Author Archive

Cat Power “Bad Religion”

Chan Marshall does a lot of things in her covers that I typically hate – she slows songs waaaay down, significantly alters melodies and chord progressions, emphasizes the lyrics over the music. But this all works for her because her approach isn’t a matter of just playing a song, it’s more about showing us how she’s heard a piece of music and connected with it. It’s as though she’s heard something that has moved her, scribbled down a lot of notes and lyrics that resonated with her, and then she made another piece of music based on that. Her version of Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” barely resembles his original, trading out his muted gospel for a cautious rhythm and guitar and piano tones that will sound familiar to anyone whose heard her ‘90s recordings. But you can really feel how she internalized his song, particularly the parts in which he’s spilling his guts to an anonymous cab driver because he feels like he’s under siege and he’s desperate to finally just say some things he can’t stop thinking about. Marshall zeroes in on the exhaustion at the core of the song and moves from there, connecting to her own terrible memories by way of Ocean’s exasperated vulnerability in the original recording.

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Guerilla Toss “Cannibal Capital”

The tonal palette of “Cannibal Capital” is bright and super saturated, a throwback to the sort of indie music that was a few steps removed from kid’s music that was ubiquitous through the 2000s. But Guerilla Toss aren’t particularly twee, just energetic and colorful – the rhythm is twitchy and the lyrics express a gnawing, overwhelming and near-constant angst. It’s become rather banal for musicians to sing about anxiety now but Kassie Carlson takes an interesting wide angle on the ideas here, imagining emotions as a delicate economy prone to surging highs and crashing lows brought on by external factors. The chorus and bridge parts aim for ecstatic catharsis but don’t quite achieve escape velocity, maybe in part because that’s the part of the song where she’s wondering if escape is even possible. This metaphorical economy is just the same as real literal ones – you can imagine something much better, but could you ever actually make it happen?

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The Smile “You Will Never Work In Television Again”

I love that Thom Yorke basically waited until people entirely topped asking for him to make straight-ahead rock music to get back to making straight-ahead rock music, and I also love that Jonny Greenwood, the other member of Radiohead anyone would have reasonably expected to be uninterested in making straight-ahead rock music is the one doing it with him. It’s a bit contrary in the way you’d expect them to be, but The Smile also just makes sense as a creative move. It’s not surprising to me that Thom Yorke would want to move away from the more electronic and rhythmically dense music he’s made on his own for a very long time now. It is totally logical to me that Jonny Greenwood, a guy with an aptitude to write and play just about anything would gravitate to the opportunity to focus on bass guitar, the instrument he hasn’t had much opportunity to explore since that’s his brother’s role in Radiohead. And it makes sense that they’d play this with a drummer like Tom Skinner, who plays with more blunt physicality than Radiohead’s Phil Selway.

It’s not hard to imagine “You Will Never Work In Television Again” as a Radiohead song, but to transfer it to that template would likely mean adding some extra layers of sound that would diminish the rough simplicity of the arrangement. You could make the song more dense and louder, but the point is made well enough by Yorke’s frantic guitar and Skinner’s bashed out percussion, with Greenwood lurking behind the din adding subtle contours to the music. Yorke’s vocal lags just behind the beat like he’s chasing the song down and yelling at it as it accelerates away from him. There’s some resemblance to “Bodysnatchers” from In Rainbows and the Bends era b-side “Permanent Midnight,” but for the most part this is a different kind of rock song for Yorke and Greenwood, something that’s more primitive than what they’ve previously attempted but informed by the nuance and complexity of the music they’ve made together and apart over the years.

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Max Changmin “Airplane Mode”

“Airplane Mode” opens in medias res on a verse, the atmosphere around the gently rolling bass line already so thick that it feels like unexpectedly walking into a room full of dry ice fog and dramatic lighting. The particular guitar tones and the starkness of the arrangement remind me a lot of the xx, but with a more overtly pop density of composition – imagine if Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft ditched Jamie xx for Max Martin while still aiming for their familiar hyper-romantic vibe. Max Changmin, a veteran of the K-pop duo TVXQ, sings with light R&B inflections like Justin Timberlake at his most wistful and brings a perfectly calibrated level of cinematic romance to the song. It’s not so much to be overly syrupy, but just enough to feel like a more restrained and tasteful choice to fit into a moment in a rom-com depicting a pained yearning for something that might be lost forever.

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Blood Red Shoes “Morbid Fascination”

It’s entirely possible that Laura-May Carter’s lyrics in “Morbid Fascination” are coming from a fully autobiographical place, but the scenario strikes me as more of a dark fantasy – finding a recent ex in a bar, sitting beside them in disguise, and hearing them describe you in a very unflattering light from their perspective. There’s a lot of places you can go from this point emotionally, but the industrial glam arrangement – think Garbage, or Goldfrapp, or certain mid-90s PJ Harvey songs – feels bold and brutal, like an armor protecting Carter from the emotional impact. She feels betrayed and angry and wonders if she actually can’t see herself clearly, but mostly the vibe here is “actually, it’s funny.” And part of that is hearing herself portrayed as “someone else,” and part of that is laughing at her own capacity for masochism.

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Kodak Black “Love and War”

Pompano Puff and J Gramm’s track for “Love and War” is focused mainly on a melodic percussion figure – a mirimba, maybe? – offset by placid guitar strums. Both parts feel gentle but I like the way the busy melody sits against those slow chord changes, like a touch of anxiety that’s soothed out by a bit of zen calm. Kodak Black’s verses play up a different contrast in expressing genuine romantic interest while still requesting nude videos and offering to send a dick pic when he’s horny. I’m not sure if this is meant to be as funny as it comes off, mainly because I think he’s just speaking plainly about the context he’s experiencing this in, the courtship rituals of his day. The emotion of the song strikes me as rather earnest to the point of being cute, and it just works well as a portrait of a kinda gross young guy who’s caught real feelings for maybe the first time ever.

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Moonchild featuring Lalah Hathaway “Tell Him”

“Tell Him” feels soft and delicate, but mostly because about trying to maneuver gracefully around tensions. You can feel a bit of anxiety bubble up in the left hand piano notes, but it’s not enough to get in the way of the brighter, more placid chords that set the mood. The vocals by Amber Navran and Lalah Hathaway covers interesting emotional ground – being frustrated in a relationship because verbal communication has been eclipsed by the power of physical intimacy. They’re not unhappy about the sex, but they do feel stifled and disempowered. The best solution they have is to have someone else do the communicating on their behalf, but who knows how well that will go. The song isn’t about telling you how that works out, just letting you linger in this weird space where pleasure and happiness is soured a little by this conundrum.

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The Weeknd “Gasoline”

I love that as The Weeknd drifts out further into the realm of new wave he’s taken on an over the top British affect – in the case of this song, “it’s 5 AM my toime again.” Winking at a previous generation of dour synthpop does more to alleviate a tension in the music than spoil the mood, and starting from this point gives him some runway before getting to the extremely bleak lyrics about reaching out to someone while relapsing and pondering what seems like imminent death. A lot of what he’s singing here could easily come off as maudlin, but the slightly playful tone makes it all go down smoother while suggesting that as dramatic as this is it’s all just a routine to him. This is, after all, the guy whose most famous song is also about being wasted and calling someone at 5 AM because “when I’m fucked up, that’s the real me.”

The music, largely composed by Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never, is a marvel of programming and well selected synth tones. Just as The Weeknd nods to the likes of Level 242 and When In Rome in his vocal without getting too far off from his grounding in modern R&B, Lopatin suggests 80s-ness more than he evokes anything specific from the era. “Gasoline,” like a lot of the songs on Dawn FM, moves The Weeknd from the more overt pastiche of the smash hit “Blinding Lights” towards a more timeless musical expression of decadance in which ’80s synthpop is just one of many spices in the curry.

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Talking Heads “Don’t Worry About the Government”

My listening habits naturally cycle familiar catalogs in and out of rotation, and in some cases I can go a very long time before coming back around to particular artists. A lot of what brings me back to an artist is based on whim or chance, I think in the case of David Byrne and Talking Heads just recently it was sparked by Byrne drastically changing the setlist of his Broadway show and including a few songs from Look Into the Eyeball, which is basically tied with Remain In Light as my favorite record in his body of work. (I know this is an uncommon take.)

I’ve spent a lot of the past few weeks moving to a new apartment, to the point that I found myself walking around the other day trying to get my head into ideas for writing but finding I didn’t really have many active emotions to engage with. I’d been so focused on tasks that I wasn’t really feeling much, or at least not much that would connect to art. And then in a moment of perfect coincidence I heard “Don’t Worry About the Government,” a song that expressed my actual thoughts: “my building has every convenience, it’s gonna make life easy for me, it’s gonna be easy to get things done.”

There’s often a tension in David Byrne’s lyrics between a guileless banality and the insinuation of ironic distance. If you want to hear “Don’t Worry About the Government” as snidely judgmental of a conformist character who does not question his lifestyle it would make a lot of sense, but I think the song works because what he’s saying about the routines of working and living in the world are things most people actually relate to. The character isn’t judging this, everything just is. He feels lucky and blessed to live in a good building, he acknowledges tensions in the world but focuses on the elements of infrastructure that work, and the civil servants who do their jobs well. The music feels like a pleasant equilibrium, the sentiment is all benign neutrality. It’s tremendously effective as a compelling piece of music that approaches feelings and ideas most would consider too dull for music.

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Talking Heads “Stay Up Late”

Byrne has spent a lot of his career essentially figuring out how to make unlikely sentiments and ideas work in music, and in subverting the tropes of popular music. In “Stay Up Late,” an up tempo tune from Little Creatures in 1985, seems to start from the premise of approaching the ubiquity of the word “baby” in pop music and taking it very literally. From a bit of distance “Stay Up Late” sounds like it’s about the usual stuff of pop music – flirtation, partying, sex – but the lyrics are actually about a kid who is excited to have a new baby sibling and thinks of him as a “plaything.” The idea of keeping the baby up all night is a weirdly transgressive thought, it’s a child’s notion of hedonism. Byrne embraces the innocence of the character while suggesting the parallels to adult behavior, a fundamental urge for fun that’s shaped by the context of childhood in the 20th century.

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David Byrne “Everyone’s In Love With You”

“Everyone’s In Love With You” has a very rom-com tone but approaches a romantic relationship from an unexpected angle: it’s a song about a guy who has noticed that since he’s been with this person, everyone he knows is also totally smitten with her too. His emotional response is interesting – he’s jealous, he’s proud, he feels a bit left out, he feels like the lesser half of the couple. (“I’m introduced to so-and-so but you’re the one they want to know.”) It’s a very sweet song, one that expresses a deep admiration for this person and the humility of understanding that he’s just got to share her with the world rather than keeping her his “big secret.”

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U2 “Ultra Violet (Light My Way)”

Bono is a hopeless romantic, which serves him well when writing love songs and even better when he wants to tell his own story. “Ultra Violet” is a bit of both, an ode to his wife Ali that starts before there was a Bono or U2, when he was just a broke guy called Paul in a room with one dangling light bulb hanging over his bed. It’s an incredible image, so economical in evoking both squalor and distant hope that the band would recycle it as central visual iconography for the autobiographical narrative played out on their Innocence + Experience tours. In that context it’s a theatrical element that’s unabashedly sentimental but in “Ultra Violet” it’s a matter of setting the stakes – “when I was all messed up and I had opera in my head, your love was a light bulb hanging over my bed.” This is basically Bono’s way of saying she’s his day one, his ride or die.

But there’s more to “Ultra Violet” than simply saying this woman has been his guiding light since before he was anyone. The lines I’m quoting are from the climax of the song and the lyrics start off in a moment of severe crisis in the present before moving backwards in time to that foundation of pure love. The opening verse, which is sung nearly a cappella before The Edge’s guitar riff kicks in, is about as abject as Bono ever gets in his music. This is a distinctly non-suicidal type of guy in a “I don’t even want to be around anymore” moment. He admits that he cannot always be strong, which is totally fine. He then tells her that he needs her to be strong, which is hypocritical but emotionally honest in a song that’s essentially about depending on someone in your lowest moments.

There are other tensions in the song, matters of secrets and lies and whisper and moans, the sort of things that bring “silence to a house where no one can sleep.” He’s setting dramatic stakes but also acknowledging the complications and clashes and detentes of long-running adult relationships. Bono was very good at this in his prime, grounding his most earnest yearnings in the grime and grit of a real life.

The Edge’s guitar in “Ultra Violet” sounds as though he’s trying to play a Motown-ish funk rhythm but somehow getting closer to the sound of church bells. Everything that should signal something earthy and groovy gets shifted into more spiritual and orchestral sort of drama – Larry Mullen Jr’s drums pound like timpani, Adam Clayton’s bass drones more like a cello. They arrive at a similar aesthetic on “Until the End of the World,” this music that’s technically quite jaunty but conveys none of the mood you’d typically associate with that word. But you hear this music, this piece that conveys an odd holiness and bright ambiance, and it’s not hard to get how Bono got to where he did lyrically from that starting point.

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Khruangbin & Leon Bridges “B-Side”

Khruangbin and Leon Bridges are very good on their own but complement each other perfectly in collaboration, as though they’re completing an aesthetic circuit. Khruangbin are extraordinary mimics and conjure an Afrobeat sound so expertly that “B-Side” could pass as a lost Fela instrumental, but while they play it straight within that musical template Bridges veers closer to American soul. This is only a minor deviation but is enough to open up the sound to feel more like the center of a Venn diagram where Afrobeat, disco, and Curtis Mayfield could overlap.

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Big Thief “Spud Infinity”

Big Thief is a band that has always thrived in capturing a live sound on record. “Spud Infinity” arrives at a point in the group’s trajectory where the sophistication of their songwriting and the casual chemistry of the band members have intersected so that the composition sounds as though it’s magically manifesting in real time. It’s an illusion of spontaneity, sure, but their playing is breezy and loose enough that the ease of it all isn’t the lie. “Spud Infinity” sounds like the band started from the notion of taking the term “cosmic country music” very literally, and writing a country rock song pondering philosophical matters like “what’s it gonna take to free the celestial body?” Adrianne Lenker’s voice and lyrics are playful and thoughtful, grounding questions about one’s significance in the greater scheme of things in colloquialisms and quirky metaphors while soberly advising anyone listening to throw themselves into the moment and express their love plainly to anyone they care about. She’s considering everything that can possibly be on the grandest possible scale, but arriving at the conclusion that what matters most is what’s immediately in front of us.

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Madelline “Daffodils”

“Daffodils” starts off as a sort of Lana Del Rey-ish postmodern ballad but within 20 seconds the song starts shifting into very different gears – a bit of Eilish-ish bubblegum industrial, a fair amount of hip-hop through the distorted aesthetic gloss of hyperpop. The song and its arrangement are gleefully chaotic, and Madelline’s lyrics conveys a volatile sense of self that’s swinging wildly between paranoid anger and unapologetic egomania. I’m particularly fond of the way she’s playfully engaging with narcissism in this song, embracing the swaggy highs of genuine self-love while also projecting a coked-up delusional mindset.

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Arca “Señorita”

“Señorita” is a brutal sort of mutated funk, a track that pulls from many genres but only really sounds like Arca. But like, a fully realized Arca – aggressively sexual and unapologetically self-mythologizing, more song-y than ever while unafraid to throw in a truly abrasive noise break in the middle of a club song. The bulk of the track reminds me of two things that were hot around the same time that I would’ve never thought to conflate – the caustic and clanging electro-punk of Mutsumi, and the staccato rapping style of Missy Elliott.

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JPEGMAFIA “What Kinda Rappin’ Is This?”

JPEGMAFIA has said that he became a rapper because no one wanted to rap on the tracks he built and “What Kinda Rappin’ Is This” is a very good example of a composition which I would imagine as being perplexing to even fairly adventurous vocalists. Like, opening with nearly a minute of a zonked-out drone with chords that seem to slowly stumble through the haze? And then some loop that feels like it belongs on an Animal Collective recording? Once a beat comes in it’s still disorienting, with waves of R&B vocals often blasting over his rap. He’s basically doing a rap equivalent to what Kevin Shields was doing with rock three decades ago – take a familiar genre and flip it inside out so that interesting tones and textures that would fill out a song are pushed into the foreground.

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Muna featuring Phoebe Bridgers “Silk Chiffon”

“Silk Chiffon” has a hook so potent – “life’s so fun, life’s so fun, got my miniskirt and my rollerblades on” – that the rest of the song can’t help but feel like it was built around it like a delivery system for this nugget of pop perfection ideally suited to the TikTok era. And it’s not even the chorus! That part of the song brings the music to a cathartic moment but it isn’t quite as memorable, feeling more like a structural inevitability than the best part of the song. But beyond that one incredible hook “Silk Chiffon” has a very specific and recognizable late ‘90s mood, like Sixpence None the Richer or Paula Cole reconfigured into something proudly queer, but also openly neurotic. When Phoebe Bridgers shows up in the second verse of the song it’s almost like she’s going full self-parody as she announces “I’m high and feeling anxious inside the CVS.” It’s a line that’s just as much a knowing wink as it is something recognizably vulnerable and human, and it just makes her declaration of lust and infatuation more poignant. As the song moves along Muna and Bridgers double down on the sappy corniness, making you feel that this sort of goofy joy is very very hard won.

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Coldplay featuring BTS “My Universe”

Coldplay has maintained commercial relevance for a very long time now, and a lot of that is because the band have worked very hard to maintain their position as one of the world’s most popular rock bands. But anyone can want to do that, the interesting thing about Coldplay is that as they’ve adapted to the whims of the pop market they’ve always sounded exactly like themselves. Some of this comes down to Chris Martin having a pleasant and immediately recognizable voice, but it’s more about how he is a nearly unrivaled expert in writing uplifting and romantic songs that make a listener feel like they’re living in a movie. There’s always going to be a space in pop culture for the sort of feelings Martin evokes, and as it turns out it works just as well in the context of ecstatic festival EDM as it did when they were working the U2 Junior lane.

Teaming up with BTS was a brilliant move both commercially, in that doing a song featuring the K-pop icons was basically a guaranteed hit, and artistically in that there probably is no Western rock band with an aesthetic that could fuse with BTS so seamlessly. “My Universe” is bright and bouncy and overflowing with a very earnest love. This song is the unashamed extreme of the nearly psychotic optimism and melodramatic movie romance that characterizes all their major works. BTS’ presence intensifies the wholesomeness of the song, balancing out Martin’s middle aged corniness with a more youthful guilelessness. It’s sorta miraculous for a song that’s essentially the merger of two powerful corporate brands to sound as devoid of cynicism as this does.

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Fika and Bambie “Coffee and Clouds”

“Coffee & Clouds” sounds calm and unbothered, like music meant for a tracking shot of someone strolling down a beautiful street on television in a very “life is good!” moment. Bambie’s lyrics complicate the mood without disrupting it – in the verses she’s dissecting her past behavior, but in the chorus she melts into affection and infatuation. There’s bits of this song that sound almost deliriously happy or blissfully content, but she never really shakes off the acute self-awareness. It basically just goes from being really in her head about being in her head, to being in her head and just loving the vibes.

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Goya Gumbani & Subculture featuring Pearl de Luna “Valley of Def”

Subculture’s track for “Valley of Def” sounds like a descent into a seedy, sexy underworld with a heavy ambiance that’s equal parts jazzy noir and stoned paranoia. Pearl de Luna’s vocals are purred and slurred in a way that reminds me of Martina Topley-Bird on the early Tricky records, while Goya Gumbani’s verses are rapped with a cautious sort of calm. He doesn’t sound relaxed, but he does sound focused and thoughtful as he seems to navigate his way through terrors from both within and without.

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CLBRKS & Dweeb “Forwhatitsworth”

CLBRKS has an odd and immediately fascinating voice – a clear and obvious English accent, but with the hard nasal honk of New York rapper. In “Forwhatitsworth” he’s framed by the sort of soul samples you’d expect to hear on say, a Ghostface or classic Kanye record, but DWEEB’s production style chops it all up very coarse and uneven. It makes even the most graceful moments feel raw and unstable, so both the music and the vocal end up sounding like a slightly uncanny version of a rap style that’s mostly quite familiar.

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Skate Key and Iblss “Rootwork”

The lyrics of “Rootwork” fixate on geography and death, and both overlapping in catastrophes and aftermaths. Skate Key senses ghosts all around him – relatives whose absence reshapes the family dynamic, communities built on the legacies of the long gone, traumas that get passed down from people he could never know. It’s a morbid song but there’s a touch of serenity in Skate Key’s soft rasp, and grace in the way he bows out of the song to let Iblss’ gentle woodwind loop run out for a few measures at the end.

Go to Iblss on Bandcamp.

Kiina “Recall”

“Recall” evokes a vaseline-on-the-lens melodrama in the way it bends and blurs what sounds like a vocal pulled from a mid-20th century ballad – not sure what, probably shouldn’t narc on it either way. It feels both melancholy and placid, particularly as the beat settles in and the music drifts out into jazzy keyboard noodling. It’s more of an interstitial than a full song, but it conveys a lot of feeling in just over a minute.

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Taylor Swift “State of Grace” (Acoustic Version) (Taylor’s Version)

Taylor Swift is beloved for her break up songs but as good as she is at articulating the anguish and disappointment of falling out of love, I think she’s even better at writing about being in love. “State of Grace” and “All Too Well” are widely understood to be written about the same relationship, and for me the latter song is made more potent by existing in the context of the former, which seems to be written midway through the happy early phase when she’s still riding the high of infatuation but has enough perspective to identify what is special to her about this connection. A lot of that is the surprise of it all, of having a vision of what she wanted and then finding something that’s actually better than she could have imagined for herself.

The primary version of “State of Grace” is a rock song with an arrangement heavily indebted to U2. The music charges forward like she’s confidently zooming into the future, she sings with an earnestness that makes the song feel like a devotional. The acoustic version strips out the rock and drastically slows the momentum, making the listener hang on every chord change. This arrangement makes the song come across like more of a meditation, but also like someone desperately trying to hold on to every moment before it passes, acutely aware that something precious and finite is slipping away. The original arrangement sounds like someone memorializing their life in the moment, but the acoustic version implies a more retrospective view in which the phrase “and I never saw you coming” feels like the sentiment most firmly rooted in the moment it is being sung.

Swift seems blown away by the clarity of her own emotions in “State of Grace” and chalks it up to meeting this person – it’s very “once I was blind, but now I see.” It’s like they’re a key unlocking something in her, and the expansion of her perspective is so overwhelming that she gives them credit when in truth it’s probably more to do with herself naturally maturing. Hearing her evoke this feeling she’s ascribed to this other person makes sense of the betrayal that came out in “All Too Well” and the pettiness given voice in “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” “State of Grace” is an expression of her investment of faith, and it’s so pure and beautiful that who can blame her for resenting having that faith broken and having to come back down to reality. She made someone her religion, and they left her forsaken.

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