Author Archive

Elita “Girls on the Internet”

“Girls on the Internet” is a few different types of song at once – a moody goth song with a driving bass line, a pop song with an extremely girlish vocal performance, an indie song trading on layers of irony. The lyrics are straightforward – she’s singing about getting obsessed with girls on the internet, and craving their approval – but it’s never clear what the perspective is. Is this a girl who wants to be like these other girls in some way? Is this a lonely guy? In any case, it conveys both the fascination and frustration of parasocial relationships. These people feel so close to you, they take up so much space in your mind, but they don’t know you exist. They’re everything, and you’re nothing, and you’ve chosen this dynamic. So what does that mean?

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Destroyer “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”

“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” is densely packed with memorable and chin-scratching lyrics by Dan Bejar, even more so than is typical for a Destroyer song. It feels almost as though he wrote an entire album of lyrics, scrapped the music, but jammed all the best Dan-isms into this song instead. The line that immediately captured both my attention and imagination comes about two minutes in: “insane intercourse, constant swapping while I fall asleep in a bass.” It’s quite evocative just in print, but there’s something in the way Bejar delivers the line that renders it very ambiguous in tone. I can’t tell if he sounds prudish or perverted here, it could go either way on any listen. It’s both? He sounds, at bare minimum, fascinated by the “constant swapping.”

But like I said, that’s just one of many quotables in this song. I’m also quite fond of these:

“We are gathered here today to have a real nice time,” pomp dissolving into pleasant banality in the span of a few seconds.

“Absent friends, where’d you go?,” a question I think of all the time these days.

“Mirthless husk floating on an ocean” – it couldn’t be me.

“My life’s a giant lid closing on an eye,” grandiose but also self-diminishing.

“God is famous for punishing” – it’s true!

And of course: “Fools rush in, but they’re the only ones with guts.” Put this on an LED screen in public like a Jenny Holzer aphorism.

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Fernette “Lowlands”

A few weeks ago I went to a show in support of the release of the second issue of the new music magazine Antics, which was booked by the magazine’s co-founder Tatiana Tenreyro. Fernette was the first band on the bill, and when they started playing I was stunned by their distinctive style and presence – it was like seeing Nico sing at a piano bar, but with robot aliens attacking on the periphery – and then I was mesmerized by the songs.

Danyelle Taylor, the singer, has the build and bearing of a 90s fashion model, and a vocal style not far off from Victoria Legrand from Beach House. She seemed intense and emotional, but also aloof and unknowable. She was flanked by Eli Dubois on piano and guitar, which he played both with a casual jazziness, and Rashid Ahmad, who fiddled around with mysterious electronic gear to yield sounds that had the abrasive tones of Autechre but the painterly, poetic quality of Kevin Shields’ guitar in My Bloody Valentine. I’ve heard a lot of things, but I’ve never heard anything quite like this contrast of slick, accomplished, and traditional musicality and total chaos.

The electronic noise aspect of the band is dialed down a bit in the studio recording of “Lowlands,” which was part of the live set. Ahmad’s sounds had a way of cutting through the other musical elements on stage, but in the studio it’s more like a backdrop. His sounds emote as much as Taylor’s voice, if not more so in some moments. The overall effect is odd and profound, like you’re hearing this woman sing out to a glitchy digital ghost that cannot sing back, but can make its presence known.

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Benjamin Booker “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar”

Benjamin Booker’s Lower has a heavy atmosphere and distinctive tonal palette that’s like the musical equivalent of desaturating color to the point that everything’s a bright headache grey. The mix emphasizes sharp textural contrasts, so you get this sort of rough sandpaper sensuality. Booker and producer Kenny Segal’s scuffed-up aesthetic brings out the humanity in the songs, as though they’ve scraped up layers to unearth hidden loveliness and unfiltered feeling.

Booker, who was previously more of a retro soul/blues guy, now sounds like an R&B singer hidden in a thick fog of shoegaze guitar and funky drumming. When that fog lifts a bit, as it does on the gorgeous ballad “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar,” he sounds isolated and vulnerable. And of course, that’s what the song is basically about – a guy stepping out of his comfort zone in an attempt to find what he badly wants, and feeling desperate for someone to truly perceive him. You hear the awkwardness and loneliness in the music, but more so, a feeling that he’s getting closer to the light. He’s almost there!

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Snapped Ankles “Raoul”

After listening to this song twice I knew I had to immediately pass it along to my friend Chris. Chris pretty much only likes music that goes hard. He recently said “my lack of tolerance for music that doesn’t slap will sometimes isolate me” because he had to turn down going to a Waxahatchee show on account of their total inability to slap. Chris loves post-punk, and he loves DFA. He loves synthesizers and songs where you get both the unforgiving lockstep of a drum machine and the physicality of live drums. He loves an intense guy singing, or even better, speak-singing. And yes, he loved this song.

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Thandii “Past”

There is no getting around how much this song sounds like Portishead. Like, it’s the main selling point. I always feel a bit guilty describing an artist’s music in terms of how much it sounds like someone else, but in this case I’m almost certain that “sounding like Portishead” was the goal, from the groove on up to the vocal performance. But here’s the important thing: This is a good Portishead song. If Portishead were to return after many, many years of silence with this song, people would be pretty happy with it. And that’s a pretty high bar to clear!

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The Beach Boys “Do It Again”

“Do It Again” is a Beach Boys single from 1968, at the tail end of the most critically celebrated and commercially successful period of the act’s career. I’ve never gone too deep on The Beach Boys, so even in spite of it being a modest hit that appears on a lot of their greatest hits compilations, I never heard it before a few weeks ago. I encountered it while listening to a recent episode of Andrew Hickey’s A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and the experience of hearing it for the first time was a little profound. It’s not just that “Do It Again” is a great song, but that it feels like a Beach Boys song made to my exact specifications. I have no idea how I avoided this song for so long, but finding it now felt like a miraculous little gift.

“Do It Again” is essentially the result of a post-Pet Sounds/“Good Vibrations” studio wizard version of The Beach Boys self-consciously trying to reconnect with the carefree surf music that was their bread and butter in the first phase of their career. It’s basically the best of both worlds – simple, innocent joy rendered a little bit strange by studio experimentation. (Check out the severe delay effect on the drums!) It’s everything I like about The Beach Boys compressed into a little over 2 minutes – unusual sounds, sweet harmonies, earnest happiness tinged with vague melancholy.

Mike Love’s lyrics are extremely direct and openly nostalgic for aimless days spent at the beach with beautiful girls. I don’t think Love had anything to say besides “Remember how fun that was? Let’s get back together and do it again.” But even if he sounds optimistic, there’s a sense in the music that it may not be so easy to get back, and that recreating happy moments from the past isn’t as satisfying as just finding new happy moments.

The song feels more poignant now, nearly 60 years after its initial release. Sure, people still hang out on the beach in California and there’s plenty of surfers, but Love’s utopian vision of the Southern California coast is particular to the mid 20th century. It’s post-war boom time USA, not too far out from the cultural creation of the teenager. It’s a vision of California as the promised land, a triumphant paradise at the end of Manifest Destiny. It’s kids goofing off at the edge of the continent, looking to the horizon and expecting even more. I think if I could have experienced something like that – a triumph you can feel but don’t think too deeply about to consciously understand – I would only dream of getting back to it too.

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Estelle Allen “Girlfriend 2”

A lot of Estelle Allen’s music is in the same aesthetic realm as 100 Gecs – twitchy, warped versions of trashy Y2K-era music with heavily processed vocals. But while the Gecs focus on a hyper, bugged-out energy, Allen has much more capacity for her version of smooth and chill sounds from the same era. “Girlfriend 2” seems to be aiming for a D’Angelo/Dilla vibe with the groove, and the vocal melody wouldn’t be out of place on the first Justin Timberlake record. It’s fun to hear that sort of music with a messy, awkward feel to it, particularly as Allen is singing from the perspective of someone who’s kind of a wreck but is yearning for that sort of romance and suave self-assurance. I find myself rooting for her as she tries to convince this girl to come over and move from casual summer fling to proper coupledom, but also play it sorta cool. I mean, she’s not doing herself any favors by singing “I promise that I’ll clean my bathroom one of these days,” but I’m hoping for the best.

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Ethel Cain “Vacillator”

“Vacillator” sounds a bit like a more glacial version of Cowboy Junkies – soft, hyper-feminine, and romantic, but also sooooo sloooooow and zoned out it borders on feeling dissociative. Ethel Cain’s lyrics are overtly seductive and alluring through the middle section of the song, but the emotional context emerges with a knife-twist in the extended outro: “if you love me, keep it to yourself.” It’s such plain language, but it’s open to a lot of interpretation. Is she ashamed to be attracted to this person, or is it more of a warning to them about what may happen if people find out they’re having sex with a trans woman? Is she discouraging a feeling she knows she can’t reciprocate? Is being loved too much for her to bear? There’s so much angst and shame swirling around in this song, but the lust and romance is still the overpowering feeling.

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Darkside “S.N.C”

The first minute and a half of “S.N.C” is about what you’d expect to hear from Darkside – moody, muted palette, sensual but not overtly sexual – and it’s gorgeous. They could have stayed in that mode through the whole song and I’d love it. But then it gets much more interesting – a Stevie Wonder-ish clavinet riff struts into the mix, the funkiness gets dialed up by 90%, and suddenly there’s a reverb-soaked vocal that sounds like it’s superimposed over the rest of the song. It sounds like if God was a member of The Bee Gees. It feels profound, like some kind of divine intervention by way of overlapping radio signals, even if the voice is singing “I did it for the money, I did it for the time of my life and the thrill.” It’s one of the coolest things I’ve heard in a song in a while.

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Birthday Girl “Did You Know I Write You Poems?”

Eva Smittle’s vocal performance keeps you edge – she’s flirtatious, she’s threatening, she’s afraid, she’s romantic, she’s nihilistic – and moves between those moods somewhat unpredictably. She comes across like someone who can’t decide how she feels about other people’s lust for her, and the moments where she seems totally repulsed ring as true as when she’s reciprocating the lust, and maybe that repulsion feeds into her desire. The music basically sounds like slow, seasick grunge – heavy and sickly but somehow still fairly sensual and sexy.

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Cumgirl8 “Ahhhh!hhhh! (I Don’t Wanna Go)”

A kinda interesting thing for me has been a lot of the styles that were hot when I started this site in the early 00s are back in style, and while that certainly makes me feel my age, I mostly feel excited to have new versions of things I liked 20 years ago. In the case of this Cumgirl8 song, they’re playing in an 00s electro/post-punk mode I’ve always loved. I hear traces of Lolita Storm, Chicks On Speed, Erase Errata, Ladytron, and Metric in this music, but it’s very much its own thing with lyrics grounded in the present, at least in terms of vernacular. But aside from some familiar creative decisions, I think what I’m responding to most in this particular song is the mix of anxiety and venom, and a seeming ambivalence about both feelings.

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LustSickPuppy “Empathy Reserved”

“Empathy Reserved” is very abrasive with its harsh electronic tones, aggro rapping and frantic chopped vocals. But it’s also remarkably tuneful when it shifts gears about 40 seconds in, even if that part is also at a freakishly high tempo. As with 100 Gecs, a bratty and deliberately difficult aesthetic is more interesting and hits harder when there’s some song craft at the core of the composition.

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Cute Door “Play Hooky”

“Play Hooky” is very post-Lana Del Rey in the way it uses irony as a mechanism of grounding its lyrical details but also distancing it from reality. But the music itself is more like a deliberately spooky John Carpenter-ish version of trap, and Cute Door’s vocals are much closer to the girlish deadpan rap of Kitty Pryde in tone and cadence. (Remember “Okay Cupid”? Amazing song, really holds up, plays as an evocative character study now.)

I think you could ask a lot of people what they think this song is about and get very different answers, all of them saying something about who the listener is. But I think broadly this is a song presenting horny lady rap – “he says my mouth feels wet like my pussy,” etc – in the context of horror. But I think there’s a lot of room for interpretation in terms of the specific subgenre of horror, and in her role in the implied narrative. I think she’s meant to be understood as a sort of supernatural or demonic figure who uses sex to lure in victims, like a siren or a succubus or whatever Scarlett Johansson was in Under the Skin.

But there’s still some vulnerability and vague paranoia in her voice that suggests a more ordinary scenario, or her not quite being an aggressor. It makes me think of an old U2 lyric – “A vampire or a victim? It depends on who’s around.” It’s never clear what side of that she’s on in the song, and the ambiguity makes the song more unsettling and interesting.

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Piri & Tommy “99%”

“99%” is pretty straightforward – a dance pop song about loving crowded basement dance parties. The title refers to how densely packed the room ought to be, though it’s also played as innuendo. (“It’s a tight fit, but we like it.”) The beat is brisk, and Piri’s topline is a variation on her best musical trick – a strong, ultra-sticky melody that resisters as casual and low-key. This works perfectly well at face value, but I like how the lyrics scan as nostalgia for the recent past and a recipe for a perfect Piri & Tommy night out. It’s the past, it’s the present, it’s the future, it’s the Dr. Manhattan of dance pop tunes.

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Elysian Fields “I Can Give You That”

“I can give you that, I can give you that…please take it,” Jennifer Charles sings in the chorus of this song, sounding sultry and sad but a little serene, like a middle point on a spectrum of vocal affect between her contemporary Hope Sandoval and Lana Del Rey. And what is that? Judging by the verses, in which she zooms out and gets broadly philosophical about intimacy and zooms in on the granular details of a sensual existence, “that” is pretty much everything. The good, the bad, the boring, and the unexpected. All the rewards and perils of true vulnerability and risk. “I Can Give You That” is romantic but also noticeably weary, coming from the perspective of someone who seems to have already experienced all the best and the worst and is willing to roll the dice all over again.

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Ela Minus “Upwards”

“Upwards” is a pop song in the way the songs on Björk’s Post and Homogenic are pop songs – bold, catchy, and propulsive, but rendered with an eccentric palette and general indifference to how things are “supposed” to sound. It’s like the opposite of sugaring a bitter pill, but not the same as self-sabotage. The twists and turns and peculiar tones are essential to how Ela Minus delivers her most enticing hooks, and the harsh, angular stylishness of the production elevates a song that could be a more straightforward dance track. It’s not a pop song in goth/industrial drag, it’s a goth/industrial song with very angsty lyrics that happens to have strong bop tendencies.

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Mura Masa featuring Yeule “We Are Making Out”

It’s exciting to hear new electroclash songs that are just as good or better than the stuff that came out in the early 2000s. “We Are Making Out” is abrasive and raunchy on the surface, but upon closer inspection it’s all sentimental sweetness. This is literally a song about making out on the London Underground on the way to their snogging partner’s place. It’s about conveying the excitement of fresh lust, and the mystery of what comes next, though it isn’t that mysterious. The fourth verse is where Yeule really cranks up the sweetness by giving this scene a little context. How did they end up making out on the Underground? “Because you drew a picture of my heart on a guitar / accidentally said, ‘I love you.'”

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Kim Deal “Crystal Breath”

Kim Deal’s first solo record mostly sounds like a slightly more eclectic and ambitious version of her most recent music released under the Breeders name, but I get why she chose to make it her first solo album. It’s a matter of framing – instead of it just another Breeders record, Nobody Loves You More is presented with the implication that it’s more personal and uncompromising, and without having to exist in the direct shadow of Pod and Last Splash.

“Crystal Breath” sounds like a wonkier, more industrial variation on The Breeders’ sound. The arrangement makes the song feel like a machine that’s been sitting around in disrepair but is back in working condition after a little tinkering. It’s still a little wobbly and almost sputters out, but it doesn’t spin out or crash. The lyrical sentiment isn’t too far off from that notion, with Deal singing about some vague trauma but coming to a clear conclusion: “Let’s start a new life.”

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Alice Phoebe Lou “Better”

Alice Phoebe Lou is very gifted with writing melodies, which is how I could hear this song many times over the past month or so without really noticing the lyrics at all. Up until just recently the only lyrics I was clocking at all was the opening line: “When you finally arrived at the party on Saturday night.” But I wasn’t picking up the following line, which is a solid self-deprecating joke: “I had been waiting in anticipation, so could you forgive my weird vibe?”

“Better” is a song about the romance resulting from that meet-cute, but after it runs its course. The general tone of the song is warm and nostalgic for the early days of their relationship, but Lou cleverly flips the sentiment “things can only get better and better” through the song. The first time the chorus is sung, it’s about feeling like life could only improve while they’re together. Later on, this optimism comes from being rid of them. She flips back and forth a couple more times, but it always sounds true.

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Bassvictim “Air On A G-String”

“Air On A G String” has the spirit of true undiluted early ’00s electroclash, but it doesn’t fully register as a retro thing because the synths and programming are firmly rooted in contemporary electronic pop. In other words, it’s like if Miss Kittin or Chicks On Speed hopped on a Brat remix. The title and lyrical conceit is basically a cheeky, pervy pun on Bach’s “Air On the G String,” and I admire vocalist Maria Manow’s commitment to the bit. She has the perfect deadpan for this sort of song – a vague Eurotrash accent, the universal cool girl affect, in on the trashy joke but also legitimately playful and flirty. You could’ve sold so much American Apparel with this song.

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Father John Misty “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose”

Talking Heads may have written the most popular song about snapping out of a fugue state and having an existential crisis, but Josh Tillman has spent most of his career exploring this lyrical territory in-depth without ever getting a good answer to the question “how did I get here?”

“Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose” is played as dark comedy, with our hapless hero tripping out in a terrible “set and setting” situation – accompanied by a woman he can’t trust and her collection of clown portraits, plus “a publicist and a celibate.” The verses, which roll around a winding piano melody, are funny, but the depiction of ego death is no joke. It plays out like a devil’s bargain over sporadic orchestra stabs, a direct view of “bare reality” in exchange for feeling permanently broken. The string arrangement sounds like dark clouds rolling in over a vast landscape, with Tillman feeling smaller and smaller as the words “you may never be whole again” are repeated and he starts to accept it as truth.

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Father John Misty “Real Love Baby” (Live in Pioneertown, CA 2024)

This is what Josh Tillman said about “Real Love Baby” just after performing it in this show from a few months ago:

“I had this realization about this song recently. Y’know, I was pretty ambivalent about it for a long time, and then it started making me a lot of money. No, I’m just kidding. Not really, not much. But I’ve got all these songs that are just about these humiliating debased scenarios I find myself in on psychedelic drugs and stuff. I was like, this song is an actually really nice thing that came out of taking psychedelic drugs. It’s a little bit of an ego death to have…that’s the only song that will last. If any of these songs has a chance of pollinating the world after I’m gone, it’s that one. And it’s just an incredible cosmic joke that this one song, which in no way fortifies my egoic perception of myself, that I’m this dark cool guy. And I like that, so now I really enjoy playing it.”

The thing is, as sweet as it is, “Real Love Baby” is not that different from his other songs. There’s a lot of lines in it that deliberately undermine that sweetness, just as there’s a lot of earnest feelings that soften the more cynical sentiments. The reason the song works and is so resonant for so many – including Cher! – is because these contradicting feelings about love coexist and overlap. This is most apparent in the later choruses, in which layers of conflicting thoughts and emotions swirl around in the vocal harmonies. It’s a battle between the head and the heart, and given that the most tender and open-hearted lyrics ring the most true as it’s sung, I think it’s a W for the heart.

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Father John Misty “The Ideal Husband” (Live in Pioneertown, CA 2024)

“The Ideal Husband” opens with Josh Tillman in a panic, terrified that Julian Assange is “gonna take my files” and reveal his scandals to the world. Is this character a politician, a celebrity, some kind of captain of industry? Maybe, but as Tillman lays out all his sins and regrets, the guy sounds more like a garden variety loser. Actually, a lot of the lines just make him sound ordinary. That only makes the terror in the song hit harder, because it prods you to imagine everything you’re privately ashamed of becoming public knowledge against your will. And like, would it change how people see you? They might already have a low opinion of you. But keeping these things private allows for a sense of security and some hope that you can actually control what other people think of you.

The final verse of the song is the punchline. It follows through on the premise that this guy is ruined, and he shows up at a girlfriend’s place at 7 in the morning, saying melodramatic things like “I’m finally succumbing” and “I’m tired of running,” and deciding he wants to settle down with her. The “7 in the morning” detail is so funny to me – Tillman probably initially landed on 7 to fit the meter, but this scene happening around when most people wake up is much funnier than if it was in the middle of the night.

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Bob Dylan “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”

“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” written and recorded in the tail end of Dylan’s Christian era, is a chugging, manic blues rock song with scattered images and anecdotes that add up to a sense of impending apocalypse. And not “apocalypse” as we tend to think of that word today, but more in the original sense – apocalypse as the revelation, and the arrival of a new order. The song doesn’t convey dread so much as anxious excitement for what’s about to go down. Amidst the violence and chaos, Dylan tracks his character’s relationship with a woman named Claudette. He can’t make up his mind about her, and she seems just as indecisive about him – “finally had to give her up ’bout the time she began to want me.” By the end of the song he’s lost track of her completely, and in context, pondering whatever had become of her is a stray thought as he’s observing Judgment Day.

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Bob Dylan “Mississippi” (Outtake from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ Sessions, Version 3)

A lot of great songs have a very defined architecture, and are specific to a particular palette, arrangement, and production style. A lot of the music I love the most is like that. But then there’s other types of songs that are more like a floating set of alluring lyrical and musical ideas that resist a permanent shape or strict form; ideas that are open to endless interpretation. This is Bob Dylan’s lane, and it’s a lot of why his music has lent itself to being covered by a wide range of artists from the start of his career in the early 1960s. But it’s also how he’s approached his own body of work – songs going through many revisions before he settled on a studio arrangement, songs being reinvented for the stage, songs taking different shapes as his voice has changed through his life.

Bob Dylan worked on “Mississippi” for a long time before landing on the version that appears on “Love and Theft” in 2001. This means there’s a lot of recordings of the song at different stages of Dylan’s writing and arranging process, and this one from the Time Out of Mind sessions is my favorite. Other iterations of “Mississippi” lean more folk or country, but this one feels lighter and sweeter than the others. Of the three recordings of the song from the Time Out of Mind sessions, it’s the one that’s most obviously the work of producer Daniel Lanois. You can hear the Lanois-ness in the sharp tonal contrasts – warm, womb-y bass offset with a crisp, bright tone in the lead guitar and a trebly organ part that guides a few dynamic shifts as the song moves through a long series of verses.

Simply put, this recording feels amazing. It’s the kind of track that can immediately change the atmosphere of a room or cleanse your mood. I figure Dylan thought this version was too Lanois-ish and not quite what he was reaching for, but I think it’s one of the finest recordings in his massive body of work. Or maybe he just wasn’t set on what the song was yet, as about 40% of the lyrics are different from the final studio recording for “Love and Theft.” But I think I prefer the lyrics in this form too.

“Mississippi,” like “Tangled Up in Blue” before it, is essentially a love song that exists on a very long timeline in which the lives of the protagonist and the object of his affection only seem to sporadically intersect. It’s a portrait of a guy who’s been through a lot of turmoil, and has spent a lot of time alone. You don’t really get a sense of this woman, only just that she’s been a safe port in a storm and something for him to hold on to as he makes his way through the world. The beautiful and sad thing about this song for me is that his love for her seems to be more important to him than having a proper relationship with her. But he’s yearning for that, and by the end of the song he’s practically begging her for the stability.

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