Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Squeeze “What More Can I Say”

Squeeze’s new record Trixies was written well before the band existed, back when Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were teenagers in the mid-1970s. The record, a concept album about a nightclub set in the far-off 1980s, was shelved and the band pivoted to the new wave-adjacent sound of their initial run of classic records.

I can’t imagine they deliberately planned to keep a stockpile of songs written close to their prime to fully realize very deep into their career, but that’s effectively what they’ve done. The songs on Trixies aren’t quite up to the high standard of Cool for Cats, Argybargy, and East Side Story, but they’re not far off either. As it turns out, Difford and Tilbrook were pretty much fully formed songwriters from the start. The melodies are sharp, the songwriting is sophisticated, and the lyrics are vivid and witty. It’s basically exactly what you expect from Squeeze, but with some very obvious mid-70s influences – Bowie, solo McCartney, Roxy Music – in the mix.

Knowing that they wrote these songs so young adds an extra layer of charm to the material. They were teen boys fascinated by adult nightlife, imagining a fun and seedy world just beyond their experience. Even when the lyrics don’t quite gel, it’s still a fun glimpse into the minds of young guys who were clearly very excited to enter the world of adulthood, performed from the perspective of their much older selves.

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Lee “Scratch” Perry & Mouse On Mars “Rockcurry”

Who would’ve guessed that a “Hallagallo” groove would go so well with the stoned mutterings of dub reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry? Not me, but I’m not surprised, since I love pretty much anything with that distinct motorik groove. Mouse On Mars and the late Perry are an unexpected pairing but make sense when you consider how much of either’s body of work comes down to tweaking recordings until they become a bit surreal. Mouse On Mars also gravitate to odd vocal tones and cadences – they made an entire record with The Fall’s Mark E Smith back in the 2000s, and a lot of their best tracks include cartoonishly distorted vocals.

“Rockcurry” mixes familiar elements into a vaguely alien new form: Perry’s sleepy phrasing melting into the zoned-out groove, but contrasted with bright, super-saturated keyboards and a slightly-too-brisk tempo that adds a touch of garage flavor to the mix.

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Slayyyter “Yes Goddd”

What if Justice circa 2007 went even harder? What if Kesha was kinda metal and way more unhinged? What if you combined those things, and drenched it in the musical equivalent of hot sauce? That’s basically what “Yes Goddd” is, but I feel like that’s still underselling its hyperactive maniac charm. It’s sleek and pop, but also brutal. Slayyyter used to be more of a novelty gay pop thing, but now she’s making music that would make me worry about the safety of people in the pit at her shows.

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Grace Ives “Neither You Nor I”

Grace Ives is a musical shape shifter, but her shape only shifts so much. Her voice and palette is consistent, but her songwriting mostly comes across as her writing her own version of “types” of songs. And it’s rarely obvious archetypes or particular popular songs. She’s a little more esoteric, like she’s trying to create a vision of pop that’s exclusively the sort of interesting non-hits that have been filling out pop records for a few decades now.

“Neither You Nor I” has the unmistakable feel of a trip hop-adjacent track circa 2000-2003. It’s mostly in the sound of the central loop, which has the semi-ironic cosmopolitan vibe of so many samples from that period. There is no credited sample in this song, which either means the label is being cagey about clearances or that Ives, John DeBold, and Ariel Rechtshaid created it from scratch. I would love for it to be the latter – it’d be the musical equivalent of people who bake Oreos from scratch at home.

The Ives-ness of the song comes through in the lyrics, in which she sings somewhat cryptically about a relationship with someone who’s interested in exploring kinks, but can only go so far with it. Which is nice, I guess, because it means they’re on the same page. The word that really stands out to me is “chubby,” which comes up a few times over. (“chubby little knife,” “stab in my chubby side”) It’s an interesting choice – it’s cute and mildly self-effacing, one of the more gentle words for fat, a little sexy for some people – but it’s also directly attached to violence in this context. You can infer a lot of mixed feelings and erotic tension in that juxtaposition.

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McLusky “As A Dad”

Anger is real. It’s arguably the strongest emotion we can feel, and it’s certainly the most destructive. There’s lots of ways for anger to be righteous and sensible, something that fuels constructive behavior. But I think more often than not, we experience anger in stupid, pointless, petty ways. It manifests in ways that make us look foolish. It can be hilarous.

This is basically the foundational premise of McLusky’s music. They convey earnest rage through pummeling distorted bass lines and gnarled guitar hooks, but Andrew Falkous’ lyrics and sneering vocal affect present that anger as absurd dark comedy. Sometimes he’s peevish and snarky, but mostly he comes across as someone who’s stepped outside himself just enough to get how funny and ridiculous his own rage is, so he leans all the way into it. The magic trick is that he doesn’t totally undermine the fury in the music. You get to have it both ways in McLusky songs.

“As A Dad” takes this approach to a natural conclusion, with Falkous singing from the perspective of a child taunting their father. It’s mean but mostly quite silly, the capricious cruelty of a mind that hasn’t developed empathy or a greater sense of context just yet. Falkous slips easily into this mindset, which feels very specific to a little kid, but is obviously still commonly found in adults.

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The New Pornographers “Votive”

Back in 2007 it felt like a big swerve when The New Pornographers’ fourth album Challengers was about 55% ballads. Up to that point, the band specialized in up-tempo bops. I saw shows early in their career which ended with a third of the audience dancing on stage with them. Even with a few notable ballads on Twin Cinema, the Challengers record came as a surprise. But in retrospect this seems crazy. There wasn’t that much of a change between the third and fourth record, and the shift towards variation in texture and tone was an inevitability as the band transitioned from supergroup project to ongoing band.

It’s almost 20 years later, and The New Pornographers have changed again. The Former Site Of, their tenth album, is pretty much bop-free. The tone is icier, the mood is fairly somber, and according to Carl Newman, the lyrics are interconnected song cycle that culminates in the the title track. (I’m taking his word on that–even with this narrative intention, his writing is as oblique as it’s ever been.)

The New Pornographers used to be one of Canada’s crop of too-many-people-on-stage bands, but they’ve shed some members in recent years. Kurt Dahle and Dan Bejar both departed after the group’s masterpiece Brill Bruisers in 2014, vestigial keyboard player Blaine Thurier bounced not long after, and the less is said about the ejection of their disgraced post-Dahle drummer, the better. The band’s been boiled down to essential personal: Carl Newman as sole songwriter and primary vocalist, Neko Case on vocals, Kathryn Calder on keyboards and harmony vocals, Todd Fancey on guitar, and John Collins on bass. Collins used to be more active as a producer, but that’s fallen by the wayside a bit as they’ve moved towards a mostly-remote recording process.

It’s not surprising that Newman would move towards slower, more atmospheric songs as The New Pornographers have become more of a recording project. And it’s not as though they need more rockers, since they’re already locked into a dozen or so of those that they always play live. But beyond matters of practicality and logic, it just sounds like this is where Newman is as a person. He sounds pessimistic and uncertain. There’s a sense of loss that permeates the new material, but not necessarily in the sense of literal mourning. It’s more like a frustration of knowing something is gone, but not quite knowing what it is or how it went away.

The opening verse of “Votive” genuinely bums me out:

My hands are cupped around a match
I’m just trying to keep the lights on
But a lighthouse should not be
In league with the rocks
Though at some point it’s all
Uncharted waters

I suppose I hear people sing more upsetting things all the time, but this degree of weariness gets under my skin. I listen to this and wonder, am I headed towards seeing everything as futile? Is it futile to resist a pull towards this feeling?

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My New Band Believe “Numerology”

“Numerology” feels smooth and suave despite itself. The ultra-frenetic acoustic guitar would typically signal agitation or anxiety, but instead feels like a strummed approximation of pulsing EDM keyboards. Skronky horns would normally feel a little uncomfortable and abrasive, but in this context, it comes across as bursts of excited energy. Cameron Picton, formerly of the proggy post-punk group Black Midi, makes the contradictions work by committing to a handsome vocal tone and singing lyrics about anticipation from a calm and calculating perspective. But not in a sinister or creepy way – he just sounds like a man with a plan, who knows what he wants from a night out dancing, and is ready to shamelessly flirt his way to his desired result.

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Joshua Idehen “You Wanna Dance or What?”

“You Wanna Dance or What?” dramatizes a scene at a dance club. The music starts out blaring a soul sample from a Tommy McGee record sped up and sliced into a new riff. The beat shifts and Joshua Idehen is suddenly lost in thought, wondering why he’s in his head rather than feeling present in the party. Then he’s outside the club, and the music recedes into the background. A man notices him, truly sees him in this moment, and tells him “There is so much darkness in this world, but not in this room, and not between us.”

This encounter and that line in particular is the conceptual through line of Idehen’s new record I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have to Try. It’s about realizing that no matter how bleak the world gets, we need each other and we need joy. Connection, creativity, expression, pleasure – these are the essentials of life, in good times and especially in bad times. Idehen and his collaborator Ludvig Parment largely explore these notions in the context of ecstatic dance music, which makes sense. What could be a better shorthand for communal connection than a dance club?

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Gorillaz featuring Mark E. Smith “Delirium”

Damon Albarn used unreleased audio from his collaborations with several deceased artists on the new Gorillaz record, a concept record that’s largely fixated on death and the afterlife. I’m a bit lukewarm on the album, but I like this conceit and think his use of the late Mark E. Smith is inspired. The Fall singer is basically the voice of an angry, capricious, and inscrutable god. An irritable and confusing god you must try to appease. It’s the ideal role for Smith, and it’s fun to go back to old Fall records and imagine it all as the gospel of this strange English deity.

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Gena “Circlez”

Every sound in “Circlez” is so gorgous and precisely calibrated – that organ tone with the just-right level of warmth radiating through the mix, the subtle high-pitched clatter punctuating Karriem Riggins’ percussion, the piano part mixed to sound as though it’s bleeding in from the next room, the heavily reverbed yells on the outro. It makes me wonder how much of Gena’s decisions came quickly from raw instinct, and how much may have been sweated over in the studio. Not that it makes a lot of difference – if it’s more the latter, they’ve achieved the illusion of convincing me that it could have just happened this way.

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Beba Rexha “Çike Çike”

“Çike Çike” owes a lot to early 90s house music and “Vogue”/Erotica-era Madonna without feeling particularly retro. Some of that is in the nuances of production, but I think it’s mostly because every era of electronic music seems to coexist naturally in a “time is a flat circle” streaming economy. Every sound is up for grabs, every sound has its audience, and everything can be a hit at once, so the micro-fashions that dictated electronic music for ages don’t matter as much as they used to. And besides, Bebe Rexha is a pop artist – she’s mixing and matching, jumping on whatever works for her. And truly, I’ve never heard a song make more sense for her. It’s trashy in the best way, and so particular to her Albanian/NYC roots. It sounds like she’s letting people in on a fun secret world.

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John Carroll Kirby “Suntory”

“Suntory” is a challenging song to write about because while I think of some poetic ways to describe its beauty, all of them seem to cheapen the sublime loveliness of the piece. Does it sound like waking up to a perfect, luxurious morning? Do the piano chords and synth tones somehow feel exactly like gentle golden sunlight on your skin? Does it have the ultra-relaxed and informal feel of Sun Ra’s “Sleeping Beauty,” one of my favorite recordings of all time? Yes, definitely, but that’s rather banal compared to what the music actually feels like. There are some songs that are so fun to describe that the music sometimes can’t live up to the words, but this is very much the opposite. This is the sort of abstraction that you immediately and instinctively understand. It’s music describing a feeling beyond the utility of words.

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Yaya Bey “Blue”

“Blue” has a tight pocket but otherwise feels totally weightless and untethered, making Yaya Bey’s voice sound like it’s floating in the sky above that gently popping bass groove. It’s serene funk. She’s singing reassuring lyrics about allowing yourself to feel pain and move on, sounding as though she’s attained enlightenment and wants to pass it on. You can hear some residual angst in her voice but it’s drowned out by her compassion, most likely for her past self.

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Fred again.., CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso “Beto’s Horns” (Fred Remix)

Almost every time I’ve heard something amazing and wondered what it was over the past few five months, it’s turned out to be Fred Again.

The first half dozen times I heard “Beto’s Horns” was at the gym, where I couldn’t Shazam the music and just had to wonder what was going on with this insane track with the frantic Latin rapping, the blaring Basement Jaxx-y horn riff, the monstrous dubstep drop? The one that speeds up like a panic attack but then unexpectedly spins off into a digital rhumba tangent? The weirdest, most viscerally exciting, most volatile track I’ve heard in a while? I had to know.

I’ve paid some attention to Fred Again in the past, but wasn’t keeping up. As it turns out, over the past year he’s evolved. He’s been rapidly accumulating top-tier tracks. He’s become one of the best artists working today.

What I hear in Fred Again is a mastery of the full vocabulary of electronic music – dubstep, drum and bass, garage and grime, drill, IDM, you name it – plus signature moves pulled from masters like Four Tet, Basement Jaxx, Aphex Twin, Burial, Underworld, Skrillex, and so on. His tracks are energetic and restless, often mixing and matching ideas from all over the map. He’s become very good at making rap records that maximize the energy and impact of the rhyming. He’s got excellent and arty taste, but he’s also clearly driven by a desire to get people excited. He’s in the zone and I want more.

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A Thousand Mad Things “Promises”

A Thousand Mad Things’ William Barradale wears his icy synth pop and goth influences on his sleeve, to the extent that his most recent singles sound like direct homages to Depeche Mode and The Cure. A lot of artists aim for this, but Barradale actually nails it on a craft level, emulating their particular approaches to melody rather than just over-indexing on the surface level aesthetics like most cold wave acts. “Promises” offsets the jauntiness of “The Lovecats” with an absolutely frigid synth arrangement, with Barradale singing wry lyrics about a torturous breakup in a classic handsome new wave voice. He’s not reinventing any wheels here, but he is making an exceptionally good wheel.

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Wet Leg “Mangetout” (The Dare remix)

The best remixes retain a song’s structure and character but completely makeover its musical wardrobe, resulting in a more stylish and effective version of itself. Wet Leg’s original recording of “Mangetout” was good, but The Dare’s remix is great, amping up its essential sass and spunk by pumping up the bass and tossing in bright retro 80s keyboards. The Dare may not be particularly original – he’s basically redoing the classic DFA remix of Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” – but he has good taste and absolutely nailed the execution on this track. Rhian Teasdale’s voice sounds very natural in this context, to the point that I hope this success has some influence on their artistic direction going forward. If she’s going to get increasingly bold and extroverted in her writing and performances, why not take the music further in that direction as well?

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Ari Lennox “Deep Strokes”

It’s a slow jam called “Deep Strokes;” you know what it’s about. But still, I appreciate Ari Lennox’s commitment to a flimsy double entendre. Sure, it’s about painting! Literal painting. Your walls have been looking kinda empty these days! And you know, the body is something like a canvas – of course you want to get some paint on it. Makes sense! Lennox’s kayfabe makes it funny, but also keeps this gorgeous ballad from dipping into “joke song” territory. There might be a wink in the lyrical conceit, but everything else about the song is earnest and straightforwardly sexy.

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Labrinth “Orchestra”

“Orchestra” is an expression of self-loathing that doubles as a statement of artistic intent. Labrinth says he’s a people pleaser, and that he’s desperate for attention and applause to soothe his fragile ego. He’ll become anything you need him to be, become every player in an orchestra designed to please your ears. He’s a creep, he’s a weirdo, but he’s found exactly what he needs to do to belong here. And he’s very good at it! The song’s spectacular arrangement overwhelms the bitter sentiment, and he’s so good at provoking sensation and providing moments of pure pop thrill that you can easily tune out the sarcasm and misery in the vocals.

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Arlo Parks “Heaven”

There’s a sound in this song that first shows up at the 00:02 mark. I’m calling it a “sound” because I don’t know exactly what it is. It’s probably a vocal snippet that’s been processed through a few filters, but who knows. The mysterious quality is part of the allure, a lot of the reason it catches your ear. As it reoccurs, you sorta end up chasing it around the song. It shows up, it fades away, it reappears. It’s like an audio firefly flitting around the negative space of the song.

Obviously, there’s a lot more going on in the music. Arlo Parks is singing about a beautiful moment watching a friend DJ at Under the K Bridge park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The beat is busy, but the song feels still, like she’s trying to inhabit a serene memory indefinitely. “Are you letting go? Do you just want time to freeze?,” she sing. “Well, I think sometimes it’s both, yeah.” She then sings something about knowing she can’t “catch a glimpse of heaven” and take it with her, but I think that’s basically what she’s done with this song.

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Ora Cogan “Honey”

In comic book art, or at least old-fashioned 20th century comic book art, one of the major roles of the inker is to embellish the penciled layout illustrations so it’s all crisply articulated in ink with subtle variations in line density. A masterful inker adds dimension and weight with precise brush strokes, and often compensates for flaws in the pencil art. It’s a very technical role in the process, but when it’s done right you get an extra bit of soul on the page.

The arrangement and mix of Ora Cogan’s “Honey” makes me think of a well-inked page. There’s a lot of ways the song could’ve sounded ordinary, but everything in the track has a carefully considered weight and dimension. There’s a lot of negative space in the music, making it feel airy and wide open. Every element is beautifully articulated and varied in its implied closeness to the ear, with an emphasis on how Finn Smith’s drums guide the track. I think this sort of balance and nuance is a goal of a lot of producers, but this work can get flattened out in the mastering. This isn’t the case for “Honey,” and so a song that might’ve topped out at “pretty good” based on the solid bones of the songwriting and a lovely vocal performance ends up startlingly beautiful.

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Holy Fuck “Evie”

Holy Fuck made a point of mentioning on their Bandcamp page that the music on their new record was largely recorded live with an emphasis on “improvisation and raw percussion.” It was a good idea for them to say this because it never crossed my mind that industrial funk track like “Evie” could be created with that ethos. They sound like a relentless machine here, like some kind of monster car steamroller tank built to crush everything in its path. Knowing this is more “organic” than I assumed makes me enjoy it a bit more, but not in some “this is more authentic” way. It’s just fun knowing these guys are going this hard and are so totally dialed in. They’re four guys, but they sound like one huge robot.

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Ford “New Groups Forming”

Recommending this song feels like telling you that I like looking out the window of the Q train when it goes over the Manhattan Bridge, or that I like how thin and soft some of my oldest t-shirts feel on my skin, or how satisfying it is to lie down on a couch when you are truly physically exhausted. Ford isn’t doing anything particularly new or distinctive on this track, but the familiarity is a lot of the appeal. It’s like how repeatedly experiencing perfect little moments doesn’t make them less appealing over time. Like, you’re never going to have a perfect sip of cold water when you’re hot and thirsty and think “why isn’t this a totally new experience?”

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Memorials “Cut Glass Hammer”

Memorials is a duo fronted by Verity Susman, who was a central player in Electrelane back in the 2000s. Memorials has a different dynamic than Electrelane – more streamlined arrangements, a little jazzier in a David Axelrod way here and there – but there’s a lot of overlap in aesthetic, to the point that this could just be labeled new Electrelane material and no one would blink. Susman’s prim vocal tone and dry affect is unmistakable, and the post-Stereolab droning vintage organ/high momentum groove combo on “Cut Glass Hammer” has always been in her wheelhouse. Susman and drummer Matthew Simms aren’t breaking new ground here, but they’re expert craftspeople when it comes to this lane of buzzing English psychedelic music. They’ll make you feel every dynamic shift in your gut as though you’re strapped to the hood of their speeding vehicle.

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Lime Garden “23”

There’s a lot of humility in the lyrics of “23,” but it’s coming from a place of having been humiliated more than any sort of innate virtue. Chloe Howard sings about feeling like she’s not made any material progress in life, and identifies moments in her past when she fumbled opportunities. This could easily be a miserable song but the tone is fairly bright and funky, and her vocal signals an even balance of snarky cynicism and low-key optimism that something might eventually work out. The arrangement feels very mid to late 00s indie to me – very clean tones, casually groovy in a post-DFA way, slinky but a little silly. It’s a great match for the lyrical sentiment, but maybe that’s just me connecting one bleak recession era to another.

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PVA “Peel”

What exactly is going on in this song? “Peel” doesn’t lay out a clear narrative, but if you add up all the evocative details you get something along the lines of a somewhat hostile erotic fantasy about remaking the body of an “awful stranger” by manually reshaping and removing their flesh. Is it sexual, is it violent? Sure, but I think the main thing here is the expression of an artistic impulse. “I create, I create, I create,” Ella Harris sings in a seductive half-whisper over pulsing keyboards. She’s pulling you in, making it all sound like a good idea, possibly even a very good time.

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Girly “What If They Knew”

I think shoegaze is a very forgiving genre in that basic competence can provide satisfying results if you have any affinity for the aesthetic. Artists working in the genre don’t have to work very hard, but at this point, I sorta demand that they do. “What If They Knew” starts off in the “basic competence” zone but gradually builds a lattice of distinct, beautiful, and emotionally potent guitar parts. The vocals barely rise above a whisper, but the blaring accompaniment is like a flood of yearning desire. Girly nail one of the best shoegaze tricks – contrasting an outward shyness with the overwhelming emotions screaming beneath the surface.

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Jaymin “Wamu”

Seems a little perverse to give this incredibly sweet R&B song about committing to the love of your life a title spinning off a clever reference to Chase’s acquisition of Washington Mutual Bank in 2008, right? It’s a weird choice, but the song is so open-hearted and vulnerable that I get wanting to put up a little bit of distance with the listener. I mean, Jaymin is basically proposing to his girl in the lyrics!

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