Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The Dare “Girls”

When “indie sleaze” took hold as a popular nostalgic obsession earlier this year at last one man called Harrison Smith took note and decided “well, fuck, I can do that.” “Girls” distills mid-00s party sleaze aesthetics into two minutes of twitchy electro-funk that basically sounds like if LCD Soundsystem had the coked-up abrasive lecherousness of Louis XIV. This is simply a song about being extremely horny for all kinds of girls, or at least all the girls who are likely to turn up at the indie sleaze club. Girls who do drugs, who hate cops and buy guns, girls with degrees, mean girls and kinky girls and trans girls and sex workers, and the list goes on. It’s a knowingly dumb and funny song, and he makes sure the joke’s on him: “they say I’m too fucking horny, wanna put me in a cage – I’d probably fuck the hole in the wall the guy before made.” The Dare could stop with just this one utterly shameless novelty single and it’d be a job well done, but I’m genuinely curious where they’d go from here. Is this the start of something bigger?

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Madonna “Live to Tell”

I was a child in the 1980s and as I gradually came to understand pop music through the radio Madonna was like a fact of life, a pillar of existence, a figure whose domination was respected but not questioned. It’s funny to think of this now, as by the time I would have this awareness Madonna would only have been around for at most three or four years. But I was a kid without a sense of chronology, and my memory of this is so blurry that I can as an adult be totally surprised to learn that “Live to Tell” was the first single from True Blue in 1986.

This was a crazy gamble at the time and you can hear the song’s composer Patrick Leonard get into that in this interview – sure, “Crazy for You” was a big hit, but at this time Madonna was known for her danceable smashes like “Into the Groove,” “Material Girl,” and “Like A Virgin.” But it wasn’t just that “Live to Tell” was a ballad, it was a very harmonically ambitious one with a peculiar structure. Leonard originally wrote the music to be an instrumental for a soundtrack and that certainly accounts for its atmosphere and busy melodies that don’t quite necessitate a vocal lead. Madonna wrote a vocal melody and lyrics as a favor to Leonard and it was immediately clear that they’d made something quite special. Something so special Madonna would lobby for it to open her comeback campaign and get her way. (It all worked out well, as the song is incredible and Madonna was an unquestioned dominating presence in pop.)

“Live to Tell” really got to me as a kid. It’s a song I clearly remember bumming me out in the backseat of my mom’s car, Leonard’s dramatic keyboard harmonies evoking some grand cosmic sadness I couldn’t imagine but could feel. Madonna sings the song with a solemnity that made lines like “a man can tell a thousand lies” and “hope I live to tell the secret I have learned, til then it will burn inside of me” register as the most important things ever sung. These secrets and lies, these intense vows! There’s no context to any of this, no implication of what the secret could be but that only makes the song seem darker. Why would you hold on to something and feel this deeply about it unless it would cause chaos and destruction? It’s specific enough to be a recognizable drama but vague enough to fit it into whatever story you need it to be, and I suspect for a lot of people it gets very bleak and traumatic.

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Madonna “Like A Prayer”

A lot of art about growing up Catholic tends to be about related trauma or being indoctrinated into a culture of guilt so young that it becomes unshakeable whether you stick with the Church or not. You can find some of that in the subtext of “Like A Prayer” but the lyrical focus of the song is more on how aspects of Catholicism can imprint on you in a way that leads to interpreting all kinds of heavy emotional experiences through its profound iconography and mysticism. You can take the song to be a love song to a man or a love song to God, I hear both at the same time. She transubstantiates this man through her lust, she’s experiencing communion through sex. She’s allowing herself to feel everything on a deeper and more profound level by exalting him and submitting to his will. To paraphrase another brilliant pop provocateur a few years down the line – her whole existence is flawed but he brings her closer to God.

Madonna wrote “Like A Prayer” with Patrick Leonard, one of her all-time best collaborators. Leonard, a jazz and prog guy when left to his own devices, came to work with Madonna on a work-for-hire songwriter. They were a bit of an odd couple but had an incredible chemistry as a songwriting duo, their respective tastes and tendencies resulting in very accessible but subtly sophisticated songwriting. Leonard’s taste for interesting chords and complex harmony made songs like “Live to Tell,” “La Isla Bonita,” and “Cherish” sound totally unlike anything else on the radio at the time, and even if people weren’t consciously registering the elegance of his compositions people could intuit a certain prestige in this music which indicated that Madonna was a cut above her direct competition.

The structural genius of “Like A Prayer” is that it moves between verses rooted in the dour musicality of Catholic psalms and choruses in the tradition of ecstatic Black gospel music, both parts rendered with the rich tones of jazz chords. The melding of two very different approaches to Christian church music makes the song wildly dynamic and thematically dense, opening up discourse on the differences between these expressions of faith while allowing Madonna to indulge in the best of both worlds. The Catholic parts of the song are full of loneliness and melancholic longing, the gospel parts emphasize joy and connection with others. It’s a continuum of feeling, a personal emotional and intellectual journey leading to a collective catharsis.

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Madonna “Borderline”

“Borderline” was written by Reggie Lucas, a guitarist who’d played with Billy Paul, Miles Davis, and Roberta Flack through the 1970s before shifting over to songwriting and production for Warner Bros in the early 80s. Most of Madonna’s early collaborators, like Jellybean Benitez and Stephen Bray, were people from her social circles, but Lucas was selected to work on her debut record in a work-for-hire capacity. He was basically a steady professional brought in to work with a green talent, and while he provided excellent raw material as a songwriter his aesthetics didn’t quite match up with what the fashion-forward Madonna was looking for, and so Benitez reworked several of the song including “Borderline” after he left the project. A messy situation, but one that worked out very well in that “Borderline” could have the musical sophistication of a composer steeped in jazz and R&B as well as the synth-heavy strut of early ‘80s NYC club music.

Like a lot of synthpop and freestyle classics, the keyboard-heavy surface gloss of “Borderline” somewhat obscures a composition firmly rooted in Motown song structures. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read, “Borderline” was not written specifically for Madonna, but was rather just a song Lucas was working on at the time he was tapped for the project. She took an immediate liking to the song – how could anyone with a pop instinct and good taste not? – and essentially worked with Lucas to tailor the song to her strengths. To run with this metaphor, Lucas’ fit was a little baggy and he insisted on a few too many accessories, and Benitez styled it to make it work. Madonna’s role was essentially similar to that of an actor – she inhabits the character written by Lucas and makes it all feel urgent and real.

Madonna has a bunch of songs about unrequited or thwarted love, but the perspective of “Borderline” doesn’t feel like one that would naturally be hers. If anything the lyrics come across like someone singing about someone like her at the time, a fascinating force of nature burning through the affections of a lot of different people who want more from her than she had time to give. But that’s conjecture, and the raw sentiment of Lucas’ lyrics would be relatable to most anyone with some dating experience or even if they’ve ever felt powerless to a crush. The lyrics are very plainly written but one thing I really like about them is how the protagonist can’t really articulate why they’re so attracted to and enthralled by this other person, it’s just this mysterious gravitational pull. The lyrics plead with the other person to take control of this, to either commit to the situation or cut her loose as an act of mercy, but she’s mistaken. She’s the one whose fixation has made this an unbreakable trap, and she’s the only one who can free herself from it.

But the prisons we make for ourselves are always so cozy, aren’t they? “Borderline” feels bright and loose, and its many keyboard hooks move with an elegance that doesn’t sound remotely oppressive. It’s not a “luxuriate in sadness” song like “Take A Bow,” it’s more like existing in a very lovely limbo that’s pleasant enough until you realize you’re stuck there. She’s just trying to talk her way out of it, the song is basically a negotiation. And as such, it’s not exactly an accident that the song’s most indelible vocal hook is “just try to understand, I’ve given all I can.”

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Nilüfer Yanya “The Dealer”

“The Dealer” sounds like trying to feel calm and rational in a chaotic situation and mostly succeeding on a mental front but not really accounting for the body still feeling the effects of anxiety. Nilüfer Yanya sings from the perspective of someone attempting to make sense of a relationship that’s suddenly become confusing – why are they seemingly acting out of character? What happened to the person I could rely on? She’s rethinking everything she knows about them and recalibrating her expectations in the moment. I like that this song is set in a moment where it’s unclear whether or not the relationship is actually doomed, the possibility that this is something that can be dealt with reasonably gives the music interesting emotional stakes. Can this be fixed, and if so, is it worth it?

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Moon Boots featuring Cherry Glazerr “Come Back Around”

Clementine Creevy’s voice is typically paired with crunchy alt guitars in her band Cherry Glazerr but more recently she’s been singing in more of a pop context – newer Cherry Glazerr originals that lean more on synths, covers of “Steal My Sunshine” and “Call Me,” and this perky bop with dance producer Moon Boots. A lot of the older Cherry Glazerr songs were good but I think Creevy just sounds better in these sort of songs – her vocal timbre and breathy delivery just sits well with keyboards, so it’s a little like someone figuring out what kinds of outfits suit their form and coloring. She’s perfect for this particular Moon Boots arrangement, keying into something essentially flirtatious about the groove and singing lines “had a daydream that would make you blush” and “stay with me boy, if you know what’s up” with a coy, teasing tone. It’s a very playful and cute song, but there’s just enough intensity to it and light tensions layered into the groove that it feels like there’s some real emotional stakes.

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PVA “Hero Man”

The answer to your question is NO, I will NEVER be sick of cold synth pop stuff with vocals by cool European women who sound kinda mean and extremely bored. Ella Harris speak-sings “Hero Man” with a tone that suggests a contempt that was once scalding has been chilled over time into something closer to frustrated cynicism. She sounds hardened, but also trapped and powerless, and full of resentment for the men who can move more freely through the world. The music plays up a sense of claustrophobic tension but the constant movement in the percussion makes the song feel agitated and wily, as though Harris is not far off from busting her way out of confinement.

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Steve Lacy “Give You the World”

There’s a time jump in the lyrics of “Give You the World,” with the first verse coming from the perspective of trying to get closer to someone and start a relationship, and the second verse zooming ahead to the point where the relationship has run its course. The music stays placid and lovey dovey throughout, you have to listen closely to even pick up on the shift of perspective. There’s certainly another way of doing this song in which Steve Lacy pushes the second half towards a darker, more depressive tone but that would defeat the purpose and the beauty of a song in which the desire for intimacy and overwhelming generosity is the entire point. I don’t think Lacy wants us to focus on the end of things so much as a pure feeling that carries beyond conclusions and disappointments. This is a song where love, however fleeting, is never a failure.

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Julia Jacklin “Love, Try Not To Let Go”

It took me a few listens to notice that a lot of “Love, Try Not to Let Go” is essentially the melody of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” merged with the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” It could be entirely unintentional but I appreciate the way Julia Jacklin seems to place herself between these two beloved classics that both contrast grand romanticism and bone-deep cynicism and still come out declaring “love is all that I want now.” She knows the risks, and has decided the potential reward is worth the likelihood of eventually wondering why the bedroom has become so cold and listening carefully to the sound of your loneliness.

Jacklin gives us some glimpses into a life – a long abandoned home town, a memory of a party, a lingering fear of losing a sense of self – and it all points in the general direction of why she’s so ready to open her heart. In this song love isn’t a cure all, but it’s something that grounds you in the support you get and the support you give. But it’s so slippery, so elusive. When the song hits a louder staccato section – TRY NOT TO LET GO! TRY NOT TO LET GO! – it’s less like a catharsis and more like the song is flying through some severe turbulence.

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Lava La Rue featuring Biig Piig “Hi-Fidelity”

I’ve been meaning to write about this song for weeks and I think on a subconscious level I was just waiting for a day that was stiflingly humid to do so since the atmosphere of this song is very much “getting a fresh blast of air conditioning on a day when the air feels like soup.” The sound is warm and sensual but a little aloof – even with lyrics that are pretty open and direct about attraction it feels like both singers are avoiding eye contact by wearing extremely nice sunglasses. Lava La Rue’s vocals have a bit more depth and soul, but I appreciate how incredibly casual Biig Piig sounds here even when singing something as wonderfully hyperbolic as “I’d steal the moon for you.”

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Viagra Boys “Creepy Crawlers”

“Creepy Crawlers” is a satire of terminal conspiracy brain that’s played straight enough that I think there are some people who could hear it, not notice the wink, and assume that Viagra Boys are totally Q-pilled. Sebastian Murphy’s vocal performance is silly and unhinged, but also conveys enough frazzled terror to make this character seem genuinely upset and concerned about little kids growing up with animal hair and creepy crawlers being put in the vaccines. This intensity is matched by music that merges the antsy claustrophobia of Suicide with the bug-eyed manic energy of Dead Kennedys to make something that sounds sickly but gets kinda fun once they’re chanting “they’re turning kids into adrenochrome.” While this is 100% a song brutally mocking actual people who believe in this stuff there’s also a bit of empathy for these people in that their emotional reality is taken seriously. It’s left unspoken, but the message is basically “imagine making yourself this upset because you need a complicated answer to why the world feels so bad right now, when the truth is actually pretty simple.”

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Quelle Chris “Alive Ain’t Always Living”

Quelle Chris is a rapper and is technically rapping through this song but his vocal performance registers more as some ambiguous combination of conversational speech and very low key soul singing, occasionally making his voice go very flat for a sort of an implied italics effect. The feel of the track is loose enough to seem as though he just happened to stroll by the melancholy piano loop on the street and felt compelled to casually monologue about his philosophy of life. This makes the content of his writing go down easier – there’s nothing self-aggrandizing or overbearing about this, just a weary guy acknowledging just how difficult life can be and coming away with the conclusion that simply being alive with only occasional moments of satisfaction is still far better than the alternative.

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Satya “Oakland”

“Oakland” is a fairly tight 3:30 pop song that moves with a very light touch and an unhurried feel, perfectly evoking both a relaxed and natural dynamic with someone and a strong gravitational pull towards them. Satya’s vocal is very low-key in her cadences but there’s a fire in her phrasing, making her sound like someone who feels calm and controlled in the moment but is on the verge of being overwhelmed by passion at any moment. The more rhythmic vocal parts are the hook here but the soul of this is in the melodic nuances – lead guitar parts that move between hesitance and eloquence, a warm bass groove that tightens up for an unexpected bridge, vocal harmonies towards the end that leave the song feeling open-ended. There’s not a lot of tension in this song, but that feeling of “what happens next…” is so potent.

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Flying Lotus featuring Devin Tracy “You Don’t Know”

Devin Tracy sings about unrequited love in “You Don’t Know” as though he’s plagued by intrusive and involuntary thoughts, totally passive to a strong attraction to an indifferent person that may as well be like the moon’s affect on tides. This could easily be an anxious or angry song but he and Flying Lotus convey the feeling with a delicate grace, letting the feeling of love be central to the song rather than the frustration. It certainly gives the listener a sense of why this is so hard to pull away from – there’s a lovely sway and warmth to this music that seems more likely to elevate a person than pull them down.

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Fresh Pepper featuring Dan Bejar “Seahorse Tranquilizer”

The novel conceit of Fresh Pepper’s debut record is that all the songs are in some way set behind the scenes in restaurants. There’s a lot of ways to approach this subject matter in music that would explore the stress and tensions that come up in a restaurant – consider the way the music supervisors of The Bear edited a live recording of Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” into a setpiece depicting a kitchen falling into chaos – but Fresh Pepper instead aim for a lite jazzy vibe so serene and relaxed that it comes across as surreal or sarcastic. A lot of the record feels like an odd dream with a very specific setting, with odd details about “new ways of chopping onions” and “mushrooms in the frying pan” floating by without much context. The aesthetics of this record are heavily indebted to Destroyer’s Kaputt and so Dan Bejar’s presence on “Seahorse Tranquilizer” feels totally natural, maybe even inevitable. Bejar doesn’t quite play along with the album concept but that actually works just fine in the context – he basically sounds like an interesting patron at a fine dining establishment, and the two other voices seem to respond to his presence like servers. They gush to him about how they “harvest insane roses” for the tables, and he seems to humor them while basically lost on his own trip.

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Anna Butterss “Doo Wop”

“Doo Wop” sounds like it’s rather pointedly adjacent to a lot of genres and styles but actually exists in some undefined space between them all, and this strikes me as much a set of interesting musical choices as an expression of displacement. And I want you to know that I arrived at this impression before I learned that Anna Butterss is an Australian who’s been living in the US for a long time! There’s just something about the sort of interstitial limbo she’s conveying here that feels like moving through surroundings that are interesting and pleasant but feeling disconnected on some deep level, as though your body is trying to tell you that you’re not where you belong. Butterss’ bass carries a lot of the feeling here, rumbling through little melodic runs in a way that sounds almost conversational. You can glean some meaning, but it’s like listening to someone speak another language and pulling meaning from the cadences.

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Muna “Solid”

“Solid” has a very ‘80s shoulder pads energy to it, the sort of pop song you might expect to find buried on the second side of a Sheena Easton record. Muna really lean into the aesthetic but stick to a more contemporary type of studio gloss, enough so that a younger listener might not even realize there’s any throwback quality to it at all. The hooks are strong but the lyrics are what make this one – they start by announcing the object of their affection is a woman who refuses to be projected upon, but then spend the rest of the song idealizing her as a superhumanly capable person who’s “using her hands, she’s pulling the levers.” It’s funny but also just really sweet to have this song that’s just like “damn, my girl gets things DONE.”

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Soccer Mommy “With U”

They released four advance singles from the new Soccer Mommy record and somehow none of them was “With U,” a lovesick power ballad that’s by far the most obviously commercial song on the album. Sophie Allison manages a tricky balance here – the song goes as big and sentimental as Taylor Swift in Red mode, but her vocal delivery signals the shyness and insecurity that comes through in most of her songs. In lesser hands that might undermine the sweep of the song, but Allison commits enough that it sounds like someone who’s pushing through their reflexive defensive moves to sing something that feels enormous to them. I like her lyrical angle here too – she’s singing about feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of her feelings in the context of a long term relationship, expressing feelings a lot of people could easily file under “codependent.” But that’s so judgmental, really, and what she’s singing isn’t toxic or anything like that. It’s just being honest that investing that much in anyone is scary, and she doesn’t feel like she wants another option.

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Flasher “Nothing”

“Nothing” hits me hard in two different but not unrelated sweet spots – harmonies that overlap in atypical ways and offer multiple perspectives on the lyrics, and lyrics about actively trying to change who you are and how you perceive yourself and the world. Flasher make the song more complicated as it moves along, starting with a rather straight forward mission of self-improvement before layering in the notion that this guy wants to change to please someone else, and then the passive aggression starts slipping in. By the time the bridge hits the tension boils over – “I’m in the basement, nothing is taking / so if you hate me, why don’t you replace me?” – and the female counterpoint vocal just voices a vague disappointment. The finale of this song is incredible, the sort of thing I find myself rewinding to hear several times in a row. The harmonies pile on as the frustration mounts, and the female voice gets louder and more passionate but still a little distant in the mix. The sound is lovely and cathartic, but the lyrics are just two people crumpling as they face futility – “when it’s all or nothing, you can count on nothing.”

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Sophia Scott “Leather Skirt”

Contemporary country music absorbed the aesthetics of ‘80s mainstream rock some time ago as part of an ongoing cycle of country pulling in sounds once they feel old enough to seem like classic Americana. This manifestation of arena rock can be hit or miss but “Leather Skirt” is definitely in the first category and basically sounds like a woman who’d be objectified in a Def Leppard or Mötley Crüe song deciding to do it herself and make her own rock anthem about how hot she is. There’s a bit of twang in Sophia Scott’s voice to make it scan as “country,” but I think that comes through more in the lyrics which lean on that genre’s conventions of performing femininity with a heavy wink and openly transactional attitude. Scott’s lyrics are straightforward – she’s singing about how great and useful it is to have a good leather skirt, and how she feels wearing it, and what she gets from wearing it. There’s no twist to this, and the endorsement is so strong that it feels like a song that should somehow contain affiliate links to online retailers of leather skirts.

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