Author Archive

Courting “Famous”

The members of Courting are very young men and “Famous” is very much a song from the point of view of someone who’s only just starting to realize they’ve aged into adulthood. I remember this being a confusing thing – wait, people I know are doing x, y, and z now? I’m expected to make actual decisions? Some of it is time flying, some of it is feeling confused why anyone would trust someone your age to do anything at all. The bittersweet current that runs through “Famous” is Sean Murphy-O’Neill feeling like he’s losing his grasp on social connections that have been meaningful to him. His vocal is kinda like a young English version of James Murphy and he approaches “All My Friends” sentiment from a very different angle, already nostalgic and wanting to pull everyone he knows back together again not long after they’ve left.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

The Orielles “The Room”

I’ve been covering The Orielles here and there on this site since their earliest releases and while there was definitely growth apparent along the way nothing they’ve done before set me up to expect anything like their two most recent singles “Beam/s” and “The Room.” There’s some musical continuity with their past work but the sharp aesthetics of these new songs and the increased scale of their ambitions make them sound like a new band. They say they wanted the new music to reflect their interest in cinema and I absolutely hear it in the dynamic shifts that hit like cuts between shots, and in a palette that somehow sounds the way a high contrast black and white film looks. The vocals keep shifting along with the beats, bass, keys, and fake strings – sometimes it’s a casually confident recitation of poetic lines, sometimes it’s more of a whisper, sometimes it’s clearly sung with a touch of English R&B in the inflection. They’re pulling from a lot of inspirations but landing on something that feels very distinct, like they might have really figured out exactly who they are as a band this time around.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Suki Waterhouse “Moves”

“Moves” is a song with a sentiment that should seem entirely self-absorbed – I want something very badly and must separate myself from you to pursue it – but it’s expressed in a way that feels very generous to the person it’s being addressed to. Suki Waterhouse sings it as a big power ballad love song, something that sounds more like the beginning than the end of something. Maybe it’s more like putting something on hold in the hope of eventually having both? But the affection is unmistakable in her vocal, and the attitude of the song is focused on fighting for what she wants to the point that the melancholy in it is pushed beneath the layers of sound in the chorus.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Oliver Sim “Sensitive Child”

Oliver Sim approaches a lot of bad memories and lingering resentments in “Sensitive Child” but doesn’t get too specific, opting to keep the lyrics focused on evocative images and abstracted details that bring him back to sense memories. It’s like the lyrics are just prompts for him to remember feelings and emote, and that emoting is the actual communication. I recognize this kind of tension, I am familiar with this kind of anger that gets stuffed around the corners of memories. Jamie XX’s arrangement moves around a central Del Shannon vocal sample but mostly responds to Sim’s emotional state and pushes into ugly, distorted territory that feels unusual for both himself and Sim. Moving into relatively unfamiliar musical terrain suits this song well conceptually – if Sim is going to get out of a comfort zone and confront very personal things, he may as well do the same with the tonal palette and rhythmic style.

Buy it from Amazon.

Warpaint “Send Nudes”

If you asked me what a song called “Send Nudes” by a band of women would be like I would have guessed something kinda darkly funny about some kind of awful relationship, but that’s not at all where Warpaint went with this. The title is used with some humorous irony around the silliness of the title phrase but it’s actually pretty earnest – this is a song about an intense and growing love, and even if it’s silly the request “send a couple nudes, baby” is not a joke. Warpaint play this song with jazzy nuance and a minimalism that makes your ear focus in on the details in the bass line and the percussion. The music feels as intimate and romantic as the lyrics, they really nail a spooning/whispering in ears sensation through the whole thing.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Angel Olsen “All the Good Times”

“All the Good Times” has a soft and cozy texture to it – the gentle hum of the organ, the warmth of the bass, the light touch on the drums – that complements Angel Olsen’s sweet but sleepy vocal, making it all sound like she’s just woke up from a dream and reality is coming back into focus. That’s basically what’s going on in the lyrics, with her coming out of a relationship and it’s a little too soon to get an accurate sense of what was going on. Was it always a mess? When did they stop caring? How long did they just go along with it because it was the path of least resistance? This definitely could be performed as an angry song but it’s not at all, Olsen plays it with a lot of lingering affection that makes it easier to get how it all happened and why it hasn’t been easy to break away from. And getting that context just makes it more sad.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Jessie Reyez “Only One”

Jessie Reyez’s lyrics in “Only One” could be read as needy, but I think it’s more that she’s being vulnerable enough to ask for what she really wants of a partner and isn’t afraid if that makes her seem insecure or demanding. Like a lot of classic R&B songs before it this is about negotiating for what you need out of a relationship and advocating for one’s desires, and she’s not asking for anything crazy here – monogamy, being someone’s priority, someone who’s open to exploring her cultural interests. She’s speaking it into the world to draw it to her, manifesting it in either the person she’s addressing or someone else entirely. The song has a strong mid to late ‘90s R&B energy – a loud and kinda cold processed beat contrasted with warm bass and emotive vocals, a go-to combination for evoking a hard exterior and soft interior.

Buy it from Amazon.

Of Montreal “Ofrenda-Flanger-Ego-à Gogo”

One of the pleasures of following Kevin Barnes’ career in real time is that each Of Montreal record truly feels like checking in with them, each record like a scene report on their inner life. In recent years Barnes has cycled through a sort of psychosexual rebirth, new love, paranoia about politics, and embracing/accepting chaos as part of life. This time around on Freewave Lucifer fck Barnes is responding to pandemic-era uncertainty with escapism and dissociation, diving deep into subconscious modes as a response to being cut off from the world. The results are stylistically scattered and a little uneven, but “Ofrenda-Flanger-Ego-à Gogo” stands out as one of their best songs in a psychedelic folk mode. Barnes’ is no stranger to free-association lyrics but the words slip out in this one like each new phrase reveals something about the previous line. It’s not really a narrative, but it’s a feeling given more context. Broadly speaking, this is like Barnes moving to some astral plane and witnessing depressive disconnection at a grand level, like something making its way through a large system.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Ari Lennox “POF”

“FOH” opens Ari Lennox’s second album like a thesis statement that she explores in every subsequent track, and while those facets get very interesting I find this song in which she just lays out all her questions the most compelling. Why does she keep getting involved with lackluster men? Why does she feel pressured to get into a serious romantic relationship as she enters her 30s, and why does that feel necessary if she’s happy with her current success as a musician? She doesn’t spell that out exactly, but her lyrics are plain enough that I’m only lightly paraphrasing her words. I hear a lot of Erykah Badu circa Mama’s Gun in Lennox’s phrasing and arrangement here, which is in and of itself high praise and reason to recommend this song, but there’s a bit more open hostility in her tone. A lot of this song is just understandable frustration and bile as she questions why both her expectations and realities have let her down. She finds some strength in this, but the beauty of this song is in the ambiguity of where she might go from this point where she recognizes the problem but hasn’t yet thought of a viable solution.

Buy it from Amazon.

Carlos Truly “Why Suffer??”

“Why Suffer??” is an odd mutant R&B song that nevertheless moves with a lot of grace, slinking and gliding and floating around and giving Carlos Truly a lot of space to exude sensativity and sensuality. The music is cozy and sexy, but…what the hell is this guy singing about? As far as I can parse this it sounds like he’s encountered some woman he’s attracted to after a minor car accident, learns she has a husband, and then he’s just like “this guy seems gross, why suffer the indignity of being with him when you could be with me?” The song positions it all like maybe there’s some abuse going on but all you really get in the lyrics about the husband is that he’s naked and sweaty at some point. Songs don’t really need to tell complete stories to work and this one certainly gets by just fine on purely musical charms, but there’s so many missing or vague details in this one that it’s hard to even tell where this song is coming from. Is this a song about a guy with a crush who develops an unreasonable grudge on this lady’s husband, and he’s meant to be an unreliable narrator? Or is this more like a song about a guy we’re meant to understand as a hero and his judgment of this husband is meant to carry more weight? I like it better if it’s the former.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Fanclubwallet “National TV”

“National TV” is written from the perspective of someone who is somewhat recently out of a relationship that clearly got very codependent and they’re adjusting to the other person’s life moving on while they just…haven’t quite done that yet. Plenty of songs are about this, but the things that really intrigue me about this one is how Hannah Judge’s lyrics deal with resentment about having an influence on a partner’s life and art – “can you believe this guy? He’s starting to sound like he’s just like me” – and approaching their own music with dread because they’re worried the songs are about them. And he’s got a new girlfriend – and she looks just like her? This is all pretty normal stuff but rendered with exactly the right level of low-key irritation and simmering anxiety around wondering whether you were just a type, or if you’re being actively replaced because you got annoying. This is a song that benefits from the implied distance and shy affect of classic indie rock because if you came in too hot on any of this it would just feel like too much for the topic, but at this temperature it’s underplaying the anger in a compelling way.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Gorillaz featuring Tame Impala and Bootie Brown “New Gold”

Damon Albarn has used Gorillaz as a vehicle for exploring a lot of musical ideas through the past two decades but there’s one trick he’s figured out that no one has come close to rivaling – electro-funk groove + energetic rap + plaintive indie vocal. This is the basic formula for a lot of the most successful and widely beloved Gorillaz songs – “Feel Good Inc,” “Superfast Jellyfish,” “Stylo,” “Ascension” – and it’s the setup for “New Gold,” their best song in a little while. It’s a delicious little ice cream sundae of a song, a perfect balance of those three core elements with a little bit of Albarn’s vocals tossed in like rainbow sprinkles. Tame Impala’s presence is the most overwhelming ingredient as anything with Kevin Parker’s voice ultimately sounds like anything else with his voice, but there’s just enough contrast between him and Bootie Brown’s verses to keep it squarely in the aesthetic realm of Gorillaz. And they’re all certainly on message with the lyrics, sketching out a vision of post-apocalyptic society not far off from most anything on 2010’s Plastic Beach.

Buy it from Amazon.

Louis Cole “I’m Tight”

“I’m Tight” is a song showcasing Louis Cole’s dazzling skill as a funk bass player, but then you go and read his bio and it says “Louis’ main instrument is the drums.” This is impressive, but also vaguely infuriating – like, really, this isn’t even your core competency? Cole plays everything else on the track too like he’s Stevie Wonder or Prince, and comes pretty close to attaining the sort of magical tight-yet-minimalist funk of the latter circa Controversy. The big difference is Cole doesn’t have a magnetic and sassy persona or an overwhelming warmth and soulfulness, and rather than emulate that kind of presence on the microphone he goes in a totally different direction by embracing neurosis and self-deprecating humor. The lyrics don’t jump out enough to overwhelm the funk with irony but he spends a lot of the song trying to sort out what he thinks of himself and embrace the parts of himself he feels good about. It seems like he’s deliberately approaching a genre that’s traditionally hosted a lot of strutting confidence as a challenge to find that in himself, in his own weird way.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Betina & Boogarins “Polaroids”

Pretty much every sound in “Polaroid” feels as though it was arranged specifically to please my ear but the part that really puts this song over the top for me is the bass, which has the slo-mo groove and womb-like warmth of a classic Jamaican dub track. Boogarins’ track pulls in sounds from other sources – modern and classic psychedelia, some traces of classic Brazilian pop, a touch of R&B – but it gracefully avoids any particular genre, though I get the sense that we’ll have better terms for this sort of aesthetic down the line. I do love the neither-here-nor-there of it, and the way Betina’s vocal moves between different shades of melancholy so there’s a definite feeling but an ambiguous degree of intensity. The weight of sadness and positive feeling is constantly shifting through the song, and that fluctuation seems to be the point.

Buy it from Amazon.

Glove “Modern Toy”

Halfway through Glove’s grinding rave-up “Modern Toy,” after the second fake-out ending, Brie Deux sings a line that made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it: “How does he handle heavy machinery?” The first few verses and choruses are all about alienation from culture and labor, and a “modern guy” who is disposable and forgettable. Deux sings it all like a vicious taunt, like she’s a representative of the system that’s making these men useless. But that switch up offers hope – maybe he does have a utility, some useful skill? Maybe it’s literal, maybe it’s about how much he can cope with being a cog in this machine. Maybe this strapping man doesn’t have to be destroyed, even if that would provide some cheap kicks.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Aidan Noell featuring Nancy Whang “Sharevari”

It’s not easy to make an effective cover of a classic electronic dance song – you can update it to make it sound modern with new technology but strip out a lot of the song’s character; you can radically alter it and bring it into another genre; you can try to clone it but what’s the point of that? Aidan Noell and Nancy Whang’s interpretation of A Number of Names’ 1981 Detroit underground banger “Sharevari” stays very true to the track’s original arrangement and dutifully replicates its beat programming and keyboard parts, but they transform the vibe of the song with their vocal performances. The original mix features vocals from a guy who sounds like a dance club Dracula – a vague European accent, a seedy but dignified attitude. Noell’s voice sounds more youthful and innocent, like she’s only recently descended into this sexy underworld and is excited to tell you all about it. The original sounds like it’s fronted by a seasoned old seducer, this one is more like the seduced taking a crack at the seducer role.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Dora Jar “Bumblebee”

“Bumblebee” is shamelessly sunny even with its somewhat self-pitying lyrics, though even the darkest lines come across as more playful than genuinely angst-ridden. The opening line “obviously you’re already over me” sets the tone perfectly – sure, there’s some bad feelings to be felt, but the stakes are pretty low and you’re listening to someone who’s trying to have some fun. It’s definitely a young person’s song in the sense that it’s approaching some emotional realities of dating that become very mundane as you move along, but it feels remarkably well-adjusted in outlook and thus more appealing to my adult ears. It’s sweet, it’s light, it delights in the very notion of possibilities even as some of them close off.

There’s a lot of extremely literal music made by very young musicians today that I can’t really get into because the teenager-ness of it is so strong that I don’t think even a well-constructed tune can withstand the cringe factor for anyone older than the intended audience. I don’t think music marketed to teens was always like this – when I was a teenager anything made specifically for teens was deeply uncool and we mostly just got the same music marketed to people in their 20s and 30s, and I think the waves of teen pop through the 2000s and 2010s always had an eye towards scaling up to mainstream credibility. The algorithmic hyper-specificity of TikTok has pushed a whole generation of kids to make music specifically for their cohort in a very utilitarian way, and while this is interesting it feels like deliberately disposable music. A little like fast fashion?

Buy it from Amazon.

Hot Chip “Freakout/Release”

The first time I heard “Freakout/Release” was at Hot Chip’s show at Avant Gardner in Brooklyn back in May, well before a studio version was available. This was an advantage in that I could be genuinely surprised by the big turn in the song when it happened as I was coming to it without “spoilers.” This part of the song, in which the band shift into a heavy rock riff after starting off in a classic Hot Chip electro-funk mode, is a bit less dramatic in the studio recording. Some of this is probably in just mixing it so it made sense as a track, but it’s still a thrilling dynamic move that delivers on the promise of the title. The structure of the track is like an answer to Alexis Taylor’s lyrics, in which he’s fretting about feeling jaded about music and not getting the kind of rush he got from it in the past. He’s blaming it on everyone else – “music used to be in love, but now people leave it or take it” – but the song implies that the answer is simply shifting it up and breaking out of old patterns. A lot of a thrill is just enjoying something you didn’t expect, so why not toss a big dumb guitar riff?

Buy it from Amazon.

Desire “Black Latex”

The best thing I can say about “Black Latex” is that it’s a song that fully delivers on the promise of naming a song “Black Latex.” Johnny Jewel’s arrangement is a strict machine built around a single menacing synth chord and electronic syncopation that gets off on witholding the funk but gives you just enough to groove. Desire’s spoken word vocal walks a similar tightrope – obviously sexy but not crassly sexual, flirtatious but not cute, romantic but not precious, intellectual but not nerdy. It’s more a scene than a song, a vision of an alternate reality created by two people with an intense bond and shared taste.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Lynks “Silly Boy”

“Silly Boy” is basically a banger entirely devoted to Lynks mercilessly roasting some obnoxious straight guy who everyone loathes for his consistent awful behavior. Actually “roasting” seems too benign to describe the goal here – it’s much more like gleefully humiliating this guy, maybe with some dim hope that he actually reflects on how he lives and course corrects. You know, maybe! For the most part this is just wild energy and vicious bile, and any ugliness to the overall vibe is pardoned by Lynks bullying exactly the type of person in the world who it’s totally justified to shame and belittle.

Buy it from Bandcamp.