Author Archive

Car Seat Headrest “Kimochi Warui (When? When? When? When? When? When? When?)”

Please don’t be put off by the title of this song. It is a such a good song, and the lyrics are so good. Trust me on this. The strange thing about this is that while the title is very cryptic and precious, Will Toledo’s words in the actual song aren’t that way at all. In a voice that’s both drowsy and endearingly romantic, he’s singing quite directly about angst and existential dread. The subject matter is as melodramatic as it gets, but his delivery and phrasing is all very matter of fact. This is how it can be when you’re depressed – every emotion blurs into blah grey nothingness. Toledo’s music is fairly low-fi and the instruments sound cheap, but it really works for this song in the way it grounds everything in a drab, mundane setting. His arrangement is great, though – it’s always moving in some interesting way, and pushes him towards moments of shabby grace as the song reaches its climax.

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Moon King “Secret Life”

“Secret Life” seems to conflate a secretive, probably closeted romance with the idea of a child having an imaginary friend. It’s sung from the perspective of feeling exhausted by having to keep up appearances, and to hide a profound connection – actively burying the part of you that feels most open and alive. The sound of the track really plays up the melancholy and anxiety at the core of the lyrics and vocal performance – it’s slow, brittle, and has a vaguely mysterious atmosphere, but then the pace will suddenly pick up like your heart race when you’re forced into a lie.

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Leikeli47 “Two Times A Charm”

It is baffling to me that Leikeli47 is not the most hyped thing in music right now. Maybe that’s by design – this is an artist known for performing in a mask – but just on musical merit, her first mini-album is worth freaking out about. The easiest artist to compare her to is M.I.A., since they share a very feminine type of aggression and ferocity, and perform with the energy of people on the outside of hip-hop and are hell bent on being heard in that genre. But where M.I.A. draws on music from the Third World, Leikeli47 is more firmly rooted in hip-hop’s recent past. This is very much a post-Yeezus record – it’s there in the abrasive textures and the urgency of the tempos, and in the unambiguously confrontational nature of her performance. But it’s not all rage and fire. One of the most interesting things about her music is the way it will swing suddenly in the opposite direction, like when “Two Times A Charm” shifts briefly into straight R&B and she reveals a very sensual and empathetic side that is no less fierce.

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Built to Spill “Never Be the Same”

Doug Martsch has spent so much time working on big lumbering epics hat it’s a really nice change of pace for him to put out a relatively simple, jangly folk rock song like this. All of his songs are very tightly written, even when they seem to jam out a bit, but this one feels especially compact – it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this was revised several times until it was nothing but hooks. The lyrics seem straightforward but are just as deceptively clever as the music itself, with Martsch flipping the perspective on his subject’s wanderlust and relationship with time and change every few lines. I particularly enjoy the idea of zooming in on someone’s motivation to keep doing new things and zooming out on a world that only changes at a glacial pace. This isn’t a new theme for him, though. His best song ever ends on essentially the same thought: “This history lesson doesn’t make any sense in any less than ten thousand year increments.”

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Donnie Trumpet featuring Chance the Rapper and Jamila Woods “Sunday Candy”

It seems like Chance is settling into a niche – he’s the rapper who specializes in soulful, optimistic, uplifting music. It’s not a particularly crowded niche at the moment. I can’t imagine a better use of his voice, though – his rhymes are always so melodic, and when he half-sings his parts he sounds very Stax to me. The music of “Sunday Candy” is rooted in gospel, and Chance runs with that by turning the entire song into a tribute to his devoutly religious grandmother. This is an exceptionally warm and affectionate song, to the point that the kindness and love at the core of it can feel a overwhelming. But that’s how gratitude works – when you consider how much someone like a parent or guardian has given to you, it can really knock you over.

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Alabama Shakes “Sound & Color”

Man, this song just sounds like it’s begging to be sampled and turned into a rap track, doesn’t it? I’d bet the band actually was influenced by sample-based rap in arranging this – it’s drawing on a lot of ’60s and ‘70s soul music, but the way the elements click together feels very post-turntablism to me. It’s in the negative space, and the way the guitar part kinda lingers half-formed in the background like a looped artifact, and how the string parts near the end feel like they’re being imported from some other song entirely. It’s a gorgeous piece of music, and Brittany Howard’s vocal performance is pitched just right – a little understated compared to a lot of her stuff, but sorta wounded and emphatic right when it matters most.

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The-Dream “Fruition”

I suppose the new EP by The-Dream isn’t quirky enough for some people, but I can’t say I’m bothered by that. I’m not particularly invested in him as some maverick artist and am fine with him doing pretty straightforward R&B music. The-Dream is a perfectly fine singer, but the real draw of his music is in the songwriting and production, and the way he laces strong compositions with melodic, rhythmic, and tonal elements that stand out without getting in the way of the vocal melody. You get that in each of the songs on Crown, and in the case of “Fruition,” you find it in that lead guitar loop that seems to slowly spin around at the center of the track. It’s a slight bit of tension in the middle of a song that otherwise feels extremely comfortable and sort of weightless. He’s singing about being in love with a wonderful person he had to work hard to find, so maybe that element is there to represent a lingering fear about messing it all up.

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Action Bronson “Terry”

The Alchemist’s production on this track is straight-up gorgeous, and in a way that is very specific to sample-based rap. The sounds are cobbled from a variety of sources, but the main thing is that lovely, melancholy guitar sample pulled from Asha Puthli’s “Let Me In Your Life.” It’s chopped up a bit, but Alchemist makes it all feel organic, like it could actually be a live band playing in a room. But like the best sample-based music, it’s not entirely seamless, and you can sense the artifacts and the fabrication. It’s part of why a lot of this music has a sad, nostalgic feeling to it – you can’t help but hear the quotation marks around the music, and the way it all seems like a fading memory. Action Bronson does a good job on this track, but of course he would – his voice and style is so similar to Ghostface, and Ghostface figured out a long time ago that this aesthetic suited him better than anything else. It’s something about the plaintive timbre of their voices, maybe.

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Charly Bliss “Urge to Purge”

It’s such a thrill to see a rock band arrive seemingly fully formed. I saw Charly Bliss open up for Colleen Green and Unrest at Shea Stadium in Brooklyn on Friday night, and I’m glad I arrived early, because they were a far better live act than either. (Green is excellent on record, but not quite as much when she’s only got a guitar and a drum machine.) Charly Bliss are a straight-up ‘90s alt-rock band, and you can easily just listen to their stuff and trainspot all their influences – that melody is The Breeders, that bass line is Pixies, that bit sounds like that one Bush song, that hook is Letters to Cleo, a whole bunch of it is Veruca Salt. There was even one song that somehow made the leap from Built to Spill to No Doubt in the space of a few measures. They’ve got the sound down, and I won’t lie – this isn’t just nostalgia for me, it’s full-on Pavlonian. I am a sucker for this very specific type of rock music. But there’s been a few bands aiming for this over the past few years, and none of them have connected with the sound and the spirit of alt-rock as much as this band. It’s not just in the shape of the music, it’s in the way they move on stage, and the way they play and sing and interact. Great alt-rock music always moves between slack and tension, a shrug and a shout. Despite all the angst, there’s a lot of joy in alt-rock – it’s very physical music, and it’s all about taking great pleasure in dynamic shifts. Charly Bliss gets it, and they do it. I’m excited for what they’re going to do next.

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Doldrums “Blow Away”

Airick Woodhead spends the majority of The Air Conditioned Nightmare, his second album under the name Doldrums, wondering why he feels so ill at ease in situations that are designed to be comfortable. It’s not so much an attack on modernity as it is a meditation on anxiety and distrust of the mundane. “Blow Away,” a song that seems like an obvious radio single to me but is for some reason not being promoted at all, provides the thematic center of the record. It’s essentially a song about feeling weirded out by comforts, whether they’re sexual, material, or mindless. I don’t totally agree with the point of view in the song, but I understand it. It’s paranoia, really – this constant feeling that anything that feels good must be some sort of trap. But what really makes this song work on a thematic level is that while Woodhead is yearning for some sort of authentic experience, he seems to have no idea what that experience could be like. And maybe that’s a trap too?

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Laura Marling “False Hope”

Laura Marling’s music is so rooted in pastoral English folk that it’s mildly disconcerting to hear her do a straight-up rock song like this. But then, the jagged rhythm and tense mood of this song suits the lyrics’ urban setting, or at least a non-city person’s experience of time spent hidden away in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It’s interesting to hear Marling’s guitar playing reduced to something so blunt – her strength on previous records and throughout Short Movie is in gorgeous finger-picked parts that convey melody just as much as the tactile aspects of fingers hitting and plucking strings. That physical quality is definitely there in this song, but unlike most of her songs, which are recorded in a way that feels alarmingly intimate, there’s a bit of distance and atmosphere. Again, it makes sense – this is really a song about feeling like you’re just outside the experience of living your life. Of course this is the song where things are just a bit off.

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Madeon featuring Kyan “You’re On”

Madeon’s bright, hyperactive pop reminds me of two very specific things – the sound of Daft Punk’s classic Discovery, which they abandoned in favor of lush overly literal ’70s pastiche, and the sort of post-EDM pop that is licensed to death in ads and tv bumpers. I’m sure “You’re On” has already been used in this way, and maybe I haven’t encountered it yet or have but don’t quite remember. But that sort of ubiquity isn’t a damning thing – if anything, it guarantees that in time, this is the sound people will reference when they want to immediately remind you of the early 2010s. “You’re On” is an exceptionally well made song, and a fine example of its sub-genre. The track would work very well as an instrumental, and the chopped vocal samples are enough of a hook to make a great song before you even factor in the pop song layered over top of it. Kyan’s vocals may feel a bit anonymous, but he meshes with the tonality of the track very well, so all these hooks and melodies merge into one big joyful burst of treble.

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Carly Rae Jepsen “All That”

The first few times I heard “All That,” including Carly Rae Jepsen’s performance of it on Saturday Night Live, I didn’t realize that the song was co-written by Dev Hynes and Ariel Rechtshaid, so I mostly just interpreted it as a surprisingly accurate simulation of late ‘80s teen pop balladry. (Which is saying something – most contemporary pop that is meant to evoke “the ‘80s” doesn’t specifically sound like anything from that time, and mostly just sounds like right now, which is no bad thing.) But now that I know that it’s Hynes and Rechtshaid, it’s all I hear in the song. Rechtshaid’s influence is a bit more subtle, but if you’ve heard enough of his work you can sense his presence by the atmosphere, and the particular tonality of the instruments. But you can’t unhear the Hynes in this – that dude has an extremely limited melodic palette, and the chorus is basically a slightly altered version of the same hook he’s written for Solange and Sky Ferreira. The melody definitely works here and Jepsen sells the demure vulnerability of the song very well, but it really makes me wonder if Hynes is capable of switching it up even a little bit.

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Godspeed You! Black Emperor “Peasantry Or ‘Light! Inside Of Light!'”

Explosions in the Sky make music for the movie of your life where you’re a hero and you win in the end, but Godspeed You! Black Emperor make music for the film where you lose, possibly on a grand cosmic scale. Even the moments that feel triumphant in Godspeed songs – and there’s definitely a few of those in “Peasantry…” – feel inherently pessimistic, and feel more like finding the strength to fight back against inevitable failure rather than actually overcoming it. The feeling of relentless impending doom in their body of work can be a little overbearing and it’s certainly not something you’d want to play all the time, but I think when they really hit their mark, the hopelessness in their music is actually sort of beautiful. It’s not a hopelessness that comes out of self-pity, but rather a sense of humility and peace in accepting that the world is unfair and has no pity on us. It’s giving in to something greater than yourself, or anything you understand.

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Lower Dens “Non Grata”

The gender identity in this song is so fluid it’s hard to get a read on who is saying what to whom and when, but I think that’s basically the point. We all have something primal and dominant in us somewhere, and it’s more about a feeling of NEED than traditional binary structures of identity. This is a very romantic song in spite of itself – the sound of it is very seductive, and Jana Hunter’s vocal performance strikes this wonderful balance of confidence and vulnerability, especially as she sings “I trust you, I believe you” in the chorus. In context, she’s trying to convince someone to do what she wants, but that doesn’t make the sentiment untrue.

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Ashley Monroe “On To Something Good”

Ashley Monroe isn’t known for writing upbeat songs, and that really comes through in a song like this, which is genuinely sunny and optimistic. The good vibes in this song are clearly hard-won, and it’s sung from the perspective of someone who’s been knocked around a lot by life but is making a real effort to be positive and hopeful going forward. You can feel that in the melody and arrangement too – it’s very warm and the melodies are total ear candy, but you just can’t ignore this subtle ache at the core of the track. It’s not so much a feeling that you’re trying to get away from so much as it it’s a thing you have to take with you to really appreciate anything good that comes your way.

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Kendrick Lamar featuring Bilal, Anna Wise, and Thundercat “These Walls”

I’ve been listening to To Pimp A Butterfly pretty much every day since it came out, but have held off on writing about it because I found it hard to pick one song to focus on. It’s all so tied together that it feels like pulling one thread would unravel the whole piece. It’s also a dense record that reveals a lot over time, and a record that is primarily concerned with issues of blackness that I feel entirely unqualified to remark on – it’s that thing where you gain a lot from listening, but lose a lot by tossing in your white guy opinions. I know some people aren’t totally on board with where Kendrick is at right now in terms of his lyrical obsessions and the record’s smooth, jazzy sound, but I’m pretty dazzled by all that.

I love that the elegance of Kendrick’s rhymes are matched by the pure musicality of the tracks – a large portion of this album would stand up pretty well without him. “These Walls” is built around a double entendre that starts off lewd but grows deeper and darker as the song moves along and the metaphors become more elaborate. The music isn’t quite as elaborate, but it’s very sophisticated as it weaves several gorgeous, seductive melodies around a loose groove. This is maybe the most superficially pleasurable track on the record – I’m not sure I totally trust the taste of someone who could deny this on a purely musical level – but you can’t get away from the melancholy at the core of this. It’s there in the words, yes, but it’s present in the music too. You can hear it in the inflection of the lead guitar, and when the song tenses up near the end, and the mood sours as Kendrick’s thoughts go darker and he snaps out of feelings of comfort and lust.

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Father featuring Richposlim “BET Uncut”

Father’s new mixtape isn’t necessarily the first time I’ve heard dudes do ultra-horny rap tracks that are also very respectful of women, but it’s maybe the first time I’ve heard that be the primary focus of a rapper’s lyrics. The lyrics on Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First? are consistently sex positive, but not in a way that seems like a front – this is simply the work of a sex-obsessed guy who genuinely likes his similarly sex-obsessed partners, and has nothing but contempt for anyone who is going to slut-shame the women he’s hooking up with. The fact that he’s coming this point of view without compromising the XXX nature of the music is a good sign, and hopefully just the direction of hip-hop going forward. I know I’m not alone in liking a LOT of hypersexual rap that’s fantastic on a musical and lyrical level up to the point where it’s unnecessarily misogynistic or homophobic and it just kills the mood and diminishes the song. A song like “BET Uncut” proves it doesn’t have to be that way.

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The Mountain Goats “Werewolf Gimmick”

I love the way John Darnielle writes about wrestling because he’s so zeroed in on the exact thing that makes the contrived theatricality of the sport resonate with young people who feel powerless. This song is sung from the perspective of a vicious heel, and is basically just him ranting about tearing apart every babyface hero in his path. The audience is meant to identify with the face, but I think the ravings of the heel make more sense for a lot of young dudes, especially the ones with a lot of anger and fantasies about humiliating the people who have made them feel small and weak. Darnielle really gets into the bluster of this character, and in doing that he draws a line connecting a lot of other similar things – movie monsters, comic book super villains and anti-heroes, heavy metal stars, rappers, anonymous asshole trolls on the internet – that indulge the same fantasy of overwhelming strength and gleeful sadism.

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Rihanna “Dancing in the Dark”

It’s a little too easy to imagine Rihanna as being an EQ setting or an artificial intelligence rather than an actual human singer – even her warmest vocal performances feel vaguely inhuman to me. But I don’t mean this as an insult! Pretty all of her best songs work because of this, or at least the implication that a real, vulnerable person is putting on a sort of vocal armor to keep us at a distance. I think that’s part of why so many people connect with her – most people wish they could so effectively guard themselves against their most painful and conflicted emotions.

There’s not much pain in “Dancing in the Dark,” but it’s definitely a song where Rihanna’s vocal affect pushes a song from good to great. I hear a lot of dancehall in her performance here, but it’s not totally that. It’s kinda like someone was adjusting the settings on the Rihanna bot to dancehall, but something is a little off. Like, every long “I” sound has turned into an “oi,” and she’s hitting each syllable on the verses a bit too hard. But like a lot of songs, the seeming off-ness of it makes it so much more interesting to hear. It’s hard to imagine anyone else actively choosing to do it this way, but it really works.

Buy it from Amazon.