Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Hatchie “This Enchanted”

I wish I could send this song back to around 1992 or so because I’d love to know what UK-oriented indie fans would make of this song that’s essentially merging girly chart pop, Madchester keyboard style, and shoegaze guitar. Would this seem like a bizarre and impossible future, or an artistic inevitability? I tend to think it’s the latter, that there’s no logical reason for these vibes to not click together and the way influence and flattened histories go it’s just natural that Hatchie and her collaborators would arrive at this simply by going with what they think sounds cool and fun.

And boy does it ever sound cool and fun – the particular aesthetic combination results in a boppy and hyper-romantic song that’s somewhat at odds with the more fraught relationship dynamics described by the verses. But the point of the song is the chorus – regardless of the messiness, she’s just overwhelmed by the more ecstatic emotions and raw attraction.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Zilo & Austin Marc “Cherry Blossom”

“Cherry Blossom” is a rather pure expression of gratitude, with Zilo singing to someone whose love and support has changed her life for the better. The lyrics are direct and effusive in their praise, but the music and vocal performance are fairly low key. This sort of sentiment is very often paired with jubilant music, and there’s a logic in getting matchy-matchy with a euphoric tone. Zilo and producer Austin Marc dial it down and keep the emotional emphasis on warmth and intimacy, making the song feel like something sweet, gentle, and private. This has a nice effect of making Zilo’s more over-the-moon statements feel grounded and sincere, and not just some hyperbole.

Buy it from Amazon.

Anaiis “Ultraviolet, Counts”

The music in “Ultraviolet, Counts” seems to move gracefully through some resistance, like a trained swimmer moving against a tide. This suits the lyrical theme perfectly as Anaiis attempts to talk someone, anyone out of suicidal ideation by appealing to rational thought – you don’t know everything, positive outcomes are as possible as negative outcomes, rebirth comes along with “research.” Her phrasing conveys equal measures of empathy and tough love, a little judgmental (“martyrdom is for cowards”) but mostly compassionate and respectful of this person’s intelligence. The arrangement contrasts a staccato organ part with more subtle and fluid counterpoints in vocal harmony, bass, and horns that seem to ripple out and around the blunt impact of the beat. Everything in the song backs up the central feeling: direct and firm, but thoughtful and flexible.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Vanishing Twin “Big Moonlight (Ookii Gekkou)”

There’s a lot of overlap in the aesthetics of Vanishing Twin and the late, great Broadcast – a certain 20th century futuristic style, a polite vocal style that signals intellectualism and introversion – but there’s a totally different sense of gravity to the music. “Big Moonlight” feels so light that parts of the arrangement seem to be floating away from the central bass line and jazzy beat. Every element in the song is crisp and clear but arranged in the stereo image in a way that feels a little uncanny, particularly when an organ part seems to teleport into the song about halfway through, a counterpart to the more distant chanted backup vocals. It’s not a jarring shift but it’s an unexpected texture that changes the atmosphere while keeping the song rooted in a dreamy sort of jazz.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Andy Shauf “Spanish on the Beach”

The character in “Spanish on the Beach” is a guy looking back on a vacation with his ex-girlfriend with enough hindsight to see exactly how the events of that trip foreshadowed the impending end of their relationship, but also a wistful nostalgia – “I wished it could be permanent.” Andy Shauf’s lyrics are plainspoken and economical as they glide along his melodies but they convey volumes of subtext about this guy and these fairly banal anecdotes. The third verse, in which he recalls fantasizing about a purposefully obnoxious public wedding proposal, is funny but also clever in sliding right by a crucial detail: “if I had bought the ring.” It does a lot to explain why the song feels more ambivalent than melancholy – he clearly had his doubts before this point, but now he seems to be wondering if he’d made the commitment they’d be together, albeit probably unhappy.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Injury Reserve “Knees”

“Knees” is built around the opening chords of Black Midi’s “Sweater” but while the Black Midi song has a romantic grandiosity to it, Injury Reserve intentionally disrupt the rhythm to make it feels stumbling and awkward. This approach is brilliant for a song about grief – there’s scattered moments of grace, but it’s mostly the musical accompaniment to someone barely holding it together. Ritchie With A T’s vocal is mostly sung with a lovely, understated vulnerability but his performance also cracks apart, rambling off into verses that aren’t quite rapped but don’t quite register as spoken word either. But as much as this song willfully swerves into awkwardness the main thing that hits you and stays with you is the purity of the sentiment and the bits of beauty scattered throughout.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Pom Poko “Andrew”

Pom Poko are a band that clearly loves to keep a listener on their toes by constantly shifting up their arrangements and tossing a lot of sounds at you, and as such they run a high risk of producing cluttered, annoying songs. They sidestep this mainly by sticking to dynamic shifts that keep the focus on the core melodies of their compositions. “Andrew” has a particularly strong set of hooks, the best of which – “love is the, love is the, love is the…” – is ultimately just a very lovely bridge into the proper chorus. I am very fond of the way the band contrasts Ragnhild Fangel’s high breathy voice with lead guitar lines that feel a little rude and messy, these blurts of melody that feel spontaneous but are in fact deployed with canny precision.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Metronomy featuring Spill Tab “Uneasy”

The bass in “Uneasy” has a very mid-00s indie sound to it, enough to spark a pang of nostalgia for the “Young Folks” era. The tonalities may feel a little deja-vu but the meat of the song is more contemporary, at least in that Spill Tab’s vocals and lyrics are very much in line with a post-Billie/Lorde aesthetic. But whereas a lot of the singers in this lane settle for a rhythmic wispiness Spill Tab’s melodies are a bit more generous and “Uneasy” moves through a few very strong hooks that tangle loosely around the bass groove. The relaxed vocal performance contrasts nicely with the lyrical sentiment – she’s singing about a very intense attachment to someone who’s clearly keeping her at arm’s length, so even the most startling things she says comes across as totally level-headed. There’s a nice ambiguity here: Is she actually being totally reasonable, or does she not fully get that she’s being bad with boundaries?

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Ari Lennox “Pressure”

There’s a lot to find charming about “Pressure” – the pleasing curls of the melody, Ari Lennox’s coy delivery, the light and relaxed tone of the groove – but the thing that puts this song over the top for me is a small detail. It’s the way a small snippet of vocal sample is dropped in as sort of punctuation, an unintelligible but raw and raspy vocal that contrasts sharply with Lennox’s more silky vocal tone. It’s deployed brilliantly but sounds like it might have started as a happy accident, like some stray fragment that happened to fall at the right spot of a ProTools session. It’s an unexpected texture that grabs the ear and highlights the best qualities of Lennox’s voice while nodding towards a more uninhibited style as an aspirational state. In a song where Lennox is coaching a guy on exactly how to fuck her, it comes across like establishing a goal – “I want you to get me there.”

Buy it from Amazon.

Nessa Barrett “I Hope Ur Miserable Until Ur Dead”

“I Hope Ur Miserable Until Ur Dead” is another in a line of Gen Z pop-rock hits that use classic alt-rock dynamics as a backdrop for lyrics very rooted in social media-driven teenage drama. As the title suggests, this is a gloriously petty song and the heaviness, tension, and melodramatic angst of this music is perfectly suited to this musical approach. That said, it is funny to me as a person who grew up with alt-rock as a default setting of popular music, to hear these sounds fully absorbed into the drama of generic Popular Kids when the version of this from the ‘90s was always coming from a more adult perspective and/or was garbled up with abstract and poetic language. There’s absolutely zero room for ambiguity in this song, just earnest invective and unfiltered emotional brutality. It’s unapologetically immature in its sentiment, and the wild mood swings of the arrangement give the message a heavy punch and the shaky volatility of a sudden emotional tantrum.

Buy it from Amazon.

King Krule “Alone, Omen 3” (Live)

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate “Alone, Omen 3” from the experience of the early phase of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It arrived just before things started to go very badly; this particular live recording is from one of the few shows King Krule was able to perform before Europe went into lockdown mode. This song was fresh in the world when its sentiment – solitude as source of both agonizing loneliness and restorative/meditative self-care, a permission to let yourself feel your sadness, a promise that you are never truly alone – was more potent and relevant than its author could have ever anticipated. There’s no way a lot of the people who probably needed it actually heard it, but at least in my personal experience it was valuable and helpful.

“Alone, Omen 3” sounds like it’s slouching somehow, and there’s a sort of gentle tumbling quality to the arpeggiated guitar and the beat that’s like the lackadaisical gait of a person walking around aimlessly. The bits of exaggerated digital echo in this performance are a nice touch, I imagine it as bits of noisy reality poking through the haze of a loneliness that makes you feel like you’re in a bubble removed from the world. Archy Marshall’s vocal at the end of the song when he’s shouting the reassurance “you’re not alone, you’re not alone” comes across as more broken and desperate in this take, more collapsing in the face of futility than heroic on the album recording. In either case he’s still pushing against something to get this message out, fighting against a world where it’s too easy in the best of conditions to feel atomized and adrift.

Buy it from Amazon.

Kate Bollinger “Shadows”

“Shadows” is a song existing in the angst-ridden limbo of some kind of managed break-up in which both sides gradually remove themselves from each other orbit. Kate Bollinger sings in a gentle high register and sounds even-handed on the surface, but pretty much every line in this song is basically saying “this is a really dumb idea.” She’s an emotional fatalist and knows her patterns well enough to recognize where she’ll be too soft and when she’ll be too cold. She essentially flips the famous Aimee Mann line “you look like a perfect fit for a girl in need of a tourniquet” into a warning that she stop the metaphorical bleeding only so much before she’s going to have to untie it. The first portion of the song feels like deliberately dulling anxiety through a stoner haze, but there’s more clarity in the second half in which some ambiance lifts and the music shifts to slow acoustic chords and she sings about the inevitability of them eventually aligning to hate each other in the sweetest tone possible.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Facs “Strawberry Cough”

The lyrics of “Strawberry Cough” come across like phrases and ideas jotted down into a notebook in the midst of a paranoid depression wedged into a loose, shouty melody. The music itself manifests the misery in a plodding mechanical rhythm, eerie synthesizer ambiance, and sudden interjections of noise that feel like bits of infrastructure suddenly breaking down and falling apart. Despite all this ambivalence about form, musical chaos, and heavy goth atmosphere there’s a proper song at the core of this, a punchy anthemic thing with a chorus that could cut right through an arena should this band ever get the opportunity to play one.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Maston & L’éclair “Ghost”

On the surface “Ghost” is all placid kitsch, gently grooving with an array of vintage keyboards as if part of the goal was to soundtrack a Hollywood pool party. But just as Hollywood is famous for dressing up misery in mellow luxury, the lyrics sketch out a character who’s just barely getting by while regularly chasing highs and burning out. There’s some judgment in the lyrics but not so much in the way the soft and empathetic way they’re sung, or the way it leaves off on a sentiment that suggests this person’s being viewed with some awe, as if the way they’ve escaped from themselves is an aspirational state – “the lonely all want to know / how’d you fight it off for a year?”

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Chvrches “California”

“California” expresses a sort of existential buyer’s remorse, in which a move to California doesn’t quite deliver on all its promises and leaves a person unmoored, lonely, and feeling trapped by their own quest for success. Lauren Mayberry’s vocal conveys a bittersweet melodrama without getting too maudlin, partly because the arrangement does a good job of presenting a sense of stasis despite a pop dynamic that nudges the chorus towards an anthemic quality. They achieve a very smart balance here, honoring the emotion at the core of it while recognizing it as small and personal and rooted in some degree of privilege.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sprints “How Does the Story Go?”

Karla Chubb’s voice is conversational through much of “How Does the Story Go?,” hashing out her neuroses and relationship troubles in an Irish accent that makes her irritable and exhausted tone seem rather funny and charming. She seems bored by her own story as she speak-sings over a guitar riff that’s compressed enough to sound like an accidentally musical piece of machinery. Chubb basically scraps her own narrative to shift gears on the chorus, cutting away all the bullshit to scream “I’M NOT FINE!!!” in an effort to say what she really is thinking, and to maybe get a “hey, I’m not fine either” from someone else in earshot.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Anz featuring George Riley “You Could Be”

“You Could Be” sounds like Anz was deliberately trying to write something that could go in some kind of Pop Crush Song Hall of Fame. I think she nails her target here, mainly in how her arrangement nails the proper ratio of effervescent energy and neurotic mania. Lean too far in the former direction and it comes out sounding too ditzy and childish, go too far in the latter direction and you get…well, a lot of the last decade of pop music. But this comes closer to the ideal – “How Will I Know,” “Call Me Maybe” – and taps into the way the low-level anxiety of having a big dumb crush is what makes it suspenseful and fun.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Men I Trust “Serenade of Water”

Given that Men I Trust have been so good with mellow, sensual, and stoned music it’s hardly a surprise that they would pivot into the trip hop lane, or that they’d pull it off with such grace. “Serenade of Water” reminds me of two specific songs that I closely associate with a move towards a very “expensive hotel lobby” sort of sophistication in the late ‘90s – “Sugar Water” by Cibo Matto, and “La Femme D’argent” by Air. It’s all in the feel of it, mixing the hazy physicality of the former with the elegant keyboard noodling of the latter into something that feels relaxed and evokes a sort of low-key luxury. Jessy Caron’s vocals are exceptionally wispy and delicate, almost blending into the keyboard drones at some points but clear enough for the important lyrical sentiments – go slow on me, be my love, I’m where I belong – to guide your conscious mind through the pure feeling of it all.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Halsey “You Asked For This”

When it was announced that Halsey had made a full album in collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross I had expected something that was mostly electronic and heavy on dark atmosphere, mainly because I figured this was the lane she’d want to stay in. As it turned out I totally underestimated the extent to which Halsey would make the most of a Nine Inch Nails collaboration – If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is a varied set of songs that contrast sharply but click together perfectly in sequence. It’s ostensibly a pivot-to-rock album but I think Halsey has actually made better pop music with Nine Inch Nails than she has in the past, mainly because the dynamics of Reznor and Ross’ arrangements and song structures have pushed her to sing bolder, stronger melodies.

We were already in the process of gradually reorienting a lot of mainstream pop back towards rock structures but this Halsey record along with Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour push everything towards more overtly dramatic balladry and the high energy dynamics of alt-rock. It’s like a rebuke of Jack Antonoff’s neurotic half measures, in which rock and folk music is laundered through “modern” production styles so it might fit in better on radio or in the wilds of the algorithms. Halsey is certainly going hard in the other direction, fully embracing musical extremes in the interest of ear-catching, soul-bearing songs.

“You Asked For This” sets a plaintive vocal melody to a track that sounds like a more commercially-minded and drum-heavy variation on My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep.” Reznor and Ross hit just the right balance of driving rhythm and soft-focus noise here, evoking a romantic feeling that’s being warped and corroded through the sheer volume of the guitars on the track. Halsey’s lyrics describe a state of uncomfortable ambivalence about domesticity and being a woman who “has it all,” bored by the trappings of comfort but not quite enough to give it up. In this context the last verse, in which she lists off a new list of things she wants, hits like a cathartic declaration of desire and just some more things she could be bored with once it’s within her grasp.

Buy it from Amazon.

U2 featuring the Sun Ra Arkestra “When Love Comes to Town” (Live at the Apollo)

The original version of “When Love Comes to Town” was written entirely by U2 but performed as a duet with B.B. King, a move that displayed the band’s incredible clout at the time as well as their good sense to realize that they’d written a legit blues rock song that might sound like a cheap affectation if they’d recorded it by themselves. It’s not just that King lended authenticity to the sound, but that his voice – and his co-sign – made it easier to hear what U2 had written. Nothing was going to stop anyone from thinking U2 were indulgent and hubristic in this moment of their career, but anyone with generous ears would hear a song with fully realized potential that made the most of Bono’s earthy poet sensibility and King’s soulful howl.

This version of “When Love Comes to Town,” recorded live with the Sun Ra Arkestra at the Apollo in Manhattan thirty years after the release of Rattle & Hum, maintains the core of the song while taking it to another place entirely. U2 bring the temperature of the song down a bit, letting Bono’s voice simmer at the lower end of his register before letting him cut loose a bit more towards the end. This decision probably came from Bono’s vocal range diminishing a bit with age, but it does the song a lot of favors in terms of dramatic tension and emphasizing the more sensual qualities of his voice. It also gives a lot of space for the Arkestra to carry a lot of the expressive weight of the song, punctuating the song with strutting fanfare, trilling leads, and unexpected bursts of treble. The Sun Arkestra was an inspired choice for this occasion – it’s easy to imagine a more pedestrian horn arrangement for this song, but their accompaniment is more colorful and sophisticated than it strictly needs to be and brings out a character in the song beyond what U2 or King ever had in mind.

Buy it from U2.