Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Guerilla Toss “Future Doesn’t Know”

“Future Doesn’t Know” has a bright and hyper sound to it that signals an energetic optimism, but the lyrics by Kassie Carlson are mostly about confronting the future with total confusion. These aren’t mutually exclusive things, of course – the sentiment here isn’t far off from Björk declaring “I don’t know the future after this weekend, and I don’t want to” in “Big Time Sensuality” – but her choice of words leans heavily on anxiety triggers. It’s an expression of indecision that vacillates from second to second between “now what???” and “NOW WHAT!!!” She may seem lost and humbled by bad experiences, but there is a joy and sense of adventure here that overrides the worst of it.

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Pink Shabab “If Only I Could Hold You One More Time”

It was not at all surprising to learn after having heard this song a few times that the primary instrument of the composer, Joseph Carvell, is the bass guitar. The bass line is prominent in the mix and central to the song, driving it along with a slow-burn urgency. The surface of the song is glossy and chill, but the tone is more like the inadvertent creepiness of someone who doesn’t understand their feelings are coming off more intense than sweet. The atmosphere of this song is excellent – the gentle drones, the chords that seem to pop in for a moment just to sound like a sparkle, and that synth flute sound which shifts abruptly from ambiance to a busy, slightly winded melodic flourish.

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Lee Ranaldo & Raül Refree “Names of North End Women”

Lee Ranaldo’s new collaborative album with Raül Refree moves about as far away as any former member of Sonic Youth has away from the aesthetics of Sonic Youth. So far, indeed, that guitars are not even part of the palette: “Names of North End Women” is all vocal and polyrhythmic percussion. Ranaldo’s voice is in excellent form here, leaning on his usual rhythmic poetry but allowing for more purely melodic and soulful moments along the way. The percussion is busy but there’s a lot of silence on the track and that negative space feels distinctly cold, like crisp winter air at a high elevation. This makes the movement of the track feel necessary, like it’s doing what must be done to get along and survive.

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Cheeze “우린 어디에나 (We’re Everywhere)”

“We’re Everywhere” is a ballad with a sophisticated R&B gloss that conveys a very heightened sense of romanticism – it’s very “we’re in a movie, and this part is so perfect it makes me cry.” It sounds like a perfect vision of love, but the English translation of the Korean lyrics reveals some interesting contextual details: She’s mostly singing about feeling awkward and anxious with someone, and is very fixated on the smallness of her body. It’s as much about being in love as it is about feeling insignificant and shy – not necessarily contradictory things, but something that complicates the sweetness and purity of this music.

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Molly Burch “What Do the Lonely Do At Christmas?”

I was not familiar with song – which was previously recorded by The Emotions and Patti LaBelle – before hearing Molly Burch’s new recording of it for her Christmas album, but it hit me immediately in the gut. Burch’s arrangement is a slightly jazzier take on the Emotions’ version, but retains a very specific early ‘70s sort of melancholy. It’s a very graceful and dignified sort of sadness, the sort of seasonal misery that would be dressed up in a beautiful peacoat. The lyrics hit very close to home for me now as someone whose family is no longer nearby and doesn’t have default company for the holidays. It’s an awkward position to be in, but at least I have this and the original recording as a way to really play up the lonely Christmas vibes.

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Scott & Charlene’s Wedding “Back in the Corner”

I like to imagine interviewing this band and casually mentioning Lou Reed and the main guy looking blankly at me like, “who is that?” It is entirely impossible to imagine that this guy is anything other than a Lou Reed obsessive who has decided to make his own Lou Reed songs. I suppose this will come off as insulting or as faint praise, but this is an exceptionally good fake Lou Reed song, something that would’ve fit in very nicely on any of the Velvet Underground records. The rhythm, the lyrical detail, the specific vocal tone – it’s all very Peak Lou in a way that doesn’t seem remotely accidental. I’m in awe of how well this guy nails it. The craft and precision is so strong you could absolutely trick someone into believing this is a Loaded outtake.

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Olivia Lane “So Good It Hurts”

“So Good It Hurts” is a country rock song that opens with an unexpected cold and brutal sound, not far off from the BDSM cyborg vibes of Goldfrapp in electro-glam mode. It’s a strange contrast with the rest of the song, which isn’t far off from Shania Twain at her most pop, but it doesn’t clash either. It just sets up an unusual tightness in the verses that makes the more traditional by-the-book chorus feel more jubilant. The whole song is just Olivia James singing about how hot her boyfriend is, so in that context it’s like the verses are all horny tension and the chorus is ecstatic gratitude for being blessed with this rugged but well-dressed country hunk. The details are specific enough to make anyone outside of the country cultural bubble go “uh, really, that’s what you’re into?” but it’s all very endearing and good-natured.

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んoon “Lumen”

“Lumen” is essentially an R&B song, but んoon’s arrangement is so peculiar in its rhythms and contrasts of textures that it comes out sounding sorta alien. It’s like Aaliyah/Timbaland music reinterpreted as post-rock – two concurrent off-kilter turn-of-the-millennium aesthetics merged into something both sleek and slightly awkward, but entirely mesmerizing. The band convey absolute confidence on this track, with every unusual choice played with an elegance that smooths out the tentative feeling of the beat.

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Letherette “Hornty”

Letherette’s music is like a much hornier version of J. Dilla, like it’s all deliberately constructed as sex music. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s all a tribute to the sensuous, luxuriant sex music of the 70s – everything they do is so rooted in those aesthetics that it’s hard not to approach this music as something that’s so earnestly enamored with its source material that it moves beyond the point of kitsch. “Hornty” is a particularly smooth track that holds up better as a discrete composition than most of Brown Lounge Vol. 5, which is clearly intended to be experienced as a suite. It’s a real “does-what-it-says-on-the-tin” sort of song: It’s obviously a horny reconfigured jazz song featuring horns. Would you want it to be anything else?

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Divino Niño “Coca Cola”

Divino Niño have a rowdy sort of elegance on stage that plays up their casual charisma and clever guitar playing, but their studio recordings have a different feeling – hazier, nostalgic, and much more introverted in tone. A song like “Coca Cola” certainly benefits from the hyper-romantic atmosphere of this production aesthetic, but it’s frustrating to listen to their record after seeing them live and feeling like their personality and energy is lost in the translation somewhere, or just overpowered by reverb and synths. But either way this song nails a specific feeling of being young and desperate to make something happen if just to alleviate boredom.

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Lulileela “Dive”

I’m not sure exactly where Lulileela is coming from in terms of her musical influences but to my American ears “Dive” sounds sorta like the quasi-80s hyper-romantic aesthetics of M83 at their commercial peak, but with the rock boy melodrama cut out and the slick sophistication dialed way up. Her voice is soft and airy, but her bass playing is very loud and assertive in the mix, driving the song while also providing popping flourishes along the way. A lot of artists aim for this mark but don’t nail it the way she does here, and I think it comes down to her composing like a bassist. Anyone with the right keyboards and presets can go for this sort of atmosphere, but not everyone can lay down a groove as dynamic as this. She centers the drama of the music in the hips rather than leaving it all to your head.

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Beck “Everlasting Nothing”

This is an excerpt from my review of the new Beck album Hyperspace for NPR.

The record ends with “Everlasting Nothing,” a majestic ballad that’s among the best songs Beck has ever released. “I woke up in a movie, didn’t know if it was my whole life,” he sings over a stately guitar rhythm. “When it ended, I laughed before I cried.” A verse later, he imagines his rebirth as “a standing ovation for the funeral of the sun,” sounding less blunt and plainspoken and more poetic and abstract — that is, more like himself.

As the song progresses it grows grander in scale, and finally peaks with the ecstatic glossolalia of female gospel singers. The effect is similar to “The Great Gig in the Sky,” in which Pink Floyd used a similar arrangement trick to convey a cosmic notion of death and the afterlife. But whereas Clare Torry’s voice was foregrounded on that song, the gospel vocals in “Everlasting Nothing” are distant in the mix, like a siren call to oblivion that Beck is tuning out for the time being, choosing to stay grounded as he faces the unknown. It’s not quite a happy ending, but it’s at least a dramatic ride into the sunset, capping all the gloomy resignation with some sense of direction and purpose.

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Jubilee featuring Maluca “Mami”

I always favor cultural omnivores as electronic dance producers. I’m not dialed into the ongoing narrative of this milieu to care much about the concepts, aesthetic purity, or subcultural contexts of microgenres, and I find it much easier to connect with the sort of DJs who have internalized every trick in the book for getting people to dance and are ruthless in their pursuit of delivering thrills. Jubilee is very much this type of producer, and while her record Call of Location doesn’t sound quite like my beloved Basement Jaxx, it’s very apparent that she’s cut from the same cloth. The record is all energy and joyful eclecticism rooted in a deep love and history with the music she’s drawing on. It’s not hard to dissect the mix of grime, Miami bass, and dancehall that comes together on “Mami,” but the song is so effective on a raw physical level that examining it that way is besides the point. She’s connecting the dots between these things, but mostly just in a “by any means necessary” approach to moving you.

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Deerhunter “Timebends”

A lot of the time, even with an artist I love and have followed for many years like Deerhunter, I put off listening to stand-alone or pre-album singles. It’s just a matter of prioritizing, and I don’t particularly like the drip drip drip drip approach to releasing songs in advance of a full record because then you hear the record in full and it feels more like a compilation. So it took a few weeks to get to “Timebends,” but I heard it at precisely the right time on a day when its lyrics about feeling emotionally flat would really click with my experience in the moment. It felt like that joke where someone in a video is aware that the song is narrating exactly what they’re doing and what’s going on around them.

“Timebends” isn’t the first time Bradford Cox has stretched out the length of a song, but it’s the first time he’s written something that’s so deliberately epic. It sounds like the goal here was to make a perfect finale for live shows and built in as many fun instrumental tangents as possible, right on down to a drum solo. It’s over-the-top but not in a way that undermines the drama of the song and the way Cox seems to be mourning the loss of a part of himself and questioning whether anything has actually been improved. It’s a little sad, but mostly just…blank. It’s very “it is what it is.”

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Taeyeon “하하하 (LOL)”

This is basically like a K-Pop version of Portishead, but who knows if that was even what these people were aiming for. One of the things I like a lot about K-Pop is that very often the maximalist aesthetic results in the writers and producers tossing a dozen different musical ideas into any given song and ending up with something fresh and distinctive if just by the novelty of the contrasting elements. “LOL” leans on a lot of trip-hop and post-Weeknd R&B aesthetics but there’s so much else going on in the song, particularly in the final third when you’re getting hand claps piled on “orchestra hit” keyboards piled on groovy organ and topped with a glossy guitar solo. Taeyeon’s vocal suits the femme fatale vibe of the music, especially when she laughs to the beat in a way that sounds very much like she’s taunting the listener.

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Lapalux featuring JFDR “Thin Air”

“Thin Air” has a very peculiar dynamic that’s more like a three-act structure than what would normally make sense for pop or dance music. The first section is tense and atmospheric, the middle section is a chaotic dance break, and the third returns to a more vibe-y aesthetic but gradually lets out all the tension like a deflating balloon. That up-tempo section is only about a minute long but is incredibly compelling – it ought to feel cathartic but the textures are all harsh and buzzy so it feels more like an anxious chase sequence. Everything in this song is just a bit off in an intriguing way, and the climax seems early and abrupt so the soft, glowy, sensual resolution lingers slightly longer than you might expect. Maybe it’s meant to be like a reward?

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Ali Barter “History of Boys”

Ali Barter’s Hello, I’m Doing My Best is mostly made up of songs about a sober person looking back on their life when their drinking was out of control with a mix of shame and confusion, like they’re just trying to piece together exactly how things got so bad. Some of the songs get very bleak, but “History of Boys” is light and nostalgic about messing around as a rebellious teen. The dark bits are still in there – she sings about blacking out in the chorus – but the lyrics and the rambunctious pop-punk style of the song honestly acknowledge the fun to be had at the top of the slippery slope. And while this is formally very much a pop-punk song, the arrangement resists the predictable patterns of that genre by putting off its hit-the-pedals chorus a bit to coast out on a pre-chorus that feels more stark and uncertain before slamming into the inevitable.

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Lilith “Figure 1 Repeated”

“Figure 1 Repeated” is a song about noticing the patterns of another person, and the sort of repeated behaviors that aren’t fully obvious to you until you’ve observed a few cycles firsthand. So it makes some thematic sense that the music itself moves in subtle circles, like a sad little train moving along an elliptical track. Hannah Liuzzo sings with a low-key melancholy tone but her words and phrasing come across as more reasonable than overtly emotional – she’s coming from a very analytical place, and seems more invested in fixing or adjusting the situation than breaking the pattern. It’s a very accommodating frame of mind, one that notices a problem but just wants to figure out how to work around it.

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Destroyer “Crimson Tide”

“Crimson Tide” isn’t far off from Dan Bejar working in his Kaputt mode, but it’s a more stark version – there’s no richness to the sound, no sax flourishes. It’s a lonelier version of the sound, and one that calls attention to its artifice in a different way. Whereas the songs in this general style on Kaputt and Ken were openly winking at Roxy Music and New Order, this song is more like going out of your way to set up a fog bank and dramatic lighting and then traipsing through the scene wearing a trench coat. It feels more overtly theatrical, and more about placing a spotlight directly on him as he shares his cryptic wisdom.

As always, Bejar’s words call out for annotation as he calls back to previous Destroyer songs as well as tunes by the likes of The Cure and Kenny Rogers, and his best lines come across like he’s saying something so personal he’s the only one who could ever really understand it. And then there’s the jokes: blowing bubbles, a funeral going completely insane. It’s all gallows humor, bitchy asides, and a half-hearted attempt to throw you off from noticing just how much of this song is about physical frailty and fear of death.

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Dua Lipa “Don’t Start Now”

“Don’t Start Now” is essentially a disco song and there is a retro quality to the production, but despite certain musical signifiers, it’s not necessarily a nod to actual ‘70s disco. This is, instead, a pop song that’s calling back to previous iterations of chart pop calling back to the disco era. In other words, this is much more Kylie Minogue than Donna Summer. To some extent this is just what happens with any genre, as signifiers and conventions are passed down over the years, less as a manner of direct homage but to assert “this is THAT kind of song.”

But unlike with various forms of rock music which are always being produced in some form, calling back to disco – particularly in its original pre-electronic form – comes in waves as the vibe falls in and out of fashion, so the evolution is a bit weirder and usually very Column A + Column B. So in the case of “Don’t Start Now,” the chorus hook is very “UK chart pop in the 21st century,” the bass line is very “Daft Punk trying to make their own Chic song six years ago,” and the lyrics seem specifically indebted to Robyn’s brand of “crying while I’m dancing” pop catharsis. (And then there’s some disco strings, gotta love some disco strings!) It’s all very considered and a whole team of people put this together, but it all comes together quite naturally. It’s rather elegant in its vaguely haughty funkiness, and ends up sounding like something that just needs to be.

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Lake Ruth “Extended Leave”

Lake Ruth singer Allison Brice is an excellent lyricist in a very understated sort of way – she’s always writing these very closely observed character studies from a bit of critical distance, as though she’s reviewing someone else’s existence in a specific moment. The music, which feels cool and precise is its rhythms and textures, emphasizes the sense of clinical detachment.

“Extended Leave” is a snapshot of someone who seems to be under a great deal of pressure who reacts by skipping out of work and getting paranoid about the passage of time. Brice fills in easily observable details – “you grow obsessed looking at your watch” – but the specifics of the situation are vague. It’s a bit like watching a stranger and imagining the story they’re living. The “why?” of everything is maddeningly vague, but imagining what’s really going on and driving them emotionally is a sort of empathy, I suppose.

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