Author Archive

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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Stereolab “Wow and Flutter”

There is an odd sort of optimism in Laetitia Sadier’s lyrics, in that she consistently acknowledges the worst of the world but also the impermanence of any condition. This is most clearly stated in the mantra of “Crest” from Transient Random Noise-Bursts with Announcements: “If there’s been a way to build it, there’ll be a way to destroy it, things are not all that out of control.” “Wow and Flutter,” a song from the subsequent album Mars Audiac Quintet, expands on this notion and goes beyond aphorism into more specific context. She roots it in personal experience of youth – “I didn’t question, I didn’t know,” “I thought IBM was born with the world, the US flag would float forever” – before embracing hope in the understanding that all things will end.

The faith at the core of “Wow and Flutter” is in that what comes after a grim present is a brighter future, or at least that it’s possible to correct mistakes rather than let them metastasize further. Sadier’s tone is cold and sober, her hopes are not particularly high but there’s a feeling in the music of swelling hope and pride. “Anthemic” isn’t a mode Stereolab worked in often, but it sorta applies to this one, and the way its chorus rises emphatically over a chugging rhythm. The song isn’t promising anything but entropy, but the music is asking you to do your part to help shift the arc of time and history towards something more bearable.

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Stereolab “Brakhage”

There are a lot of things happening in “Brakhage” but the center of the song is just two chords, strummed in a steady and relaxing pattern through all the rhythmic and melodic changes. As with “Metronomic Underground,” there’s a suggestion of objects moving in an unconscious synchronicity through a physical space. I closely associate the sound of this with commuter trains and hub spaces, moving walkways and airports. The tone isn’t tense or agitated, it’s more a sense of calm and order. It’s turning your mind off and going on autopilot as you navigate your way from point A to point B.

You follow the pulse of Tim Gane’s guitar until there’s finally a deviation of the pattern in a break sequence a little over 4 minutes in, and you get a different two chord pattern for a few seconds before clicking back into the original sequence. There is a feeling of low-key relief in that switch-up, like you’ve just arrived at a destination only to get back to moving through corridors on your way to someplace else.

Laetitia Sadier’s lyrics reinforce the commuter interpretation by repeating a mantra – “we need so damn many things to keep our stupid lives going” – that spells out the motivation of keeping oneself in this loop of passive behavior. The tone isn’t angry or dismissive, just self-aware and clued in to the absurdity of it all. It’s the awareness of how fragile needs make us, and how much we risk by stepping outside of this system.

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Stereolab “Metronomic Underground”

When Stereolab perform “Metronomic Underground” now, Laetitia Sadier introduces it as music for “meditation.” I’d never thought of the song in that way before, but when I consider how I’ve engaged with it through the past few decades, I somehow instinctively understood this intention. It’s a song I’ve always gravitated to when I need to find a center, or a feeling of peace and harmony in a hectic world. I’ve always heard the music as being specifically urban, like a musical depiction of a city observed from a distance, people and cars and trains moving to a hidden groove.

This is one of my favorite pieces of music. If I had to make a list of my top songs through my life, it’d probably be top 10. I can never understate how much I love this song, and its bass groove in particular. The arrangement feels geometric to me, like shapes moving and aligning around that bass in a steady lateral progression. There is a profound sense of balance and precision to the music, but it’s performed with a very human energy. Live versions of the song go faster, and include extended noisy sequences. The version the groop performs in 2019 does both of these things, but also shifts the tempo around – it slows near the end, but it’s a bit of a fake-out as it picks back up before the conclusion. It’s like the music is an immaculately designed map, and the band takes different paths through it every time.

The lyrics for “Metronomic Underground” are essentially evergreen in relationship to a culture with some form of media, but feel particularly prescient about the time we live in now. “Who knows does not speak, who speaks does not know” sums up the state of political media. “Rounding the sharpness, untie the tangles,” a good description of the urge to simplify the complexity of art and human experience in the interest of harsh moral judgment or a refusal to engage with contradiction. “To be infinite, to be vacuous,” a pithy summary of social media. This is all very cynical, but it doesn’t undermine the meditative quality of the music. The critique is abstracted and removed from context in a way that suggests an eternal truth. It’s all something to be understood, a state of human nature. You have to find your peace with it.

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Sault “Masterpiece”

“Masterpiece” is built around around a bass melody that’s warm and comforting in tone, but conveys a low-key melancholy feeling. The vibe isn’t sad so much as doubtful, as the singer lays out a romantic scenario in which she’s fully invested in someone who keeps her waiting and unfulfilled. The vocals are soulful and bittersweet, full of love but also the gradual realization that this is just not going to work. She’s not ready to give up or give in, but she knows it’s almost time to cut and run. Until then she’s still trying to will a fantasy into existing, and her imaginary life is too enticing to ignore.

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Nine Inch Nails “Somewhat Damaged”

The first part of “Somewhat Damaged” sounds like sharp wires and tightening screws, the second part sounds like being smashed by a dozen giant hammers. Nine Inch Nails have always been labelled as “industrial” but this song actually sounds like you’re being fed through a Pretty Hate Machine in Trent Reznor’s rage factory. The tension builds and the rhythm tightens as the song moves along, and Reznor’s voice responds by getting louder and angrier. When he finally starts screaming a chorus – “TOO FUCKED UP TO CARE ANYMORE!” – the music thwarts the catharsis by getting even more tight and oppressive. That key lyric calls back to a running theme from Reznor’s The Downward Spiral era – “nothing can stop me now because I don’t care anymore” – but this music, the first song on the follow-up record The Fragile, makes something very clear: No, you’re definitely stopped. You’re crushed. You can’t win and nothing will save you. Maybe you ought to actually care now.

The final third of the song shifts gears. The tension subsides a bit, and the perspective pulls back. Reznor sings in a softer and more vulnerable tone over clashing rhythms, and his lyrics move from self-castigation to recriminations aimed at some other person who has betrayed him. This is the part of the song that’s always gotten deep under my skin, when he sings about feeling totally abandoned at his lowest point. He seethes over the broken promise of support, and while you get the sense that maybe he’s done his part to burn this bridge, his anger over being lonely and lost in this dark moment is overwhelming. The real catharsis of the song comes at the end when he unleashes his full fury: “THEN MY HEAD FELL APART AND WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU??” It’s an impotent rage – unheard by who he’s addressing, and damaging to himself. But it’s a brutally honest response to getting stuck in this trap of his own making.

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Brittany Howard “Baby”

The arrangement of “Baby” is lovely but halting and tentative, just like the person Brittany Howard is singing about. They’re hot enough to draw you in but unwilling to give much or even show up, and expect that hotness to make you forgive every other shortcoming. Howard sings her lyrics with a resigned exasperation, like she’s rolling her eyes every time she sings the word “baby.” The feeling of the song is like that expression “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” set to an R&B slow jam. It’s serious enough to convey some heartbreak, but it’s mostly playful in tone, particularly in the final third when the tempo starts to slow like a pendulum gently swaying its way back to stillness. It ends without drama. It’s just time running out.

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Sabrina Claudio “As Long As You’re Asleep”

“As Long As You’re Asleep” is a sensual R&B ballad that’s almost entirely about insecurity and jealousy. Sabrina Claudio sings from the perspective of a woman who is so hopelessly in love that she feels removed from time and space, just moving through life in a daze any time she’s not hooking up with this magic lover. She sounds woozy but dazzled, and right on the edge of acknowledging that she feels awful. The chorus is what really stings, where she’s imagining them in bed with someone else and just hoping they’re asleep rather than having sex. You know a situation is sad when the best case scenario for the paranoid fantasy in the song is that she’s the other woman for a married or coupled person, and not just another girl on the side. But you know, if they’re asleep they’re not doing anything or thinking of someone else. What a depressing thing to cling to, but I totally get this feeling she’s putting out there.

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Fountain “Cataclysmic Fusion”

Fountain call back to a sort of indie rock that’s been out of fashion for quite a while: extroverted, rowdy, weird, and abrasive but heavy on grooves. Think of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, or Royal Trux, or Girls Against Boys, or maybe the more aggressively strange side of Pavement. Their songs are well put together but feel like they’re being improvised on the spot, thanks in large part to the wild energy of drummer Laura Jeffery. “Cataclysmic Fusion” has a geeky strut to it – not quite funky, but it moves with a lot of attitude. It’s the sort of tune that could be very obnoxious if the band weren’t so charming in a bratty sort of way.

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Samia “Ode to Artifice”

A title like “Ode to Artifice” suggests a song that’s overly cold and clever, but Samia’s music and lead vocal exudes a warmth that overwhelms the more arch elements of her lyrics. The melody, which at some points sounds like it could break out into “This Old Heart of Mine,” seems to wind gently around a guitar groove that feels very casual without sounding particularly loose. The lyrics address some anxiety and social confusion, but it’s nothing too heavy – like, how stressed can she be when she’s affectionately addressing someone as “honeybun” in every chorus?

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Magdalena Bay “Only If You Want It”

There is no shortage of young artists aiming for late 90s/early 00s pop aesthetics, but a real dearth of artists who can actually provide this beyond a surface-level glossiness. But here’s Magdalena Bay, a duo who have somehow written a bright, hyper-infatuated bop with the melodic grace and effortless bounce of an actual early Britney Spears hit. “Only If You Want It” sounds great and feels very authentic in large part because the composers understand that writer-producers like Max Martin were aiming to replicate ‘90s R&B, and the bones of the song are rooted in those traditions even if the aesthetics are all neon plastic and overbearing sunshine. They push the cheery hyper-pop vibe to an extreme, and follow through on a conceptual level with lyrics that come across as playfully unhinged as they push the “I’m obsessed with my crush!!!” boilerplate sentiments of teen pop to a deranged conclusion.

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Modern Nature “Footsteps”

It takes a little over a minute for the saxophone to show up in “Footsteps,” and when it does, it entirely shifts the emotional register of the song. Everything else in the song up to the point it enters – and then on through the end of it – feels cool and neutral, but the sax lead is forceful and emotive. It’s somewhat jarring, particularly in contrast with the cool and aloof tone of the vocal. It takes over the song as it moves along, and it’s like this strong and sort of inappropriate emotion cracking through in a situation that calls for polite decorum. The feeling is held somewhat in check, but it’s still a disruption of a chill vibe.

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Belle & Sebastian “This Letter”

Belle & Sebastian have erred on the side of maximalism for a long time now, partly a result of being a band with so many members. But “This Letter,” a song from their new soundtrack Days of the Bagnold Summer, is almost startlingly minimal: Mostly just Stuart Murdoch’s voice and a gently plucked acoustic guitar, but with an understated muted trumpet solo and a subtle organ part. Murdoch’s melody is gorgeous enough that he doesn’t need to work in choruses or refrains – it’s a classic folk structure, a series of verses broken up by brief musical interludes.

The lyrics are written as a letter to someone very important to Murdoch that he hasn’t talked to in some time, and going on some clues in the first verse, it’s most likely an ex-girlfriend. But the contents aren’t sad, dramatic, or romantic. It’s mostly just admitting that while they’re apart for good reason, she’s still on his mind from time to time. It’s basically a song dealing with a problem I think most any adult can relate to: When you’ve connected with someone and can have a sort of conversation with them you can’t have with anyone else, what do you do with the part of you who needs that particular thing when the relationship has changed and you can’t get it anymore? You can write a letter like this, but I’m inclined to say you probably shouldn’t actually send it.

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