Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Seba Kaapstad “Don’t”

“Don’t” starts off sounding so harmonically and texturally rich in its first 30 seconds that I wouldn’t have minded if it just vamped in that mode for a couple minutes or so. From there it only gets more elegant and lovely as the song glides from groovy verse to weightless chorus, and then into an extended instrumental coda led by violin. This is a remarkably ambitious piece of music, but even in spite of a string coda and some heavy lyrics about the state of the world, it mostly just sounds smooth and effortless. It’s all feel and feelings, and the odd contours of the composition only really stand out if you’re looking at it from a distance.

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Flying Lotus featuring Tierra Whack “Yellow Belly”

“Yellow Belly” falls in the middle of Flamagra, a suite of songs that shift unpredictably between smooth grooves and agitated funk. This track is particularly odd – it’s a bit like stumbling into a room you’re not supposed to be in and witnessing some kind of odd sexual role-playing you can’t quite fathom. Flying Lotus’ track feels a bit like a Missy/Timbaland production thrown entirely off balance, and Tierra Whack raps like she’s deliberately trying to make you feel disoriented. When the song gets explicitly sexual at the end, it’s more slapstick than porno.

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Yohuna “Mirroring”

“Mirroring” delivers the expected sensations of dream pop and shoegaze, or whatever you want to call music that sounds like it exists in a world where the only record label that has ever existed is 4AD. But there’s an interesting tension in Johanne Swanson’s lyrics that undercuts the romantic haze of the music, and an insecurity at the core of it that bleeds out into every texture. Swanson sings about a relationship that’s intimate enough that they begin to mirror one another, and she can’t seem to tell how she feels about this. There’s a strong implication that she can’t understand how she appears to someone else, and then is perplexed by why someone she loves would want to be more like her. The uncertainty and ambiguity really makes the song, and the structure emphasizes the open-ended feeling by starting and ending as if bracketed by ellipses.

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J-E-T-S featuring Dawn Richard “Potions”

The keyboard tones in “Potions” feel slightly uncanny, like if flickering neon lights had a sound. The producers Jimmy Edgar and Machinedrum make the song feel spacious and chilly, like a large loft with over-aggressive air conditioning. It’s basically an R&B song built around a track that’s not too far removed from where Autechre was in the late ‘90s, so Dawn Richard’s fairly straightforward vocal feels a bit aloof if just for being in this context. The lust and emotional rawness is there, but it seems like she’s at a literal physical distance from the groove. I’m not sure if this is what anyone was going for, but she sounds like someone trying to put on a sexy pose and be engaging, but also protect their heart as much as possible.

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Steve Lacy featuring Daisy “Like Me”

Steve Lacy says at the top of “Like Me” that he didn’t want to make a “big deal” out of coming out as bisexual in this song, but then it goes on to be a 9 minute suite, so go figure. The composition of the music is ambitious, but the tone of his lyrics are low-key, which is more to his point. He’s just meditating on how something as simple as being attracted to a variety of genders can be interpreted as something more complex and create so many unnecessary complications in his life. It’s a bittersweet song, and while he’s mostly talking about his own experiences, the real feeling in the music is a desire to connect with other people. When Daisy joins in for her own verse, the loneliness lifts and the verses shift from monologue to dialogue, and when they sing the chorus together it goes from lament to commiseration.

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The National “Rylan”

I have no investment in The National, and have only liked scattered songs through their discography, mainly because their music tends to be so drab and monotonous. So it’s interesting to find that “Rylan,” one of the brightest and most dynamic songs they’ve ever released, is one that they had written many years ago but only recently completed. The work in tinkering with this song paid off. The beat is crisp and vital rather than plodding, the chords seem move rather than linger. As my friend Emily put it in her review of this record, the addition of other voices makes Matt Berninger’s deep, sad voice seem less dreary – as she puts it, it’s like adding a bit of salt to a chocolate chip cookie to make all the other flavors pop. The relatively light tone suits the subject matter well. He’s singing about a precocious child and observing their charms and challenges, and honoring the complexity of their character in a way that’s somewhat rare in songs about kids. This feels significantly warmer than a typical National song, and also a little more optimistic. They’re not sugar-coating anything, but hoping for the best.

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Carly Rae Jepsen “Everything He Needs”

Carly Rae Jepsen has made “having a crush” her brand through rigorous determination – she’s barely ever off-message. Even the darker and more complicated feelings that bubble up in her songs are part of a fantasy of romance – it’s the way rom-coms always need a bit of drama and tension in the lead-up to make the sappy parts work the way they ought to. This makes some sense of why her modest but intensely devoted audience tends to be young adults rather than teens – the idealized melodramatic love she sells is a regressive notion, it’s about being an adult who is fully aware of how disappointing this stuff gets IRL and wishing it could all have the supposed simplicity of teenage infatuation. (Revisionist history, nearly always.) Actual teens are usually in a hurry to feel older and more mature and gravitate to more “adult” experiences, or whatever they perceive that to be with their frame of reference. Hence the current popularity of Billie Eilish.

“Everything He Needs” is light and blissful even in terms of the CRJ discography. Just hearing it will make your body feel a bit lighter – it’s like the whole thing is floating on a light breeze on a sunny day. Something about it just screams “listen to me on a boat, or by a pool.” The main hook is lifted from a song Harry Nilsson wrote for Popeye, which strikes me as a rather inspired place to lift, but the most appealing structural elements of the song are original – the chords, Jepsen’s relaxed and gentle phrasing on the verses, and the pitch-shifted countermelody in the chorus. It’s all so incredibly sweet that you can just sorta gloss over how much the lyrics sound like someone convincing themselves that the person they’re into is more into them than they probably are.

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Charly Bliss “Young Enough”

“Young Enough” is essentially Charly Bliss rewriting LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” into a yearning love song, the sort of thing it’s not hard to imagine playing during a particularly sappy moment in a modern rom-com. This is not faint praise. “Young Enough” is a slow burn that steadily builds to a well-earned climax while side-stepping obvious moves and sentimentality. It’s nostalgic, sure, but it’s not about overly romanticizing a failed relationship or punishing yourself for making a mistake. It’s remarkable how much compassion this song has for both sides of the situation. There is a significant musical debt to LCD here – and to New Order before them – but the most important thing Eva Hendricks takes from “All My Friends” is from the song’s most important statement: “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life.”

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Verdigirls “Women In Fiction”

“Women In Fiction” is like a critical essay in song form, in which Catherine and Anna Wolk examine the often shallow and idealized depictions of women in stories created by men. There’s a lot of nuance in this critique, as well as humor and a strong yearning to connect with something on a page or a screen as a way of validating one’s own existence. The arrangement of the song is gorgeous in its balance of graceful synth pop and delicate chamber strings. Wolk sings with a lovely but prim voice that reminds me a lot of a young Natalie Merchant. It’s a similar mix of unapologetic overt femininity, introverted thoughtfulness, and low-key erudition. It’s just the right tone for the lyrics too – serious and incisive, but coming more from a place of idealism and empathy than spite or rage.

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Cate Le Bon “Mother’s Mother’s Magazines”

“Mother’s Mother’s Magazines” starts off feeling quite similar to Vivien Goldman’s post-punk classic “Launderette,” with its awkwardly funky bass groove, creaky atmosphere, and a wry sensibility. But Cate Le Bon doesn’t settle there. The song becomes more jaunty as it moves along, ending on an extended vamp in which horns honk rhythmically alongside keyboard lines that seem to wiggle and squiggle like worms. Le Bon somehow makes this weird, borderline unpleasant sound feel vaguely soothing. Maybe it’s in the way any word sounds nonsensical through repetition, or how the absurdity in the track is so jolly and inviting. It’s like entering someone’s eccentric but ultimately comfortable little home.

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Big Thief “UFOF”

The tone of “UFOF” is so ambiguous that its loveliest qualities feel vaguely uncomfortable and ominous. This unsettled feeling suits the lyrics, which are largely about mystery and miracles, and how much not fully understanding things allows for both humility and magic. Arianne Lenker’s voice falls somewhere between the elfin intonation of Joanna Newsom and the conspiratorial whispering of Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, and her words render apocalyptic visions and romantic moments in vivid detail. It’s hard to get a read on her mood – she seems to find some beauty in chaos and a measure of terror in tenderness, and is intrigued by pretty much everything in between.

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Imperial Teen “We Do What We Do Best”

I’ve been listening to Imperial Teen since their first album came out in the mid ‘90s, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out what it is about them that makes them distinctive among indie/power pop bands: It’s the constant suggestion of seediness and odd sexual energy. The queerness of the band has always been overt, but that dirty, furtive quality is more subtextual. It’s in the playful but nervous energy in the tunes, and the way they can create this tightly-coiled tension in their grooves that screams “barely repressed horniness.” “We Do What We Do Best,” the first single from their sixth album, is indeed them doing what they do best. They chant that title phrase as one of the key hooks and the cockiness suits them well. Their synth tones are on point here too – a bit filthy, a bit dorky. It’s in a direct lineage of pervy new wave going back to The Cars and Soft Cell.

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Jamila Woods “Miles”

“Miles” is Jamila Woods’ attempt to channel the energy of Miles Davis, and though there are musical nods to his early ‘70s aesthetics, it’s more about his persona and legend. Woods sings bold words with a righteously contemptuous tone, and in approaching his absolute confidence she gives herself permission to feel self-assured and powerful. She’s playing out a role but you can sense she’s truly feeling it – the swagger is real, the soulfulness is not a put-on. The funk in the music carries through to her voice, and though it’s not a visual medium, you can feel her movement. It’s a willful transformation that’s both spiritual and physical.

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Quantic “Atlantic Oscillations”

“Atlantic Oscillations” calls back to an era of disco-era dance music when everything sounded extremely expensive. The bass groove is down and dirty, but the strings and piano accompaniment sparkle like fancy baubles, and the mix has the dry, crystal clear aesthetics of 70s studio wizardry. I’ve heard a lot of artists attempt this vibe over the years but Quantic nails it, largely if just because the composition is on the level of its sonic ambitions. The groove is right, and the melodies are graceful and glorious. It sounds like a pleasure machine built by an expert hedonist.

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Vampire Weekend “How Long?”

“How Long?” is played as a light and jovial tune, right on down to including some goofy sound effects as punctuation on Ezra Koenig’s pleasantly winding melodies. It’s an amiable front for what could be Koenig’s crankiest, most bitter song thus far. It starts off with Koenig’s character grumbling about getting dumped by someone who cleverly tried to make it seem like a mutual breakup – “the only choice you gave to me is one I took reluctantly.” From there he’s questioning the value of pretty much anything, and though he’s doing it with a bit of levity, he’s not fully concealing his wounded pride. This is pretty bold for a guy who up until this point wrote every song in a way that suggested that he’d never had an unreasonable thought or feeling in his life. “How Long?” is pretty much nothing but unreasonable thoughts and feelings. It’s a song in which he conjures images of environmental catastrophe and it’s all just a hyperbolic backdrop for these two people to get stuck together alone all over again. Every mess seems entirely inevitable to him, and he’s just sitting there impatiently waiting for it just happen already.

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Ari Lennox “Up Late”

“Up Late” is a very classic sort of slow jam, something you could probably have slipped into a Quiet Storm radio set if not for all the lyrics that wouldn’t make it past the FCC regulations. Ari Lennox’s voice has a low-key boldness here – she sounds so fully command of the situation that the relaxed sensuality of the track isn’t undermined by traces of insecurity. She’s singing about a regular hookup, and as sexy as the song gets, the most interesting bits of the song allow for unsexy details – duplicate key fobs, tv news, the very presence of the phrase “corn on the cob.” Even the more glamorous details, like setting the song in North Hollywood, get grounded in her mentioning her “Target lingerie,” complete with the ironic “Tar-jay” pronunciation.

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Eve Maret “Sound of Space Between”

“Sound of Space Between” is like a meditation on the simple act of talking to someone you love on the telephone that starts off in “galaxy brain” mode and then kinda spirals out from there. Eve Maret’s arrangement is like Kraftwerk gone cosmic, and she sings with a flat affect that does nothing to hide the vulnerability and warmth in her voice. The most interesting thing about this song for me is the way the song seems to move in an orbit, so it feels a bit like you’re observing musical and lyrical motifs from slightly different angles as the song progresses. Maret reaches no conclusions – it’s just a thought and a feeling in a moment that is extended to the point of abstraction.

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Stephen Malkmus “Forget Your Place”

“Forget Your Place” is an exploration of vagueness and neutrality in which the most distinctive qualities of Stephen Malkmus’ musical identity – the way he plays guitar, the sound of his voice – are either removed or significantly altered to the point it’s nearly unrecognizable. The song is built around droning sound loops that feel both tranquil and slightly unnerving, evoking the drab hum of computers, appliances, and fluorescent lights. Malkmus’ voice is mostly pitched much lower than his natural range, and he sings phrases that seem lightly disassociated but also quite friendly. When his regular singing voice appears it seems like he’s breaking out a spell, repeating “24/7 creative adults!” like he’s realizing what’s going on in a light panic. This is basically the nightmare of having a kinda-OK day job from a guy who has been a successful artist for nearly his entire adult life. Or maybe it’s also a little bit of a fantasy? It’s not actually that bleak.

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Faye Webster “Right Side of My Neck”

“Right Side of My Neck” is a song about the early days of a romance, one in which the infatuation is strong, and very much requited. There’s no anxiety to this song, just a confident bliss and anticipation for more just moments after separating. There’s no sense of gravity in the arrangement – the sounds seem to float in mid-air as Faye Webster sings like someone whose head is in the proverbial clouds. Listening to this song without experiencing the same feelings makes one long for this feeling in real life, but also get a contact high from it. Webster and her band distill this specific feeling so accurately that it can be sort of abstract sort of calm, relaxed joy. It’s a bit like the art of perfume, really, which is appropriate given that scent is such a big part of the song’s beautifully evocative chorus: “The right side of my neck still smells like you.”

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Chrysta Bell “Do You Think You Could Love Me?”

“Do You Think You Could Love Me,” perhaps deliberately, sounds a self-consciously dark and moody cover of an ’80s pop song that never was – an imaginary hit Olivia Newton-John, Irene Cara, or Taylor Dayne just never got around to making. The craft is strong, but the commitment to aesthetic is even stronger. Chrysta Bell is a frequent collaborator of David Lynch, and though he was not involved in this song his influence is very apparent. The effect is basically that whatever sexual intensity that would have been in the song regardless is run through a Lynchian filter of grim ambiguity – there’s a suggestion of fucked-up subtext that shifts the possible meaning of every line, so Bell’s motives are always difficult to read. What does she actually want? Is it exactly what she says, or is she toying with the person she’s addressing? It makes you feel like you need to know the answer.

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