parts, which sound misty or like light reflecting on rippling water at night. Those parts are fairly quiet in the mix, implying a weightlessness relative to Pratt’s voice and guitar. But even those central elements don’t take up too much space in the mix, and the whole song feels light enough to carry on a breeze.
May 8th, 2024 3:47pm
“No One Noticed” is a song about contemporary long-distance romance, but one where the lyrical emphasis is placed almost entirely on feeling lonely and desperate for intimacy. There’s a lot of love and affection in María Zardoya’s vocals and in the delicate and dreamy quality of the arrangement, but the emotional undertow of the song is in the awareness that this “virtual connection” is just a temporary solution for her real problem. The music builds up the romance but undercuts it the second half as she considers what would happen if she were to fly to their city: “Hold me, console me, and then I leave without a trace.” That last part cuts deep – not just for confronting the futility head-on, but also in how it sounds like she’s talking herself out of something she needs.
May 7th, 2024 5:10pm
The opening track on Spell Blanket, a collection of demos Broadcast created between 2006 and 2009 for a follow-up to Tender Buttons that never came to be, is a brief recording of Trish Keenan singing a snippet of a hook while walking around outside. It sounds like it’s just come to her in a flash of inspiration, there’s a slight hestitation as she sings some of the words as though she’s figuring out the phrasing as she’s going along. You can hear her steps, you can hear some ambient noise. The song sounds like it would’ve been amazing, perhaps even something career-defining, but this is all we have of it. It’s a trade off, I suppose – a fully realized ballad, or a document of an artist at work and truly being herself not long before she died. I like having this recording, I like feeling close to Trish in this moment. I like hearing her be creative and alive.
Some of the songs on Spell Blanket are more or less fully formed, albeit fairly lo-fi. The lo-fi sound suits the out-of-time quality of Broadcast’s music, making the music sound like it’s from either 60 years ago or 60 years from now. It makes the name of the band seem more literal, like we’re hearing something that was transmitted at some point and recorded for posterity. Keenan’s melodies often sound incredibly old and extremely English, like she was tapped into some Jungian collective unconscious of British folk melodies.
“Colour in the Numbers,” one of the most fully realized tracks on the collection, sounds so familiar that I figure it must be drawing on something I’ve encountered at some point. A traditional melody, something very old or religious? Something from a lost BBC children’s show from the mid 20th century? Is that loop a sample, even if Keenan and James Cargill are the only credited songwriters? In any case, the overdubbed harmonies are a wonderful showcase for Keenan’s distinctive voice. She sounds childlike, she sounds like an adult, she sounds like an android, she sounds like a ghost. She sounds like she knows something, and this is the closest we’ll get to figuring out what it was.
May 2nd, 2024 9:18pm
The beauty of Justice’s early material was that it was elegantly crude. They were big and loud and dumb, but also rather thoughtful in their craft. They were masters of artful clipping. Their new record still has some of that going for it, but it’s all much more…tasteful? A little more refined? Or just a little more normal? In any case, a lot of the record sounds like a tribute to the past 25 years or so of French house in general and Alan Braxe in particular. The vibe suits them, especially on a song as ecstatic as “Afterimage.” You know how baking websites will show you how to make a mass produced thing like a Hostess cupcake, and maybe they’ll “elevate” it with fresh ingredients? “Afterimage” is sort of like that, but for filter disco. You get the form, you get the thrill, but that custom vocal instead of a sample? That’s the fancy ganache.
It can be so difficult to write about music like this without sounding like a dork. You can play amateur musicologist, but being a nerd about baile funk gets in the way of making it clear that this music is waaaaay more physical than cerebral. Writing about how aggressively horny the song is just makes you sound like a dweeb, a prude, or a lame perv. Just trust me that this one rules, OK? It’s very fun.
May 1st, 2024 10:48pm
We can always expect Trent Reznor to give a project his all, but who would’ve guessed a movie about a love triangle between three tennis players would inspire him to create some of the best music of his long and impressive career? Reznor and his creative partner Atticus Ross’ score for Luca Gaudagnino’s Challengers is a collection of techno pop bangers that plays up the intense physicality of the film, whether the players are facing each other on the court or entangled in a fraught hotel threesome. The tone is fun and sexy and, crucially, very intense while not particularly serious.
One of my favorite things about Challengers is that at least 15 minutes of the runtime is devoted to the two male leads losing their minds with lust while ogling Zendaya. It’s silly and cartoonish but very effective in showing us that these guys are ultra-horny and bonding over their shared lust for this woman, which turns out to be a step towards openly expressing lust for each other. Reznor and Ross’ score plays up this energy, a musical manifestation of all the adrenaline and pheromones.
“Yeah x10” is to Zendaya’s character what “The Imperial March” is to Darth Vader, a musical theme that immediately conveys everything you need to know about their power and physicality. It’s bombastic, but graceful. It’s flirty, it’s forceful, it’s hyper-focused, it’s meditative. Just as a piece of music, it makes sense that this could fry a dude’s brain and reduce him to nothing but base urges.
April 26th, 2024 12:02pm
The lyrics of “Down Bad” are extremely “written in 2023” but the sound is more like something that would’ve appeared on this site back in 2003-2007. It’s right on the edge of electroclash aesthetics, has a pulsing synth groove that resembles at least three LCD Soundsystem songs, and the vocal melody sounds like something that could’ve been on a Sugababes or Girls Aloud record. But despite sounding so much like music from nearly 20 years ago, it doesn’t hit as retro, maybe because technology hasn’t changed so much in that time to signal any sort of obsolescence. The lyrics are pretty standard for pop these days – bitter and cutting lines about a bad relationship steeped in pop psychology, but I really like the way Tatyana sings “falling for you is such a chore” in a taunting sing-song cadence, and how the verse about this person not having a girlfriend for “more than a couple months, maybe a year” is delivered with a mix of pity and dismissiveness.
April 25th, 2024 6:45pm
Last summer I went to see Phish and they played this song. The show was part of a week of Phish gigs at Madison Square Garden, and it was pretty easy to get an inexpensive ticket on a whim on the day of the gig. Phish is known for having very intense and obsessive fans, but Phish shows – and “jam band” shows more generally – are perfect for casual listeners. It’s a situation where knowing a lot of songs going in helpful, but also sets you up for disappointment since there’s no telling what the band might play beyond ruling out whatever they played at the few shows. You’re meant to show up and just go along for the ride. It’s like a musical rollercoaster that they make just for you and the people in the room on that night, and then never again. I haven’t seen a lot of Phish shows, but I think that night was a particularly fun musical rollercoaster.
I know enough Phish songs to recognize some of the big classics in their repertoire, but not enough to know what they’re playing through most of a set. “Evolve” was one of the songs that really grabbed me in the show, especially when the chorus hook kicks in about halfway through. It’s a warm and generous song, relaxed and easygoing and optimistic to its core. It sounds more like Belle & Sebastian than you’d expect from them. I’d assumed it was an oldie, but it’s actually from a somewhat recent Trey Anastasio solo record, and it’s been rerecorded as the title track of the band’s next album.
Phish studio recordings tend to be pretty dry and matter of fact, like their goal is strictly getting a clean document of the basic structure of a song. That’s basically what you’re getting on this recording. It’s the song, and the song is good, but you don’t get much in the way of improvisational quirks or interesting audio texture. I think this is like how Fugazi would say their albums are the menu and their shows were the meal, but those guys put a lot more into giving their studio output a specific feel. I’m happy to have a nice clean and concise version of “Evolve” that I can post here and include on playlists, but I can’t help but feel the song might be better suited with a more ambitious studio approach. More overtly psychedelic, in one way or another? More room sound, to give a sense of space? Something like that.
April 23rd, 2024 3:08pm
I’m of two minds about Andrew Watt’s involvement in Pearl Jam’s new record Dark Matter as producer and co-writer. On the one hand, I have yet to be impressed by Watt and find that his collaborations with much older legend-status acts like Ozzy Osbourne, The Rolling Stones, and now both Eddie Vedder solo and Pearl Jam feels like the human equivalent of training an AI on those artists’ material. You don’t get new ideas from a Watt production, you just get something closer to the average listener’s expectations of the artist he’s producing. Watt is a fan surrogate, and I think he’s attractive to major labels who want to get the most commercial potential out of their legacy acts and a flattering presence for artists, who get to work with someone rather worshipful who truly believes in them. It makes sense, but in the case of the Stones it’s notable that the songs on Hackney Diamonds that feel the most rote and formulaic have Watt songwriting credits and the one song that actually captures the band’s specific magic is a pure Jagger/Richards composition.
On the other hand, I was listening to Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament talk about the process of making the album with Watt on Broken Record and it was obvious how much the young producer had done to shake them out of exhausted creative patterns and push them back to more of a full-band collaboration. Gossard in particular sounded like he needed Watt’s enthusiastic confidence in him as a guitarist to get hyped up.
I think their previous album Gigaton is much better album and definitely their best record released after the 90s, but I can see how the process of making that one was more labored and less enjoyable. But on that record I could feel them pushing themselves, and Dark Matter sounds like them writing new iterations of stock Pearl Jam songs, and what I mean by that would be apparent if you flick through every album from Yield onward, which is effectively the same sort of songs sequenced in basically the same way over and over. They can’t capture the magic of Ten or Vs again, but they sure as hell can rewrite Yield forever.
OK, slight backtrack: “Waiting for Stevie” actually does get some of the old Ten magic, if just by pushing the band members towards strengths I think they’ve backed away from to some extent for fear of being too repetitive or veering into self-parody. Vedder’s voice is huge on this song, going full-anthem mode after years of a lot of semi-anthem mode. The main riff resembles Gossard’s parts on both “Black” and “In Hiding,” while the climax and outro brings Mike McCready back to end-of-“Alive” territory. This is indeed exactly what people think Pearl Jam sounds like, but in the best, most reverent way. If anything they’re trying to go bigger than ever here, and borrowing tricks from Soundgarden and Jane’s Addiction to get this song properly mountain-sized. I’m not crazy about the mix – it gets a little too tinny and I’d prefer a more pronounced bass sound like you get on “Breath,” but this is Pearl Jam: there will be dozens of looser, and more probably more energetic live recordings, assuming they don’t give up on it early because they already have to play “Alive” at every show and maybe this is just too similar in function?
April 23rd, 2024 3:01am
Gesafflestein’s new record Gamma is 100% sexy goth villain music, a stylish mish-mash of Depeche Mode, Suicide, Iggy Pop, Nine Inch Nails, Matthew Dear, The Cramps, and a dash of David Bowie. It’s camp, but only so much, and mostly just in the deadpan vocals. The textures and programming is sleek and seductive, a sound that perfectly suits the producer’s glossy black metallic mask. “Digital Slaves” is the most fun song the record, an old time rock and roll number with a spooky electronic makeover and gleefully nihilist lyrics. Like a lot of the best goth music, it’s winking and a little silly, but also fully committed to the darkness.
April 18th, 2024 2:12pm
“ItsNotREEAALLLLLLLL” is built around a sample of Orion Sun’s “Mirage,” a little sketch of a song from the singer’s 2020 record. That recording is loose and tentative, like a quick demo that stuck in its abbreviated and minimal form because the woozy, elliptical nature was exactly right for the lyrical sentiment about dissociation. Fred Again takes that vocal and lyrical idea and pushes into a more nightmarish direction, resulting in the EDM equivalent of a A24 horror movie. The music feels like it’s stalking her, her voice sounds warped and inhuman. It’s a sick paranoid vibe, but it goes hard enough that it works as dynamic dance music.
April 16th, 2024 7:00pm
I don’t know a lot about Bad Bad Hats’ Kerry Alexander, but the impression I get from most of her lyrics is that she’s generally working through tensions in relationships in her songs. And that’s a lot of lyricists, particularly in the pop lane, but it’s never really big dramatic moments or spiteful jabs. It’s more about navigating the day to day of stable situations, where little annoyances pile up and you end up sighing “God, it’s always something with you” at the end of a verse. “My Heart, Your Heart” has a soft spikiness to it, a little agitated but ultimately warm and affectionate. I like the way the chorus arrives at no conclusion besides acknowledging that she’s tied tightly with the person she’s addressing. I think it’s Alexander’s way of putting all the little conflicts in perspective – none of this would matter if they weren’t so committed to one another.
April 15th, 2024 12:47pm
Nia Archives has been a crucial figure in bringing breakbeats and drum and bass programming back into pop over the past few years, and her new record Silence Is Loud is her boldest move yet in that she’s going waaaay more pop without compromising her commitment to ultra-fast beats at all. “Cards on the Table” is simultaneously her most normal and weirdest song, a straightforward acoustic pop tune about falling in love set accompanied by zooming busy beats that probably shouldn’t work, but actually do. The lyrics are basically about making it clear to someone that you’re way into them, and the arrangement manifests the emotional state of trying to put on a chill, laid back front while your anxiety and fear of rejection kicks into overdrive. A lot of songs aim to evoke that “butterflies” feeling, but this one is like swarms of butterflies flying around chaotically while you try to play it cool.
The first few times I heard “Espresso” I was trying to figure out why it felt so familiar and then it hit me: this song is remarkably similar to late-period Phoenix, right on down to the melody in the chorus sounding extremely Thomas Mars to me. I’m not sure if this is something anyone involved was shooting for but it’s a great aesthetic. Sunny and fresh and clean and overtly relaxed, but tightly wound in more subtle ways. Sabrina Carpenter isn’t a very distinct vocalist but she has a big personality that comes through in her lyrics – funny and flirty and a little camp, as though she’s trying to bring a Kim Cattrall energy to pop. “Espresso” is basically a song about being impressed by one’s own skill in attracting men, with her telling us up top “I can’t relate to desperation” because so many guys get obsessed with her that it’s mostly become amusing to her. The light and breezy feel of the song is key in making this sentiment work. It’s just not that serious, so it doesn’t come off as either annoyingly arrogant or like she’s trying to prove something to the listener. It’s mostly just “ooh, isn’t this fun?,” and so it is.
April 10th, 2024 8:12pm
Khruangbin is a trio with no weak link, but I find that I mainly connect to their music through Marko Speer’s guitar. He typically plays with a plaintive, understated tone and lets his melodies flow very casually, like an impressionistic story gradually unfolding through his notes. There’s a tendency for a lot of listeners, particularly writers, to think of lyrics as the meat of a song, but music like this is basically telling you words are inadequate, that you have to play a guitar to express certain things. In other words, there’s an elegance and eloquence to Speer’s playing that I think is beyond a lot of the most thoughtful and clever lyricists’ capacity.
I had to look up and verify that Brittany Howard is indeed the sole author of this song because the atmosphere and the pitch of the vocal hook suggested that it was built around the kind of vintage R&B sample that you’d expect to be the center of a Ghostface Killah song. The whole song is in 60s soul mode but I love how the more traditional aspects of the arrangement mesh with the “chipmunk soul” aesthetic, like she’s collapsing down the eras and pushing the sound out of either nostalgia or DJ quotation. The timeline collapse also suits the lyrical conceit – she’s singing about being too overworked and exhausted to have fun, and that’s as evergreen a sentiment as you’re going to get.
April 9th, 2024 5:29pm
Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, a 32 track album split across two imaginary CDs and only available as a single stream on YouTube or a download from the band’s Geocities page, is kinda like getting the entire discography of a really cool lost psychedelic band in one lump sum. Even with the existence of previous Cindy Lee records, this feels like a complete body of work documenting a series of related musical phases. It also sounds like a world unto itself, with a very “live” feel and some of the most beautifully recorded guitar parts I’ve heard in a while. It’s not a hi-fi sound, but it’s not really lo-fi either – it’s more like naturalism with a flattering soft focus. I have no idea what the Cindy Lee working process was like, but the recording and mixing gives the impression of listening in on a rehearsal when the band is in the zone and every improvisational flourish is inspired.
If you go along with the “entire discography” notion, “Lockstepp” is like a mid-career shift into a darker vibe. It’s like a zonked-out glam song with a severe krautrock groove and a goth tonal palette. The lyrics are sung from the POV of someone who seems to come out of some kind of literal or metaphorical cult, a lament about needing someone to believe in and figuring out you probably chose the wrong person or institution. There’s a sick hollow feeling at the core of this song, like you’re in this person’s head and you can’t help but feel the pull of this void they’re trying to fill.
April 3rd, 2024 3:30pm
“Ohio” has three distinct sections and ten credited producers, so I have no idea who did what or which producer(s) may have been responsible for making this collection of beats flow so seamlessly. But the whole crew deserves a lot of credit for building up an incredible tension and heavy atmosphere, particularly in the moody and lightly jazzy first and third sections. I especially like the slow-mo funk of the bass line in the first part and how it flatters the warmth and grit in Schoolboy Q’s voice, and the dreary piano chords and plaintive sax in the final minute that complement the mournful quality of Freddie Gibbs’ vocal tone. There’s a heavy feeling through the whole track, and even if Q is spends a lot of the song flexing he still sounds like he’s passing through some dark cloud.
March 29th, 2024 3:21pm
Anysia Kym is mainly a producer, and it shows a bit on her new record Truest in that the track composition and arrangements are very interesting and convey a lot of confidence in the studio, while she seems a little shy on the microphone. This isn’t necessarily an issue, at least not on “Test Your Patience” where some vocal timidity seems central to getting across the feeling of the song. The whole song feels smooth yet tentative, like she’s tip-toeing her way through a lot of volatile motions both within and without. The vibe is relaxed, but only in a calm-before-the-storm sort of way.
March 29th, 2024 1:39am
“On and On” is an unusually melancholy song about partying, one in which the South African singer Tyla sings about enjoying a party so much that the thought of leaving it and going back to regular life is incredibly depressing. It’s late in the party, she can feel it winding down, and she’s at the bargaining stage of grieving the end of the night. The beat is danceable but the song is more of a ballad, and Tyla sings it with just the right degree of poignancy. She’s not overselling it, but she’s not minimizing the emotion either. You get a sense that there’s some stakes to this that she’s not getting into, something this party is giving her that’s otherwise in very short supply in her life.
March 28th, 2024 1:29am
That bright trebly sound in “Amama” is not guitar, it’s electric sitar. It’s not played in a way that screams “you’re listening to a sitar,” which I find it usually the case with the instrument, but it’s definitely apparent once you know what it is. It sounds like Lila Ramani is transposing a regular guitar part to the sitar, so you don’t get a big drone but you do get this wobbly haze of very high pitched notes. That ultra high end is very pronounced in contrast with Jesse Brotter’s bass, which bounces off a particularly funky groove by drummer Jonathan Gilad. Like a lot of the best Crumb songs, it really moves while also feeling very stoned and zoned out. Ramani’s lyrics aren’t super legible in the mix, but they’re quite good – a little story about falling in love with someone who’s only ever too close or too far away.
