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12/3/15

Skinny Dipping In A Neon Pool

Pill “Hotline”

All the sounds in this track signal danger – the thud of the drums, the buzzing siren quality of the organ, the traffic jam skronk of the sax. But Veronica Torres’ vocal pat seems to charge right into harm’s way, and her words and casually confrontational tone has a specific city girl “fuck you, asshole” quality that you don’t really find too often outside of vintage No Wave music. Her character is addressing creepy, predatory men, but she seems a bit creepy and predatory too – very aware of what she’s getting into, but willing to put up with some things to surround herself with convertibles and Infinity Pools.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Christine and the Queens “Tilted”

“Tilted” is a translated version of a previous song, “Christine,” and though my French is rather poor and I can’t tell how similar the words are between the two, I am impressed by the English lyrics. “I am actually good” is a very interesting refrain for a pop song – defiant, but also oddly defensive. Maybe that’s just the sort of unique phrasing that comes out of translation, but I think it’s lovely. The words aren’t really the point though – in either iteration of this track, it’s really about how that melodic hook floats alongside that main keyboard part, which sorta flutters gracefully through the song’s ample negative space.

Buy it from Amazon.

12/2/15

There Are Better Things For Me

Wet “Deadwater”

Wet’s music has a lot of superficial gloss that connects it to the more adult contemporary end of modern R&B, but their melodic style isn’t rooted much in soul. A song like “Deadwater” feels more simpatico with melancholy teen pop from the early ‘90s, or even folksy pop like Melanie from the ‘60s. The melody is particularly strong, and I love the way the natural tone of Kelly Zutrau’s voice has this bright, optimistic quality as the melody signals sadness and the lyrics are mostly an expression of futility.

Buy it from Amazon.

Demi Lovato “Stone Cold”

I’ve dismissed Demi Lovato as a second string version of Katy Perry who turns up with bland Perry-like hits whenever the real deal is between album cycles, and while I stand by that assessment of songs like “Cool for the Summer” and “Skyscraper,” the ballad “Stone Cold” reveals something in Lovato that’s not as easily written off. The song is pitched somewhere between understated minimalism and scenery-chewing melodrama, with Lovato belting out some lines like she’s trying to make Christina Aguilera seem subtle by comparison. I think that actually works for the song, though – it’s not hard to imagine a more graceful version of it that shades in the R&B-gospel qualities of the melody, but going way over the top gives it a touch of maudlin camp that enhances rather than undermines the raw emotion at the core of it. She basically sounds like she’s slaying her own song at karaoke, and that’s kinda brilliant.

Buy it from Amazon.

12/1/15

Studio One Holiday Party

Studio One Holiday Party

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Dennis Alcapone “Power Version” / Johnny Osbourne “Sing Jah Stylee” / Michigan & Smiley “Rub A Dub Style” / Willie Williams “Master Plan” / The Soulettes “King Street” / Maria Griffiths “Tell Me Now” / Willie Williams and the Brentford Disco Set “Armagideon Time” / Sugar Minott “Love and Understanding” / Alton Ellis “You Make Me Happy” / Prince Francis “Street Doctor” / Green Tea & Chassy “Ghetto Girl” / Prince Francis “Rockfort Shock” / Sound Dimension “Granny Scratch Scratch” / Senior Soul “Is It Because I’m Black?” / Larry Marshall “Nanny Goat Du” / The Mad Lads “Ten to One” / Jennifer Lara “Tell Me Where” / Wailing Souls “Row Fisherman Row” / Cornell Campbell “My Conversation” / Aubrey Adams & Rico Rodriguez “Stew Peas and Cornflakes” / Simms & Robinson “White Christmas”

Over the past seven years or so I’ve developed a personal tradition of listening to a lot of classic Studio One reggae, ska, rocksteady, dub, and dancehall in early winter. I’ve come to closely associate the music with crisp air, early nights, Christmas lights, and the general look and feeling of New York City in this time of year. The music has sorta replaced traditional Christmas music in my life, and though I listen to a lot of this stuff year-round, the comfortable feeling of listening to it under these conditions has become part of why December is unquestionably my favorite month of the year. I’d really like to throw a party someday where it’s just a lot of people in a room lit by Christmas lights, and only Studio One music is played. That’s not in the cards this year, but this collection features a lot of the music I’d want to play at a Studio One holiday party.

My personal Studio One playlist features well over a hundred songs, but this set covers a lot of the very best tunes, and my favorite versions of several popular riddims. (Believe me, it was really hard to narrow down to just one in some cases – I could listen to variations on “Real Rock,” “Rockfort Rock,” “Sidewalk Doctor,” and “Far East” for hours on end.)

If you are new to Studio One – or Jamaican music from the ’60s and ’70s in general – I recommend jumping into this music without burdening yourself with too much context, and just feeling it. This is some of the most joyous, texturally unique, beautiful, adventurous, funky music you will ever encounter. But this is indeed music with a very interesting and rich history, and if you want to learn more about it, this documentary about Coxsone Dodd and Studio One produced by Soul Jazz is a great place to start.

This collection features tracks from various Studio One compilations and singles reissued by the Soul Jazz label. Do yourself a huge favor and buy as many as you can from them. A lot of this stuff cannot be found on streaming services.

11/30/15

Going Back To Knowing Nothing

Majical Cloudz “Disappeared”

There’s a line in Spoon’s “The Mystery Zone” that’s never too far from my mind, in which Britt Daniel sings about “the times that we met before we met.” He’s romanticizing the time before two people connect in a meaningful way, and he’s fantasizing about going back in time and doing it all over again. This Majical Cloudz song is sorta the reverse of that idea, and dwells on the time after you’ve become estranged from or simply lost touch with someone who was once important to you, and going back to being strangers with separate lives. There’s a lot of yearning for the past in this song, but no fantasy – he wants the old intimacy, and knows he can’t ever go back. He can hardly even imagine experiencing something similar with someone else. It’s an incredibly sad song, but despite its despondent tone it also conveys a lot of kindness and sympathy for the people who’ve moved on. It’s a lot easier to retroactively make the people who disappear from your life into villains, and that’s not what this is at all. This is more like the thing you wish you could say to someone, but can’t out of respect for their wishes.

Buy it from Amazon.

11/23/15

1987 Survey Mix

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This is the third in my series of 1980s survey mixes, which are designed to give more context to the music of that decade. Most versions of ‘80s history focus on specific niches and canons, but mostly ignore or write off parallel and overlapping cultural trends. My goal in doing this project is to highlight all the different things going on from year to year, to better understand the original context of familiar songs and to highlight a lot of the music that has faded from cultural memory. Here are the mixes for 1988 and 1989.

1987 may be the greatest year of the ‘80s – the sheer number of enduring classics in this set, particularly on the first disc, is staggering, and I think a lot of the aesthetic of “80s-ness” in music today is largely rooted in the music of this year. This isn’t to say everything is perfect, but I think it’s safe to say that blockbuster pop and “college rock” are both at their pinnacle in this year. There’s also a lot of top-quality cheesy pop music in this year, and a good number of songs that you may not recognize in terms of artist/song title, but will probably be like “oh, they play this all the time at the pharmacy” when you hear it.

Thanks to Paul Cox, Sean T. Collins, and Chris Conroy for their assistance in putting this set together. I’m going to pause this project in December for the 2015 survey set, and resume it again in mid to late January with the 1986 survey.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

U2 “Where the Streets Have No Name” / INXS “Need You Tonight” / George Michael “I Want Your Sex” / Whitney Houston “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” / Michael Jackson “The Way You Make Me Feel” / Prince “U Got the Look” / M/A/R/R/S “Pump Up the Volume” / Sly & Robbie “Boops (Here to Go)” / Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam “Head to Toe” / Terence Trent D’Arby “Wishing Well” / T’Pau “Heart and Soul” / Aretha Franklin featuring George Michael “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” / Def Leppard “Pour Some Sugar On Me” / Swing Out Sister “Breakout” / Erasure “Victim of Love” / The Fall “Hit the North” / Eric B and Rakim “I Know You Got Soul” / LL Cool J “Going Back to Cali” / Suzanne Vega “Luka”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

R.E.M. “Finest Worksong” / The Cure “Just Like Heaven” / Depeche Mode “Never Let Me Down Again” / Belinda Carlisle “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” / Fleetwood Mac “Everywhere” / Eric Carmen “Hungry Eyes” / Pet Shop Boys “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” / ABC “When Smokey Sings” / Kool Moe Dee “How Ya Like Me Now” / Run-D.M.C. “Christmas In Hollis” / Joseph Cotton “No Touch the Style” / Jody Watley “Looking For A New Love” / Madonna “Who’s That Girl” / Squeeze “Hourglass” / The Smiths “Girlfriend In A Coma” / George Strait “All My Ex’s Live In Texas” / Bruce Springsteen “Brilliant Disguise” / Rosanne Cash “If You Change Your Mind” / Cabaret Voltaire “Don’t Argue” / The System “Don’t Disturb This Groove”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” / Richard Marx “Don’t Mean Nothing” / Rick Astley “Never Gonna Give You Up” / Debbie Gibson “Only In My Dreams” / Tiffany “I Think We’re Alone Now” / Kim Wilde “You Keep Me Hanging On” / Club Nouveau “Lean On Me” / John Cougar Mellencamp “Cherry Bomb” / Just-Ice & KRS-One “Moshitup (1-800-Suicide)” / Public Enemy “Public Enemy No. 1” / Nitzer Ebb “Join In the Chant” / LeVert “Casanova” / Skinny Puppy “Addiction” / Starship “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” / Atlantic Starr “Always” / They Might Be Giants “Don’t Let’s Start” / Los Lobos “La Bamba” / Billy Idol “Mony Mony (Live)”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

Guns N’ Roses “Welcome to the Jungle” / Motley Crue “Girls Girls Girls” / Aerosmith “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” / Sinead O’Connor “Mandinka” / Midnight Oil “Beds Are Burning” / Biz Markie “Nobody Beats the Biz” / MC Shan “Kill That Noise” / MC Shy D “Gotta Be Tough” / Dana Dane “Nightmares” / Icehouse “Electric Blue” / Johnny Hates Jazz “Shattered Dreams” / New Order “True Faith” / Reese & Santonio “Bounce Your Body to the Box” / Echo and the Bunnymen “Lips Like Sugar” / Bl’ast “It’s In My Blood” / The Bangles “Hazy Shade of Winter” / Robbie Robertson “Broken Arrow” / Jandek “I Passed By the Building” / Holger Czukay “Blessed Easter”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Penguin Cafe Orchestra “Perpetuum Mobile” / Sonic Youth “Schizophrenia” / Sisters of Mercy “This Corrosion” / Anthrax “I Am the Law” / Candlemass “Dark Are the Veils of Death” / XTC “Dear God” / The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl “Fairytale of New York” / Heart “Alone” / Pink Floyd “Learning to Fly” / Sting “Englishman In New York” / Tom Waits “Way Down in the Hole” / Frankie Knuckles “Baby Wants to Ride” / Fat Boys featuring the Beach Boys “Wipeout” / Exposé “Let Me Be the One” / Laura Branigan “Shattered Glass” / Buster Poindexter “Hot Hot Hot” / Public Image Ltd. “Seattle” / King Missile “Sensitive Artist”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Pixies “Caribou” / The Grateful Dead “Touch of Grey” / 10,000 Maniacs “Like the Weather” / The Replacements “Alex Chilton” / Dinosaur Jr. “Little Fury Things” / The Jesus and Mary Chain “April Skies” / Game Theory “Dripping with Looks” / Siouxsie and the Banshees “This Wheel’s On Fire” / Pulp “I Want You” / Whitesnake “Here I Go Again” / Bob Seger “Shakedown” / Ice-T “6 ’N the Mornin’” / Too Short “Freaky Tales” / Conroy Smith “Dangerous” / Phuture “Your Only Friend” / Derrick May “Nude Photo” / Was Not Was “Walk the Dinosaur” / Charlie Haden Quartet West “Bay City”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Coldcut “Say Kids (What Time Is It?) / Kaos “Court’s In Session” / Schooly D “Saturday Night” / Spoonie Gee “The Godfather” / Beastie Boys “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” / Suicidal Tendencies “Possessed to Skate” / Testament “C.O.T.L.O.D. (Curse of the Legions of Death)” / Dag Nasty “Trying” / Spermbirds “Americans Are Cool” / Blasters “Just Another Sunday” / John Hiatt “Thank You Girl” / Lou Gramm “Midnight Blue” / F.R. David “Don’t Go” / Reba McEntire “The Last One to Know” / Marianne Faithful “As Tears Go By” / MX-80 “We Will Bury You” / Bongwater “His New Look” / The Embarrassment “Wellsville” / The dB’s “Think Too Hard” / The Wedding Present “Anyone Can Make A Mistake” / Love & Rockets “No New Tale to Tell” / Dolly Parton, Linda Rondstadt, and Emmylou Harris “To Know Him Is To Love Him”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” / Maxi Priest “Some Guys Have All the Luck” / The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu “All You Need Is Love” / Red Hot Chili Peppers “Me and My Friends” / Rhythim Is Rhythim “String of Life” / Eurythmics “Beethoven (I Love To Listen To)” / Blue Mercedes “I Want To Be Your Property” / Admiral Bailey “Kill Them With It” / E.U. “Da Butt” / T La Rock “Lyrical King” / Marshall Crenshaw “This Is Easy” / Wire “Ahead” / Hüsker Dü “Could You Be the One?” / Big Black “Bad Penny” / The Bats “Sir Queen” / Lyle Lovett “If I Had A Boat” / k.d. lang “Angel With A Lariat” / The Housemartins “Five Get Over Excited” / Lloyd Cole and the Commotions “From the Hip” / The Go-Betweens “Right Here” / Aztec Camera “Somewhere In My Heart” / Celtic Frost “Mesmerized” / Rollins Band “Do It”

11/20/15

When We Finally Smashed The State

Future Punx “Post-Wave”

Future Punx really commit to their premise – this is a song about the future of punk, and it’s a future that imagines the movement eventually succeeding in “smashing the state” and literally saving people’s lives. They sound like the future as imagined in the late ‘70s or very early ‘80s, which is to say… it’s actually more new wave, and rather a lot like Devo. The concept is fun, but the music is a lot better. This isn’t tremendously original in style or tone, but it’s so much in the spirit and tone of a lot of weirdo sci-fi punk from the early ‘80s that it’d be easy to believe this was released in 1981 and not a few months ago in 2015. I can get very cynical about punk, but this is the type of song that makes me believe in the genre, or more specifically, the elements of the genre that informed new wave.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

11/19/15

Dipped It In Chrome

!!! “Lucy Mongoosey”

On both a musical and lyrical level, “Lucy Mongoosey” seems to be about situations which are mostly good, but there’s something slightly wrong about it and you just can’t really place it. The music is mostly funky and bright, but there’s a sad drag to it, and Nic Offer’s voice sounds worn out and exhausted as he gently begs someone not to waste his time. There’s a lot of affection in this song, but it’s all tainted by a vague unease and an acute awareness that time is running out, one way or another. Maybe the point of a song like this is to force someone’s hand, and to get things right somehow. Offer certainly doesn’t sound like a guy who’s excited about the possibility of wrecking a good thing because it’s not totally perfect. If anything, “Lucy Mongoosey” projects a feeling of guilt about thinking that way.

Buy it from Amazon.

11/18/15

The Thinnest Line To Hang You By

Maribou State featuring Holly Walker “Steal”

At this point in time it’s pretty standard to mix R&B-inflected vocals with cool electronic textures, but even still, there’s a warmth and richness to Holly Walker’s voice that contrasts with the tone of this Maribou State track that it almost seems wrong. The music isn’t too far off from what you might expect from, say, Four Tet or Jamie xx, but whereas vocals kinda just float around in their mixes, Walker’s voice is so foregrounded that everything else seems slightly blurry most of the time, like it’s a musical form of rack focus. It really works for the song – she’s expressing a lot of guilt and regret, and she seems so close that her words and feelings can’t be easily tuned out.

Buy it from Amazon.

11/17/15

Hotter When The Sun Goes Down

Eric Church “Chattanooga Lucy”

Eric Church’s Mr. Misunderstood is a “surprise record,” and the product of rapid creativity – ten songs written and recorded in less than a month. You can hear that in the music, particularly in the way a song like “Chattanooga Lucy” has this feverish immediacy. Like a lot of country musicians, Church is a musician with a high level of craft, but nothing about this song feels fussed over or over-considered. It’s exciting to hear a guy trust his instincts so much, and to go out on a limb stylistically and come out with a funk/gospel/country hybrid that doesn’t seem forced in any way. The urgency of the track suits the “forbidden fruit” theme of the lyrics really well, too – you get the sense that when he’s singing about hooking up with this girl that he’s risking a huge mistake at any moment, and that just gets him more excited.

Buy it from Amazon.

11/16/15

I Come Alive When I Hear Your Voice

One Direction “Hey Angel”

“Hey Angel” sounds like every song on The Verve’s Urban Hymns album distilled into one epic, lovelorn ballad, and it’s a great look on the boys of One Direction. Richard Ashcroft’s music may be a lot more dark and depressive than what you’d normally get from 1D, but his aesthetic was always hyper-romantic and melodramatic, and that suits them perfectly. Like pretty much all the best 1D songs, this is basically a song in which a bunch of cute boys sing about their admiration for some ordinary yet outstanding young woman. Now, look, the guys in One Direction and their various collaborators aren’t idiots, and they know this formula is something that makes them insane amounts of money. Flattery gets them everywhere. But I really don’t think it’s that cynical, and I think they sincerely respect the audience and aren’t bullshitting when they drop a chorus that goes “Oh, I wish I could be more like you! / Do you wish you could be more like me?” It’s exciting to hear respect and admiration be the focus of pop songs, particularly since that’s in short supply when it comes to the music of other major male pop stars today. You’re sure as hell never going to get this from misogynist uber-creeps like Drake and The Weeknd. And even if 1D is truly coming from a place of greedy cynicism, I just can’t see any downside in a lot of girls growing up listening to songs in which desirable young men sing about how cool girls are and how much they wish they were like them.

Buy it from Amazon.

11/13/15

Feel The Ice White Heat

Kate Boy “Northern Lights”

Kate Boy sounds a little like if The Knife had decided to chase pop stardom after Deep Cuts instead of, y’know, going full goth, exploring avant garde opera, and creating abrasive electronic agitprop. This isn’t a bad thing – as much as I love and admire what The Knife became, there’s always that part of me that wishes they would’ve made some more pop music because they were so good at it, and so far ahead of the curve. (Seriously, people are catching up with where they were in 2003 in 2015.) “Northern Lights” is superficially quite a lot like The Knife in terms of rhythm and tonality, but the song itself feels more common. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily – Kate Akhurst has a good sense of melody and drama, and it’s interesting to hear a more conventional piece of music get a Knife-like makeover. It’s a spikier, more aggressive sound, and that icy vibe always has a way of disrupting any sense of traditional binary sexuality. Twelve years late, and it still sounds like the future.

Buy it from Amazon.

11/12/15

Sweep The Past Mistakes Away

Boots “Only”

This song feels like a cousin to Radiohead’s “Nude,” and falls into a similar aesthetic territory in which terror, depression, and anxiety is rendered in this oddly graceful and sexy way. A lot of that comes from how the arrangement feels like a jazzy R&B ballad that’s been gutted to the point that only the scaffolding remains, and the way Boots’ voice has the echo of someone alone in a big, bombed-out empty space. He’d sound lonely and desperate even if he wasn’t being very literal in the lyrics and singing “I am the only one alive / that is the only thing I know,” but I appreciate him going in hard on the post-apocalyptic vibe. There’s maybe too much post-apocalypse in tv, movies, and comics, but you really don’t get much of it in music.

Buy it from Amazon.

11/10/15

You Can’t Give Me The Dreams That Were Mine Anyway

Aurora “Half the World Away”

This is an old Oasis song, a b-side from the “Whatever” single that eventually become better known than the a-side in that “Noel Gallagher couldn’t stop relegating his best tunes to bonus tracks at his peak” way. The original was sung by Noel and has a ragged charm to it, as though he just rolled out of bed and casually knocked it out on his acoustic guitar and electric piano. This cover by a young Norwegian singer takes a more refined approach to the song – her voice is more traditionally beautiful, and there’s gently swelling strings that give it a Disney-ish sentimentality. If this version nudged any further in any direction it’d be a bit too twee or mawkish, but the balance is just right and it’s quite moving. Gallagher’s original comes from a very sincere place, but there’s a bit of an ironic shrug to it, as though he’s not ready to be totally vulnerable but doing his best. This version totally owns the conflicted emotion of the song, and my heart breaks a bit every time I hear her sing “I’ve been lost, I’ve been found, but I don’t feel down.”

Buy it from Amazon.

11/9/15

Running Every Red Light

Grimes “Artangels”

I can feel a bit jealous when I listen to “Artangels” because the feeling of love and excitement that Grimes is describing is so perfect and powerful, and I wish I had it in my life. This is a love song to her muse – sometimes it sounds like a person, and in the chorus it’s definitely the city of Montréal – and the feeling she’s so high on is inspiration and creativity. The music captures this feeling perfectly. On a superficial level it feels a bit like the intoxicating rush of a crush, but it’s really more about gratitude for unlocking something inside your mind, and feeling like you’ve been liberated in some way. It’s a precious feeling but it comes and goes so easily, and the fear that her muse could abandon her comes through in the music along with the joy. My favorite part is when she sings “everything I love is consolation after you.” It’s just a lovely sentiment, but also her way of saying that there’s nothing more important to her than art, and nothing more crucial to her sense of self than creativity. I can relate.

Buy it from Amazon.

11/6/15

I Fell Into A Black Hole

Gems “Soak”

It drives me a little bit crazy that we still don’t really have something to call this type of music, aside from maybe recycling the term “indie pop,” as my BuzzFeed colleague Reggie Ugwu did recently. (I don’t approve of this, as indie pop has been a specific thing for a long time, but beggars can’t be choosers.) But you know this sound — the clicking beats, the unobtrusive keyboard tones, the tasteful minimalism, the sensual vibe, the vague R&B-ness of it, the way the female and male voices hint at sexual tension but seem strangely noncommittal about it. This is the “sexy” music of many people you’d call millennials, and it sounds like the music that’d play at the “Blasé Olympics” described by Alana Massey in her excellent essay Against Chill. Gems is good at this genre, and “Soak” is a good song, but it reflects a culture that I find sad and alienating and unimaginative. The singers are describing passionate feelings, but not conveying them. What I hear is people trying to connect but holding back too much. Or maybe it’s more like they’ve chilled these fiery emotions in music that just makes them lukewarm.

Buy it from Amazon.

10/29/15

Dizzy From The Circle

Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts “Support Tours”

I imagine the audience for a song about the specific things that make touring as an opening act so awful is fairly tiny, but I’m certainly in it. “Support Tours” is basically a very interesting and funny blog entry set to music, but it is in fact musical – Lewis’ words flow along a strong melody line, and his cadence and inflections add shades of irony, sadness, and bemusement to his lyrics’ jokes and truth-bombs. I particularly like when he gets to the part about graduating to headliner level and it being his turn to screw over some other band, and it’s like a defeated shrug. The entire song is just like “hey, this all sucks, but what can you do?”

Buy it from Amazon.

10/28/15

Amazing Feelings Juice

Hinds “Chili Town”

Hinds is a band of charming, effortlessly cool Spanish girls, and “Chili Town” is their most charming and effortlessly cool song. I’m sure there are people who would hear this and actually wish they’d put a bit more effort into it – it always sounds like one thing could go wrong and collapse at any moment, and their voices have a…sorta casual relationship with the notion of singing in tune. But that lead guitar part really nails a relaxed yet vaguely nervous feeling, and I don’t know if these lyrics about being so flirty and bratty to mask underlying feelings of uncertainty and impatience would come off as perfectly if they didn’t sound so very cool. The lyrics are fantastic too, full of vivid language like “amazing feelings juice,” “my laugh is oversized,” “saliva mixed with lies,” and “I am swimming in the dark because all your friends are sharks.” I like that they just state the subtext of their actions in the song, because in the actual moment, they’re just doing everything they can to keep it buried because they want some dude to catch a hint.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

10/27/15

Art Gets What It Wants And Art Gets What It Deserves

Car Seat Headrest “Times to Die”

A thing I really love about Will Toledo’s music is how often the songs sound like they’re being made up on the spot. This is a major feature of Car Seat Headrest’s live show, where I’m pretty certain I have literally seen them improvise new material on stage, but it’s apparent in a song like “Times to Die,” which has a very eccentric, nonlinear structure. It is in fact a highly structured song with very deliberate lyrics, but the feeling in the recording is that Toledo keeps remembering that he has more things to talk to you about, and so he keeps adding a bit more time to your trip, like “Fuck it, let’s drive another few blocks.” He’s got a lot on his mind, though! “Times to Die” is about him getting signed to Matador, and the Book of Job, and feeling like your friends have more adult lives than you, and grand ambitions, and the peculiarities of organized religion and sacraments, feeling on the outside of things, literally dying, metaphorically dying, and probably seven or eight other things. He piles on the hooks and bridges and asides and ideas as though this is the only song he’ll ever write, but the beautiful thing is that this is all coming from a hugely prolific songwriter who’s got an entire other record in the can as his Matador debut comes out this week. He’s very interesting, to say the least.

Buy it from Amazon.

10/26/15

Just Say What You’re After

Peaches “Dumb Fuck”

Peaches sings this song from the perspective, more or less, of the sort of person Heather Havrilesky has been telling people to be over the past few years of her Dear Polly column. Which is to say, she’s being direct and honest and not buying into the insecurity-masquerading-as-politeness that allows tepid dudes to keep on being flakey and indecisive with impunity. Peaches isn’t fucking around here – she wants to define the relationship, or move on. She doesn’t really want to dump the guy, but she’s flustered by how dense he’s being. So what do you do if he doesn’t have a clue? You just call him a dumb fuck over and over until the exasperation turns into catharsis. Yet another great lesson from the teaches of Peaches.

Buy it from Amazon.

10/22/15

Love Letters In Motion

Eleanor Friedberger “False Alphabet City”

“False Alphabet City” is basically a song in which Eleanor Friedberger deals with the frustration of having nostalgia for a version of a neighborhood that doesn’t really exist anymore, and feeling like maybe you don’t really belong in that space anymore. This could easily be a more maudlin or angry song, but the feeling of the music is very relaxed, and at least to me feels like going home. Everything sounds familiar – the shape of things, the sense of space, even if the details are off. It sounds like a much looser version of the aesthetic The Fiery Furnaces had on Widow City and I’m Going Away, with the more rigid rhythmic structures swapped out for groovier bass parts and a lot more hi-hat. You can’t really go back but you can get close enough sometimes.

Buy it from Amazon.


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