Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Burial “Dark Gethsemane”

“Dark Gethsemane” is essentially a rave track but it plays out like cinema, with sequences as scenes moving gradually through escalating climaxes towards a bold and emotional conclusion. It’s an incredible flex, not just in terms of Burial’s technical mastery but in conveying a powerful message without a trace of corny didacticism. The song is always moving so the through line is mostly in the repetition of vocal samples. In the first half the message is “don’t get cynical,” pitched up enough to sound angelic but not change the wounded and weary inflection of the sampled singer. The second half of the piece is built around the phrase “we must shock this nation with the power of love!,” apparently lifted from a church sermon. The repetition here is both artful in iteration and totally blunt in effect, the syllables in SHOCK and POWER and LOVE cracking on impact every time. The velocity picks up in this section but the way Burial ratchets up the intensity still doesn’t quite prepare you for the conclusion. After some blaring horn fanfare the sample is stripped of effects and paired with bludgeoning rock bass line that changes the tone completely. The last minute is brutal but passionate, and earthy in a way that contrasts with the more ethereal qualities of the early portions of the track. It sounds like all the lights have come up, and it’s all suddenly quite immediate and real.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Faye Webster “Cheers”

The songs on Faye Webster’s last album Atlanta Millionaires Club all had a certain lightness to them, a gentle breeziness that came with its pedal steel atmosphere and low-key soul grooves. “Cheers,” the first song released from her follow up, is a hard swerve away from that vibe. Webster remains a warm and lovely presence on vocals, but the music has a nervy, off-balanced feel that’s mostly a result of an overdriven low end that seems to rattle and potentially shatter the more delicate instrumentation layered on top of it. Webster sounds cautious, and in the lyrics she comes off as someone doing her very best to be diplomatic and even-handed as she describes what sounds like a good relationship that’s stuck a rut. Her lyrics are direct and sincere, but she leaves a lot of room for subtext – her phrasing lets slip just enough uncertainty that it’s easy to imagine a parallel comic book thought balloon with an anxious interior monologue like “Uh, I think? Is this good? I want it to be good…but am I settling??”

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Alfa Mist featuring Lex Amor “Mind the Gap”

“Mind the Gap” opens with a clip of a train announcement, which makes me imagine Alfa Mist and Lex Amor’s performances as the interior monologues of two exhausted, weary people making their way home from a shift at night. The sort of people you can glance at from across the train and sense the weight on them as they stare off into space or try to rest their eyes in half-sleep. The keyboard and sax parts set a drowsy atmosphere, but it’s Lex Amor’s hushed and delicate voice that really sells the bleary-eyed angst. Her phrasing is remarkably nuanced, sliding seamlessly between rhythm and melody in every line while conveying a thousand shades of hopelessness, anxiety, irritation, and fear in just the tone of her voice before even keying into her actual words.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Hiatus Kaiyote featuring Arthur Verocai “Get Sun”

“Get Sun” is mostly slick, smooth, and easy on the ears. The string arrangement by Arthur Verocai comes in like a warm breeze, the rest of the track settles into a comfortable groove that’s tight enough to provide a danceable structure but loose enough to imply plenty of space to lounge around. Naomi Saalfield’s lead vocal resists the flow of the track in some spots, in some moments seeming to move against the tide of it if just to make it feel more profound when she lets up and glides along with it on the chorus. She’s dramaticizing the notion of the lyrics, which deal with learning to open up to joy, but I get the sense that she was responding to the feeling of the song rather than forcing the music line up conceptually with her words.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Billy Nomates “Petrol Fumes”

“Petrol Fumes” is a song about driving yourself crazy by falling in love and knowing you can’t do anything about it without the very likely possibility of blowing up the whole situation and losing a lot more than you would if you just kept your mouth shut and buried your feelings. This is hardly a novel topic but Tor Maries approaches it with nuance and a vocal performance that’s conveys a simmering lust and low-key nobility rather than communicating misery or self-destruction. The most interesting details Maries drops in the song portray the object of her affection as someone charismatic and popular, someone with a lot of suitors. “Well, I know the world is heavy and everyone seems to want a little piece of you,” she sings with a bit of a sigh, in awe of this person and unable to see herself as a particularly compelling option. The music, which sounds a little like a crossbreeding of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” and “I’m On Fire,” is all quick-paced tension that makes you feel her reach the point of snapping and shooting her shot: “Well, nothing’s ever gonna really be the same right after this…”

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Proper Nouns “Feel Free”

Proper Nouns’ debut album sounds so much like Ted Leo that it’s a little disconcerting, it’s almost like listening to the result of someone deciding to make their own Pharmacists record because it’s been 11 years since The Brutalist Bricks and they ran out of patience. This is not a complaint. I also would like to have a new Pharmacists record, and it’s a remarkable feat to write and perform music that sounds like Leo in style, structure, and content. It’s entirely possible that Proper Nouns songwriter Spencer Compton is not even familiar with Leo’s music, and if that was the case it’d be even more impressive for someone with a very similar voice and melodic sensibility to arrive at similar conclusions. But either way, I feel like it would be dishonest to not note the similarities – it’s both obvious and a major selling point.

Compton reaches for a Leo-esque falsetto on “Feel Free,” but it’s otherwise one of the least Pharmacists-y numbers on the record. The song has the swing of csoul but the rigid crispness of power pop, and a breeziness that contrasts with the neurotic tension of the lyrics without negating it. When the song reaches its climax on the bridge there’s some degree of catharsis – or at least airing of annoyance – and then, interestingly, the song sorta abruptly resolves on the breezy part.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

WheelUP featuring Bembe Segue “Fusion”

The aptly-titled “Fusion” is dense with great sounds and strong hooks and it all adds up to something that commands physical movements, but the part of that really gets me is what Danny Wheeler does with clips of rhythm guitar and blips of keyboards throughout the composition. I love the way it sounds like those parts on another plane from the rest of the track, like something dropped in or superimposed over the more solid whole. There’s a haphazard feel to it, like there’s some degree of raw improvision to these sampled elements – I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Wheeler manipulated them in a loose and gestural way, something deliberately unquantized in a track that’s otherwise quite tight in the bounce of its polyrhythms.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Heno “Creases”

The lyrics of “Creases” feel a bit like a personal essay set to a melody, with Heno starting with a thesis statement – “you can never know the extent of the pain someone’s going through” – and then outlining his experiences, his philosophy, and his plan for action in life. It’s thoughtful and clear-headed, but also direct in speaking about depression and trauma in a way that feels very particular to this moment in time. I’ve noticed that when musicians write about these topics now it’s almost always in plain and direct language that wouldn’t be too far off from, say, an Instagram caption. It makes some sense, in that being this clear about it is the most effective way of communicating these ideas and it’s a choice to be raw and vulnerable, but I do find myself yearning for more abstaction. I can imagine a version of this that isn’t quite so obvious in its language and plays more on the ambiguous feel of the melody and arrangement, which conveys a feeling of calm just on the other side of panic and chaos.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor “First of the Last Glaciers”

For a long time Godspeed You! Black Emperor specialized in compositions that evoked a crushing sense of dread and a certainty that the world was moving towards an unavoidable apocalypse in the near future. Their most recent work – 2017’s Luciferian Towers and the brand new G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END – mark an interesting tonal shift, presenting a more hopeful sound as the world becomes more overtly dystopian. To be clear, it’s not a hope that terrible things will not come, but rather than that now is the time for people to fight back against the powerful figures who have broken the world. I think these are meant to be inspirational works, grandiose compositions that respect an apocalyptic negativity but ask the listener not to give up or give in on the assumption that all is lost. The band has stated that the new album is about us all “waiting for the end,” but this time it’s not the end of all things. We’re waiting for the end of the things that are crushing humanity, waiting for a crash that can lead to something new.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Nick Hakim & Roy Nathanson “Cry and Party”

The music in “Cry and Party” is essentially the result of Nick Hakim doing a “yes, and…” with poetry written in advance by Roy Nathanson. Hakim’s composition complements the conversational flow of Nathanson’s words but also serves to illustrate his notions, conjuring up a big boisterous party with a slinky bass and cheerful horn groove while some pre-party sadness seems to linger in the air. Hakim and Nathanson evoke a wonderful atmosphere here, without using all that many elements they sketch out a space that feels very specific. I can picture this room, I can imagine people moving through it, and I can see the guy Nathanson is speaking as kinda static off in a corner.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Museum of Love “Cluttered World”

The groove of “Cluttered World” rumbles along in a holding pattern, a steady core for a song that’s otherwise fairly chaotic. The rogue element is mostly the piano performance, where even the most delicate parts seem haphazardly bashed out by someone with a good sense of which notes to hit but minimal respect for the instrument. Pat Mahoney’s vocal is nearly as wild a presence as he affects a Nick Cave-ish manic crooner energy, belting out key lines at the ends of verses for dramatic emphasis but also hitting less expected lines with raw emotional phrasing in a way that makes the song feel a bit shaky and drunken. It suits the song well – he is, after all, singing a strange love song about connection and affection in a world where everything is finite and the clock is always ticking.

Buy it from Amazon.

Izy “They Don’t Care”

Izy is a trio of young men from Melbourne who play neo-soul like grizzled veterans –always a crisp and tight pocket groove, but also loose enough to let every part feel breezy and spontaneous. “They Don’t Care” sounds like they were aiming for a very D’Angelo-on-Voodoo sort of feel and mostly got there, though they’re not as strong with atmosphere. Ryo Montgomery’s guitar is the focal point here, carrying the main melody with a warm tone and elegant but not terribly fussy jazz inflections. The lead vocal and harmonies are strong too, but whereas the music seems to flow quite naturally from the players, the vocals seem like they’re working a bit too hard to sound American. It’s hardly a deal breaker, much less a problem for this particular song, but I suspect they’ll level up if they can figure out how to perform in this style with more personal vocal styles.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Drea the Vibes Dealer “Save Me”

“Save Me” has the feeling of being unable to fall asleep in an incredibly comfortable bed. The feel of the track is loose and relaxed in a jazzy coffee shop sort of way, but the composition is spiked with bits of anxious energy and features a lead vocal that’s a bit like lying there unable to turn off your mind because it’s stuck in obsessive loops. Drea the Vibes Dealer is singing about a pure love that’s tied up in interpersonal complexities, her lyrics seem to move through the steps of logic and clauses while always coming back to simple, blunt messages. The backing vocals, apparently also performed by Drea, are a brilliant touch – a nod to girl group innocence, but also an echoey ambiance that complements the more spacey jazz elements of the song.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Gilligan Moss featuring Rebecca & Fiona “Ferris Wheel”

Gilligan Moss sound extremely familiar but are in fact something that feels very new to me – a sort of retro music seemingly made to bring back to the wistful twee vibes and aggressively cheerful grooves of the 2000s. The aesthetics on their debut record have not been gone for long, but just long enough to feel both potently nostalgic and vaguely wrong, like we’re not quite ready to reconnect with this sort of joyful innocent optimism just yet. “Ferris Wheel,” a song that feels particular to the early Obama era, is even premised on nostalgia on a lyrical level as Rebecca & Fiona reminisce on a failed romance in a carnival setting. The relationship isnt necessarily what’s being romanticized here, though – it’s more a yearning for a sense of mindless freedom and seemingly unlimited possibility. In that sense, it’s a perfect song for the waning days of the pandemic, as people impatiently wait to regain that feeling and jump impetuously into anything like good old-fashioned fun.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

India Jordan “And Groove”

“And Groove” contrasts two deliberately mechanical elements – fast and precise programmed beats and a vocal sample loop – with a keyboard part that feels loose and soulful, like India Jordan sat down and improvised a chord progression on the spot while the tape was rolling. I’m not knowledgeable enough to identify the make and model but I love the tone they are using, a bit like Fender Rhodes but not quite as expensive-sounding? The finale of the song is unexpected but appropriate – the beat and loops drop out and you just hear the keyboard unaccompanied, playing out the chords for an extra 30 seconds.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Sofia Kourtesis “By Your Side”

One bit of film critic wisdom I hear repeated a lot is the idea that a movie shouldn’t overtly reference a far better film because it’s basically asking the audience to think about how much better than film is than what they’re watching. I don’t think that logic totally applies to music – nods to other songs in the form of interpolations and samples mostly just integrate warm feelings towards the source material into one’s reaction to the new song. The more analogous thing is probably when an artist with bad or middling material covers much better artists, since you have more of a stark contrast of their attempt at songwriting and the compositional talent of someone else.

I bring this up because one of the several samples floating around in Sofia Kourtesis’ “By Your Side” is a man announcing The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It’s not a sample of the song, just someone mentioning the existence of this widely beloved pop classic. This ought to trigger the problem that happens with referentiality in film, but it doesn’t – for one, Kourtesis’ own composition is very beautiful and highly effective as a dance track, so it succeeds on terms entirely unrelated to The Flamingos’ song. The nod to “I Only Have Eyes for You” doesn’t undermine anything about “By Your Side.” Being reminded of the Flamingos song in a non-musical way has the effect of drawing a line between these two seemingly unrelated works, highlighting the way these two very different songs share a similar sort of heavenly romantic ambiance.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Tune-Yards “Sometime”

“Sometime” is built on a beat that’s steady and forceful but has a loose bounce to it, like someone dribbling a basketball down the court. The bass sounds slippery and sneaky, like it’s trying to hide behind the beat but it’s far too big to be obscured by it. In all this, there’s Merril Garbus’ voice, or more accurately, her voices – the high end swirling and soaring like gusts of wind, the low end more closely tethered to the rhythm, not quite rapping. The aesthetic is very recognizable as Tune-Yards but with anything that would register as “twee” removed so it’s reduced to blunt rhythm and a thin atmosphere of harmony. I was a little put off by the extreme neuroses of the more recent Tune-Yards records but “Sometime” seems to be reacting against that somewhat as Garbus sings about developing a sense of historical context for the present, confronting the uselessness of a reflexive pessimism about the state of the world, and being able to forgive yourself for your complicity in bad things without necessarily letting yourself off the hook.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Yard Act “Fixer Upper”

On a groove level “Fixer Upper” has the twitchy and anxious brutality of The Fall, but in the place of Mark E. Smith’s abstracted invective you get an overly cheerful guy rambling on about his new house in the suburbs and demonstrating himself to be exactly the kind of well-to-do fool who would, say, vote yes on Brexit. It’s a joke, obviously, but it’s played very dry and James Smith’s commitment to the bit of embodying a clueless dork with money to burn makes him come across more like Steve Coogan than anyone in the post-punk lineage.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Shame “Nigel Hitter”

“Nigel Hitter” is a song that’s caught between the exhaustion and wear-and-tear of doing something all the time and the dullness of doing nothing all the time, a jarring lifestyle transition that was once mainly available to touring musicians but suddenly is relatable to a much larger portion of people on the planet. The fun of this song is that the music doesn’t try to convey either sort of tedium described in the lyrics, but rather a burst of energy and inspiration on the other side of the grind. The rhythms are energized, the chorus hits like a bolt of unexpected joy.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

The Cool Greenhouse “Alexa!”

“Alexa!,” a perky and snarky song about Amazon’s ubiquitous personal assistant AI, is right on the edge of novelty song status. The humor in the song is mostly observational or sly references to bugs in Amazon’s system, but as the song moves along it’s more like a biting critique of the product and its cultural implications than just a joke. The small and silly tone of the song is a Trojan horse for darker ideas about pandering to the wealthy, technology-induced cultural hegemony, and nonstop corporate surveillance, just as the benign and often malfunctioning device is a Trojan horse for Amazon’s more ambitious plans for gradually taking over everything it possibly can. Tom Greenhouse’s vocal performance is perfectly balanced here – he sells the quips, but doesn’t lean to hard into the subtext. He trusts you to get it.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Dry Cleaning “Strong Feelings”

Florence Shaw’s voice is cold and deadpan as she recites her words, which are not sung or rapped, but certainly performed with more musicality than “spoken” would suggest. She fits perfectly into her band’s grooves, which sound like music to play while driving down a highway in some kind of post-apocalyptic horror film. The tension in the sound comes and goes, but there’s always a feeling of blank-eyed forward momentum.

Just calling this song “Strong Feelings” is a little funny – yes, she’s writing about a powerful attraction to someone, but that’s all buried beneath momentary distractions, self-deprecating asides, and the outside world becoming so awful that it ruins the mood entirely. The best example here is the way the direct and unguarded phrase “kiss me” is quickly blurted out after her droll reading of the line “I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours.” Shaw is good at conveying the mundane details of furtively hiding her feelings, but leaving her reasons to your imagination. Why is she repressing this, what is she afraid of? Probably the usual stuff, but presented in this way something that ordinarily is just about low self-esteem can come off as sort of darkly glamorous.

Buy it from Bandcamp.