Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Burial “Unknown Summer”

In the same way that Wes Anderson is a cartoonist who somehow works in the medium of live action film, Burial is a filmmaker who somehow works in the medium of music. This is especially true of Burial’s more recent works, which tend to be one-off singles that contain enough musical ideas to feel like entire albums condensed into ten minutes or so. This isn’t to say that there’s a plot to these songs, but more that the movements in the music come across as scenes that imply narrative structure. Even with some intelligible vocal samples floating through the track this is a very abstract work and the bits that really hit are purely musical – an opening sequence that deliberately fries your perception of time, a balearic house keyboard part that feels like a flashback to a happier time, the way everything in the final third seems to slowly disintegrate. All the little disorienting asymmetries in this track are masterfully edited and lend the overall composition a bittersweet nostalgic quality that I find very, very moving in ways I can’t quite explain.

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Jungle “Back on 74”

“Back on 74” is a beautifully composed delivery system for a gorgeously harmonized chorus, one so smooth and balmy and comforting that it can make your whole body suddenly relax upon hearing it. The verses feel relaxed too, but a little tighter as the chords and vocal cling to a crisp pocket beat, opening up a lot of negative space in the mix. Once the harmony vocals click in the song gets a lot more dense but the weight shifts, making it feel like you’ve suddenly plunged into a warm pool of water. Jungle and their collaborators are using a lot of old R&B tricks here to great effect but the song doesn’t come out sounding super retro – you recognize the old moves, but the structure and tone feels a little more…mechanical? It’s not electronic, but you can intuit a lot of electronic music ideas informing the decisions here.

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Model/Actriz “Slate”

“Slate” is essentially a song about unrequited love performed with the life-or-death intensity of horror, from Cole Haden’s breathy and desperate vocals on down to Jack Wetmore’s guitar, which sounds like frantic metal clicking, and not much like guitar at all. Model-Actriz’s music mostly sounds like a fresh take on industrial to me – all harsh mechanical tones, unrelenting grooves, and strong suggestion of both vulgarity and sadomasochism. They often sound like they’re trying to channel “March of the Pigs” and “Closer” simultaneously, with Haden bringing an erotic charge and overt sensuality to their most brutal and abrasive music. It’s clear enough in “Slate” that lust and violence overlap quite a bit for Haden and as much as the song expresses a deprived and distressed mindset of someone who knows they can’t have exactly what they want, they can’t deny their satisfaction in the submission and humiliation.

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The Alchemist featuring Earl Sweatshirt and Billy Woods “RIP Tracy”

Earl Sweatshirt’s voice is deep, his cadence is precise, and he often writes in odd meters that disrupt expectations. He tends to use this as a distancing device – he frequently sounds cold, or dismissive, or fully misanthropic to the point of shutting everyone out. This is interesting, but what makes him compelling is the way he slips in little moments of vulnerability or warmth that break up the flat affect. This approach casts every feeling in sharp relief – he sounds more wounded, more angry, more depressed when the feelings are exposed through the vocal armor. He’s very well suited to The Alchemist’s production style, particularly on “RIP Tracy,” which conveys a similar mix of feelings but contrasts Sweatshirt’s bitter tone with a sentimentality, even if that’s only coming through between scare quotes in a sample. Billy Woods also shines here, wrapping the song on a verse that’s more nakedly emotional in the performance but goes even darker in the lyrics.

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Tinashe “Talk to Me Nice”

“You got options, I got options” Tinashe sings in “Talk to Me Nice,” a song about what sounds like a very pleasant situationship that nevertheless has a tension running through it that suggests that there’s more angst and unresolved feelings expressed in this music than she’s letting on in the lyrics. Nosaj Thing and Scoop DeVille’s track centers a tranquil keyboard tone but frames it with syncopated beats that signal both sexiness and mild anxiety, not exactly undermining the vibe but definitely complicating the mood of it. My favorite musical move in this song comes after the chorus, when the chords shift up for an overtly melancholic bridge sequence in which Tinashe drops the carefree NSA front for a moment to get into what she truly values – loyalty, realness, feelings money can’t buy. She’s not negating anything she’s said there, but you do get the impression she’s wanting more than she’s getting and trying to smooth out some cognitive dissonance.

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Rose of the West “Come and Find Me”

“Come and Find Me” makes lyrical nods to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It” and Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” but musically the reference points are all late 80s goth and the darker edges of dance pop. Gina Marie Barrington and her collaborators inhabit a very familiar vibe here without aping any song in particular, emulating specific tones and settings but bending it all into something with a distinctive shape. Barrington’s lyrics deliberately blur the lines between love song and political song, presenting any variation on human relationships as a question of love and respect – ie, if you’re not getting the respect, is it really the love at all?

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The Kills “LA Hex”

The Kills have been away for quite some time now, but have returned with a couple songs that sound as though we’ve missed some of their creative evolution in the meantime. Jamie Hince’s arrangement on “LA Hex,” as well as its double A side counterpart “New York,” feels deliberately lopsided and hobbled. The beat lurches a bit, the music generally feels like a hole has been shot through it but it wasn’t enough to kill the song. Hince and Alison Mosshart sound like they’re muttering just out of synch with each other while making their way through a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, the main synth part bearing down on them like hot dry air. Hince keeps the song in the Kills comfort zone by tossing in that signature guitar effect that sounds sorta like a car engine, but then pushes in the opposite direction by adding a choir near the end. The choir part really makes the song, adding an unexpected dignity and grace to a song that feels like it could suddenly collapse at any moment.

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Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee featuring James Murphy “Los Angeles”

Here’s an interesting mix of characters – the drummer of the most classic iteration of The Cure, the drummer from Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the producer of late period works by R.E.M. and U2, with the guy who does nearly everything on LCD Soundsystem records as a guest on vocals. James Murphy’s presence is pretty overwhelming on this song, to the point that the arrangement just sounds like something he would do left to his own devices – imagine Suicide doing a shuffle, but with a classic New York City guy singing about Los Angeles as if it’s a city full of literal monsters. I like how crazed Murphy sounds here, like he’s hamming it up just enough to make it clear he’s kinda joking, but not completely.

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Activity “Where the Art is Hung”

Travis Johnson’s arpeggiated guitar in “Where the Art is Hung” has an interesting weight to it – light enough to feel like an object floating in the breeze, but dense enough for that to feel like something that shouldn’t be happening. There’s a distinct supernatural vibe going on here and it only intensifies when Jess Rees starts singing, sounding like a ghost passing through the mix. The most impressive part of this song is that as the percussion builds to a climax it doesn’t change the implied density of the music at all. The drums sound as though they’re trying to keep a spirit in place, like a vain attempt to set a perimeter around something that can’t be contained.

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Suki Waterhouse x Belle & Sebastian “Every Day’s A Lesson In Humility”

“Every Day’s A Lesson In Humility” is a title that could reasonably be applied to nearly every song in the Belle & Sebastian catalog, in as much as it’s basically the thesis statement of nearly everything Stuart Murdoch and his bandmates have written for three decades. It’s a world view that balances acknowledgment of life’s many difficulties with an equal awareness of the beauty in life, particularly in the smaller moments. This song, made in collaboration with musician/actress Suki Waterhouse, comes at the title premise idea from a few directions at once. It’s a song about shaking off little humiliations, it’s a song about wishing you could communicate with your younger self, it’s a song about trying to make the best of what you have. The most interesting angle in this song for me is how they approach relationships as a frustrating and beautiful mystery – you don’t know how long anyone will ever be in your life, and the amount of time someone’s in your life isn’t necessarily proportional to their impact.

Waterhouse, whose voice isn’t far off in timbre from that of central B&S member Sarah Martin but conveys a little more angst, fits very naturally into the Murdoch milieu. This would’ve sounded lovely in Murdoch’s voice but I think Waterhouse’s glamor is key in setting the scale of it, particularly in the way in places someone who arguably has it all – a music career, a modeling career, an acting career, her boyfriend is the guy who plays Batman – and asks you to understand her as an ordinary person doing ordinary things and experience ordinary emotions. She subverts her image, but also opens it up.

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Disclosure “Higher Than Ever Before”

It’s not too surprising to me that Disclosure would mess around with drum-and-bass breakbeats given that they’re essentially dance music scholars with a gift for emulating different styles, and that they certainly get that this style of drum programming is back in fashion. The surprising thing to me is more in how they did it. “Higher Than Ever Before” has a strong modern psychedelia vibe to it, a sound Philip Sherburne described as “What might a golden-age jungle remix of Tame Impala sound like?” I think that’s a very accurate read, though I’d say it’s more like if The Chemical Brothers made a “Setting Sun” based on The Slow Rush instead of “Tomorrow Never Knows.” In any case, there are some truly ecstatic moments in this song and I’d love for them to do some music in this lane.

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Depeche Mode “Wagging Tongue” (Wet Leg Remix)

This Wet Leg remix of a recent Depeche Mode song does not sound that much like either of those bands, but it DOES sound like a lost indie dance track from the mid to late 2000s blog house era and a particularly good one at that. The original version of “Wagging Tongue” is a fairly solemn meditation on mortality and loss set to Martin Gore arrangement that’s about as Kraftwerk-y as he ever gets. Wet Leg toss most of that and scramble the rest, placing the emphasis on an indie disco groove and a wordless cooing vocal hook sung by Rhian Teasdale and/or Hester Chambers. There’s a distinct “Heart of Glass” feeling to this without necessarily emulating anything specific about the Blondie classic. Some artists use remixes as a testing ground for ideas they’d like to explore and I certainly hope this is a direction Wet Leg are considering going on their next record – the vibe would suit them well and it would add something fresh to their live show without repeating all the same moves from their debut.

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En Attendent Ana “Same Old Story”

I was trying to figure out exactly why Le Attendent Ana reminds me of Stereolab despite not actually playing music much like anything Stereolab ever produced. I think it comes down to the French accented vocals and their approach to harmony, which are not far off from how Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen sang together in the band’s middle period. Much like Sadier, Margaux Bouchaudon sings with a tone that seems lightly authoritative, sharply erudite, somewhat wry, and sometimes surprisingly warm. They both have a gift for making harshly critical lyrics land in a way that seem sensitive to how they may be received yet are not diluted by a front of false kindness. “Same Old Story” is a tightly wound but very groovy song, more peevish in tone than angry, but not so much that it gets in the way of the music’s more fun and playful qualities. The tone is just ambiguous enough that you could take this as a break up song, a self-directed song about frustration, or kind of a mean flirt.

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Anohni and the Johnsons “It Must Change”

I first heard “It Must Change” with no context besides being familiar with Anohni and immediately clocked that it was borrowing a lot from Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” As it turns out this is much more than a vibes-based aesthetic choice, and that the record is meant to be something of an echo or continuation of what Gaye was trying to do over 50 years ago. I think this serves Anohni well in that it gives listeners an easy path into her rhetorical goals – Gaye’s sound is relaxed and familiar, but also a music specifically devised to feel conversational and overtly message-based with a weary but not abjectly miserable tone. Anohni’s lyrics tell you what most reasonable people already know – climate change is tipping towards a catastrophic stage, petty hatred and division keep us miserable and unable to make necessary changes. Somehow all that is the sugar on this pill, the bitter part is stated near the end: “We’re not getting out of here, that’s why this is so sad.” She sounds exhausted and exasperated to an extent that the best case scenario is humanity figuring out how to be at peace before everything totally falls apart. So yes, fully agreed: it must change.

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Glüme “Brittany”

“Brittany” is a romantic synth pop song with a hazy atmosphere so thick that it sounds like you could choke on it, like fog from a smoke machine. Glüme presents the title character as a charismatic and wild person who invites obsessive infatuation in the way she influences her to feel more present and alive. There’s hints in the music and lyrics that this won’t last, but the song is permanently frozen in this magical moment where these two women cut loose listening to Lana Del Rey. The most peculiar aspect of this song is the second line – “I like girls but my mom was the one I couldn’t change.” This bit of context connects to the autobiographical elements of the rest of Glüme’s album, which is often about her experience with growing up with a stage mother. But in this song it suggests something a lot more complicated and confusing – like, is she drawn to Brittany because she’s in some way like her mom? Is this some oedipal thing? The whole song feels like it’s swinging between extreme self-awareness and unexamined raw impulse, an awkward but exciting frame of mind.

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Kaytraminé “Ugh Ugh”

The keyboard drones in “Ugh Ugh” sound like the summer to me, but not necessarily the aspects of summer people usually romanticize in pop music. This feels less “fun in the sun” and more like the zapped, lazy feeling of walking around in oppressive heat and dense humidity. Kaytranada’s track is laid back to the point of feeling lethargic, which pushes Aminé to make his vocal performance as dynamic as possible to keep the music moving. He sounds like a guy who thrives in this sort of weather but can’t understand why everyone else can’t keep up, frequently dipping into a lightly condescending tone through the song as he makes it clear he believes that the scope of his ambitions are far greater than most anyone else’s. Even when he’s borrowing a lot from Lil Wayne’s cadence and vocal tone he sounds fully embodied and totally casual in his confidence.

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6lack “Inwood Hill Park”

“Inwood Hill Park” is a snapshot of a relationship in an interesting moment – they’re established enough to have gone through a lot in the past, they’re fresh enough that the passion still runs very strong, but he’s so deep in his head about external stress that he’s reaching out to her in the hope that she can snap him out of it. I think some people might ungenerously look at this as a song about a guy asking for “emotional labor,” but I think the song works because it’s coming from a place of reverence and genuine intimacy. There’s a lot of lyrics in this song that are basically 6lack talking about career anxieties and a desire for artistic growth, and I think to some extent he’s putting those thoughts into a romantic song to convey the sort of trust he has in her. The mood of the music is a little ambiguous, with depressive angst mingling with horniness and a slight standoffishness. He’s so distracted that even the most directly sexual lines are hedged a bit in the phrasing, like when he sings “that pussy is…uh… elite.”

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Olivia Rodrigo “Vampire”

The most appealing thing about Olivia Rodrigo’s music to me is how it always seems as though she and her songwriting partner Dan Nigro are trying to write the next great karaoke staple. If that’s the case they’ve already succeeded a few times over, and I think “Vampire” has a shot too, though I think it’s more of a “for the heads” song than, say, “Drivers License” or “Good 4 U.” The songs have the raw punch of alt-rock but the calculated bombast of musical theater, which turns out to be an incredible vehicle for delivering lyrics that directly express very adolescent forms of anguish. I don’t mean that in a condescending way – the beauty of Rodrigo’s writing is in how she articulates the sort of conflicts, resentments, and heartaches that seem much more enormous and world-shattering at a young age than they do with a bit more time and experience. It’s all exaggerated but totally accurate, and I think for anyone who’s outgrown this mindset the songs provide a way back into those intense young emotions.

“Vampire” is a song about betrayal, but more specifically it’s a classic “now that I’m famous, I can’t trust people” type of song. It’s about blood suckers, fame fuckers, and people who sell you off for parts. It’s a song that will resonate for anyone who worries about “fake friends” regardless of their actual status. The thing that really makes this work is how Rodrigo sounds genuinely hurt and surprised through the whole song, as though she simply never considered the music industry wasn’t built around exactly the sort of relationship she describes in the song. A lot of young musicians will almost preemptively write songs like this, it’s such a part of the standard star narrative, but this is very much coming from a warm and uncalloused heart. She’ll inevitably get to that pragmatic defensiveness later, but this song is like listening to a loss of innocence in real time.

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Sam Burton “Long Way Around”

“Long Way Around” is a very 70s sort of song in its arrangement – light country pop with melodramatic yet sort of understated orchestration – but also in its lyrics, which matter-of-factly express the melancholy of the ramblin’ man. Sam Burton sings about a relationship that’s been deferred on account of his wandering with a gentle ambivalence in his voice, as though he’s just starting to realize that he’s been running away from someone who genuinely wants him. The song puts up a front of stoicism but the longing and regret in this music is heavy and unmistakable. The strings carry a lot of this emotional weight but the most endearing element is Burton’s voice, which has a warm, honeyed tone not unlike a young Willie Nelson.

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The Smile “Bending Hectic”

Two big musical swerves happen in the final third of “Bending Hectic.” The first is the arrival of a screeching atonal string section, something you’d expect from Jonny Greenwood in the years since he transitioned into becoming one of the most in-demand film score composers. (In fact, it sounds a lot like what he did for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.) The second is a burst of heavy grunge guitar, which along with thudding drums and soaring Thom Yorke vocals provides a genuine catharsis for a song that is mostly so delicate and minimal that it sounds as though it could get blown away with a slight breeze. That second part is a wild curveball for Greenwood and Yorke, who I think most anyone would have reasonably assumed were done with this sort of sound sometime during the first Clinton administration. But maybe the feel free to do this sort of thing without the baggage of being called Radiohead, or maybe this is a mode they just wanted to try out with Tom Skinner on drums. But really this is just a logical place for this song to go, a storm following all that eerie stillness.

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PJ Harvey “A Child’s Question, August”

In the context of Polly Jean Harvey’s incredible body of work “A Child’s Question, August” falls into an intriguing aesthetic space between the relentless grey atmosphere of Is This Desire? and the ghostly sound of White Chalk. The arrangement is creeky and plodding, as though a series of unrelated mechanical and naturally occuring sounds have magically clicked together into music. Harvey sings near the top of her register on the verses, adapting poetry written in Dorset dialect from Orlam, her recent novel-in-verse. I have not read the book so the greater context is mostly lost on me, but the song is very effective in conveying a mournful tone and a sense that we’re listening to a broken person who’s resigned themselves to a very small life of bleak fatalism. The one flicker of hope in the song is in Harvey and Ben Whishaw invoking Elvis Presely on the chorus, referencing “Love Me Tender,” but approaching the concept of tender love with skepticism. It doesn’t quite crack the cynicism and despair, but it registers just enough to suggest a way out.

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