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Dua Lipa “Don’t Start Now”

“Don’t Start Now” is essentially a disco song and there is a retro quality to the production, but despite certain musical signifiers, it’s not necessarily a nod to actual ‘70s disco. This is, instead, a pop song that’s calling back to previous iterations of chart pop calling back to the disco era. In other words, this is much more Kylie Minogue than Donna Summer. To some extent this is just what happens with any genre, as signifiers and conventions are passed down over the years, less as a manner of direct homage but to assert “this is THAT kind of song.”

But unlike with various forms of rock music which are always being produced in some form, calling back to disco – particularly in its original pre-electronic form – comes in waves as the vibe falls in and out of fashion, so the evolution is a bit weirder and usually very Column A + Column B. So in the case of “Don’t Start Now,” the chorus hook is very “UK chart pop in the 21st century,” the bass line is very “Daft Punk trying to make their own Chic song six years ago,” and the lyrics seem specifically indebted to Robyn’s brand of “crying while I’m dancing” pop catharsis. (And then there’s some disco strings, gotta love some disco strings!) It’s all very considered and a whole team of people put this together, but it all comes together quite naturally. It’s rather elegant in its vaguely haughty funkiness, and ends up sounding like something that just needs to be.

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The 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s Monster is out this weekend, and I’m very proud to say that I wrote the liner notes for the set, with new interviews with Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck, and Scott Litt. My liner notes appear in two versions of the reissue – a 2CD version featuring the remastered album and a substantially altered full album remix by Scott Litt, and a 6-disc set featuring those discs along with demos, a previously unavailable live show from 1995, and a Blu-Ray featuring the Road Movie concert film, all the videos, and hi-res audio. (It will also be available on vinyl.) It’s a beautiful set that is designed to give you a lot of new ways of looking at this brilliant and unique album. I think one of the coolest things about this set is that between my liner notes, the demos, and Litt using so many alternate takes and unearthing buried elements of the music, you will get a very deep understanding of the band’s creative process at the time.

I think the most stunning “new” piece of music included in the set is Litt’s remix of “You,” which has always been one of my favorite songs on the record. In one of his boldest remix decisions, he cut out all the percussion on the first third of the song. It changes the atmosphere of the music significantly, and makes it even more haunting and emotionally charged than before. Here’s that remix, along with what I wrote about the song many years ago.

R.E.M. “You” (Scott Litt Remix)

It’s a bad idea to try to pin any sort of narrative on Monster — simply put, one does not exist — but in the context of the album, “You” is the logical conclusion to its general theme of obsessive, unrequited love. By the time we get to “You,” the cuteness of “Crush With Eyeliner,” the coyness of “King of Comedy,” and the earnestness of “Strange Currencies” are all distant memories, and even the destructive self-loathing of “I Took Your Name” and “Circus Envy” has run its course. At this point in the record, the singer’s religion is thoroughly and irrevocably lost, and all that is left is an aching emotional void and a lingering, undead desire.

Peter Buck’s guitars dominate the track, with an eerie pulse emphasizing a sense of post-traumatic shock, and a heavy, slashing rhythm evoking nothing less than total emotional devastation. Michael Stipe’s vocal performance is intense yet slightly disconnected, lending even his most benign sentiments a creepy, unhealthy tone. The song contains some of the most evocative images of Stipe’s career as a lyricist — “all my childhood toys with chew marks in your smile,” “I can see you there with lunar moths and watermelon gum” — but the peculiar specificity of the words only highlights the song’s desperate, deranged sensibility.

As the track comes to an end, Stipe repeats the word “you” with increasingly urgency as the music hits a chilling peak. It sounds like an act of self-nullification, as though he could only think to destroy himself by focusing his entire existence on someone else. When the song begins, Stipe’s character seems physically disconnected from his body and the world, and in its final moments, his mind seems to disappear as well.

(Originally posted on Pop Songs 07 on April 4th 2007.)

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Lake Ruth “Extended Leave”

Lake Ruth singer Allison Brice is an excellent lyricist in a very understated sort of way – she’s always writing these very closely observed character studies from a bit of critical distance, as though she’s reviewing someone else’s existence in a specific moment. The music, which feels cool and precise is its rhythms and textures, emphasizes the sense of clinical detachment.

“Extended Leave” is a snapshot of someone who seems to be under a great deal of pressure who reacts by skipping out of work and getting paranoid about the passage of time. Brice fills in easily observable details – “you grow obsessed looking at your watch” – but the specifics of the situation are vague. It’s a bit like watching a stranger and imagining the story they’re living. The “why?” of everything is maddeningly vague, but imagining what’s really going on and driving them emotionally is a sort of empathy, I suppose.

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Kanye West “God Is”

If you’re a middle-aged career artist in the wilderness phase of your career, the “Bob Dylan Christian phase” move isn’t the worst direction you could go on, particularly if you’re Kanye West and lyrics about Jesus and recontexualized soul/gospel chords have always been one of your strong suits. Jesus Is King is a “return to form” album that’s also a radical break album – the textures of classic Kanye but in the service of a manic rebranding as a Christian crusader out to convert his fanbase. “God Is” is lovely but also vaguely unnerving in its fervor and obvious extreme sincerity. West sings most of the song with a raspy voice, delivering a message of how he’s been saved by Jesus with a raw, ragged intensity. It’d be convincing if we didn’t know enough to get the sense that we’re listening to someone who seems more than a little delusional, but in fairness, knowing a lot about the low points of anyone who’s grasping for redemption like this is bound to make you question their motives, especially when on the same record he’s still saying very dubious things. But he sounds committed and joyful in this moment, and I hope he’s genuinely happy and it sticks for him.

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Locate S,1 “From the Nun”

Christina Schneider’s songs are smooth on the surface but winding and jagged on a structural level, as though she insists on complicating every pleasure by keeping you slightly off-balance and confused. “From the Nun” is something of a disco/rock number, but it’s a bit too off-kilter to settle into a groove. This isn’t a problem, especially as the emphasis is more on melody and lyrics, and the mood is somewhat dazed and loopy. Schneider sings in a sweet Debbie Harry-like coo but her words are sour and cruel, as she fantasizes about throwing cigarettes at a child and smashing fine china. A lot of Schneider’s lyrics deal with repressed anger, but this is where it’s most obvious, and also the most funny.

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Mauno “Expectations”

The mood and lyrical concerns of “Expectations” are fairly low stakes, but it all still conveys a tightly-wound low grade anxiety as Eliza Niemi parses the hidden meaning in thoughtless gestures and runs the cost-benefit analysis of a relationship that is steady and reliable but not particularly thrilling. Mauno’s guitar parts are crisp and dynamic, clicking around like a finely tuned machine in some parts, while thudding dramatically for emphasis in slightly unexpected ways. The music doesn’t move far outside of set expectations but still builds a sense of vague suspense, like you’re always just waiting for some other shoe to drop even if you don’t really want it to.

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Jennah Barry “The Real Moon”

“The Real Moon” seems to be about the space between feeling close to people and things while actually being quite isolated. Jennah Barry’s music is delicate and precise without feeling particularly fussy, and she evokes melancholy without getting maudlin or depressing. It’s a very specific mood – lonely but satisfied in solitude, peaceful in the natural world but vaguely intimidated by its mystery. The sound is crisp, cool, and distinctly autumnal, and feels like a scene in a story that ought to be romantic but ended up being lonely.

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Kate Bollinger “No Other Like You”

Kate Bollinger’s songs always feel so soft and cozy, like every sound in the arrangement is meant to make the listener feel as relaxed, comfortable, and welcome as possible. There’s a friendly generosity in her voice and in her melodies that makes the low-key confessional quality of her lyrics feel like you’re just listening to someone you care about open up about what’s going on in their life. “No Other Like You” is a love song in which she expresses deep gratitude to someone who has been very good and supportive of her, but she’s worried about what to expect of other people now that they’ve raised the bar so high for what she can expect. There’s a bittersweet feeling to the music, but the sound mostly conveys warmth and love. She’s still in the glow of the good feelings to get lost in the fear of what happens without them.

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Beabadoobee “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus”

I can only look at that song title and go “yeah, same.” But given that the writer of this song wasn’t even born until after Pavement broke up, I wonder what Stephen Malkmus means to her, in semiotic terms. What kind of aspiration is this – to write rock songs as well as him? To have his casual confidence and coolness? To somehow create emotionally moving art while always seeming like nothing ever bothers him? She doesn’t seem too interested in imitating him, since the guitar tones in this song are all very un-Malkmus, and the dynamics come a lot closer to hit-the-pyro-on-the-chorus bombast of Weezer.

But given that the song is more about dyeing your hair blue to mark a change in your life, it seems like the title is a bit of a self-deprecating joke, calling back to the opening line of “Cut Your Hair” – “darling, don’t you go and cut your hair, do you think it’s gonna make him change?” She knows it’s sorta silly to think a superficial change of style is going to make a big difference, but also gets that the smallest changes can give you enough of a charge to fake it til you make it something bigger.

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Omni “Skeleton Key”

Philip Frobos sings with a laid back and mildly bemused tone in pretty much every Omni song, like the world in front of him is always something he’s not quite figured out just yet. In “Skeleton Key” he’s sorting through the confusing give-and-take of app-based dating, and the gap between the appealing curation of self we can present in these situations and the actual self, which can be messy and awful once communication actually begins. There’s no conclusions or statements, just this dude poking at a topic from a few different angles in a song that’s splitting the aesthetic difference between Thin Lizzy and Pylon. It’s an interesting and surprisingly natural vibe – groovy and light, but with an undertow of nervous tension.

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Kacy & Clayton “Carrying On”

“Carrying On” is bright in tone but extremely dark in sentiment, with Kacy Anderson singing about the inevitability of death and dread about wasting time with a wholesome country twang. The anxiety and neuroses of her lyrics are almost entirely disconnected from the sound of the music, which feels rather light and easy-going. But this contrast would seem to be the point – not in a cheap “see, it’s actually quite depressing” way, but more in how these feelings can overlap, and one thing motivates the other. It’s not as though she’s talking herself out of life, either. It’s really more of a “carpe diem” sentiment, and the sense that she’s spooked herself into fearing that she’s wasted even a moment is just an unfortunate by-product of embracing life and aspiring for joy.

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Angel Olsen “What It Is”

“What It Is” could’ve worked just fine if it was just left at Angel Olsen doing her version of a chugging T. Rex glam song. It probably would’ve been my favorite song on her new record either way, because I prefer this sort of groove to the more dirgey or ponderous material that makes up most of the album. What pushes the song from good to great is the string arrangement by Jherek Bischoff, which starts off as a flourish that adds a touch of drama to the central groove, but eventually becomes foregrounded in an instrumental break that radically shifts the sense of scale and depth in the composition. Bischoff’s strings seem to leap out of the mix like the audio equivalent of a 3-D effect, and are recorded with a touch of reverb that evokes glimmering lights on chrome. It’s bombastic but tightly controlled, which is a nice contrast with Olsen’s more mannered approach to her vocal performance. She’s singing about trying to figure out your emotions or even know enough to recognize a strong feeling when it’s right there. She’s essentially singing the ego, while Bischoff’s arrangement covers the id, and the rest of the music is like the unbridged gulf between all this feeling and thinking.

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Big Thief “Rock and Sing”

Big Thief have a lot of excellent songs, but I think a lot of what has made them become a big deal this year comes down to people becoming fascinated by Adrianne Lenker and her baffling charisma. She’s strange and enigmatic without any perceptible calculation, and performs with a vulnerability and intensity that’s almost uncomfortable to behold in person. On stage she seems like she could be either 10 or 1,000,000 years old, and sings with a fragility that is starkly contrasted with the sturdiness of her guitar playing, which often makes me imagine the roots, trunks, and branches of tall trees. The music often evokes images of the natural world, and seems very old somehow, but maybe only because Lenker’s sentimentality and her engagement with the present is in touch with a lot of things that get filtered out of perception these days.

“Rock and Sing” opens Two Hands, the second of the band’s two records released this year. It’s a brief folk song that sounds like a sweet lullaby, but has lyrics that suggest a complicated relationship with one’s body and a desperate need for connection and stability. The melody is absolutely gorgeous but she’s not precious about it, and in a few spots lightly disrupts the meter of her words to get across the emotional weight of a line. Relative to other songs on the record, “Rock and Sing” feels tiny in scale, but the suggestion of extreme intimacy makes it feel like a hyper-concentrated dose of raw feeling.

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Caribou “Home”

“Home” isn’t a huge stylistic shift for Caribou. The basic elements of groove, space, sampling, and Dan Snaith’s distinctive voice are all right there, but the tone is different. The songs on Our Love and Swim have an ambiguous feeling to them, but “Home” is all warmth and joy. The vocal sample, sourced from the Gloria Barnes R&B song of the same name, is more central and communicative rather than texture. It’s closer to the aesthetics of Kanye West, Ghostface Killah, or The Avalanches – soul vocals from the past presented like a portal into a happier past, or a more authentic emotional state. Snaith lets the Barnes loop carry the strongest feelings while his vocal is cooler in tone and more focused on sketching in details as he observes a woman escape a bad situation and get back to something solid and fundamental in her life. Musically and lyrically Snaith is at a distance from the emotion and the action of the song, he’s processing and learning by watching her make choices and move on. From him, presumably? If so, this is the happiest break up song I’ve ever heard.

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Pom Pom Squad “Again”

The main tension of “Again” is in how Mia Berrin moves between states of self-pity and anguish, with each moment of relatively subdued sadness seeming as if it could suddenly swing over to cathartic anger. It’s a break-up song from the perspective of someone in the most awful phase of adjusting to a disappointing new reality. She’s cycling through every flavor of grief, but mostly stuck on mourning what she can’t have anymore. The line that really stands out to me is “I start to envy an old version of me somehow,” which is painful in its nostalgia but also suggests guilt for not appreciating what she had in the moment because she assumed she was at the start of a story rather than somewhere in the middle of it.

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Kim Gordon “Hungry Baby”

You never really know what to expect of the music made by the members of Sonic Youth outside the context of Sonic Youth. In a lot of cases, like with the most recent Thurston Moore release or Kim Gordon’s work as half of Body/Head, you get their most far-out experimental ideas and/or their most indulgent impulses. In the case of Lee Ranaldo’s Between the Times and the Tides and Last Night On Earth or Moore’s Psychic Hearts, you get fully-formed rock songs that convey the undiluted essence of their persona.

Kim Gordon’s first proper solo album, No Home Record, is in the latter category but still has a lot of experimental edginess to it. It’s artsy and abrasive, but that’s Kim’s nature – even her most “pop” songs have been pretty weird. Her new songs are heavy on noise and groove, and serve as compelling backdrops for her distinctive voice and the evocative story-sketches of her lyrics. The closest comparison, particularly on the vaguely rockabilly-ish “Hungry Baby,” is the dynamic of Mark E. Smith in The Fall. It’s an extremely charismatic but not inherently musical voice performing in a very confrontation style over music that’s very harsh and physical. But there’s also a lot of industrial aesthetics here too, and Gordon’s often distressed vocals sound particularly dramatic in the context of all these broken machine clangs and hums.

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Danny Brown “Theme Song”

“Theme Song” feels airy and loose – a sample loop that’s like a cloud of weed smoke, and verses from Danny Brown that sound composed, but still a bit off the cuff. And that’s certainly the vibe Q-Tip was going for, even if it turns out to be pretty far from the truth. According to Brown, Q-Tip is so meticulous and detail-oriented that he made him record his vocal “over 300 times.” That could be an exaggeration somewhat, but it’s basically like the rap version of Stanley Kubrick forcing Tom Cruise to walk through a doorway a hundred times over. I’m not sure what Q-Tip’s goal was here – finding one perfect take? cutting together multiple takes into a seamless composite? – but the resulting track is so smooth that I was genuinely shocked to discover it was made this way, but not necessarily surprised that either man would work like this. Q-Tip is known to be a perfectionist, and Brown…he just seems up for a challenge.

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Niall Horan “Nice to Meet Ya”

“Nice to Meet Ya” is a remarkable facsimile of the slickest end of British rock at the end of the 20th century, a song that was made this year but sounds exactly like it could be track 14 on a CD packaged along with a copy of Q or Select somewhere between 1997 and 2000. The vocal melody sounds extremely Noel Gallagher to me, and there’s traces of Primal Scream, Mansun, Blur, Garbage, Fatboy Slim, and The Chemical Brothers in the arrangement. It doesn’t pull from any particular reference point, it just feels very particular to around 20 years ago. And this makes sense given that Niall Horan was born in Ireland in the early 90s and almost certainly grew up hearing a lot of music like this. He’s very good at channeling this energy. Horan is aiming for “bad boy” here and the calculation is obvious, but the laddish swagger suits his voice well.

This also sets him apart from his former bandmates in One Direction, who’ve all gravitated to different musical aesthetics but all project an overbearing earnestness. It’s especially striking in contrast with Harry Styles, whose relentless focus on being Pop-Rock’s #1 Very Good Boy has kept him from making much in the way of actually compelling rock music. Whereas Styles’ most rocking moments – mostly just “Kiwi” – sound like a Broadway musical’s sanitized approximation of a very generic notion of ’70s rock, “Nice to Meet Ya” sounds like the work of a person with very specific taste who isn’t afraid to come off a bit sleazy, or even just like an actual human rather than an idealized image.

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Stereolab “Jenny Ondioline” (7″ Version, Alternate Mix)

Stereolab is now best known for an immaculate, groovy, keyboard-heavy sound, but their breakthrough record Transient Random Noise-Bursts with Announcements only barely hints at that aesthetic in a couple tracks and places all emphasis on Tim Gane’s overdriven guitar riffs, buzzing synths, and Krautrock-derived rhythms. It’s a highly distinctive aesthetic – a maturation of where they started on Peng! and the Switched On singles, but far less lounge-y and refined than where they’d end up only a year later on Mars Audiac Quintet. But whereas the former record is a transitional work on the way to Gane and Laetitia Sadier truly finding their stylistic lane on Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Transient is a fully formed masterpiece. They could have kept iterating on this vibe, but probably understood it was unlikely to top what they had accomplished with it.

The version of “Jenny Ondioline” that appears on Transient is a side-long 18 minute suite which also includes what is separately known as “Exploding Head Movie” on the Refried Ectoplasm compilation. That sequence is essentially a reworked cover of Neu!’s “Hallogallo,” the very definition of what is called the “motorik” aesthetic. The primary part of the song, which is about the first 7 minutes on record but is edited down to under 4 minutes for the single version, is pretty much the pinnacle of the first phase of Stereolab’s career. All of Gane and Sadier’s musical and lyrical concepts culminate in this piece, and in the process, they level up as pure songwriters.

“Jenny Ondioline” is rough and loud but elegantly composed, and bracketed by two power-strummed guitar sequences that work like sonic columns. The main rhythm is mechanical and precise, but has a brightness to it as well, like sparkling light on chrome. The section just before the chorus, in which the music drops back and a “oooooooh” vocal is foregrounded, builds drama but also offers a more sensual sort of beauty. The chorus is probably the best proper chorus of their career – bold, emphatic, and defiant with punk spirit even if the tone is more reasonable and pragmatic. Sadier is bitter but idealistic here, singing about the dire state of encroaching fascism and the disappointments of socialism in action, but with a genuine hope that conditions can be improved. This is a thematic thread that carries on through her work for many years, but it’s rarely stated as clearly and as powerfully as it is here.

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Stereolab “Come and Play in the Milky Night”

“Come and Play in the Milky Night” has a swing to it that sets it apart from Stereolab’s tendency towards more rigid grooves. The song feels light and effervescent, with Tim Gane’s gentle chords playing off Andy Ramsay’s cymbals in a way that evokes light reflecting off water on a summer night. The bass, keyboard, and vocal melodies are just as lovely, and it all comes together as one of the group’s most relaxed and beautiful recordings. It’s strange that this song is something of an outlier in their discography – the feel of it seems very natural for them, or at least for Ramsay. As the catalog progressed, Gane’s compositional style moved mostly towards tighter constructions, to the point that the later works often felt more like listening to structures than songs.

Laetitia Sadier sings at the top of her register here, and given the way her words are clipped by the melody, I didn’t realize for a long time that she was singing in English rather than French. The words just didn’t register at all, and the vocal here feels more atmospheric than central to the composition. The lyrics support the tone of the track, offering up images of stars and the night sky while suggesting a move away from rational thought. It’s like she’s just telling you – “it’s alright, let it all go for now and enjoy this moment.”

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