Author Archive

Taeyeon “하하하 (LOL)”

This is basically like a K-Pop version of Portishead, but who knows if that was even what these people were aiming for. One of the things I like a lot about K-Pop is that very often the maximalist aesthetic results in the writers and producers tossing a dozen different musical ideas into any given song and ending up with something fresh and distinctive if just by the novelty of the contrasting elements. “LOL” leans on a lot of trip-hop and post-Weeknd R&B aesthetics but there’s so much else going on in the song, particularly in the final third when you’re getting hand claps piled on “orchestra hit” keyboards piled on groovy organ and topped with a glossy guitar solo. Taeyeon’s vocal suits the femme fatale vibe of the music, especially when she laughs to the beat in a way that sounds very much like she’s taunting the listener.

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Lapalux featuring JFDR “Thin Air”

“Thin Air” has a very peculiar dynamic that’s more like a three-act structure than what would normally make sense for pop or dance music. The first section is tense and atmospheric, the middle section is a chaotic dance break, and the third returns to a more vibe-y aesthetic but gradually lets out all the tension like a deflating balloon. That up-tempo section is only about a minute long but is incredibly compelling – it ought to feel cathartic but the textures are all harsh and buzzy so it feels more like an anxious chase sequence. Everything in this song is just a bit off in an intriguing way, and the climax seems early and abrupt so the soft, glowy, sensual resolution lingers slightly longer than you might expect. Maybe it’s meant to be like a reward?

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Neon Indian “Fallout”

Like any genre made up by music critics, chillwave is both silly and poorly thought out AND a very useful way of categorizing an ephemeral aesthetic. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny but you see the word “chillwave” and you know exactly what the sound and look of it is, and how it connects to a specific moment that feels very innocent and optimistic from the perspective of late 2019.

Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo didn’t run away from the aesthetics that made his project one of the defining pillars of chillwave along with Washed Out and Toro y Moi, but he did do a lot to expand its expressive range and dynamic possibilities. “Fallout,” the first single released from his post-Summer of Chillwave album Era Extraña, is emotionally heavy in a way that feels very removed from the stoner vibes of Psychic Chasms, which never got much deeper than conveying ennui or a vague pensiveness. In “Fallout,” Palomo kept the thick atmosphere of his first wave of songs but applied it to a composition with a much darker palette and an overtly romantic sensibility. The song vaguely resembles Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” but its sentiment is almost the exact opposite, with him trying to convince himself to fall out of love with someone who he’s realized is all wrong for him.

The most intriguing lyric of the song is the line that gives us the best sense of who the other person is – “are you still carving out a man, is that the plan?” It seems to be the type of person who wants to “fix” a partner and make them into the kind of person they want to be with, and being on the other side of that can be quite taxing. You always feel like you’re disappointing and never good enough, or that the person you are in the moment isn’t as worth loving as a person you might never actually become. Palomo’s vocal isn’t very expressive, but it suits the dejected tone of the lyrics, and when he sings “if I could fall out of love with you” in the chorus, he sounds like someone who doesn’t believe he has the strength to break it off or become this person he’d so badly like to be for them.

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Slow Club “Two Cousins”

I originally wrote about this song twice – once on this site and only scratching the surface of it, and again on Pitchfork in the context of a review of the album it’s from, Paradise. I’m coming back to it now as I’m going back through favorite songs from the past decade.

It’s generally understood that listeners make their own meanings for songs, but this one for me is an example of deliberately only hearing what I want so I can hammer it into what I’ve needed it to be. And what I’ve needed it to be is so specific and personal I don’t really want to get into it, but it’s really just tapping into the core of what this song is actually intended to be about, which is estrangement. Rebecca Taylor’s lyrics put that feeling in the context of family, but those are the bits I’ve learned to tune out in the interest of utility. What I’m really interested in here is the way she sings it all – you can hear a lot of guilt and regret in her voice. She sounds defeated, like she knows there’s just no fixing what’s gone wrong.

This song is from the summer of 2011 and from the distance of autumn 2019, the song resonates in a slightly different way. Back then relating to this song was urgent and rooted in events of the recent past, but now it’s all stuff I have to strain to remember. Things that were once incredibly important are vague memories now, and people become strangers. So now the part that really cuts deep is the end of the chorus, in which Taylor imagines crossing paths again in the future: “I look into your eyes / you don’t know who I am.” And that’s where I am now – a stranger to even this old version of myself. It’s about a different sort of loss now.

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Ali Barter “History of Boys”

Ali Barter’s Hello, I’m Doing My Best is mostly made up of songs about a sober person looking back on their life when their drinking was out of control with a mix of shame and confusion, like they’re just trying to piece together exactly how things got so bad. Some of the songs get very bleak, but “History of Boys” is light and nostalgic about messing around as a rebellious teen. The dark bits are still in there – she sings about blacking out in the chorus – but the lyrics and the rambunctious pop-punk style of the song honestly acknowledge the fun to be had at the top of the slippery slope. And while this is formally very much a pop-punk song, the arrangement resists the predictable patterns of that genre by putting off its hit-the-pedals chorus a bit to coast out on a pre-chorus that feels more stark and uncertain before slamming into the inevitable.

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Lilith “Figure 1 Repeated”

“Figure 1 Repeated” is a song about noticing the patterns of another person, and the sort of repeated behaviors that aren’t fully obvious to you until you’ve observed a few cycles firsthand. So it makes some thematic sense that the music itself moves in subtle circles, like a sad little train moving along an elliptical track. Hannah Liuzzo sings with a low-key melancholy tone but her words and phrasing come across as more reasonable than overtly emotional – she’s coming from a very analytical place, and seems more invested in fixing or adjusting the situation than breaking the pattern. It’s a very accommodating frame of mind, one that notices a problem but just wants to figure out how to work around it.

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Stone Temple Pilots “Silvergun Superman” (Live at New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, New Haven, CT, 8/23/1994)

“Silvergun Superman” is a freaky hybrid juggernaut, like if mid-period epic Led Zeppelin merged with David Bowie in his glam-boogie phase but was recorded with the aesthetics of grunge. It’s the logical outcome of the Stone Temple Pilots collective rock obsessions, and made distinctive by the slightly odd angles and tangents of the DeLeo brothers’ guitar parts and the slippery charisma of Scott Weiland.

It’s still so difficult to get a handle on what made Weiland such a compelling presence – he had the look and the voice, sure, but also a peculiar balance of raw sincerity and eagerness to obscure himself in personas and poses. At the time this mercurial identity was considered crass and inauthentic and was subject to merciless ridicule, but now it’s clear that he was acting out genuine fandom and trying to protect himself. This is most obvious when he’s singing the more aggressive and macho STP songs – he’s play-acting masculinity, and in his own way critiquing what would later be commonly known as “toxic masculinity.”

The more glam and arch STP got, the more it seemed like we were getting the “real” Weiland, and that’s probably true to some extent. But it’s also pretty clear that the songs confronting his self-loathing and struggles with addiction were deeply felt. And so while a cheeky glam song like “Big Bang Baby” is still a very good time, a song like “Silvergun Superman,” which is sly and winking AND extremely bleak in its portrayal of life as a junkie seems like the greater triumph. Weiland’s lyrics are very vivid in this song as he sketches out scenes of pitiful lows with a touch of sentimentality and grapples with paranoia in a way that grounds terrible decisions in the context of loneliness and a deep need for connection.

This live recording of “Silvergun Superman,” included in a full 1994 concert included in the recent deluxe reissue of Purple, doesn’t change much about the song but presents it in a state that’s a bit more loose and raw than the album production by Brendan O’Brien. The DeLeo brothers really shine here, particularly in the final third when Robert’s bass part gets a bit more fluid after mostly thudding through the main riffs and Dean gets to emulate the graceful shredding of Jimmy Page on the outro.

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Destroyer “Crimson Tide”

“Crimson Tide” isn’t far off from Dan Bejar working in his Kaputt mode, but it’s a more stark version – there’s no richness to the sound, no sax flourishes. It’s a lonelier version of the sound, and one that calls attention to its artifice in a different way. Whereas the songs in this general style on Kaputt and Ken were openly winking at Roxy Music and New Order, this song is more like going out of your way to set up a fog bank and dramatic lighting and then traipsing through the scene wearing a trench coat. It feels more overtly theatrical, and more about placing a spotlight directly on him as he shares his cryptic wisdom.

As always, Bejar’s words call out for annotation as he calls back to previous Destroyer songs as well as tunes by the likes of The Cure and Kenny Rogers, and his best lines come across like he’s saying something so personal he’s the only one who could ever really understand it. And then there’s the jokes: blowing bubbles, a funeral going completely insane. It’s all gallows humor, bitchy asides, and a half-hearted attempt to throw you off from noticing just how much of this song is about physical frailty and fear of death.

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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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