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Crepes “As You Go”

“As You Go” is a marvel of rock craftsmanship – it’s neat and elegant in its construction, but still has enough physicality to keep it from feeling cold or sterile. Crepes thread a ’60s British Invasion sort of melody through an arrangement that nods towards jazzy rock, the Talking Heads end of new wave, and Tame Impala-ish contemporary psychedelia without ever feeling quite like it belongs in any particular genre. There’s a pleasing fluidity to this song as it progresses, particularly as it shifts into its extended instrumental outro and all the threads resolve before an unexpected guitar solo finale.

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Pavement “Heaven Is A Truck” (Live in Cologne, 1996)

I have spent two thirds of my life wishing I could be more like Stephen Malkmus. I want his style and grace. I want everything I do to seem loose and casual, but always brilliant and perfectly composed. I want to indicate great emotion and meaning with small gestures and oblique phrases. Wanting to be more like him has served me well in a lot of ways, but it’s an impossible standard. This guy has so much style that it’s wasted.

I don’t think you can fully understand what Pavement was without listening to live recordings, and few of them have been made commercially available. The records present the songs quite well, but on stage there was a strange alchemy in the personalities and far more space for inspired improvisation. This is also where the personality of the drummers asserted themselves – when Gary Young was in the zone (as on the Brixton show included on Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe), he hit with a force and urgency that nudged the band closer to the intensity of Nirvana. Steve West, his replacement, was more relaxed and groovy, and highlighted Malkmus’ fluidity and swing.

You can really hear that in this recording of “Heaven Is A Truck,” which as far as I’m concerned is the definitive version of the song. This take has the chill feeling of the studio recording but it’s a little less plodding. Westy’s pocket here is so loose that it’s baggy, but it’s perfect for the tune – everything just sorta floats along, and the slackness of it all makes my body ease up like I’ve been shot with a muscle relaxant. It’s a quick remedy for a weird mood, which is why I’ve listened to so much of this and other live Pavement tracks over the past few days. You can tell yourself to chill out, but sometimes you need to just induce it.

“Heaven Is A Truck” is a California song, and obviously, a driving song. I can’t relate to that, so I’ve always heard it more as a strange sort of love song that’s not really about another person so much as the feeling left in their wake. Malkmus’ words are certain but ambiguous, every other line is about subjective reality. The most evocative line in the song – “I know arks can’t fly, I know that sharks they don’t have wings” – is a declaration of what he does not believe. He sings about a woman with reverence, but it’s unclear whether or not he’s being affectionate. For every line that suggests he knows exactly what’s going on, the tone suggests he hasn’t actually figured out how he feels. So many songs are about processed emotion, but a song like this is more like just letting yourself linger in a feeling before you can start to define it.

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Rilo Kiley “Does He Love You?”

Songs about being the Other Woman or Other Man are always agonizing, but Jenny Lewis goes the extra mile in “Does He Love You?” by making you gradually realize that she is friends with the wife of the man she’s fallen in love with. Each verse adds another layer of awful emotion – loneliness, then insecurity, then anxiety, then self-delusion, then envy, and then finally, bitter resignation. Lewis always portrays her protagonist as sympathetic; you’re meant to identify with her needs and her rationalizations. All of this is played as melodrama, and the music follows the lyrical arc until there’s a string section scoring the angst-ridden finale like she’s living out the plot of a Hollywood film. The final revelation that this friend of hers doesn’t even really want the life she so badly covets is gutting, particularly as Lewis loses all composure and allows her voice to get as ugly and twisted as the feeling she’s conveying.

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Metric “Love You Back”

Emily Haines has always been so good at conveying self possession, emotional clarity, and determination. There’s a sharpness to her songs – her language is almost always declarative, her lyrics are very often critical in nature. Even when she’s expressing sorrow, she sounds like someone who has made up her mind.

“Love You Back,” from the new Metric record, is very much about feeling sure of something. She’s singing about deciding to move from trauma and aggravation, and to not give in to what is holding her back. The music is heavy, bold, and firm, giving shape to her defiant tone. That’s part of why the chorus is so striking and startling: “I wanna love you back so bad.” It’s a bit of a plot twist, really – what is she really singing about her? Is this always about a relationship, or is this more about a sort of radical love and forgiveness? There’s some ambiguity there, but it’s presented with such certainty, and a confrontational kind of joy.

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Mercury Rev “Nite and Fog”

Mercury Rev’s album All Is Dream came out on September 11th, 2001. I was in the city for 9/11, I watched the buildings fall with my own eyes across the river in the loft I shared with seven other people in DUMBO, long before it became the fancy Wealth District it is today. I did not get a copy of All Is Dream until a week or so after its release, and I closely associate the music with going home to the Hudson Valley for a while to… I don’t know, hide? It was a really weird and paranoid time and no one knew what to expect. I guess I needed to be around the river and the mountains and trees I grew up with, that I was so eager to escape the entire time I lived there.

Mercury Rev are from the Hudson Valley too, though further north than where I’m from, up in the Catskills. Their music sounds like home to me, and I closely associate it with the beginning of autumn. This is hard to explain – it’s not any particular musical element, but more the way their aesthetic on their late ‘90s through mid ‘00s material resonates with the vibe of the area. A lot of music conveys a “nature” feeling, and that’s not what this is. It’s about the texture and light, physical space and the history of it all. It sounds like the Hudson Valley the way most Sonic Youth sounds just like whatever version of New York City existed at the time of the recordings. I don’t expect this to make sense to anyone else, but I am certain that on some level this is their intention.

There’s a lot of whimsy and romance in Mercury Rev’s music. Jonathan Donahue has an odd voice, he always sounds kinda like a heroic but very sensitive elf on some sort of quixotic quest. “Nite and Fog” is a sort of skewed love song, it’s about a man who has fallen in love with a woman who he barely understands and knows he cannot please. He feels lost, literally and figuratively. Donahue sings the song with great sincerity, his frustration comes off as sweet and earnest. He does not seems at all angry about not being enough for her, and when he sings “but you want it all” in the chorus, he sounds like he genuinely wishes he could give her everything. It’s funny that a song so melodramatic and grandiose would be above all other things an expression of deep humility.

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Magic Potion “Shock Proof”

Magic Potion sound so casual it’s vaguely surprising the songs even hold together, as if the players might all drift apart musically at any moment, or the drummer might literally get up and walk away to get a beer or something. It takes some effort and intention to sound this chilled out! “Shock Proof” ambles along with a weird grace, and Gustaf Montelius sings the song with a slightly bewildered tone. He seems so guileless and sweet, like everything he sees is at least a little bit fascinating to him. It’s a good vibe, and it has a way of skewing your senses to match their pace and perspective. They bring you into their world, and you just stroll along with them.

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The Cure “Six Different Ways”

“Six Different Ways” has the hooks and bright melodies of a pop song, but not the shape of one. There’s an awkward sway to it, like someone trying to seem casual and cool at a party but betraying their nervousness in jerky little motions and pulling on their hair. The verses and hooks come at odd intervals – the sound is always pleasurable and the mood is always perky, but it keeps you off balance and unsure of what part could be next. That’s not a bad thing, though. If anything, it just makes the best moments pop a bit more, like every time the song circles back to Robert Smith’s voice going higher on the line “I’ll tell them anything at all,” or seems to click back into focus when he sings “this is stranger than I thought.” The strangeness of it all seems to be the point of the song. It’s a little celebration of happy uncertain feelings and the joys of being surprised by the moment. The song makes you feel ready for any kind of fun, romantic weirdness.

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Lana Del Rey “Mariners Apartment Complex”

Can you save someone you love from depression? That’s the idea behind “Mariners Apartment Complex,” a country rock ballad in which Lana Del Rey offers support and guidance to a man who mistakenly believes her to be as miserable and messed up as he is. She tries to give him perspective, she tries to show him the bright side of life. She tells him that she believes that people can change and that life can get better. She’s so earnest and sweet in this song, but also grounded and mature. She’s not offering any sort of false hope, and this isn’t really an expression of romantic love. It’s just pure compassion, and in the context of Lana’s body of work, a signal to the audience that she’s moved on from some of the darker feelings from her earlier records. The wistful vibe of the song and the firm, frank tone of her voice indicate that she doesn’t have any illusions of what’s going on here – she knows she can only help him so much, and that there probably isn’t much future to this relationship. But she truly cares, and she makes you care too.

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Noname “Self”

Noname seems so calm when she raps. Her words spill out at a relaxed but deliberate pace, like she’s extemporaneously speaking about something she knows everything about. In the case of “Self,” it’s processing her feelings after breaking up with someone and finding out she’s a lot more confident coming out of the situation than going into it. The track is nearly as chill as her voice – the keyboard parts have a smoothness you’d expect from D’Angelo or Erykah Badu, and the beat is remarkably unhurried and casual for a song that doesn’t even break the two minute mark. Near the end, she starts repeating the word “pussy,” and each time she says she sounds a little more comfortable and empowered by it, like she’s reciting an incantation to make her feel more confident. The song seems to just stop when the change sets in.

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Oh Sees “Sentient Oona”

John Dwyer is highly committed to the physical thrills of rock music, and builds his songs like they’re meant to be amusement park rides. It’s all in the momentum, the building of tension, the sudden release. He’s always looking for a new spin on the same essential thrills, and these days it’s in a quasi prog-metal milieu – a little more ponderous in spots, and heavier in others, but still a rush when you get to the classic Oh Sees “whoooo!” bits. “Sentient Oona” is all about how the tension in the double-drummer beat and Dwyer’s smooth mellow chords at the start gradually lead up to when it all explodes into a series of crushing riffs. The dude knows what he’s doing.

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George Clanton “Make It Forever”

“Make It Forever” sounds like an intriguing midway point between My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Tears for Fears’ early ‘90s material. I’m not sure if this is something George Clanton was deliberately going for – Loveless seems like a deliberate reference point for his work, but he seems like he may be trying to channel a more general very early ‘90s aesthetic. I like the way the Tears for Fears-ness of this song foregrounds the sort of romanticism and grandeur that would only be implied in MBV’s music. This is a very earnest tune – he’s singing straightforwardly about missing someone and wanting to reunite, and just be together forever after that. Clanton isn’t hedging his bets or playing it cool, and the music echoes the innocence and intensity of his feelings. He’s imagining a perfect moment, and in the music, he’s trying to will it into reality.

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Anchorsong “Testimony”

Masaaki Yoshida’s compositions have a neat, orderly structure – if they were physical forms, it’d be a lot of balance and symmetry. Clean lines and smooth surfaces. Not overly rigid and airless, per se, but precise and deliberate. “Testimony” is built upon busy rhythms but still somehow feels quite still and serene. It sounds like calmly moving through a crowded space with a clear mind, taking in the world around you but at a slight intellectual and emotional remove. As the song moves towards its conclusion, the sound gets less and less dense, adding to the feeling of peacefulness and calm.

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Spiritualized “The Morning After”

I am not sure how much lyrical continuity Jason Pierce intends to have in his music, but it’s not much of a leap to think that the Jane in “The Morning After” is the same Jane he was addressing in “Hey Jane” on the previous Spiritualized album from 2012. Whereas “Hey Jane” was largely about the singer’s perception of her and her influence on him, “The Morning After” is more of a character study in the style of Lou Reed’s “____ Says” songs. Here we learn that Jane’s from a difficult but affluent family, that she’s unlucky in love, and she’s in terrible health. There’s a lot of affection in the way Pierce writes about Jane, but also a bit of distance – it’s a little like how you might talk about an ex you still have some feelings for, or a once-close friend you’ve fallen out of touch with.

“The Morning After” is a rocker, and while the arrangement has the usual sort of Spiritualized density of instrumentation, there’s a relative lightness to it that stands apart from Pierce’s usual work. A lot of that comes from a groovy lead guitar part that gives the track a stoned ‘60s vibe, but it’s also in the way the music seems to unravel around the time the horns start getting wild and skronky in the final couple minutes. You get a sense of a life falling apart, but it doesn’t sound bleak or heavy. It’s more like a celebration that gets out of hand.

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The Cars “Candy-O”

God, that guitar sounds so lascivious! “Candy-O” radiates a very particular sort of lust energy, a barely-restrained horniness that’s spiked with neurotic twitchiness and a bit of suppressed anger. Ric Ocasek’s lyrics further complicate the tone, alternating between worshipful desire for a girl named Candy and verses that imply a vague but sinister situation. Benjamin Orr sings everything with a menacing tone – he sounds cold and calculating, and slightly contemptuous of this woman he’s objectifying. I don’t doubt the guy in this song’s affection for this girl, but it is creepy to hear a love song that comes off as ruthless and unyielding.

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ZZ Top “Got Me Under Pressure”

The sound and aesthetic of “Candy-O” was adapted – intentionally or not, I’m not sure – by ZZ Top a few years after the song came out on their extraordinarily popular album Eliminator. The ZZ Top guys kept the extreme horny vibes but replaced Ocasek and Orr’s dark urges with their usual smirking bawdiness. Like “Candy O,” “Got Me Under Pressure” is about some cool chick, but Billy Gibbons puts a lot more effort into letting the listener know details about what turns out to be an extremely specific woman. Like, for example: “She don’t like other women / she likes whips and chains / she likes cocaine / and filppin’ out with Great Danes.” An intriguing lady! Sure, he’s thinking about breaking up with her, but you really get a sense of why he’s so worked up about her.

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King Krule “Czech One”

Archy Marshall makes loneliness and despair seem so romantic and sexy. It’s almost irresponsible, really. “Czech One” is noir in tone, but there isn’t much drama in it. It’s an expression of emotional and physical stasis: He’s sitting there in a bar, trying to write. He’s sitting there in a bar, talking to a girl he can’t bear to look in the eye. He’s sitting there in a bar, lost in thought. He’s sitting there in a bar, trying to kill his feelings. He’s sitting there in a bar, utterly failing to kill his feelings.

He’s stuck and miserable, but he makes it sound like an aspirational and poetic form of sadness. The main keyboard motif is gentle and comforting, but everything else is either pure atmosphere or an intriguing flourish just passing through the mix. The feeling of it seems to loop, but the track never sounds steady or stable. It always sounds like something is just about to happen, but nothing comes. At the end of the song, it sounds like he just nods off. Even that sounds romantic.

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Richard & Linda Thompson “Don’t Renege On Our Love”

Richard Thompson is quick to point out that Shoot Out the Lights, his final album with his ex-wife Linda, was not written to be about the dissolution of their marriage. They didn’t actually split up until around the time the record came out in 1982, and these songs date back to 1980. But that only makes the record seem more sad, since they come from early on in the process of breaking up. They’re about the littles cracks and strains that gradually break a relationship and the way love can slowly drain from your heart. It’s the agony of knowing what’s coming but trying to somehow avoid it.

Thompson wants to hold on in “Don’t Renege On Our Love.” He sings the song in a tone that’s both gallant and pleading; he just can’t stand the thought of breaking off a commitment when he’s put so much of himself into it. He sounds so betrayed, but willing to bargain and blame himself if it will buy him just a bit more time. His focus and determination is emphasized by the drums, which gallop under his voice and guitar like a horse he’s riding into battle. He knows how this is going to go down, and he’s ready to go down fighting. He can’t give up, he’s just too hung up on the symbolism of it all. And there’s the real fear: It’s not being alone, it’s not losing her. It’s the dread of it all being meaningless.

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Juliana Hatfield “Universal Heart-Beat”

“Universal Heart-Beat” has an extremely bright and perky sound, like if music could somehow be made out of Starbursts and Skittles. The overwhelming sweetness of the sound barely masks the bitterness of the lyrics, in which Juliana Hatfield argues that love is entirely inseparable from pain. “A heart that hurts is a heart that works!” she sings cheerfully in the chorus, which feels like early ’80s aerobics pop filtered through crunchy mid-’90s alt-rock chords. It all sounds very fun, and that’s half her point: The high highs and the low lows are an emotional rollercoaster ride, and if you get over your anxiety and just go along with it, it’s a total rush. The bad parts don’t even seem so bad in retrospect – she comes across as rather nostalgic when she recalls the more humbling and pathetic moments. Better than feeling numb, right? That’s just boring.

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PJ Harvey “My Beautiful Leah”

Polly Jean Harvey wrote “My Beautiful Leah” in the depths of depression and heartache, in the wake of breaking up with Nick Cave over 20 years ago. It’s a horror film in two minutes of sound; a vivid sketch of a broken and miserable woman who… well, Polly never really says. But the implication is grim – it seems that she has disappeared for months. A suicide, probably. Or maybe it’s more of a Looking for Mr. Goodbar scenario? Either way, it’s rather bleak.

The lyrics are about Leah, but she is strictly a figure being observed from afar. She’s lonely and isolated. Everyone notices her misery but keeps a distance – maybe she’s walled herself off so she seems unapproachable, or perhaps everyone is afraid her darkness is contagious. Her despair poisons her life and withers her body. It’s easy to see how this could be a despondent Harvey imagining her own future.

Harvey’s arrangement for this song is truly upsetting. The bass is so deep and clipped that it seems designed to make you feel physically ill – a low rumbling tone that evokes and provokes nausea. It sounds as if it’s scraping slowly at the edges of the song while the beat seems to limp along in constant dull pain. The high end of the composition is just as unnerving as the low parts – organ drones signal slasher film paranoia, and a repetitive bashing of a cymbal suggests sudden violence. When the music cuts out abruptly at the end, it comes as a relief.

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The Beatles “Hey Jude”

Everyone thinks “Hey Jude” is for them, because it is. Paul McCartney’s wisdom is specific but universal: “Take a sad song and make it better.” “It’s a fool who plays it cool.” “You have found her, now go and get her.” “Remember to let her into your heart.” Love is different for everyone, but it’s always the same – you don’t get anywhere without opening up, you can’t get close without getting vulnerable. Paul wants you to be happy. That is an essential Paul quality: He truly wants everyone to love and be loved. “Hey Jude” is Paul telling you that if you follow your best intentions and open up and give honest and unselfish love, you will do just fine. “Hey Jude” is his way of saying “you’ve got this, buddy” to people he actually knew – Julian Lennon, John Lennon, himself – and to the entire world, forever and ever.

I get choked up thinking about the kindness of this song. It is a pure expression of friendship and empathy, Paul has no ulterior motives or agenda other than hoping that the listener heeds his words and finds the love they want so much, or solace in a time of sorrow. The music has a touch of melancholy to it, but warms up incrementally until it bursts into that “na na na” extended outro and it’s like Paul is trying to have a group hug with everyone on the planet. That shift in scale is a shift in perspective – from an intimate conversation to a sort of global awareness. The music illustrates Paul’s meaning in the lyrics: When our hearts are closed off, our lives are small and lonely. When we open up, the world is suddenly bigger and brighter. This is Paul showing you how much better better better better BETTER BETTER life can be.

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Miss World “Carb Yr Enthusiasm”

Natalie Chahal’s Miss World project is a mash up of Instagram aesthetics, ’90s references, and free-wheeling garage rock. Her lyrics and themes mostly satirize the more vapid aspects of social media and media aimed at women, but she’s doing it from a position of ambivalence – she clearly thinks a lot of this is very fun, but can’t help but smirk at the Kardashians and the way romance and betrayal can exist in the context of, say, Instagram stories. “Carb Yr Enthusiasm” is an aggressive surf rock tune about dieting and “beach bodies,” and it’s so heavy on irony that it almost comes around to not sounding ironic at all. Chahal’s voice is ideal for bitter punk sarcasm – there’s a nasty pinched quality to her delivery that’s a little bit Johnny Rotten and a lot “extremely mean popular girl in a teen drama.” She makes the song work in three ways: it’s a fun rock song, a funny joke, and a pointed critique. Not an easy balance to pull off!

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