Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

ITZY “Boys Like You”

“Boys Like You” is an unrelenting juggernaut of sugar-rush pop, a breed of pop single that was ubiquitous in the 2000s but seems almost alien now unless you’re plugged into the K-pop scene that birthed ITZY. At this point in time K-Pop is massively successful in the United States but seems to mostly exist in parallel with mainstream pop, this thing that you can either opt into as an alternative or actively ignore. Given that “Boys Like You” is sung entirely in English it seems deliberately aimed at cracking the American market on its own terms, but the aesthetics of the song do not budge even a little bit to fit in better on the US charts. It’s bright and bold and unafraid to be obnoxious and cutesy, and like a lot of the best K-Pop it reconfigures the sound of 2000s pop culture in a way that makes it feel slightly off, but also super-charged and weaponized. My favorite thing about this one is how it seems to pile on its bratty little hooks like a Jenga tower, and the most thrilling moment is when they sing the title phrase pushing up towards the song’s highest notes and it all seems to wobble slightly for a moment but it never collapses.

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RM featuring Erykah Badu “Yun”

“Yun” is a tribute to the late South Korean abstract painter Yun Hyong Keun, one that draws on the meditative quality of his works but also takes direct inspiration from his ethos – “he always said ‘be human first’.” I like where RM goes with this idea, letting the notion of being a human ground him as an artist despite his massive success as a crucial member of BTS and coming to the creation of pure hip-hop records from a position of humility and genuine passion. RM seems accutely aware of his outsider status in rap but doesn’t produce or perform with any noticeable insecurity or eagerness to please. He has a natural affinity for the more mellow and spiritual side of rap to the degree Erykah Badu seems totally at home on the track, and his blend of English and Korean lyrics flow together with a relaxed grace rather than seeming awkwardly glued together as a matter of commercial concerns. Despite a lot of pressure, he sounds totally…human.

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Brakence “Argyle”

Brakence songs sound like very inventive and glitchy remixes of the most petulant emo boy songs you’ve ever heard – none of the boring off-the-rack musical conventions of that genre but all of the tortured white guy self-pity, if not more somehow. “Argyle” is a breakup song from the perspective of a guy who anyone would be correct to get away from, which seems to be the point, as I think portraying himself as an obnoxious loser is part of the self-flagellation process. There’s no subtext here, just a guy speaking plainly about wanting to die but being “too fucking cowardly to off myself,” and then snidely singing “good luck with your next boyfriend.” It’s interesting to me how his voice and the music conveys a real pain, but he articulates it all in words that invite you to lose empathy for him. But he’s a 21 year old guy, and I can see the worst of myself at that age in this. It’s an extremely 21 year old guy kind of song.

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Nova Twins “Choose Your Fighter”

Nova Twins sound like a collision of turn-of-the-millennium aesthetics – imagine glossy girly pop commandeering nü-metal riffs, spiked with a bit of crunk and screamo. It’s a synthesis of extremely bold styles that comes out sounding more extreme and bold than its genre components, and you can feel how much fun they’re having making this ultra-catchy cacophony in every moment of every song. “Choose Your Fighter” alternates between bouncy and thrashing energies so effectively that it seems impossible for an audience not to instinctively click into its implied choreography of pogoing and moshing. The lyrics sound like they’re from a video game set in a series of increasingly violent mosh pits, tapping into a bit of real anger but blowing it out into a cartoonish fantasy of cathartic aggression.

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JVKE “This Is What Falling In Love Feels Like”

What does falling in love feel like? According to JVKE it’s like a little bit of melodramatic strings, some major key twinkly piano, and a lot of big blasts of distorted keyboard chords that sound like the affirmative version of a WRONG buzzer on a game show. The melodies is “This Is What Falling In Love Feels Like” fall into a pleasant middle ground between musical theater aesthetics and extremely vague hip-hop adjacent cadences of modern pop, and it’s all packed into a tight two minutes like most music that comes up on social media platforms now. I would not have a problem with this song going on another minute or so but the jingle-ish brevity suits it well, particularly as falling in love can often be a rather fleeting moment.

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Rauw Alejandro “Dime Quién???”

I think when people look back on the early part of this decade one of the key sounds that will spark nostalgia will be this driving, ambiguously melancholy quasi-synthpop style that manifested in mega-hits like The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” Harry Styles’ “As It Was,” The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s “Stay,” and Rauw Alejandro’s “Todo de Ti.” The latter is the most interesting of the bunch, mainly because Alejandro grounds this vibe in reggaeton aesthetics and arrived at a mutant sound that was genuinely unique. “Dime Quién???,” from his new follow up record, goes even deeper into this sound, though it’s structurally and tonally closer to actual ‘80s synthpop. You lose maybe 20% of the novelty of “Todo de Ti” but the trade off is a high level of focused craft. This is an absolute nuke of a pop song, it’s the kind of tune that makes you yield to its charms, its emotional gravity, its hooks, its sheer momentum. It’s sung entirely in Spanish but even before checking for an English translation I was picking up on its romantic angst loud and clear. You can just feel this guy’s jealousy and yearning in that chorus, the specifics of it – which involve BeReal, a thing that will really ground this in 2022 for all eternity – are besides the point.

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Dummy “Mono Retriever”

I’ve been wondering for a while why there aren’t more bands just shamelessly imitating Stereolab, particularly as I think artists can do that with relative impunity as Stereolab built their own sound out of shamelessly absorbing and reinterpreting ideas from older records. Dummy clearly is on the right track here – “Mono Retriever” owes a massive debt to the groop circa Mars Audiac Quintet/Refried Ectoplasm, but has enough of their own character and flavor to keep it from feeling like a weak impression. A lot of this comes down to the central voice being masculine and cold, but there’s a different kind of color palette to this. If Stereolab is more like bold primaries, this is a little more muted and blurry, particularly as the song nudges a little closer to shoegaze. Anyway, I’m an easy mark for this. I’ll take more, please.

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PinkPantheress “Do You Miss Me?”

PinkPantheress started her career attempting to make music with a Kaytranada feel to it, and here she is on this song actually collaborating with him. She says she missed the mark on her own, but her instinct was always correct – his elegant grooviness meshes perfectly with her taste for jumpy late 90s beats and complements the cool tone of her singing voice. It makes me think of food – a very hot and spicy dishes cooled by a bit of cream, or something sweet given more dimension by a sharp saltiness. Her lyrics take a similar route, contrasting a genuine lovey-dovey feeling with intense possessiveness and jealousy that comes through midway in the song. The dark turn only makes sense with the stakes set by how deeply she’s into the person she’s addressing, but the sweetness doesn’t quite stand up to the sourness by the end.

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The Cool Greenhouse “Hard Rock Potato”

“Hard Rock Potato” is a lyrical snapshot of an odd pandemic moment – Redditors playing the stock market game as a goof, trading apps making it all feel like a video game. Tom Greenhouse speak-sings it all with an arch deadpan – you’d never mistake him for being serious, but he’s committed to the bit enough for the sarcasm to hit just right. As with the band’s previous song “Alexa,” Greenhouse is in interesting thematic territory by fixating on how new tech trends become most absurd the moment they become widespread enough to become fairly mundane. Greenhouse pokes at the absurdity and has a laugh, all the while his band lock into a very mid-80s The Fall kind of groove.

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Roc Marciano & The Alchemist “Quantum Leap”

The Alchemist’s track for “Quantum Leap” has such a strong nocturnal vibe that it feels wrong to listen to it in daylight. It’s mostly in the keyboard part, this warm and rich tone that evokes the amber hues of city street lights. Roc Marciano is well suited to a track like this and performs with a casual grace, giving off the energy of someone who’s very confident and comfortable in their skin and knows they have the upper hand in a situation. Marciano’s bragging about his stature and success through the song but he sounds thoroughly relaxed and often very deadpan, particularly when he opens a verse with “uhh, I made murder sexy.”

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Whitmer Thomas “Most Likely”

Whitmer Thomas’ primary lane is comedy but he’s an accomplished songwriter whose songs flirt with comedic premises and punchlines but mostly veer away from novelty territory. This sets him apart from the likes of Bo Burnham, whose music is always a pastiche of some kind in service of a joke, and puts him firmly in an indie rock tradition. If you squint your ears a bit “Most Likely” could pass a Wilco song – a little brighter in tonality than most Jeff Tweedy compositions, but with a similar grain of voice and a Charlie Brown-ish mix of humor and melancholy. The song is basically Thomas running through sad sack sentiments – What if there was a room at every party where you could just watch a movie? What if he’s too sentimental for when he was too broke to get a therapist? How do you get over imposter syndrome? The song is overflowing with neuroses but the phrasing and tone make it clear at every moment that he’s making himself the joke here, and he’s doing so because he’s got enough perspective on himself to know when he’s being silly. And in showing himself being silly, he’s giving people some room to laugh at themselves a bit too.

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Muni Long “Crack”

Songs like “Crack” are annoying to write about because I will feel like a dork no matter what angle I take in describing or even acknowledging the very explicit lyrics. I figure pure descriptive bluntness is the best path: This is a song in which a woman tells her new partner that they’re about to become hopelessly addicted to her pussy. It’s been done before, but Muni Long nails the tone by dialing it in to about 70% confident sexuality and 30% subtle vulnerability. The latter comes through more in musical moves and Long’s phrasing, these little touches that indicate some lightly percolating fears – Is she overselling this? Will they agree with her assessment of her skills? Does she seem desperate? But none of that is close enough to the surface to undermine the overt sexiness of the song, it’s all just layered in to make it feel human.

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Spoon “The Devil & Mr. Jones” (Adrian Sherwood Reconstruction)

The only thing that’s surprising to me about Spoon having Adrian Sherwood create a dub version of their most recent album Lucifer on the Sofa is that it’s taken this long for Spoon to actually have a dub version of any thing. You can hear the influence of dub on their studio work going back to Kill the Moonlight, to the point that the final mix some songs in their catalog sounds like a dub version of a more normal rock recording. Sherwood, one of the great icons of dub, does some great work with Spoon’s raw material and in the case of “On the Radio” and “The Devil and Mr. Jones” pushes the songs to become something much better than on the original record. The latter song takes on an entirely different character with Sherwood at the boards, unlocking some ska vibes that were only lurking beneath the surface of the original arrangement. There’s a lot of heavy reverb and psychedelic warping in the mix but the song is pretty much intact, even if Britt Daniel’s voice often gets abstracted to the point of pure sound. It works as a Spoon song, it works as dub – pretty much the ideal for a remix.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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