Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Terrace Martin featuring Denzel Curry, Kamasi Washington, G Perico, & Daylyt “Pig Feet”

Terrace Martin packs a lot into just over three minutes with “Pig Feet” – radio drama, nods to jazz and fusion, dive-bombing guitars, rapid-fire raps from Denzel Curry and Daylyt that sound as thought they’re charging at the heavy drums rather than riding the flow of the beat. It’s dense but incredibly focused and direct, laying out the immediate aftermath of racist police brutality in the skit sequences and the ongoing psychological impact of this being a day-to-day reality in Curry and Daylyt’s verses. Curry thrives on tracks that allow him to be forceful and bold, and on this one his words pop off with a righteous indignation that gives voice to rage while Kamasi Washington’s sax articulates mourning and despair in contrast. Daylyt’s verse is more nimble and wordy like Inspectah Deck or Talib Kweli in their ’90s prime, and pushes through the pain towards a defiant optimism by the end of the track.

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Run the Jewels featuring Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha “JU$T”

The best posse cuts make the most of contrasting the voices of every rapper on the track, the way RZA deliberately constructed Wu-Tang songs around vocal timbres like they were instruments in a band. “JU$T” pulls this off beautifully by approaching the same lyric – “look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar” – from three different angles with escalating intensity. Pharrell lays things out in his hook with a cool-headed logic, presenting every “respectable” path towards class mobility as simply buying into the oppressive capitalism of those in power. His voice, always so smooth and chill, sugars the pill a bit, whereas Killer Mike repeats the refrain without diluting the bitterness even a bit. And then when Zach de la Rocha finishes the chorus, it all tips over into vicious unrestrained fury and disgust. It’s a little bit like the galaxy brain meme.

The first two times you hear de la Rocha on the track it’s like a warning, and when he shows up for a full verse at the end his tone shifts expectations. He’s not doing his tension-to-scream move here, but rather adapting his intense presence to the minimalism of the track. He’s a voice of moral clarity expressing uncertainty about the immediate future, sure that something is about to blow up but wary about expecting the sort of revolution he wants. He’s concerned about half-measures – “how can we be the peace when the beast gonna reach for the worst?” – and skeptical of how much anyone is willing to fight. And in the end, he’s cynical about every movement just being turned into a sellable aesthetic, which is something he knows all too well from his career: “The breath in me is weaponry, but for you, it’s just money.”

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Beauty Pill “Tattooed Love Boys”

This is one of the most inventive covers I’ve heard in ages. Chad Clark keeps the core of The Pretenders’ song while completely reimagining its arrangement, starting with trading out the original’s incessant nervous shake for a more graceful but dazed tone. He keeps James Honeyman-Scott’s chimey lead guitar part, but whereas the original only foregrounds it towards the end, the Beauty Pill centers it. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason this cover exists is because Clark just wanted to explore the possibilities of that melodic motif.) The tension and clatter of the source material is in this version, but it comes out sounding more sparkly and lovely, and Clark’s vocal comes across as sort of wistful and reflective. That’s the key thing, really – even though Chrissie Hynde’s lyrics were always in the past tense, the music made the awkward and scary moments she was describing feel very urgent and present tense. Clark embraces that past tense, sounding a lot more nostalgic than shaken.

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Archers of Loaf “Nevermind the Enemy”

“Nevermind the Enemy” is a song of gleeful schadenfreude, and while that’s not necessarily the most admirable feeling in the world, it can certainly be valid. The context for this song is petty – at this point in his career Eric Bachmann was writing mostly about the record industry and scene politics from the perspective of someone who was both highly competitive and likely to opt out of participating in anything he thought was distasteful or corrupt. It’s extremely smug but in a very fun way, and because he’s so focused on repping for underdogs and losers it’s relatable and inclusive, and always comes across as punching up. In this song, he’s proudly declaring “I found a reason to quit” and is inviting the listener to opt out too. He makes it sound like watching sports – “we can watch their plans fall through,” “never mind your friends ’cause you can make a joke of them.” The music sounds scrappy and energetic, with Bachmann’s distorted riff punctuated by sharp tones that sound like a truck backing up. It’s always made me think of getting in on a joy ride.

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Shudder to Think “Survival”

Shudder to Think’s 50,000 B.C. is technically the group’s final album but is nevertheless a transitional work that falls between the odd collision of post-punk and prog rock on their 1994 classic Pony Express Record and the genre-hopping pastiche found on their late ’90s soundtrack work and most of primary songwriter Craig Wedren’s subsequent work outside the band. The prog elements and Wedren’s fascination with fitting his melodies and lyrics into odd meters remain, but it’s all smoothed out into a bright, shiny tunes that foreground the glam rock that was previously buried beneath all the jagged edges of their music.

“Survival,” the most overtly glam song on the record, is built around a slinky melody that makes the most of Wedren’s glorious vocal range and wry attitude. The lyrics allude to his fairly recent experience of surviving cancer without directly announcing it or even necessarily being entirely about that topic. About a quarter of the lyrics are written in Wedren’s abstract absurdist style, but he sings lines like “grease the temple” and “balloons light the lawns” in a way that suggests he has a very precise personal meaning in mind that’s just not for us to know.

The rest of his words sketch out the mood of a man who feels some gratitude for his luck, but also a bewilderment when it comes to what to make of his life in the aftermath. He sounds like he’s attempting to weigh the significance of a lot of things – why he got spared, the value of particular relationships, the prospect of not doing all that much with his new lease on life – and all the scales are broken. I think when it comes down to it, this is a song about shrugging off all the heaviness of meaning and learning to just enjoy the simple pleasures of being alive and getting to write a song, and another one after that.

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Carly Rae Jepsen “This Is What They Say”

I wish that Carly Rae Jepsen would or could give her new album a distinct title rather than call it Dedicated Side B, which bashfully suggests the material is not as strong as the music on Dedicated and not worthy of being considered as a record in its own right despite being of roughly equal quality and all her music being relentlessly consistent in style and theme to the point of monomania. This is probably to a large extent a record company decision that allows her to release multiple albums within a particular production and promotion budget, and given the way she talks about her prolific nature might also speak to how she does not differentiate her output beyond “eras” of writing and recording. And while this approach plays into the underdog narrative that drives her career – “her b-sides are better than most pop stars’ album tracks!!!” – I think it is ultimately something that undermines her as an artist. Why not own it more? It’s not as though Radiohead felt compelled to call Amnesiac “Kid A Side B” despite it essentially being outtakes from the sessions for that record released as an album a year later.

“This Is What They Say” certainly fits into the “her b-sides are better than most album tracks” narrative in that it’s definitely in the top percentile of all her work and yet has been lumped in with the supposedly second rate tunes. That said, with Jepsen’s music being so uniform lyrically and musically all matters of differentiation are extremely subjective. How do I actually make a convincing case that this boppy, joyful pop tune about having a mind-consuming crush is better than all her other boppy, joyful pop tunes about having a mind-consuming crush? Her level of craft is always solid but a lot of them do nothing for me, yet I think this one is excellent. You’re just going to have to take my word for it, I guess.

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Vero “Waves of Love”

“Waves of Love” reminds me a lot of late ’80s/very early ’90s pop rock aesthetics – think the Divinyls, or Roxette, or Alannah Myles – but with a deliberately retro drum machine beat and the wry playfulness of Elastica. All of that is a great recipe for a song, but the real draw here is the craft more than the particulars of the execution. The melody is terrific and the vocal nails a sultriness that doesn’t tip over into camp, and the arrangement has that sprezzatura thing of being very tidy and well put together while retaining a deliberate casual, quasi-tossed off feel.

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Owen Pallett “Paragon of Order (Version)”

The connecting thread in all of the Owen Pallett songs I like the most is this feeling of being small and powerless in the face of uncaring gods and other forces that keep you trapped and limited by circumstances. This is a lyrical theme in his songs, but also something suggested by the music itself, particularly when he contrasts minimalist sections of his arrangements with a sort of futile grace and grandeur. “Paragon of Order” sounds like a character gradually escaping a prison suggested by a steady single piano chord, but by the time we’ve made it through the more soaring and triumphant parts of the song, it doesn’t feel like they’ve actually made it out of anything.

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Tame Impala “One More Year”

“One More Year” has a deep resonance with me, so deep that it makes me realize that it’s actually sort of rare that I fully identify with the words of songs in a way that reflects my actual lived experience. Kevin Parker is essentially singing in this song about the cost of committing oneself to a project that becomes a vocation that becomes the center of your existence. He sings the song with some ambivalence about throwing himself so fully into his life’s work, noting that it’s all he’s ever wanted but acknowledging that it hasn’t given him space to experience much else. He’s noticing how many possibilities are being closed off, and while he’s not yearning for anything in particular he still feels some nagging sense of FOMO. “I know we promised we’d be doing this until we die,” he sings, “and now I fear we might.”

But despite the anxieties expressed in the lyrics, “One More Year” feels quite relaxed and soothing in its steady groove and layers of wavy synths. It sounds like it’s coming from outside of time somehow, with Parker looking at his feelings from a perspective that takes them seriously but understands how little it all matters as time continues to pass. The big cathartic epiphany of the song is just Parker deciding to let the worry rest and give himself another year. Another year to procrastinate, another year to do the work, another year to avoid confronting his fears, another year to experience life and see where it all goes. When it comes down to it, “one more year” is the best we can hope for. Just being alive can be enough.

This song feels so right for this year, in which everything feels uncertain and possibilities are closed off and time seems to move differently. There’s one particular line – “we’re on a roller coaster stuck on its loop-de-loop” – that feels like a pretty good metaphor for how the world feels in the spring of 2020. It’s like we’re all just dangling in suspense indefinitely, and everyone trapped in this precarious situation interprets with varying levels of panic and boredom depending on their mindset. Some people, and by “some people” I mean me a little bit, might even feel a thrill at the novelty of it all and the challenge of figuring out how to make the best of it.

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Faye Webster “In A Good Way”

Faye Webster is good at conveying an elegant sort of melancholy romanticism in which her voice projects raw vulnerability but the music is very clean and composed. “In A Good Way” sounds low-key glamorous, like a movie star emoting convincingly while retaining all their style and dignity. As with all of Webster’s songs, the lyrics are direct and specific, with her expressing her gratitude to a partner who’s made her feel open to love and joy after feeling cold and cynical about the prospect. Of course, this happiness is overwhelming, and bleeds over into sadness – “you make wanna cry…in a good way.” The chorus is gentle and sweet, and hits the perfect mark between surprise and appreciation.

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The Magnetic Fields “The Biggest Tits in History”

The core joke of this song is a bit of a groaner – the tits in question are birds, haha – but Stephin Merritt knows that and so the actual humor of the lyrics comes from the strange details he has to write in to reverse engineer a character’s life from the very thin premise. The craft is strong, starting with ambiguous language but by the third verse tossing in details about cloning birds for the government and intercepting drones. The song is sung by longtime Merritt foil Shirley Simms, who delivers the lines with a rock sneer that hits all the marks in getting across Merritt’s droll tone without overtly signaling “this is a joke song,” so it’s easy to imagine someone just half-listening to it and not noticing that it’s not about some extremely busty lady.

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Charli XCX “Claws”

Charli XCX’s new record, which she wrote and recorded within the past two months of quarantine, is the first album in her career that sounds fully like her doing exactly what she wants to do and playing to her strengths, and not absolutely drenched in record industry flop sweat. Without weak attempts at crossover hits or the transparent trend-chasing of the absurd number of features on her previous record, she’s free to get laser focused on her distinctive brand of sing-song melodies and taste for harsh electronic tones and yields a bunch of songs that sound like they could be actual hits rather than merely notional ones.

“Claws,” which XCX made in collaboration with the producer Dylan Brady, realizes the promise of the early PC Music phase in which accessible melodies were layered into fully digital tracks pushed to cartoonish extremes. It’s contemporary pop technique pushed to the point of abstraction, or maybe just a logical conclusion. There’s a campiness to this song, but XCX’s vocal is sweet and sincere in projecting infatuation to the point of guilelessness. The song conveys purity while sounding like a corrupted file.

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Victoria Monét “Moment”

I love the low-key ego of this song, and the way Victoria Monét sings from the perspective of being treated like a prize with a matter of fact tone. She’s basically saying “OK, you fantasized about me for ages and now you’ve got me, so what are you gonna do?” As elegant and romantic as the music is, the song is ultimately about an awkward situation in which the thrill of pursuit disappears and the pressure to be present and deliver on a promise sets in. Monét alternates between nurturing and demanding phrases, asserting control over the scene as much as she would like to have everything click into something magical and effortless as the string parts that seem to float into the mix like something out of a Hollywood love scene.

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Chicano Batman “Pink Elephant”

The main guitar hook in “Pink Elephant” is played by Chicano Batman but presented like a sample, as if it’s mixed with quotation marks around it and moved off to the side from the persussion groove. This trick in making a band sound more adjacent to hip-hop goes back to the late ’90s, but this doesn’t necessarily feel like a trick so much just how the band has internalized a sense of “good production” going back to their childhoods. You could definitely have recorded this song with more depth and warmth, but the feel of this relies a lot on the beat sounding thin and the guitar part seeming choppy and a little too trebly. It’s crucial to the ambiance, and any implied nostalgia is tied up in second-hand uses of sounds rather than full fidelity.

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Caribou “New Jade”

Dan Snaith’s music is so much about sensation and hypnotic grooves that it’s easy to overlook his lyrics, but on his new record as Caribou he’s working with an interesting set of themes – the way life can seem to open up or close off with the end of relationships, and how this is more obvious to someone observing a situation than one living inside it. The two most stunning tracks, “Home” and “New Jade,” are both sung from Snaith’s perspective and addressed to women getting out of bad relationships but struggling with grief. The hooks in both songs come from sampled female voices, but the verses he sings in his gentle, unassuming voice are basically pep talks assuring them that they are moving on to better things. Snaith conveys a pure, unselfish empathy in this music, and manages to avoid laying it on thick either lyrically or musically.

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Deradoorian “Saturnine Night”

“Saturnine Night” is like one of the chugging quasi-motorik Thee Oh Sees numbers remade with goth aesthetics, with Angel Deradoorian singing about “innocence in my death” and “purifying the shadow of the soul” through heavy reverb. The dark vibe and the insistent groove suits Deradoodian well, allowing her room to embrace the less overtly pretty aspects of her singing voice, in as much as her voice is naturally musical and gorgeous. Letting the rhythm section carry the structure also gives her space to use her guitar mainly for atmosphere, pulling this closer to her more ambient works than the more folky side of her catalog.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

No Joy “Birthmark”

One of the great pleasures of watching artists evolve over long stretches of time is in noticing how their aesthetic shifts along with their capabilities, and influences that were once only implied become overt as others that were on the surface recede. No Joy started as a more blunt and primitive version of a shoegaze band with blaring guitars and buried vocals, but all along suggesting a delicate sentimentality and sophisticated melodic sensibility. As the band has become more of a solo project for Jasamine White-Gluz, the music has gradually moved towards foregrounding what was once obscured while maintaining an artsy haze and exaggerated sense of spacial relationships in the mixes. On Motherhood, the forthcoming new album by No Joy, White-Gluz has refined her aesthetic to the point that anything she does now sounds fully like her even when she’s emulating elements of trip-hop, nü-metal, and ’90s adult contemporary pop. It’s always been in there, she’s now just making it more obvious – no shame, just beauty and feeling.

“Birthmark,” the lead track off Motherhood, consolidates all of White-Gluz’s major musical threads from the past six years into one gorgeous and emotionally direct pop song. When I hear the song the word that comes to mind is “clarity” – in the arrangement and mix, in the vocal performance, in the lyrics, in the abstract sense that it sounds like a musical approximation of a crystal chandelier. The ways she’s implied nonlinear vagueness and a collage-maker’s sense of textural juxtaposition is all there, but it’s more in the service of articulating the complexity of a feeling rather than in masking or muting it. She’s not being at all ambiguous in singing openly about love, but the way she does it is up for interpretation: What kind of love, and how intense is it?

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Little Simz “Might Bang, Might Not”

I love the way Little Simz’ vocal performance in this song feels like she’s competing with the beat, like she’s trying to outpace it or outlast it. I imagine it like an elaborate tap dance routine, fast and precise in its movements. It would be enough to carry the song, but the most compelling thing about “Might Bang, Might Not” is the way that performance is contrasted with the bass part, which is fairly simple and seems to wind casually around the groove. The vocal and bass don’t compete for space and complement each other nicely but it still feels like they’re at odds somehow, as though that relatively relaxed but tonally dominant bass part is taunting the more overtly aggressive vocal.

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Muzz “Bad Feeling”

Muzz is a new band by Paul Banks from Interpol, but despite the fact that he sings and plays guitar in this band, they do not sound much like Interpol. Banks still sings as he would normally, but without having to lock into the tight rhythms that define that band’s aesthetic. Whereas Interpol records can feel claustrophobic and oppressive, the Muzz songs feel spacious and relaxed – a deep sigh of resignation rather than a high-strung fit. Banks sings with a wounded, weary tone on “Bad Feeling,” a song built around chord changes that sound like slowly blinking Christmas lights. The arrangement is filled out with un-Interpol sounds, like gentle organ drones and soft female backing vocals and a mellow horn section. The horns are particularly beautiful, capping off the song with a grace that feels redemptive in the context of a song that’s otherwise sounds ragged and exhausted.

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Cindy Lee “Lucifer Stand”

“Lucifer Stand” is built around a keyboard vamp that sounds like a hollowed out version of Goldfrapp in their electro-glam phase. Everything else in the mix seems to echo off the walls implied by that riff, with the vocals sounding especially distant from wherever you are in this. Cindy Lee doesn’t overdo it, keeping the tone from getting too campy in its spookiness, or too deep into horror film soundtrack territory. The context of the song is revealed at the end, as you hear a recording of a woman giving a testimony that ends with her saying she’d rather “spend eternity in nothing” than to spend eternity with Satan. The lyrics take that premise but take the notion of eternity in nothingness with Satan as a beautiful promise rather than a horrifying fate. The song begs for this oblivion – “remove me, if only for a night.”

Buy it from Bandcamp.