Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Max Tundra “Lights” (A.G. Cook Remix)

Within a few minutes of having the thought “I wonder if the hyperpop people know about Max Tundra?” I had an answer in the form of this remix, which comes from a mini-album of remixes and covers of Tundra’s songs that was released earlier this year. (I totally missed it despite following Tundra on social media, but it’s easy to miss these sort of things.)

Tundra’s three albums from the 00s are singular in their aesthetics – extraordinarily tuneful songs gleefully subverted by his odd glitchy programming and clever lyrics, playful in spirit but meticulous in construction. It’s easy to draw a line from these records to what A.G. Cook has been doing over the past several years, especially the early days of PC Music which really went in on pushing the sounds of modern pop production to grotesque and silly extremes. It makes a lot of sense that Cook reworked “Lights” in particular – if there’s any clear precedent to his music, a blueprint for his sound, it’s this song. The remix is only a mild update, the structure and novel conceit of it are fully intact.

The vocal part of “Lights” is sped-up and clipped, it sounds a bit like playing only the vocal of the song at double speed and losing some syllables along the way. The lyrics are dense and diaristic, Tundra veering between poetic language and quotidian detail as he describes the day jobs he worked to pay for his music making and being so deep into studio mode that the only romantic imagery that come to mind is in the beauty of the lights on his array of equipment. It’s lovely but awkward, and some of the meta tension of the song is in how vulnerable Tundra is willing to get in the lyrics, but also defensive enough to distract attention from the actual words he’s singing.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Saay “Mind Ur Business”

“Mind Ur Business” belongs to a pop tradition of songs expressing something like “actually, I’m doing great without you and breaking up was a good idea!,” a type of song that’s become particularly ubiquitous over the past ten years or so. Saay, singing in both Korean and English, comes across as more relieved than aggrieved, and the song’s very ‘90s R&B groove conveys confident low-key sexiness with only a trace of melancholy. It’s not a flirty kind of song but you can feel her reconnecting with that part of herself, or more broadly settling into a true comfort in her skin after spending some time having to adjust for someone else whether they asked for it or not.

Buy it from Amazon.

MorMor “Days End”

The first half of “Days End” makes MorMor sound like he’s dwarfed by the sound, as though he’s crawling through some huge tunnel of bass groove and percussion, singing out his angst only to have it echo off the walls back at him. That all drops out for the second half in which it’s just him and layers of ambient keyboards – he sounds free, he sounds like he’s singing directly into your ear, but he still sounds trapped in his feelings. The temperature of the song shifts along with the implied space of it, the warmth of all that bass replaced by the chill of the keyboard tones. There’s a before/after thing going on here too, the lyrics suggesting the that second half is where he lands once he accepts the person he’s singing to has truly left him. It sounds like a very lonely sort of freedom.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sault “Safe Within Your Hands”

Sault released five free albums this week, a volume of material that demands to be digested gradually though there are plenty of songs spread through the records that immediately announce themselves as career highlights for the mysterious British R&B collective. “Safe Within Your Hands,” off the heavily gospel-centric Untitled (God), had me from its first few jazzy piano notes. This is a gospel song with the slinky sexuality of D’Angelo on Voodoo; one that uses the old Christian pop trick of making lyrics ambiguous enough to either be about romantic love or a relationship with God to its advantage. When the choir sings “your love is all I need for the day” it feels like it could be about either but I hear it as both – finding your way to the higher power in love and sex, physical and emotional intimacy that blurs into religiosity.

Get it from Sault.

Dry Cleaning “No Decent Shoes for Rain”

Florence Shaw mostly sounds like she’s bemusedly reading a notebook full of random phrases she’s overheard, or trying to recite from memory the most awkward exchanges she’s had in the past week. This is an odd voice to build a band around but it makes sense in the context of Dry Cleaning’s compositions, which are dynamic enough suggest cutting between different scenes in a film. In a song like “No Decent Shoes for Rain” it all clicks together to feel like music that operates on dream logic, all jumbled up in neuroses and absurdity and spliced up sense memory and potent emotional resonances that don’t fully make sense. Should “I’ve seen your arse but not your mouth, that’s normal now” feel as weirdly poignant as it does here? Probably not, but they make it feel like something anyway.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Phoenix feat. Ezra Koenig “Tonight”

Phoenix are the only rock band I can think of whose genre would be best described as “romantic comedy.” The romance part is obvious enough just by hearing most of their songs – sometimes the feel is more flirty, sometimes more longing, later in the catelog more often the lived-in feeling of long term partnership – but it’s always there, some ambient field of affection and attraction permeating every measure. The comedy comes through in the details of Thomas Mars’ lyrics, typically an English-as-second-language stew of evocative phrases, oddball syntax, and little bits of French. Mars zeroes in on little absurdities and comic moments, grounding big emotional moments or interpersonal tensions with, in the case of “Tonight,” a silly refrain like “who let the boys spill their entrée?” This is a bit of levity before moving on to the more emotionally fraught line “dinner is served, can’t you see we’re not opposites?” I can clearly imagine this playing out as a scene in a film, but it feels more efficient in musical abstraction. The plot doesn’t matter as much as the feeling.

“Tonight” feels a lot like Phoenix’s biggest hit “1901,” mainly in the way the grooves circle each other – one guitar figure suggesting a hesitant movement forwards, the rush into the chorus cutting loose and embracing a carefree acceleration. I’m intrigued by the decision to include Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend to sing this with Mars as a duet. The implication is not so much that they’re singing to each other but more as different aspects of the same person in conversation, dramatizing the lyrical hook “I talk to myself and it’s quite surprising.” This also underlines the unspoken tension at the core of this song – he’s overly familiar with his internal monologue, but he’s singing to someone who can still be a mystery to him.

Buy it from Amazon.

Yo La Tengo “Fallout”

This song sounds as though the members of Yo La Tengo were challenged to make something that would answer the question “what’s so special about Yo La Tengo?” and absolutely nailed the assignment. Yo La Tengo have written a lot of different types of songs through the years but this one really gets to the core of their identity – Ira Kaplan’s distinctive guitar tone and the way he strangles notes out of his instrument in a way that introduces a bit of manic violence to a fuzziness that would otherwise feel cozy, the contrast of a low-key nearly deadpan quality in the vocals with an obvious warmth and sincerity. “Fallout” sounds like it’s in the sweet spot of their mid-90s run of albums Painful, Electr-O-Pura, and I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, but it doesn’t sound like a self-conscious return to anything. It’s just the logical outcome of moving from the cut-and-paste construction of their last full album to something very live and raw, and this is just what they’re like when they get in that mode. It’s muscle memory, it’s core competencies, it’s a musical identity honed for over 30 years.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Say Sue Me “Elevate Me Later”

This version of Pavement’s “Elevator Me Later” – aka “Ell Ess Two” – does the best cover move, which is to fully honor the melodic and structural character of a song while totally changing its feel. Say Sue Me transform the song into a melancholic bossa nova tune, a move that makes total sense in retrospect the moment you hear how the chords and melodies fall into this template. The original from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain aimed for a sort of antsy melodrama – emphasis placed on “those who sleep with electric guitars” and “the city we forgot to name” – but this one feels more like the gentle shrug of someone who’s learned to lower their expectations, the emphasis placed on “so why you complaining? Ta!” I love the busy high note noodling they added around the groove here, it fills out the space in the song nicely while bringing a bit of nervous energy to the mix.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Genesis Owusu “Get Inspired”

I like the lyrical conceit of “Get Inspired.” Genesis Owusu gives voice to all the reasons making art can seem silly when there are so many problems to be faced in the world every day and then shrugs it off – sure, OK. He concedes a little, but only just to dial down the scale of his message to some bit of useful and realistic advice: get inspired. Owusu’s punchy rhythmic cadence sells the tough love and the irony, the track pulls some tricks from the likes of TV on the Radio and Devo to project a manic urgency. He’s not telling you how to get inspired, but he’s nudging you towards the why of it all. How is anything positive big or small supposed to happen without that spark?

Buy it from Amazon.

Taylor Swift “Sweet Nothing (Piano Remix)”

The Taylor Swift songs that have connected with me the most over her past few records are the ones that offer a window into her steady long term relationship with Joe Alwyn, her songwriting collaborator on a handful of songs including “Sweet Nothing,” my clear favorite on Midnights. Swift is famous for writing about big tumultuous romantic dramas, but songs like this and “Invisible String,” “Peace,” and “Lover” find something deep and affecting in much smaller moments. These are the songs with the biggest stakes and she focuses on the fragility of this happiness in each of them, and in the case of “Sweet Nothing” and “Peace” she dwells on how her extraordinary life puts this intimacy in constant peril. The sweet low key romantic scenes in this song get crowded out by paranoia in the chorus – “they said the end is coming, everyone is up to something” – and a fear of slimy entertainment industry creeps in the bridge. But the point of the song is that this relationship is her refuge from all that, something solid and real and dependable in a life otherwise full of conflicting pressures and people who know who she is but don’t really know her.

I like both versions of “Sweet Nothing,” though I strongly prefer the “piano remix” found on the Target edition of Midnights. The song is something of an outlier on the album both musically and thematically so the arrangement of the proper album version has the neon lights palette of the rest of the record. The piano part sounds cuter, the high notes twinkling like little Christmas lights. The “piano remix” shifts everything closer to a Folklore palette, though the strings and woodwinds that add color and weight to the arrangement have a tonality I don’t think she’s approached before – gracefulness but not grandeur, downplaying drama but highlighting a wounded humility. I’m glad Swift thought enough of this song to make sure it was included on the main version of the album, but this more low key and earthy version feels more “accurate” to the mood and sentiment of the piece.

Buy it from Target.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard “Iron Lung”

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have been churning out records at a dizzying pace for a decade but I’ve only recently jumped into their body of work. But the timing seems right as I’ve hit them at an inflection point in their career in which their songwriting has reached maturity at the same moment they’ve fully embraced jamming out and merging their psychedelic aesthetics with jazz fusion. “Iron Lung” is a perfect example – immediately hooky and sophisticated in its grooviness, but set up to give the band room to explore within the structure. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of someone incapacitated in a literal iron lung, so there’s some irony in the music being all about movement and passage. But the idea seems to be that the body is broken but the mind is free to roam, and the Gizzard boys’ guitars take this guy hovering near death to the edges of the universe.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Scout Gillett “444 Marcy Ave.”

“444 Marcy Ave” moves between two very ‘90s modes, starting with a stark and intimate strummed section that sounds a lot like PJ Harvey at the start of that decade or Cat Power at the end of it, but then shifting into a groove that’s more like Tori Amos after she got very into making Matt Chamberlin do live drum parts that sound like filtered loops. Scout Gillett, who is not to be confused with the similarly named Scout Niblett but probably will be, sings with a slightly ghostly affect that emphasizes her lowest and highest notes without much space between. The song sounds like a very dark and sordid place, though I can say as a Brooklyn resident this address is just some apartment building in South Williamsburg. She makes it feel more like some bleak abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere, but I might just be getting that from the subtle banjo counterpoint with the groove.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Customer “Floorboards”

It was only a matter of time before the sort of talky post-punk from the UK and Ireland that I’ve been documenting in my “narrators” playlist would start bubbling up in the United States and this debut single from the NYC band Customer is truly the best case scenario for such a thing. But then again, these guys are something of a ringer in that one of the members, Nicola Leel, is Scottish, so maybe it’s more like one of these types of bands just started in New York instead? In any case “Floorboards” is a remarkably confident debut that position Mallory Hawk as a charismatic presences within the first few seconds and just zips along to a shouty fist-pumper chorus that hinges on the provocative phrase “get your phantom limbs off my neck.” Hawk doesn’t waste time with narrative specifics and instead focuses her lyrical energy on evoking a terrible and recognizable feeling – you’re done with someone, you’ve moved on, but you’re still haunted by them having the nerve to be out there existing in the world.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Dorian Concept “Let It All Go”

“Let It All Go” is basically the mission statement for Dorian Concept’s new record, in which the electronic producer deliberately avoids digital perfection in favor of layering live keyboard parts in a way that comes together to sound like a live band rather than an electronic producer. I’m not totally clear on the process here but a lot of what makes this composition work is the feeling that parts are responding to others in real time, even if it’s just improvising in overdubs. There’s a slightly awkward throb to the groove, but the song sounds like it’s always got a new idea, like it’s just floating through a series of minor epiphanies.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

2nd Grade “Poet In Residence”

The riff in “Poet In Residence” is so familiar but I can’t quite place it, it nags at me a little while I listen to it. But I don’t really want to know what it is because I think part of the magic here is that it sounds like 2nd Grade is just barely getting away with stealing something famous for a tiny lo-fi song. It adds a meta level of stakes to the piece, and the laid back swagger of the riff makes the person being sung about seem a little cooler. But not that much cooler – I wouldn’t say this is a joke song, but the joke of the song is that this is an ode to someone who is a very ordinary sort of cool, and a very mild sort of fun. This isn’t a song set in a glamorous world, but rather one that’s mundane and drab and this person is what qualifies as the poetic rock star in this context.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Pixies “Get Stimulated”

There are now four post-reunion Pixies albums and it still feels weird. It’s no secret that these records are a matter of practicality – Black Francis is a prolific songwriter and obviously his records will sell better if they’re called Pixies, and if he’s always playing with the Pixies anyway why not just record with them and use the name? It’s all very logical, the math checks out. Black Francis still sounds like Black Francis, the music is full of their signature moves, and Paz Lenchantin does as good a job as anyone could hope to filling in on Kim Deal’s role in the band. Time is the enemy in this situation – too much time since they wrote the original body of work and were tapped into something truly inspired and original; too much time with Black Francis piling up solo records that gave us a sense of what he’s like without the Pixies. These are records that would be considered above-average Black Francis solo albums, but the baggage of the Pixies name makes them feel disappointing, ill-advised, or even sacrilegious.

At this point the most fair way to approach these records is considering them a separate body of work by a different band. Kim Deal was an essential and defining part of Pixies and she’s not on these records, that’s enough of a shift in the basic dynamics to look at this as something else entirely. So what is this band? Well, it’s Black Francis doing the fully matured version of his aesthetic and working with a drummer and lead guitarist he has proven chemistry with, and Paz Lenchantin bringing a similar but slightly different feminine energy to the mix. She’s more ethereal than girl-next-door, her bass playing simultaneously more blunt and more refined. She doesn’t have a level of charisma that competes with Black Francis, and that changes the feel of the songs – “Get Stimulated” is a good example of how well his voice meshes and contrasts with a softer feminine vocal, but you do get the sense that if Kim was the one singing your ear would focus on her presence. But it’s also a good example of something that feels uniquely Pixies with or without Deal, and the song is strong enough that it feels silly to not open up to it because of a concern like “oh no what about your legacy?” If you just let this version of the band be its own thing, it’s easy to just enjoy it for what it is without high stakes.

Buy it from Amazon.

Elkka “I Just Want To Love You”

The lyrical content of this song is limited to pretty much the title phrase repeated like a mantra, the rest of the music seeming to circle it as if to get every possible perspective on the emotion. Elkka’s arrangement borrows a bit of John Martyn’s “Small Hours” for ambience, his odd guitar tone adding a touch of tenderness and sadness that fits comfortably alongside the more straight forward ecstatic house elements of the track. The overall feeling is that of excitement, generosity, and an open-hearted willingness to be vulnerable. The song says exactly what it means, but then really lets you feel everything that words would fail.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Fievel Is Glauque “Save the Phenomenon”

“Save the Phenomenon” is an odd bit of indie jazz pop that finds an intriguing common ground between Gaucho-era Steely Dan, Stereolab, and Tom Jobim. The melody is gorgeous and the chords are lovely; it would all sound very relaxed if not for the tempo of the vocals, which speed up against the changes just enough to add some nervous energy to the song. It’s not odd enough to disrupt the more traditional charms of the composition, but it’s just weird enough to come off as lightly playful and vaguely punkish. I get the sense that Fievel Is Glauque is aiming for subversion of their own style, but more in the spirit of bringing a Zappa-like novelty, unpredictability, and mystery to the music rather than undermining their own skills as players.

Buy it from Math Interactive.

Alvvays “After the Earthquake”

The guitarists in Alvvays play “After the Earthquake” as if they’re in a competition to prove who loves Peter Buck more, with harmonic tangles of jangle ringing out through a very dynamic composition that sounds like it is sprinting away, except for the one part where it sounds like it’s stopping to catch its breath. Molly Rankin’s lyrics contrast literal and metaphoric sudden upheaval, focusing in on banal details to emphasize the way normal surroundings can look surreal in the wake of disaster. The more personal and emotional breakup side of this song reveals itself gradually, and the line that cuts most deeply is nearly buried as it trails off into a dynamic shift – “if you wake up will you remember the awful things I said at the edge of the bed?” This image is grounded by another detail about hearing Murder She Wrote playing in the background and noise in the hallway, trivial distractions burned into sense memory by association with a traumatic event. The anxiety in the song comes through in that frenetic pace, but I think it’s meaningful that it still sounds bright and light overall. Even if she’s wondering “why would I ever love again?,” she’s moving on and casting off some weight.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

СОЮЗ featuring Kate NV “I Knew It (Я так и знал)”

A lot of the time when I write about songs in languages I do not speak I try to find the lyrics online and run them through translation to English if just to get a rough idea of the sentiment. In the case of this song the full lyrics are presented in English on Bandcamp despite it being sung entirely in Russian, which is definitely helpful but also a little odd. But the lyrics are in fact pretty key to getting what СОЮЗ and Kate NV are going for here, and only hearing this as a lovely slightly jazzy kinda Brazilian 70s lite FM sort of song strips it of pathos and irony. The lyrics set up some imminent doomsday scenario but digress into a lament on the futility of documenting the past and creating art with the idea of preserving something of yourself through time when everything can be wiped out so easily. Some things may remain, but when they are found will they even be understood? The light and breezy tone of the music seems a bit at odds with the heaviness of the lyrics, but then again so much of the sentiment comes down to trying to shrug and let go of any attempts at immortality and just live in the moment.

Buy it from Bandcamp.