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U2 “Dirty Day” (Songs of Surrender)

U2 are among the artists I have the longest and deepest relationship with, going back to pretty much day one of my life as a music obsessive. There are some artists I have this sort of relationship where I can endorse pretty much everything they’ve ever made, artists who’ve rarely if ever been embarrassing or pursued creative directions that didn’t suit them at all. U2 don’t make it easy. U2 have created some of the best music I’ve heard and some of the most cringe, and even at their best they’re more likely to make a goofy decision than a cool decision.

This is a long way of saying if you’ve wondered who their new record of 40 remakes of songs throughout their catalog is for, it is for people like me. I’m invested enough in The Edge in particular to be fascinated by how he approaches translating his own style, especially when he’s trying to drastically reduce things crucial to his aesthetic – implied scale, odd electronic textures, density of sound. I’m interested enough in Bono to want to him compensate for his reduced vocal range with different approaches to phrasing, and taking his tendency to rewrite lyrics on the spot in shows back into the studio. While I’m sure some of the new versions of old songs will take on lives of their own, particularly through use in television and film, Songs of Surrender is for hardcore fans. The revisions here are meant to be additive, a new way of hearing something familiar. Nothing is being replaced, and at best the songs are enhanced with a new perspective on their musical and lyrical character. (That said, the material from Innocence and Experience is mostly greatly improved by scraping off all the “this has to be a radio hit” gloss of producers like Ryan Tedder and Paul Epworth.)

“Dirty Day” is one of my all-time favorite U2 songs. It’s a song about how complicated relationships between fathers and sons can be, especially when the son is old enough to be a father too. Bono has written a fair number of songs about his relationship with his father ­– “Kite” is about Bono’s experience of preparing for his dad’s death while he was dying, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” one album later reflects on their strained relationship after he passed. In all of these songs Bono’s father is portrayed as stern and stubborn, emotionally distant but affectionate in unexpected ways, and a man who offered wisdom in ways that were often blunt and abrasive. The power of the songs is in how much Bono yearns for this man’s love and approval, and how frustrated he is that the things that make them alike are what pushed them apart.

“Dirty Day,” written many years before either of those songs, focuses on the tension. In the context of Zooropa the song is in sharp contrast with “Lemon,” one of several U2 songs in which Bono tries to connect with his mother, who died when he was very young. She exists mainly as an idealized memory; in that song he’s extrapolating as much as he can from a bit of video footage from when she was alive. “Dirty Day” is largely about familiarity breeding contempt, and too much messy history getting in the way of important things. Many of the lyrics are adapted from things Bono’s father had said to him, and I think Bono was trying to understand something about him by singing from his perspective. A lot of these words were clearly meant to deflate Bono, to force him into recognizing how futile some things are, how there’s no satisfying explanation for a lot of things. The most haunting line is somewhere between a promise and a threat – “I’m in you, more so when they put me in the ground.”

The Edge’s new arrangement for “Dirty Day” cuts out all the ambience and weight of the original version, and transposes the main bass part to cello much like the Garbage remix of the song from the “Please” single. The recording is unusually raw for U2, so minimal and closely mic’d that you can hear hands pressing down on strings and squeaking on fretboards, or what sounds like Bono adjusting his body in his chair as he sings. It’s almost uncomfortably intimate, and Bono’s voice is low and sometimes a little whispery, like he’s doing U2 ASMR. The additional strings bring a mournful quality to the music, trading the passive-aggressive antagonism in the original for lamentation. This arrangement reorients everything in the song around lingering regret for how life was actually lived, and Bono inhabiting his father’s perspective now seems more like proof that his father is with him more in death than he ever was in his life.

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Kenya Grace “Afterparty Lover”

When Kenya Grace sings “I don’t want to be your afterparty lover” she really means to say she doesn’t want to only be their afterparty lover. The afterparty loving is already done, she’s singing from the perspective of someone who has fully caught feelings and is trying to figure how to convert a one-off into a full-timer. The sound is very well suited to the subject – Grace’s vocal melody is sticky and assertive while the drum and bass beat lends a clear sense of immediacy and urgency, but also a butterflies-in-stomach twitchiness. There’s a lot of songs like this where you can easily predict how things will probably go for the character, and usually it doesn’t look good. But in this case I’m feeling good about her chances, at least in the short term.

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Neggy Gemmy “Black Ferrari”

“Black Ferrari” is such a well composed dance pop song that it took me a while to even grasp the fun production trick Neggy Gemmy pulls off by switching the beat up from standard modern pop to house to industrial and back around again. The transition from essentially an early 00s Kylie Minogue vibe to more of a mid-90s Prodigy sound is especially thrilling to me, it’s like a brilliant DJ set move written into the arrangement of the song. The transition from ecstatic to tense deepens the mood, but then the switch back to house ends up feeling ten times more ecstatic.

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100 Gecs “757”

A lot of 100 Gecs sounds to me like two people pulling together random fond memories of the 2000s and synthesizing it all into something that’s simultaneously rooted in the past and sounds further into the future than most people are living right now. “757” is a wild impressionistic blur of rap lyrics and pop-punk hooks, all scrambled up like Max Tundra and played back at a nighcore tempo. It’s playful and silly and deliberately annoying, but also so well-crafted that listening to it once more or less dooms you to hearing the main hook repeating in the back of your brain for days on end. It sounds like musical amphetamine but it’s about weed, it revels in trashiness but there’s a real sophistication to what they’re doing.

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Nia Archives “Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall”

One thing I find very appealing about the resurgence of drum and bass ultra-fast beat programming is that in many cases the music being made has a very chill vibe, so bursts of frantic percussion either serve as a sharp contrast with everything else in the arrangement or an element that becomes chill despite itself. It makes sense to me as I’ve always felt this sort of percussion in an ASMR way, it sparks a sort of pleasing tingling sensation in my brain. It’s also like finding calm within chaos – the beats may come at breakneck speed, but there’s still a steadiness within it.

Nia Archives’ music seems like the result of a mission to seamlessly and cleverly work drum and bass programming into different types of songs, like a contestant on a cooking show tasked with being creative in their use of ingredients with seemingly limited utility. “Sunrise Beat Ur Head Against Tha Wall” does both of the things I described above – bursts of percussion drop in out of nowhere but the dynamic shift isn’t too jarring because they end up feeling just as meditative as the considerably more relaxed piano part or the warm, soothing quality of her voice. The contrasts are extreme, but the overall sensation is much closer to equilibrium than chaos.

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JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown “Lean Beef Patty”

There are two aspects of “Lean Beef Patty” that I find striking and surprising – the first being the way JPEGMAFIA’s track has this very abrasive and frenetic IDM-ish sound that’s pretty close to the more accessible end of the Autechre catalog, and then how low he and Danny Brown’s voices are in the mix relative to the beats and keyboards. By the time Brown shows up on the track the keyboards are so loud he’s nearly drowned out, as though his voice is a secondary element in the composition like on a shoegaze record. This is a wild thing to do with a larger than life rapper like Brown, but then again you’d need someone with a bold voice like his to stand up to the chaotic volume and density of JPEGMAFIA’s track.

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Kelela “Contact”

The first verse of “Contact” describes hearing loud bass-heavy dance music at a party as a surreal experience, a pure and intense sensation that disrupts a sense of time. The music captures that feeling by nudging its 90s-style beat loop into slight distortion and filling out the mix with synthesizer parts that feel a bit eerie and detached, like you’re somehow hearing the beat up against the speakers but everything else is a room away. The sound suggests dissociation but Kelela’s vocal is very present and grounded as the song turns from describing the feeling of being at the party to trying to seduce someone who’s clearly too distracted by their loneliness and stress to surrender to the moment.

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Arlo Parks “Impurities”

“Impurities” is a love song, but more specifically it’s a song about feeling loved and learning to see yourself from the point of view of someone who adores you and accepts many things about yourself that you do not. Arlo Parks’ arrangement feels airy and dreamy, like she’s so dazzled by this moment and this feeling that she’s floating outside herself and finding a new awareness. Her vocal performance is calm and gentle, particularly in the refrain “I radiate like a star, like a star, like a star,” which is the most melodically satisfying part of the song and the point where she sounds most elated and self-assured.

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Venbee x Goddard “Messy In Heaven”

There’s an old Electric Six song I like a lot called “One Sick Puppy” with a bridge that goes like this: “Jesus was a guy who said some stuff long ago and he had a rich dad who wouldn’t chill or let him go.” “Messy In Heaven” starts from a similar premise with a killer opening line – “I heard Jesus did cocaine on a night out” – but takes the idea of a rich kid Jesus a lot more seriously, with enough space in the lyrics to portray him as a cokehead party boy, as a leader, as a miracle worker, and as a guy slowly destroyed by all the expectations people put on him. Venbee sings all of this with a mix of reverence and pity over a drum and bass track that includes a bit of plaintive acoustic guitar, much like the Roni Size classic “Brown Paper Bag.” You get the thrill of the club, you get the swallowed sorrow, you get some brief moments of uplift.

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Shiv “Late Now”

“Late Now” sounds extremely early 90s to me without necessarily feeling like a retro thing, which is maybe just the result of taking a familiar kind of breakbeat loop and bass groove and rendering it with modern tools. It’s probably also to do with Shiv’s R&B approach to vocals that adds a richness and depth that wouldn’t quite be there if the same melody was sung by a white guy from Manchester, England. I love the way this song feels both casual and heavy at the same time, and the way Shiv mirrors that contradictory dynamic by singing in a tone that’s very emotionally engaged but also sort of dismissive, as though she’s acutely aware that this person dragging on her feelings doesn’t need to be that important. Not anymore, anyway.

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Coupdekat “Superglue”

“Superglue” does a nice trick of contrasting a very simple and obvious chorus about having a powerful crush with verses that put this pure ecstatic feeling in the context of guilt, economic status, and family dynamics. By the second time Coupdekat hits the chorus it sounds the same but feels much different, with lines about “I don’t know what to do” and “I’m stuck to you” seeming more helpless and frustrated than joyful or playful. The ambivalence carries through the rest of the song, with her sounding like she doesn’t quite know how to process any of this but fully invested in the thrill of it whether it turns out to be a good or bad thing.

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Omar Apollo “3 Boys”

“3 Boys” is a rather retro soul ballad with a more modern lyrical perspective as Omar Apollo sings about struggling to embrace non-monogamy because he’s so hung up on his feelings for Boyfriend #1 that he can’t really appreciate Boyfriends #2 and #3. I’m sure there are people who hear this and hate that this song is basically an ENM guy yearning for monogamy, but the conflict between logical pragmatism and raw emotion is what makes this so heartbreaking. He sounds so frustrated in every part of this situation, including the part where his actual desires conflict with having all the cake and eating it too. He can’t decide whether his feelings and attachment are an annoying inconvenience or the best thing he’s ever experienced.

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Kali Uchis “Moonlight”

“Moonlight” doesn’t sound just like Kali Uchis’ breakthrough hit “Telepatia” but it seems pretty obvious that it was written as a next step from the vibe and sound established on that track. Benny Blanco and Cashmere Cat evoke a similar sort of stoned funk but nudge the mood into more overtly romantic territory. This is perfect for Uchis, who moves between a breathy and flirty tone on the chorus and a more bold and sultry tone on the verses. She reminds me a lot of Sade in those parts – self-possessed and sultry, but also keenly aware of how serious and complicated things can get between two people in love. This push and pull between romance as momentary pleasure and source of heavy drama is the core of this song. It’s about 80% laid back sexiness, 20% awareness that the stakes are high.

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Gorillaz featuring Bad Bunny “Tormenta”

I’m sure Damon Albarn recruited Bad Bunny for the same reasons he pulls any talented artist into a Gorillaz project – the promise of a fun collaboration, an interesting aesthetic combination, a new energy to pull into the Gorillaz universe. But there’s just no way he didn’t go into making this song knowing that the magnitude of Bad Bunny’s success on streaming was such that this song was almost guaranteed to become one of his most popular songs ever just because Bad Bunny showed up. This song doesn’t have to be all that good, it barely even has to work. But it does work, largely because Albarn’s taste in musical harmony diverges just enough from usual Bad Bunny productions to cast the rapper in a different light, and his Gorillaz-era mix of easy breezy vibes and understated but pervasive melancholy mixes well with Bunny’s blend of vulnerability and bravado. The lyrics center on a metaphor of the sun coming out during a storm, and a lot of what makes this click is they’re both a little bit sun and storm here.

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Cuco “Best Disaster”

It’s amazing how shameless a lot of artists can be about directly emulating the fairly specific Tame Impala sound, but I never really mind because the songs are usually pretty good. Everything besides the chorus in Cuco’s “Best Disaster” sounds strikingly similar to Tame Impala, to the point I’m certain I would’ve been fooled if it had been presented to be as a new Tame tune. Those marks are nailed but it’s the deviation that makes this song work on Cuco’s terms. The song swings into ballad mode on the chorus and shifts focus to Cuco’s voice, which sounds love-dazed and extremely vulnerable, as though he’d be crushed if you told him “nah” after he sings “this could be your favorite song.” But he also sounds sweet enough that his subsequent invitation to “put the world on pause” and be “the best disaster” together is kinda convincing.

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µ-Ziq “4am”

“4am” sounds like it is haunted by the ghost of some half-remembered 80s pop song. Mike Paradinas gives us bits of vocal and keyboards that sound like another song bleeding through his own more modern composition, a bit like radio station signals overlapping. Or maybe it’s more like how beautiful vegetation can grow around broken machinery or architecture, something lovely merging with the form of some busted thing.

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Skrillex featuring Missy Elliott and Mr Oizo “RATATA”

I love Skrillex for his energy and because his aesthetic is basically the music equivalent of dousing everything in hot sauce. “RATATA” spins an entirely new song out of a memorable bit of Missy Elliott’s classic “Work It,” which she flips into more of a dancehall toasting vibe to suit Skrillex’s frantic beat. Elliott isn’t a stranger to this kind of tempo but she sounds ferocious and unleashed by Skrillex’s track, like she’s just trying to match his enthusiasm level.

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Cloonee “Badman Sound”

“Badman Sound” is an absolute beast of a track, a mutant bass house/dancehall hybrid built to push a room into frenzy mode. After listening to this many times over I realized my favorite bits were the drum parts that deviated from the thump – a drum fill that sounds like it’s yanked out of a rock record, and a snare build that sounds like 500 drumlines in unison.

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Crushed “Respawn”

I think that if someone had played this for me and told me it was a coulda-been shoulda-been song from the late 90s or early 00s I would have believed it. Crushed are incredibly dialed into the adult contemporary by way of alt-rock aesthetics of that period, particularly in the quasi hip-hop drum programming, ostentatiously laid back bass line, and a clear, bold vocal performance that sounds like someone earnestly channeling Sarah McLachlan or the more restrained side of Alanis Morissette. This may be a pastiche but there’s no wink to it. This is real heart-on-sleeve stuff, a ballad about being given the chance to start again after a break up that embraces the “main character” grandeur of that feeling while being brought down to earth by the casual feel of the groove.

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Andy Shauf “Don’t Let It Get to You”

“Don’t Let It Get to You” is built around a soft piano part that seems like an eternal loop of someone pausing and then stepping back, forever trapped in a pensive moment. It’s a song that seems to exist in the space between the aftermath of something and the start of some other, unknown new direction. Andy Shauf keeps the lyrics minimal, mostly setting up the POV of someone getting used to the notion that someone they knew would leave has left, and letting that piano part and occasional synthesizer buzzes carry the feeling of emptiness, light confusion, and vague relief. That buzzing sound is a particularly inspired part of the arrangement – it’s a sharp contrast with the acoustic guitar and piano, and makes the whole song feel more disoriented and lost.

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Yuné Pinku “Night Light”

The first few times I heard this song with absolutely no context the lyric that jumped out to me was “everybody’s saying we’re in love for what that’s worth,” sung in a vague and inscrutable tone. Is this something that’s so self-evident that it’s boring? Is she unsure of the situation? Is everybody dead wrong? Does she feel any sort of way about this?

A bit later I read that this song was written from the perspective of an AI and I can see how this makes sense. Yuné Pinku’s lyrics sketch out a simulated consciousness that responds to stimuli and has some intentions and imperatives, but doesn’t have much else filling up the spaces between incoming data and pre-coded responses. The character experiences “fun” and “love” as facts and doesn’t interpret much beyond acknowledging “this is happening.” Pinku’s track is like a little dance club snowglobe the AI exists in, singing dance music clichés over the chorus and engaging with existential thoughts like “it’s fake to die, we’re all still alive” like they’re just logic puzzles.

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Yo La Tengo “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”

A lot of guitarists let their guitar speak for them in solos but everything Ira Kaplan gets out of his instrument in “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” is like the result of a brutal interrogation. He slaps, slams, batters, and scrapes the thing up. A lot of the sound is just impact, but then he starts to coax more coherent melodies out of the thing. All of this is in contrast with a sedate but slightly tense groove and a demure vocal performance that makes Kaplan’s playing seem all the more unhinged and violent. The overall effect is an odd mix of soothing and abrasive, and the chaos in the guitar becoming a pleasant or at least interesting localized sensation while everything else in the mix numbs you out. It’s thrilling music to zone out to. Yo La Tengo have existed for four decades and this has long been a part of Kaplan’s style but what they achieve here feels special and new, like different aspects of their sound were always on course to finally converge like this.

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