Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Animal Collective “Gem and I”

Sometimes the more “normal” Animal Collective gets the more their essential eccentricity comes through. “Gem and I” feels somewhat familiar with its cocktail vibe and somewhat kitschy vocal harmonies but the distinctive tics and jumbled reference points of the AnCo players push it firmly into oddball territory. Panda Bear shines the brightest on this one – he’s the one laying down the beat and giving the song an odd sort of swing, and he’s the lead vocalist carrying one of the best melodies the band has written for a while. The lyrics seem to be about Animal Collective as a unit, both in terms of the pleasure of playing together and the challenge of finding new things to say and do while working with the same guys. “Another tip to the golden years,” he sings, more than two decades into this collaboration. “We’re probably in it.”

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Mitski “I Don’t Like My Mind”

The first several times I heard “I Don’t Like My Mind” I didn’t pay very close attention to the lyrics and just took in the sound of it, which feels essentially like Mitski doing her own variation of Angel Olsen in reverb-heavy country ballad mode. The mix is incredible – her voice loud and clear, the accompaniment slightly blurred into abstraction. I was so taken by the emotion of it all that I just did not notice that the chorus is about eating an entire cake alone. This is funny and unexpected, but also a level of specificity that makes her lyrics about struggling with impulse control and general misery feel a lot more grounded and real. It’s a punchline at her own expense, but also, like, a genuinely concerning detail that suggests some things a lot darker than she’s willing to spell out in the song.

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Laurel Halo “Belleville”

“Belleville,” like the rest of Laurel Halo’s excellent new record Atlas, sounds like a very specific kind of nowhere. It’s mostly a piano instrumental but the piano part sounds semi-improvised, as though someone was passing through a house, spotted a piano, and sat down to play for a few minutes. But this is really more of an ambient track so you hear the room as much as the music, making it sort of like an installation art piece that you can only hear and infer what else is in that space. There’s vague traces of violin, non-musical sounds made by the body as the instrument is played, some hint of weather outside. A minute and a half in there’s a sudden burst of layered vocals that brightens the sound considerably and adds implied depth as it sounds like it’s in “focus” while everything before it and around it is considerably hazier.

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Laufey “California and Me”

Laufey is at the center of an interesting musical venn diagram – a songwriter and performer with roots in classical who mainly writes jazz vocal song with the lyrical POV of a contemporary indie singer-songwriter. “California and Me” is a song at the dead center of that diagram, a jazz ballad with old Hollywood orchestration and a vocal that laments the end of a situationship with great sadness but also a little humor in the more clever lines. I admire the elegance of her craft, she’s so precise and economical and she tugs on a listener’s heartstrings in a way that’s very gentle but highly effective. “California and Me” is calibrated to make you feel the exact flavor of loneliness she’s feeling, but it’s nuanced enough to get that as sad as she is about feeling left alone part of her feels optimistic about whatever may come her way in the wake of this. Close a door, open a window…

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Electric Six “Born to be Ridiculed”

The characters populating the lyrics of Electric Six songs are mostly creeps, rubes, charlatans, and losers. In this respect they’re like a Steely Dan for the 21st century, but with the noble and romantic loser archetype replaced by a more pathetic and deeply uncool version. “Born to Be Ridiculed” is from the POV of one of those guys, a hapless fool who’s come to realize they can’t avoid putting themselves in situations that bring them humiliation and/or the disdain of strangers. But as far as E6 characters go, this guy isn’t that bad and the appeal of the song is how the rockabilly energy of the music and Dick Valentine’s vocal performance make him seem very accepting of his fate. He sounds like he’s owning it. He sounds like he’s almost unafraid.

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DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ “Honey”

DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s new album Destiny is an incredibly bold body of work, even beyond its epic but somehow not entirely exhausting four hour run time. The general tone and structure of the record is similar to the luxurious party vibe of The Avalanches’ classic Since I Left You, but with most of the nostalgia-button-smashing musical references and textures coming from about 1997 through 2002. (That Avalanches album came out in 2001, so it’s one more reference to the era.)

Destiny sounds like a paradise constructed specifically for people born between 1978 and 1985; an older Millennial’s imaginary world in which 9/11 never happened and the later Clinton-era boom years extended into infinity. It’s also like having your brain flooded with a thousand happy memories at once, overlapping and bleeding into one incomprehensible but ecstatic song. “Honey” is basically the overture of Destiny, establishing the tonal palette, musical themes, and general ironic-yet-entirely-earnest sensibility of the record within eight minutes. It also acclimates your ear to Sabrina’s skill for building dense layers of sounds, often to such an extent that the music becomes overwhelming and it feels a bit like you’re listening to four different songs at once that share the same beat.

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Helena Deland “Spring Bug”

“Spring Bug” is obviously about the spring, but the idea in this song – being excited about a change of seasons at least partly for nostalgic reasons, and reconnecting with older versions of oneself by reenacting favorite experiences – is applicable to all the seasons. If anything, in we tend to think about this with regards to summer and autumn with music, so Helena Deland is sticking up for an underrated part of the calendar. Underrated, maybe, but definitely the most symbolically rich as a period of rejuvenation. The tension in this gentle and easygoing song seems mainly in the contradiction of feeling reborn but running into previous selves. The past doesn’t die as you keep living, but it might ask to sit down next to you for a few minutes on a park bench while you look out at budding flowers.

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Zach Bryan “Fear and Friday’s”

There’s never been a shortage of guys trying to be Bruce Springsteen at any point in my time on this planet. Zach Bryan is one of the only singer-songwriters I’ve ever heard who’s stepped into the Boss’ zone and possesses the charisma, energy, and songwriting craft to not just pull it off but find their own voice in this lane. “Fear and Friday’s” is one of Bryan’s most overtly Springsteen-esque songs but I feel like the Bruce-ness of it is mostly in the melody and delivery of the chorus.

That’s the part of the song that really gets to me. Bryan is singing about a relationship with a very fickle woman who’s clearly nowhere near as invested in him as he is in her. “I got a fear, dear, that it’s gonna end,” he sings, displaying an earnest vulnerability that’s not whiney or needy or acting like he’s owed something. When the chorus ends on “you only love me like you mean it when it’s after dark,” it’s not some petulant Drake burn. He sounds like a guy who’s quite happy for that after dark hook-up, but disappointed that it probably can’t be more because he wants to give more.

Bryan’s new album opens with another song called “Fear and Friday’s (Poem)” that doesn’t have a lot to do with this song besides providing a bit of context for the shared title: “I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common, they’re overdone and glorified and they always leave you wanting.” In other words, like another great songwriter once sang: “Don’t expect, don’t expect, don’t expect, don’t expect.”

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Ratboys “No Way”

“No Way” sounds immediately familiar, as though it’s a song I’ve known for 20+ years but haven’t heard in about 17 years. It’s brand new, but the “it all comes rushing back” happens anyway. I’m not sure what song or songs I’m trying to remember. Is it a particular chord change, something specific about the guitar tone, something about how it swings from loose and casual to emphatic and cathartic? The Ratboys are working firmly within genre here – indie rock with a little alt-country flair – so this kind of mild deja vu is par for the course. The charm of “No Way,” and certainly what makes it interesting beyond mere recognition, is in how the band sound very excited to have written this kind of song. A song this catchy, a song this easy to click into emotionally, a song that sounds like it’d be fun to play for an audience who knows the words to the chorus. It’s a song that approaches a breakup from two valid positions at once, gracefully moving from befuddled shrug to bold declaration that this sort of thing won’t happen again, or at least with them.

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NEXT GIRLZ babyMINT “Hellokittybalahcurrihellokitty美味しい”

BabyMINT are a Tawainese girl group spinning out of a idol competition show called Next Girlz, and they have made one of the most aggressively weird pop singles I’ve encountered in a while. “Hellokittybalahcurrihellokitty美味しい” combines extremely twee girly energy with K-pop maximalism and an AG Cook/Sophie flavor of hyperpop, resulting in something adorably berserk. The song begins with an interactive challenge in which the song speeds up every measure, but then it bounces around between different high energy modes like the song itself is daring you to keep up with it. It’s kind of a stunt song, but it holds together amazingly well and the novelty does not wear off much after repeat listens.

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Victoria Monét “Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem)”

“Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem)” is essentially an answer record, with Victoria Monét claiming the classic pimp trope for women in a way that’s aspirational for some of the audience and affirming for the rest. This is a clever enough high concept, but the magic is in how effortlessly Monét fits into this mode, this mood, this whole motif. Her voice sounds great paired with that dank and slinky bass line, which is generic enough to indirectly reference a lot of funk and rap classics but to my ear is most directly evocative of Outkast’s “SpottieOttieDopalicious.” It’s sort of like musical cosplay but it really flatters everything about her voice and taste in melody, and it embraces fantasy enough that a line like “we women been winning since from the beginning of your whole life” rings true in this context even if in real life it’s kind of a… debatable notion.

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Fievel Is Glauque “Dark Dancing”

“Dark Dancing” is a demo that Fievel Is Glauque decided to release as-is rather than fully flesh it out, and I think that was a wise decision in that this recording captures something I find distinct and interesting about them. That is, they write these sophisticated little songs steeped in jazz and mid-20th century adult-oriented pop but perform them very loose and off-the-cuff, which ends up highlighting their eccentricity and adding a touch of rawness and naivete that would typically be lost in a type of music dominated by slick professionals. There’s a twitchiness to their music too, particularly in Ma Clément’s vocal cadences. “Dark Dancing” has a lovely melody but the notes bunch up in odd ways, often moving a bit diagonal from where you think they’ll go. This approach could be abrasive, but for the most part it’s not, as Clément’s cool and calm voice makes every move seem totally rational.

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girl_irl “Bullseye”

“Bullseye” reminds me a bit of Tricky circa Pre-Millennium Tension and Angels With Dirty Faces, when he was trying to make his funk grooves as abrasive as possible to scare off anyone who liked the more overtly R&B qualities of Maxinquaye. But whereas his greatest stylistic trick was to double his breathy, muttered raps with the more soulful and angelic voice of Martina Topley-Bird, girl_irl embodies both his menace and Topley-Bird’s femme grace in her vocal on this song. The tone of the lyrics is kinda braggy and swaggy, but as much as she proclaims herself a goddess and roasts this other person she’s entangled with, the context seems messy and toxic enough that you question how she’s in this situationship if she’s so elevated and cool. But I think that’s a lot of the point, the idealized self-image punctured yet preserved.

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Geese “Mysterious Love”

Cameron Winter sings like a guy totally in love with cool rock voices and is trying to inhabit as many of them as possible from moment to moment in any Geese song. Take “Mysterious Love” – from one line to another, he’s a little Mick Jagger, he’s a little Thurston Moore, he’s a little Lou Reed, he’s a little Jack White, he’s a tiny bit Tom Verlaine and Jarvis Cocker. He’s pulling from a lot of sources but the goal is emboding “cool rock guy,” a person with a lot of attitude who knows what’s up, who knows how to have a good time, who’s rarely predictable and is never uptight. He never sounds shy. You can tell Winter has a great sense of humor about what he’s doing, but also that he’s taking the job of rock and roll singer very seriously and pushing himself to his physical limits with absolute earnestness. This is the magic combination for rock music – fun and volatile and trashy and silly and flirty and thoroughly convinced of its own coolness.

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Tanukichan “Don’t Give Up”

Tanukichan are very unapologetic about their extreme late 90s vibe, looking and sounding as though they’re a shoegaze band signed to Grand Royal in 1997 who were pushed through a time portal into our era. Toro Y Moi’s production on their new record only exacerbates this by placing a lot of emphasis on the percussion, which mostly sounds like how alt-rock drummers started emulating dance rhythms and hip-hop drum loops starting around 1996. Besides this the most interesting element of the band’s sound is how Hannah von Loon’s pummeling bass parts contrasts with her softly murmured vocals, as though she’s using her instrument to express a bold aggressive at odds with her more demure impulses. A lot of shoegaze music sounds like a small and sensitive voice trying to break through the noise, but in her case it sounds more like she’s trying to beat down her voice with the bass.

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Addison Rae “It Could’ve Been U”

Addison Rae is famous – and in many circles fully iconic – as a dance-centric Tiktok personality, and she’s been flirting with a pivot to pop stardom for a little while now. From what I can tell some of the hesitancy has been in finding the right music to suit her persona and aesthetic, which Stargirl’s Emma Baker has described (in great detail!) as a joyful expression of “embodiment.” Which is to say she has a seemingly effortless and carefree physicality, an incredible asset to any pop star but something that’s a bit ambiguous in terms of pairing with music that could potentially be hugely popular in the moment.

Going on Baker’s conception of Rae I think the most obvious type of song for her would be something along the lines of Whitney Houston’s classic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” or Beyoncé’s “Love On Top,” but even if someone could write a song of that caliber for her, I don’t think she’s necessarily ready to sing like that. The second most obvious thing, and probably more in Rae’s wheelhouse, would be to emulate prime era Britney Spears. But if your goal is to reach teens now, you probably have to meet them where they are, and so that means the best songs on Rae’s new EP are post-Olivia Rodrigo pithy rock songs with a little extra dance-pop gloss.

“It Could’ve Been U” is co-written and produced by Alexander 23, a rock-leaning pop producer whose best-known work is contributing to Rodrigo’s mega-smash “Good 4 U.” He does fantastic work here in crafting a tight, hook-packed song that fits well next to any Rodrigo rocker but also feels like something Selena Gomez might’ve done earlier in her career. It also sounds like something you could easily nudge into a killer EDM remix if that was required. It’s interesting to hear the song in the context of the track Charli XCX produced for this EP, which sounds rather stale – I assume Charli gave her pretty old scraps? In any case, it’s a situation where in shopping around for a style it’s clear that for the moment she’s got a couple songs that are fully of this current zeitgeist, right on down to the requisite ultra-literal first-person expression of resentment towards an ex. It sounds fresh and fun, and I have no idea whether this will be Rae’s pop lane in the long run but it suits her right now.

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Margaret Glaspy “Female Brain”

One thing I like a lot about Margaret Glaspy is the way her music is always contrasting delicacy and bluntness in its physicality, which carries over to her lyrics and singing. She conveys warmth and sensuality as often as she’s putting up her defenses and guarding her boundaries, and it’s not presented as a contradiction as much as a reasonable way of living in a harsh world. Glaspy’s new record Echo the Diamond almost completely strips out the R&B aspects of her music and focuses on the more rough and cathartic side of what she does. “Female Brain” stands out as a particularly blunt and edgy song – overtly resentful and confrontational in its lyrics, and so taut and tense that it sometimes feels like it might snap with a little more strain. It’s a terse and scathing little song, not quite violent but definitely irritated to the point where that doesn’t seem out of the question.

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Serebii “±”

Every time I hear “±” I’m a little surprised when the lead vocals come in about two thirds of the way through a piece of music that seems pretty comfortable as a fairly zoned-out instrumental piece. It feels a little like walking around a place you’re pretty sure is completely empty but eventually finding someone who barely notices you. Serebii’s vocal is lovely and plaintive but it’s not nearly as evocative as what he does with keyboards and what sounds like rhythmic breathing on this track. The atmosphere is thick and humid, every sound feels a little wet or dripping. But there’s also a cool current in it, like catching a little bit of stray air conditioning on an oppressively hot day.

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Jamila Woods featuring Duendita “Tiny Garden”

One of the things that has become most annoying to me writing this site over the years is that I don’t have the skill to hear music and explain exactly what’s happening on a musical level, so I have to always write around that. A lot of the time that’s fine, and writing more descriptively or poetically gets closer to what I like about the music anyway. But in the case of a song like “Tiny Garden” I’m left very frustrated because one of the things I find most refreshing and appealing about it musically is that something about it feels very mid 90s to me, but I can’t identify what I’m recognizing. Like, would I say this song feels something like Dionne Farris’ mid 90s hits? Yes, but I don’t know why. I’m just glad to have that feeling back again. Maybe you can tell me what I’m hearing here.

“Tiny Garden” is a very thoughtful love song. Jamila Woods is singing about a sustainable kind of love that goes beyond the sort of initial infatuation that is the standard muse of pop music. The title metaphor is lovely – it’s humble, it’s natural, it’s something that takes time and steady attention, it’s something potentially beautiful and useful. There’s a deep patience and generosity of spirit in this song that I find very moving, along with the implication that Woods isn’t wasting her time on just anyone. The love feels reciprocal, she’s just trying to keep it alive and thriving.

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Miguel featuring Lil Yachty “Number 9”

“Number 9” basically sounds like if Timbaland had produced Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, which is a bold but not at all illogical musical stunt. Miguel’s arrangement hinges on a very Panda Bear type of choral melody but removes the dense layers of sound you’d expect to hear on an Animal Collective record in favor of a stark beat and simple deep bass line. The emphasis on syncopation and minimalism casts the vocal hook in sharp relief, resulting in a very striking and alien sound that’s also more than a little churchy. Lil Yachty’s part has the structural utility of a guest rap verse but is just as melodically and harmonically interesting as Miguel’s layers of vocals, particularly as the song elegantly slides out of that verse into another round of the chorus. This is a stunning piece of music, something that simultaneously sounds like it’s from the future and the distant past. Miguel and Yachty both have reputations as adventurous genre-bending artists but this is pushing into very exciting uncharted territory so I’m dying to hear what else Miguel has cooked up for his fifth record.

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Maribou State “Blackoak”

The string arrangement in “Blackoak” gives the song a majestic feel, but it’s a casual sort of majesty I’d compare to, say, Lisa Stansfield’s classic “Been Around the World.” I think a lot of this comes down to the way a very lived-in soulful vocal part adds depth to the drama built up by the music rather than amps it up further. It counters the hyperbolic quality of the arrangement without deflating it and conveys a very centered perspective that really sells the gratitude at the heart of the song. That sentiment hits harder with the implication that it’s coming from someone who sees the person they’re addressing very clearly.

Buy it from Bandcamp.