Author Archive

Broadcast “Lights Out” (Evening Session 1997)

The studio recording of “Lights Out” on Work and Non Work is lovely but relative to this live session recording it feels colder and more distant. To put in terms from the song’s lyrics the studio version feels as though you’re the stranger on the other side of the glass as Trish Keenan waves to you, and this Evening Session version feels like you’re right there with her in her lonely little room. The recording implies intimacy, but only in terms of proximity as Keenan still seems aloof and unknowable as she sings about a loneliness and boredom so pervasive in her character’s life that it hardly even sounds melancholy. It’s more like an emotional equilibrium in which circumstances don’t seem likely to improve, but they’re tolerable enough as far as available options go. Keenan sings as though vague disappointment was simply the baseline of all feeling, and the music somehow conveys a drab existence while also sounding quite fascinating and stylish in the approximate musical equivalent of mid-century modern furnishings.

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Destroyer “It Takes A Thief”

Labyrinthitis mostly provides the sort of things we’ve come to expect to hear on Destroyer records: New Order-ish synthpop rendered entirely in overcast tones, some atmospheric guitar songs that feels like a fantasy of a romantic experience, and lots of Dan Bejar doing his wry Dan Bejar thing. (I am particularly fond of how he delivers the line “Now, what do you call it when every part of said bird is used?” with total gleeful depravity.) “It Takes A Thief” is the surprising outlier, a bright and groovy number that somehow gracefully contrasts sophistipop touches with slapstick sound effects over a chunky bass line. It’s a song that probably would’ve fit in well on a New Pornographers record in tonal terms, though I think bringing more harmony to this may defeat some of its charm. I like the way Bejar sounds silly and playful here, like he’s the bewildered star of a comedy about a band that takes itself very seriously.

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Father John Misty “The Next 20th Century”

“The Next 20th Century” is a song only Father John Misty could write. In fact, it may be the most “Father John Misty” song he’s written, the one where he perfects his very particular way of stacking a world weary cynicism upon dark humor and sick ironies without it collapsing in on itself or negating the very sincere longing and despair at the center of it all. He’s practically daring the listener to take him the wrong way from the opening line, but if you make it through to the concluding verse his POV is very clear: This is someone who sees the same old tragedies in each new disaster and doesn’t believe there’s any real escape from the world we’ve all been making for centuries on end. Even romance and fantasies are infected by the rot, even the purest true love is burdened by the weight of historical context. “And now things keep getting worse while staying so eerily the same,” he sings, really getting to the bitter core of the song. Everyone is waiting for some brutal apocalypse, but we never get the punishment we crave. It’s worse to live in the anticipation.

There’s a deliberate cinematic quality to the arrangement “The Next 20th Century,” with little nods to westerns and melodramas along the way. The song is aiming for a very 20th century sort of grandeur, but true to concept, the song itself sounds more like an endless plateau rather than some dramatic vista. The instrumental spaces between verses are the most striking musical elements of the piece, particularly in how each verse is punctuated with a very different sound. After the first time, it’s a glorious and melodic string sequence. After the second time, it’s a thunderous distorted guitar solo. The space between the third and fourth verses is mostly just a simple keyboard part plinked out in a way that makes it sound very small and tinny in the middle of this grandiose track. It’s a very effective moment of calm but also something that foreshadows the feeling of impotence expressed in the following verse.

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Disclosure & Raye “Waterfall”

Like a lot of electronic production duos Disclosure work through a lot of collaborators but it’s usually pretty easy to tell you’re listening to them – there’s always a very particular bounce to the keyboards, like it’s springing up off the beat with a precisely calibrated degree of force. The best Dislosure songs are energetic and joyful but also a little relaxed; for the most part they convey a casual level of fun and a low-key sexiness. The English singer Raye makes the most of this aesthetic in “Waterfall,” a song that tries to keep its effusive praise of a new partner at least a little coy until the chorus hits and then it’s just waves of unmitigated euphoria. It’s not too far removed from what they did with their breakthrough hit “Latch” years ago, but the anxious tension in that song is replaced here by a willingness to let the song hit an uncomplicated high.

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Oliver Sim “Romance With A Memory”

The xx is a band with a sound so narrow and specific that while there’s a lot of room to work within that aesthetic, there’s also a lot of creative directions that simply wouldn’t work. It’s a situation that gives its members license to do very different things on their own, and in this song Oliver Sim moves confidently into a sort of minimalist neo-soul direction. The minimalism isn’t just in the track, which is produced by Jamie xx but has the crisp warmth of a Richard Swift production, but also in Sim’s vocal which indicates its soulfulness in understated gestures. He starts one of the verses with the line “Handsome, all I wanted to be was handsome,” and that’s exactly the word to describe his voice here. It’s the sound of a casually attractive man, and he’s presenting himself as the romantic lead of this little drama. The catch is that this is a song about a romance that only existed in his head, and he’s wrestling with the notion that this guy has had more of an impact on him as this mostly fictional character than he probably would have if they’d actually kissed and connected. He wonders if this is some kind of punishment, but the sting in the song is him coming up to the realization that he’s more engaged by fantasy than reality even if it’s less fulfilling.

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Soccer Mommy “Shotgun”

I didn’t know Daniel Lopatin produced this song until after I’d heard it several times, but that bit of contextual information made a lot of sense of the part of this song that threw me for a loop the first time I heard it, and still kinda does now. It’s in the shift from verse to chorus, the way the texture of the sound completely changes on a dime from this dingy grunge bass line with a sorta plodding beat to this burst of melodramatically mood synthesizers that don’t sound as much like actual 80s new wave music as it sounds like The Smashing Pumpkins’ late 90s approximation of that aesthetic in the Adore/Machina era. The heart of the song is in that sudden shift more than it is in either tonal palette. Sophie Allison is singing about a relationship that sounds kinda bleak and depression on those verses, and in the chorus she’s romanticizing the situation. She’s pledging that she’ll be there no matter what, even if she’s aware of how self-destructive it is. She’s covered similar ground before on “Yr Dog,” but that song was pretty much the opposite and declaring that she’s had enough of this sort of thing. But you go back to that sudden kick into the keyboard endorphins and it all makes sense why she’s getting dragged back in. She and Lopatin really nail that effect here.

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Tyler, the Creator “Come On, Let’s Go”

People like to say they “feel seen” in art now, and I suppose this happens rarely enough for me that I never consider it to be a virtue worth seeking out. But here we are with an entire Tyler, the Creator song about being a punctual person totally aggravated with someone else for running late and potentially screwing up your plans, and… yes, I relate to this quite a lot! The song is played as a joke, but only up to a point. The frustration and anger here is exaggerated from comedic effect but still very real, and the deeper tension in the song is a nagging question of compatibility: “Although we in love we are NOT the same.” Tyler made the track with Pharrell and the music plays up the impatience with pulsing tones that shift over into clattering beats, all these little sounds that convey annoyance without tipping over into sounding annoying. I recognize this very well, though I should say it’s not necessarily the most positive way of “feeling seen.”

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Charli XCX “Yuck”

Until the chorus hits “Yuck” could easily pass for a Dua Lipa hit, a groovy quasi-disco number with an urbane gloss and lyrics focused on love. But once that chorus comes we’re firmly in Charli XCX territory – a little bratty, a little silly, and deliberately subverting pop expectations. The premise of this one is very clever: she’s into this guy, but he’s too into her and laying it on thick with romantic gestures she finds utterly nauseating. It’s just as relatable as a typical love song but covering more specific ground, particularly as the lyrics and the whole feeling of the song nudges toward an unstated question: Why the hell do I even feel this grossed out? Is this a matter of taste – bro, can you please just be cool? – or more about self-sabotage, insecurities, or anxieties about being smothered? There’s a lot going on in this song that could easily just be taken as a joke.

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Omar Apollo “Tamagotchi”

“Tamagotchi” is essentially an acoustic ballad about trying to hook up on the road but tricked out by The Neptunes so that the Spanish guitar takes a secondary role to classic Williams/Hugo syncopated drum programming with an emphasis on a booming bass drum. The guitar part feels a little cold and crystalline, so the shift into chords on the outro feels like a sudden warm breeze coming through the track. Omar Apollo tips between rapped and sung parts that mostly stick to bragging about designer clothes and trying to get laid, but he follows the lead of the chords and gets rather tender on that outro, layered with lovely harmonies and comically – but effectively! – contrasted with the widely sampled “DON’T STOP! POP THAT POP THAT!” bit from Luke’s “I Wanna Rock.” That last thing probably shouldn’t work, but the Neptunes really work their magic by making it click right into the arrangement.

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Red Hot Chili Peppers “Poster Child”

I like to imagine Anthony Kiedis alone in a room memorizing his own lyrics, particularly for a song with a dense rhyme scheme like “Poster Child.” It’s a funny image, but I’d genuinely like to get a sene of how seriously he takes the craft of doing something so goofy yet carefully balanced against the fluid, casual funk of the rest of his band. Kiedis’ vocal is actually the tightest element in the song, everything else feels exceptionally breezy and light in a way that’s unusual for Chili Peppers singles. John Frusciante’s presence after many years away is very apparent – he was always the guy bringing a bit of elegance and grace to the band’s hypermasculine physicality, and in this case you find everyone else just trying to flow with his mellow energy. Kiedis’ words are mostly silly doggerel but I appreciate the musical and cultural canon he’s sketching out here, and his apparent pledge to do his best to get on the level of what he loves.

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Guerilla Toss “Happy Me”

The songs on Guerilla Toss’ excellent new record Famously Alive are bright and bold in a way that’s half cathartic and half confrontational, as though they’re daring the listener to embrace a positive mindset in the face of seemingly insurmountable anxiety, despair, and dire external circumstances. Kassie Carlson sings from the point of view of someone actively fighting through all this and has managed to break through to the other side, and is now rushing back to tell everyone else – this can be done! “Happy Me” is the climax of the record and the point where the lyrical theme running through all of it is stated outright over a groove that seems to sparkle and gleam before moving into a more triumphant mode at the end. Guerilla Toss successfully pull off a tightrope walk in this music – one false move and they could fall into a cheerful, saccharine abyss. But they keep the sound just weird enough to avoid a very 00s sort of goofiness, and the lyrics based in dark realities enough to keep it from being just hollow inspirational chatter.

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Folly Group “I Raise You (The Price of Your Head)”

To some extent this song feels like a delivery mechanism for catchy get-everyone-in-the-club-screaming-along chorus, but my favorite parts here are actually the verses in which Sean Harper speak-sings a vocal flow that playfully glides around the beat he’s laying down on the drums. Harper’s lyrics come across like a polite and cerebral diss track in which he essentially tears into a sell out performer. The line that really knocks me out is more a sick burn on this person’s audience than anything else – “strange work to consider your finest / that catalyzes such shyness from the spineless.” This song’s dynamics will surely prevent it from ever getting that kind of response – the groove has post-punk twitchiness but krautrock drive and steadiness, and the bit where they stop cold for a second on a Harper singing “the world stops” is a clever way of pulling more of a rap production move in a rock song.

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Just Mustard “Still”

“Still” sounds like a love song gone wrong, as though the singer has been knowingly seduced into something quite ominous. The music is horror film by way of post-punk, a soft and innocent-seeming vocal from Katie Ball contrasted with cold industrial beats, eerie ambiance, and a severely distorted guitar part that seems to violently scrape through the surface of the audio image. Ball sounds like she’s sinking into something – I imagine something like the alien bringing men into the black tar in Under the Surface – but is cautiously happy to be succumbing to the experience.

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Sales “Moving By Backwards”

Sales’ aesthetic template is essentially the same as that of Beach House – a generally drowsy sound built around the combination of drum machine, spare lead guitar lines that get a lot out of lovely tones, and a female vocalist who tends towards understated phrasing. The key difference, particularly on “Moving By Backwards,” is that Lauren Morgan comes across as a warmer presence in the music than Beach House’s Victoria Legrand, who has more of regal quality of elegant standoffishness. Sales is less dreamy and more overtly sensitive, with the minimalism of the track leaving Morgan’s vulnerable performance sounding particularly exposed. It sounds a bit like taking the core of a shoegaze song and removing all the sound that would normally bury it, but instead of shrinking in shyness Morgan just commits to singing it like she’s staring you right in the eyes.

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Automatic “New Beginning”

Automatic have an energy and attitude that reminds me a lot of what was going on in the earliest phases of this site in the early to mid ‘00s – all those skewed electro-punks with pop know-how and a hedonism driven by nihilism and/or pessimism. You can hear traces of the likes of Chicks On Speed, Le Tigre, Erase Errata, The Rogers Sisters, and Enon in “New Beginning,” but the music feels fresh rather than nostalgic. A lot of this comes down to Automatic’s sophistication in deploying their blunt minimalism, particularly in how judiciously they drop in the synthesizer. The groove is carried entirely by the rhythm section so Izzy Gluadini’s synth is used entirely as a punctuating effect, like this heavily distorted WRONG!!!! buzzer that gets slammed to put the listener on edge. This is a nice contrast with Gluadini’s vocal, which is rather cold and detached as she sings about human desire finding a way to overcome obstacles up to and including total societal breakdown.

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Goose “Dripfield”

Goose are a jam band in both practice and cultural context but “Dripfield,” the title track of their forthcoming third record, doesn’t really sound like anything you’d reasonably expect from that world regardless of whether you have positive or negative associations with it. “Dripfield” sounds more like the work of a band rooted a general post-Radiohead lane of alt-rock, a song that would sit comfortably alongside the likes of Sigur Ros, My Morning Jacket, TV on the Radio, Muse, or Coldplay at their most adventurous. If you told me this was produced by Brian Eno, I’d believe it – it certainly has the feel of when he applies his aesthetic vision to striving, searching, epic rock music. If you’re looking for the jam band elements you can find them, mostly towards the end of the song when the tension breaks and a bright guitar solo feels like it absolutely could head off into a more improvisational direction but instead settles into a gently decelerating outro. I’m very curious to see where Goose go with this – if they keep moving into this type of rock while maintaining the philosophies and concert structures of jam band music they would be exploring very new musical territory. Like, I don’t think anyone was ever wondering what it’d be like if U2 and Phish could somehow be the same band, but this is making a good case for what that might be like.

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Belle & Sebastian “Unnecessary Drama”

Part of the long term charm of Belle & Sebastian’s body of work is the way they seem to deliberately operate at a 20-30 year lag from musical trends, gradually picking up new sounds to integrate once they feel sufficiently old and nostalgic. In the case of “Unnecessary Drama” they’ve caught up with rock dynamics of the early 2000s, which is ironic since they actually existed at that time and sounded nothing like this. Or at least the core rhythm section didn’t – aside from the core groove and the particular sound of the bass, this feels very much like a Belle & Sebastian song, though the punch of the chorus combined with the harmonic approach actually brings them closer to Twin Cinema era New Pornographers. (I saw them play shows with The New Pornographers in 2005! The slow drip of influence, maybe.)

“Unnecessary Drama” is one of the most interesting post-pandemic songs I’ve encountered, largely because unlike most artists’ impulse to approach the subject matter from a place of expressing anxiety and dread, Stuart Murdoch focuses more on the need to face the situation and figure out a way to thrive in it. This is a very Murdoch point of view – even before the pandemic, large chunks of his body of work dealt with basically the same situation of pushing towards joy and human connection through personal issues and chronic illness. Murdoch is never patronizing in doing this either – in this song he really puts a lot of the focus on the difficulties and nuisances, and all the possible mistakes that can be made along the way. But the song is asking you, even if this is your “so-called life,” what else are you going to do if not actually live it?

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Kate Bollinger “Who Am I But Someone”

Kate Bollinger’s music often feels very light, both in the sense of weightlessness and illumination. This is a lot of the appeal of her music, which mostly feels like it was created specifically to sound wonderful on a breezy spring afternoon. But it’s also a little ironic as Bollinger’s lyrics are consistently very neurotic, not so much that she seems cripplingly neurotic, but definitely like someone who overthinks a lot of things and is prone to getting deep in existential thought spirals. “Who Am I But Someone” is more in the latter category, a song in which Bollinger sounds fairly serene as she considers why she feels stuck in repetitive self-defeating behaviors. “Who am I but someone who will resign to the comforts of who I always was” is definitely a sentiment I can relate to, but I’m intrigued by how even the more depressive lines are expressed as if in a state of total emotional equilibrium. She’s not coming at this from a state of angst, it’s more like half meditative half analytical. She’s singing about inertia, but she sounds like someone who’s identified a problem and is actually fixing it through cognitive behavior therapy pop music.

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Earthgang featuring JID and J Cole “Waterboyz”

Daoud, Phoelix, and Groove’s arrangement for “Waterboyz” is slinky but off-kilter, mostly built around the contrast of a busy bass line and something that sounds like a guitar sample pitched up to the tonality of a sitar. The percussion and keyboards shift around through the piece, framing each rapper’s voice a little differently while keeping a steady verse/chorus/verse structure and consistent feel. While this is a posse cut with guest features the most memorable parts here are definitely Johnny Venus’ chorus and bridge parts – there’s a fun, playful tone to his vocal, and he plays off the producers’ syncopation rather than just flow along with it.

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Denzel Curry featuring Slowthai “Zatoichi”

“Zatoichi” moves fast and then much faster, shifting gears into a drum and bass chorus in which Slowthai’s rapid-fire rhymes are blasted out in the mix so his voice hits more like ambient noise than rapped bars. The track, produced by Powers Pleasant and Jonnywood, is an energetic vehicle for Denzel Curry’s aggressive vocal performance but there’s a dreamy atmosphere that runs through it that softens the impact a bit. There’s a bit of wordless R&B vocal – a sample, actual backing vocals, I don’t know – that adds a touch of pathos to the music as it overlaps with Curry’s rap, suggesting a sadness lingering beneath his bravado.

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