Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Hanni El Khatib “Stressy”

“Stressy” is built around the sort of processed breakbeat that was just about the coolest thing in the world in the late ‘90s but is hard to come by now – hard and fast and full of clattering cymbal ambiance, like “Tomorrow Never Knows” but more shambling. Hanni El Khatib uses this as the basis for a garage rock song with the psychedelic sample aesthetics of The Chemical Brothers and The Dust Brothers. “Stressy” expresses a teeth-gritting angst and has a rather dark tonal palette but it sounds like catharsis to me, with all the shifts in rhythm relieving a physical tension rather than tightening up. It feels more like “and now I don’t fucking care!” than freaking out.

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King Krule “Underclass”

Archy Marshall’s early songs as King Krule followed tighter, more traditional songwriting trajectories but as he’s moved along he’s drifted towards less obvious structures that nevertheless follow intuitive emotional paths. “Underclass” sounds almost improvisational, like Marshall’s just writing a jazzy ballad along with his train of thought as he ponders his feelings about a relationship that keeps drawing him in despite his apparent ambivalence. The form suits the theme in as much as his character here is passive and seems to just go along with the moment despite his better judgment, and so you get this contrast of more tentative chord changes at the start, and a more loose and swaying section with a saxophone lead once he loosens up a bit. The most interesting trick of the song is in how Marshall conveys all this uncertainty in a song that still sounds incredibly romantic and sexy. “Little did I know I had this feeling,” he sings near the end of it, as if he’s confused to discover the reasons why he falls so easily under this person’s sway.

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Beach Bunny “April”

“April” is a song about months going by while you’re stuck in an emotional stasis, hung up on a relationship that’s long over but is idealized in your mind beyond all reason. Lili Trifilio sings the song with a plaintive but slightly defensive tone, as though she’s a little embarrassed to feel this way but honors her emotion too much to side against the part of herself that might be like “oh, please, shut up about this, this isn’t healthy.” Maybe the sentiment here is a bit pathetic, but only if you’re looking at it without much empathy or the emotional intelligence to notice it’s all just processing an experience to learn what you actually want and need. Not for nothing, but the most melodically and emotionally resonant bit of this song is when she’s declaring what she wants in the future: “Sometimes I just want somebody that reminds me that they’ll always love me.”

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Strawberry Generation “When You Were Here And I Was Sad”

There’s never been any shortage of fey indie-pop bands aiming for a sunny-yet-melancholy twee sensibility, but there has been a relatively low number of bands who I feel have the songwriting skill to nail this type of song rather than just sort of set a vibe and call it a day. “When You Were Here and I Was Sad” is nearly perfect iteration of this type of song, from the contrast of the bright and crisp lead guitar lines and the more hazy ambiance of the chords in the chorus to the particular lilt in Valerie Zhu’s voice as she sings her instantly memorable verse melodies. This band is clearly steeped in the history of their subgenre and have learned all the right lessons from all the right bands – I would be pretty surprised if these people are not Velocity Girl fans – yielding an expertly crafted song within a tradition.

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Tame Impala “Is It True”

Tame Impala started off as a band that fit rather neatly into the box of “retro psychedelic rock band” but have gradually mutated to the point that their songs all seem to exist in the blurry space between genres. “Is It True” is mostly grounded in a Liquid Liquid/ESG post-punk space disco aesthetic, but the ambiance is as hazy and psychedelic as anything Kevin Parker’s ever done in this band. It’s sort of shocking to me that this song wasn’t selected as a single for the new record since the hooks are immediate and bold, whereas the last couple singles were a lot more vague and sedate. It also helps that the lyrics register more clearly than usual, as Parker tends to sing in a high coo that blends into the midrange occupied by his many layers of keyboards and guitars. He’s singing from the perspective of someone who isn’t quite ready to make long-term promises to someone who seems to have fallen in love with him, and while you could certainly read this as a sort of fuckboy anthem, I feel like this comes from a more sensitive and gentle place. He’s not willing to set up expectations he can’t deliver on, but he’s not exactly unwilling to see things through. It’s a “let’s wait and see and not ruin the moment” sentiment.

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Deeper “This Heat”

“This Heat” is the extremely crisp and rhythmically tight sort of post-punk, the kind that sounds as though it’s a mathematically precise chart of someone’s real-time anxiety that’s been transposed to musical notation. Deeper aren’t reinventing any wheels here – if this is a vibe you enjoy, it will sound immediate familiar and welcome – but they execute this mode of music at a high level. A lot of this comes down to Deeper being as adept with writing melodies as they are with creating a tense rhythm, and the way the vocals sound a lot like The Cure’s Robert Smith in the best possible ways, drawing on the raw humanity and open-wound melodrama of his trebly yelps. It cuts straight through the more schematic elements of the music to keep you focused on the angst at the core of it.

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Trippie Redd featuring Young Thug “Yell Oh”

“Yell Oh” is immediately apparent as a Pi’erre Bourne composition even before his signature “Yo Pierre!!” drop comes in around 20 seconds into the track. The piano hook is just so extremely him – the tone has the uncanny quality of a cheap keyboard in preset piano mode, and the repeated melodic hook is almost too busy to allow space for rapping. There’s also the way the drum programming sounds as though it’s tilted at a diagonal from the vocal, leaving the music feeling a bit drunk and stumbling. The use of bass here is particularly inspired, with a low rumble that vibrates under the track in a way that makes it feel as though all these other elements stacked on top of it could fall over and crash like a Jenga tower if the frequency gets any deeper.

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Melkbelly “LCR”

“LCR” would feel wired and panicky in most any arrangement given its fast and jagged central guitar riff, but Melkbelly’s James Wetzel pushes the song to a frazzled extreme with his dizzyingly busy drum fills. The rhythm is constantly shifting but even in relatively quiet moments there’s no sense of stillness, only a jittery pause before bolting forwards again. But as the music signals anxiety, singer Miranda Winters sounds as unaffected and chill as a young Kim Deal while singing about observing people but feeling totally disconnected from them. Is she just bored, maybe? Or could it be it’s more like she’s traumatized and numb by whatever intense experience the music seems to be reacting to?

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Angelica Garcia “It Don’t Hinder Me”

The weight of “It Don’t Hinder Me” shifts around – a bit airy at the start, and stridently stomping in the more theatrical second half to emphasize the singer’s strength and pride. Angelica Garcia, a Southern Californian of Mexican and Salvadorian heritage, is singing about the cultural details of her youth that make her feel homesick, and the context that gives her a sense of self. There’s a vibrant specificity to her lyrics, particularly as she recalls bits of her past that weren’t exactly fun or glamorous. But she’s making a point of claiming it all, because every bit of it made her what she is, and this is a song about being proud. This sort of thing could easily be sentimental or tacky, but Garcia’s witty delivery and the punky bluntness of the rhythm keeps it all in check.

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The Heliocentrics “Burning Wooden Ship”

There’s really no getting around mentioning that The Heliocentrics are doing a Silver Apples thing with this song, right? The Silver Apples aesthetic – that crisp in-the-pocket percussion, the woozy vocal, the sci-fi synthesizer – is so distinctive that anyone who emulates it can’t really do so without it being a sort of tribute. It’s a great sound, though, and this band does a great job in interpreting it, particularly in the way the drum performance integrates a bit of the feel of Can’s Jaki Liebezeit circa Tago Mago. “Burning Wooden Ship” sounds like an excursion into the cosmos, especially as the percussion drops out and the song drifts off course in the middle section. When the song clicks back into its tight rhythm, it’s like the whole thing falls back into gravity.

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Soccer Mommy “Circle the Drain”

The best way I can explain the appeal of “Circle the Drain” is like when people make approximations of popular fast food and commercially produced snack items with superior ingredients. In this case the fast food item is a rock-pop ballad in the mode of the very late ‘90s/early ‘00s: think Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne, maybe a little Vanessa Carlton. The song evokes that general feeling but doesn’t go as heavy on the gloss or sentimentality. Soccer Mommy’s Sophy Allison is reaching for a more accessible – and at this point, highly nostalgic – style, but still retains a lot of her indie aesthetics. (To keep up the metaphor, consider this the artisanal ingredients.) She’s also a lot darker in her lyrics as she sings frankly about crippling depression, and without reaching any sort of conclusion or teachable lesson. The sort of misery she sings about here is an ongoing suck on her body and soul, and the best she can come up with in the short term is just “trying to seem strong for my love, for my family, and friends.”

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Caroline Rose “Feel the Way I Want”

Believing in yourself, allowing yourself to want what you want, and giving yourself person to do and be what you want all requires a leap of faith that can look delusional and arrogant when viewed from any direction. “Feel the Way I Want” plays on that ambiguity, both celebrating its character’s decision to throw herself into her desires and ambitions and looking askance at her, vaguely dubious of whether she can actually follow through on some big talk. But that bit of doubt is mostly just subtext – the synthy bounce of the song conveys a blithe confidence, and Rose sings her choruses with a joyful sincerity and delivers her verses with a touch of weight and tension, rooting her resolutions in a history of conflict and low self-esteem.

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Tara Clerkin Trio “In the Room”

The Tara Clerkin Trio are mostly a jazz group, but their music bleeds into other neighboring territories – vibey electronic music, artsy indie music, psychedelia. “In the Room” starts off slow and pensive with a simple saxophone figure repeating like drawing in steady, calming breaths for about two minutes. After that the song clicks into a mellow percussive groove with a clipped, hypnotic vocal pattern. This shift feels a bit like clouds parting to let in some fresh sunlight after a bit of rain. The pressure changes, the mood lifts. It’s incredibly lovely and calming, and only gets more so as the song drifts out and the percussion dissipates as that original sax pattern gets softer and softer.

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Basia Bulat “Your Girl”

“Your Girl” is a wistful folk-pop song in the tradition of Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs – crisp and clean in structure, but earthy and wholesome in aesthetics. Basia Bulat’s perspective is somewhat ambiguous in this song, shifting between a first-person testimonial about how she’s become hesitant to fall in love after some difficult experiences and choruses in which she’s addressing someone else about how they’ve let down their girl. It could just be that she’s talking to the one who wronged her, but there’s a suggestion of elapsed time. It could be advice to a friend, a warning to an ex that they’re keeping up the same mistakes, or maybe it’s just her reliving the same old traumas. But it’s notably that the song isn’t bitter or angry, just resigned to the seemingly inevitable catastrophes of people getting close to each other.

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Jeff Parker featuring Ruby Parker “Build A Nest”

I will admit to you that I feel a bit corny sharing the only song with vocals on a consistently great and inventive new jazz record, but just listen to this – it’s so lovely and gentle, it seems like it’s radiating warmth and benevolence! The feel of the track is easy going but there’s a slight tension in the groove, a bit of resistance to the call to slow down and enjoy the moment in the lyrics. Ruby Parker, the composer’s daughter, sings a very Dirty Projectors sort of melody with serene tones, as though she’s just moving with the waves of the rhythm. There’s a passive feeling to the song, but only in the sense of learning to calm down, trying to trust the universe, and letting that make you feel free.

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Andy Shauf “Where Are You Judy?”

In the story cycle of Andy Shauf’s new album The Neon Skyline, “Where Are You Judy?” is the inciting incident: Shauf’s lonely barfly discovers his ex-girlfriend is back in town, and gets it in his head that he needs to see her again. You hardly need the other songs on the record to get a complete experience of it – to be honest, given that I like this song more than the others and I prefer not following up on where the character goes from here, I prefer it on its own. Shauf conveys a lot of information with economical language, first sketching out the character’s romantic notion of why his relationship with Judy ended, i.e., that she was enticed away by the possibilities of flashy experiences somewhere else. He fantasizes about her giving him a call, telling him that she got bored of all that, that what she was chasing instead of staying with him was empty. And, by extension, that what they had together…that was fulfilling. The final chorus turns that flash of egocentric optimism inside-out without changing a word. Instead of wondering where she literally is in the moment, he’s flashing back to her lying in bed with him, her mind a million miles away. “Where are you, Judy?”

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Activity “Calls Your Name”

Activity’s forthcoming record Unmask Whoever is one of the best debut records I’ve heard in a long time – a band arriving fully formed after years of its members doing strong work in other groups (Grooms, Field Mouse) and pulling together a set of tasteful influences in interesting and evocative new ways. The band exists in a very Portishead-ish space between electronic music and bleak art rock, with the single “Calls Your Name” leaning a bit more towards sample-based production and a clicking, twitchy paranoia. The music in this song feels tight and claustrophobic but also overtly sexual, like they were making music on the prompt of “erotic panic attack.” The vocals signal a sort of flirty ennui, the guitar and keyboard parts offer subtle melodicism beneath the rhythmic clatter. It’s not even their best song.

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Four Tet “Baby”

Over the past decade or so Kieran Hebden has emerged as the master of the chopped and decontextualized vocal sample. His approach is both melodic and painterly, applying snippets of voice to the area of the song with both precise intention and gestural grace. He’s never trying to hide the nature of what he’s doing – you can always tell it’s cut up and digitally edited – but the sound is never about the process, it’s entirely about feeling and abstraction. “Baby,” a new song made in collaboration with the singer Ellie Goulding, is a particularly strong iteration on his usual formula and adds an unusual dimension to a Four Tet song in allowing the listener to recognize and fixate on the voice of a pop star. It feels slightly transgressive to separate a pop vocal from clarity and meaning, and to reduce Goulding to just the particular sound of her voice. In doing this Hebden highlights the best aspects of Goulding – the specific brightness of her tone, the way she often sounds like she’s grasping for something, the way she sounds like she’s pushing herself through painful feelings. In framing her voice like this, he’s presenting a very flattering portrait of her as a singer.

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Dreamville & Ari Lennox “Bussit”

Ari Lennox sings sexy, sensual R&B songs with the authoritative cadence of a rapper. Her phrasing is so bold and direct that even her most vulnerable or submissive lyrics can come across like statements or commands. This works particularly well on “Bussit,” a slow jam in which Lennox is taking control of a relationship that’s been hot but a little ambiguous. “You scared of love, but fuck your fear,” she sings in the first verse, not allowing any room for negotiation. The sentiment of this song would probably feel sinister coming from a man, but in this context, it’s a woman who knows what she wants doing her best to cut through a man’s bullshit and anxiety. I suppose this song is an ultimatum, but she’s mostly just asking him to get over himself and commit to something he actually cares about.

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Pearl Jam “Dance of the Clairvoyants”

Over the past two decades Pearl Jam shifted fully over to a jam band model in which the live show – and recordings of the live shows – was the primary focus of everything they did, and new studio albums were sporadically made as a way of bringing new songs into the setlist and having a peg for launching big tours. They only released four albums in this time, which is quite a drop from their frantic pace of writing and recording through the ‘90s. The records have their moments but feel very formulaic, as though the band identified a set of song archetypes they had to iterate on in order to fill out a sequencing arc that was pretty much the same every time. (2002’s overlong Riot Act is an outlier in this respect, but the tracks on the subsequent albums are interchangeable in production style and musical function.)

So with this in mind, “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” the first single from the forthcoming record Gigaton, is quite a surprise. “Dance” doesn’t sound quite like anything the band has ever done – it has prominent synths, a groove that encourages awkward dancing, and a vocal by Eddie Vedder that verges on a full-on David Byrne impression. It’s dark, but also sort of cheeky. (Near the end Vedder sings “I know the boys wanna grow their dicks and fix and file things.”) Even if the description of this seems potentially horrible, it all clicks together very nicely and sounds genuinely inspired. The band seem motivated to push themselves musically and Vedder is clearly inspired by the bleakness of contemporary politics and the oncoming disasters of climate change. His rich baritone is well suited to doomsaying, and when he sings a line like “the past is the present and the future’s no more” it comes out sounding like a prophecy rather than paranoia.

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