Author Archive

Slow Club “Suffering You, Suffering Me”

“Suffering You, Suffering Me” initially doesn’t seem to stray too far outside of Slow Club’s established comfort zone – sure, Rebecca Taylor’s voice is a bit more overtly “soul” than usual, but it’s more or less in the same sort of slow, melancholy space as much of their first album. But once it gets going, it shifts into a full-on Motown stomper, and she really cuts loose. I’ve written about how great Taylor is as a vocalist before, but her performances on Slow Club’s new record Complete Surrender are at a whole new level of confidence, and she’s learned to write to this strength pretty effortlessly. But you know, a lot of people can do a convincing R&B voice – the thing that really puts Taylor over the top is how she sings it all with this genuine wounded vulnerability that makes it seem like she could break into tears at any moment. There’s a real sense of urgency in her voice that keeps it from being just another “northern soul” pastiche.

Buy it from Amazon.

Museum of Love “Monotronic”

Museum of Love is a new band led by Pat Mahony, the drummer from LCD Soundsystem. Mahony is hardly a James Murphy clone, but you can definitely hear how working with Murphy has influenced the way Mahony writes his own music, or maybe it’s more that you can hear how they were very simpatico to begin with. A lot of the first Museum of Love record feels like the more low-key LCD songs, but with even more space and a more relaxed tone. Murphy couldn’t help but be bold and extroverted on even his most pensive songs, but particularly on a cut like “Monotronic,” Mahony seems gentle and a little distant. The vocals are a big part of the song, but it sounds like he’s made them seem smaller in scale to the rest of the music, which feels like this wide-open, oceanic space. He doesn’t just sound like he’s being humble – it’s almost as though he’s forcing this humility upon himself as his thoughts go kinda zen.

Buy it from DFA.

FKA Twigs “Two Weeks”

FKA Twigs’ music very often puts a higher priority on interesting texture and ambience than melody, but “Two Weeks” shows just how incredible she can be when the melody and lyrics are as engaging as the surface of the track. The hooks in “Two Weeks” are still relatively subtle for a pop song, but the way the track unfolds is very seductive, which is ideal for a song that is in fact about seducing someone. The lyrics strike a very interesting balance between aggression and submission – she’s in complete control, but is demanding to be acted upon. Her voice is soft, but the words are hard.

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A Sunny Day in Glasgow “Crushin'”

I’ve been listening to A Sunny Day in Glasgow for a long time, and I think they are always at their best when Ben Daniels takes a relatively conventional sort of song and then cracks it apart and rearranges the layers without totally sacrificing the form of it. The core of “Crushin'” – the vocals, the bass, a keyboard motif – is very pop, but everything that orbits the main melodies feels unstable. The song makes you feel like you’re standing in place, but the ground keeps moving beneath you. There’s always a sense of being a sensitive, passive person in ASDIG’s music, but this feels less like you’re being acted upon and more like you’re just lost in a feeling. And in this case, that feeling would be sweet, confusing love.

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Clipping featuring Cocc Pistol Cree “Work Work”

The complaint I’ve seen around about Clipping is that the quality and character of the group’s production style is greater than the actual rapping on the record, and I think I can agree with that up to a point. I have no problem with the rapping on the album – it’s definitely not bad, and certainly a notch above competent. But yeah, there’s no question that the raps are the traditional element at the center of music that otherwise pushes in willfully strange or outright abrasive directions. I think this makes sense, though – to really make good use of unusual musical ideas, you kinda need a basic structure. Clipping aren’t really asking questions about the possibilities of rap; they’re more interested in the possibilities of how you can frame it. A song like “Work Work” isn’t even that alien or cut off from tradition, it’s just like “how about we put this otherwise very catchy and accessible rap song in a track that sounds like a busted Four Tet song?” And of course I’m going to like that.

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Tune-Yards @ Webster Hall 6/22/2014
Hey Life / Gangsta / Sink-O / Real Thing / Powa / Time of Dark / Real Live Flesh / Stop That Man / Bizness / Water Fountain / Find A New Way // Fiya

Tune-Yards “Water Fountain”

This was the first Tune-Yards show I’ve seen in some time, and the first show I’ve seen Merrill play with her new expanded band lineup. There’s a lot of good things about the new band: They add a lot of layers of sound that Merrill previously would have needed to build up in loops, and cutting out a lot of that looping time frees up some time in the show. The strange, unexpected result of this is that her performances with the new players seem a lot less immediate than when she’s just playing with bassist Nate Brenner. Those songs – pretty much all the cuts from nikki back – felt a lot more restrained and over-practiced than the older numbers, which were mostly performed as they always have been. Merrill remains a fierce and charismatic vocalist, but I couldn’t help but feel that the edge of the band had been dulled down by the additional musicians. I’m not quite sure if it’s because there WERE additional musicians – probably not? – but because the particular players were good but not quite on Merrill and Nate’s level. I mean, at least in the sense that those two have such musical chemistry that they can improvise a lot in the moment, and that didn’t seem as much like a possibility when the band filled out.

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How to Dress Well “See You Fall”

Am I wrong to hear The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” lurking underneath the pretty, delicate layers of this song? You catch it in some pauses, when the saccharine vocal melody and the gentle tinkling of piano keys recede, and you feel that slight dissonance and anxious pulse. Without that buried beneath it all, this wouldn’t be quite as effective – lovely, sure, but not as moving. With it, we get a context for emotion, and a suggestion that everything Tom Krell is singing is a lot darker than he’s telling you in his words.

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Priests “New”

Priests are a punk band, and they’re good at it. This is important to say because the sort of things they do very well – convey urgency, project defiant aggression, give off a general vibe of violence and danger – are all conventions of the genre that many untalented bands can barely handle. The thing that frustrates me about a band like this is that while they nail these things, they seem indifferent to pushing beyond convention. And I think that’s a fair enough thing a lot of the time – most music is part of some tradition or another – but that eagerness to conform to expectations seems at odds with the sentiment of the music. This is the problem of punk rock, really – people are so brainwashed into thinking that it’s all transgressive and cool that most people working within it don’t realize how conservative their art is. There’s a lot of power and venom in this band, but they’re still new – I’d like to think that they might do something more bold with their music later on. I’m not gonna count on it, though.

Buy it from Amazon.

Alvvays “Adult Diversion”

My relationship with twee and “indie pop” has always been a little tricky. I mean, I definitely love particularly artists in that realm, but for the most part I have no particular sentimentality or reverence for that canon. I tend to think of indie pop artists as cutesy underachievers with a willfully narrow range of musical influences. In other words, a song in this genre needs to be exceptionally well made and charming to appeal to me. This song is one of those: The tonality and melodic style is familiar, but the execution is fantastic. Like a lot of the best songs in this genre, it’s effective partly because the wistful tone of the song matches the relatively small emotional scale of the lyrics. This is basically just a song about a crush, and not even a particularly intense one. She’s trying to understand it, but there’s no particular urgency. This could be a bad thing for some songs, something that forces your to think “who cares???”, but “Adult Diversion” really connects with the vague pleasure that comes with having this kind of non-problem in your life.

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Lana Del Rey “Shades of Cool”

At least part of Lana Del Rey’s success is owed to the fact that she’s pretty much the only notable artist in pop music who is entirely devoted to performing melancholy ballads and torch songs. That style of pop has been out of fashion for so long that the irony in her music is necessary – the audience’s associations with this particular sort of melodrama and sentimentality are removed from historical context. The music has to be a commentary on its own genre because it’s such a self conscious and contrary thing to embrace, and the modern details in the lyrics should be slightly at odds with the tone of the music. She’s gone overboard with the winking in the past, but with her third album Ultraviolence, she’s found a way to dial down the irony and focus more clearly on the emotion in her songs.

“Shades of Cool” is particularly great because it takes on a very James Bond theme sort of grandeur while keeping the lyrics very direct. This is very plainly a song about a woman who is dealing with a severely emotionally unavailable man, and reckoning with the reality of the situation. She has no illusions about him – the most powerful moment of the song is the part of the chorus in which she sings the words “You’re unfixable” with this odd, trilling tone – but she’s still holding on to some hope that things will work out. It’s a simple and lovely sentiment, and entirely merits this melodramatic arrangement.

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xxxy “No More”

I went to the Governors Ball festival over the weekend, and when I was there I had to reckon with the reality that if you want to see dance/house music in a setting like that now, you’re going to have to deal with a lot of asshole bros. Like, a LOT. I tried to enjoy Disclosure but I just couldn’t, it was too unpleasant and aggravating. And while I get how this happened on a lot of levels, it’s still weird to me because Disclosure’s music is not particularly aggressive or macho. But it is physical, and it is what would be played a lot of the clubs where these people go, and I never do. I like the idea of a dance club in the abstract, but my experience with dance music is more personal — I listen mainly on headphones, the physical experience is limited to things like sorta-dancing in an inconspicuous way at my desk, or walking a little faster down the street, or accelerating a bit on an elliptical machine. In the case of dance music like xxxy, my experience is actually not that different from shoegazer indie music – it’s something to daze off to, to just feel on a musical level that doesn’t necessarily intersect with active thought. I know I’m not alone in this sort of thing, but it still feels like something I should apologize for on some level, as though there’s something bad about enjoying something made for a specific utility in some other way. It’s dumb, but I do.

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Shabazz Places “They Come In Gold”

Ishmael Butler makes hip-hop music, but his approach defies many formal conventions of the genre. Even a lot of the most adventurous rap music tends to be somewhat formulaic in structure, as the music is basically scaffolding to support the rhymed verses. Butler’s music has that, of course, but he’s very interested in building something bigger than a rap delivery system. Ever since he started working as Shabazz Palaces, he’s been playing around with tonal and rhythmic digressions, and in setting a thick atmosphere that doesn’t always need to involve vocals. His forthcoming album Lese Majesty pushes this all much further, with its 18 tracks actually adding up to movements divided among 7 discrete suites. The music isn’t as immediate as the songs on its basically perfect predecessor Black Up, but it’s a lot more hypnotic, ambient, and disorienting. To be honest, I’ve barely processed Butler’s dense lyrics, but it’s mainly because the music is so vivid and shifting that it’s a lot to just take in the experience of finding your way through the overall piece. “They Come In Gold” is about as conventional as Lese Majesty gets – it basically serves as a doorway to a very strange but rewarding musical space.

Pre-order it from Sub Pop.

Jack White “Alone In My Home”

Jack White’s last album, his solo debut, is unquestionably my favorite record he’s ever made. So it’s definitely a let down for me that his second solo record, Lazaretto, feels so uninspired. White has a level of craft and talent that keeps the record from being *bad*, but most of the songs sound like he’s just kinda going through the motions and writing material that falls into his stock song types. He seems content with being himself, which is great, but unless you’re a super fan it’s never that interesting to hear an artist just sorta coast along. It’s funny how the things that get on my nerves on this record – his female duet partner, the lush ’60s country arrangements, White’s old-timey affectations in general – didn’t bother me at all when he had a ridiculously strong set of songs the last time around.

There’s a few keepers, though – “Three Women” and the title track are fine if a bit too much like older, better songs, and “Just One Drink” and “Alone In My Home” are well-written pop tunes. The latter is definitely my favorite – I really like White in piano mode, and the lyrics play on his paranoia and anxieties in a way that doesn’t grate with a sense of martyrdom and entitlement, like a lot of the other songs.

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The Roots featuring Dice Raw and Greg Porn “Understand”

I’m not sure if this song is religious, per se, but it is a very interesting meditation on the way people often reflexively evoke God and prayer when it’s convenient to them, even though they don’t ordinarily live their lives as religious people. Dice Raw flips the idea a little on the chorus, shifting the perspective to a God who is confounded by humanity, where we’re just as much a mystery to Him as He is to us. And if you come at it from a non-religious place, it’s like a structure created so humans can understand themselves has fundamentally lost its ability to do so. And all these people, all of us, are left without really knowing what to do about that.

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Haunted Hearts “Initiate Me”

Dee Dee has been slowly shifting over the past few years from a more demure ’60s aesthetic to something more lurid and ’80s. Her new record as Haunted Hearts with her husband, Brandon Welchez, is the most overtly sexual record of her career. The lyrics are very clearly about S&M and kink, and it’s all filtered through this hazy, Cure-like atmosphere that’s both romantic and sorta sinister. I think this works really well for the both of them – it’s probably better that this is separate from the Dum Dum Girls catalog, though it’s definitely on a similar wavelength of tonality and musicality as their new record Too True. I like that as Dee Dee becomes more bold and open in her music, there’s still this quiet, shy quality to the music – this album in particular is a very introverted sort of sexuality.

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Parquet Courts “Bodies”

It grates on me so much when people say that bands “sound like Pavement,” because they never really do. It’s usually just code for “indie rock band, dude can’t sing.” And while Malkmus is very far from a technically proficient singer, he’s a guy who has a remarkably expressive voice, and that – along with the seemingly effortless grasp of melody and an innate, casual swing to the way he and the others played – is what makes Pavement sound like Pavement. Parquet Courts is a pretty decent indie rock band, but they sound way more like a band who definitely likes Pavement a lot than Pavement. Andrew Savage can sometimes come close to that casual swing here and there, but he and his band can’t help but sound kinda uptight. That’s a really good thing on “Bodies,” which has a vague, neurotic charge to it that makes it feel exciting and evocative. Savage’s voice works here too – he sounds like an anxious guy trying to seem super chill. Sometimes his voice is too flat and dull for me to take, but this is the best approach for him.

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Sam Smith “Money On My Mind”

I think it’s to Sam Smith’s credit that I heard “Money On My Mind” many times over before I actually noticed that the song is entirely about him announcing his independence as an artist. It felt more universal than that, and even if he’s going into some details that are extremely specific to a young artist signed to a recording contract, maybe it is. This song is a statement of idealism and authenticity, and that’s something a lot of young people try to make one way or another. Smith’s lyrics could very easily seem petulant or self-aggrandizing, but the breeziness of the track and the gentle quality in his voice keep it from getting douchey. It just feels really pleasant, but with just enough touch of urgency to the rhythm to give it some nervous energy.

Buy it from Amazon.

Guided by Voices @ 5/23/2014
These Dooms / Table at Fool’s Tooth / A Good Flying Bird / A Bird with No Name / Alex and the Omegas / Authoritarian Zoo / Vote for Me Dummy / You Get Every Game / Game of Pricks / Xeno Pariah / Pan Swimmer / The Head / Buzzards and Dreadful Crows / Psychotic Crush / Wished I Was a Giant / Planet Score / Males of Wormwood Mars / How I Met My Mother / Record Level Love / Echos Myron / Zero Elasticity / Fast Crawl / Tractor Rape Chain / Ester’s Day / Fair Touching / Teenage FBI / Hat of Flames / All American Boy / Gold Star For Robot Boy / Littlest League Possible / The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory / No Transmission / Spiderfighter / Cool Planet / I Am A Scientist // The Challenge Is Much More / Unleashed! The Large-Hearted Boy / 14 Cheerleader Coldfront / Smothered in Hugs /// He Rises! Our Union Bellboy / Shocker in Gloomtown / Awful Bliss / Pimple Zoo / Motor Away /// Cut-Out Witch / Exit Flagger / Quality of Armor / A Salty Salute

Guided by Voices “Males of Wormwood Mars”

I was sorta wary about going to this show, mainly because I haven’t spent a great deal of time with the six post-reunion GBV records, and I don’t feel any particular sentimentality for the “classic lineup” of the band. I simply disagree with that – to me, the version of the live band anchored by Doug Gillard through the early ’00s is the one I love and associate with many great memories. But that was silly: GBV shows are always fun, and Bob Pollard has so much charisma that it’s easy to get on board with an onslaught of songs you only sorta know. I was never tuned out for the many recent songs in this show, and the generous helping of music from the Bee Thousand/Alien Lanes era is always going to be welcome, even if I do wish Pollard would play more from the long middle period of the band’s history. I’m definitely a lot more sold on the new songs, particularly those on this year’s Motivational Jumpsuit and Cool Planet – I think the first few nu-GBV records were a little uninspired, but Pollard and Tobin Sprout are in a good creative zone at the moment.

Buy it from Amazon.

Kate Tempest “Marshall Law”

One of the most frustrating things to me about genre is how it can create this pressure for artists to conform to a set of established expectations, as if all possible ways of working within a form have been exhausted. This is particularly true within rap – the basics of the genre only really require rhythm and rhyming, but it’s so closely associated with a very specific black culture that artists will feel a need to conform – or perform – culture even if they’re not from it at all. (Hi there, Iggy Azalea.) Kate Tempest is exciting because while she is working within rap, she makes no attempt to be anything but exactly who she is: A working class woman from England with a background in poetry and literature. She is purely herself in this music, and I think in doing that is actually closer to the spirit of hip-hop than the sort of white artists whose entire rap career may as well be shouting “hey me too I can do that too” without much self-awareness or cultural sensitivity.

Tempest’s music and creative voice isn’t far off from Mike Skinner’s work as The Streets, but her writing style is far more literary. “Marshall Law,” the first track off her debut Everybody Down, is densely written short story set to beats. Not even in the sense that “oh, it’s a story in a song,” but like, I’m reasonably sure that if you transcribed it, it would read exactly like prose on the page. Tempest’s lyrics are extremely vivid and precise as she narrates an encounter at a terrible artsy party between a girl and an ambitious but quite lonely guy who rambles on about his feelings and personal goals and becomes convinced that he’s found a special person who GETS HIM. Of course, he never really asks much about her, so she gets bored and leaves. Tempest’s words are a cutting critique of this self-absorbed guy, but the song has a lot of empathy for him – you really get a sense of his misery and desperation for a connection, and his cluelessness about his behavior only makes his situation more tragic. He’ll probably never learn.

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Michael Jackson “Love Never Felt So Good”

There are three versions of this song – the original demo, the version with Justin Timberlake, and this glorious, classy disco tune arranged by Timbaland and J-Roc. You can’t go wrong with any version of it, it’s just a gorgeous, joyful song written and sung by Jackson at the pinnacle of his talent, but this is undoubtedly my favorite. I don’t think Jackson would’ve ever done a thing like this if he were still alive; he seemed very resistant to going back to his Off the Wall sound. But this is on par with the best music of his career, and even if it’s morally dubious to mess around with his discarded work after he’s died, I really do think the world is a better place with this song in it. It’s also nice to have a song on the charts that truly connects with the melodic and harmonic generosity of prime disco – compared to this, a thing like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” is revealed to be rather flimsy.

Buy it from Amazon.