Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

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.

Courting “Famous”

The members of Courting are very young men and “Famous” is very much a song from the point of view of someone who’s only just starting to realize they’ve aged into adulthood. I remember this being a confusing thing – wait, people I know are doing x, y, and z now? I’m expected to make actual decisions? Some of it is time flying, some of it is feeling confused why anyone would trust someone your age to do anything at all. The bittersweet current that runs through “Famous” is Sean Murphy-O’Neill feeling like he’s losing his grasp on social connections that have been meaningful to him. His vocal is kinda like a young English version of James Murphy and he approaches “All My Friends” sentiment from a very different angle, already nostalgic and wanting to pull everyone he knows back together again not long after they’ve left.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

The Orielles “The Room”

I’ve been covering The Orielles here and there on this site since their earliest releases and while there was definitely growth apparent along the way nothing they’ve done before set me up to expect anything like their two most recent singles “Beam/s” and “The Room.” There’s some musical continuity with their past work but the sharp aesthetics of these new songs and the increased scale of their ambitions make them sound like a new band. They say they wanted the new music to reflect their interest in cinema and I absolutely hear it in the dynamic shifts that hit like cuts between shots, and in a palette that somehow sounds the way a high contrast black and white film looks. The vocals keep shifting along with the beats, bass, keys, and fake strings – sometimes it’s a casually confident recitation of poetic lines, sometimes it’s more of a whisper, sometimes it’s clearly sung with a touch of English R&B in the inflection. They’re pulling from a lot of inspirations but landing on something that feels very distinct, like they might have really figured out exactly who they are as a band this time around.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Suki Waterhouse “Moves”

“Moves” is a song with a sentiment that should seem entirely self-absorbed – I want something very badly and must separate myself from you to pursue it – but it’s expressed in a way that feels very generous to the person it’s being addressed to. Suki Waterhouse sings it as a big power ballad love song, something that sounds more like the beginning than the end of something. Maybe it’s more like putting something on hold in the hope of eventually having both? But the affection is unmistakable in her vocal, and the attitude of the song is focused on fighting for what she wants to the point that the melancholy in it is pushed beneath the layers of sound in the chorus.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Oliver Sim “Sensitive Child”

Oliver Sim approaches a lot of bad memories and lingering resentments in “Sensitive Child” but doesn’t get too specific, opting to keep the lyrics focused on evocative images and abstracted details that bring him back to sense memories. It’s like the lyrics are just prompts for him to remember feelings and emote, and that emoting is the actual communication. I recognize this kind of tension, I am familiar with this kind of anger that gets stuffed around the corners of memories. Jamie XX’s arrangement moves around a central Del Shannon vocal sample but mostly responds to Sim’s emotional state and pushes into ugly, distorted territory that feels unusual for both himself and Sim. Moving into relatively unfamiliar musical terrain suits this song well conceptually – if Sim is going to get out of a comfort zone and confront very personal things, he may as well do the same with the tonal palette and rhythmic style.

Buy it from Amazon.

Warpaint “Send Nudes”

If you asked me what a song called “Send Nudes” by a band of women would be like I would have guessed something kinda darkly funny about some kind of awful relationship, but that’s not at all where Warpaint went with this. The title is used with some humorous irony around the silliness of the title phrase but it’s actually pretty earnest – this is a song about an intense and growing love, and even if it’s silly the request “send a couple nudes, baby” is not a joke. Warpaint play this song with jazzy nuance and a minimalism that makes your ear focus in on the details in the bass line and the percussion. The music feels as intimate and romantic as the lyrics, they really nail a spooning/whispering in ears sensation through the whole thing.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Angel Olsen “All the Good Times”

“All the Good Times” has a soft and cozy texture to it – the gentle hum of the organ, the warmth of the bass, the light touch on the drums – that complements Angel Olsen’s sweet but sleepy vocal, making it all sound like she’s just woke up from a dream and reality is coming back into focus. That’s basically what’s going on in the lyrics, with her coming out of a relationship and it’s a little too soon to get an accurate sense of what was going on. Was it always a mess? When did they stop caring? How long did they just go along with it because it was the path of least resistance? This definitely could be performed as an angry song but it’s not at all, Olsen plays it with a lot of lingering affection that makes it easier to get how it all happened and why it hasn’t been easy to break away from. And getting that context just makes it more sad.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Jessie Reyez “Only One”

Jessie Reyez’s lyrics in “Only One” could be read as needy, but I think it’s more that she’s being vulnerable enough to ask for what she really wants of a partner and isn’t afraid if that makes her seem insecure or demanding. Like a lot of classic R&B songs before it this is about negotiating for what you need out of a relationship and advocating for one’s desires, and she’s not asking for anything crazy here – monogamy, being someone’s priority, someone who’s open to exploring her cultural interests. She’s speaking it into the world to draw it to her, manifesting it in either the person she’s addressing or someone else entirely. The song has a strong mid to late ‘90s R&B energy – a loud and kinda cold processed beat contrasted with warm bass and emotive vocals, a go-to combination for evoking a hard exterior and soft interior.

Buy it from Amazon.