Not A Single Kiss Goodbye

Charli XCX “Camera”

The aesthetic premise of Music, Fashion, Film is basically “pop-punk, but aesthetically interesting.” Charli XCX has been toying with rock sounds through her entire career, so it’s not surprising she’d tip in this direction. If anything, she’s always been a punk making pop and dance music, and not the other way around.

The intriguing thing about this body of work is how she and collaborators AG Cook and Finn Keane reinterpret a very 00s version of rock music. They clearly have a lot of affection for the dynamics of pop-punk and “landfill indie” of their youth, but not so much the drab and limited palette of all that music. They splice up chords, aggressively transpose and mutilate timbre, and glitch it up to avoid plodding rhythms. It’s not unprecedented – for one thing, Madonna and Mirwais were on this at the turn of the 21st century – but it’s well-executed and highly effective in applying fresh style to an overly familiar form.

It is a little frustrating to me that this music is so poetic and evocative in its abstraction of guitar rock, but Charli’s lyrics are direct to the point of total artlessness. I suppose for a lot of people that’s the entire appeal – the sound is ultra stylized, but she’s telling you exactly how she feels. If you have a parasocial investment in her, it may seem unguarded and brutally honest. It might feel like she’s letting you in. But I don’t feel that way about Charli XCX, so the lyrics mostly sound like a flat statement of neuroses. Sometimes it just sounds like she’s singing a press release or publicist approved notes app message. I’m fine with the subject matter, I just wish it felt more of a piece with the music rather than a supposedly artful juxtaposition.

Buy it from Amazon.

Coupdekat “Mwah”

At my age, Goodbye 2012! is a hilarious title for a record. By that point in my life I had been writing Fluxblog for 10 years, had just finished my runs with Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, and was just starting a job as music editor for BuzzFeed. I suppose I have some nostalgia attached to my early days at BuzzFeed – it truly felt like joining a cult early on – but I don’t have a romantic feeling about this era. I was too adult, too jaded, too settled into my identity.

Not so for Coupdekat, who was a preteen in 2012, and made Goodbye 2012! as a way of exploring an innocent time in her life just prior to puberty. I love this idea, if just because I’m curious about what this period looked like to someone from a totally different perspective.

A lot of the record isn’t particularly retro – to my ears a majority of tracks are firmly rooted in contemporary post-hyperpop electronic indie production – but “mwah” is a very evocative throwback to the later phases of what’s now called indie sleaze. It feels more 00s to me, but that’s only because I spent a decade before 2012 collecting songs just like it.

Buy it from Bandcamp.