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Overcoats “Apathetic Boys”

“Apathetic Boys” is perky electro-rock song by a duo of young women that roasts dull and condescending indie guys, and claims some power and agency by declaring these men entirely irrelevant. It reminds me quite a bit of another song by a female duo that I wrote up here 15 years ago called “Indie Boys (Don’t Deserve It)” by the Queens of Noize. They are both aggressive but tongue-in-cheek songs about the same sort of guys, but the differences between the songs say a lot about their respective eras.

The Queens of Noize track is extremely mid-00s – very rooted in the British landfill indie scene of the day, and borne of the self-consciously raunchy and bratty post-Vice aesthetic. They acknowledge the sexual impropriety of the indie boys but make a joke of it – “coppin’ a feel, now you got a record deal” – and the best they can do to shame them for it is to say a snarky line like “it’ll still take a sack of pills to get laid.”

Overcoats’ song is quite obviously the product of the late ‘10s – the humor is less bawdy but more trollish, full of little jabs meant to evoke a “U mad?” response. Whereas the Queens of Noize admit to some measure of lust for these dopey rock guys, Overcoats express a casual meme-ified misandry and seem fully repulsed by these guys’ apathy and lack of imagination. But they arrrive at a better place by the end – instead of shrugging these guys off and bitterly accepting “how things are,” “Apathetic Boys” suggests a path forward entirely free of this element.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to another one of these in 10-15 years. It’s not as though the apathetic indie boys are going to start deserving it any time soon.

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This post is a lightning round of mini-reviews of songs that are featured on my Disco 2020 playlist, which collects great disco and dance songs from this year.

Cinthie featuring Gilli.jpg “Bassline”

Cinthie’s production on “Bassline” is so sharp and focused that it feels almost like a weapon, this thing programmed to override your mind and body until you’re dancing to her song. That the vocal is just a woman belting out the word BASSLINE over and over adds to the domination vibe – it’s like a command you must obey.

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Robert Ouimet and Dave Godin “Dancing Girl”

You can tell just by hearing it that “Dancing Girl” is the work of a veteran DJ – it’s a little old fashioned in some ways, but the craft is expert, elegant, and highly effective in getting a physical response. The funk here is raw enough to feel sort of lewd, but it’s delivered very carefully, like Ouimet and Godin are pacing out the dosage of something that could be fatal if the concentration is too high.

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Jayda G “Both of Us”

“Both of Us” shifts gracefully between two modes – a soft romantic elegance rooted in R&B and an overwhelming wave of euphoria that hits with the full force of house music. I can imagine the more gentle digressions killing a floor a bit, but in bringing the song down it just makes the impact of the beat hit harder when it returns.

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Thurston Moore “Calligraphy”

Sonic Youth is one of the most important bands in my personal history but I’ve found it hard to get enthusiastic about Thurston Moore’s post-SY material. This isn’t to say I think it’s been bad but more that when I hear him on his own now it all feels too familiar, like I just know how he plays too well and I’m not surprised by anything he does from one chord to the next. This was a creeping problem in the later Sonic Youth records, but in that situation Lee Ranaldo, Kim Gordon, and Steve Shelley were bringing their own ideas and impulses to it so no song ever rested entirely on his guitar or his voice. A lot of Moore’s songs now feel less like songwriting and more like a meditative practice, and this is simply him engaging with his instrument in a way that feels most natural and unforced. I get it, but a lot of it doesn’t quite beg to be heard.

“Calligraphy” is an outlier in that Moore’s guitar style is noticeably different in its textures and tones, even if the chord changes and lead parts are very obviously him. It feels more rough and rustic; something about the particular tone of the acoustic guitar reminds me of the smell of burning wood. You can hear peace in his voice but a bit of restlessness in his guitar, like he’s waiting for his body to catch up with his mind.

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Gorillaz featuring Beck “The Valley of the Pagans”

Beck and Damon Albarn are two of the most versatile artists of all time, both capable of working up to a high standard in a very wide range of styles. So what happens when you put these two clever chameleons together on a track? Well… you basically just get them both on autopilot and singing default-mode melodies over a track that sounds like it was made of spare parts from the Güero and Demon Days records. It’s a good but totally unsurprising song. I think what really happened here is their core styles overlap a bit too neatly, so it just becomes a composite of them both. Albarn’s more interesting collaborations tend to be with artists who he has much less in common with, so there’s a bit of tension in how they push and pull. This is more like two magnets snapping together.

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Elvis Costello “Hetty O’Hara Confidential”

“Hetty O’Hara Confidential” is a cautionary tale of a gossip columnist who was once quite powerful but is now outmoded in a time when “everyone has a megaphone.” It’s a brutal portrait of someone who was exceptionally good at her job but a bit drunk on the power that went along with it, and progressively more indifferent to the havoc she could wreak in her subject’s lives by telling all their secrets. Elvis Costello seems a bit awed by her – it’s all written like he’s singing about a formidable opponent. The music, made entirely by Costello, is very playful in tone and a little abrasive in its beats and textures. It’s an outlier for him but the style works, particularly as it places more emphasis on his voice and words.

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Otta “Just Like the Rain”

Otta sings positive affirmations in this song with a slightly exasperated tone, like she’s addressing someone who seems incapable of seeing their own value. This is the tip off to me that she’s singing to herself – there’s a familiarity and frustration in her tone that suggests she’s confronting her most stubborn insecurities rather than talking about someone else’s hang ups. “Just Like the Rain” has a smooth and soothing groove, but Otta’s vocal brings a little bit of neurotic energy to the track – even when she’s aiming for gentle and sweet, she can’t quite project a chill vibe. But that works for the song, as the bass is there to provide the feeling of comfort, warmth, and stability.

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Norah Jones “Hurts To Be Alone”

Norah Jones is famous for the raw loveliness of her voice and the subtle nuances of her phrasing – she’s the kind of singer who can convey a lot of emotional information in slight inflections. But she’s also quite remarkable on the piano, and that gift for graceful articulation carries over to her style on that instrument. “Hurts To Be Alone,” a song she composed herself, showcases both ends of her skill set. The chords are sophisticated but understated, carrying the melodic weight of the music so her vocal can drift along behind it like a leaf in the breeze. There’s great details in the arrangement too – the way the standup bass will occasionally pluck out a couple notes to punctuate a pause, the sound of a Hammond B3 gently streaking through the mix as an accent. Everything about this recording is very thoughtful but played with a loose and gentle touch, that perfect sweet spot between calculation and improvisation.

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Kylie Minogue “Miss A Thing”

It’s rather commonplace for songs to be put together in remote sessions now, even before it was fully necessitated by quarantine lockdowns, but even still knowing this particular song was made this way makes it feel a little more poignant. It’s a disco song for a world without discotheques, elaborately produced with an imaginary string section and a thumping bass line that will mostly just be heard on tinny laptop speakers and earbuds. It’s far from the only song robbed of its deserved context in 2020, but because it was made under these circumstances the song itself seems to know that it’s thwarted, and even as Kylie Minogue sings it like any other pop song her emphasis on moving quickly as not to miss anything suggests she was very much thinking about time running out for all sorts of ordinary joys. It’s basically a very “carpe diem” sort of song, but with a very acute sense of the clock running down on that diem.

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Activity “Violent and Vivisect”

Activity’s debut album Unmask Whoever was made in 2019 but matches the tone of 2020 very well – cold and claustrophobic and paranoid, desperate emotions deadened by a cynicism that’s beaten into you from a near total lack of positive news. The record mostly feels like being trapped in a depressive haze, with songs that move on a tension that shifts but never really lifts. “Violent and Vivisect,” the penultimate track on the record, is the only song that allows for a true catharsis. It starts off very tightly wound but in context it nevertheless feels like a gasp of air after so much heavy atmosphere. The eventual climax is a blast of traditional alt-rock on a record in which this rock band otherwise avoids obvious alt-rock dynamics, as though the entire concept of the record was to start from the most harshly electronic that was possible for them and to very gradually allow themselves the permission to cut loose. And even after letting it all out in the final third of this song, it still ends on an unresolved feeling. It’s like getting all riled up and then losing all energy, collapsing into a defeated sigh.

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Meyhem Lauren & Harry Fraud “Yucca”

“Yucca” is built around a looped guitar part that sounds desolate, despairing, and cinematic, like it drifted in from a nearby Godspeed You Black Emperor session. Harry Fraud keeps the track simple and lo-fi, giving the guitar part ample space to resonate while an understated beat supports Meyhem Lauren’s vocal. Lauren’s verses are all bluster and jokes, but in this context it comes out sounding hollow and haunted, like a guy trying to keep a brave face while he walks through some broken post-apocalyptic landscape.

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Ariana Grande “My Hair”

There’s seven credited writers including Ariana Grande on “My Hair,” but the one whose presence feels most obvious to me Grande’s frequent co-writer, the R&B singer-songwriter Victoria Monét. The contours of the melody sound very Monét to me, and the arrangement fits into her general neo-soul wheelhouse. The jazzy chords and the verse melody fits Grande’s voice perfectly – you can tell how much she likes singing around the curves of it, and how that elegant slide into the chorus flatters the most mature and sensual aspects of her technique. Like pretty much everything else on Positions this song is overtly horny, but the lyrics get into a very particular aspect of intimacy for her as she gives detailed instructions to her partner on when and how to touch her hair. The specificity levels up the song a bit, making it feel more like a window into a person’s actual life rather than just some sexy boilerplate.

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⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ “೧ູ࿃ूੂ༽oooooo(ଳծູ　̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ l̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡*̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡| ̲̲͡ π̲̲͡͡ ɵੂ≢)_̴ı”

I stumbled into this song on Spotify and was immediately very excited by it, but confused and frustrated by all the text associated with it being in indecipherable wingdings. I was thinking about how self-defeating it is for some new artist to make something so well-composed and brilliant, like if Four Tet went kinda rave-y, and made it so impossible to know anything about them. I went out of my way to figure out how to copy/paste the wingdings from Spotify and then I found out that…well, it actually IS Four Tet. This shouldn’t be too surprising to me as Kieran Hebden has reached a very Aphex Twin/Luke Vibert stage of his career in which he’s been using a handful of alternate names to release his music, but it is disappointing in that I would have liked for this to be someone totally new. This is very plausible as music heavily influenced by Hebden rather than actual Hebden music – the melodic keyboard part is very him, but the track feels less dense and more symmetrical than usual. The vocal loop fits in with his M.O. but it’s less artful than his usual sample manipulation – rather than odd cuts and intervals, it’s more of an unbroken hypnotic repetition. But these are observations, not criticisms: This song is as direct and effective and fun as he ever gets.

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Busta Rhymes featuring Kendrick Lamar “Look Over Your Shoulder”

The most incredible thing about “Look Over Your Shoulder” is that it features Kendrick Lamar and Busta Rhymes rapping at the top of their game along with samples of a young Michael Jackson from the climax of “I’ll Be There” and you could take all three of those voices off the track and it would still feel overwhelmingly emotional just with the piano chords and strings in Nottz’s instrumental. The gut-punch of the song is in how he contrasts this very melancholy and nostalgic vibe with a very innocent sweetness and hope, and that’s just amped up by the presence of Jackson’s earnest and empathetic voice. Kendrick and Busta approach their verses from different angles but I love that both connect to the sentimentality of the music by talking about their commitment to rap as an art form. When given a track that has this purity and love at the core of it, they both think of the one thing they clearly love more than anything else in the world.

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Omar Apollo “Stayback”

There’s some things about “Stayback” that very obviously point in the direction of a heavy Prince influence, but the most Prince-ly thing in the song is fairly subtle – that line where Omar Apollo sings about wanting to switch bodies with the person he’s in love with. A lot of people can be a funky minimalist, sing falsetto, or rip a hot solo, but not everyone can approach that desire for a freaky, unreal intimacy that twists gender and crosses boundaries. It’s all the more interesting in that this isn’t a “I’m so into you I want to be you” song, but more of a breakup song. The desire to switch bodies is a desire for control, to somehow give himself closure by treating this other person like a puppet. Weird stuff.

Stream it on Bandcamp.

Tom Petty “Walls” (Live)

“Walls” is a song that exists in a limbo zone between a relationship falling apart and fully moving on from it. It’s part of an emotional journey but only just the longest, most boring part of the trip, like indefinitely cruising down a featureless interstate of the soul. This sort of thing but be tedious in fiction but it’s perfect for a song, particularly one like this that so perfectly evokes an emotional palette with well-mixed shades of ennui, regret, bitterness, and affection.

Tom Petty’s lyrics strive towards a warm-hearted clarity, like he’s just trying to be reasonable and patient as he processes it all. But the song resists its own attempts to put feelings in perspective – sure, some days are diamonds and some days are rocks, but that’s just what you say in the verses. The real feeling of the song is in that simple, beautiful chorus where he can’t quite get over this person with a heart so big it could crush this town, and he has to admit that one way or another he’s gonna crumble along with all those walls.

Buy the Wildflowers box set from Amazon.

Hot Chip featuring Jarvis Cocker “Straight to the Morning”

“Straight to the Morning” is a joyful disco/house track with lyrics about partying all night and into the next day. It functions perfectly well at face value, but this being a Hot Chip song, there’s some subtextual layers of pathos under the boppy beats and bright chords – scratch the surface just a little bit, and it’s a song about aging. This is three middle aged men singing about going out all night, and how saying all of this feels a bit different in the context of being older. When Alexis Taylor announces “we’re going out tonight,” it comes across as announcing something that’s more of an event than a regular occurrence. The idea of dancing all night seems a little more daunting than it would be for guys in their 20s. When Joe Goddard sings “it’s a small slice of heaven,” the joy feels a bit more hard-earned. When the ever-droll Jarvis Cocker says “we’ve only just begun to get it on,” the words sound a little overly optimistic. But this song isn’t a joke at their own expense, it’s a song arguing that there shouldn’t be an arbitrary age limit for dancing and having fun. If anything, they’re arguing that there’s always a time for this sort of release.

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Gabriels “Love and Hate in a Different Time”

There’s a musical shift in “Love and Hate in a Different Time” that’s so sudden and surprising that mentioning it here before you hear it ought to be preface by a spoiler warning: The part where this solemn but groovy soul number moves into an instrumental break and instead of a piano or guitar solo, there’s a wild analog synth part that tosses out melody in favor of what sounds sorta like an R2-D2 freestyle. It’s an inspired choice, but it also does a good job of grounding this song which in many ways feels rooted to the 1960s in the present. That tether between then and now is musically interesting but also serves the concept of the song, as singer Jacob Lusk tries to make sense of how peaceful coexist always gets disrupted by people who insist on yanking everything back to a previous state of discord.

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Róisín Murphy “Incapable”

The character in “Incapable” is reckoning with her life and asking herself if she’s incapable of love, and while she seems proud to have never had a broken heart it’s also clear she’s beginning to realize that being so protective of herself has cheated her of bigger, deeper feelings and connections to other people. The music plays out like a slow epiphany with Richard Barratt’s keyboard grooves starting off with a hesitant orbit around the beat, but gradually growing more urgent and the track gets more dense with sounds. It’s a brilliant concept for an icy disco number – it seems like the perfect setting for this type of person, and the momentum of it suggests the drama of a real-time epiphany.

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Moodymann “Do Wrong”

Moodymann is best known for making soulful house music, and the majority of his excellent new record Taken Away is in that lane, at least in terms of bpm rates. “Do Wrong” goes another way, framing its often spiteful breakup lyrics with a humid funk groove and snippets from Al Green’s “Love and Forgiveness” that provide both atmosphere and bitter irony. It’s a thick and swampy song with a rhythm that seems to bop up and down, and at some points sounds as though it’s sinking down below its implied surface. There’s an evil vibe to this song, but as much as the lyrics address someone else, the darkness of it feels more like it’s directed inwards. It’s like that great Carrie Fisher quote: “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

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James Blake “Do You Ever”

It’s been interesting hearing James Blake evolve over the past decade from a mostly instrumental electronic musician with buried R&B tendencies into a more of an actual R&B artist with the aesthetics of an instrumental electronic musician. These days he’s somewhere at the center of that spectrum and it really works for him – he sounds like he’s fully comfortable as himself now, and it’s a sound that conveys equal parts sensuality and introversion. “Do You Ever,” like a lot of Blake’s best material, focuses in on the aspects of being vulnerable and intimate that hit the raw nerves of insecurity and doubt. He’s singing about a relationship that now, with some hindsight, was a lot better than he thought it was at the time. He gets anxious with the question of whether or not they think of him still, and maybe if they think of him fondly too. He sounds a little desperate and needy, but in a very relatable way – he’s looking for validation, not just for his past self but for his indulgence in this nostalgia.

Buy it from Amazon.