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Octo Octa “Move Your Body”

“Move Your Body” works very well as a utilitarian dance song – the beat is powerful, the synth riff jabs with the joyful vigor of a ‘90s Jock Jam, and a voice tells you over and over and over to move your body in order to get you to acquiesce and move your body. The fun trick of this song is the way the repetition of body can push you into your head and get self-conscious: Body. Body. I have a body. I have to move my body. My body must respond. My body is here. My body is here for movement. My body is here for pleasure. My body is my body. But rather than freeze you up, Octo Octa nudges you towards a positive conclusion: I love my body, and I should have fun.

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La Neve “A Pretty Red”

Imagine someone trying to do early 80s post-punk, The Rapture, “Groove is in the Heart,” and Primal Scream circa their Screamedelica Madchester phase all at once. That’s more or less what’s happening in this song, though it still feels like selling it a bit short. La Neve is throwing together a lot of different but familiar musical ideas and the result is surprising cohesive, thanks largely to a feverish vocal performance that serves as a focal point for the composition. Picture it in cinematic terms – it’s like the camera follows her around as the music is scenery shifting behind her. It wouldn’t work with a less charismatic presence, and you end up hanging on every word without it all needing to make sense. The message of the song is clear enough on the repeated line that stands out the most: “Here I am – a precious gem!”

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In Flagranti “Rather Sexy”

In Flagranti, true to their name, specialize in a sort of dance music that evokes an extremely horny atmosphere – seedy, humid, sticky, and louche. It’s ambient perversity. But there’s always a wink to it, a campiness that doesn’t cancel out the lust but instead amplifies it by amping up the perv factor and making you think “oh is this how the sleazes of the past did it?” “Rather Sexy” has a freaky churn to it that reminds me of a lot of Matthew Dear’s best work, but the dark claustrophobic tone is contrasted with a smooth vocal that’s urging us to chill out a bit. He seems like he ought to be wearing a silk robe and offering us “relaxants.” It really completes the vibe.

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Of Monsters and Men “Alligator”

“Alligator” is an outlier for Of Monsters and Men – a very mid-00s sort of hard-charging dance rock anthem coming from a band more at home in an 2010s indie-folk mode. This fact is a bit maddening in that this song exhibits such a mastery of up tempo rock dynamics that it’s hard to comprehend why they’d only do this once, and why the rest of the album this song comes from sounds nothing like it. Like, not just that the other songs don’t rock in the same way, but that they sound like a completely different band in an aggravating band-and-switch sort of way.

“Alligator” is a song with a relentless, focused drive and a restless energy. The arrangement is constantly shifting – the structure is straightforward verse/chorus/verse, but the music never lets your ear settle into anything for more than 10 seconds or so before dropping something out or layering something else in. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir’s voice is a revelation here, showing off a sort of grit and sassiness that wasn’t quite there on previous material, and a earthy intensity that keeps the soaring chorus from getting too corny. There’s a general feeling of empowerment to the song, but it’s all grounded in something dark and elemental that’s suggested but not fully explicated by the lyrics – there’s stars and light and soil and water, and rituals of life, death, and rebirth. The hook is “wake me up, I’m fever dreaming,” but it’s never quite clear what part of this is the dream.

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Bat for Lashes “So Good”

Bat for Lashes’ fifth album Lost Girls is a logical culmination of Natasha Khan’s body of work to date – an atmospheric synth pop record about supernatural romance set in a nostalgic ultra-cinematic version of late 20th century Los Angeles. Everything about the record and the visuals she has made to go along with it is extremely on-brand, to the point that while it’s all very good, it’s vaguely disappointing to me in the sense that as a long term fan I think I’d be more excited by a more radical stylistic or thematic shift. But that’s a cheap complaint when so few artists today can conjure this sort of extreme romanticism, even though there are so many who try. Khan’s craft is top shelf, her voice is gorgeous and distinctive, her taste is exquisite, and her reference points are specific.

“So Good” is the song on Lost Girls that strays furthest from Khan’s earlier work while staying firmly in the conceptual boundaries of the project. It’s a different flavor of ‘80s pop than she’s tried before – more bubbly and heavily programmed, and a bit closer to “cheesy” than “sexy.” It’s the song in the cycle in which her character swoons over the sexy vampire man while acknowledging his darkness and cruelty, and realizing that this turns her on. She sings the verses in a lower register but shifts up to her more natural high notes on the chorus, and the whole song brightens in that sequence. But it’s not a light of clarity – it’s more like a disorienting strobe light, and if she can focus at all it’s on small slivers of the moment she’s in.

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Hot Chip “Hungry Child”

Hot Chip have reached a moment of their career where their live show is essentially a DJ set of their greatest hits, and they present this to audiences with a maximum level of pride and zero shame. They are DJs at heart, and despite a lot of strong album tracks, they’ve also always been a classic singles band. Last night at Brooklyn Steel the group opened their show with a parade of some of their most crowd-pleasing songs – “Haurache Lights,” “One Life Stand,” “Night & Day,” “Flutes,” “Over & Over” – in the way a good DJ aims to get people on the floor as quickly as possible. It’s the opposite of how most live bands would sequence a show, with the goal of building towards a climax in the final third of a set. But the DJ logic works, and when they moved from “Over & Over” into the more recent single “Hungry Child,” the audience was primed to greet it as another great banger rather than an untested new tune to be burned off before the real hits.

It seems like part of Hot Chip’s ongoing project is creating a body of work that lends itself to this sort of performance or a killer greatest hits compilation, and writing new songs is a bit like figuring out what sort of songs they need to improve that end result. “Hungry Child” has a particular utility as a more pure sort of house track than they’ve typically made before, and brings in tropes of the genre that haven’t featured on the other hits. I particularly love the gospel-house elements, and the way the neutral but plaintive tones of Alexis Taylor’s voice contrast with an overtly passionate sound.

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Ghost Funk Orchestra “Modern Scene”

Ghost Funk Orchestra make a jazzy sort of psychedelic rock that I suppose is essentially nostalgic in its major debt to ’60s recordings, but the actual music feels disconnected from any particular time or place, as it’s really just bandleader Seth Applebaum piecing together an imagined past from scraps of old music he finds beautiful and interesting. (As a collector of old magazines, I feel like I’m recognizing some common instincts.) Their new record A Song for Paul has an aesthetic kinship with Broadcast in their The Noise Made By People phase – the music sounds “accurate,” but there’s a slight implied ironic distance and enough modern touches to keep it from seeming like a replica. The most noticeable difference is in the vocal performance, which signals “indie” more than “60s” and contrasts with the more obviously retro funk psychedelia elements like a neon green stripe through a black and white photograph.

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Cigarettes After Sex “Heavenly”

There’s no catch to “Heavenly.” It’s a romantic song about romantic love, with nothing to subvert or undermine that feeling. Greg Gonzalez sings his lyrics with an earnest purity – his voice is soft and gentle, but there’s also a firm certainty in his phrasing. The music conveys lovey-dovey infatuation without a trace of anxiety or impatience. Gonzalez is presenting an idealized version of the sort of intense love that seems to stop time, or at least slow it down to a crawl. It sounds like eyes locking, lips pulling back from a kiss, and the tiniest physical sensations amplified times a hundred.

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Lana Del Rey “Norman Fucking Rockwell”

What must it be like to be a man in a Lana Del Rey song? It’s a lot of mixed messages, for sure. The subject of this song gets high praise at the top of the first verse – “you fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you’” – but almost every subsequent line drags him mercilessly for his mopey vibe, bad art, and tiresome intellectual vanity. The magic of the song is that the core emotion isn’t pettiness or anger, but rather genuine affection and empathy for this wounded mess of a man despite these flaws. She’s definitely frustrated with herself for caring about him, but even when she’s dismissing his behavior – “you’re just a man, it’s just what you do” – she won’t completely write off his humanity.

As with most Lana songs, she’s asking the listener to consider that contradictory thoughts complete each other more often that not. The “man-child” here is aggravating, but he’s interesting, and loving, and allows himself to be vulnerable with her. She probably can do better, but is “doing better” always the point of human relationships? And even if love is just a game to be won, if put under the same sort of scrutiny as the guy in this song would she or any of us come out looking good? Love can’t work unless you’re willing to deal with flaws, and “Norman Fucking Rockwell” is just asking if this guy is worth the trouble and not quite arriving at a conclusion.

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Charlotte Adigéry “Cursed and Cussed”

“Cursed and Cussed” is built on a looped breakbeat that sounds very early ‘90s, the sort of rhythm that drew a line straight through rap, new jack swing, and rave and then filtered into crossover pop in the liminal phase before gangsta rap and grunge shifted the direction of mainstream music. Charlotte Adigéry’s vocal is understated in tone but her lyrics are overtly filthy, sketching out BDSM scenes and repeating “God punishes, I beg for more” on the hook. The funniest bits of the song are when Adigéry jokingly self-censors, as when she stops the word “gloryhole” midway through to sing “hold that thought, climax control.” Adigéry sets a kinky scene, but makes it sexier by giving the audience a little wink.

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Beverly Glenn-Copeland “In the Image”

“In the Image” is a piece of music that overflows with empathy and love, and that’s even before you listen to what Beverly Glenn-Copeland is singing over that “Apache” beat. There’s a sort of gently audio glow to this song, like West Coast golden hour light dimming slowly at sunset. Glenn-Copeland’s voice has a calm and loving tone, and nearly every line she sings is either enticing the listener to dance or to accept some life-affirming thought. None of it comes across as a hollow platitude – she sounds grounded in the reality of the world, and her generosity of spirit is entirely sincere. It’s not quite emphatic enough to signal gospel music, but it’s reaching for the same feelings and message. It’s just a bit more blissful and zen.

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That Dog “If You Just Didn’t Do It”

Anna Waronker’s voice has a very “90s cool girl” quality – exceptionally good for conveying sarcasm, low-key bitterness, and carefully guarded sincerity. That all comes to play in “If You Just Didn’t Do It,” her first song as the singer of That Dog in over two decades. The band’s particular aesthetic of raw alt-rock dynamics contrasted with delicate flourishes mostly contributed by Petra Haden hasn’t changed, but Waronker’s lyrical perspective has shifted somewhat. This song is nothing but tough love, and it opens with her explaining that this is basically a message to someone to whom the best way of getting through to them is through a song. She’s not pulling any punches here – she’s not outright attacking them or calling them a toxic person, but she is making it clear that their self-destructive impulses have made them impossible to be around. The song hits its main point with blunt force: “If you just didn’t do it, then you wouldn’t do it, and you wouldn’t be here right now.” It’s not sensitive, but sometimes the only rhetorical trick that works is a tautology.

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Black Party featuring Anajah “4AM in NY”

“4AM in NY” unfolds as if it is bracketed by ellipses on both sides, a formless melancholy state that seems infinite in the moment. The guitar tone is sleepy and the groove is gentle and low-key, but the lyrics sung by both Anajah and Malik Flint are restless and angsty. The song sounds like a breakup scenario split between two perspectives, which each not fully understanding how invested the other is in the relationship. Anajah is tearing herself apart trying to get a handle on why her love feels so unrequited, but comes to a conclusion that she’s done with it on the chorus hook. Flint, on the other hand, is just as attached but can’t seem to stop sabotaging the relationship out of insecurity and fear. The song plays out like watching them both in real time in split screen, highlighting the irony of their feelings, but also showing us exactly why these two can’t get on the same page emotionally despite their affection for one another.

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Ala.ni “Sha La La”

The melody of “Sha La La” is warm and familiar to the point that I get a sort of deja-vu feeling when listening to it – where exactly have I heard this before? It sounds very ’60s to me on down to its arrangement, which feels a lot like when Studio One players would adapt American girl group music into ska and rocksteady. Ala.ni’s arrangement leans heavily on a cappella with just a bit of subtle percussion and organ to bolster the architecture of the song. Her voice is sweet and sad as she sings very direct and plain spoken lyrics about a breakup. It’s not angry or bitter, just honest in what she needs her former partner to know about her feelings. She just misses the connection and affection – “someone to hug and trust,” as she puts it. She feels betrayed by their initial promise not to break her heart, but it’s hitting her now that no one can ever guarantee a thing like that. It happened and she’s feeling it, and she’s moving on, sha la la, sha la la.

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Teyana Taylor featuring King Combs “How You Want It?”

“How You Want It” is an exceedingly horny song in which Teyana Taylor is like a waitress listing off the day’s specials off a menu of sexual action, and suggests a few of her favorite house specialities. The acoustic guitar groove is low-key and the beat is fairly subtle, with a lot of room in the mix for a sultry atmosphere. Taylor sings “what’s the quickest way to turn you on?” over the best melodic hook in the song, and the line leaps out – she’s earnest in her desire to please, but there’s also something a little bit funny and a tiny bit sad about the focus on expediency. Kinda odd to be so urgent in a song that sounds like it’s in no hurry at all.

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Snoh Aalegra “Toronto”

Snoh Aalegra spends most of “Toronto” spends about 75% of “Toronto” trying to invite herself over for a hook up, and the remaining 25% wondering if the other person is also horny. Given how much work she seems to be doing here to get things going, this just might be a coupling of mismatched libidos. But either way, this is a fabulous sexy and sensual piece of music with a sleek, low-key funk bounce that reminds me a bit of late ’80s Prince. Aalegra’s voice is impressively versatile too, singing her verses at the bottom of her register before seamlessly shifting up to the top for brighter notes for a flirty chorus that seems to float up on a breeze.

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Anna Wise “Nerve”

“Nerve” contrasts a clicky impatient beat with a vocal performance by Anna Wise that’s soulful, serene, and certain. The incongruity is the point – knowing what you need and what you want, and feeling an nagging anxiety and desperate urgency about making it real. The rest of the arrangement is all shifting planes of melody and texture, all of it feeling ephemeral and unsettled. There’s other fragments of vocals in counterpoint – background chatter, a few declarations that break into the course of the verses – but it’s just more distracting thoughts and feelings circling the calm center of Wise’s voice. Hearing her speak the words “but I got to do this for me” doesn’t sound half as confident as hearing her sing any other emphatic statement in the song.

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Taylor Swift “Lover”

I’m not surprised that Taylor Swift would sound so good in a song that spends about a third of its running time sounding quite a lot like Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” but I am a little surprised that it actually happened. “Lover” is Swift at her most tender and romantic. It’s a full-hearted love song with only minor levels of Swift celebrity meta-narrative to get in the way of being a perfect track for wedding playlists for years to come. As usual her lyrics thrive in specificity of details (“we could leave the Christmas lights up til January,” “with every guitar string scar on my hand”) and pithy aphorisms that nail extremely relatable feelings (“I’m highly suspicious that everyone who sees you wants you”). But aside from those Mazzy-ish verses and the ultra-swoony chorus, the peak of this song comes in a perfectly structured bridge in which Swift shifts from a low-key vibe to high-key Swift-iness in both melody and sentiment. The line about taking “this magnetic-force-of-a-man” to be her lover is delightfully extra, and when she swears to be “overdramatic and true” for him, she’s simultaneously winking to the audience and being extremely earnest. This is not someone who’d ever be chill about this sort of thing and bless her for it.

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Sleater-Kinney “Can I Go On”

I don’t have a problem with Sleater-Kinney trying new things, since trying new things have served them well in the past. But it’s funny how “new things” is a very relative notion. Sleater-Kinney are indeed experimenting with “new things” on their 9th album The Center Won’t Hold, but to my ears, it mostly sounds like musical ideas that have been cycled through and chewed up by many lesser bands over the course of their existence. The elements of these songs that sound fresh and vital are the types of melodies and dynamics that have been with Sleater-Kinney all along, and the bits that feel “new” or at least unlike classic S-K sound a lot like drab major label radio rock from the past decade or so. In some cases, like “Ruins” or “Bad Dance,” the production moves work for the songs, albeit in a vaguely cheesy way – you know, like how if you wear certain clothes it will look more like a costume on you than an outfit? On other songs, like “Reach Out,” you get fabulous verses that are weighed down by an uninspired chorus that sounds too much like the bland hooks churned out by pro songwriters to blend in with the overall dynamics of contemporary radio.

Of all the new songs, “Can I Go On” is the one that best connects the particular spirit of classic S-K to a glossier studio aesthetic. It’s fairly light and boppy, and with its tone and processing, it comes out sounding a bit like a song that could’ve been used in an Apple iPod ad circa the mid 2000s. (You know, back when they were busy splitting the planet in half on The Woods.) Carrie Brownstein’s voice is bright and enthusiastic as she sings about feeling grim and drained, approaching the album’s theme of crushed hope and disconnection from a more personal and low-key perspective. It’s a song that answers is its own questions in music as they are expressed in lyrics – she sings “maybe I’m not sure I wanna go on,” but her voice and the energy behind the music make it clear that she very much is, despite it all.

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Poppy “Voicemail”

Two years ago Poppy was largely a meta deadpan art project largely spun out of the stranger and more surreal bits of YouTube subcultures. These days Poppy has taken a darker turn, but one that still in many ways mirrors trends in both music and visual art. It’s all very post-Billie Eilish now, with more of an emphasis on a goth-y industrial sort of pop minimalism. The satire of the earlier work is still in there, but dialed down to the point where it can function just as well as fully sincere music. “Voicemail” sets up a dark mood with self-consciously scary lyrics, but winks at us with odd lyrical turns – “I called up the police, their voicemail was full,” “Poppy is your mommy, Poppy is your mommy,” and a bit about feeling embarrassed randomly sung in Japanese. These odd bits only emphasizes the overall uncanny creepiness of the song.

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