Sleigh Bells is a band, but they’re also a blueprint and a prototype of what rock music could become. In this way “Justine Go Genesis” – a glorious hybrid of Slayer riffs and Spice Girls pop decked out with breakneck drum & bass beats and a stray organ parts straight out of ? And the Mysterians – is both classic Sleigh Bells and next-level Sleigh Bells, pushing everything to a new degree of ultra-hype frenzy. It’s faster, harder, catchier, brighter. It’s a thing that’s made to jolt you, to make you feel more alive and in the moment. I hear it as a rejection of the world as it is, a refusal to live on anyone else’s dreary terms even if doing so means attempting to force your fantasy into reality. The point of view in the lyrics certainly presents dodging boredom and misery as a life-or-death prospect, and every beat and twist and turn in the song feels like you’re right there with her outrunning some awful fate.
Italia 90 fit into the ongoing wave of bands from the UK and Ireland mixing half-spoken vocals with post-punk derived aesthetics, but vocalist Les Miserable’s approach is noticeably less wry or literary than a lot of his peers. In “Borderline” he sounds abrasive and hectoring as he repeats lines about making cowardly and lazy decisions that lead one to a misery that just gets deeper. Is he talking to you? Is he talking to himself? Is he talking about society, man? Could be all of the above! I like that lyrics as blunt as this could still come across as ambiguous – it’s not even clear whether this is meant to be a show of tough love or just rubbing salt in someone’s wounds.
“Deepfake” feels both zoned out and twitchy with paranoia, contrasting but not exactly contradictory states of mind that suit a song about learning your image has been altered without your consent. There’s a feeling of powerful alienation in this music, not just from one’s sense of identity and autonomy, but from anyone else. Singing half the song in French emphasizes the sense of detachment here, as though making statements like “my body is no longer mine” in a language besides English might keep the feeling more private. The song simmers in anger but never boils over into rage, settling more into a feeling of shell-shocked alienation as the English lyrics offer a harsh judgment along with a bitter shrug.
David Crosby has been extremely successful as a musician for well over 50 years now but here he is, truly living his dream as one of the most supremely Danpilled humans on the planet by recording a song with lyrics written by his hero Donald Fagen. Fagen only contributed lyrics to “Rodriguez for a Night,” the composition itself is Crosby and his son James Raymond doing their best to emulate a Steely Dan vibe. I think they were probably aiming for a Gaucho feel but actually landed a little closer to the airtight funk of Two Against Nature, but that works out just fine as Fagen’s lyrics about a guy fantasizing about being the guy who stole his girlfriend feels closer to the hapless post-midlife crisis caricatures on that record. The song works very well, particularly as a showcase for the more soulful end of Crosby’s silky vocal style, but also serves as proof that Fagen’s lyrical aesthetic is unmistakably recognizable even outside the context of his own songwriting.
Denzel Curry is blessed with a perfect voice for rap, this perfect blend of a booming and commanding Chuck D tone with the nimble vocal dexterity of a Raekwon or Ghostface, and the raw energy of a young LL Cool J or Lil Wayne. He pulls this all together without sounding too much like a throwback, and with a persona that’s all his own. Charlie Heat’s track for “The Game” allows Curry to flex his chops and charisma over an aggressive but very bouncy synth bass part that has the energy of cartoon violence. The details are what really make this work – eerie hums dropping in and out of the mix, distant background shouts in the chorus, percussion accents that sound like clacking screwdrivers on metal pipes. It’s just enough for the song to feel vibrant and dynamic, but not too much to make it feel choked and top-heavy.
Modest Mouse is not a band known for optimistic lyrics, but on “The Sun Hasn’t Left” Isaac Brock plays against type by taking stock of the world as we’ve known it in the recent past and offering a sentiment that boils down to “yeah, things are fucked but the world is still going.” It’s the kind of positivity that comes from a mind that’s predisposed to negativity, enough so to be able to tell the difference between problems and absolute catastrophes. There’s no promise that things will always be okay or that collective luck won’t eventually run out, just that it hasn’t happened yet and so you need to embrace what’s still good. Brock’s tone is weary but thoroughly kind, his voice poking through an arrangement of dense beats and a very artificial mirimba hook like a little flower growing through cracks in concrete. He never sounds preachy or like anyone but a guy who at bare minimum knows enough to tell you that a life spent doom scrolling is no life at all.
GFOTY is no longer affiliated with PC Music but her style remains garish and gleefully artificial in the grand PC Music tradition, complete with funhouse mirror versions of mainstream pop dynamics and gender performance. “Brand New Bra” is all vulgar camp, with her singing exclusively about having huge tits in ways that start off fairly run-of-the-mill but end up in more overtly goofy territory like proclaiming they make car honk sounds when you squeeze them. At the beginning it sounds like a song that’s going for “body positivity” but as it moves along it feels more like presenting the body as something inherently silly and weird, particularly in a world where some body parts end up being wildly commercialized and fetishized. I don’t think this song is pushing back on that so much as just having a laugh about it, like a horny cartoon turned into a song.
The English duo Barney Artist and Mr. Jukes are unabashedly retro on their record The Locket, which is so devoid of recent trends in hip-hop that it sounds like it could have plausibly been released around the late ‘90s alongside The Love Movement, Things Fall Apart, and Black Star, or maybe a little further up the timeline with Dilla and early Kanye West. No one should take this as anything but a compliment from me – novelty and innovation is nice, but so is working extremely well within established traditions. “Check the Pulse” is exceptionally warm and easy going, and the vocal performances keep up the kind vibe, particularly in the final third when the mic gets passed every line with the casual coolness of vintage Beastie Boys or A Tribe Called Quest.
Marcey Yates and XOBOI are on a similar wavelength, but their reference points are a bit up the timeline – Outkast, Kanye, Dilla/Slum Village. “Ghosttown District” glides by on a lush, slightly zonked-out groove, with a vocal sample that seems to blow by like puffs of smoke. Yates and Mars Black fit snuggly into the pocket in their verses, coming off like steady constants in an arrangement that’s very dynamic for something that feels so much like lying down.
“HB2U” is a type of rap song I’m always going to be partial to, the kind where sentimentality and nostalgia is conveyed musically through somewhat syrupy vintage soul samples and a slow, nodding beat. Isaiah Rashad is certainly reminiscing in his lyrics but he’s at best ambivalent about the memories he’s conjuring, and the real focus in the song is on taking note of old patterns in himself and his family and using it as motivation to move on. The song is split into two parts – the first section centered specifically on memories, the second serving more as a conclusion to the broader themes of the album as Rashad struggles with sobriety and acclimates to living outside his comfort zone both literally and figuratively. The second section is what really gets me, particularly the way Rashad repeats the line “you are now a human being” is his soulful but defeated rasp. He sounds like he knows he should feel more jubilant about surviving and getting to start over again, but more than anything he just seems exhausted by the effort and knowing how much work is ahead of him.
Zella Day sounds like a very big fan of Lana Del Rey. You can’t get around the Lana in her – it’s in her vocal delivery, it’s in her wry Pinterest-board lyrics, it’s in her melodic phrasing. It’s not a big surprise given that Day has collaborated directly with her in the past, she’s clearly more of a simpatico fellow traveler than a deliberate clone. The interesting thing about “Girls” is that Day takes the LDR aesthetic to a different place by applying it to the sort of chill summer fun song Del Rey often gestures in the general direction of but is too committed to dramatic gloom to ever actually do. “Girls” is very breezy but also slightly off-kilter, just enough to make it clear that the vision of comfort, success, and uncomplicated sexuality communicated in the lyrics is a fantasy or a facade. Of course, the aspirational part of the song is foregrounded right there in the chorus – “girls / I want to be / girls.”
“Diamond Studded Shoes” is an overtly political song about pushing for improvements despite knowing that your efforts will likely be in vain, but despite that tense and dreary lyrical perspective the music has a loose and relaxed feel. Yola is working at a very ‘70s intersection of country and rock, and while there’s also some gospel and soul in the mix she’s calling back to an era where those elements hadn’t quite been bred out of rock music just yet. The balance of vibe and message really works here – it deflates some potential preachiness or self-seriousness, lures the listener in with some musical honey, and places the emphasis on the notion that a life of activism and righteousness isn’t about big moments so much as being aware and vigilant on a daily basis. The looseness of the track and the relatively chill tone isn’t a contradiction so much as communicating an informal every day feeling.
Oh, just imagine my incredible surprise upon learning that this excellent bass-heavy groover from the UK was created in collaboration with Inflo, the producer of Sault. I could’ve just fell over! Jungle have a much brighter and optimistic vibe than anything else I’ve heard from Inflo but the approach to bass and percussion is so distinctive – I’m sure there’s something technical about it, something in the mic’ing or mixing or EQing, but that’s beyond me. “Talk About It” hits on a purely physical level – bass that instantly shakes you, drum breaks that slam like Big Beat but with a more organic sound that bypasses the deliberate tackiness of that genre. The shift towards psychedelia feels very Chemical Brothers to me, but the grounding in gospel keeps it closer in tone to Inflo’s usual work and makes it feel like a spiritual successor to The Joubert Singers’ classic “Stand on the Word.”
“Sweet Freedom” requires a contemporary listener to surrender to the extreme ‘80s-ness of it all. Even relative to the most egregiously corny ‘80s pop this song is a bit extra with its relentlessly perky funk and a recording style so precise and heavily synthesized that the percussion, bass, and keyboard tones all sound rather uncanny. The song was composed by English songwriter Rod Temperton – if you don’t know his name you’ve certainly heard his music as he’s the sole writer of the Michael Jackson classics “Rock with You” and “Thriller” among other late ’70s to mid ‘80s post-disco hits – and everything about the track is basically the Temperton aesthetic pushed to an auteurist extreme.
“Sweet Freedom” is basically a crew of studio ringers executing Temperton’s musical ideas, unfettered by the creative whims of a client artist. The track is dense with intersecting rhythms and melodies without feeling too heavy, and Temperton is so effective at directing your attention to the lead melodies that more the more rhythmic keyboard elements like the galloping chords on the chorus can feel relatively subtle in the mix. The song wasn’t written specifically for Michael McDonald but it’s hard to imagine it being better with anyone else at the center as he matches the track’s odd blend of primary color boldness and easy-going breeziness. Who else can seem to bellow like a grizzly bear but make it feel like a whisper?
Temperton was such a genius of funk and composition that his lyrics can seem purely functional, accessible and inoffensive phrases that simply carry the melody. But as I’ve obsessively listened to “Sweet Freedom” over and over in the recent past I’ve inevitably paid more attention to what McDonald is actually singing and I can’t help but imagine it as the ramblings of a very earnest guy who has just done enough cocaine to feel like he’s grooving on some deeper truths and clicking into some new, vague ambition. The whole song exists in the moment of epiphany – inspirational and aspirational, but also irrational. It’s a moment of intense self-belief and optimism extended, amplified, and frozen in time. McDonald sings “there’s no turning back from what I’m feeling,” and while he very well might come down from that feeling within an hour, he sings it like there’s no chance he could be wrong.
Steven Tyler doesn’t ever come across like a loser in his songs, even when he’s singing from the position of a guy who’s been dumped and can’t figure out how to move on in “What It Takes.” He’s always the cool guy, the sexed-up fun guy, the guy who’s rough around the edges but always has a high status. He’s a rock star and he’s always got a party, and he’s always inviting you to come along. His problem in “What It Takes” is not so much that he’s been dumped but that this happens so rarely to him that he doesn’t even know how to process it. He’s so used to being on the other end of the dynamic that not getting what he wants is somewhat alien to him. This could be kinda gross, but it’s not – the arrangement is rooted in blues but it’s played in a bright major key, and while Tyler sings with feeling he’s also giving us his usual razzle dazzle, so it’s more hammy and theatrical than genuinely melancholy. It’s more like he’s indulging in the idea of sadness than spiraling into actual despair. Maybe it’s supposed to be that thing of “let’s acknowledge this feeling, honor it, and move on.”
“What It Takes” is from Pump, the hugely popular follow-up to Aerosmith’s comeback album Permanent Vacation. That record re-established the band as hitmakers with the help of outside songwriters Jim Vallance and Desmond Child and while the soppy power ballad “Angel” has a touch of desperation to it, the band mostly just sounded like a brighter version of themselves with major late ‘80s studio gloss. Aerosmith fit in well with the hair metal party rockers of that era but the music was more complementary than similar, and the songs on Pump in particular have a high degree of ambition and sophistication that it’s easy to forget when the most memorable bits are just big dumb rock n’ roll. “What It Takes” is exceedingly warm and rich, a gloriously decorated dessert of a song that would have quite good but far less remarkable with a more standard rock arrangement, and possibly very bad with a more maudlin and earnest power ballad arrangement.
“Love In An Elevator” is a good example of studio excess of Pump working in Aerosmith’s favor. It’s a swaggering rock song about fucking on the job that starts with the line “workin’ like a dog for the boss man” and even attempts a winking double entendre on the word “fax.” It’s a song with some sledgehammer hooks, a dirty riff, and a Penthouse Letters lyrical conceit, and you really could just stop right there and you’d probably have a hit. But they just keep upping the ante, piling on harmonies and pushing the song higher until you get to the point where they basically decide to turn this horny himbo anthem into their “A Day In the Life.” It’s musically satisfying but also totally absurd, it makes the joke of the song funnier but also presents Tyler as someone who is horny on like, a cosmic or mythological level. I don’t know if anyone can relate to this or even if it’s necessarily aspirational, it’s more like listening to this is communing with some kind of raunchy godhead.
“Lying Legal Horror Lawyers” is the kind of politically-charged punk song that gives you enough scraps of information to pick up on what the band is trying to lay out, but not enough connective tissue in the lyrics to get, like, a nuanced position. But nuanced positions are besides the point – this is about using the energy of this music as a vehicle for venting frustration, and in this case it’s “men’s rights” activists, the courts, and attempts to take children away from their mothers. Just going on the vibes and the tone of Hannah D’Amato’s yelps and shouts here it’s clear enough that their basic position is that “men’s rights” are laughable, the courts are embarrassing, and the band is siding with moms broadly or possibly even universally. You get the sense she’s reacting to a particular story, but that’s lost in the abstraction of the twitchy groove and punchy chorus. In any context we can all agree that lying legal horror lawyers suck. Fuck those guys!
A few months ago I wrote about the boom of English bands playing post-punk style music with half-spoken vocals and I wish I could have retroactively worked Wet Leg into that piece because their debut single is truly one of the best specimens to come out of this aesthetic thus far. “Chaise Longue” cruises along on a slightly twitchy groove that gives off a “let’s go out for a joyride…but oh my god, what if we get caught???” energy, and features a vocal performance by Rhian Teasdale that’s coy and mysterious, but overtly sexual. A lot of the lyrics feel like Teasdale deliberately writing things that are theoretically subtle in saying something very horny, but actually landing on something that’s more lewd and lascivious. (“I went to school and I got a degree / all my friends call it ‘the big D’,” “Is your muffin buttered? / Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?”) The tone is playful, even more so when they start flirting with theoretical audience members in a deadpan tone, but there’s just enough ambiguity and vague menace to in the track to keep it from feeling cutesy or like a novelty. It’s more of a trickster thing – they’re clearly fucking with you, and they’re very good at it.
“Fault” plays a classic post-punk/goth trick of aiming for absolutely epic melodrama but undercutting any of the preciousness that might go with that with blunt instrumentation that signals brute force and a total absence of sentimentality. Jo Bevan’s vocal here sounds quite a bit like Siouxsie Sioux and that totally works for the song, as she successfully channels her fierceness as well as her potent undercurrents of anxiety and dread. The lyrics are basically about living in a horrible apartment situation that offers shelter but no comforts of home but it’s mostly a jump-off for more philosophical musings about whether or not your problems are the result of passivity or actively making bad decisions.
Clairo’s voice usually sounds small and fragile, an impression exacerbated by production moves that wash her out in reverb or multitrack her vocals so it’s like musical baklava, lots of thin layers not quite adding up to anything you could call dense or firm. The smallness feels like a key part of what’s being expressed in any given song – it’s vulnerability, it’s passivity, it’s a sense of helplessness. “Amoeba” is a bit of an outlier in her small discography in that there’s a little more density and confidence in her vocal than usual as well as more groove and sway to the arrangement. The vibe feels a bit Todd Rundgren to me, the majestic but cozy melancholy of a full-time introvert. The lyrics sketch out some lovely specific images of suburban malaise but there’s some ambiguity at the core of it, as it’s hard to tell whether she’s addressing someone else or singing in the second person. “Aren’t you glad you reside in a hell and in disguise?” definitely stings more if it’s self-directed, and I’m inclined to think that’s the case here.
Tyler, the Creator spends pretty much the entirety of “Massa” explaining himself to the listener, but with a sort of begrudging attitude – it’s like he can’t tell why he wants to explain himself to you, or why you’d need him to do that in the first place. This is a core tension of a lot of his music, this push-and-pull between wanting to be understood and resenting the implications of that desire. For a song that’s spilling guts about his motivations and pivotal moments in his life he seems very guarded, like he’s more interested in shaping your idea of him and setting the record straight on misconceptions about him and his class origins. The thing that jumps out at me in the lyrics is how many lines explain the context of his previous records – they’re not just mile markers for his personal growth, but clearly the focus of his entire life.
And of course this is the case for a auteur rapper/producer. “Massa” feels as powerful and confessional as it does in large part for Tyler’s expert framing of his own vocal. The production is crisp but the drum loop and organ parts feel just a little grimy, the arrangement is sparse but gets gradually more dense as the drama builds. Nothing is too ham-fisted, nothing is too subtle, nothing gets in the way of the nuances in his voice.
“On My Mind” gives off a vibe of opulent sadness, a glamorous misery befitting a gorgeous celebrity sulking around a luxurious estate under overcast skies. The music evokes an aspirational gloom but Snow Aalegra’s vocal is more down to earth in its deliberately understated phrasing. You can feel her restraint on the mic, and it carries over to her lyrics – she’s hung up on a relationship that has ended very badly, but doing everything she can to keep her resentment and jealousies at a low simmer. She’s indulging in the cinematic sadness of the music but the part she’s playing is that of a woman trying to hold it together and making an effort to control her feelings. The tension at the heart of the song is that she can’t quite get her brain to cooperate, she can’t stop thinking about this no matter how much she tells herself stuff like “never having closure is the reason I’m open.”
