Author Archive

Keys N Krates featuring Juicy J, Chip, and Marbi “Original Classic”

The most novel aspect of Keys N Krates – they’re a trio including a drummer who play electronic dance music live on stage – is lost on a studio recording where you’re basically just hearing electronic dance music that’s centered on keyboards and samples. But even still, you can feel the difference a live drummer makes even when the snare hits have the tonality of a drum machine. Adam Tune keeps “Original Classic” in a tight pocket but adds a bit of a bounce and relaxed swing to the groove that mellows out the more intense keyboard hook. Juicy J and Chip both lean into expressing a casual confidence in their verses, the former sounding as though he’s just strolling through the song while on vacation.

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Oasis “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” (Live at Knebworth, 8/11/1996)

Oasis’ shows at Knebworth in 1996 are a crucial part of the band’s legend, an event that is demonstrably the apex of the band’s success. Over the course of two nights they played for around 250,000 people, with the capacity for each show roughly amounting to playing two stadiums at once (or about 7 simultaneous Madison Square Gardens.) The show itself is basically a greatest hits – almost everything from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, about half of Definitely Maybe, a bunch of non-album tracks that may as well have been A-sides, and two songs that would later end up on Be Here Now, the famously bloated album that brought their level of success down to merely “quite popular.”

“It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” is one of those Be Here Now songs, clearly written from the perspective of someone riding high on an extraordinary hot streak. It would be easy to snark on this song for how its “I’ve only just begun, I will NEVER FAIL!” bravado ended up on a record that sorta flopped out, but it would miss the point that this sort of defiant optimism is really just Oasis in their default setting. “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” was basically Noel Gallagher moving back into Definitely Maybe sun-sheee-iiiine mode, but whereas songs like “Rock N Roll Star” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol” were written from the POV of aspiring rock stars, he was at this point the real deal and was now giving advice on how others can live their own dream. The verses are very “believe in yourself and just do it, mate!” but Liam Gallagher sings it with the reassuring conviction of someone who knows for a fact that this kind of thing can actually work out sometimes. Noel can’t help but slip in a few lines that suggest how fleeting success can be, but that just adds to the YOLO spirit of the music.

The Knebworth shows have been bootlegged in radio broadcast quality audio for many years now, but it was wise for the band to officially make it part of their discography. It’s useful for lore, but even beyond that there’s a real spark to these recordings. The sheer magnitude of the audience stokes the band’s ego but also puts them in a sort of do-or-die position of needing to bring the goods. You can hear tensions between Liam and Noel throughout the set, but that’s part of the performance – if they don’t do a bit of that, a quarter million people would go home feeling a little cheated. And you definitely want to hear it here, on a live document of a band at their absolute pinnacle. It may be all downhill from this moment on, but this moment was like the summit of Everest.

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Lady Wray “Games People Play”

Lady Wray sings “Games People Play” from a bit of a remove, looking on at someone else making the same mistakes she’s already made in youthful relationships with a feeling of resignation – this is just what people do, the “silly shit you do when you’re young.” There’s empathy in the song and warmth in her voice, but more than anything you hear lingering pain in her phrasing and a determination that she won’t be repeating any of this as an adult. The arrangement is full of classic soul moves but there’s a chilliness to the tone, mainly in the trebly lead guitar part that runs through the center of the composition. The reverb is lovely ambiance but emphasizes the aloofness of the song, suggesting a physical and emotional distance between Wray and the music.

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Eulajay and Serpentwithfeet “Luvaroq”

As the title suggests “Luvaroq” is heavily indebted to the Lover’s Rock subgenre of reggae, to such an extent that I swear I’ve heard some version of this before but I can’t quite place it. The track is all warm, womb-like bass and tastefully applied bits of treble, like the lead organ part that in context has an effect roughly equivalent to a loosely strung line of Christmas lights. Elujay and Serpentwithfeet trade off vocals, each of them pleading to their love interest to not to dump them. They’re not exactly offering the best arguments for this in their lyrics – Serpentwithfeet in particular seems like he’s kind of a dick to his boyfriend here – but there’s an earnestness in their singing and a gentle purity to the music that makes a strong case in their favor.

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Blonder “Ice Cream Girl”

Constantine Anastasakis is very good at a very ‘90s alt-rock move of contrasting bright notes with a heavy and burbling low end that makes the whole song feel a bit nauseous. It’s an underrated way of expressing anxiety – a more jittery rhythm feels right for a more high-strung personality, but the sounds in “Ice Cream Girl” are more particular to someone with lower expectations in life and less inclination to want to control everything. Despite the sickly tone the song really works as pop, particularly as Anastasakis’ voices drifts up into falsetto on the sing-songy bridge into the slam-the-fuzzbox chorus.

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Aminé “Van Gogh”

The keyboards in “Van Gogh” are pitched up to the point that it has the cartoonish plasticy tinkle of children’s music, making the song feel a bit like a perverted lullabye that involves bragging about fucking a girl on a Van Gogh painting. Like a lot of artists in the recent past Aminé is basically singing with rap cadences but unlike fellow travelers like Lil Uzi Vert or Playboi Carti, there’s a pleasing softness in his voice that really sells the flirtatiousness in this particular song. There’s a real himbo energy to this one, just the perspective of a silly dude who wants to party and get laid and he makes it all sound kinda sweet.

Stream it via Aminé.

Duendita “Open Eyes”

The musical elements of “Open Eyes” are always shifting but there’s still a sense of stillness to it, as though no movement could disrupt its equilibrium for more than a few seconds. As the song progresses it moves towards a powerful feeling of peacefulness, not necessarily in a lack of tension but in conveying patience and acceptance. Duendita sings with a voice that acknowledges turmoil and traumas, but she sounds as though she’s filtering out the dark feelings in an effort to get to a more pure state of grace. At the end of the song when her voice starts getting digitally warped it’s almost as though she’s singing in tongues, though I think it feels more psychedelic.

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Beach House “Once Twice Melody”

It continues to be impressive how much Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally can do within the seemingly narrow aesthetic confines of Beach House. The general feel and core palette of their music has been essentially the same for eight records in a row, the variety and artistic growth is mainly in the textures, details, and tonal balances. It’s a bit like musical Fabergé eggs – the format and aesthetic is consistent but the ornamentation is unique every time. “Once Twice Melody,” the title track of their eighth record, is one of the more striking variations. It sounds like a pastoral English folk song blurred out by a dense fog of their familiar keyboard drones. The brighter keyboard tones seem to sparkle through it, lending the track a vaguely mystical aura. Lagrand’s vocal performance is as sedate as ever but her phrasing feels a bit stiff and formal, making her sound like some sort of prim but gentle authority figure as she sings lyrics that allude to mid 20th century erotic works Belle du Jour and Histoire de Melody Nelson. It’s not sexy, per se, but it does add a light lasciviousness to the music.

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Pecas “Talking to Myself”

“Talking to Myself” feels very relaxed and sensual, a song where most everything in the vocal performance and the arrangement is signaling a pleasant mixture of stoned and sultry. The lyrics run contrary to all that as Sandy Davis sings about feeling foolish for an emotional investment in someone who doesn’t value her affection or compassion. She feels so shut out that she feels like airing these grievances is just talking to herself. Listening to the song with a more clear idea of what’s being expressed shifts the tone a bit – the melancholy undercurrents are more exposed, and the more breathy parts of her vocal read more as sighs of exasperation rather than anything to do with pleasure.

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Aimee Mann “You Fall”

Aimee Mann’s new album Queens of the Summer Hotel is a set of songs written for a stage musical adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted, a project that’s fallen into limbo in the wake of the pandemic. It makes a lot of sense why Mann would be asked to do such a thing – through her career she’s always had a keen insight into fragile and volatile emotional states, and approaching characters at their lowest lows with respect and empathy. In terms of substance the material on this record could just as well be another Aimee Mann record, so the main difference here is in style – strings and horns that evoke a very 20th Century sort of stuffy melodrama, but played without a trace of sappiness. “You Fall” is particularly stunning in its starkness, opening in medias res on a woman who’s trying to hold it together and present as a normal person but on the precipice of succumbing to despair. Mann’s lyrics are cooly observational but her voice conveys a calm compassion. This song is coming from a place of being keenly aware, likely through personal experience, of how easy it is to fall apart – she’s not about to judge this woman or anyone else.

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SOPHIETHEHOMIE “Natural Disaster”

The first few songs SOPHIETHEHOME released were all firmly in R&B territory, kinda like homemade semi lo-fi Erykah Badu music. “Natural Disaster” is a fascinating swerve into the indie rock lane while maintaining a similar vibe – her vocal style is mostly the same, but it’s recast in a song built upon a rumbling alt-rock bass line that I’d guess is aiming for Nirvana or Kim Deal energy but actually sounds just like “A Salty Salute” by Guided by Voices. It all comes together sounding very natural, as though this thick, heavy bass and clattering cymbals are there as a defense mechanism for this sensitive, vulnerable R&B ballad about feeling like you’ve totally screwed up a relationship and exhausted yourself emotionally. It’s too early to know whether this is a stylistic eureka moment for SOPHIETHEHOMIE or just a one-off creative cul de sac, but either way it’s very evocative and interesting.

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Glenn Gould featuring U.S. Girls “Good Kinda High”

This song was created as part of a project in which the producer Billy Wild collaborates with contemporary artists with the goal of giving the late pianist Glenn Gould’s music new life in modern music. In the case of this song made with Meg Remy of U.S. Girls the Glenn Gould of it all is rather subtle, as it’s entirely subsumed into something that basically just sounds like a very good U.S. Girls song in structure, tone, and feeling. It’s a song with a strong melody and a sour tone, produced with just enough gloss that it sounds like if Britney Spears had recorded a Bond theme off the strength of the high-tech spy movie vibes of “Toxic.” But as far as the song gets from Glenn Gould’s classical context his piano part is still centered in the piece and is not chopped up or noticeably altered. As much as the piano is decontextualized his playing is clearly identifiable, a tone and touch that’s familiar to anyone who’s heard his Goldberg Variations.

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Habibi “Somewhere They Can’t Find Us”

We’re only just now starting to hear a lot of the music that was written during the darkest depths of the pandemic, which is interesting because it’s as close as we can get to a collective writing prompt for a massive chunk of the world’s musicians. Do you confront it head on and Say Something About It, do you just move on with what you’d ordinarily do, do you question everything you’ve done before, do you embrace limitations or chafe against them? I figure a lot of artists just fully shut down through this and we’ll never really know, though fully shutting down is also a valid artistic response to the situation.

Habibi’s new single “Somewhere They Can’t Find Us” was written mid-pandemic and while it’s not exactly screaming “I’M A PANDEMIC SONG” it’s very apparent in the tone and lyrics. The music aims for physical catharsis – big groovy beat, slinky bass, a classic indie club banger in the mold of The Slits or Delta 5. It sounds like four isolated people willing a party into existence. The words are more grim, evoking the bleakest days in New York City when “sirens sound day and night” was not at all an understatement. Despite that anchor in a time and place, the lyrical concerns are fairly evergreen – a desire for escape and community, an impulse to help others even if you end up giving more than you take. In a low key way, it resolves on a prayer to God.

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Spoon “The Hardest Cut”

“The Hardest Cut” has the aesthetics you’d expect from Spoon – the tight rhythms, the stylized but controlled chaos, Britt Daniel’s distinctive rasp – but it’s at the service of a brawnier type of rock than they usually play, a little closer to something like Queens of the Stone Age or The Black Keys. The synthesis works out well, particularly as it’s ultimately just a different type of blunt minimalism to run through the filters of their style and taste. The bluesy central riff is so taut it sounds like it could be used as a garrote, and Alex Fischel’s parts on the refrains are all blunt force rendered in the mix to sound like the distorted chords are punching out through the speakers. This is probably the most commercial and straight forward rock song they’ve done but the relative normalcy of the composition is a perfect vehicle for proving out their aesthetic concerns – this sort of song is usually produced with a certain flatness, but in their hands it’s so consistently dynamic that the studio image feels like 3D.

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St. Panther “Problems”

Daniela Bojorges-Giraldo is responsible for making and engineering every sound on this recording so it’s hard to single out what to praise her for – the low-key loveliness of her melodies, the warmth and presence she captures in her engineering, the elegant restraint of how she plays bass, the crispness of her drumming, the sweet rasp of her voice? “Problems” is a sophisticated song with a clear and direct feeling that’s more urgent than the formal elements that make it go down so smooth. Bojorges-Giraldo sounds incredibly frustrated here, almost resentful of having a love that she can’t bring herself to honor with clear communication. She can’t quite articulate what’s going on to herself or the other person, but it’s clear enough it’s all self-destructive.

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Crystal Murray “Too Much to Taste”

“Too Much to Taste” is so exuberantly horny that Crystal Murray actually just sings the phrase “I’m horny” mid-song because hey, why bother being coy about it? There’s no shame in this music, just huge flirty vibes and ecstatic R&B melodies grafted on to sleek electro pop. There’s no friction to the groove, but there is some tension in the lyrics and Murray’s vocal in the form of a mild angst about being so overcome with lust that you’re giving over too much of yourself. The thrill of the song is that it’s not too hung up on that thought – if anything, it sounds like Murray is just daring herself to take this even further.

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Animal Collective “Prester John”

The most striking sound in “Prester John” is the element of it that sounds the least like Animal Collective as we’ve known them for the past 20 years – a central keyboard riff that’s crisp, clean, and traditionally groovy. It’s one of the most normal sounds I can remember showing up on any of their records but it ends up feeling like the weirdest part of a song that’s otherwise working with very classic Animal Collective approaches to musical textures, ambiance, and vocal harmonies. The vocal parts – mainly sung by Panda Bear – are lovely in a way that feels very casual and lived-in, which I suppose is a result of this song having been mutating through various live incarnations over the past few years. Revision through live iteration has been a big part of the group’s process all along but at this stage where the final studio rendition can feel confident and organic rather than tight and overworked, which I think happened on a lot of their last two proper Animal Collective albums. With this they’ve circled back to the earnest loveliness of the Merriweather Post Pavilion era but with far less reliance on the haziness of heavily processed sounds and extreme reverb.

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Lana Del Rey featuring Miles Kane “Dealer”

The surprising thing about “Dealer” isn’t so much that it’s groovy bass and warm organ drones are a musical outlier in the context of Lana Del Rey’s new record Blue Bannisters or that guest vocalist Miles Kane takes up so much space in the song that it seems like she’s the featured singer on the track and not vice versa. The “wait, what?” moment comes when she sings the line “I can’t liiiiiiiiiiive” in a bold, unrestrained voice that’s far removed from the aloof chanteuse shtick she’s been working for over a decade. The line and its delivery is a homage to Harry Nilsson’s “Without You,” but it’s more of a referential gesture than a full interpolation – she inhabits that naked need for just a few seconds before shaking it off and getting back to chewing out a junkie boyfriend who’s wasted her affections and betrayed her one too many times. She reverts to coy form after this moment, but that little glimpse of a more full-voiced and emotive Del Rey changes how everything else lands, including Kane’s performance. Even with a touch of irony in that big emotional moment it establishes different stakes – anger often gets diffused in self-loathing in Del Rey’s music but here’s it’s very clearly directed outwards.

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Bonobo “Rosewood”

The first two thirds of “Rosewood” are grounded in warm Fender Rhodes chords that repeat a simple lulling groove before shifting gears into a very chill sort of acid house finale. The intensity picks up and catharsis is provided but Bonobo never really moves the song out of a deliberately vague melancholy. The vocal samples convey regret and heartbreak but it’s all loosely sketched out, evoking a limbo state of being not quite outside the emotional blast radius of something that’s rattled you to the core. The trajectory of the song suggests a move towards momentary escape or moving on completely, but the arc is just not bending towards a full recovery.

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Guided by Voices “Dance of Gurus”

“Dance of Gurus” almost tricks you into thinking it’s a straight ahead rock song in the style of The Cars for the first 30 seconds or so before veering off into a more eccentric path that disrupts the expectations of pop structure while amping up the drama. Condensing the dynamic shifts of prog down into the tight minimalism of punk and new wave is a classic Bob Pollard move but it’s particularly effective here in that his lyrics about an epiphany brought on by a chance encounter with an unusually chipper homeless man click into the song so that his big ideas hit when the music suddenly accelerates. He’s playing around with ideas of societal expectations but when it comes down to it he’s essentially delivering a message of solidarity – winners, sinners, all arm in arm and collapsed in laughter.

Buy it from Bandcamp.