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Beyoncé & Jay-Z “Lovehappy”

Everything Is Love seems as though it was deliberately designed by Beyoncé and Jay-Z to be the third part of a trilogy about their marital troubles that began with her Lemonade and his 4:44. Those records are both quite good and focused, examining potent emotions of betrayal and guilt while also delivering thoughtful meditations on race and culture. This one is more like a victory lap in which they spend a little time addressing the dynamics of their reconciliation, but mostly flaunt their outrageous wealth, treat their small children like IP, present their family as an aspirational brand, and air petty grievances with the music industry. (They’re not appreciated enough, you see.) The music is pretty good relative to other people’s records, but compared to what Beyoncé does regularly and what Jay-Z accomplished with No-ID on 4:44, it’s all rather ho-hum. It mostly just sounds smug to me. And complacent.

I feel bad saying this. I like both of these artists a lot, and respect them deeply. I recognize what Beyoncé in particular means to people, and I don’t begrudge anyone’s enthusiasm about this record. But it’s 2018, and it’s hard for me to stomach any kind of ostentatious wealth, particularly when it’s presented as this aspirational luxury lifestyle that pushes people to buy into the worst aspects of capitalism. I have personally moved too far left to not feel alienated by prosperity gospel bullshit. I have no love for celebrity culture, and only really care about these people as musicians. I also don’t like the way Beyoncé has figured out that surprise album drops kills all critical takes on her work by drowning it out in enthusiasm and online publications’ desperate need to hype up trending topics. It makes even minor dissent seem contrarian, or the griping of a killjoy.

“Lovehappy” is the final song on the record, and its lyrics essentially summarize the talking points of the project. It’s also the most musically impressive song – it starts off in a very mid-’90s NYC rap track, but shifts into more of a warm, soulful R&B tune that allows Beyoncé to emote as she faces the future of their relationship with genuine optimism. In some ways it is a thematic reiteration of Beyoncé’s “All Night,” but hey, you didn’t get Jay-Z on that track. I appreciate the nuance of this song, and how it embraces the complexities of adult relationships in a way that rejects binary morality. “We’re flawed but we’re still perfect for each other,” she sings, and I believe that’s probably true. These are two incredibly competitive people who live to triumph over obstacles. This is a love song about doing that.

Sophie “Immaterial”

“Immaterial” is the thematic and emotional climax of Sophie’s debut album, a song expressing the pure joy of embracing one’s power to decide for themselves who they want to be. In this song, fluidity of identity is a blessing, not a curse. It’s an opportunity, and a path to freedom and fun. The music starts off feeling like a burden being lifted, but moves into a hyperactive dance pop zone – imagine Calvin Harris, but more sparkly and camp. It’s the sort of song that sounds like a huge epiphany, and listening to it without directly relating to the experience makes it all seem very aspirational.

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The Smashing Pumpkins “Solara”

Billy Corgan’s output over the past decade or so has been split between the music he makes for himself – the personal stuff, the formally or conceptually experimental stuff – and the music that seems like him trying to give people what he thinks they want. Some of the music in the former category has been good, and some of the music in the latter category has been good too. But I think for the most part, a lot of it has been lackluster because the songs he wrote at his creative and commercial peak was all in the Venn diagram overlap of those two motivations. Some things are only meant for hardcore fans, and that’s fine, but it’s not very fun to listen to music by someone who seems to be half-heartedly aiming to please.

“Solara,” the first song he’s released with both Jimmy Chamberlain and James Iha in the band with him since 2000, falls in that perfect overlap. He sounds both genuinely fired up AND eager to please, and is more generous with hooks than he’s been in ages. “Solara” glides from hook to hook with supreme confidence, and every member of the band sounds like they want to prove that they can still bring it. I don’t think this is quite Siamese Dream level, but this is strong stuff, and probably what radio stations would’ve liked them to deliver circa 1997/1998 than their Adore material. It’s all oomph and momentum, and the key line – “I am nothing but a body in my mind” – brings a new sort of anxiety into the classic Corgan angst matrix. Hopefully this incarnation of the band can keep this focus, enthusiasm, and raw energy going for a while.

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Jeremih featuring Ty Dolla $ign “The Light”

Ty Dolla $ign’s first line in this song is so exuberant and direct that it cracks me up: “Let’s haaaaaave sex!” Like, why bother with euphemisms, right? This song is too funky to put this politely. But scratch that, this actually is kinda polite, as he immediately adds a series of caveats: not without the foreplay, or a first date. When Jeremih comes into the song, he sounds twice as smooth and ten times more lascivious. The chords in his section have a cool, relaxed vibe, and make lines like “I’m tryna fuck you on top” seem a lot more gentle and romantic than they might seem otherwise. The sequence of grooves here is all about tension and relief, and the shift in lyrical perspective keeps the lust and sensitivity equally balanced.

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Jorja Smith “Lost & Found”

Jorja Smith sings with poise and precision, and her songs are mostly laid back and tranquil. But that’s all on the surface – the songs themselves are about subtle turmoil and nuanced emotional dilemmas. “Lost & Found,” her loveliest and most accomplished song, is about an infatuation that’s become an entanglement, but not quite a relationship. Smith sounds like she’s processing it all in real time, with changes in her melody and vocal cadence reflecting different stages of delusion, denial, and acceptance. The chill vibe of the song is not necessarily at odds with the neuroses of the lyrics – I think part of the point is that she’s holding herself together well, and coming to a mature realization. It’s a low-key feeling, more bittersweet than emotionally devastating.

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Kids See Ghosts “Freee (Ghost Town Pt. 2)”

Whereas the guitar parts in “Ghost Town” were relatively subtle in shaping the mood and feeling of the song, the guitars in “Freee (Ghost Town Pt 2)” are thundering and bombastic. The ambivalence and conflict of the first song is gone, replaced by unambiguous triumph, with Kanye West, Kid Cudi, and Ty Dolla $ign declaring themselves free of all pain. (This is an… interesting… thing for Kanye, a guy coming off opioids, to say.)

“Freee” comes from a few different perspectives. It starts off with a sort of foreword from Marcus Garvey, who speaks about the power of self-knowledge. Ty Dolla $ign’s lines are paranoid, expressing a frustration with how fickle other people can be. Cudi sounds like a guy who has found some peace, while Kanye’s declaration of freedom comes off as slightly spiteful and vindictive. He makes it sound more like a status than a feeling.

It’s interesting to hear so much rock in Kanye’s new songs, whether he’s building a rock feeling out of purely hip-hop sounds on Pusha T’s “If You Know You Know,” or going for straight-forward arena rock vibe here. The main things Kanye is importing from rock are dynamics, swagger, and drama. (He’s done this before, most notably on “Black Skinhead.”) In absorbing these aesthetics into his established style, he’s highlighting valuable aspects of rock music and offering new ways of framing these core competencies. Hopefully some rock people are paying attention and taking notes.

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Twice “Deja Vu”

“Deja Vu” is the kind of song that seems like everyone in the studio was screaming “NO! MAKE IT CATCHIER! FASTER! MORE PEP!!!” and they kept slamming the buttons in a gleeful franzy until they got…this. This is gloriously hyperactive pop, even by K-pop standards. It gets more energetic and hooky with every turn, to the point that the Skrillex-ish EDM break seems more like an inevitability than very late bandwagon-jumping opportunism. If you’re writing a song in the key of HYPE in the 2010s, you gotta go there. It’s not enough to bop! You must go full bangarang.

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Hit-Boy featuring Dom Kennedy “Out the Window”

Hit-Boy is the producer who made classics like “Backseat Freestyle,” “N**** In Paris,” “Goldie,” “***Flawless,” “Clique,” and “Feeling Myself,” but he’s still somehow underrated. But maybe this is by design – he’s a very active producer but seems more interested in working with great artists than chasing hits, and he’s clearly very invested in building his own career as a rapper. It’s interesting hearing the way he produces music for himself as opposed to what he makes for other rappers. A lot of his biggest hits sound like they were designed to get the most aggressive performances possible out of the rappers on the tracks. But left to his own devices, he steers away from bangers in favor of slower, meditative beats and stoned vibes. To some extent, this is basically just finding the clothes that fit him – his voice is scratchy and low-key and his rhymes are laid back. He’d probably sound lost in the sort of song he’d hand to Kanye or Kendrick. But it’s nice to hear him stretch beyond bangers, especially when a composition like “Out the Window” has a poetic, late night feeling that reminds me a lot of DJ Premier in his prime.

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Maggie Rogers “Fallingwater”

It sounds as though Maggie Rogers and her collaborator Rostam Batmanglij arranged “Fallingwater” with a lot of caution, as if one false move could push the tune too far over into the realm of Adult Contemporary pop. They never get in the way of the melody, but they consistently go small and intimate when the song could easily go big and glossy, like a Wilson Phillips song. At every turn, they choose sincerity over sentimentality, and emphasize the way Rogers’ voice sounds a bit sad and nervous even when she’s expressing joy. The song shifts into a more anthemic lane at the end, but even when they aim for drama, they dial it back. I imagine they had a very clear idea of how big the feeling in this song is, and the song is an exact scale model.

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Kanye West “Ghost Town”

“Ghost Town” threads together a series of beautiful moments of vulnerability, but it’s all a bit loose and off-kilter like the ramblings of a sentimental drunk. And like, this is a song where Kanye says he sometimes talks “like I drank all the wine,” so I assume this effect is intentional.

Some of the rawest feelings in the song get outsourced to other vocalists – a heartbreaking quote from “Take Me For A Little While,” a highly emotive John Legend seemingly making up his part on the spot, and an outro section by 070 Shake which is somehow both depressingly bleak and triumphant. These parts bracket West’s own verse in the middle of the track, and it sounds a bit like he’s using them as a sort of protective barrier. West’s voice on his verse has a warmth and shine to it that calls back to his earliest work. He’s half-singing everything, but there’s nothing masking or altering his voice. He sounds…happy. Content. Self-aware. Optimistic that the worst is now behind him. I’m certain he intends this to be an olive branch to the world. I think he’s very sincere, or at least he is on this song.

I have no idea who is playing guitar on this song – there is no official credit for this, but I assume it’s the guy from Francis and the Lights since he’s listed as a contributing producer – but that part is crucial to the success of this song. It’s a loud, emotionally wrenching part, but it’s layered into the composition in such a way that you can feel its effect without paying it much attention. The distorted guitar chords seem to slash around Legend’s yelping, and grind like gears around the “Take Me For A Little While” part. It’s more melodic and poignant during 070 Shake’s sequence, adding both anthemic oomph and a touch of grace. It drops out entirely during West’s verse, further emphasizing this barrier around him and how free and gentle he sounds when he’s on the mic.

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Stewart Lupton has died at the age of 43. As the singer of Jonathan Fire Eater and the leader of The Child Ballads he was one of the most fascinating and charismatic rock frontmen of the past few decades, but his addictions and erratic behavior kept him from reaching a level of fame commensurate to his talent. His body of officially released material is quite small – a handful of EPs, a few stray singles, and one full album with Jonathan Fire Eater. I was fortunate enough to have produced a radio session that he recorded for PRI’s Fair Game back in 2008, when he was making a comeback with Child Ballads. One of the songs from that session was an adaptation of Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle” which was never officially released. Here it is, along with the copy I wrote for it when I originally posted it a decade ago. It’s beautiful and intense, and I think it’s particularly poignant now in how the lyrics provide some insight into his troubled, complicated life.

Stewart Lupton “Stewart Hassle”

Stewart Lupton has a new strategy: He’s writing new lyrics upon the foundations of respected classics, which is both supremely ballsy, and in line with the folk tradition. “Stewart Hassle” is his variation on Lou Reed’s epic “Street Hassle.” In this recording, he transposes its main theme to acoustic guitar, and replaces Reeds’ “great monologue set to rock” with a personal story about a homecoming, a reckoning, and a lost love. Lupton’s words are stark and colloquial, and linger in a place halfway between wisdom and regret. At the core, it’s a song about wounded pride — Lupton sounds genuinely embarrassed at certain moments, particularly when he explains “I did some things out in the streets / and some things were done to me / and the scariest thing / is just how it looked / the same as it does on the tv.” Throughout, he clings to the remnants of his dignity, and does his best to put his worst days into perspective, but in the end, the most gutting sentiment is expressed with only a slight modification of Reed’s words — “Love has gone away / it’s stripped the rings from my fingers / and there’s nothing left to say / except that I miss you, baby.”

(Originally posted March 27th 2008)

Shawn Mendes “Nervous”

Something about “Nervous” felt very familiar when I first heard it, but I couldn’t quite place it. But then I saw the credits and it all clicked: This song is co-written by Julia Michaels, and the verse melody and lyrics are very similar to her work on Selena Gomez’s “Bad Liar” last year, and Janelle Monáe’s “Make Me Feel” this year. “Nervous,” which was written by Michaels with Shawn Mendes and producer Scott Harris, is expertly composed blue-eyed soul filtered through a very neurotic perspective. Given the similarities between “Nervous,” “Bad Liar,” and “Make Me Feel,” it would seem that Michaels’ talent is in how she can lace raw, vulnerable feelings into big, generous melodic hooks that have more to do with classic ’80s pop by the likes of Madonna, George Michael, and either of the Jacksons than anything that’s been commercially successful over the past decade or so. Mendes is a great vehicle for the Michaels aesthetic – he’s got a terrific vocal range, sings with an obvious joy, and isn’t afraid to dial it back and focus on nuance while delivering those finely detailed lyrics on the verses.

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A$AP Rocky “Changes”

A$AP Rocky has been arty from the start, but early on he had a way of smuggling strange textures and unlikely samples into songs that passed for mainstream rap. His new record Testing goes much further out into experimental territory – there isn’t anything remotely like a banger, several songs resist form and structure, samples and vocals often overlap like clouds rather than click into rhythms, and everything feels like a woozy audio hallucination.

“Changes,” a song built around a sample of Charles Bradley cover’ of Black Sabbath’s ballad of the same name, swaps a standard verse-chorus-verse form in favor of a three-act structure. The first verse is a homage to Andre 3000’s famous verse from “International Players Anthem,” but flips that tentative ode to monogamy into a story about getting rejected and acting out. The narrative shifts along with the music, with Rocky’s lyrics growing more introspective and self-critical as it goes along. It’s a bittersweet song – he’s obsessing over changes in himself and others, and scrolling through Instagram envying other people who are embracing stability while he feels totally adrift. (Very relatable!)

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Red Velvet “All Right”

“All Right” is a ruthless pleasure machine designed to smash every joy button in your skull. The melodies are unstoppable earworms, the chords are designed to elicit maximum euphoria. Even by the chipper, hyperactive standards of K-Pop, this song is a lot. And oh god, I LOVE IT. But of course I do: I spent the first decade of this blog chasing this sort of pop high, and will always be a mark for well-constructed joyful dance pop. “All Right” is a hodgepodge of pop tics from the late ’90s and early ’00s – a bit of pop R&B melody on the verses, super-charged Britney on the chorus – with just enough English lyrics sprinkled in to keep it from sounding too alien to Western ears. And having read a translation of the lyrics, I can assure you that you don’t need much more than “ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT!” to grasp the meaning of this song.

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Pusha T “If You Know You Know”

Kanye West may be going through a… difficult phase… right now, but it’s a huge relief that he’s bounced back as a producer after his dull and uninspired work on The Life of Pablo a few years ago. “If You Know You Know,” the opening track from Pusha T’s new record, is essentially a strutting glam rock song built entirely out of very Kanye sounds culled from obscure samples and expertly programmed beats. The music is dynamic and carefully calibrated so that the cool bits hit with maximum impact, whether it’s the introduction of the keyboard sample about 35 seconds into the track, or how the stuttering staccato vocal sample seems to bounce off of Pusha’s words. Pusha thrives on a track like this – it suits his gloating supervillain vibe, and gives him space to be a bit more playful than usual. His voice always conveys an even balance of cool and cruel, but the way he delivers the title phrase on this track is a new peak: so casually taunting, so glibly dismissive.

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Chvrches “Graffiti”

Chvrches sound so nervous and frightened on their third album Love Is Dead. About half the songs sound as though they’re trying to appease several constituencies at once – label people, radio programmers, random Spotify listeners, their old indie fans, themselves – and land in a weird space somewhere between the songs that made them popular and the corny, vacant melodrama of radio acts like Imagine Dragons and OneRepublic. Too many of the songs feel overworked and compromised. The songs that work best, like the opening track “Graffiti,” deliver the sort of melodies and synth tones they gave us on their debut album, but cautiously add no new elements.

This anxiety comes through in the lyrics too. Lauren Mayberry’s voice always sounds bright and confident, but her words fixate on guilt, confusion, and an all-consuming feeling that everything and everyone is doomed. “Graffiti” is about reckoning with the notion that the future has been canceled, and thinking about what that means personally. Suddenly a lot of time feels wasted, and what she expected of her life feels impossible. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to grow old,” she sings. “And now we never will.” There’s a lot of songs about wanting to burn bright in your youth and never get old, but it’s rare to hear a pop song that is disappointed by the idea of only ever being young.

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Jo Passed “Repair”

The vocals in this song are mostly there for tone and texture – the words are nearly unintelligible, and it’s all at best secondary to the guitar harmonies. The guitars are gorgeous on this track, shifting from tangling arpeggios and psychedelic noodling to bright strokes and a distorted section that hits like a brief tantrum. It’s like a weather system as an indie rock song, with this small, high-pitched voice coming out whenever it seems like the clouds are parting and a bit of sunshine is coming through.

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Cuco “Lover Is A Day” (Audiotree Session Version)

Cuco’s original recording of “Lover Is A Day” has a nice, chillwave-y vibe, but the arrangement didn’t quite do justice to the song’s elegant and melancholy lead melody. This version, recorded live for the Audiotree series, has a significantly better arrangement if just by virtue of having a live drummer. Whereas the original version felt a bit flat and static, the drums here gives the song more contour and drama. And really, with this song, the more drama the better – this is a very young sort of breakup song, and its strength lies in how much it dwells in this theatrical sadness and neurotic hand-wringing. Like, this is a song in which the singer feels so broken by this relationship falling apart that he flashes back to simpler times, like when he was 6 years old and watching Star Wars movies. It’s adorable and sweet, but also fundamentally silly.

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Joan of Arc “Punk Kid”

I have been following Joan of Arc’s career over the past 20 years or so, and I can say that despite how much they’ve changed from record to record, their new record 1984 is the first time when they’ve changed so much that they’ve become entirely unrecognizable. Everything is different. Tim Kinsella has been replaced on vocals by Melina Ausikaitis, who has a completely different approach to singing and lyric writing. The music is produced and arranged entirely by Nate Kinsella, whose elegant minimalism is a world away from the nervous energy of his brother’s usual work. I don’t quite understand why they’re even calling this record Joan of Arc – it just kinda isn’t, and I think it’s not entirely fair to Ausikaitis to force a comparison between this and anything from the band’s back catalog – but I do see how this radical change and deliberate silencing of the band’s mastermind is a very Joan of Arc move.

Melina Ausikaitis sings blunt, vivid lyrics about mostly bad memories with a disarmingly folksy tone. She sounds raw and vulnerable, which is quite a change for a band that’s always filtered emotions through layers of conceptualism and irony. (Not necessarily a bad thing, I should say.) “Punk Kid” is a story about being an awkward outcast rendered mostly in small details – the bits of youth that somehow stay in your mind fully intact while so much else fades in your memory over time. There’s a wounded pride in Ausikaitis’ voice when she sings “look at me, I’m a real punk kid,” and it’s all the more affecting as the music swells slightly, like the ghost version of a rock anthem.

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TV Girl “7 Days Til Sunday”

TV Girl’s Brad Petering mainly writes songs about dating, with an emphasis on how stories from pop culture influence the way we think about real life romance. “7 Days Til Sunday” is a story of someone who is aiming for whimsical Hollywood romance, but eventually settles for lots of drinking, confused communication, awkward sex, and smoking cigarettes on a roof in New York City. Like, not the worst thing ever and certainly something plenty of people can relate to, but not exactly classic rom-com material. The music nods in the general direction of glossy, sexy vibes but Petering’s vocal undermines that a bit by sounding both melancholy and deadpan. That might not work in some cases, but here it really emphasizes the gulf between the singer’s expectations and his reality.

Buy it from Bandcamp.