Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Crumb “Ghostride”

“Ghostride” is a slow, gentle, hazy song about living in a daze. Lila Ramani sings about feeling stuck “on automatic” and being reminded she’s alive by mundane stimulation in the back of a car. She’s passively going along with moving from place to place, but her mind is either somewhere else or entirely turned off, depending on the moment. There’s a bit of sadness and introspection, but it’s mostly just a pleasant sort of disassociation. The sound of the song is psychedelic, but without a lot the usual atmospheric signifiers of that vibe – it’s like the ambience has been cut out entirely in favor of a dry, clean, uncanny recording aesthetic.

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Kate Bollinger “I Don’t Wanna Lose”

“I Don’t Wanna Lose” has a light, easy-going feel to it, but under the seeming tranquility of the music is a tangle of confusion, fear, and insecurity. Kate Bollinger confronts all of this with modesty and self-deprecating wit – “so what if it’s all my decisions / or my indecision / oh, I just can’t pick one” – but doesn’t deny herself the weight of her emotions. Given the tone of her words and the graceful and relaxed tone of her arrangement, the anxiety at the heart of the song is placed in a greater context. There, but ultimately at scale with the rest of her life, and what’s around her. It’s like a coping mechanism set to music, like she’s carefully guiding herself through a maze of emotion to get to the desired point: “I just wanna win.”

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Sir Babygirl “Cheerleader”

“Cheerleader” is a very charged word, one that evokes a lot of overlapping anxieties about status, conformity, femininity, commodification of teen girls, and how Hollywood has packaged teen archetypes for generations. Kelsie Hogue gleefully dives into all of that in this bombastic and melodramatic pop song, but adds a few extra layers of angst by centering it on latent homoerotic desire and a fraught frenemy relationship between two girls. Hogue sings the song with a touch of irony – you’re certainly meant to hear it in the context of previous iterations of teen pop culture artifacts, and she’s aware of the heightened emotion of the characters. But even still, the level of commitment in the lyrics and vocal performance make it clear that this is coming from a very raw emotional place that’s only just getting filtered through glossiness, camp, and archetypes.

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Miss World “I Found A Girl”

As Miss World creates more music and videos, it’s clear to me that she’s a true auteur who is gradually creating her own distinctive aesthetic and iconography out of kitschy elements of the past and present. She’s kinda like the Anna Biller of indie rock, building fun but cleverly pointed art that on the surface comes off as frivolous because she’s mostly making references to junk culture made for women and the less glamorous elements of the internet.

“I Found A Girl” is Miss World in curatorial mode. The song was originally performed by an amateur singer called Roye’l on a public access show and spread as a minor video meme back in the early days of YouTube. Miss World’s cover of the song is not devoid of irony – she layers images of herself over the original footage in the video – but it’s very clear that her love for this song is entirely earnest. This is her best vocal performance to date – her timbre is uncannily similar to that of a young Madonna, and that along with the particular tone of the synths makes it sound like it could be a great lost mid-80s Madonna ballad.

The real joy of this recording is in how much she embraces the purity of Roye’l’s song, and sings it like the hit it ought to be. The hook is truly gorgeous, and I feel like my heart is glowing every time I hear her sing the phrase “I found her a girl, her name is Jikokoa!” The subtle tension in her version comes down to a bitter knowledge of how the world can be, and how first loves can go, but singing it all like she’s just trying to will more purity and kind-hearted joy into the world.

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Mabanua featuring Chara “Call On Me” (Knxwledge Remix)

Knxwledge’s remix of this song by the Japanese producer Mabanua is so drastically that it’s surprising to go back to the source material and find something rather boppy and twee. Knxwledge takes the vocal Chara and turns the melody sideways in a deep, humid funk track. His arrangement remakes her breathy performance as an R&B vocal, and brings out a raw sensuality that’s far more Adina Howard or TLC than anything remotely like J-Pop. It’s a cool trick, but also an assertion of Knxwledge’s powerful aesthetic. Listening to this, you get the sense that he could will most any song into his low-key but intensely sexual vibe.

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Ice Cream “Peanut Butter”

Do you ever stumble upon a song and just feel like “geez, were they trying to make me happy, like, me specifically?” Because that’s how this one is for me – it’s like the platonic ideal of the sort of independent pop music I was searching for all the time in the first seven or eight years of this site’s existence. The tunefulness and danceability of pop, but with the edge of rock. But usually in these things, the guitar parts are pretty simple, and sound like riffs presented with scare quotes. The guitar tone on “Peanut Butter” is far more distinctive and interesting – it’s very similar to Robert Fripp, but if Robert Fripp was inclined to do a guest spot on a Peaches song. It adds a touch of shiny glamour to the groove, and contrasts nicely with the emphatic and passionate tone of the vocals, which deliver low-key spiteful lyrics. It sounds raw, but sort of elegant.

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Black Midi “Speedway”

The lyrics of “Speedway” list off structures and spaces, a newly built city viewed both up close and from a distance. It’s the kind of song where the lyrics mostly serve as subtitles for the instrumental – even if there were no vocals, it’d be pretty obvious that this music was a meditation on geometry and structure. The video suggests itself: stark shots of clean new buildings and infrastructure, cut to the song’s abrupt staccato guitar chords and busy percussion. The contrast of those musical elements is the most appealing aspect – it’s like moving through a crowded, bustling space with a calm state of mind, navigating entirely on instinct.

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Adia Victoria “Devil Is A Lie”

“Devil Is A Lie” is a ballad that comes out of both jazz vocal and showtune traditions, but more specifically owes a debt to Fiona Apple and Jon Brion’s synergy of those styles on her second and third records. Adia Victoria doesn’t always work in this lane – her current record often sounds more like blues rock filtered through TV on the Radio vibes – but she ought to do songs like this more often as it really suits her raspy but expressive vocal style. The melody of this song is a delight, and there’s a very appealing low-key hamminess to Victoria’s delivery. Her phrasing is playful, but not so much that she obscures her struggles with temptation or her annoyance with “the stress of always having to be happy all the time.” The sweetness of the tune is undercut by bitterness and acidity, like the musical equivalent of a good dark chocolate.

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The Lonely Island “Focus on the Game”

The vast majority of The Lonely Island’s comedy has been focused on goofing on masculinity, and as they progress through their career their delight in mocking the absurdity of machismo only seems to intensify. In this way, The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is the pinnacle of their catalog to date – a rap opera visual album about famed steroid abusers José Canseco and Mark McGwire at the peak of their baseball careers in the late 80s. The record isn’t so much about the real life Canseco and McGwire as it is about how the pre-adolescent Lonely Island guys imagined them to be, a fantasy of hyper-masculine success built out of the images and messages they’d internalized from absorbing ’80s culture as children.

The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is hilarious; the only thing that’s been anywhere near as funny this year is the Lonely Island-produced I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. But it’s also incredibly sad in the way they explore their characters’ loneliness, paranoia, insecurity, and ‘roided-out rage. They’re just enormous two baby men obsessed with winning the love of their distant fathers, and oblivious to how other people are taking advantage of them. They love to objectify women and are obsessed with attaining their notion of male physical perfection, but chafe at being objectified by women.

“Focus on the Game” is the most melancholy song in Bash Brothers, and also probably the most lovely thing they’ve ever made in terms of pure melody. It’s a song about feeling lonely at the top – they’re both isolated and depressed, and terrified that their terrible secret about getting juiced up on steroids will come out and they’ll lose everything. The moment that kills me in this song is near the end where José and Mark’s perspectives overlap, and they address that they’re the only ones who truly understands the other. But this just pushes them apart, as they also realize that they’d be complicit in each other’s downfall. The phrase “you’re the only one who knows what it truly means to bash” shouldn’t be as poignant as it is in this song, but they made it work.

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Father John Misty “Date Night”

Josh Tillman loves to play the heel in his own songs, and he’s exceptionally good at it. He knows what’s up in culture, he’s aware of his reputation, and he knows what he looks like to you. He’s not really that guy, but he’s enough like that guy to satirize it and poke holes in a particular form of bohemian masculinity. His character in “Date Night” is a dangerous but charming creep who’s a little too clueless to be good at manipulating other people. He aspires to be a grifter, but he’s actually the mark – he’s just far too obsessed with creating an image for himself to give much thought into anyone else’s motivations or desires. You get the impression that you could trick this guy into anything if he thought you were cooler than him, or that it would give him some edge. He’s ultimately just a bad date, some goon who’s trying too hard to seem nonchalant, quirky, and impressive, and mostly comes off as a frantic mess. It’s probably not too hard for a guy who gave himself the name “Father John Misty” and carefully crafted a louche “homeless billionaire” look for himself to get into this mindset. But he’s 100% in on the joke even if you’re not.

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Squid “Houseplants”

I can’t claim to know all of the music that’s been coming out over the past few years, but I have screened a LOT of it and one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s very rare to hear anyone younger than 35 really scream these days. I have theories about this, but let’s not get into it. I’m just getting at how to hear a new band with a screaming, hugely expressive singer is a rarity now. It sounds extra unhinged.

Ollie Judge, the drummer and vocalist of Squid, sounds like a fucking maniac on this song. It’s not cookie-monster-vocal machismo or anything you’d typically get out of metal or grunge. It’s more bug-eyed and deranged, and the lyrics are so cryptic and odd that it’s all the more weird and jarring. It’s unsettling to hear a guy screaming “HOUSEPLANTS! HOUSEPLANTS!” like he’s having some sort of episode. The music is essentially punk but there’s bits of krautrock and jazzy skronk in the mix. Given that Judge has some vocal similarity to James Murphy, it comes out sounding like if all of LCD Soundsystem were dosed with bath salts.

This is fantastic and I want more of it.

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Meernaa “Ready to Break”

“Ready to Break” is a very dense and rich piece of music that nevertheless feels loose and light. That’s mostly due to the way the song’s syncopated percussion seems to be at some distance from the keyboard chords and lead lines, with Carly Bond’s emotive voice lingering somewhere in the space between. There’s some interesting twists and turns here – it starts off as an 80s sort of funk pop ballad, but takes off on a tangent for the last couple minutes that sounds like if Robert Fripp and Sheila E sat in on a Janet Jackson song around 1986. There’s a real joy to this music, particularly in the way they seem to utterly delight in the sounds of the chords they choose, and how they pack them into the song with a lot of grace and style.

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Madonna “I Don’t Search, I Find”

Madonna is the most Leo of all pop stars and this may be her most Leo song, a luxurious disco tune about finding a new lover who meets her very high standards, opening with the announcement: “Finally, enough love!” The song exudes confidence and power, but also a deep need to feel confident and powerful. It’s not a song about merely finding love – how ordinary – but selecting someone special and worthy of her desire, and able to give her the exact amount of love she requires.

“I Don’t Search, I Find” was written with the French producer Mirwais, who is best known for collaborating with her on most of Music. They still have a strong connection, but the sound doesn’t really call back to her early to mid ‘00s work so much as her vibe circa Erotica. Given her resistance to nostalgia for her back catalog, I’m sort of surprised this song even exists. But I’m glad it does – this sort of classy house aesthetic is one of her best modes, and as much as I appreciate her pushing herself creatively I’m more excited to hear her do something she can do better than anyone else.

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Katie Dey “Stuck”

“Stuck” is a song that clearly states the anxieties and pains of body dysmorphia. Katie Dey’s lyrics are so direct that it’s sort of unnerving; I know that my empathy goes into overdrive just hearing a line like “I’m constantly scared that we will never speak again.” As plain as the lyrics are, Dey’s arrangement embraces abstraction and metaphor. The song sounds like something delicate and graceful that’s lost in odd ambient sounds, and contrasted with rather harsh percussion. The core of the song sounds like something lovely trying to emerge, and just pushing to the surface without getting free.

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Radiohead “Lift”

It probably wouldn’t be all that exciting to hear 18 hours of process recordings by most artists, but Radiohead in the late ‘90s is an exception. This is partly because they were willing to take big swings in terms of arrangements, and it’s just interesting to hear them, say, try “Karma Police” with a dub reggae groove and give up halfway through. But it’s mostly because this archive of material is a document of them denying a lot of their own instincts and impulses in the interest of pushing towards a bolder evolution.

This takes a few different forms in the archive. In some cases, you get recordings of Thom Yorke seemingly improvising songs off the top of his head and you can hear the sort of melodies and chords he reaches for when he’s not really thinking and acting on a sort of muscle memory. There’s also a lot of full-band improvisations and abandoned songs in which in retrospect it’s pretty obvious they’re just getting various influences out of their system, whether it’s yet another standard 80s-style alt-rock song, or them going into a funk jam for 11 minutes just to see if anything cool happens. Then there’s just a lot of rejected arrangements and approaches to songs – you really get a sense of how “Airbag” evolved in particular, and how they pushed it from a rote “High & Dry”-esque ballad into something that still sounds quite futuristic and progressive over 20 years later.

Then there’s “Lift.” It’s pretty clear they knew that “Lift” was a very commercial song, but one where if it was indeed successful would push them in a rather square direction that would ultimately become Coldplay’s entire lane as a band. It’s a beautiful song in any arrangement, and triggers big emotions even as Yorke seems to undermine his own song with odd lyrics when the melody seems to call out for something more sentimental and direct. There’s a few versions of “Lift” in the minidisc archive, including an unmastered studio recording that is batched along with the full unmastered OK Computer and most of its b-sides, suggesting that the song came awfully close to being included or released on one of the singles.

The recording of “Lift” I’ve posted here is the best of all the known versions; the one where they get out of their own way and just let the song be as big and emotional as it wants to be. They’re leaning into every musical impulse they’re trying to get away from in this period, and it’s beautiful and unguarded. Thom sings with earnest passion, and Jonny Greenwood is unashamed to pile on a ton of synthesized strings to tug at your heartstrings. Maybe this, like that funk jam, was just a way of getting some impulses out of their system. I get why they felt a need to discard this and move on, but I’m very glad we have this recording now. It’s absolutely wonderful on its own terms.

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L-Vis 1990 featuring Brook Bailli “Caught Up”

L-Vis 1990 is typically more of a garage/funky club producer, but on this track his aesthetic has shifted into a quasi-‘90s R&B space to great effect. “Caught Up” has a smooth, casual groove built around synth chords that cycle between a highly filtered loop and airy tones on the chorus. Brook Bailli manages to sound both frustrated and sweet in her vocal as she tries to work out whether or not she wants to hold on to a relationship, and basically lays out her terms for what she’d accept from her partner if they want to stay with her. There’s a lot of confidence and maturity in the song, but the pragmatism can’t hide the wounded feelings that carry through in her voice and in the general tone of the song. You really get the sense she’d rather do anything but try to be practical about this.

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Prince “Manic Monday”

The new Prince compilation Originals is another bit of wish-granting from the genies combing through the late songwriter’s vaults – a whole album full of his original recordings of songs he gave away to his various protégées and associates. It’s very exciting to hear him sing classics like “The Glamorous Life,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “Jungle Love,” and “Manic Monday,” but it’s immediately apparent upon hearing all of them why he decided to give them to other singers. You can hear him not feeling quite comfortable singing them, like he can tell he’s written something that’s not meant for his particular voice.

“Manic Monday” is a particularly good example of this. The song was originally slated to become a duet with Apollonia for an Apollonia 6 record, but he waited until 1986 to pass it along to The Bangles, who made it a hit. Prince selected The Bangles based on his love of their minor hit “Hero Takes A Fall” and offered the song to them, confident that they could do the song justice. Contrasting his original with their version shows that his instincts were correct. Their particular blend of glossy pop and neo-60s psychedelia matched the vibe of the instrumental, and Susanna Hoffs’ voice was just plaintive enough to convey wistfulness and ennui, but not an overbearing sadness. Prince sings this demo a bit too long to give himself much room to be very expressive, and the tempo is a bit plodding compared to the much zippier arrangement by The Bangles. The song itself is impeccable, but you can hear him be a little frustrated by it. I find this interesting just as a document of artistic humility – he probably did want to keep an obvious hit like this for himself, but was aware of his own limitations and wasn’t afraid to let someone else shine on it.

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YG “Hard Bottoms & White Socks”

Lil Rich’s arrangement for “Hard Bottoms & White Socks” signals a lot of vulnerability in its soft electric piano chords and slow, unhurried beat. It’s the sound of leaving yourself wide open and moving at your own pace – confident, but with no defenses up. YG follows the vibe by laying out verses that detail the complicated feelings that go into ambition and artistic confidence. He’s got a lot of ideas and resents the people who place limits on him, and he’s proud of his accomplishments but clearly doesn’t feel like he’s done enough. When he boasts, it sounds like self-affirmation more than a declaration. There’s a few subtle notes of doubt in YG’s voice, but there isn’t anything he expresses that contradicts his faith in himself. He’s just being open about the anxieties that drive this feeling.

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J.Lamotta “If You Wanna”

J.Lamotta Suzume has a lovely and expressive voice, but her more compelling talent is in her skill as a composer and producer. “If You Wanna” is a remarkably graceful neo-soul number arranged and recorded with a slickness on par with what Steely Dan and Gary Katz got up to at the end of the 70s, or where D’Angelo was at around Voodoo. The record is extra dry but mixed so everything has incredible presence, particularly the drums and electric piano. The crispness of the snare hits contrast with the softness of Suzume’s voice and the swoon-y quality of the horns. It’s not just that this is a luxurious and sensual sound, but that it’s such a perfect articulation of an overwhelmingly sweet feeling. You hear this and just end up with a lovey-dovey contact high.

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Mndsgn “Sumdim”

“Sumdim” doesn’t even make it to the two minute mark. That’s kinda annoying, honestly – the groove is so strong and the vibe is so extremely pleasant that I’d like to hang out in this feeling at least another minute or two longer. It’s an interlude, and kinda like the most memorable part of a trip being some random moment along the way to a destination. But this also sounds like THE destination – there’s a strong beachy/poolside feeling to this, and I’m suckered in without being a beachy/poolside person at all. It’s hard to say why I even have this impression. There’s just something watery about the bass and some of the synth sounds burbling in the mix, and that high pitched lead keyboard part just feels like that particular light you get in Southern California.

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