Author Archive

Grace Ives “Loose”

I was a little surprised to see that this new Grace Ives single is released by Universal Music Group given the scrappy Bandcamp indie nature of her previous record. But on a musical level it makes sense – a lot of the appeal of her music is how it sounds like someone from a more indie/punk background reworking modern pop aesthetics to suit her, rather than the other way around. “Loose” sounds like a logical step forward for her, full of the nervous energy and sharp dynamics of her last record, but a little smoother and more confident in presenting a big chorus. Ives’ lyrics here fixate on stress and a desperate need to alleviate it, but the angst seems less focused on the immediate concerns of being broke or worrying that you’re not good enough and more on the question of whether this is ever going to end. Like, are you on the verge of getting to a better position in life, or is this just how it’s going to be?

Buy it from Amazon.

Raveena “Kathy Left 4 Kathmandu”

“Kathy Left 4 Kathmandu” presents as a laid-back vacation type of song, breezy and bright and sung with a soft, inviting voice. But that’s all just sugaring the pill as Raveena’s lyrics describe an earnest but clueless “rich hippie” girl who wants to consume an exotic Eastern culture to make herself feel better. It’s covering very similar ground as the Mike White show White Lotus, but whereas that series placed the narrative emphasis on the affluent tourists the point of view here is firmly on the Kathmandu citizen who’s grinning and facillitating Kathy’s Eat Pray Love fantasy while looking down on her and just trying to get her money. The spite isn’t that well hidden but the vibe stays mellow, even when the keyboards fizz and flutter a bit like a slightly malfunctioning hologram.

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Foxes “Growing on Me”

“Growing on Me” starts off with a tone halfway between the euphoria-chasing bopping of Carly Rae Jepsen and the very particular wholesome energy of Maggie Rogers, and honestly, that odd little pop cocktail would be enough to be appealing and interesting to me. The song gets genuinely surprising as it shifts gears into the chorus and moves into a guitar riff that seems to slash and grind backwards against the beat, adding unexpected tension to an otherwise light song and serving as an unusual contrast with Foxes’ bright tone and optimistic sentiment. But then it makes some thematic sense – she’s saying someone has grown on her and she was afraid to admit it, and that riff feels like the resistance she had to move through to get to this more open-hearted feeling.

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Mura Masa & Lil Uzi Vert & PinkPantheress featuring Shygirl “Bbycakes”

I’m not sure I get the major label logic of officially listing Shygirl as the featured artist on this song when she sings about as much as Lil Uzi Vert and PinkPantheress on this Mura Masa track, I suppose it’s because she sings the most memorable part of the hook? In any case, as much as this probably looks like a pile up of random young artists this song feels remarkably organic and effortlessly catchy. I’m sure you could argue a lot about where this lands in genre terms, but I think broadly this is a pleasing intersection of Lil Uzi Vert’s melodic singsong style and a post-PC Music/hyperpop aesthetic that’s like an uncanny valley version of pop for weird digital children. As in a lot of hyperpop music the childlike affect gets subverted by adult concerns – in this case, a suggestion that all three singers are chafing against the restrictions of monogamy and negotiating some kind of polycule situation.

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Melody’s Echo Chamber “Looking Backward”

“Looking Backwards” has the aesthetics and feel of modern dissociation wave psychedelia but the groove of classic Motown. This gives the song a powerful sensation of forward momentum but also a dazed feeling, like you’re just careening into a pleasant void. Melody Prochet’s lyrics get a bit obscured on account of her thin, high voice blurring into the treble but the lines that hit the ear clearly suggest a cosmic approach to processing a break up. There’s a wave of disappointment cresting through this track, but the primary emotion is closer to acceptance.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Drama “Monte Carlo”

“Monte Carlo” absolutely sparkles with a piano and groove-centric arrangement that sounds like the sort of opulent splendor suggested by the title. Drama, also true to their name, use this as the foundation for a song about romantic angst and hesitation, with Via Rosa singing wistfully about an on-again/off-again with someone everyone warned her about from the start. The song comes together to feel like an aspirational sort of melancholy, an entanglement that’s as fun and exciting as it is emotionally taxing. The song just lets you luxuriate in the sadness, never letting you forget how much of the pain is driven by pleasure.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Piri & Tommy Villiers “Beachin”

“Beachin’” is extremely mellow at a high tempo, a dreamy moonlit ballad set to beats that sound like they’ve been yanked from a Roni Size record from the late 90s. Tommy Villiers’ production is rich with details but feels a lot more breezy than busy, judiciously doling out bass notes and never lets the vibey atmosphere of the lead guitar or keyboard washes thicken into a dense fog. Piri sings with very modern English R&B inflections – a lot of restraint and no showy runs, but with an elegant soulfulness in smaller moments. She fits perfectly in Villiers’ track, matching the tone for the most low-key parts while adding a boldness when the bass and breakbeats really hit.

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Black Country, New Road “Good Will Hunting”

It’s interesting how Isaac Wood’s vocals in Black Country, New Road songs sound both witholding and nakedly emotional, as though he’s doing his best to be aloof or stoic and he’s just constantly failing. We’re always catching him as the facade shatters, a shy person suddenly thrust into the spotlight of some movie scored by a bunch of people who wholeheartedly embrace the ornate melodrama of 2000s indie rock. “Good Will Hunting” turns a small moment of Wood imagining an idealized future for a relationship that clearly doesn’t have one into something gloriously bombastic in its sentiment. As the music raises the stakes Wood’s imagery gets more over the top and switches film genres entirely, tossing the sweet summers in France of the first verse for imagining the two of them on a burning starship, and an epic separation across the galaxy. And as huge and overblown as the song gets, it never quite loses the thread of this all just being a guy making a lot out of not much at all and basically just torturing himself.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Spoon “Satellite”

“Satellite” is sung from the perspective of someone honoring boundaries set by someone they love but clearly doesn’t love them, and suffering quietly from a distance while insisting “I know I love you more.” Britt Daniel sings this chorus with the full awareness that his love is in vain but he doesn’t care – this isn’t about dignity, this isn’t about reality or possibilities, this is just about the truth as he feels it. It’s not a threat or even an oath to make good on his love, it’s holding on to something pure inside him for a little while longer before it eventually fades away.

This is a fairly old song dating back to around 2014, and one Spoon had seemingly abandoned in the space between They Want My Soul and Hot Thoughts. I’m not sure what the problem was – maybe it just took a while to find the right level of drama and pathos in the arrangement, or perhaps they sensed the song just didn’t fit on Hot Thoughts, or it could be that Daniel needed some space from this sentiment or moment in his life. It’s also possible that he just wasn’t comfortable with using the same “I’m your satellite” lyrical conceit in both this and “Inside Out,” though I like the way the implication feels totally different between the two songs. In “Inside Out,” it’s more about being caught in an attraction so strong he barely can resist it, and in this he’s just this person orbiting someone on the periphery of their life because he can’t let go.

It’s a similar shift in perspective that makes that chorus so different from Karen O singing “wait, they don’t love you like I love you” in “Maps” despite essentially saying the same thing. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs song comes from a place of vulnerability, she’s finding the courage to say something that scares her a little. “I know I love you more” is a statement of pride, it’s coming from a place of refusing to lose when it’s clear the game is over. Daniel makes the song sting by leaning into that pride, and letting you feel it as he dismantles his own romantic delusions.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Kim Petras “Treat Me Like A Slut”

Kim Petras’ new mini-album Slut Pop sounds like the work of someone who has diligently studied The Teaches of Peaches and has now become a master of extremely horny pop in her own right. There’s obviously been no shortage of ultra-sexual music in the past decade but given her age and where she grew up I find it hard to imagine a lot of the cartoonishly vulgar dance pop I anthologized on my Motherfuckers & Fatherfuckers: Horny Hipsters 2000-2010 playlist were not major formative influences for her. She’s certainly tapping into that specific spirit on “Treat Me Like A Slut,” a silly-but-not-joking banger that’s like a fully ascended form of Avenue D.

Buy it from Kim Petras.

Cate Le Bon “Running Away”

Cate Le Bon often sings lyrics expressing exasperation and annoyance though her new record Pompeii but it’s always in this aloof and steady tone, like she’s always trying to keep up some sense of decorum. This vocal delivery and the cold geometric quality of her compositions suggests an even keel, but it’s really just an accurate depiction of adult emotions – dialed down, managed, nagging questions that get deferred indefinitely. The lyrics of “Running Away” move between declarations (“I’m sick of soft hearts”), clarifications (“I’m not cold by nature”), and lamentations (“You can’t put your arms around it, it’s not there anymore”), but as much as those lines leap out as provocative phrases, the emotional inertia implied by the music is expressed in a more conceptual line in the chorus: “Multi-directional love with nowhere left to go.”

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Animal Collective “Walker”

Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs is a great example of a band circling back to their greatest strengths as musicians/songwriters after a long period of exploration in various configurations, but if you’re paying attention they’ve added a lot of new tricks and ways of playing together. The most obvious changes is that Deakin has grown considerably as a keyboard player and Panda Bear has evolved as a drummer, leading both towards grooves that nod towards R&B grooves without straying from the distinctive feel of Animal Collective. “Walker” combines the boyish harmonies of their most widely beloved music with a strutting groove that’s just on the edge of full funk, all in the service of ambiguous yet clearly reassuring lyrics. The result is bright and joyful, particularly when they accent it all with melodic mallet percussion that adds a little extra sparkle to the mix.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Saba “One Way”

Daoud & daedaePIVOT set up a delicate and subtle tension here, keeping the bass taut and the percussion in crisp, nervey pockets while leaving enough softness and space for the overall feel of the track to seem at least superfically relaxed. They make you feel every little shift under Saba’s voice – a bit of a tug as the tangle tightens, the relief as it loosens a bit, the weight that lifts when it drops almost entirely and feels like a miracle. Saba’s vocal is just as thoughtful and intuitive as the bass and percussion, sometimes gently dragging up against the music and in other moments gliding gracefully with it, conveying some warmth while maintaining a bit of aloof distance.

Buy it from Amazon.

Koma Saxo featuring Sofia Jernberg, Otis Sandsjö, Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen & Christian Lillinger “Koma Kaprifol”

Petter Eldh and his Koma Saxo ensemble approach jazz as though they’re just trying to organically get to where DJs and producers like DJ Shadow and Luke Vibert got with jazz through sampling and digital approximation by themselves 20-25 years ago. “Koma Kaprifol” has the compositional logic of a DJ track – the flute part is played like a loop over the beat, every other element seems to get layered in like a collage. The break sequence that leads to a shift in beat and a more wild bass part even sounds to me like the way Shadow would sometimes cut away from neat loops for a bit of carefully composed funky chaos. Eldh really gets the best of both worlds here, this balance of that meta compositional approach and the energy of musicians in a room actually deliberately playing the stuff rather than having it repurposed later on.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Pom Poko “Enduro Corner”

Pom Poko songs tend to be very dynamic to the point that they can sometimes feel twitchy and impatient, as though the band is always eager to leap to another section from where they are in the moment. “Enduro Corner” has the big dynamic swings but a more mellow disposition as Ragnhild Fangel sings a gentle tangle of melody on the verses over guitar parts that seem to sway in a breeze. This is the tone that dominates most of the song, but it’s in some ways just an extended set up for the big dramatic moment in the chorus as the guitars feel like they’re suddenly dropping you off a cliff. The song eventually resolves into a more relaxed state, but only after a staccato part that somewhat disrupts the calm.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Warpaint “Champion”

A lot of Warpaint’s music sounds very much like the work of a band that do their best in a room together, songs that come across like music that was born in jams and refined through steady work. “Champion,” from the group’s new record largely made by remote through the pandemic, makes the most of their physical separation by moving towards an arrangement that suggests distance and isolation in its cold tones and wide open negative space. But as icy as the keyboard tones are and as clicky as the drumming gets, there’s some warmth radiating through this song. The guitar part sounds like it’s a thousand miles away from the drums but in a way that makes it feel like a far off beacon, and the vocals send a message of support and love from across the apparent chasm. The song doesn’t actually come across as especially sad or lonely, more just meditative, kind, and hopeful in its longing.

Buy it from Warpaint.

Cola “Blank Curtain”

Cola somewhat resemble the sound of Interpol on “Blank Curtain,” but a version of Interpol in which all the members have been unknowingly hit with some kind of tranquilizer. Interpol would play this fast super tight, but Cola play it slow and slack. It feels a bit like the stage of insomnia where your body and mind are totally exhausted but you still can’t quite turn off, so everything seems to happen in a slow blur. Tim Darcy’s voice sounds drowsy and slurred but there’s an obvious core of empathy in his performance even without paying attention to the lyrics, in which he’s musing on someone else’s feeling of emptiness and loss. “I wish it could be easy on you, that I could reduce the cost,” he sings, conveying a genuine kindness but also just a profound sense of impotence in the face of everyday misery.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Gabriella Cohen “I Just Got So High”

“I Just Got So High” feels like a song fully destined to licensing ubiquity, a breezy and instantly appealing and vaguely familiar sorta-neo-soul tune that clearly expresses a powerful romantic feeling but with just enough tension to make it interesting. You could build an entire Netflix rom-com around it, it’s just so easy to visualize this as a montage maybe two or three narrative beats after the meet-cute. Gabriella Cohen sings it all with a flirty charm that feels effortless but also has some stagey contrivance to it, this full commitment to a heightened reality where somehow the whole world is doing great because this one lady has a crush.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Toro Y Moi featuring Salami Rose Joe Louis “Magazine”

“Magazine” falls into an intriguing middle ground between chill and queasy. Salami Rose Joe Louis’ vocal moves between a low mutter that reminds me a lot of Mica Levi on old Micachu and the Shapes songs and a high, breathy sung part that sounds like they’re in a sad daze. The beat is busy but it’s up against keyboard and bass parts that seem to just churn around in circles. There’s enough forward momentum to keep the music from feeling like it’s a holding pattern but Chaz Bear’s arrangement signals a lot of muted frustration. The lead guitar part near the end is very expressive without allowing for much catharsis, and the song ends by basically ducking outside itself and into another unrelated groove that “accidentally” gets warped and eaten up like bad tape.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Fatlip & Blu “Gangsta Rap”

Madlib goes absolutely wild with the sampled surface noise on this track, foregrounding it to the point that it becomes a heavy ambient element so it sounds like Fatlip and Blu are rapping through a literal nostalgic haze. Both rappers take the cue to reminisce – Blu’s verse offers a wry perspective of growing up and finding some direction in rap, while Fatlip recalls friction in the music industry back in his Pharcyde days. There’s an interesting low-key tension in Fatlip’s performance here, like he’s holding back from going off and actively deciding to focus on what he’s happy about in his life. The whole song feels happy but a little bittersweet, the way looking back on the past can just dredge up old disappointments and even if they don’t mean much anymore it still can sting.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Riches “Light of Dawn”

“Light of Dawn” is an expression of love so pure that it might seem naïve. Catherine McCandless sings this sweet, simple tune with total sincerity and seriousness – there’s no wink, there’s no doubt, just total belief in the power of the love she shares with the person addressed in the lyrics. The song is very folk in its structure and melody but the tones are mostly electronic, starting with the simple drum machine beat and moving along to layers of gently treated vocal harmonies. The tonality and atmosphere reminds me a lot of Massive Attack’s classic “Teardrop” but the mood is closer to The Bangle’s “Eternal Flame.” It’s a love so intense and achingingly sweet that it feels sad – maybe it’s a tears of joy thing, or maybe it’s the fear that nothing like this can actually last.

Buy it from Bandcamp.