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The Beatles “I’ve Got A Feeling” (Take 10)

The outtakes featured on the new “super deluxe” version of Let It Be are wonderfully loose and relaxed, a document of four dudes who’ve been playing together for years and know each other well enough to intuitively anticipate moves and effortlessly click together. They’re also close enough for that familiarity to breed a contempt that would end the band within a year, but you don’t really hear that on these tapes. These are just unadorned recordings of The Beatles performing with a casual confidence and playfulness that reminds me a lot of my favorite Pavement live recordings.

The most intriguing moments captured in these tapes are when they launch into impromptu rehearsals of songs like “Oh Darling” and “Something” that would be fleshed out into classics within a few months in the Abbey Road sessions. These are helpful glimpses into songwriting process and subtle band dynamics, but the more fun thing is hearing more tossed-off performances of Let It Be cuts like “Dig A Pony,” “Get Back,” and “I’ve Got A Feeling.” The latter is a total joy, particularly as the contrasting vocal parts by Paul McCartney and John Lennon give both men space to be a little silly with it. It’s just so nice to hear them have fun together, especially since this is the last time they’d do anything like a duet in their lives.

I’ve always been fond of their approximation of southern rock on “I’ve Got A Feeling” and I feel like it sounds a little better in this take with a slightly slower tempo and a bit more slack in the rhythm. The decision to tighten it up a bit for the final take makes sense but I think the spirit of the song is to be more off the cuff and informal. It’s not hard to imagine an alternate timeline in which this version of The Beatles hit the road and closed out sets with this one, extending it out into more of a jam.

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Common Saints “Fastlane”

The Eagles’ “Life in the Fast Lane” presents its characters as vapid horny assholes without any regard for anything besides satisfying their base urges, a lot of what makes the song work is that Don Henley sounds equally repulsed and impressed by them. Whereas that song examines this life from the outside, Common Saints’ “Fastlane” approaches it by getting into the mind of a self-destructive rogue and finding conflict and confusion where Henley would presume to find nothing but a void. “Fastlane” works within the template of Tame Impala-esque modern psychedelia but dials up the drama level so the whole song sounds like a car speeding through a cosmic tunnel towards some unseen but inevitable brick wall. And as the song zooms forwards, the lyrics pull deeper inward – down through despair, seeking an escape through zen self-acceptance.

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Sundur “My Dear”

“My Dear” opens Sundur’s excellent debut album full of music that exists largely in the spectrum of trip-hop with a jazzy, lightly psychedelic lullaby that sounds like Sarah Vaughan by way of Broadcast. The more conventional trip-hop and stoned R&B numbers on the record are quite good but this more delicate and jazz-oriented music is where Sundur thrive – producer DJ Platurn gets to use a more distinctive palette, and singer Savannah Lancaster can show off her range as well as her restraint. Her performance here is precise and controlled but also nakedly emotional as she sings about embracing apathy in a voice that makes it clear that she’s just too passionate and engaged to allow herself any kind of ignorant bliss. The music certainly does its best to lull you into a relaxed state though, particularly that lovely repeating keyboard motif that sounds like it’s made of moonlight.

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Silas Short “Drawing”

“Drawing” feels rich and luxurious as well as light and minimal, a trick pulled off largely because Silas Short has excellent instincts for handling negative space. I imagine the core arrangement – bass, guitar, drums, keyboards so sparingly used they’re nearly subliminal – as a loose circular frame around his voice and all the empty air around it. There’s a lot going on in the song but it all just sort of floats by, with parts coming into crisper focus here and there but never distracting from the overall feel and composition. Short sounds like he’s internalized a lot of D’Angelo’s best elements as a musician without necessarily trying to sound like him as a singer, so you get something that feels both very familiar and distinctive as his high and delicate voice moves towards melodic and rhythmic turns that owe more to the cadences of modern rappers like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti.

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Melkbelly “Prehistoric Worm”

“Prehistoric Worm” plays on the familiar dynamics of commercial ‘90s alt-rock but Melkbelly twist and tilt everything just enough to make the rumbling bass and feedback hums feel a bit queasy and imbalanced. Miranda Winters’ vocal melody – which she seems to sing through a grin like Kim Deal – is the most immediate pleasing element of the song but her words are vaguely sinister: “A vast expanse of land demands that we become more depressed.” Her lyrics on the chorus are just as enigmatic, and the sense that it’s hard to parse context or perspective here feels somewhat upsetting, like she’s seeing and understanding something we can’t and her hidden knowledge isn’t pleasant.

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Alessia Cara “Somebody Else”

It took me a little while to realize that “Somebody Else” sounded weirdly familiar because what I was recognizing was elements from an unexpected source – the melodies, chords, and stylishly immaculate production style is all very Phoenix. Whether this was intentional or not the aesthetic suits Alessia Cara’s voice well, flattering the clarity of her tone and allowing space for more nuanced phrasing to register without dropping the direct and assertive tone of a pop track. The crispness of the music is also an effective contrast with Cara’s ambivalent tone through the song as she ponders how someone she once loved could become such a stranger to her. There’s no clear cut feelings here, just a woman trying to make sense of dulled pains, vague regrets, and uncertainty of how much it really matters that something has been lost.

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Lauren O’Connell “Game of Pricks”

The raw material of “Game of Pricks” is so exquisite that only a truly inept musician could fuck it up. It’s a song that will make a mediocre artist sound better than they are, and while Robert Pollard’s core melody could be applied in many ways, there’s something elemental about it that makes it difficult to embellish. Lauren O’Connell, a singer-songwriter who has devoted a large chunk of her time to recording her interpretations of other artists’ songs on Bandcamp, manages to make “Game of Pricks” her own while being entirely faithful to the musicality of the original. O’Connell’s phrasing is crisp and simple, focused mainly on articulating the melody in a lovely tone while communicating a touch of shyness and vulnerability in her tone. Her arrangement replaces Guided by Voices’ garage rock aesthetics with a tidy minimalism – the guitar is hushed, there’s some light piano tinkling for atmosphere, and sparse electronic percussion moves along the dynamics but largely stays out of the way. The song is presented as this perfect immutable thing but O’Connell changes the feel and the gravity of it completely. This has the effect of shifting the perspective of the song – Pollard’s version is callous and caddish, but O’Connell zeroes in on the loneliness and self-destructive impulses at the heart of the song.

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Bnny “Promises”

“Promises” clocks in just under two minutes, which is exactly as much time as the song needs to shimmy and shake and project both a sexy atmosphere and a twitchy anxiety. Jess Viscius’ lyrics come from a place of uncertainty and ambivalence as she announces her disillusionment with a man in one breath and in the next admits to feeling seduced by him. Her vocal is breathy and sultry but also a little tough, conveying traces of anger and disappointment. As the song goes along that seems to be directed more inward though – she’s letting herself down, but as she sings “I haven’t been happy in years / so what’s a few more tears?”

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Muni Long “Just Beginning”

“Just Beginning” is a song about feeling betrayed and heartbroken because you’ve deduced through Instagram that your boyfriend is cheating on you and just introduced you to his sidechick thinking you’re none the wiser. It wouldn’t take much for this song to be extremely petty, but Muni Long’s vocal performance keeps the emphasis squarely on her disappointment and frustration. She’s just theatrical enough to make to make the more banal elements of this seem very dramatic in context, but there’s a rawness in her voice that sounds genuinely wounded and betrayed. The arrangement maintains a similar balance – the main piano part has the feel of an impromptu club performance, but the synth washes signal melodrama without getting too saccharine.

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Hatchie “This Enchanted”

I wish I could send this song back to around 1992 or so because I’d love to know what UK-oriented indie fans would make of this song that’s essentially merging girly chart pop, Madchester keyboard style, and shoegaze guitar. Would this seem like a bizarre and impossible future, or an artistic inevitability? I tend to think it’s the latter, that there’s no logical reason for these vibes to not click together and the way influence and flattened histories go it’s just natural that Hatchie and her collaborators would arrive at this simply by going with what they think sounds cool and fun.

And boy does it ever sound cool and fun – the particular aesthetic combination results in a boppy and hyper-romantic song that’s somewhat at odds with the more fraught relationship dynamics described by the verses. But the point of the song is the chorus – regardless of the messiness, she’s just overwhelmed by the more ecstatic emotions and raw attraction.

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Zilo & Austin Marc “Cherry Blossom”

“Cherry Blossom” is a rather pure expression of gratitude, with Zilo singing to someone whose love and support has changed her life for the better. The lyrics are direct and effusive in their praise, but the music and vocal performance are fairly low key. This sort of sentiment is very often paired with jubilant music, and there’s a logic in getting matchy-matchy with a euphoric tone. Zilo and producer Austin Marc dial it down and keep the emotional emphasis on warmth and intimacy, making the song feel like something sweet, gentle, and private. This has a nice effect of making Zilo’s more over-the-moon statements feel grounded and sincere, and not just some hyperbole.

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Anaiis “Ultraviolet, Counts”

The music in “Ultraviolet, Counts” seems to move gracefully through some resistance, like a trained swimmer moving against a tide. This suits the lyrical theme perfectly as Anaiis attempts to talk someone, anyone out of suicidal ideation by appealing to rational thought – you don’t know everything, positive outcomes are as possible as negative outcomes, rebirth comes along with “research.” Her phrasing conveys equal measures of empathy and tough love, a little judgmental (“martyrdom is for cowards”) but mostly compassionate and respectful of this person’s intelligence. The arrangement contrasts a staccato organ part with more subtle and fluid counterpoints in vocal harmony, bass, and horns that seem to ripple out and around the blunt impact of the beat. Everything in the song backs up the central feeling: direct and firm, but thoughtful and flexible.

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Vanishing Twin “Big Moonlight (Ookii Gekkou)”

There’s a lot of overlap in the aesthetics of Vanishing Twin and the late, great Broadcast – a certain 20th century futuristic style, a polite vocal style that signals intellectualism and introversion – but there’s a totally different sense of gravity to the music. “Big Moonlight” feels so light that parts of the arrangement seem to be floating away from the central bass line and jazzy beat. Every element in the song is crisp and clear but arranged in the stereo image in a way that feels a little uncanny, particularly when an organ part seems to teleport into the song about halfway through, a counterpart to the more distant chanted backup vocals. It’s not a jarring shift but it’s an unexpected texture that changes the atmosphere while keeping the song rooted in a dreamy sort of jazz.

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Andy Shauf “Spanish on the Beach”

The character in “Spanish on the Beach” is a guy looking back on a vacation with his ex-girlfriend with enough hindsight to see exactly how the events of that trip foreshadowed the impending end of their relationship, but also a wistful nostalgia – “I wished it could be permanent.” Andy Shauf’s lyrics are plainspoken and economical as they glide along his melodies but they convey volumes of subtext about this guy and these fairly banal anecdotes. The third verse, in which he recalls fantasizing about a purposefully obnoxious public wedding proposal, is funny but also clever in sliding right by a crucial detail: “if I had bought the ring.” It does a lot to explain why the song feels more ambivalent than melancholy – he clearly had his doubts before this point, but now he seems to be wondering if he’d made the commitment they’d be together, albeit probably unhappy.

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Injury Reserve “Knees”

“Knees” is built around the opening chords of Black Midi’s “Sweater” but while the Black Midi song has a romantic grandiosity to it, Injury Reserve intentionally disrupt the rhythm to make it feels stumbling and awkward. This approach is brilliant for a song about grief – there’s scattered moments of grace, but it’s mostly the musical accompaniment to someone barely holding it together. Ritchie With A T’s vocal is mostly sung with a lovely, understated vulnerability but his performance also cracks apart, rambling off into verses that aren’t quite rapped but don’t quite register as spoken word either. But as much as this song willfully swerves into awkwardness the main thing that hits you and stays with you is the purity of the sentiment and the bits of beauty scattered throughout.

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Pom Poko “Andrew”

Pom Poko are a band that clearly loves to keep a listener on their toes by constantly shifting up their arrangements and tossing a lot of sounds at you, and as such they run a high risk of producing cluttered, annoying songs. They sidestep this mainly by sticking to dynamic shifts that keep the focus on the core melodies of their compositions. “Andrew” has a particularly strong set of hooks, the best of which – “love is the, love is the, love is the…” – is ultimately just a very lovely bridge into the proper chorus. I am very fond of the way the band contrasts Ragnhild Fangel’s high breathy voice with lead guitar lines that feel a little rude and messy, these blurts of melody that feel spontaneous but are in fact deployed with canny precision.

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Metronomy featuring Spill Tab “Uneasy”

The bass in “Uneasy” has a very mid-00s indie sound to it, enough to spark a pang of nostalgia for the “Young Folks” era. The tonalities may feel a little deja-vu but the meat of the song is more contemporary, at least in that Spill Tab’s vocals and lyrics are very much in line with a post-Billie/Lorde aesthetic. But whereas a lot of the singers in this lane settle for a rhythmic wispiness Spill Tab’s melodies are a bit more generous and “Uneasy” moves through a few very strong hooks that tangle loosely around the bass groove. The relaxed vocal performance contrasts nicely with the lyrical sentiment – she’s singing about a very intense attachment to someone who’s clearly keeping her at arm’s length, so even the most startling things she says comes across as totally level-headed. There’s a nice ambiguity here: Is she actually being totally reasonable, or does she not fully get that she’s being bad with boundaries?

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Ari Lennox “Pressure”

There’s a lot to find charming about “Pressure” – the pleasing curls of the melody, Ari Lennox’s coy delivery, the light and relaxed tone of the groove – but the thing that puts this song over the top for me is a small detail. It’s the way a small snippet of vocal sample is dropped in as sort of punctuation, an unintelligible but raw and raspy vocal that contrasts sharply with Lennox’s more silky vocal tone. It’s deployed brilliantly but sounds like it might have started as a happy accident, like some stray fragment that happened to fall at the right spot of a ProTools session. It’s an unexpected texture that grabs the ear and highlights the best qualities of Lennox’s voice while nodding towards a more uninhibited style as an aspirational state. In a song where Lennox is coaching a guy on exactly how to fuck her, it comes across like establishing a goal – “I want you to get me there.”

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Nessa Barrett “I Hope Ur Miserable Until Ur Dead”

“I Hope Ur Miserable Until Ur Dead” is another in a line of Gen Z pop-rock hits that use classic alt-rock dynamics as a backdrop for lyrics very rooted in social media-driven teenage drama. As the title suggests, this is a gloriously petty song and the heaviness, tension, and melodramatic angst of this music is perfectly suited to this musical approach. That said, it is funny to me as a person who grew up with alt-rock as a default setting of popular music, to hear these sounds fully absorbed into the drama of generic Popular Kids when the version of this from the ‘90s was always coming from a more adult perspective and/or was garbled up with abstract and poetic language. There’s absolutely zero room for ambiguity in this song, just earnest invective and unfiltered emotional brutality. It’s unapologetically immature in its sentiment, and the wild mood swings of the arrangement give the message a heavy punch and the shaky volatility of a sudden emotional tantrum.

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King Krule “Alone, Omen 3” (Live)

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate “Alone, Omen 3” from the experience of the early phase of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It arrived just before things started to go very badly; this particular live recording is from one of the few shows King Krule was able to perform before Europe went into lockdown mode. This song was fresh in the world when its sentiment – solitude as source of both agonizing loneliness and restorative/meditative self-care, a permission to let yourself feel your sadness, a promise that you are never truly alone – was more potent and relevant than its author could have ever anticipated. There’s no way a lot of the people who probably needed it actually heard it, but at least in my personal experience it was valuable and helpful.

“Alone, Omen 3” sounds like it’s slouching somehow, and there’s a sort of gentle tumbling quality to the arpeggiated guitar and the beat that’s like the lackadaisical gait of a person walking around aimlessly. The bits of exaggerated digital echo in this performance are a nice touch, I imagine it as bits of noisy reality poking through the haze of a loneliness that makes you feel like you’re in a bubble removed from the world. Archy Marshall’s vocal at the end of the song when he’s shouting the reassurance “you’re not alone, you’re not alone” comes across as more broken and desperate in this take, more collapsing in the face of futility than heroic on the album recording. In either case he’s still pushing against something to get this message out, fighting against a world where it’s too easy in the best of conditions to feel atomized and adrift.

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