Author Archive

Little Simz featuring Cleo Sol “Woman”

The last two times I featured Little Simz on this site was for songs in which she gave performances that were very fast and fierce, songs that came off like a flex to display what she was capable of as a rapper. “Woman” is a very different mode – slower but not softer, contemplative but still rather intense. The energy shift has a lot to do with her working with Sault producer Inflo and his frequent collaborator Cleo Sol, who both lean towards a 70s-by-way-of-90s-but-now approach to slick yet warm R&B. The combination of Simz’ cadences on this track with Sol’s sung vocals brings the general feel of “Woman” pretty close to where Lauryn Hill was on Miseducation – high praise, obviously, but something that seems less like direct intention of homage and more like a set of shared natural inclinations as musicians.

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Jessie Ware “Please”

The arrangements of Jessie Ware songs always have two main objectives – set up a strong groove and showcase the way her voice can effortlessly swing from icy cool to red hot. I like Ware’s voice, but I find that the songs she’s done that I like the most don’t rely on it to carry the track. “Please” is a good example – as much as her vocal is the center of the song, my ear is more attracted to the particular tone of the synth bass, the trebly atmosphere that drops in on the chorus, or the fairly subtle funk guitar that fills the space between the first chorus and the second verse. This is a song that’s very eager to, uh… please… but it’s not trying to hammer you with obvious jabs at pleasure centers. It’s a little more delicate and precise, and aims for elegance and sensuality over screaming ecstasy.

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Sorry “Cigarette Packet”

There’s a lot of songs that simulate an anxious twitchy feeling – I should know, as I have written about hundreds at this point! I remember back in the late 2000s a friend pointing out how often I wrote about anxiety songs and it being a real “wait…he’s right” moment because I’d simply not processed that as a recurring thing and I don’t think I’ve ever self-identified as a particularly anxious person. But in the context of all those songs the twitchy angst of “Cigarette Packet” feels distinct, the throb of it sounds more like it’s signifying withdrawal tremors and strobe lights. Asha Lorenz sounds like her mind is racing but she’s totally bored by it, zooming through a bad night out in her head before it even happens. It’s a bad, sickly vibe but it’s so catchy that it’s a pleasure to hear, which I suppose is the exact right aesthetic for a song about a compulsive need to do something that you know won’t be good for you.

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Courting “Popshop!”

“Popshop!” is a song expressing a bone-deep cynicism about the music industry from a band who’ve released a grand total of 7 songs to date. But like, you’d have to be a fool to think otherwise, right? The song is basically having a laugh at the notion that they’re willfully entering this rigged game if just because being a band is fun. Sean Murphy-O’Neill delivers his punchlines with a good-natured tone, coming off more like a clever guy with a wry take than an asshole shooting his mouth off. There’s quips at the expense of others – “if you stream ‘Shape of You’ you’re going straight to hell” and a goof on Belle Delphine selling her bathwater – but most of the humor is at Courting’s expense, since he’s so skeptical about achieving fame and fortune that the loftiest achievable goal in the song is a band outing at a chain British holiday resort.

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Burial “Dark Gethsemane”

“Dark Gethsemane” is essentially a rave track but it plays out like cinema, with sequences as scenes moving gradually through escalating climaxes towards a bold and emotional conclusion. It’s an incredible flex, not just in terms of Burial’s technical mastery but in conveying a powerful message without a trace of corny didacticism. The song is always moving so the through line is mostly in the repetition of vocal samples. In the first half the message is “don’t get cynical,” pitched up enough to sound angelic but not change the wounded and weary inflection of the sampled singer. The second half of the piece is built around the phrase “we must shock this nation with the power of love!,” apparently lifted from a church sermon. The repetition here is both artful in iteration and totally blunt in effect, the syllables in SHOCK and POWER and LOVE cracking on impact every time. The velocity picks up in this section but the way Burial ratchets up the intensity still doesn’t quite prepare you for the conclusion. After some blaring horn fanfare the sample is stripped of effects and paired with bludgeoning rock bass line that changes the tone completely. The last minute is brutal but passionate, and earthy in a way that contrasts with the more ethereal qualities of the early portions of the track. It sounds like all the lights have come up, and it’s all suddenly quite immediate and real.

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Faye Webster “Cheers”

The songs on Faye Webster’s last album Atlanta Millionaires Club all had a certain lightness to them, a gentle breeziness that came with its pedal steel atmosphere and low-key soul grooves. “Cheers,” the first song released from her follow up, is a hard swerve away from that vibe. Webster remains a warm and lovely presence on vocals, but the music has a nervy, off-balanced feel that’s mostly a result of an overdriven low end that seems to rattle and potentially shatter the more delicate instrumentation layered on top of it. Webster sounds cautious, and in the lyrics she comes off as someone doing her very best to be diplomatic and even-handed as she describes what sounds like a good relationship that’s stuck a rut. Her lyrics are direct and sincere, but she leaves a lot of room for subtext – her phrasing lets slip just enough uncertainty that it’s easy to imagine a parallel comic book thought balloon with an anxious interior monologue like “Uh, I think? Is this good? I want it to be good…but am I settling??”

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Alfa Mist featuring Lex Amor “Mind the Gap”

“Mind the Gap” opens with a clip of a train announcement, which makes me imagine Alfa Mist and Lex Amor’s performances as the interior monologues of two exhausted, weary people making their way home from a shift at night. The sort of people you can glance at from across the train and sense the weight on them as they stare off into space or try to rest their eyes in half-sleep. The keyboard and sax parts set a drowsy atmosphere, but it’s Lex Amor’s hushed and delicate voice that really sells the bleary-eyed angst. Her phrasing is remarkably nuanced, sliding seamlessly between rhythm and melody in every line while conveying a thousand shades of hopelessness, anxiety, irritation, and fear in just the tone of her voice before even keying into her actual words.

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Hiatus Kaiyote featuring Arthur Verocai “Get Sun”

“Get Sun” is mostly slick, smooth, and easy on the ears. The string arrangement by Arthur Verocai comes in like a warm breeze, the rest of the track settles into a comfortable groove that’s tight enough to provide a danceable structure but loose enough to imply plenty of space to lounge around. Naomi Saalfield’s lead vocal resists the flow of the track in some spots, in some moments seeming to move against the tide of it if just to make it feel more profound when she lets up and glides along with it on the chorus. She’s dramaticizing the notion of the lyrics, which deal with learning to open up to joy, but I get the sense that she was responding to the feeling of the song rather than forcing the music line up conceptually with her words.

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Billy Nomates “Petrol Fumes”

“Petrol Fumes” is a song about driving yourself crazy by falling in love and knowing you can’t do anything about it without the very likely possibility of blowing up the whole situation and losing a lot more than you would if you just kept your mouth shut and buried your feelings. This is hardly a novel topic but Tor Maries approaches it with nuance and a vocal performance that’s conveys a simmering lust and low-key nobility rather than communicating misery or self-destruction. The most interesting details Maries drops in the song portray the object of her affection as someone charismatic and popular, someone with a lot of suitors. “Well, I know the world is heavy and everyone seems to want a little piece of you,” she sings with a bit of a sigh, in awe of this person and unable to see herself as a particularly compelling option. The music, which sounds a little like a crossbreeding of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” and “I’m On Fire,” is all quick-paced tension that makes you feel her reach the point of snapping and shooting her shot: “Well, nothing’s ever gonna really be the same right after this…”

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Proper Nouns “Feel Free”

Proper Nouns’ debut album sounds so much like Ted Leo that it’s a little disconcerting, it’s almost like listening to the result of someone deciding to make their own Pharmacists record because it’s been 11 years since The Brutalist Bricks and they ran out of patience. This is not a complaint. I also would like to have a new Pharmacists record, and it’s a remarkable feat to write and perform music that sounds like Leo in style, structure, and content. It’s entirely possible that Proper Nouns songwriter Spencer Compton is not even familiar with Leo’s music, and if that was the case it’d be even more impressive for someone with a very similar voice and melodic sensibility to arrive at similar conclusions. But either way, I feel like it would be dishonest to not note the similarities – it’s both obvious and a major selling point.

Compton reaches for a Leo-esque falsetto on “Feel Free,” but it’s otherwise one of the least Pharmacists-y numbers on the record. The song has the swing of csoul but the rigid crispness of power pop, and a breeziness that contrasts with the neurotic tension of the lyrics without negating it. When the song reaches its climax on the bridge there’s some degree of catharsis – or at least airing of annoyance – and then, interestingly, the song sorta abruptly resolves on the breezy part.

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WheelUP featuring Bembe Segue “Fusion”

The aptly-titled “Fusion” is dense with great sounds and strong hooks and it all adds up to something that commands physical movements, but the part of that really gets me is what Danny Wheeler does with clips of rhythm guitar and blips of keyboards throughout the composition. I love the way it sounds like those parts on another plane from the rest of the track, like something dropped in or superimposed over the more solid whole. There’s a haphazard feel to it, like there’s some degree of raw improvision to these sampled elements – I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Wheeler manipulated them in a loose and gestural way, something deliberately unquantized in a track that’s otherwise quite tight in the bounce of its polyrhythms.

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Heno “Creases”

The lyrics of “Creases” feel a bit like a personal essay set to a melody, with Heno starting with a thesis statement – “you can never know the extent of the pain someone’s going through” – and then outlining his experiences, his philosophy, and his plan for action in life. It’s thoughtful and clear-headed, but also direct in speaking about depression and trauma in a way that feels very particular to this moment in time. I’ve noticed that when musicians write about these topics now it’s almost always in plain and direct language that wouldn’t be too far off from, say, an Instagram caption. It makes some sense, in that being this clear about it is the most effective way of communicating these ideas and it’s a choice to be raw and vulnerable, but I do find myself yearning for more abstaction. I can imagine a version of this that isn’t quite so obvious in its language and plays more on the ambiguous feel of the melody and arrangement, which conveys a feeling of calm just on the other side of panic and chaos.

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The Loud Family “Sodium Laureth Sulfate”

“Sodium Laureth Sulfate” puts you off balance from the start, blasting you with noise and clips of studio chatter, opening Interbabe Concern in a way that pushes the listener to consider that there’s something wrong with their CD. Once the song shifts into a more normal but still off-kilter pop structure it’s a different sort of fractured, with Scott Miller singing from two perspectives, one of which is rudely interrupting the other:

So you’ve got a new girl, better tell us all
about her
    well, we met—
No, we were thinking of lascivious detail

I love this as the start of a song, immediately cutting through the bullshit to nudge the song into something less mundane. Of course, instead of getting something sexy, the other guy gives us something…more descriptive:

she’s a little like
tendon-slash dimension crash entropica
cryogen magenta kevlar ebola

As the song goes along we never get a clear picture of this woman, but we do get the gist of the situation – she’s stringing him along, she’s distant, she’s emotionally brutal, she’s fascinating. The other guy is concerned, but this dude is too far gone – “and the zero times she calls me back refine my soul.” He’s beyond rationalizing her behavior, she’s giving him exactly what he craves: high drama and casual cruelty! As a wise woman would write many years later: “Boys only want love if it’s torture.”

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Godspeed You! Black Emperor “First of the Last Glaciers”

For a long time Godspeed You! Black Emperor specialized in compositions that evoked a crushing sense of dread and a certainty that the world was moving towards an unavoidable apocalypse in the near future. Their most recent work – 2017’s Luciferian Towers and the brand new G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END – mark an interesting tonal shift, presenting a more hopeful sound as the world becomes more overtly dystopian. To be clear, it’s not a hope that terrible things will not come, but rather than that now is the time for people to fight back against the powerful figures who have broken the world. I think these are meant to be inspirational works, grandiose compositions that respect an apocalyptic negativity but ask the listener not to give up or give in on the assumption that all is lost. The band has stated that the new album is about us all “waiting for the end,” but this time it’s not the end of all things. We’re waiting for the end of the things that are crushing humanity, waiting for a crash that can lead to something new.

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Nick Hakim & Roy Nathanson “Cry and Party”

The music in “Cry and Party” is essentially the result of Nick Hakim doing a “yes, and…” with poetry written in advance by Roy Nathanson. Hakim’s composition complements the conversational flow of Nathanson’s words but also serves to illustrate his notions, conjuring up a big boisterous party with a slinky bass and cheerful horn groove while some pre-party sadness seems to linger in the air. Hakim and Nathanson evoke a wonderful atmosphere here, without using all that many elements they sketch out a space that feels very specific. I can picture this room, I can imagine people moving through it, and I can see the guy Nathanson is speaking as kinda static off in a corner.

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Museum of Love “Cluttered World”

The groove of “Cluttered World” rumbles along in a holding pattern, a steady core for a song that’s otherwise fairly chaotic. The rogue element is mostly the piano performance, where even the most delicate parts seem haphazardly bashed out by someone with a good sense of which notes to hit but minimal respect for the instrument. Pat Mahoney’s vocal is nearly as wild a presence as he affects a Nick Cave-ish manic crooner energy, belting out key lines at the ends of verses for dramatic emphasis but also hitting less expected lines with raw emotional phrasing in a way that makes the song feel a bit shaky and drunken. It suits the song well – he is, after all, singing a strange love song about connection and affection in a world where everything is finite and the clock is always ticking.

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Izy “They Don’t Care”

Izy is a trio of young men from Melbourne who play neo-soul like grizzled veterans –always a crisp and tight pocket groove, but also loose enough to let every part feel breezy and spontaneous. “They Don’t Care” sounds like they were aiming for a very D’Angelo-on-Voodoo sort of feel and mostly got there, though they’re not as strong with atmosphere. Ryo Montgomery’s guitar is the focal point here, carrying the main melody with a warm tone and elegant but not terribly fussy jazz inflections. The lead vocal and harmonies are strong too, but whereas the music seems to flow quite naturally from the players, the vocals seem like they’re working a bit too hard to sound American. It’s hardly a deal breaker, much less a problem for this particular song, but I suspect they’ll level up if they can figure out how to perform in this style with more personal vocal styles.

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Drea the Vibes Dealer “Save Me”

“Save Me” has the feeling of being unable to fall asleep in an incredibly comfortable bed. The feel of the track is loose and relaxed in a jazzy coffee shop sort of way, but the composition is spiked with bits of anxious energy and features a lead vocal that’s a bit like lying there unable to turn off your mind because it’s stuck in obsessive loops. Drea the Vibes Dealer is singing about a pure love that’s tied up in interpersonal complexities, her lyrics seem to move through the steps of logic and clauses while always coming back to simple, blunt messages. The backing vocals, apparently also performed by Drea, are a brilliant touch – a nod to girl group innocence, but also an echoey ambiance that complements the more spacey jazz elements of the song.

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Gilligan Moss featuring Rebecca & Fiona “Ferris Wheel”

Gilligan Moss sound extremely familiar but are in fact something that feels very new to me – a sort of retro music seemingly made to bring back to the wistful twee vibes and aggressively cheerful grooves of the 2000s. The aesthetics on their debut record have not been gone for long, but just long enough to feel both potently nostalgic and vaguely wrong, like we’re not quite ready to reconnect with this sort of joyful innocent optimism just yet. “Ferris Wheel,” a song that feels particular to the early Obama era, is even premised on nostalgia on a lyrical level as Rebecca & Fiona reminisce on a failed romance in a carnival setting. The relationship isnt necessarily what’s being romanticized here, though – it’s more a yearning for a sense of mindless freedom and seemingly unlimited possibility. In that sense, it’s a perfect song for the waning days of the pandemic, as people impatiently wait to regain that feeling and jump impetuously into anything like good old-fashioned fun.

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India Jordan “And Groove”

“And Groove” contrasts two deliberately mechanical elements – fast and precise programmed beats and a vocal sample loop – with a keyboard part that feels loose and soulful, like India Jordan sat down and improvised a chord progression on the spot while the tape was rolling. I’m not knowledgeable enough to identify the make and model but I love the tone they are using, a bit like Fender Rhodes but not quite as expensive-sounding? The finale of the song is unexpected but appropriate – the beat and loops drop out and you just hear the keyboard unaccompanied, playing out the chords for an extra 30 seconds.

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