Fluxblog

Author Archive

6/24/22

The Space Behind The Sky

Jockstrap “Concrete Over Water”

“Concrete Over Water” is a tricky song to write about in as much as a lot of the initial thrill of it is being genuinely surprised by the musical choices made along the way and I’d really rather not spoil that for you. But the arrangement is an ever-shifting thing in which the sections of the song feel like different physical locations, as though we’re following Georgia Ellery’s voice through some elaborate house or varied landscape. Another way of looking at this is that the music responds to her voice, which sticks to a coherent and steady melodic structure and is quite stunning in its natural beauty in a way that’s at odds with some of the more eccentric sounds that pass through the composition. When it comes down to it, this is a case where a band had a very lovely song that could have been played in a normal style but they went a few steps further and made something more strange, beautiful, and theatrical.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

6/22/22

More Than The Dream Itself

Tim Bernardes “Mistificar”

Tim Bernardes’ string arrangement for “Mistificar” sounds a bit uncanny to me, clearly indebted to lush and melodramatic mid 20th century aesthetics but somehow just off-kilter enough to make it feel deliberately anachronistic in the present moment. This is a song about embracing a sort of magical thinking as an essential part of romance, to let down one’s guard and just be corny and starry-eyed. Bernardes pushes against cynicism in his lyrics here but not so much that he’s trying to bury some part of his nature. It’s more that he’s allowing himself to appreciate things he on some level understands to be an illusion because it’s fun and because it’s part of what brings you to set the foundation for satisfying romantic partnership.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

6/21/22

She’s So Flirtatious

Doechii “Persuasive”

“Persuasive” is basically a love song about weed, and not even in a “if you really pay attention…” sort of way as the chorus starts “she’s so persuasive, that marijuana.” It sounds like the sort of music that you’d typically pair with lyrics about obsessive lust, though lust is still very much on the table if they’re willing to be a third. The core of the sentiment here is really about someone feeling as though some elements of themselves are being unlocked – sensuality, hedonism, grace – while every bit of anxiety and awkwardness is at least temporarily locked away. And if our hope for romantic love is to find someone who brings out the best in us and mitigates the worst in us, who’s to say this isn’t truly love for Doechii?

Buy it from Amazon.

6/17/22

Take Your Pictures Off The Wall

Tchotchke “Don’t Hang Up On Me”

The melodies and structure of “Don’t Hang Up On Me” feel so particular to the 1970s that it can be a bit hard to believe it was actually written and recorded in the recent past. And while that statement can be true of a lot of songs that come out, Tchotchke’s music feels all the more unlikely because the melodic style they’re drawing on feels much more extinct than other strains of ‘70s music that are still prevalent like disco, funk, punk, and hard rock. This comes more from a squeeky-clean but kinda glam 70s power-pop aesthetic where the ultimate aim of any song is to pack as many hooks into two to three minutes as possible. (A good example of what I’m talking about is this wonderful but very obscure mid 70s song “Champagne and the Starline,” which I posted here ages ago.) Even the vocals feel out of time, high pitched and hyper-femme in an arch sort of way, signaling a wink to the listener even as the lyrics confront genuine romantic angst.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/16/22

Why Are You So Cruel

The Range “Ricercar”

“Ricercar” is in essence an elaborate rework of Tamar Braxton’s “My Man” that zeroes in one particularly raw chunk of the song as sung by a fan on Instagram. The Range’s arrangement takes a totally different shape, particularly once he starts layering in breakbeats, but it’s all framing this heartbroken and embittered sentiment. What he does here is a little like when there’s one bit of a song that really gets under your skin and so you rewind to that part over and over. This is like building a shrine to a moment like that, and meshing it thoroughly with your own sound and point and view. It’s a totally new piece of music, but also a work of rather intense fandom.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

6/15/22

The Empty Seat Across The Table Is Staring Back

Liam Gallagher “Moscow Rules”

I first heard “Moscow Rules” totally aware that the song’s primary author is Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend but even if I went in unaware I find it hard to imagine I wouldn’t have suspected that by the first chorus. Koenig’s melodic style is unmistakable to me even when he’s clearly aiming to emulate Paul McCartney, as he definitely is on this song. And like, if you’re asked to write for Liam Gallagher why wouldn’t you do that? “Moscow Rules” has a generous melody well suited to Liam’s matured voice, but also gives him something to work with that’s notably different from what Noel ever wrote for him even if they’re both inspired by the same muse. Noel certainly never pulled this sort of pathos from Liam’s voice, but it could be that he’s simply grown into being the sort of singer who can believably convey the alienation, paranoia, and abject loneliness of a Cold War era spy. I prefer to hear this as more of a metaphor though, where it’s not literally a spy but rather someone who’s found themselves embracing and internalizing rules like “everyone is potentially under opposition control” and “lull them into a state of complacency.”

Buy it from Amazon.

6/14/22

The Feeling’s Coming For The Millionth Time

Fontaines D.C. “How Cold Love Is”

Grian Chatten sings the phrase “how cold love is” over a dozen times through this song and every time it feels a little bit brutal, like he’s this exhausted and weary guy telling you a truth you’re not ready to hear and he simply doesn’t have the pity or patience to sugar coat it for you. But it’s clearly more his truth than anyone else’s, as he sounds like someone reciting a mantra to snuff out any lingering fire in his heart. The music feels as stark and unforgiving as Chatten’s vocal, with sorta unremarkable chords played at a slightly odd cadence so it sounds sorta like they’re hammering icicles into the ground. It comes together to sound like something from the late Britpop era pushed to strange angles, making Oasis moves sound more like Joy Division moves.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

6/9/22

The Fading Facade Of A White Collar Dream

Automatic “Skyscraper”

There’s a line from Richard Linklater’s Slacker derived from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies that was made more famous by R.E.M. when Michael Stipe worked it into the hit “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”: “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.” That feels very relevant to Automatic, particularly in this song in which Izzy Glaudini’s deadpan vocal and cold observation of the wealthy sounds like she’s withdrawing in disgust in real time. The focus in “Skyscraper” is on the way the extremely wealthy put a distance between themselves and the underclasses as an escape from reality, but it’s a precarious situation – if things go wrong, it’s a much steeper fall. Glaudini zeroes in on this fear of failure and the way it becomes a prison that can spoil the aspiration to ascend above the rest. In the climax of the song, the one part of the song that’s a little more harmonically rich than the stark skeletal sound of the rest of the track, she perks up the melody just to reach a bleak conclusion: “You’re lost in the fog, your skin fits so tight now you can’t move it all.”

Buy it from Bandcamp.

6/9/22

Something A Little More Revealing

Grace Ives “Lazy Day”

Grace Ives’ track for “Lazy Day” sounds urbane and sophisticated in a distinctly mid to late ‘90s way, like the sort of music you’d imagine for a hip but upscale bar in that era. But it’s not a total match as the implied scale of the music feels more small and private, and the sentiment is closer to what we’d call “self care” today. Ives is singing with a lot of self-awareness about being stuck in a cycle – “I got addicted to the hurt, then the healing” – and the song seems to exist in the healing part of all that. She’s just trying to chill out and enjoy herself, to feel comfortable in her body. Every emphasis in this song is on taking every little bit of pleasure available, and as the song moves towards its conclusion she sounds low-key ecstatic and then mildly contented.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/8/22

A Purple Cloud In The Consommé

Phoenix “Alpha Zulu”

“Alpha Zulu” is a terrific comeback single for Phoenix in the sense that it sounds like a hyper-concentrated version of their aesthetic – the quintessence of the band delivered with exacting efficiency to make anyone who likes them at all go “oh yeah, Phoenix, I like them.” They’ve always been precise technicians of pop and this song delivers a sequence of hooks in well-timed intervals, most likely the result of a careful editing processing but in practice a smooth conveyor belt of catchy moments that build up to one of their finest choruses. The biggest hook is in the lead up though, that rhythmic chunk where Thomas Mars is almost like a Gallic Busta Rhymes with his “woo ha, singing Hallelujah.” He’s singing about preparing for catastrophe there; the rest of the song is more cryptic and full of imagery – “your Mona Lisa immortalized, décapitée,” “I must have died at 51 in 1953,” “a hologram waiting for the tie-break.” As with most of Mars’ lyrics from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix onward there’s always a sense that he’s writing in code, little things that he and maybe his wife will get, but there’s always the alternate explanation of this just coming from a playful use of English when it’s his second language.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/7/22

A Dream Retrieved From A Common Spring

Wilco “Mystery Binds”

Wilco’s Cruel Country is a gift to long-suffering Wilco fans who desperately wanted Jeff Tweedy to get back to making warm country rock records like AM and Being There again. I like but don’t love those records so of course I zero in on the outlier – “Mystery Binds,” a moody and more electric number more in line with the stark and aloof vibes of more recent Wilco records. The song moves like it’s trying to sneak out of a house, a soft chug that leads up to an elegant and vaguely familiar lead guitar hook played by Nels Cline. Tweedy’s lyrics seem to approach misery as a shared experience, like some kind of Jungian collective unconscious, but love as a more solitary thing. It seems true in as much as the person telling you this seems to pass on his sorrows freely, but clings jealously to love like he can’t risk sharing it and thus can’t receive new love. This music feels a bit cursed, but it’s rather lovely.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

6/3/22

A Time When Everything Rhymed

Kurt Vile “Like Exploding Stones”

Kurt Vile’s music always sounds like something made to please himself when left to his own devices, but he’s fine with you listening in. It’s all the languid and indulgent stuff that other artists might tighten up in later drafts, and the kind of slightly goofy lyrics that you might make up on the spot as a stopgap to get the melody down. It’s not as though he’s just recording random jams, though – he is refining everything, especially these days, but the key is preserving the essence of himself at his most relaxed and instinctive. “Like Exploding Stones” leans towards the more produced end of his output, a mellow groove filled out with synths that sound like grey clouds and a sax part that drifts into the mix with a surreal tone similar to that of Destroyer’s Kaputt album. He narrates these moves in real time – “Moog making noise now, guitar’s feeding back now” – and it’s funny in a deadpan way, but then he states that it’s all just at attempt to soothe his own pain and it’s suddenly quite poignant.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/1/22

A Good Look Around

Jean-Luc Swift “B Like U”

The arrangement of “B Like U” is fussy with little details but still overwhelmingly airy and light, bringing to mind a statement of relaxation with lingering trace amounts of tension and worry. I find this song to be a “come for the loose part, stay for the tight part” proposition as I particularly love the sections in which the music seems to compress around a vocal sample that reminds me a lot of the bit in Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” where they repeat “I wanna, I wanna, I wanna.” This part also includes a bit of turntable scratching that really sells a specific late ‘90s vibe, a musical sensation that hits like an unexpected and disorienting wave of nostalgia in the midst of a song with a very different feel to it. It’s a little too cerebral and grounded to qualify as spacey and stoned, but it’s almost there.

Buy it from Amazon.

5/31/22

Seeing Different Numbers

KH “Looking At Your Pager”

Every time I write about Kieron Hebden’s music I end up focusing on his masterful use of vocal sampling, which tends to obscure lyrics in favor of pure vocal sound and melodic inflection. “Looking At Your Pager” goes in another direction – he flips the entire opening verse from 3LW’s relatively obscure early 2000s hit “No More” into a totally different piece of music. The words are the same but the melody is pushed into another shape, and processed just enough that unless you’re paying close attention it doesn’t totally register as being sung in English. The track has a pulse that’s familiar with other Four Tet tracks but the addition of wubs and dubs makes the music pop a bit more in an direct way, like he’s pandering to the floor much more than usual but in the best possible way. On paper this is as obvious and accessible as Hebden gets but the music still retains his essential abstraction, an unmistakable blurry bliss that’s particular to his sensibility.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

5/31/22

My Immediate Action Is Required

Madelline “Participation Trophies”

“Participation Trophies” is written in the plain spoken first person “relatable” voice that has been dominant in young pop for a while now but veers off model in a significant way – instead of being written from the perspective of some annoyed and wronged person, it’s an incredibly self-deprecating song about being a total loser. Send this song 30 years back in time and it’s an indie slacker song, though people might be lost on what “airpods” are. Madelline’s vocal delivery is deadpan even in the more uplifting bits of the song which nudge the sentiment towards shrugging self-acceptance. The production style is clean and glossy enough to make it all sound like a sunny day, but the structure of the song gently rebels against its own drive towards anthemic rock. It gets there, but everything seems to resolve in some form of “oh well, whatever, never mind.”

Buy it from Amazon.

5/20/22

In My Prayer I Don’t Speak

Mallrat “Teeth”

I read a line from Grace Shaw of Mallrat about this song where she says she thinks of this song as something that could’ve been on The OC soundtrack if it existed in 2004, and maybe that’s true, but being a little older that seems odd to me as this music is far more aligned with mid-90s alt-rock aesthetics than the corporate gloss “indie” of The OC era, though there’s obviously a fair amount of aesthetic crossover. I certainly would consider sounding like mid 90s alt-rock to be the more flattering comparison, but I would, wouldn’t I? The main reason I hear “Teeth” as part of that lineage is that it’s built around a very Kim Deal-ish bass line that throbs in a way that somehow conveys both a relaxed looseness and a vaguely sexual menace. There’s a grit and desperation to this music, a sense that you’re dealing with someone under a lot of pressure who’s not afraid to snap. Shaw deliberately conflates sex, religion, and violence in the tradition of PJ Harvey and Tori Amos, and delights in the blur of it all as if to say “why not all three?”

Buy it from Amazon.

5/18/22

Dancing For Pennies

The Smile “Pana-Vision”

A lot of people talk about how they want to feel “seen,” particularly by those who love them. And not just to simply be perceived, but fully understood in that gaze. “Pana-Vision” is a song that makes that concept seem awful and terrifying, with Thom Yorke giving voice to a character who is rattled by his apparent partner’s mysterious, cosmic, and inescapable surveillance. The music is led by Yorke’s piano, which moves between a circular melodic motif and his oddly distinctive way of playing rhythmic chords. Tom Skinner plays jazzy around the piano while Jonny Greenwood goes overtly cinematic in orchestration, making the music fall somewhere in an odd space between eerie horror and regal grandeur. That tone is just right for Yorke’s lyrical conceit – you can’t quite tell whether he’s more frightened or awed through most of it, and by the end he seems to be willfully succumbing to her power.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

5/17/22

When I Decided To Wage Holy War

Florence + The Machine “Girls Against God”

The lyrics of “Girls Against God” were written mid-lockdown, the musings of a woman gone a bit stir-crazy and resenting God for putting her in circumstances where all she could do is dwell on the past without being able to move towards the future. Florence Welch is a singer with a powerful voice that can make anything sound heavy and important, so it’s interesting to hear her sing about feeling pathetic and powerless here. The song opens with her admitting that she never feels comfortable being loved because it makes her feel trapped, and then she’s singing about feeling trapped in her home, and then flashing back to a Tom Vek basement show when she was too young to act on her feelings whether they were positive or negative. The song builds to a declaration of war on God, a symbolic rejection of impotence and passivity, but a lot of what makes the song poignant is her knowing this is just another way of doing nothing in the face of something that feels impossible. It’s just coming from the perspective of someone who knows enough that you have to find a way to claim power, even if it’s all just in the mind.

Buy it from Amazon.

5/17/22

Flame Down Pacific Highway

Interpol “Toni”

Interpol is a band that has stayed within rather narrow aesthetic boundaries for two decades so “Toni,” a song that prominently features piano, can hit as a bold new direction even if everything else about it sounds like an Interpol song. Daniel Kessler’s piano part here isn’t that different from what he’d play on a guitar but it changes the temperature of the music like a gust of cold wind blowing through the room. The delicate tonality of the piano brings out a wounded quality in Paul Banks’ voice on the verses, and then a more majestic feel once the drums pick up and the vocal harmonies kick in. Interpol have always specialized in austerity and stateliness, but this song pushes beyond that towards a refined elegance. Banks’ lyrics, as enigmatic as ever, suggest the point of view of a worn down person who’s feeling an unexpected optimism, though it seems to be tempered by self-interest. The character comes across as complicated, but the music makes the glimmer of hope in the song feel profound and hard-won.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

5/13/22

To Avoid Potential Heartbreak

Sabrina Claudio “Protect Her”

Sabrina Claudio is singing from the perspective of a very exhausted woman in “Protect Her,” a song that’s basically about deciding it’s best not to go out in case she meets someone and falls in love again, which could only end poorly. This song comes at the end of a record that gets into a lot of romantic turmoil, so it makes a lot of thematic sense to close out on an expression of “you know what, I give up.” But as with pretty much everything else on Based On A Feeling, this is a song that sounds extremely romantic and seductive. That central irony is what makes it all click, though – even when she knows better, the pulls towards love and lust is just too strong. The first line of the chorus rings very true – “I fall in love too quickly” – but the concluding line – “girl, just stay home tonight” – just sounds like, at best, a temporary solution. There’s just no protecting a heart that wants connection this much.

Buy it from Amazon.

©2008 Fluxblog

Site by Ryan Catbird