Author Archive

Ari Lennox “No One”

“No One” addresses a very particular 21st century form of loneliness – looking at your phone and wondering why out of 251 contacts, not one of them wants to reach out to you. From the perspective of a depressed extrovert, that can seem like 251 people collectively deciding to reject you when you’re in need. But this isn’t really about 251 people, it’s about just one of them. Ari Lennox sings around that point – she’s trying to distract herself, to vent her frustrations to friends who don’t seem to care, but no matter what she does her thoughts circle back to the one person whose attention she craves the most. Near the end of the song she tries to talk herself into moving on from this fixation, but I don’t believe her. The sound of her voice lacks conviction, and it’s the same bitter melancholy in her tone throughout the song never goes away. If anything, it just gets more intense.

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Mariah Carey “A No No”

Mariah Carey’s new record is stronger and more focused than anything she’s done in a while, largely because she seems like she’s lost interest in chasing trends and just wants to do Mariah Carey Things. “A No No” is the most fun she’s been in ages – energetic, sassy, and utterly ruthless in the way she drags her former manager for the crime of being dumb enough to cross Mariah fucking Carey. She sounds absolutely delighted to spend an entire song being extremely petty, and really chews on catty lines like “Ed Scissorhands, AKA, I cut you off” and “Parlez-vous Francais? I said non / let me translate it, I said NO.” The winding curve of the melody and syncopated beat flatters Carey’s vocal phrasing without having to show off her fading but still highly impressive voice. Even the seemingly random insertion of an old Biggie hook from a Lil Kim song works here – it’s a bit like something she might have had on a “Favorite Disses” vision board and just decided to throw into the song.

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Vince Staples “Don’t Get Chipped”

Vince Staples has spent a lot of his career to date being very fashion-forward and adventurous in his selection of beats and production, but his new record narrows his focus to a contemporary spin on classic Los Angeles rap sounds – Dr. Dre aesthetics filtered through trap, basically. I prefer his more up-tempo EDM-ish work for the most part, but it works very well on FM, particularly in that the lyrics are so rooted in Long Beach that the music serves as a necessary backdrop. It sounds familiar and strange, like visiting a place you used to know that’s changed a lot since you’ve been gone. A feeling of alienation permeates this music, from Staples’ bugged-out tone on down the to jittery drum programming.

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Boygenius “Salt in the Wound”

There’s three singers in Boygenius, and all three are fairly successful singer-songwriters on their own, but the one who intrigues me the most is Lucy Dacus. She’s exceptionally good at conveying the disappointed feelings of a pessimist, and in writing lyrics that sound like the sort of carefully edited complaints of someone who has been having an argument with someone in their head so many times over that it’s been pared their words down to something refined and incredibly sharp. Something in her voice evokes the bright headache-inducing bright grey of overcast skies. “Salt in the Wound,” a breakup song that starts off uncertain but builds to a loud, overtly emotional climax, is a perfect vehicle for her voice. Even still, the presence of Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker is crucial – they enter as the song progresses, and seem like they’ve arrived to show Dacus support while she’s down. That solidarity makes the song feel all the more cathartic – they’re helping her through a mess, and they’re all stronger for it in the end.

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Action Bronson “Prince Charming”

It always feels like damning Action Bronson with faint praise when you point out the obvious thing – that he sounds amazingly similar to Ghostface Killah – but like, let’s be real, sounding like Ghostface Killah is an INCREDIBLE ACHIEVEMENT. And given that Ghostface is much less prolific these days, a song like “Prince Charming” feels like a welcome taste of a flavor that’s largely missing from rap now. Bronson’s Ghostface style extends to his choice of beats, and this Knxledge production has that perfect warm, woozy soul haze vibe that Ghost favored circa The Pretty Toney Album and Fishscale. Anyway, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with who sounds like the one you love.

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Sonic Youth “Kotton Krown” (Live in Brooklyn, August 12 2011)

Sonic Youth recently released a handful of live recordings on the site Nugs, including the band’s final concert in New York City in 2011. This show, which was performed at the Williamsburg Waterfront, was the last time I would ever see them live, after seeing them perform almost every year between 1995 and then. Going to Sonic Youth shows was a big part of my life in my teens and 20s. The first two shows I ever went to were both Sonic Youth gigs.

No one at the time of this Williamsburg Waterfront show had any idea what was going on within the band, or that there was any chance this gig would be our last opportunity to see them. It was just another outdoor summer Sonic Youth show, and they had no new album to promote. I wrote about this show at the time, and the big deal of it for me was that the setlist was mainly comprised of the few classic live songs I had never seen them perform over the years – “Flower,” “I Love Her All the Time,” “Kill Yr Idols,” “Inhuman,” “Psychic Hearts” – and a few major favorites I was hoping to see again, like “Starfield Road” and “Kotton Krown.” It retrospect the setlist feels like a parting gift to fans like me.

I noticed at the time that the show was heavy on love songs sung by Thurston Moore, and knowing now that he was involved with another woman and his marriage with Kim Gordon was dissolving makes that an uncomfortable thing to think about. Having Kim sing “Kotton Krown,” a duet about the early days of their romance, with him not long after she discovered his betrayal is some serious Fleetwood Mac level mindfuckery. What must this have been like for Kim, hearing Thurston turn a song about her into a song about someone else as she sang along?

The end of Kim and Thurston’s marriage stings for two main reasons: It forced the end of the band, and it spoiled what was for many people including myself an aspirational model for a longterm heterosexual relationship. It’s hard to accept that as cool and feminist as Thurston is, he still fell in love with another woman and cheated on Kim. I’ve had a lot of time to adjust to this, and have come around to a more optimistic view of the situation: Any relationship that lasts for multiple decades should be considered a success, even if it ends with the two people drifting apart. The best elements of their marriage and creative partnership remain inspiring. I still want to be the Thurston Moore to someone’s Kim Gordon, but I’d hope I wouldn’t do what Thurston did towards the end of the marriage.

“Kotton Krown” is one of my favorite love songs. It’s a weird one, for sure, but it’s also mostly very direct and earnest in its language: “Love has come to stay,” “It feels like a wish coming true, it feels like an angel dreaming of you.” Thurston and Kim sing it in unison, like they’re reciting an oath to each other. The music is all about contrasts – the melody is sweet but the tones are harsh and bleak, and the blissful serenity of the verses surround an instrumental section that’s stormy and turbulent. My favorite part of the song is when that instrumental part ends and it snaps back into the verse. There’s a sense of clarity in this moment, and then they sing a line that is inexplicably extremely romantic to me: “New York City is forever kitty / I’m wasted in time and you’re never ready.” I can’t hear this part without feeling a bit of envy. I want to feel like this, and for real. I want to take control of the chemistry and manifest the mystery, and I want to be fading, fading, and celebrating. Whatever this is, whatever feeling they were trying to convey in this song – I want it too.

Buy the full show from Nugs.

Pistol Annies “Got My Name Changed Back”

Miranda Lambert has always been at her best when she’s salty and spiteful, so it’s hardly a shock that she shines very bright on a bitter divorce song like this. She sings about the formalities of going back to her maiden name with a dark sort of glee – clearly very excited about moving on, but also quite aggrieved that she’s had to move on from anything at all. But still, if there’s even a trace of love in this song, I can’t discern it. This is a song for someone who’s truly come to despise someone they used to want to spend their life with, and while it’s all very fun, it’s a mean sort of fun meant to blunt out the pain.

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H.E.R. “Can’t Help Me”

Gabi Wilson sings “Can’t Help Me” with a cautious tone, delivering lines addressed to a partner in a fracturing relationship with the knowledge that her feelings have to be filtered through careful diplomacy. The music, mostly just a thin line of melody plucked out on an acoustic guitar, feels just as gentle and careful. The song is technically sort of chill, but that’s just the surface – you don’t even need to listen too closely to feel the tension in the background of it all. This sort of song could easily be much angrier, or more defensive, or just flat-out mopey, but Wilson opts for a refreshing maturity. She’s obviously too full of love here to get petty.

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Deerhunter “Death In Midsummer”

“Death In Midsummer” has an unusually crisp sound for Deerhunter, a band more accustomed to an artful soft-focus aesthetic. A lot of this comes down to the way the verses are guided by a taut rhythm and the clean, trebly tone of the harpsichord. The song moves along for nearly three minutes before shifting into a cathartic guitar solo section that sounds like Bradford Cox doing what he can to channel the sci-fi tones of Robert Fripp. It’s a very graceful and confident piece of music, and it moves the band into a more elegant aesthetic while retaining all of the most essential elements of their sound going back to the harsher, more goth tones of Cryptograms and Microcastle. The pace of Cox’s work has slowed down drastically over the years – this new album comes four years after the last one, and this is a guy who put out five full-length albums and an EP in the space of 2008 and 2009 – but if his art is becoming more carefully composed and refined, that’s a fair trade off.

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Iggy Pop “Fall In Love with Me”

Iggy Pop improvised his lyrics to this song, and it shows – it’s pretty clear that he’s free-associating, and there are some lines that probably would’ve been changed or removed if it were more deliberately written. (Why does he seems so impressed by a table being made of wood?)

This is very much a song that would be compromised by too much thought, and a lot of the appeal is in the looseness of the music and the way Iggy seems to be figuring out his feelings of lust in real time. Half of the song is just him trying to describe this woman he’s hot for – her clothes, her personality, her aesthetic – and the rest is him trying to will a relationship into existence. Sometimes the title phrase is a suggestion, other times it’s more of a demand. A lot of the time it’s just a wish that he desperately needs to come true.

The line that really gets me in “Fall In Love with Me” is when Iggy says “there’s just a few like you.” I like the way that acknowledges and appreciates her being special and rare, but hedges just a tiny little bit. That’s the part in the song that best conveys the stakes – he knows he can’t afford to screw this up, because the chances of meeting and seducing one of the others like her seems fairly slim. And when you’re Iggy Pop in the late ‘70s, that’s really saying something.

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Ian Sweet “Question It”

It’s hard to get a sense of what the feeling of “Question It” is, exactly, but I think that’s probably the point. Jilian Medford’s voice seems a bit timid and uncertain, and while the structure is a straight-ahead verse/chorus/verse, her guitar parts seem to slink around and coil up in a way that makes the song feel a lot more windy and meandering than it actually is. Medford’s lyrics follow a similar path, laying out a pensive and self-conscious scenario at the start, but shifting into a chorus that sounds like a kinder, more rational part of her talking herself out of anxiety and shame. It’s quite sweet: “Every pair of scissors cuts a different shape.”

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PC Worship “Shell Shower”

“Shell Shower” is a direct descendant of Neu!’s “Hallogallo,” the blueprint for all arty rock music that seems to be steadily zooming towards some unknown horizon. Justin Frye isn’t breaking much ground here, but that’s not a big concern since it’s really just about the ride. Frye’s buzzy guitar tones add some friction and texture to the groove, and I like the way the blaring loudness feels a bit like turning the music up a bit too high in the car to compensate for the sound of the air rushing into the windows. It’s a very recognizable sensation.

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Julia Holter “Whether”

“Whether” feels unstable and frantic from the start, with a staccato organ that could pass for a clock alarm, and a beat that feels like it’s always tumbling apart. But within that, Julia Holter sounds remarkably peaceful and focused. Her lyrics are observational, almost journalistic in tone, as though she’s just singing from notes jotted down in a diary while traveling. Her vocal is oddly clipped, as though her vocal take is buffering from a bad connection. It’s a very strange mood to sustain for three minutes, but it definitely sounds cool.

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Joe Jackson “Steppin’ Out”

With its restless electronic pulse and bright keyboard notes, “Steppin’ Out” sounds like Kraftwerk sitting in at a piano bar. Joe Jackson’s piano part signals “classy and elegant,” evoking the ambiance of jazz or pop standards without sounding quite like it, like how a gifted cartoonist can imply a lot of visual information with only a few lines. The piano seems to sparkle, and nudges you towards imagining a ritzy club or an ornate ballroom. He pushes you to imagine a place filled with glamour, grace, and luxury.

“Steppin’ Out” is a New York City song written from the perspective of a visitor who is caught up in the romance of it all. His character is talking his partner into going out on the town for the night, and imagining the good times he might miss if they just stay in and watch television. Today we would call this FOMO.

The loveliest line in the song is when he imagines a small moment en route to wherever they’re going: “In a yellow taxi turn to me and smile / we’ll be there in just a while.” That’s what this guy really wants, much more so than going to the place itself. He wants that little bit of intimacy and sweetness, and being excited about sharing a special experience. There’s never any indication that the character ever talks his partner into going out; the song exists entirely in a liminal space of fantasy and anticipation.

Steve Barron’s video for “Steppin’ Out” – one of my all-time favorite music videos! – pushes all of these ideas into a more literal visual presentation without spoiling any of the more abstract and magical qualities of Jackson’s song. Barron’s camera captures the glamour and grime of early ‘80s Manhattan, with a particular focus on neon lights, shiny chrome, and lavish old places that seem to exist outside of regular time. The plot of the video centers on a maid at a posh hotel who imagines herself living the life of a fancy, stylish woman dating a handsome, wealthy man. She just wants to escape her drab life, to be the woman in the chic dress, to ascend in class status.

Jackson and producer David Kershenbaum’s arrangement for the song is rather simple and streamlined, but has some very intriguing details. I particularly like the odd little synth note that opens the second and third verses – it’s a strange and subtle thing, but adds to the dynamics of the song without cluttering it. The breakdown at the end is also quite lovely, with its seamless segue into live drums and the addition of another melody played on some kind of mallet instrument that adds an extra layer of glitter before the song is through.

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Thom Yorke “Has Ended”

“Has Ended” is about as optimistic as Them Yorke gets – a fantasy about the Western world suddenly snapping out of its drive towards fascism set to music that sounds like a gradually fading hangover. He imagines exploding phones, the forgiveness of the planet itself, and most unrealistically, the fascists feeling any sort of shame. It’s a nice thought, but it says a lot that Yorke can only express it in music that still sounds so bleak and downtrodden. But this is when you have these ideas, right? When you’re so broken the only thing you can do is to imagine being miraculously repaired.

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Yo La Tengo “Winter A-Go-Go”

“Winter A-Go-Go” is sung from the perspective of someone who is very concerned about a friend who seems to be lost and depressed, but knows there’s not much she can really do other than show them support. This is a perfect song for Georgia Hubley’s singing voice – extremely low key and unassuming, but exceptionally warm and empathetic. The song is an expression of kindness, but also of frustration at how powerless she is to fix the situation beyond being loving and supportive. As the title implies, the sound of the music evokes the beach on the off season, with traces of summery sounds muted by chilly and overcast tones. This is a fairly obscure Yo La Tengo song, but I think it’s one of their best composed pieces of music – Ira Kaplan’s organ solo is particularly inspired, and seems to open up the emotional range of the song before it narrows back down for the final round of the chorus, in which Hubley just seems to shrug: “It’s not an impossible thing to do / I know there’s a better life for you / I can’t keep from wondering.”

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The Supremes “You Can’t Hurry Love”

The waiting is agony. You see everyone else get the love you want, but it’s somehow so elusive for you. It’s like playing a game rigged against you, and you start to resent it. Maybe you just give up. Maybe you decide love is for everyone but you, and that the best you could hope for is to settle. But you’ve got to listen to the advice of the mother in this song, one of the finest pieces of music ever composed in the United States: You can’t hurry love, you just have to wait. Love don’t come easy.

This is the last thing you want to hear when you feel lost and desperate and lonely, though. And this was a song intended for a young audience – you have no perspective on time when you’re a teenager, or even in your 20s! Diana Ross and the Supremes sing this song with the urgency of a lovesick teen and the unwavering faith of a true believer, anchored by what I consider to be the most exquisitely boppy beat Motown ever produced. “You Can’t Hurry Love” may be secular, but it’s about faith and holding out hope for some divine plan and purpose. The song cycles through melancholy, exasperation, desperation, and hope before landing on a final verse that sounds far more at ease and resolute than the rest of the song. That’s the part – “keep on waiting, anticipating for that soft voice to talk to me at night” – that sounds like a prayer. It’s the part where they truly know this mother’s wisdom is the truth.

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The Concretes “Diana Ross”

Victoria Bergsman sings “Diana Ross” with a drowsy, uncertain tone that’s very far removed from the bold, hyper-confident voice of the song’s namesake. But she knows that, and this isn’t emulation so much as a tribute, or an attempt to connect with a strength and power beyond what you believe you’re capable of. In most cases, this is the actual utility of pop music – it’s a proxy, and a way to understand or channel our feelings into something more beautiful or elegant. Bergsman is referencing “Love Hangover” in particular, which has a smooth, sensual quality that’s quite different from the slightly awkward staccato beat and wobbly sax of this song. But as much as insecurity manifests itself in the music, it also sounds like a shy person speaking up and reaching out. Bergsman gives the chorus everything she’s got, and for me, hearing her sing out with such overwhelming sincerity is more moving than most Ross performances.

That chorus though. “I didn’t know what I feared, but I do know what I feel.” Boy, do I ever know how you feel there, Victoria. She sings it like she’s surprising herself, like she’s only just now understanding how fear can put you out of touch with reality. But feelings? Feelings are usually the truth. Hearing Bergsman repeat “I do know what I feel” at the end of the song gets me in the gut. She’s realizing something, and getting strength from it. Maybe Diana Ross is what brought her to that epiphany, but I don’t really think so.

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Matthew Dear “Echo”

Matthew Dear’s voice has always had a strange allure – dead-eyed, deadpan, and dead serious all at once. On previous records his voice was like an odd bit of flavor layered over his dark, lurid productions but with Bunny, it’s become the focal point of the music. In “Echo,” he tells a grim story about a young boy speeding from childhood into adulthood not by maturing, but by doing a lot of stuff that’s just not for kids. Dear leans on vocal fry to a comic degree here, digitally nudging it into a grotesque sizzle as his keyboards and clipped drum clicks create an odd unsettling feeling that evokes a druggy drowsiness and the gradual tightening of a mechanical vice.

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Kurt Vile “Bassackwards”

“Bassackwards” sounds like someone wandering around searching for something but forgetting what they were looking for almost immediately. Even for a Kurt Vile song this is exceptionally stoned and meandering, but it’s also quite lovely in the way it creates a sense of pleasant stasis. Vile seems caught between feelings here – not quite upset, not quite lonely, not quite happy. Everything just is. “This is life and it’s flat,” as Stephen Malkmus once sang. But it’s not bleak – he appreciates friends, he appreciates moments of beauty. And while the music doesn’t go anywhere in particular, it feels good. It feels alive, in the most low key way.

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