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.”
Kerry Alexander’s voice is precisely calibrated to deliver even measures of wry humor and frank emotion in her songs, the recognizable point of view of someone who’s in touch with their feelings enough to be quite blunt about what they want and need but has the appropriate distance to see exactly what’s funny about the slapstick collisions of those wants and needs. “Detroit Basketball” opens with a killer line – “gotta find a man who deserves my kissing and doesn’t blow my money on the Detroit Pistons” – but briskly moves from the punchline to a resolution to move on and a chorus that delights in freedom, even if it’s the direct result of embarrassment. Like all the best Bad Bad Hats songs the structure is a sturdy and efficient sequence of strong hooks, the result of a thoughtful craft-oriented band, but it’s played with just enough casual cool that the vibe is not precious or try-hard. Everything about the song is just-so, the way any interesting person you know is essentially dialed in to a specific disposition.
Anna Fox Rochinski’s Cherry is a perfect example of the distiction between a debut and a solo debut – the songs display all the confidence of a seasoned professional, but also the enthusiasms and undiluted idiosycracies of a musician who’s no longer confined by the democratic processes of being part of a band. Cherry sounds like a very deliberate album, the kind where it’s a safe guess that each song went through many revisions, arrangements, and mixes before arriving at something close to perfect. This approach can suffocate some material but Rochinski gives her crisp, tight arrangements enough negative space to breathe and give her expressive voice some room to move.
“Everybody’s Down” is a particularly strong showcase for her vocals, which seem to glide around her grooves as she makes her way up from the lower end of her register on the verses up to near the top of her range on the chorus. I’m not quite clear on the POV in the lyrics – the lines about offers and contracts are simultaneously specific and vague – but I love the way the refrain “who supports this brand of violence? / leave it to me to get to the bottom of it” comes across as a joke at the expense of clueless and privileged white people who mean well but rarely offer more than shallow gestures when it comes to trying to help anyone but themselves. It’s hard for me not to take the song as satire of complicit people waking up to a reality outside their bubble, but it’s not so brutal to have no sympathy for its subject. If anything, it feels like it’s meant for a self-aware audience who’s experienced some version of this awkward awakening.
“Let’s Sing, Let’s Dance” is built around a piano part that conveys an ambiguous feeling – from some angles it’s diluted melancholy, from others it’s more like diluted joy. The chords signal the calculated elegance of a hotel piano bar, but the actual tone is obviously synthetic and likely the output of a cheap keyboard. Park Hye Jin embraces the neither-here-nor-there quality of this part, essentially making it a neutral state that the rest of the song is trying to either nudge into something else with beats and bass, or escape through the proposal of the title – to sing, to dance. The composition never moves beyond this vibe but as an album opener of a dance record it’s very promising. It sets the scene for more ecstatic music to come while presenting a very recognizable empty but yearning feeling.
Snapped Ankles, a group of anonymous British musicians who dress up in what looks like ghillie suits designed by Matthew Barney, have an elaborate mythology around their new record which involves a character called The Cornucopian. This is their avatar of the capitalist glutton, the hedonistic striver who reaches for material luxuries they can hardly afford. The character is given voice in this song, a crazed carnival tune that sounds like it should be signifying a good time but actually feels sweaty, paranoid, and unbalanced. The vocals strongly resemble that of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith in tonality, phrasing, and sentiment as they spit bitterly sarcastic lines such as the opening “it’s a great time to be alive if only you’ve got some funds.” The ideas they’re working with could come off a bit too didactic in lesser hands but this lot stays on the right side of satire and wisely place their greatest emphasis on rhythm and texture. You never need to pay attention to the words or look into their context to understand exactly what kind of bad – but still fun! – vibe they’re putting across here.
“No Great Endings” is a fairly straightforward song that feels a bit bent and warped by the strange gravity of Zoee’s voice, which sounds something like a depressed faerie. You mainly hear this in a keyboard part that seems to wobble like jello at some points and in others more like a crude caricature of a harp. But it’s there in the rest of the arrangement too, which moves with a solid groove but projects a dazed and detached vibe. The lyrics are full of poetic descriptions in the verses, but chorus is quite plain and direct: “Where to put this pain? / It’s always the same.” The emphasis on pragmatism is interesting – she doesn’t sound like she wants bury it or deny the feeling, but is jaded enough to half-expect more is on the way. It’s less like an expression of denial and more like imagining a plan to carefully catalog it all in some kind of emotional library.
“Chaeri” starts at a hot simmer but gradually builds up to a rolling boil, incrementally building the intensity of its longing and grief until it’s overwhelming and cathartic. Magdalena Bay, always great students of the history of modern pop, seem to be deliberately paying tribute to Robyn on this track but I think they delve into a darker emotional palette here. They’re also going into a very different sort of relationship drama, a platonic friend breakup that if anything is far more damaging and agonizing than the end of most romantic relationships. Mica Tenenbaum sings about feeling guilty, for not understanding that she was hurting this other person, for not getting she was being a “bad friend.” She’s torn up by complicated and conflicting feelings – she’s defensive, she’s self-flagellating, she’s empathetic, she’s concerned about their well-being and mental health. The lyrics start from the position that it’s all done and there’s nothing left to repair, and the pleading chorus is all coulda-woulda-shoulda. But she doesn’t sound like she’s entirely given up hope for reconciliation, even when that hope comes with the understanding that she must suffer for it: “Better crucified than alone.”
I’ve heard so many songs over the years that are about someone getting mixed signals from someone they’re attracted to and just wanting clarity on the matter and it’s interesting how such a basic idea can be interated in so many ways, this nuanced spectrum of experiencing the same thing. Navy’s “LMK” falls on the more relaxed end of things, and not just for its supremely chill Caribbean vibes and a central keyboard part that’s like a sonic command to loosen up one’s muscles. Navy seems concerned about her situation in as much as she’d much rather skip to uncomplicated romance, but she comes off as self-assured and not especially overeager to force something that’s not meant to be. She’s singing as a person with a very clear idea of what she wants, but is wise enough to not want a compromised version of that. There’s versions of this song where it’s like the singer could explode with anxiety at any moment, but here’s Navy just patiently singing “if you want me, let me know…”
Pareja & Lupe, an Argentinian duo who began their collaboration during the pandemic without ever having met in person, specialize in energetic dance music with a heavy, drowsy atmosphere. It’s an odd contrast that totally works for them as both aspects of the tracks emphasize sensuality and physicality. My grasp of Spanish isn’t great but as far as I can glean, the lyrics are specifically about physicality – the body in motion, dancing as an expression that doesn’t require an audience. “Nuestra Forma” makes sense as dance music made during lockdown, a moody and slightly spaced out banger that’s built for solitude but would nevertheless feel complete in a crowded room.
You could create a conspiracy theorist pinboard for Sault where you can connect the names of everyone involved, from the primary producer Inflo to regular singer Cleo Sol to an extended network of collaborators including Little Simz and Jack Peñate on the new record. You could try to crack the code of their oblique album titles and minimalist art, or speculate as to the politics that drive their lyrics and distribution models. But despite them creating a natural curiosity gap with their deliberately mysterious shtick, thinking about this misses the obvious point that they clearly want this music to be faceless and to speak for itself.
“Bitter Streets,” a song credited to Inflo, Cleo Sol, and Jack Peñate, is Sault in mellow and meditative mode. The arrangement is straight-up stunning – womb-warm bass gliding around a crisp pocket beat, a choral part that sounds like it’s being played on an old Melotron, and a string section part that’s almost but not quite understated. The music nods in the direction of melodrama but doesn’t go there, evoking a very movie mood without straining for a “cinematic” feel. Sol’s vocal performance is similarly low-key, investing her lament for a friend who “fell in love with the streets” with a world-weariness but not a heavy grief. She’s not singing like someone who is surprised by anything that’s happened. If anything, she sounds bored by the same story, over and over.
Laura Mvula holds back on the verses of this song, singing at the low end of her register in a rhythmic monotone that slips right into the groove but conveys a slightly deadened feeling. She’s waking up, she’s remembering being with this other person, and now just feels a lack. It sets the scene, but mostly is just to provide contrast for when she sings in her fullest, most passionate voice in the chorus, back up by a very ‘80s R&B horn fanfare. It’s like the movie trick of changing color saturation or film stock to signal a drastic mood shift – the verses here are too rich and Michael Jackson-ish to come across as black and white, but think of it like cutting from a muted palette to bold, bright, super saturated colors. She sounds confident and joyful on the chorus, expressing absolute pleasure in submission – “I’m a slave to the sound of your command.” As Trent Reznor put it years ago, happiness in slavery.
“I Wanna Be A Dog” could’ve simply been a Weird Al style parody of the Iggy and the Stooges classic “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” but Colleen Green really goes all the way with the conceit, essentially using that simple joke as the starting point for an extended metaphor for discussing her neuroses. Green has always been at her best when approaching anxieties and hang-ups with a bit of self-effacing humor, resulting in songs that are open about issues without the sort of ultra-earnest seriousness that pushes so much contemporary “let me tell you about my psychological issues” music into full-on cringe territory. Green’s song craft here is excellent too, piling on simple breezy hooks with a casual ease. The crisp production keeps it light and clean, and also has the benefit of calling attention to her similarities to like-minded ‘90s alt-rockers Juliana Hatfield, That Dog, and Belly.
