Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

St. Panther “These Days”

Daniela Bojorges-Giraldo sings with a soulful rasp and a very mature level of nuance and control, but that’s just part of what makes “These Days” so captivating. The most fascinating thing for me is Bojorges-Giraldo’s performance on bass and drums, which keeps a nice pocket groove with a loose feel along the lines of Mitch Mitchell’s drumming for Jimi Hendrix. It’s an R&B song stripped down to raw essentials without feeling “minimalist,” and she gives space in the arrangement so that common elements like backing vocals and horn parts hit with maximum impact. Everything sounds very in-the-moment, nothing feels overthought. She just sounds like a musician with great instincts who fully trusts those instincts.

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No Joy “Four”

In retrospect Jasamine White-Gluz’s discography as No Joy is like this reverse “anxiety of influence” arc in which she resists emulating the things she grew up loving to the point that it was limiting her creativity, and she fully becomes herself when she gives herself permission to embrace the largely uncool late 90s/early 00s music that shaped her taste. Motherhood, her new record as No Joy, boldly integrates elements of nü-metal, the commercial end of trip-hop, and quasi-futuristic pre-millennial production trends you’d recognize from albums like No Doubt’s Return of Saturn, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, and Madonna’s Ray of Light into her established romantic shoegaze aesthetic. She sounds truly free on this record, like someone who is unafraid to let you see who they are. This starts in formal terms but carries through to the emotional content of it – even when lyrics are hazy and the sound gets abstract, there’s an open-hearted vulnerability on display that’s poignant and relatable.

“Four” strings together all the stylistic extremes of Motherhood into one remarkably coherent piece of music. It’s basically a suite – an atmospheric shoegaze section flowing into a groovy trip-hop section flowing into a thrashing nü-metal finale – and a lot of the reason it works so well is that at least from White-Gluz’s perspective this is a fully intuitive progression. The trip-hop section is the main draw here. It’s very confident in its funk despite this previously never being an element of the No Joy sound, and I love the way the juxtaposition of White-Gluz’s voice singing “just keep calling me baby,” a pitched-down masculine voice, and a baby giggle that’s clearly in homage to the famous baby sample in Aaliyah “Are You That Somebody” suggest a lot of ideas about female sexuality and motherhood without explicating anything. It’s more of a Rorschach blot, or the song deliberately posing a leading question.

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King Krule “Stoned Again”

“Stoned Again” moves along on the slow drag of a grungy bass riff that serves as the numb, deadened center of a song that’s otherwise expressing extreme depression, paranoia, and grief. The arrangement sketches out multiple levels of awareness – the guitar and sax parts fill in a melancholy atmosphere that’s like a dimming perception of the bleakness of the outside world, while Archy Marshall’s vocals cover conscious thoughts and feelings. He splits his vocal into two overlapping parts – the first a semi-rapped stream of conscious ramble contrasting memories of innocence with a pathetic and desperate present, and the second mostly wordless screams of anguish. The effect is similar to superimposing in film, and it’s up to the listener to decide whether it’s meant to evoke a collapsed timeline of emotions or the feelings just under the surface of the coherent thoughts. Marshall’s voice is unrestrained in both performances but particularly impressive in the foregrounded part where his words seem to tumble out of his mouth and verses end with him shifting his phrasing into a bark of disgust.

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Chemtrails “Slag Heap Deity 1”

“Slap Heap Deity 1” comes in upbeat and bright, bopping along as it comes to a big chorus in which Mia Lust cheerfully sings about the inevitability of failure. “We try our best, we are unsuccessful,” she chirps, “our hearts get filled with regrets and cholesterol, then we all just die yeah yeah yeah yeah!” I think normally this sort of peppy negativity would be considered a subversion of the form, but I think in this case it’s more about finding joy by rearranging expectations. The energy and drama of the song is not ironic, this isn’t about some sardonic wink to the audience. Lust and her band sound like they’ve found freedom in letting go of a lot of nonsense, and of throwing themselves into these chords and these melodies in the moment. And is insisting that we’re not special actually the same thing as nihilism?

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Gimgigam featuring Takara Araki “Dunia Kuu”

“Dunia Kuu” seems to introduce new musical ideas and textures every 20 seconds or so but never feels busy, cluttered, or disjointed. It’s more just a steady lateral progression through different sensations, all held together by a steadily bouncing groove, quasi-tropical instrumental motifs, and wordless vocals that are just shy of Donna Summer-ish moans of pleasure. The contrast of negative space and busy percussion through this track feels very humid to me, but not necessarily in the oppressive sense – it mostly just sounds like the way the air feels just after a flash rainstorm in the summer.

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Lianne La Havas “Weird Fishes”

Lianne La Havas co-wrote all but one of the songs on her new album so I feel a little bad about focusing in on the one she didn’t write, which is a Radiohead song. I mean no disrespect to her as a songwriter, but her work in arranging and performing “Weird Fishes” is remarkable, up to the point of rivaling the original Radiohead version in quality. La Havas’ version of the song isn’t far off from Radiohead’s arrangement, but she loosens up some of its stiffness and foregrounds R&B elements that they had left under the surface. There are other songs from In Rainbows that are more obviously Radiohead approximations of R&B – “Nude,” “House of Cards,” “All I Need” – but “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” tilts more towards their art rock comfort zone with its interlocking guitar melodies and Steve Shelley-ish beat. La Havas’ interpretation is inspired in hearing the soul in this one, for slowing it down to a more liesurely Erykah Badu-ish pace and giving space for the vocal to convey a sensuousness that Thom Yorke stops short of fully exploring. It’s not hard to imagine members of Radiohead listening to this recording and hearing the song they were trying to make but were not able to create due to their limitations as performers. These limitations are what give their own performances and recordings character, but an interpretation of their work on this level this reveals their full range as songwriters.

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Kate NV “Plans”

Kate NV presents her titles in English but sings in Russian, which I suppose makes a certain amount of sense: In terms of reaching the English-speaking world, i.e. a substantial chunk of the potential market for her sort of groove-centric art rock, having the titles be understood and pronounceable is a matter of utility. The actual content of the music is so effective in terms of melody, groove, and texture that English lyrics are superfluous. (After all, plenty of indie records are sung in English but are barely comprehensible because the singing is muffled or mumbled.) “Plans” sounds like Kate Bush with the rhythmic edge of Interpol – jagged and thrusting, but also soft and hazy. About two minutes in the song takes a very welcome left turn into a sax solo apparently assembled entirely from samples. It’s a great bit of unexpected atmosphere that nudges the sort deeper into a Bush-esque hyper-romantic surrealism.

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Hum “Waves”

The sound of “Waves” is simple enough to explain with two ’90s reference points – it’s basically the sensuous romantic noise of My Bloody Valentine but performed with the precise brutality of Helmet – but the effect of the music goes beyond that aesthetic arithmetic. It sounds simultaneously violent and serene, and truly vast in scale. The chord changes feel like they could represent geographic epochs, like the song is some kind of time lapse representation of chaos and catastrophe settling into equilibrium. Matt Talbott’s voice is low in the mix; his monotone vocals make him come across like a cold and dispassionate witness of this enormous noise. His lyrics are like jotted down observations – not particularly emotional in tone, but emotional in impact as he describes the humbling effect of perceiving things at this scale and remove.

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Taylor Swift “Invisible String”

“Invisible String” is a song in which Taylor Swift ponders the notion of fate, of whether there was something guiding her to the stable, happy relationship she’s in now. The lyrics lay out two unrelated trajectories coming together, like she’s looking for some logic in how her life has played out. A lot of the charm of this song is in that she’s not fully convinced this is some divinely preordained thing, though she thinks it would be “just so pretty” to think it was. The traces of skepticism give the song its depth – it’s about looking at this relationship as a miracle that she’s grateful for, not some fait accompli. The tone of the music, which sounds a bit like she was trying to remember how to play Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” but arrived at this instead, feels bittersweet and hesitant rather than jubilant, as the lyrics might indicate. It sounds like she’s being careful not break a fragile and delicate thing, as though she’s afraid that if she expressed more joy about this relationship the invisible string could snap.

Buy it from Taylor Swift’s official site.

Beabadoobee “Care”

“Care” has the dynamics of early to mid ’90s alt-rock but has the shiny polish of late ’90s/early ’00s mainstream rock – the vocal tone conveys softness and earnestness rather than aggression and irony, and when the guitar gets crunchy and loud it’s rendered with a styled gloss rather than blunt force. Beabadoobee is aiming for a romanticized Hollywood sound here and nails it, right on down to the vague sense of triumph as the song moves along. The sentiment of this song is extremely teenage – “I’m misunderstood and alienated and none of you actually care about me, but I will get through this!!!” – but it’s real and pure, and the song has just enough self-aware brattiness to it to keep it from getting too self-pitying.

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Young Chris & Wale “Yellow Flag”

Super Miles and DJMoney’s track for “Yellow Flag” is pure mid-’00s chipmunk soul, so reverent to the form that it could slot in seamlessly with early Kanye and Just Blaze tracks, or songs from Ghostface’s peak era as a solo act. This is a huge compliment as far as I’m concerned – originality may be nice, but you can’t argue with effective results when someone absolutely nails genre conventions. Young Chris and Wale trade off verses through “Yellow Flag” like they’re running a relay race, and while the tonality of their voices are fairly similar, there’s a nice contrast between Wale’s wordy delivery and Young Chris’ slower, more relaxed flow.

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Jockstrap “Acid”

“Acid” is, at its essence, a straightforward ballad in the tradition of mid 20th century melodramatic pop, but the arrangement is constantly mutating to the point that the entire track feels a bit deranged. Taylor Skye’s production decisions have the song lunging between clashing tonalities, lending the piece a cartoonish quality. Imagine flipping the channels on a TV and every station is playing the same song with a different kitschy arrangement. Georgia Ellery plays it straight with her vocal, but her high and pretty voice lends another layer of uncanny irony to the song by obscuring her more brutal and grotesque lyrics somewhat in sugary sweetness.

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Pop Smoke “Yea Yea”

Pop Smoke was murdered only a few months ago, he was only 20 years old. His voice on record comes across as much older than that – raspy and weathered, with a cadence that suggests relaxed patience rather than youthful exuberance. “Yea Yea,” from his recently released posthumous major label debut, is a showcase for that loose, unhurried delivery. He raps a lot about luxury, but the most luxurious thing on display is that vocal delivery and how it conveys the absolute confidence of someone who knows he doesn’t have to work too hard to impress anyone. I wouldn’t say he sounds care free here, you can hear traces of stress and strain in his voice and in his words. But when paired with SephGotTheWaves and Hakz Beats’ mellow, guitar-centric track he projects almost a zen “be here now” vibe even when he’s mostly just listing off models of guns in the chorus.

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Vampire Weekend “2021” (Live in St. Augustine, Florida 2019)

Father of the Bride is full of lyrics that have taken on new meanings during the pandemic – “I don’t want to live like this but I don’t wanna die,” “things have never been stranger, things are going to stay strange” – but the track that’s most transformed in the new context is “2021.” The song, just over a minute and a half long, is brief meditation on time and patience. It’s all questions and incomplete thoughts, the space between weighing options and making decisions. The core question – “I could wait a year but I shouldn’t wait three” – changes over the course of the song, the second time Ezra Koenig sings it the second part becomes “couldn’t wait three.” He’s thought about it enough in that space to realize the damage the wait would do to him, but it still doesn’t sound like he’s fully committed to anything else.

The live arrangement of “2021” is quite different, and extends the length of the composition by an extra three minutes that mostly elaborates on the lovely guitar melody that breaks up the more minimal and vibey piano-centric verses. I prefer this version, largely because it focuses on my favorite melodic part and emphasizes the “lost-in-thought” character of the song. The harmonic aspects of the song are much deeper too, and when you move through the instrumental break before reaching the final verse it feels like an emotional journey, as if you’re flash forwarding through entire potential timelines full of good and bad possibilities. Whereas the studio recording is so elliptical it doesn’t suggest any end to a holding pattern, the live version suggests an eventual path out of this purgatory. In a moment when we’re all waiting around to find out what our lives might be like in 2021 for reasons Koenig could have never foreseen, the more hopeful version of the song feels like a gift. The suspense of waiting is excruciating, but it’s not forever.

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Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire “Black Mirror”

Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire is a tremendously versatile rapper, as adept with over-the-top raunch and bravado as he is with aggressive political music or more introspective and philosophical work. “Black Mirror” is in the third category, with him reflecting on his childhood in Bed-Stuy, the physical and psychological tortures that Black slaves endured in America, and as he puts it in his own description of the song on Bandcamp, “Black masculinity and the role males play in the growth of younger men.” His performance matches the wistful tone of MadLib’s track, which recuts an old Stylistics track into melancholy abstraction. The second half of the song is a tribute to eXquire’s late uncle, a man he credits with setting him on the course of becoming a rapper. He’s clearly in awe of the man but doesn’t portray him as some untouchable hero but rather as a complicated person who taught him to respect himself and take pride in what he does. This could easily just be pure sentimentality, but eXquire ties together all these thoughts to arrive at a core theme: Pride is important, and it has to be modeled and passed down somehow.

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Drea the Vibe Dealer “Catastrophe”

“Catastrophe” is stacked with the sort of ear-catching bits that someone could sample and extrapolate into another song entirely – the slinky guitar part at the top of the song, the chiming chords at the start of the chorus, the ba-da-boop keyboard sound that punctuates the hook, the slight drag on the beat. Drea the Vibe Dealer is truly dealing in strong vibes here, and this extends to how she records her vocal so her jazzy phrasing slurs slightly in heavy reverb without sacrificing the nuances of her singing. Maybe the best way to put it is that it’s sort of painterly – photorealistic, but smudged and blurred a bit for style.

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Sault “Monsters”

“Monsters” is one of the first songs I’ve heard in 2020 that sounds like it’s offering a new aesthetic direction for the coming decade rather than sounding like something that’s just leftover from the past two years. The combination of sounds in this song are immediately striking – heavy layers of overdriven keyboards contrasted with the sort of crisp, slick groove that’s become Sault producer Inflo’s signature sound, and a vocal that’s so wet with reverb that the song’s straightforward melodic hooks have a ghostly, somewhat uncanny feel. This suits the lyrics very well, rendering spiritual but overtly political BLM-adjacent sentiments with an abrasive edge and a touch of supernatural power. The super-saturated sounds and the clean, dry tones are balanced perfectly in the mix so the opposite textures complement each other rather than clash or lose definition. It takes a lot of skill to make a song feel so raw and blunt, but also sophisticated.

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Jessie Ware “Mirage (Don’t Stop)”

Jessie Ware’s vocal melody in “Mirage” is the same as the verses of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” but that didn’t quite hit me at first – it sounded immediately familiar, but the feeling of this song is very different and the lyrics fake you out a bit by nodding to another famous song from 1983, “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life” by Indeep. Ware’s new songs are referential even when they’re not directly interpolating old hits, and much like Dua Lipa she’s side-stepping declining recent trends in dance music in favor of something that sounds more classic and rooted in disco. But whereas Lipa’s songs have a brighter, bolder pop feel, Ware stays in the “classy” and “adult” pop lane she’s been in for years. She’s more of an aesthete, and excels when she’s curating bits of the past to create a vibe in the moment. “Mirage” conveys a luxurious sensibility; it presents dance pop as an aspirational product rather than a functional commodity good.

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Teyana Taylor featuring Erykah Badu “Lowkey”

Teyana Taylor is clearly living a blessed life – she managed to pull off the late ’90s/early ’00s hat trick of getting Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, AND Erykah Badu to all appear on her album. This would be like if Charli XCX got Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, AND Justin Timberlake on her next record, or if Car Seat Headrest got in collaborations with Stephen Malkmus, Beck, AND Thurston Moore on their next one. It’s a staggering achievement in feature-wrangling, and certainly gives the impression that she’s been anointed by these icons.

Even more impressive is that Taylor convinced Badu to essentially make a sequel to one of her most famous and beloved songs, “Next Lifetime,” with her. According to Taylor she heard echoes of “Next Lifetime” in the track and decided to embrace the similarity rather than run away from it, and reached out to Badu for her blessing and to invite her to be involved. (I absolutely love the confidence of this.) There are definitely ways this could be a sort of crass move, but Taylor’s lyrics and performance come from an artistically genuine place – it’s not a tribute to the original so much as it’s in conversation with it. She’s examining the song’s themes of talking yourself out of infidelity despite the temptation of an intense emotional connection from her own angle. Whereas Badu’s original was sung from a position of bittersweet certainty, Taylor sounds more tormented and indecisive. When Badu appears on the track, she’s more in Taylor’s emotional zone – conflicted, and only begrudgingly doing the right thing.

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Ego Ella May “How Long ‘Til We’re Home”

Ego Ella May’s guitar parts in “How Long ‘Til We’re Home” are delicate and subtle, all gentle arpeggios and gorgeous chord strums that seem to glimmer in the empty spaces of the arrangement. The rhythm section is tighter and sounds much more crisp in the mix, allowing the treble parts to be more atmospheric and emotive. May’s vocal part is soulful but subdued, delivering lyrics expressing deep skepticism of the media and cynicism about the direction of society with a sober, matter of fact tone. The calmness of the music seems pointed – it conveys a feeling of resignation and lowered expectations, but still some small amount of faith and optimism even when she sings the words “I’m losing hope” at the end of the chorus.

Buy it from Bandcamp.