Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

A few years ago I wrote about “cultural cartography,” an idea that floated through BuzzFeed during its peak era that boils down to the notion that all forms of content have utility, though a lot of the time the audience decides what that utility will be when and how they share it or make it part of their identity. The New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka’s new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture has a clear and specific utility, which is to reassure people who identify as having an interest in culture that the reason they feel disconnected from or disappointed by contemporary culture is that recommendation algorithms have compromised everything. It’s a book that exists to give people who have minimal active engagement in culture – but still perceive themselves to be tasteful – an easy way to write off contemporary culture completely. Ah, it’s all ruined by The Algorithm! It’s all bland and bad now! It’s a book that gives its readers permission to give up on the arts. 

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Sly5thAve “Monoxide”

I’m never unhappy to hear music that’s obviously influenced by D’Angelo, much less jumping off from ideas he laid down on Black Messiah. “Monoxide” starts from a similar point as the more gnarly tracks on that record but pushes a little further into jazz territory, with some bits recalling Herbie Hancock in his grandiose space-funk Sextant era or Miles Davis in fusion mode. Sly5thave is demonstrating a high level of both taste and skill here, and while I think it’s a fairly easy game of “spot the influence,” you can hear his distinct character in the disorienting quality of the music. The lyrics are basically just saying “I want to get high with you” over and over, but the music suggests a level of being stoned that would make communicating with someone a little challenging.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Mary Timony “Looking For the Sun”

I hear a lot of English folk psychedelia in the songs on Mary Timony’s new record Untame the Tiger and I think it suits her very well, especially after an extended spell of records with Ex Hex which went for a more blunt new wave minimalism. “Looking For the Sun” is a different sort of minimalism, I suppose, but the scope suggested by her guitar feels much grander than that. She makes the verses feel like an expanse of barren desert, which only makes the brighter chords on the chorus sound more like a burst of sunlight through parting clouds. Like a few other tracks on the record, the lyrics describe a rather bleak state of mind in direct but not unpoetic language. She imagines misery as a bad friend, and misfortune only exacerbating a fear of everyone else. But despite all that the song mostly sounds like an expression of optimism, or at least faith in the light at the end of every tunnel.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Astrid Sonne “Do You Wanna”

In most cases the implication of a song title like “Do You Wanna” is yes, you definitely wanna. You wanna have fun, you wanna have sex, you wanna get high, you wanna be free, etc. Astrid Sonne goes hard in the opposite direction, presenting the question full question – “do you wanna have a baby?” – and then leaving you in anticipation as it hangs in the air and a loud, clipped beat slowly moves you towards her next line. She makes you run through the possibilities in your head. Do you wanna commit to bringing a child into the world, the world we’re in right now? Do you wanna really commit? Do you wanna trust the other person to stick around? Do you wanna disappoint them by declining? Her answer ends up being “I really don’t know,” and she really makes you feel that confusion and uncertainty in your gut.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Angelic Milk “Diana Ross”

“Diana Ross” is a song for anyone who’d say that they’d prefer to desire than be desired. Angelic Milk conjure the sound of early 60s girl group pop, but more importantly they tap into that sort of cosmic longing. Sarah Persephona sings about unrequited love like a highly aestheticized ritual, a personal religion in which whoever she’s singing about is the deity. They come to her in dreams, time seems to stretch out indefinitely, and songs from The Little Mermaid and Diana Ross are referenced like hymns. She shows some signs of doubt, but she clings to her faith and it’s quite beautiful.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Four Tet “Daydream Repeat”

The first 30 seconds of “Daydream Repeat” go by about as you’d expect from Four Tet, with percussive elements gradually clicking together into an up-tempo groove. Then the noise kicks in. It’s like a screaming vacuum, a massive blade scraping metal, a blast disintegrating everything in its path. It comes and goes through the track like a brutal storm, broken up by sections led by a piano part that sounds very gentle and innocent. The piano is lovely but it’s that digital noise that allures, this sound that’s not quite musical but carries some recognizable humanity to it. It’s like some disruptive furious feeling getting in the way of, but also giving weight to, the more level-headed moments.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Nourished by Time “Hand On Me”

A very cool synth bass part drops around the 1:40 mark in this song, which retroactively makes the first half of it feel a little hesitant, as though Marcus Brown is biding time waiting for this inevitable groove to kick in. That synth bass changes the way everything else feels in the song – what felt a little off-balance feels less precarious, what felt empty feels full. Brown opens the song singing “Have you never loved somebody, I’ve never tried,” and once the song fills out and the groove is complete, it sounds like he’s finally feeling that love he’s denied himself.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Vampire Weekend “Capricorn”

The first four Vampire Weekend records have a very clean tonal palette, to the point that the debut and Contra in particular can feel a little antiseptic and fussy. That wasn’t a problem, really – that crisp just-so quality was a big part of the group’s personality and felt like a musical manifestation of the faux-preppy vibe they were going for. They started with a polished sound that many bands work their way towards from scrappy beginnings, so it makes some sense that their evolution would follow the reverse trajectory and feel comfortable embracing big loud noises on their fifth record Only God Was Above Us.

This is Vampire Weekend, so when I say “big loud noises,” I don’t mean they just slammed on some distortion pedals and played some riffs. The most discordant elements of the new singles “Capricorn” and “Gen-X Cops” are very tightly controlled and carefully chosen tones that hit very precise marks in the mix. The bursts of what I think are heavily processed keyboards that start midway through “Capricorn” are genuinely surprising and lend a sense of danger and precarity to song that, up until that point, sounds like a pretty standard Ezra Koenig ballad including a piano break that sounds perhaps a little too much like the one from “Step.” (I can’t tell whether that’s an intentional thematic callback, which Koenig is wont to do and makes some sense as both songs are about aging, or if it’s simply a songwriter writing like themselves.)

That noise, which sounds like an oddly sensual version of a BZZZT WRONG button in a game show, doesn’t entirely come out of nowhere. The percussion is presented with an exaggerated room sound that makes the whole song feel like it’s in soft focus. The air feels different in this song relative to previous Vampire recordings – dry and cold, filling a space that’s somehow both more and less claustrophobic. Koenig sounds distant as he sings about someone – a version of himself? – getting older and increasingly frustrated in trying to find answers, or pieces of the past that resonate with his particular place on a timeline. There are no answers in this song but there is some advice: “I know you’re tired of trying, listen clearly – you don’t have to try.” Is that the same as giving up? Not sure, but the music signals so much weariness and potential disaster that it’s at least asking someone to take a break and not be so hard on themselves.

Buy it from Amazon.

Atarashii Gakko! “Hello”

The Japanese girl group Atarashii Gakko specialize in extremely high energy tunes with a bratty, punky snarl so it makes sense they’d shine in a song that seems like it was built to be their own version of Le Tigre’s immortal “Deceptacon.” There’s other ingredients in this soup – I hear a little “Burning Up” by Madonna, a touch of the Afrika Bambaata/Johnny Rotten song “World Destruction,” the early Beastie Boys in general – but the thing that puts this over is the attitude in the Atarashii Gakko girls’ vocal delivery. They seem a little cute and flirty, but mostly intimidating and fearless.

Buy it from Amazon.

Goat Girl “Ride Around”

The guitar parts in “Ride Around” have a sludgy tone and churning rhythm that feels sickly and uncomfortable. The hesistant feel of the percussion only exacerbates that, at some points bringing to mind the kind of cautious movements of someone who feels like they’re about to puke. This is all very unpleasant and probably not the most enticing way to describe a song, but it really works as a vibe and matches the lyrics nicely. If you’re gonna sing “The way it goes, I think you’re kinda gross / me and you, I think we could be close,” it shouldn’t be in a song that goes down easy, right?

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Cheekface “The Fringe”

Cheekface is a godsend for anyone out there who misses Cake, or ever wished Calvin Johnson had made a late 70s/early 80s style power-pop record, or wanted to know what a hybrid of They Might Be Giants and Talking Heads might be like. But despite aesthetic similarities to some very specific artists of previous generations, Cheekface has their own personality. A lot of that comes down to the way they mix and match the recognizable elements, like they simply found a new way to style that droll Johnson/John McCrea vocal affect into a fresh new outfit. The personality also comes through in Greg Katz’s lyrical fixation on recognizable hipster archetypes as they manifest in the present day – a frustrated guy deciding to make himself a local character in a town full of surveillance cameras, guys who are frustrated that their friends “getting square,” dudes who are “dispassionately vaping” while watering plants, and in the case of “The Fringe,” an artist who seems to be motivated to create unappealing art to gain some clout. The jokes are pretty good, but the replay value is a direct result of the band taking structure and arrangement very seriously.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Yungatita “Pick At Your Face”

“Pick At Your Face” sounds bright and bratty and effortless as Yungatita seem to tumble through a series of very strong melodies. It’s a song about feeling listless, ugly, and disheveled, but more in a “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t ya kill me” way than a “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here” way. The band go big and bold on the chorus, but also very cutesy – as 90s-coded as this gets, the backing vocals have a post-Kidz Bop quality that’s much more in line with strains of 2000s indie that aren’t particularly cool at the moment. But you know, songs this good have a way of changing minds about aesthetic choices that are a little cringe at face value.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Unessential Oils “Distrust the Magician”

I didn’t really notice there was singing on “Distrust the Magician” until I’d heard it a few times, mainly because it’s so easy to zone out and get lost in the song’s groove and heavy vibe that a lot of the details and structure gets blurry. That’s sort of the point, though closer attention to individual components of the arrangement is rewarded, particularly if you’re focusing in on the lead guitar or the pulsing keyboard drone filling in the background. The performance feels lose and at least partially improvised but the palette is very considered and precise – guitar tones that sound light and lovely but also gritty and grey, percussion with just the right level of dry crispiness, a mix that feels spacious but allows the guitar parts to overlap into a lattice with a very tasteful density.

Buy it from Secret City Records.

Liquid Mike “Small Giants”

Liquid Mike’s new record sounds like a musical stew made from ingredients exclusively sourced from a CD bin marked “$4 used alternative,” but the element of their style that grabbed me is how much of the vocal and lead guitar melodies remind me specifically of Matthew Sweet. But you know, if Matthew Sweet was more of a dirtbag delinquent? I have no idea whether or not the members of this band even listen to Sweet, but that Sweet-ness is a touch of harmonic polish that levels up the more straight ahead pop-punk aspects of a song like “Small Giants.” It suits the lyrics well too, amping up the golden sunny nostalgia of a song that romanticizes being a young loser.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

The Last Dinner Party “The Feminine Urge”

The Last Dinner Party sound as though they’ve somehow never heard music besides indie-aligned records from the United Kingdom, like they were bred from childhood to take their place in a lineage of clever, somewhat stuffy bands including The Smiths, Pulp, The Charlatans, Catatonia, Camera Obscura, The Long Blondes, The Pipettes, Florence and the Machine, and so on. They have enough craft and charm to fit into that RIYL list, but thus far I’m having trouble locating something specific to them in their songs. They execute tropes rather well, the lyrics are fairly sharp, and they’re capable of writing a genuinely strong hook like the fluttery ascending melody in the chorus of “The Feminine Urge.” This can be enough, and lord knows plenty of bands working in the same milieu can’t pull any of that off. But I’d like to feel like this band can do more than just effectively reassemble the ideas of other bands.

Buy it from Amazon.

Boeckner “Lose”

One of the oldest conventions of this blog is using a line from a song as the title of the post, ideally something abstract and evocative. Sometimes I don’t have a lot to work with, but in the case of “Lose,” it’s like top to bottom cool abstract evocative lines. “Living blind in isolation,” “every star in retrograde,” “this is a city of doorways,” “the vanishing neighbors,” “some Eldritch strange eraser,” and that’s just the first verse. Dan Boeckner built the song to feel like a speeding car, the lyrics feel a little like quick glimpses out the window as you zoom away from somewhere, not necessarily towards someplace in particular. It’s hard to shake how doomed this song feels – everything is crumbling around him, he was bound to lose his love – but Boeckner sings with so much heart and go-for-broke intensity that it overpowers any of his cynical impulses.

Buy it from Sub Pop.

Omni “Plastic Pyramid”

I’m a big fan of songs in which singers interact like they’re talking to each other, particularly when the lyrics aren’t particularly obvious and it’s like listening in on a very strange conversation. That’s the case in “Plastic Pyramid,” a twitchy post-punk song that seems to conflate fast fashion with travel in which Omni’s Philip Frobos trades lines with Izzy Glaudini of Automatic in a listless “are they on a bad date?” tone. (Love the way she seems to audibly roll her eyes at the question “are you hydrated, baby?”) in Glaudini was a terrific choice for this role – she’s always got this droll cool girl quality, but the song allows her to embody boredom, passivity, and vague contempt at different points.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Drahla “Default Parody”

Here’s another post-punk song. I read a tweet today by the English music critic Tom Ewing who was lamenting how post-punk started as a framework for experimentation and pushing beyond genre constraints, but its cyclical revivals treat the sound as a genre like any other. It’s iterative rather than explorative. I think this is a good point, but I don’t think the intentions of the artists who establish a genre ever really factor into how other artists end up playing with their conventions. Every genre convention wasn’t conventional at some point.

Drahla are very good at what they do even if what they do isn’t at all original. I think the post-punk aesthetic is something that’s mostly interesting depending on the energy of the execution, how much musicians throw themselves into the deep end of the sound. “Default Parody” has a cool groove and appealing deadpan vocals, but it clicks mainly because the guitarists sound like they’re having a great time wringing the sickest, most abrasive sounds out of their instruments. Even if a lot of the song feels rigid and mechanical, those guitars make it all sound wild.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Bullion featuring Carly Rae Jepsen “Rare”

I hear “Rare” in terms of temperature – the bass is at a low simmer, the synth textures and Bullion’s voice have a slight chill. Neither is at an extreme, but the contrast is still quite sharp. His voice and cadence feels very formal and polite to me, he sounds like an introverted and cerebral person trying to reason his way though something quite emotional. Carly Rae Jepsen isn’t that much warmer in tone on this track, but she comes across as more present and down to earth. You get the feeling that she’s trying to acclimate to his vibe, trying to feel things as he feels them. With this in mind I quite like the ambiguity of the chorus – “deep in the heart, deep in the heart” – because it sounds like they’re trying to make love work, but at least one of them has to dig deeper and work harder for it to click.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Sleater-Kinney “Small Finds”

Corin Tucker’s lyrics in “Small Finds” jumble up hunger, sex, and violence in a way where it’s unclear whether she’s singing about animals or humans. It’s all primal urges and survival instincts, but it’s also totally unapologetic pleasures. Tucker’s fierce and uninhibited voice is perfect for a song with these themes, but so is Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s guitar attack, which is about as gnarly as they’ve ever sounded. I can imagine them approaching the same idea with a more cerebral and ironic angle, but I think going for wild vulgarity and brutality is the more honest and compelling move.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bad Tuner “24 Hours”

“24 Hours” isn’t just the first great Big Beat song to come along in a long time, it’s a Big Beat song that stands up to the very best of The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, or The Crystal Method in their late 90s prime. This track is a dense ecosystem of dynamic shifts crafted to keep you moving and it’s so effective that you can feel helpless to it, like Bad Tuner is remotely hijacking your body or just throwing you around like a doll. The aggression isn’t limited to how hard the beats slam – the vocal clips are furious and defiant and confident in the power of resisting “those in power,” and the textures and random sounds owe a lot to The Bomb Squad at Public Enemy’s peak. There’s no getting around how this is a style rooted in another era but this doesn’t feel retro to me, more like a new artist harnessing the power of old techniques to make something fresh and forceful for this moment in time.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Idles “Grace”

Some songs sound like they’re driven by an idea – some kind of mission – that pushes the artist out of their comfort zone. “Grace” feels very different from any Idles song I’ve heard before, much more delicate and far less monochromatic without losing the post-punk tension at the core of their sound. The song sounds like pastel light breaking through a grey haze, some softness and beauty contrasted with harsh and rigid mechanical utility. Joseph Talbot is singing about love on a grand scale, about true solidarity for humanity at large. The verses read like a prayer but the song overtly rejects religion, or at least the institutional structure around it. The idea here, simple as it is, is laid out in the chorus – let go of institutions, let go of the things that control us, embrace love. Talbot is hardly the first to propose this, but he and his band make an excellent case for it here.

Buy it from Amazon.