Author Archive

Merchandise “Enemy”

I was not particularly interested in the earlier incarnation of Merchandise. I didn’t hear fully formed songs in their recordings, and I don’t think that being a band who plays a lot of DIY gigs is even remotely intriguing. But this new version of the band on 4AD has my attention, in part because they’ve embraced a level of craft and a particular approach to recording that reminds me mainly of music that’s extremely unfashionable among the sort of people who had up til now embraced a band like Merchandise – R.E.M., Joshua Tree-era U2, James, later Tears for Fears, and all manner of tastefully produced early ‘90s major label alt-music. They’re good at too! “Enemy,” the best cut on their new record, sounds like Peter Buck strumming alongside The Edge over a relaxed yet brisk beat. There’s a lot of implied negative space in the music, but it’s not begging you to notice that like a lot of airy indie rock does. They’ve just absorbed something really key about the way Brian Eno produced bands like U2 and James – you can play things very straight forward and really let people hear the chords clearly, but it will pop a bit more if you add just a touch of ambience.

Buy it from Amazon.

QT “Hey QT”

This song, a collaboration, between Sophie and A.G. Cook from PC Music, may be actual proof that the universe likes me and wants me to be happy. This is all concentrate energy and joy, and somehow manages to feel fresh and new while also feeling vaguely nostalgic. I’m not sure for what – does it just feel like a pop song from 10, 20, 30 years ago? Is it more about reconnecting with the feeling of loving a silly pop song when you’re very young? Either way, this feels like a big step in Sophie’s evolution in particular – there’s a lot more to the structure of the song than the blunt minimalism of the first two singles, and there seems to be something more pointed here about the way he insists on pitch-shifting his voice to sound like a female singer.

Buy it from Beatport.

Ty Segall “The Singer”

In a strange way, this song strikes me as the midway point between Pavement in 1995 and Oasis in 1995. I say “in a strange way” because neither of those bands really did waltzes, and it doesn’t literally sound exactly like either band. But on this song – and a few others – Segall is gesturing towards a shabby psychedelic balladry that Stephen Malkmus sometimes gestures towards, but can’t quite do. And it’s also in the solo, and the pleasing slackness of the rhythm section. The Oasis part is in the nasal pinch of Segall’s voice, and the more refined side of the arrangement, which goes all in on a sort of drama Malkmus has always shied away from. It’s a magnificent song, and maybe it’s ridiculous for me to say this after spending an entire paragraph comparing him to other artists, but I feel like this is the song/the album where Segall has really found his voice as an artist.

Buy it from Amazon.

The New Pornographers “Dancehall Domine”

Of all the songs on The New Pornographers’ sixth album Brill Bruisers, “Dancehall Domine” is the one that most reminds me of the sleek, turbo-charged sound that made me fall in love with the band back in the very early ‘00s. They never really abandoned that sound, but this one feels like a fresh spin on the signature sound – a little colder, a little harder. I really like the lyrics, which seem to be addressed to a newly famous person, and it made me realize just how many New Pornographers songs address the idea of fame and chasing status. “Dancehall Domine” works so well because it’s both skeptical of the social constructs of fame, but also really sympathetic to someone who may suddenly feel very overwhelmed and out of their depth.

Buy it from Amazon.

Arcade Fire @ Barclays Center 8/24/2014
Reflektor / Flashbulb Eyes / Power Out / Rebellion (Lies) / Joan of Arc / Rococo / The Suburbs / Ready to Start / Tunnels / We Exist / My Body Is A Cage / No Cars Go / Haiti / Afterlife / It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus) / Sprawl II // Dream Baby Dream (with David Byrne) / Here Comes the Night Time / Normal Person / Wake Up

Arcade Fire “Here Comes the Night Time”

I’ve seen a bunch of Arcade Fire shows going back to 2007 in venues of varying shapes and sizes – a small church, a huge field, a converted movie palace, an arena, a makeshift club – and this was, by FAR, the best show I’ve ever seen them play. The tour they’re on now is the one where they’ve fully realized all of their ideas and aesthetics, and pushed them further into this colorful carnival spirit that I think it took a while for them to fully inhabit. When I saw them last year, they were using a lot of the same costumes and the bobble head people, etc, but it just wasn’t quite there yet. It all seemed forced.

But now all the Reflektor songs are very lived-in and they fans know them well, and the band is working with a much bigger stage and higher production values. They can pull off performance art staging like dramatizing Orpheus’ quest for Eurydice during “It’s Never Over” and have it seem fun and cool rather than dorky and pretentious, and end “Wake Up” by leaving the venue on a New Orleans second line playing a jazz version of the song. They can have guys in high heels dancing to “We Exist” on a stage in the middle of the room, and get David Byrne to dress up like a dracula and sing backup on a Suicide cover. They can blast confetti and have a bunch of auxiliary percussionists and genuinely make people dance through much of the set. It just clicks. This whole carnival thing is part of them now, and it’s a good thing – a problem with the earlier incarnation of their show was that it was just a bit too dour, and all deep dark catharsis and not much pure fun. Now they are pulling off a full tonal range, and it’s a far richer experience.

Buy it from Amazon.

Girlpool “American Beauty”

These girls are putting up a bratty front in this song, and you can tell they’re pretty excited to push the envelope a bit by singing “eat me out to American Beauty. That’s fun, but what really makes this work is that they’re not too cool for their own song and are singing very genuinely about lust. There’s a tacit acknowledgment in this song of the willingness to be vulnerable in order to follow through on that, and the way you can try to keep some defenses up even after you have.

Buy it from Girlpool’s BandCamp page.

Kero Kero Bonito “Sick Beat”

It’s funny to get this song in the same week that Taylor Swift dropped a single in which she describes a totally conventional pop 4/4 as a “sick beat.” This track actually does make good on the promise of a sick beat, and taps into the same manic, surrealistic pop aesthetic of this trio’s South London contemporaries – A.G. Cook, Sophie, the general PC Music crew. Whereas Cook’s tracks feel like they could veer off in another musical, tonal, or lyrical direction at any moment, “Sick Beats” is a lot more linear. This is more about energy and color, and the way the lyrics slip in and out of English, and keep flipping between inane, silly nostalgia and lines that clearly come from a mature, feminist perspective.

Buy it from iTunes.

Nicholas Krgovich “The Backlot”

The first line of the chorus of this song should resonate with, well, most any human being who has moved on from a relationship: “I don’t know what came along and tricked me into believing that you were the only one for me.” There’s a lot of ways you could deliver a sentiment like that, but Nicholas Krgovich and his collaborators undersell it a bit, and make it feel like the sort of rational hindsight a few years after it all goes wrong, rather than the immediate aftermath. The entire song is lovely and calm, but the airiness of the arrangement is offset by the blunt rhythms played on the piano. That gives it some oomph and texture, but also makes the emotion of the song feel very strong and grounded.

Buy it from Tin Angel Records.

Kimbra “Madhouse”

Who knew that Kimbra, the girl from that “Somebody That I Used To Know” song, had it in her to make a solid art-funk album that legitimately sounds like late ’80s Prince? I like these little surprises in life. “Madhouse” is the most overtly Prince-ish track on the record, but there’s echoes of a lot of music he’s made or inspired over the years throughout the album. (I hear Erykah Badu, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Janet Jackson, of Montreal, Spektrum, Janelle Monaé in there too.) But despite belonging to this lineage of freaky funk pop, it doesn’t feel rote or devoid of imagination. The production feels very fresh and contemporary, and her persona is different. She’s not a big character like a lot of the artists I’ve mentioned, but she has a distinct tone to her voice, and a way of implying that she’s at a simmer, but about to roll over to a boil.

Buy it from Amazon.

Mr. Twin Sister “Blush”

Back when Mr. Twin Sister was known simply as Twin Sister, the band’s best material were the tracks where they strayed away from shoegaze-y indie stuff and embraced a very mid-90s moody sophistication. They wisely have kept moving in that direction, and “Blush,” a single from their forthcoming record, nails this aesthetic better than anything I’ve heard them or most anyone else do in recent years. “Blush” falls somewhere between early, straightforwardly soulful Erykah Badu and the rich, smoky atmosphere of trip-hop era Portishead – this is so obvious that virtually all descriptions of the song mention this, but it’s such an inspired combination that it now feels shocking that no one has done it before. I hope this isn’t a fluke for them, because it’d be fantastic to have a full album of songs in this vein.

Visit the Mr Twin Sister site.

Cam’ron “Lala”

Cam’ron is a rapper who has aged very well on record in large part because his vocal style has never been about projecting youthful vitality or energy. He has a very NYC kind of laid-back cool, and his cadences always feel relaxed and lived-in. My favorite thing that he does with his voice, and you can hear it on this track for sure, is add a light smirk to end of his lines that sounds both defiant and affectionate. Even when Cam is angry, he never sounds like he’s mad at you, and that he’s letting you in on something.

Buy it from Amazon.

Saint Pepsi “Fiona Coyne (Maxi Yo Remix)”

Look, it’s not easy to choose between this version of “Fiona Coyne” and the original mix by Saint Pepsi. They both have the optimistic vibe and perky groove, but they come at it from different angles. The remix is nearly half as long as the original, and starts off feeling a bit loose and spacey before shifting into a more assertive and direct groove accented by keyboard horn hits. Like a lot of Saint Pepsi’s music, the song really thrives on tapping into a classy-kitsch aesthetic, and approximating the sort of clean, digital interpretation of disco that was big at the beginning and end of the ’90s.

Visit the Saint Pepsi page on SoundCloud.

Love Inks “Shoot 100 Panes of Glass”

If someone had lied to me and told me that the forthcoming record by Love Inks was a new album by Young Marble Giants, I would have believed that without a moment of hesitation. Love Inks draw on more or less exactly the same formula – extreme minimalism built upon the implication of tension in an empty space, all sense of movement coming from simple drum machine programming, and a very particular vocal tone and cadence. Love Inks feels just a bit colder somehow – maybe it’s the difference between digital and analog, maybe it’s in the way Sherry LeBlanc sings with a more confident, measured tone than Alison Statton. But either way, they decorate the void at the center of this track very well.

Buy it from Amazon.

Weezer “Back to the Shack”

A lot of the best recent Weezer songs – and there’s really not that many, so we’re talking about a small sample size here – are basically just Rivers Cuomo singing about his job. And that’s a strange thing for a guy whose most famous work connected with audiences because they saw themselves in his lyrics, even when he was being creepily specific. (Especially when, in the case of Pinkerton fanboys.)

“Back to the Shack,” the first single from the band’s forthcoming ninth album, is a self-consciously “back to basics” song with lyrics that sound like a musical press release announcing the band’s intention to reconnect with their lapsed fans. The entire first verse is an apology, with Rivers saying that he regrets taking his core audience for granted and making some ill-advised moves in the hope of chasing new fans. At face value, this is a terrible idea, but somehow he makes this work because he delivers these lines with his characteristic blend of earnestness and goofball wit. He’s just being himself, and unlike a good chunk of the band’s more recent catalog, it doesn’t seem like he’s dumbing himself down or acting like someone trying to emulate the feelings of a normal person. The song comes across as emotional and sincere, and maybe we can’t all relate to this directly in terms of being an aging rock star, but it’s not hard to connect if you think about it as an expression of regret about losing touch with what you see as your most authentic self.

The thing about this song is that it can easily set up a disappointment. The chorus is fantastic, but it’s also a promise that the band might not be able to keep. Will this new Weezer record fully reconnect with the spirit of their early years? Or is that just something they have to say in order to get anyone interested these days? This is a good song, but it’s really just a jingle advertising the next record, and while I don’t personally have a lot invested in this, it’d be nice if they followed through on this promise.

Buy it from Amazon.

Spoon @ McKittrick Hotel 8/3/2014
Knock Knock Knock / Inside Out / Small Stakes / The Beast and Dragon, Adored / Do You / Don’t Make Me A Target / Outlier / Who Makes Your Money / Rent I Pay / Got Nuffin // I Turn My Camera On / You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb / Black Like Me

There were a lot of moments in this special Spoon show where I was just thinking about how they are almost definitely the best existing rock and roll band. Yes, there’s a few rock bands who are still together who are in the same league as artists, but they aren’t quite “rock and roll,” and I think that matters a lot. Most of the best rock bands of the past two decades are in some way embarrassed to be rock at all, and either do whatever they can to distance themselves from cliches, or introduce some element of irony to it all. Spoon don’t do either of those things. They hold on to a lot of the best elements of rock that have fallen away – raw sexuality and swagger, direct passionate emotion, pure physicality – and filter it through a distinct and modern approach to arrangement, performance, and production, so it all feels fresh. Their magic is being able to simultaneously convey wild spontaneity and total formal mastery. It’s a rare and special gift, and they pull this off just as easily in the more abstracted space of a studio recording just as well as they can on stage.

Spoon “Inside Out”

“Inside Out” is a song about gravity, both metaphorically – Britt sings about being locked into a woman’s romantic orbit – and musically, as the elements in the arrangement all respond to the implied gravity of the bass line. Spoon do this a lot, but the negative space in this track feels especially vast. But still, despite that, it feels remarkably intimate. Maybe it’s because Britt sings so much of it like a soulful whisper. Or perhaps it’s the way the bass pulses in a way that feels like hearing someone’s heartbeat through their chest. Sort of distant, but also so close.

Buy it from Amazon.

Redinho “Playing with Fire”

I know lyrics are besides the point in a song like this – it’s really all about the tonality of the keyboard parts and the way the melodies seem to gently lean against the beat – but wow, this guy really isn’t messing around with the easy rhymes and clichés. I don’t think it hurts the song even a bit, and really, pop songs are pretty much the only place in life where you should be able to get away with fire/desire rhymes. Also, if you’re gonna make a song this chill, why should you stress about trying to say anything “original”? It’d just get lost under those gorgeous neon synth textures.

Visit the Redinho page on Soundcloud.

GFOTY “Don’t Wanna/Let’s Do It”

Here’s another track from the PC Music crew, and it’s one of the most bizarre and confounding pop songs I’ve ever encountered. The structure is glitchy and warped, but in a way, that’s not too weird. A lot of music now is glitchy and warped. This is interesting in how the voice and lyrics are bent and clipped up too, so it’s really hard to get a sense of whether there’s any deliberate, linear connection between the sections and tangents, or if it’s all just a silly string of inane non sequiturs you might overhear on a city street at night. A lot of the appeal of this for me is in the tension between those two things, and the way it makes me feel like I’m just not cool enough to pick up on what these very young people are trying to say. I’m always a sucker for music that does this, and implies it’s all a code to be cracked.

Visit the PC Music page on Soundcloud.

Sophie “Lemonade”

I don’t really know much about Sophie other than that despite the name, it’s a male producer. Or something. Not knowing anything about Sophie makes his songs feel even more alien than they already do – like “Bipp” before it, “Lemonade” is a pure, direct R&B/rap-derived pop song that feels like it’s been warped in some indescribable way. Everything feels rubbery and unreal, particularly as it shifts into this bright, pitched-up chorus out of the rhythmic verses. At some points it sounds like Max Tundra if he could pull off a banger, but for the most part, it just feels fresh.

Buy it from iTunes. You definitely want to hear the b-side.

A.G. Cook featuring Hannah Diamond “Keri Baby”

Sophie doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As far as I can tell, there’s a small crop of producers in London on a similar wavelength – short, extremely catchy rap/R&B-centric pop with odd, hyperactive production and extremely youthful vocals. A.G. Cook, the apparent mastermind of PC Music, is extremely good at this, and this collaboration with Hannah Diamond is a perfect example of it’s very teen-ish aesthetic. The vocals shift between playground rapping, sing-song, and chopped up robotic phrasing. I’m particularly fond of the bit where Hannah Diamond sings “I don’t want to be / an MP3 / three two oh / kay bee pee ess / you know that I feel / kind of real / kind of ooooh,” partly because it’s just so clever, and mostly because it seems like there’s a mission statement buried in there.

Visit the PC Music page on Soundcloud.

Jenny Lewis “She’s Not Me”

This is basically a song about seeing one of your exes go on to have a seemingly happy and stable adult relationship, and wondering if that relationship works entirely because their new partner is just a lot easier to deal with than yourself. The line that really stings is when Jenny Lewis says “I bet you tell her I’m crazy,” which is a safe bet, because people are always compelled to turn their ex into a villain. In this song, Lewis doesn’t seem to blame the guy – she does admit to cheating, after all. Lewis sings all of this with a touch of sadness and regret, but mostly seems pretty mellow about it. The tone of the song suggests an emotional state that’s moved on from being hung up about the past relationship, but certainly not from the sort of negative, self-doubting impulses that poison relationships, or keep them from ever happening.

Buy it from Amazon.

Veruca Salt @ Bowery Ballroom 7/24/2014
Get Back / All Hail Me / It’s Holy / Straight / Forsythia / Spider-Man ’79 / With David Bowie / One Last Time / Don’t Make Me Prove It / Wolf / I’m Taking Europe with Me / Venus Man Trap / Celebrate You / Aurora / Museum of Broken Relationships / Hey Little Ghost – Seether / Shimmer Like A Girl / 25 // Shutterbug / Volcano Girls / Victrola / Earthcrosser

Veruca Salt “Don’t Make Me Prove It”

This was a show by the original reunited lineup of Veruca Salt, which had dissolved sometime around 1998. I never got a chance to see them play as a teenager, but in retrospect, I think that’s fine – I certainly appreciate them more now, and the band on stage seemed as though they’d walked through a time portal from the mid-’90s. They appear to have barely aged despite being in their mid to late 40s, and they rock really, really hard. One nice thing about seeing Veruca Salt now is that their very presence highlights the reality that nearly all rock bands led by people in their early to mid 20s today are substandard in songwriting and anemic in execution. There were so many excellent bands in the ’90s that it was possible for people to shrug off a band this good and fierce because we just had so many options that we could get really picky. In 1995, they were part of a glut. In 2014, they’re like a goddamn miracle. It’s not nostalgia, it’s just the thrill of seeing someone do this RIGHT.

The mood of this show was very warm and celebratory, and focused on these four people enjoying being on stage together after years of being apart. Louise Post, the only member who stuck with the Veruca Salt name over all that time, was clearly the most excited, and took a bit of time in “Celebrate You” to talk about how they – and especially she – managed to get over their shit. I’m sure she does this at every show lately, but she’s very genuine, and it’s kinda inspiring to see people actually get over petty grievances and long term grudges. I think particular to a band like this, it can be hard for talented people to really appreciate the value of chemistry until they have to do without it. Nina Gordon and Louise Post just click, and one of the things you really get from seeing them live as opposed to hearing them on record is the extent to which their vocal and guitar parts are constantly intertwined. On paper, there’s Nina songs and Louise songs, but on stage, there’s just Veruca Salt songs.

Buy it from Amazon.