Author Archive

Escape-ism “Lonely At the Top”

Escape-ism is the first music project Ian Svenonius has done entirely on his own, and he really makes the most of that by embracing a severe minimalism. He’s basically doing his own version of Suicide’s first record, but in this case, he’s both Alan Vega and Martin Rev. Svenonius’ voice is always the most interesting and exciting thing about any band he’s in, so placing all the emphasis of the music on it is a winning bet. There’s barely anything to “Lonely At the Top” other than a jumpy electronic beat and him alternating between sing-song verses and anxious bleats and squeals, and it’s incredibly compelling. He’s using the same musical tactics that Suicide used to convey claustrophobic tension and the threat of violence, but shifting it into farce – this isn’t sung from the perspective of some mentally ill street person, but rather the paranoid interior monologue of some rich guy trying to cling to power and prestige.

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Keshi “Goes to Waste”

I’ve never been a big fan of Coldplay’s “Fix You” but I love what Keshi does with bits of it in this composition. A few fragments of Chris Martin’s vocal are chopped and screwed, and presented as a context for Keshi’s own vocal performance, which is rather feminine and delicate. The “Fix You” quotes are basically a jumping off point for a meditation on a dying relationship, but the airy, elliptical quality of the track evades the maudlin melodrama of Coldplay’s original. Also, crucially, whereas Chris Martin sings “Fix You” like someone still convinced he can make things right, Keshi doesn’t seem even slightly optimistic.

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Jonathan Bree feat. Clara Viñals “Say You Love Me Too”

Everything in “Say You Love Me Too” moves around a slinky, vaguely sinister bass line that loops through every moment of the song aside from the bridge. The drums, vocals, and keyboard parts respond to the bass melody – the singers convey low-key romantic obsession, the percussion emphasize the lascivious sexuality of the groove, the piano notes and organ drone suggest both a yearning and a void. In some ways, this is like Peter, Björn, and John’s “Young Folks” turned inside out, with much of the same aesthetic choices, but with that song’s sweetness and forward momentum flipped into sexual frustration and pacing in circles.

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Stella Donnelly “Mean to Me”

There’s a lot of lovely songs in the world written about people who don’t deserve such beauty, and “Mean to Me” is almost definitely one of them. Stella Donnelly is singing about a failing relationship with someone who barely seems to like her, and is just dragging her along out of convenience. Even if you’ve never been in this relationship, you’ve seen it from the outside. This happens allllll the time. Donnelly’s vocal performance seems to take that into account – there’s something in her phrasing that comes off as a bit self-aware and knowing – but more than anything, it’s sweet and vulnerable and affectionate. This isn’t sung from the perspective of the relationship actually being over, it’s right there in the thick of it, right before the ending. There’s a bit of pleading in her voice, trying to make a case for better treatment. The must gutting bit is how wounded she sounds to be kicked around like this, particularly after the gorgeous, wordless bridge. The statement “you’re so mean to me” comes out sounding a bit like an incredulous question.

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Demi Lovato “Daddy Issues”

“Daddy Issues” sounds like Demi Lovato is straight up singing the subtext of another more artful or demure pop song. It’s like having the most literal interpretations from a Genius annotation replace the actual lyrics of a song, and the effect is vaguely jarring – like, wait, aren’t you supposed to be bullshitting us at least a little bit? At this stage in pop music we’re used to hearing pop stars be blunt and vulgar, but Lovato’s incredibly direct lyrics and forthright vocal style projects both a charming guilelessness and an impatient desire to be understood. The music is just as emphatic as the words, and I love the way the keyboard comes down in the chorus as if it’s underlining her lyrics a few times over.

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Poppy “My Style”

Poppy’s YouTube channel is an amazing piece of deadpan pop art that’s hilarious, ominous, mesmerizing, confusing, cute, and unnerving all at once. It’s a bit hard to explain – sometimes it’s modern dada, sometimes it’s a biting parody of the cult of personality, and sometimes it’s just straight-up funny. It’s always beautiful, but the aesthetic is deliberately sterile and surreal. The tone is somehow both serene and anxious. There’s a cloying sweetness to the character, but it’s undermined by Poppy’s vacant affect and the constant suggestion that this whole thing is a cult and you’re in danger of getting brainwashed and indoctrinated. There’s a lot of potent ideas in the mix here, but it’s all so off-kilter that it never comes off as a didactic critique. Mostly it’s just bizarre and fun.

Poppy’s music is just as clever and well-crafted as her videos. This actually took me by surprise – I’ve enjoyed the videos for a while, but usually skipped the songs because I figured they’d be kinda flimsy and less interesting than the sketches. I was very wrong. The songs on Poppy.Computer are consistently catchy and fun, and you don’t need to have ever seen a Poppy video to enjoy it. It certainly helps if you’re into artists deliberately fucking with you, though.

The lyrics play the same head games as the videos, but whereas many of the videos are maddeningly oblique, there’s more of a wink in the songs. “My Style,” maybe the best track on the record, is where she lays out the basic ideas: Her aesthetic embraces random contradictions, she’s a product, she loves you, she will destroy you. Truly, no one has ever sounded cuter while threatening to break your neck.

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Lake Ruth “Empty Morning”

Allison Brice’s voice has a high, delicate tone that floats gently through “Empty Morning” like a light breeze. It seems to move through the electric piano chords that guide the song, and through the treble of the guitar and snare hits. There’s a languid pace to the piece but the music is always moving forward, Brice’s voice pushing towards its conclusion. When the song finally reaches the end, the beat stops with a few rapid hits. As romantic as the music sounds, the end is oddly unsentimental: Hey, we’re here. We’re done.

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Municipality “Miles Away”

I don’t say this to belittle the band Municipality, but the degree to which this song sounds like The Clientele is astonishing. As in, it can be difficult to imagine that this is not Alasdair MacLean leading another band. The particular tone of the voice, the melodic style, the guitar tone, the way the drums fall into this pocket that’s loose but precise. It’s a dead ringer, and I mean this as a compliment – this is a winning sound, and it’s not as though there aren’t around 300 fake Joy Divisions out there we have to all pretend are fresh and exciting. Also, “Miles Away” is an incredibly lovely piece of music, and frankly, better than a LOT of actual Clientele songs. If you’re going to go with someone else’s style, you really ought to at least do it as well or better.

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Kelela “Waitin'”

The bit from “Waiting’” that gets me is the melodic turn on “Damn, didn’t we have a good time?,” as the song shifts into pre-chorus mode. It has the lovely understated elegance of mid-‘90s Janet Jackson, and signals a feeling of relief and clarity. In the context of the lyrics, it’s the moment where Kelela’s chance encounter with a recent ex has her reexamining their past and contemplating whether they might actually have a future. She nails a very specific combination of emotions in her phrasing – giddiness blended with skepticism, with a bit of nostalgia, loneliness, and anxiety tossed in. The excited feeling is dominant, so you get a sense of where this story is going even if she doesn’t spell it out.

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Miss World “Click and Yr Mine”

“Click and Yr Mine” has a lusty, sassy sound to it that makes it sound like a sort of love song, but listen a bit closer – this woman is literally singing about shopping for clothes online. I think a songwriter from a previous generation would’ve made this some kind of withering critique of capitalism, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here at all. The subversive element here is in upending the expectations of a crush song, and not only removing the guy as the object of lust, but dismissing men altogether: “I don’t need no boys telling me what is wrong in my life!” It’s not a mean-spirited song, though. It’s just someone allowing themselves to prioritize their enthusiasms.

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Melkbelly “Cawthra”

There’s a wired restlessness to pretty much all of Melkbelly’s music, a crazed energy that comes through even in the relatively still and relaxed bits of a track like “Cawthra.” The song is built so the entire first minute or so is like a lit fuse, and you feel the inevitability of the explosion coming even if you’re not totally sure on which measure it’ll come. The loud bits are cathartic, but the more quiet parts are the draw – there’s a touch of childlike mischief to the vocal melody, and hidden subtleties to the mounting tension.

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Jessie Ware “Midnight”

I’ve appreciated Jessie Ware’s earlier work, but never connected with it until hearing her new record Glasshouse. Two things changed – the songwriting has leveled up, and her voice has become more confident and focused. Her phrasing now reminds me a lot of Anita Baker and Whitney Houston in the ‘80s – bold and assertive in expressing emotion, but shaded with nuanced, complicated feelings. Her performance on “Midnight” is particularly excellent, with her contrasting a soft, fragile tone on the verses with a direct, passionate approach on the chorus. The vulnerability leads to strength and vice versa, it’s presented as a continuum of intimacy and lust. The music shifts too, starting off in a more atmospheric space not far removed from a lot of other contemporary pop before shifting into the firmer structure of a chord sequence that sounds quite a bit like Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets.”

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Fever Ray “To the Moon and Back”

I wouldn’t have expected Karin Dreijer’s first new song in several years to be something of a throwback to the aesthetics of The Knife’s Deep Cuts, but it’s a very welcome surprise. “To the Moon and Back” has a perky bounce to it, and melodies that are overtly catchy while resisting the traditional verse/chorus/verse structure of pop music. The song is very generous with the listener, but holds back from providing the catharsis of a chorus. This seems rather deliberate – the lyrics are full of lust and anticipation, and while there’s some vivid action going in the words, it’s always just shy of a literal or figurative climax. There’s the old saying “always leave ‘em wanting more,” and that applies here, even more so because the song is very much about wanting more.

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Destroyer “In the Morning”

“In the Morning” was built to deliberately evoke the sound of early New Order, specifically the way that band created this overwhelming grey atmosphere and a rhythmic momentum that’s like pacing around nervously in circles. Like most Destroyer songs, Dan Bejar creates a familiar, nostalgic musical setting and knocks it off kilter simply by singing on it. The character of his voice is incredibly distinctive, and he always sings with this odd mix of aloofness and sentimentality, like he’s visiting someplace but is embarrassed to be a tourist.

Songwriting is a form of time travel for Bejar, but it’s not always clear whether he has a particular mission or destination. The lyrics of “In the Morning” don’t seem to evoke anything particular about the early ‘80s, and he’s too young to have anything other than childhood memories of the era. But I get the impulse to go back in time to a period just slightly ahead of your time – this is, in fact, one of my greatest fantasies. (And something I’ve also indulged in music, with the survey sets on this site.) With this in mind, the crucial lyric of this song is the refrain “you wanted it to be cool.” Maybe part of this song is in wondering why things from this period, particularly New Order, have been considered cool for so long. What is it about this feeling that never seems to go away? Is it about it sounding cool, or because it’s the sound of decline and it hasn’t stopped being relevant?

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Electric Six “Sex with Somebody”

Electric Six have spent the past 15 years releasing music year in and year out that mercilessly satirizes contemporary masculinity. The characters in Dick Valentine’s songs are vivid caricatures of delusional idiots, desperate creeps, obnoxious blowhards, and wannabe alpha males, but like… these days a lot of that is less cartoonish and more like photorealism. “Sex with Somebody” is a groovy “end of the night” low key disco song sung from the perspective of some guy with an urgent need to have sex with literally anyone who will let him, and at first it just seems like the joke is that Valentine is just singing the subtext of lots of other pop songs. But the song is really more the character’s desperation and loneliness, and how he only can feel validated in this way. It’s not about sex or human contact, just about serving his ego and acting out a social ritual. It’s all benchmarks and no humanity.

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Werewolf Diskdrive “Hamburgers & Hot Dogs”

This essentially sounds like Liars in electronic punk mode, but with the lyrical concerns of Weird Al Yankovic. This is a throbbing, dirty electro banger about strongly preferring hamburgers and hot dogs (and a few other lowbrow, generally unhealthy foods) over trendy, healthy foods like kale and quinoa. It is gloriously silly, but played totally straight, to the point that it’s a lot more like a “slobs vs. snobs” class thing than a gleefully childish Tim & Eric thing. (They, of course, wrote their own wonderful “Hamburgers and Hot Dogs” song.) But really, it’s the music that makes this so impressive – this does not need to be such a banger, and yet it is. I would love to be at the kind of loud, sweaty party where this gets people going. This really ought to be the “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” of 2017.

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William Patrick Corgan “Processional”

I saw Billy Corgan perform a solo show at the Murmrr Theater – actually the Union Temple of Brooklyn with a makeshift stage – over the weekend. The opening set was his new solo record, Ogilala in full, and the second set was a career-spanning setlist ranging from late period material to deep cuts from the classic ‘90s Smashing Pumpkins catalog. This second set was excellent, and genuinely surprised me several times over. I never expected to ever see him play “Starla” live, much less a gorgeous solo piano version. There was also a lovely piano arrangement for “Soma,” an inspired simplified versions of “Muzzle,” “Annie-Dog,” and “Age of Innocence,” all big favorites for me.

It was a very intimate and generous performance, and it was met great enthusiasm by the audience whether he was playing the new material or songs from his most famous records. (He received at least five standing ovations from the entire audience, including when he first came on stage.) I feel like on some level the motivation of the audience was to show Corgan how much he is appreciated, since he so often seems bitter and misunderstood. He seemed genuinely moved by the love of the audience. He also seemed at peace during much of the performance – there is a serenity at the core of the new songs in particular, perhaps the effect of being a new father. He ended the show with “Farewell and Goodnight” from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and made a point of telling the audience that the song was written with James Iha, and then clarifying further that it was mostly James’ song. There was a lot of affection in his voice when he talked about James, and it was so nice to hear knowing that they had been estranged for a long time.

James Iha plays on the studio recording of “Processional,” and it’s the first song they recorded together since “Untitled,” the final track recorded by the Pumpkins in their original run. The song is low key and lovely, and feels relaxed in a way that Corgan rarely seems, even on his most mellow songs. If you’d asked me to peg which cut on the record featured Iha, I might not have chosen this – it’s so simple and spare that it doesn’t announce itself as a song with a guest star. But I think it’s meaningful that these guys came together for a song that feels so calm and graceful. It’s like a peace offering, or a prayer.

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Beck “I’m So Free”

The surface of Beck’s Colors is glossy and upbeat, as though Beck and his collaborator Greg Kurstin went out of their way to make a record that would sound mainstream and contemporary. They seem most directly inspired by Phoenix – and frankly, a lot of it is better Phoenix music than their own recent album – but the overall aesthetics fit in with commercial quasi-indie acts like Foster the People, Portugal the Man, and Fitz and the Tantrums. There’s also a touch of the tropical vibes that have been all over pop for a while now, and a general chill, stoned Los Angeles feeling to it.

It sounds kinda like Beck trying to make a record for “normal” people, but not quite hitting the mark because he’s an oddball to the core. It’s like the bit in Clifford when Martin Short is asked to make a face like a normal boy and Short makes a series of faces that leap directly into the uncanny valley of human facial expressions. Beck is possibly the greatest and most versatile mimic in the history of pop music, but he can’t will himself to be ordinary. But it’s very interesting for him to try, and I respect that an artist as accomplished and canonized as him would seem this sincerely engaged with contemporary mainstream sounds. In this way, the record is his equivalent to David Bowie’s Let’s Dance – an elder statesman engaging with popular music relatively late in his career, if just for kicks.

The lyrics of Colors tell a different story. Beck’s words are lucid and straightforward, almost entirely setting aside the surrealism of his best known work in favor of more direct and philosophical approach. The lyrics seem to pull back and forth between a dissatisfied yearning and a sort of zen contentedness. It reminds me of George Harrison – cycles of anxiety and vague, formless dread followed by moments of spirituality and perspective.

The song that really jumped out at me both musically and lyrically is “I’m So Free,” which is more rocking than anything else on the record, and has a sentiment that seems to be rooted in his background in Scientology. He’s singing about some feeling of enlightenment, and being “so free” of what seems like what Scientologists would call “suppressive persons.” It’s a bit rattling to hear Beck sing “I’m gonna freeze out these enemies” – he’s never really seemed like a guy with an enemies list, you know? But there’s other lines that suggest he’s casting out negative parts of himself, so perhaps I’m reading a bit too much into this.

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St. Vincent “Fear the Future”

I have always felt like an optimistic person. I may be cynical about a lot of aspects of humanity, but I genuinely feel like humans are always fighting towards a better world. Not a perfect world, but slightly better. Somehow, I still feel this way, though it’s been very difficult recently. There’s a lot of emotional wear and tear on keeping up with the outside world – opening Twitter or Facebook now feels like a direct portal to everyone’s undiluted rage, confusion, and anguish. If you can’t turn off your empathy, it’s completely draining. If this is your primary window on the world, it seems like an unending nightmare. Everything in the world is shut out except for the the horror and the screaming and the fighting. It makes you fear the future.

“Fear the Future” is a bit of an outlier on St. Vincent’s Masseduction, though it’s clearly important enough to Annie Clark that the song title is also the name of her forthcoming tour. A lot of the other songs have a sleek, playful quality to them and directly address sexuality, but “Fear the Future” is more about intimacy. There’s panic and drama in the sound of this track, but Clark’s voice seems cool and centered. She’s singing about love in the midst of terror and violence, of shrinking your world down to “me and you” to keep focused on what matters and to remind yourself there’s more to life than chaos and catastrophe. When the chorus ends on her proclaiming “I fear the future” before the bottom of the music suddenly dropping out, I don’t hear actual fear in her voice. It sounds a lot more like she’s bravely staring the future down to me.

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Hamilton Leithauser & Angel Olsen “Heartstruck (Wild Hunger)”

Hamilton Leithauser voices has always conveyed a lot of romance so it’s nice to hear him go full-on ’50s pop ballad with “Heartstruck.” The sentiment of this tune is overwhelming – they’re really laying the twinkling starlight melodrama on thick in the arrangement, it sounds like it’s meant to be the happy ending of a Hollywood tearjerker. Leithauser’s performance is business as usual for him – ragged and vulnerable, with the emoting dialed up a few notches above what most normal singers would do. Angel Olsen goes a bit further, pushing her voice into an over-the-top trill that sounds more periodic-specific, like she’s just trying to make sure this powerful feeling comes across on a transistor radio.

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King Krule “Biscuit Town”

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to adequately describe Archy Marshall’s voice and it’s quite difficult. There’s so much raw humanity in the tone of it, his phrasing, the cadence, and way it shifts and splashes on the microphone. He’s clearly put a lot of thought into how he uses his voice but the performances always sound entirely instinctive, as if he’s just making up the tune and words on the spot. But at the core of all of this is two things – deep loneliness and the vulnerability of a broken young man. He always sounds desperate for connection, and like he’s trying to cut through the bullshit of social niceties to get to something more real.

It’s no coincidence that he obsesses on urban space in his songs. Big dense cities are the best place to be if you feel a powerful need to be around other people but also want to be entirely alone. “Biscuit Town” opens The Ooz with a dreary rainy weekday night atmosphere. The mood is so precise that I can’t hear the resonance of the chords in the mix without picturing puddles on concrete lit by neon bar lights. “I seem to sink lower,” he sings at the start, and by the end of the record he sounds like he’s sunk entirely. But the album ends on such a delicate and graceful note that maybe the point is that sinking isn’t actually such a bad thing.

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