Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Faye Webster “But Not Kiss”

“But Not Kiss” fakes you out within 14 seconds, shifting from angsty lo-fi indie intimacy to grand melodramatic romance as the piano and rhythm kick in. The song is musically and lyrically about that contradiction, the push and pull of wanting someone badly but retreating into a comfort zone of solitude and inaction. Webster spends a lot of the song rationalizing it all away – they’re meant to be but not yet, she doesn’t want to regret anything, she doesn’t want to mess with them if they’re in a good place, on and on. She never sounds like she’s lying to herself, every neurotic thought is deeply felt and her desire not to screw things up is just as strong as her yearning for this other person. It’s all very fraught but extremely lovely, particularly when pedal steel enters the arrangement and seems to glide between the extremes. It’s a very graceful and relaxing sound, and I think in context it feels like the solution to her inner conflict: Let it all go, and just trust the feeling that feels the best.

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Pangaea “Installation”

A lot of the chopped up vocal samples in dance music tend to be airy and ethereal, like Four Tet flipping bits of singing into pure sensation – essentially ambient and abstract, but obviously warm and human. Pangaea’s “Installation” goes another way, emphasizing the force and cadence of the vocalist but slicing out syllables so words never form. The result is a dance banger where the vocal exaggerates the impact of the beats, and the song has an aggressive attitude without a trace of context. It’s post-language pop, music that’s about pure feeling and physical sensation that provides a major cathartic rush but doesn’t tell you what that catharsis should be about.

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Jenny Lewis “Joy’all”

Carrie Courogen wrote an essay this week on her newsletter about the new Jenny Lewis record Joy’all, mostly very frustrated with the banality of Lewis’ lyrics on this album, at least relative to her previous work. Carrie’s a terrific writer and makes some good points, but her piece mainly made me realize how differently I’ve been approaching Lewis over the years. I think she’s written some great lyrics, particularly on the Rilo Kiley album More Adventurous, but that’s just never been a major point of connection for me with her songs. I’m much more interested in how she writes melody and arranges songs, and the main draw has always been the warm, personable quality of her singing. Lewis always sounds like a cool friend, one who has intriguing drama in their life and a lot of good advice for you. I think this is crucial to why she’s developed such a loyal audience, but also explains why someone like Carrie could be put off by her not saying anything very interesting. Sometimes our friends get boring, and you love them still but you lose some active interest until something changes. Sometimes everyone is boring.

I don’t think the song “Joy’all” is boring at all, but again, I’m mainly listening to the bass groove and the vocal melody here. I like the way the bass part feels vaguely sinister, but also fun and flirty. I also like the way it slides very naturally into a much brighter and warmer chorus with deliberately goofy lyrics instructing the listeners to “follow your joy’all.” I think Lewis understood that if she wanted to get across this sort of sentiment the odds were very unlikely she could do it and also sound cool, so she decided to push the goofiness to an extreme where that chorus line rhymes with “not a toy, y’all” and “not a boy, y’all.” It’s silly pop music logic, and this wouldn’t be the first time she’s indulged in that. It’s a winning strategy that embraces the reality that lyrics are often not the point of a song.

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Christine and the Queens “Tears Can Be So Soft”

It’s not just that “Tears Can Be So Soft” sounds like Portishead, Tricky, and Massive Attack in the mid 90s. Plenty of artists have aimed for that and ended up with songs that were just OK. This song actually nails the stoned groove magic of the Bristol cohort while pushing it in a very different and far more melodramatic direction in the way Chris sings it, splitting the difference between earthy R&B moves and a more theatrical bombast that reminds me of Amy Lee of Evanescence. The lyrics are fairly despondent, lamenting a loss of so many key things in life – family, love, joy – but embracing crying as an act of cleansing catharsis. The vocal is emotionally raw and compelling, but I think the biggest reason this song works is the studio work by rap production legend Mike Dean, who I think brought a lot of nuance to the beat and got just the right ratio of menace, melancholy, and romance out of a central Marvin Gaye sample.

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Feeble Little Horse “Freak”

“Freak” sounds like a melange of musically ambitious 90s indie rock – a little bit Chavez, some Built to Spill and Dinosaur Jr, a lot of Helium – but packed very densely into a song that doesn’t even crack the two minute mark. The first few times I listened to this I wasn’t paying very close attention to the lyrics and heard the chorus as “I know you want me to freak,” which feels like a pretty common sentiment for contemporary indie. But no, it’s actually it’s “I know you want me, freak” and the whole song is about lusting for a 6’5” sports star and resenting his tiny little girlfriend. This is so much more interesting to me, much more like something Liz Phair might have written if she had a different type back in her 20s. Lydia Slocum’s words are direct but shielded somewhat by humor, giving the impression that while this probably isn’t going anywhere, she’s more disappointed by that then she’s letting on.

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John Carroll Kirby “Sun Go Down”

“Sun Goes Down” is a remarkable composition that works wonderfully on its own terms, yet more than any piece of music I’ve encountered in the past few years screams out “sample me, remix me, interpolate me!” I can hear in my mind ways other artists could run with John Carroll Kirby’s keyboard parts or the flute counterpoints, to the point that I wonder if on some level he was making this as an invitation to other artists to mess around with the same motifs. Maybe part of that is because Kirby himself is pulling a lot from the past in the melody, tones, and construction here, and I’m just sensing his understanding that music is ultimately about people taking communal ideas and going in their own directions. But even without all that, and if no one ever actually uses this composition as a starting point, “Sun Goes Down” has a magic to it – funky, relaxed, and vaguely regal, like it’s the soundtrack for someone particularly impressive arriving to a backyard party just in time for a glorious sunset.

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Alice Phoebe Lou “Lose My Head”

“Lose My Head” starts speeding out the gate on a chugging groove, setting up a reasonable expectation that the big guitar chords will hit on the chorus like a typical alt/indie/pop-punk sort of song. Alice Phoebe Lou sidesteps that by coasting on the groove and filling the arrangement with delicate piano and atmospheric guitar, which feels like switching to a widescreen framing. The song gets more dense as it rushes forward, but then she flips expectations a second time in just two minutes, letting the energy dissipate and crashing down into a final sequence that’s just piano chords and vocal. The last bit is different enough that it feels more like a medley transition, but Lou makes it feel seamless on an emotional level as it pays off the lyrics and makes the forward momentum of the music end at a satisfying location.

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L’Rain “New Years UnResolution”

“New Years UnResolution” sounds as though L’Rain is trying to zoom all the way out on a feeling in the hope that forcing it into perspective might answer crucial questions such as “why do I feel this way?” and “why do I keep doing things that make me feel this way?” This is extremely pensive dance music, to the point that the groove feels distant. It’s as though the bass and percussion are ground level, but we’re up in the sky with vocal parts slowly moving around like clouds. The lyrics concern a relationship that’s run its course, so much that there’s not much in the lyrics to suggest she’s at all interesting in holding on to anything about it. It’s more of a “what now?” sentiment, with her feeling time whoosh by without her figuring out the answer.

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Water From Your Eyes “Barley”

“Barley” sounds to me like a musical grandchild of Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather” – the shakers, the off-kilter minimalism, the deadpan counting vocals. But that’s just part of what’s going on in this peculiar piece of music that somehow works as a pop song despite everything about its arrangement pushing in the opposite direction. There’s pulses of sound that sound like someone hitting a space bar and accidentally pausing the music for a second, a melodic counterpoint that sounds like a detuned police siren, harsh buzzes, clattering drums. Water From Your Eyes turn cacophony into coherent hooks mostly by keeping the emphasis on rhythm. The music rushes forward but Rachel Brown’s voice holds your hand through it, their dry affect making it seem like just another hum-drum day in world of chaos.

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Locate S,1 “You Were Right About One Thing”

“You Were Right About One Thing” is a 70s-style country rock ballad, but it’s not some off-the-rack pastiche. Christina Schneider tailors the sound precisely, bending it into the distinctive shape of a Locate S,1 song – slightly jagged rhythms, interesting meter choices, and lyrics that approach very emotional subjects with some post-modern distance without diluting the sentiment with heavy irony. This sound works really well for her, I think in part because it’s so immediately pleasing to the ear that it smooths out some of her more contrary impulses as a writer. It’s also just a lovely setting for her voice, which is typically pretty high and sits comfortably with all the treble in the arrangement.

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Genesis Owusu “Leaving the Light”

“Leaving the Light” sounds like a grandchild to Time Zone’s “World Destruction,” a cousin to Death Grips’ “I’ve Seen Footage,” and a nephew to at least five great TV on the Radio songs. It’s a very particular merging of punk and early rap aesthetics, a forceful and aggressive rhythmic attack that makes the music sound very athletic, as though you should be grunting “UGH!!!” at the end of each measure. Genesis Owusu has covered similar ground before, notably on a song last year called “Get Inspired,” and it’s a great use of his voice, particularly when he adds a touch of sly wit to the blunt impact of rhythmic shouting. I love the lyrical angle on this one – Owusu is on the run from God Himself, and he’s not willing to slow down or give in. Truly, if you’re going to write a song where you sound like the Hulk about to tear a skyscraper down for fun, why not make your opponent God?

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Jam City featuring Empress Of “Wild N Sweet”

“Wild N Sweet” is a bop. It’s a major glorious summertime bop, and I need to tell you that right away because it would be dumb to bury that lede and risk you skimming over the point. Jam City’s arrangement doesn’t reinvent the EDM pop wheel but the craft level is very high, carefully calibrating its joyous energy so every part of it feels like candy, but the peak of the sugar rush of the drop doesn’t come til over two minutes into it. Empress Of’s vocal is pretty sweet too, initially coming off kinda innocent but as the song moves along it’s more like very earnest horniness. The lyrics are basically about hooking up with someone you barely know and feeling extremely alive in the moment, but also feeling a bit of tension as you don’t really know how discrete they want to be. She repeats “can you keep a promise?” several times through the song, but it’s not some anxious thing ruining the fun. She sounds optimistic and trusting more than anything else.

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Blur “The Narcissist”

I like that Gorillaz has become so successful in both commercial and creative terms for Damon Albarn that when he occassionally circles back to make Blur records he puts his focus on what’s special about the other three guys in that band, clearly appreciative of their distinctive dynamic and chemistry. One project allows for artistic freedom and endless novelty, and the other is about a bond between four players going back over 30 years. Albarn has it figured out.

“The Narcissist,” the first single from the group’s forthcoming The Ballad of Darren,” feels vaguely like music from different parts of the Blur catalog, but it’s not like any particular song. It’s got the plaintive tone and direct lyrics of the 13 era, a lean arrangement that recalls the less overtly Britpop-ish songs from Modern Life Is Rubbish, and the contrasting vocal with Graham Coxon reminds me of both “Country House” and “M.O.R.” The song feels a lot more sentimental than the old stuff, with Albarn singing about breaking addictive and destructive patterns with a note of real hope in his voice. A lot of his work is an expression of cynicism and pessimism and on this song it sounds as though he’s trying to push beyond that. I don’t think his hopes are too high here, but “connect us to love and keep us peaceful for a while” is a much brighter take on humanity than, say, “The Universal.”

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Cornelius “Sparks”

Cornelius is known for his early music as a crucial part of the colorful Shibuya-kei scene in the 1990s – colorful, kitschy, artfully composed music that was basically a direct result of a vibrant crate-digging subculture. He hasn’t been tremendously prolific through his career but he has changed a lot of over time, to the point that his new single “Sparks” sounds like the kind of indie rock that his own music had served as an alternative to in the late 90s and early 00s. Well, at least on a surface level. “Sparks” is a rock song, but one arranged with Cornelius’ taste for precision and audio novelty. Chords and notes seem to ping-pong diagonally across the mix, or blink out momentarily like a string of lights. There’s a strong melancholy permeating the track, particularly noticeable in the vocal harmonies, but every surface seems like it’s been sterilized as it to keep the sadness from infecting anyone else.

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Rahill “Gone Astray”

I did not listen to Rahill’s debut solo album Flowers At Your Feet until after I had made my Late 90s Sophisticate playlist, a collection of songs that exemplified the largely chill and eclectic music made from a DJ mindset that signaled an upscale crate-digging tastefulness at the end of the 20th century. Rahill, intentionally or not, has made a record that fits into that aesthetic perfectly, embodying a few variations on the sound over the course of 14 tracks. Sometimes it’s in the drum programming, sometimes it’s in the chords and arrangement, sometimes it’s in the vocal affect, but it’s always in her combination of excellent taste and low-key songcraft.

It was unusually difficult to choose one song to feature here but I had to go with “Gone Astray” if just because it’s not enough that she made a song that feels remarkably similar to Broadcast circa The Noise Made By People, but that if this was in fact a Broadcast song it would be among their best. This one reminds me specifically of “You Can Fall” and I love the way it takes that thick atmosphere of ominous mysterious and muted resentment in that music and makes that the emotional baseline for a song about knowing that your relationship is about to end, but not really knowing the why of it yet.

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Bruiser & Bicycle “Aerial Shipyards”

It isn’t hard to reverse engineer Bruiser & Bicycle’s aesthetics, at least not if you were paying attention to indie rock in the mid to late 2000s. This sounds like the work of musicians who were steeped in very specific records at a formative age – The Shins, Girls, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips, and most especially Animal Collective. I try not to overemphasize “this sounds like that” here as it can be lazy and unfair to artists, but there’s just no getting around the degree to which the vocals in most of their songs sound like Avey Tare. It’s in the contours of the melodies, it’s in the specificity of the cadence, it’s in the timbre of the voice. If I heard this without context I probably would have just thought it was a new Avey Tare band, albeit one considerably more normal than his other bands.

But this is no complaint. I have long admired Avey Tare’s gift for melody and it’s nice to see that become an influential aspect of Animal Collective rather than the surface elements of their work. Also, the scramble of influences – however identifiable – is what makes Bruiser & Bicycle stand out as something fun, distinctive, and little wild. “Aerial Shipyards” is full of playful twists and turns, a song with the structure of an epic but played scrappy enough that it comes off as more like a low-key whimsical lark. The lyrics are wordy but very vivid in laying out what I interpret as a metaphor about how all of life is graceful and fascinating but doomed to eventually crash one way or another.

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Avalon Emerson “Sandrail Silhouette”

“Sandrail Silhouette” has a lot of familiar elements of shoegaze – the guitar rhythm and tone and the vocal melody and delivery suggest this is the work of someone who’s heard My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless so many times that Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher’s mannerism have been fully internalized. Avalon Emerson could’ve stopped there and had a pretty good song, but she went a little further by adding a string section and horns and ended up with something sublime. I love the way the hook played by the string section feels slightly separate, as though the shoegaze elements are something superimposed over a more “solid” musical structure. The vocal part is also foregrounded in a way that goes against shoegaze convention, drawing on the context of how these sounds are arranged in other songs to imply that in this one you’re getting a crisp and clear image of something that’s typically obscured by clouds.

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Snow Strippers “It’s Goin’ Bad”

“It’s Goin Bad” is a dark synthpop song along the lines of Crystal Castles’ or Ladytron’s best work but the sound is pushed into the red like a shoegaze song, blaring over the vocal to the point that the lyrics are barely intelligible but the despondent mood is still perfectly legible. If anything, that bleak mood is more clear this way. She sounds overwhelmed and defeated in a way that feels very particular to being in one’s late teens to mid 20s, kinda glib about it all and more than a little bit in love with their sadness. The music is a little overbearing in just the right way, pushing everything towards pure sensation in a way that makes the song as a whole this dreary and grim thing that feels absolutely amazing.

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Jana Horn “The Dream”

I was surprised to learn that “The Dream” began as a poem written as part of an esoteric literature workshop. Not so much for the content of the writing, but in that Jana Horn’s melody sounds so lovely and natural that it doesn’t have that awkward “words forced into a song” quality common to music where the words come first. But the lyrics are indeed a cut above, a meditation on perspective and perception that contrasts the natural world with an inner world observed by her mind’s eye. The music sounds like overcast skies and the overall mood of the song feels like a mix of physical peace and intellectual restlessness. The lead guitar parts are particularly good and evocative, communicating a lot of the tension in the song without undermining the more serene aspects of the piece.

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Eddie Chacon “Holy Hell”

“Holy Hell” is a pastiche of slow-burn disco ballads in the vein of Boz Scaggs, but one so elegantly composed and well executed that I think a lot of people could be tricked into believing it’s actually from 1980. A lot of this comes down to the use of a vintage Fender Rhodes and producer John Carroll Kirby keeping the arrangement in constant motion while keeping it all feeling uncluttered and loose. He and Chacon know the power of abundant negative space and an unhurried groove. Chacon’s vocal is understated but conveys some warmth, but not a lot, like he’s trying to hold back the full intensity of his feelings. Everything about the song feels pensive and circumspect, like they’re building an ice wall around a fire, and it’s only a matter of time before it melts away.

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