Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Quelle Chris “Popeye”

Quelle Chris’ Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often opens with “Buddies,” a slightly tongue-in-cheek song about self-love that simultaneously pokes fun at narcissism while embracing a healthy self-esteem. I mention this because I’m not writing about that song, but rather the track immediately after it. “Popeye” is the reverse sentiment, with Chris muttering about failure and frustration. He isn’t beating himself up, but he is looking at his life and his art with clear, unsympathetic eyes and questioning a commitment to something that hasn’t resulted in that much. All of this is set against a track built around a vocal loop that feels melancholy but also kinda heroic, like something you’d play in a flashback to leaner times in the life of someone who later became a big deal. Maybe that’s exactly what Chris is trying to get across here.

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Spiral Stairs “Emotions”

The last time Spiral Stairs put out a record was about eight years ago, and I reviewed it for Pitchfork. I know the review bothered him a lot, and I don’t blame him. I wrote about how he served as an important foil to Stephen Malkmus in Pavement, and stand by that. I compared their dynamic to that of Milhouse Van Houten and Bart Simpson, which I think is accurate, but also kinda mean. Again, I can’t blame Spiral for hating that review. (For what it’s worth, Milhouse is by far my favorite Simpons character.)

It’s weird knowing that one of the guys in my favorite band personally dislikes me, especially since I have nothing but good feelings about him. Spiral is an underdog I like to root for, and a talent who has been undervalued for getting on 25 years. Part of the problem here is that it’s hard to stand up for Spiral’s gifts without seeming contrary or overzealous. He’s not an idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kind genius like Malkmus. He’s original and interesting in a less obvious way, and connecting with him requires some degree of identification with his particular type of artsy nerdiness and his oddly evasive approach to expressing himself.

Even at his most direct – which accounts for a lot of his new album, Doris and the Daggers – Spiral seems like a guy who wants to say something straightforward, but gets shy and walks that feeling back a bit. Malkmus isn’t much different, actually. But whereas that guy projects a superhuman ease and confidence, Spiral can’t help but seem awkward and self-effacing. This is not a bad thing! My favorite Spiral moment is when he pushes himself to go louder and more plaintive in “Kennel District” – “I wanted to stay there / but you know I needed more than that” – and conveys an aching regret anyone could recognize. Not every line of that song scans, but he wasn’t afraid to make sure the important bits stand out. “That little look in your eye.” “I was busted in my gut that time I said ‘I know it’s true.’” “Why didn’t I ask, why didn’t I ask, why didn’t I ask?” It’s the closest thing Pavement ever came to something that could’ve been in a John Hughes movie, and there’s no way it could’ve come from Malkmus. I can’t imagine Malkmus ever actually experienced the feeling of that song, or at least he didn’t in the way a guy like Spiral could.

“Emotions,” like pretty much all the songs on Doris and the Daggers, has this crisp, sunny tone that is immediately recognizable as Spiral’s aesthetic. It was there in the later Pavement records, and has carried through most of his Preston School of Industry and solo material. It’s become cleaner over time as his playing has become more confident and precise. The new songs sound like little labors of love, you can hear the patience and care that went into them. The guy who used to be even more off-the-cuff than Malkmus has evolved into the type of guy who lives with songs for a while, and invests each with some personal significance. You really can hear eight years of life in the album – ending and starting relationships, watching a kid grow up, moving across the world. It’s like catching up with someone after too long.

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J.I.D featuring Mereba “All Bad”

J.I.D is primarily a rapper, and he raps very well throughout his new record The Never Story, but when I was choosing a song to feature here I had to go with this track where he’s mostly singing. “All Bad” has the tone of a sexy slow jam, but the lyrics are about a relationship that’s breaking down in slow motion. The emotions are complicated and messy on both sides, and neither seem to be ready to confront the other’s version of “the truth.” Mereba’s verse is a bit more confrontational in tone, but you can still hear a lot of love mixed in with the hurt. Hollywood JB’s production ties it all together with a gorgeous but low-key organ part that sounds like it’s being played slowly with a bit of caution, mirroring the way both singers are treading lightly around the most painful subjects in order to spare the other’s feelings. There’s a woozy feeling to it too, especially at the end when the keyboard part is suddenly pitched up as it’s being played.

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Real Estate “After the Moon”

Nearly all of Real Estate’s songs feel like they take place at some point in the afternoon. Maybe one will feel like 1 PM on sunny Saturday in April, or another more like an overcast 3 PM on a Sunday in September. But there’s something in the band’s guitar tone that has the ring of daylight to it, and something in Martin Courtney’s voice that expresses a very minor sort of melancholy that guarantees a “enjoy this nice moment while it lasts” subtext to every tune. “After the Moon” is the first Real Estate song I’ve heard that sounds like a night song – a little slower, a little more delicate, some suggestion of moonlight in the timbre of the chords. Courtney must agree with this impression of the music, as his lyrics fixate on the night as well. There’s a sadness and frustration in his words, but the sound of it is incredibly placid. Even as the negative feelings come out, they seem to almost immediately dissipate.

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Spoon “Do I Have To Talk You Into It?”

Spoon is the rare type of band whose style is essentially a sub-genre of their own making, with its own set of formal rules and quirks particular to their musical strengths. Spoon songs fall on a continuum of them stepping outside of their comfort zone while retaining their character – the new sax-based instrumental “Us,” for example – to adapting a familiar song type to their style – “I Summon You,” “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” – to a song like “Do I Have To Talk You Into It,” which is pure, unfiltered Spoon aesthetics. You get Jim Eno’s in-the-pocket yet slightly off-kilter drums; Britt Daniel’s soulful yet playful rasp hovering around the beat; the distinctly dry direct-input tone of the piano setting on an electric keyboard; miscellaneous odd sounds that float through the mix but never occupy the big chunk of negative space at the core of the track. This one’s got it all, folks. It’s Spoon as fuck.

The interesting thing here is that this extremely Spoon-ish song seems to be about Spoon. Britt’s lyrics seem to be about some romantic or sexual relationship on the surface, but a closer read – paired with some basic knowledge of the guy’s biography – suggests that this is actually about his long collaboration with Jim. (Here’s another clue for you all: there’s a verse about someone named Jimmy, and the walrus was Paul.) So it’s funny that the song on the new record that sounds the most like Britt in dialogue with Jim’s drumming on a musical level may also be that on a lyrical level too, with him reflecting on their personal dynamic and dealing with the frustrations of any long term partnership.

There’s also an intriguing aside about the downside of being in a long-running successful band, i.e., people moving on to some other hot new thing: “When the mood of the era’s gone / everybody’s fading me, even my ma!” This explains a lot of Britt’s restless feeling, but the sense of “eh, who cares, let’s just keep doing our thing” sentiment in this song is stronger.

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Your Old Droog “You Can Do It! (Give Up)”

It’s hard to tell whether this song, which details the terrible decisions that wrecked three people who started out in life with great promise, is meant to be taken as a cautionary tale, or just some deeply pessimistic schadenfreude. Your Old Droog sounds genuinely disappointed in the failed basketball star in the first verse, but there’s noticeable bile in the way he talks about the would-be model and the aspiring rapper in the second and third verses. But the song isn’t just “look at these pathetic assholes.” Droog’s lyrics are really about the social pressures and negative influences that derailed these people, and without stressing it too much, draws your attention to how these stumbling blocks get built into black American culture as an end result of institutional racism. The point here isn’t that these people are stupid for trying – trying is a good thing – but are likely irrevocably fucked for life because they failed.

Also: I was going nuts trying to figure out what sample this song was built on, and was thinking it was something from the ’70s but couldn’t place it. As it turns out, it’s Richard Swift’s “Lady Luck,” a song that was featured here a few years ago.

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Faye Webster “She Won’t Go Away”

“She Won’t Go Away” is a country rock song, but Faye Webster’s arrangement keeps the most obvious country signifiers at a minimum. I don’t think this is a case of trying to pretend the song isn’t what it is to bait and switch the audience, but rather that Webster is prioritizing the backbeat by leaving a lot of negative space around the drum track. It’s one of those ‘70s melancholy groove records, like Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” or Todd Rundgren’s “I Saw the Light,” but with the clean, digital tone of keyboard-based rap. The sound of the instruments is remarkably crisp, but Webster’s voice is a lot more raw – not fragile, per se, but certainly more weathered than everything else in the mix.

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The Shins “Cherry Hearts”

As it turns out, all I ever really needed to appreciate The Shins more was for James Mercer to do his regular thing but with, like, 60% more Scritti Politti and Erasure vibes. “Cherry Hearts” is a perky, bouncy synth pop tune about the most synth pop topic possible: A confusing crush that leaves you feeling both euphoric and neurotic. “You kissed me once while we were drunk,” Mercer sings a few times in each chorus, repeating the thought as if it will all become totally logical if he thinks about it enough. He probably wouldn’t even be hung up on this girl if that moment never happened, and there wasn’t some hope for something more. He’s frustrated and flustered, but the song makes it clear that he loves the excitement of it all.

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Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble featuring Alexis Taylor “Love Captive”

“Love Captive” begins with Laetitia Sadier and Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip repeating a line that is about as Laetitia Sadier as it gets: “Like so many other things, love has to be reinvented.” It’s the syntax, it’s the succinct statement, it’s the way she makes revolutionary ideas seem both urgent and sensible. This could easily be something she would have sung in Stereolab, but I don’t think the sentiment would have suited that band’s aesthetic as well as this loose, gently swaying arrangement. Stereolab songs were so tight and geometric; they don’t feel much like the sort of free love Sadier is proselytizing here. Sadier is encouraging freedom, kindness, and generosity, not a lack of responsibility. She’s imagining a world with fewer hang-ups, less destructive jealousy, fluid sexuality, and abundant love for all. It’s a vision of utopia, and the music helps make her argument by feeling so incredibly relaxed and vaguely spiritual.

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Laura Marling “Nothing Not Nearly”

Laura Marling always sounds so certain, and since so many of her songs are reflecting on something in the past, her records sound like the product of months – or even years – of quiet contemplation. “Nothing Not Nearly” is essentially a report on a romantic relationship gone right. She’s recalling shared moments and little displays of affection, and coming to the conclusion that, in an otherwise dark time for her, this love was necessary and crucial. This being a clear-eyed Laura Marling song, there is a catch: She’s already concerned that the “afterglow” is fading, and she can’t help but imply that this person not being “afraid of trees or bears or anything with tendencies to wanna hurt you good” extends to her too. Even the way she sings the song suggests she’s trying to enjoy this while it lasts, as packs as many words as she can into the meter of the verses, and sings the chorus with a bit of a melancholy sigh.

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Karriem Riggins “Bahia Dreamin'”

Instrumental hip-hop is such an odd space – a logical and satisfying presentation for a lot of musical ideas that might otherwise need to compete with a rapper for your attention, but also vaguely unsatisfying as your ear is trained to expect to hear a rapper rapping. For every DJ Shadow or Prefuse 73 track that stands out as a powerful and thoughtfully composed piece of music, there’s a bunch of interesting beats that make you nod and go “huh, [some rapper you like] would sound great over this.”

Karriem Riggins’ Headnod Suite can sometimes veer into the latter category, but his best compositions have a rhythmic and harmonic density that’s emotionally resonant and a bit too busy to pair with vocals. The main hook in “Bahia Dreamin’” is a call-and-response between a slightly clipped up keyboard riff and wordless vocals, but within two minutes the rhythmic thread holding it all together is unraveled, tangled, and unwound again while some odd bass notes and unexpectedly lovely piano melodies fill in the more chaotic moments. It’s just barely over two minutes, but it’s a flood of good ideas.

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Matt Martians “Alotta Women/Useless”

Speaking of instrumental hip-hop, this song by Matt Martians could just be a loop of the beat and that slightly distorted keyboard hook and I would be perfectly happy. But Martians keeps the track moving through two minutes of he said/she raid rap verses and a couple runs through a chorus before flipping the beat entirely. The “Useless” section is more overtly funky and melodic, spinning through busier keyboard parts and vocal melodies while the “Alotta Women” section was mostly static on an instrumental level. I like this diptych structure – this could easily be cut up into discrete tracks, but keeping it this way deepens either side by suggesting a parallel narrative and a more complicated set of emotions.

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Note: I’m posting these two songs together because I sorta accidentally discovered that they sound fantastic back to back, as if the Riggins track was always meant to transition into the Martians tune. Try it yourself.

Jay Som “1 Billion Dogs”

Melina Duterte’s voice blurs slightly into the treble haze of her guitar on “1 Billion Dogs” – not enough to obliterate its character or totally obscure her words, but just enough to make the sounds feel like they’ve merged into one big wave. The song begins in a state of acceleration and never really lets up for nearly three minutes. The only real break is a solo near the end, but that has a broken, shambling quality that sounds as though Duterte is scrambling to get the notes out before the weight of all the guitar distortion comes crashing down on her. It’s always nice when a rock song feels like a chase sequence in a film.

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This is the third in the 1990s survey mix series, which will come out monthly in chronological order through this year. It’s important for the ‘90s to be presented in order, because the story of music in that decade is basically a trilogy in which each act ends in tragedy – the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the murders of Tupac and Biggie, and the toxic masculinity run rampant at Woodstock ’99. You can find the previous mixes here.

The most striking thing about 1992 is the sheer quantity of enormously famous songs, most of them being the most popular work by some of the most successful acts in the history of the record industry. It’s enough to make you wonder how anyone had the time to listen to all of this stuff back then, but you can answer that with just three letters: MTV. The cable station was revolutionary in the ‘80s, but became an unstoppable cultural force by the early ‘90s, and essentially dictated the course of popular music in this era along with more niche video networks like VH1, CMT, BET, and The Box. There’s an increasingly vital underground in this period too, though thanks to the massive success of Nirvana and “grunge,” nearly everyone in those scenes have been set on a collision course that will play out over the course of the next three surveys.

Thanks to Paul Cox, Rob Sheffield, Chris Ott, Sean T. Collins, and Dan Kois for their valuable assistance in putting this set together.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Beastie Boys “So What’cha Want” / Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Dogg “Nuthin’ But A G Thang” / Ice Cube “It Was A Good Day” / Gang Starr “Ex Girl to the Next Girl” / The Pharcyde “Otha Fish” / The Sugarcubes “Hit” / INXS “Not Enough Time” / Sophie B. Hawkins “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” / k.d. lang “Constant Craving” / Annie Lennox “Walking On Broken Glass” / Mary J. Blige “Real Love” / En Vogue “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” / Sonic Youth “100%” / Bikini Kill “Feels Blind” / The Nation of Ulysses “Last Train to Cool” / Pavement “Trigger Cut/Wounded Kite at :17” / The Cure “Friday I’m In Love” / Nirvana “Lithium” / Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge” / 10,000 Maniacs “Candy Everybody Wants” / R.E.M. “Man on the Moon” / U2 “One” / The Smashing Pumpkins “Drown” / Pearl Jam “Jeremy” / Guns N Roses “November Rain” / Tori Amos “Silent All These Years”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Alice In Chains “Would?” / Rage Against the Machine “Killing in the Name” / Nine Inch Nails “Wish” / Ministry “N.W.O.” / Helmet “Unsung” / Body Count “Cop Killer” / House of Pain “Jump Around” / Kris Kross “Jump” / Right Said Fred “I’m Too Sexy” / Sir Mix-a-Lot “Baby Got Back” / Arrested Development “Tennessee” / The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy “Television the Drug of a Nation” / Fu-Schnickens “True Fuschnick” / Das EFX “They Want EFX” / TLC “Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg” / Bobby Brown “Humpin’ Around” / Michael Jackson “Remember the Time” / SWV “Right Here” / Charles & Eddie “Would I Lie to You?” / Prince “7” / My Bloody Valentine “Only Shallow” / The Cranberries “Dreams” / Ozzy Osbourne “Mama, I’m Coming Home” / Royal Trux “Junkie Nurse” / Temple of the Dog “Hunger Strike” / CeCe Peniston “Finally” / Grand Puba “360° (What Goes Around)” / Luther Vandross & Janet Jackson “The Best Things In Life Are Free” / Boy George “The Crying Game” / Boyz II Men “End of the Road” / Whitney Houston “I Will Always Love You”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Madonna “Erotica” / Sade “No Ordinary Love” / Aphex Twin “Xtal” / King Missile “Detachable Penis” / Soul Asylum “Somebody to Shove” / Cracker “Teen Angst” / The Black Crowes “Remedy” / Blind Melon “No Rain” / Neil Young “Harvest Moon” / Eric Clapton “Tears in Heaven” / The Sundays “Wild Horses” / The Jayhawks “Waiting for the Sun” / Alabama “I’m In A Hurry (And I Don’t Know Why)” / Alan Jackson “Love’s Got A Hold On You” / Phish “Tweezer” / Morrissey “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” / The Lemonheads “Alison’s Starting to Happen” / Belly “Gepetto” / PJ Harvey “Sheela-na-Gig” / Babes in Toyland “Bruise Violet” / L7 “Pretend We’re Dead” / White Zombie “Thunder Kiss ’65” / The Jesus and Mary Chain “Sugar Ray” / Sloan “Underwhelmed” / Suede “Drowners” / Blur “Popscene” / Ride “Leave Them All Behind”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

Megadeth “Symphony of Destruction” / Kyuss “Green Machine” / Mudhoney “Suck You Dry” / Pantera “Mouth for War” / Metallica “Wherever I May Roam” / Ultramagnetic MCs “Poppa Large” / UGK “Something Good” / Lush “Nothing Natural” / Peter Gabriel “Diggin’ in the Dirt” / Suzanne Vega “99.9 F” / Luna “Anesthesia” / Lyle Lovett “You’ve Been So Good Up to Now” / Billy Ray Cyrus “Achy Breaky Heart” / Spin Doctors “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” / Gin Blossoms “Found Out About You” / Inspiral Carpets “Dragging Me Down” / Underworld “M.E.” / Basehead “2000 BC” / Compton’s Most Wanted “Hood Took Me Under” / Da Lench Mob “Guerrillas in the Mist” / DJ Quik “Way 2 Fonky” / Pulp “Babies” / Unrest “Cherry Cream On” / Beat Happening “Tiger Trap” / Tasmin Archer “Sleeping Satellite” / Mariah Carey “I’ll Be There” / Lea Salonga and Brad Kane “A Whole New World”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Wreckx-n-Effect “Rump Shaker” / Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” / Pete Rock & CL Smooth “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” / Bushwick Bill “Ever So Clear” / Indigo Girls “Galileo” / Paul Westerberg “Dyslexic Heart” / The Wedding Present “California” / Manic Street Preachers “Motorcycle Emptiness” / Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine “The Only Living Boy in New Cross” / The Lightning Seeds “The Life of Riley” / Babyface & Toni Braxton “Give U My Heart” / Eazy-E “Only If You Want It” / Morphine “You Look Like Rain” / The Fall “Free Range” / The Afghan Whigs “Conjure Me” / Danzig “Dirty Black Summer” / The Prodigy “Out of Space” / KMFDM “Money” / Palace Brothers “Ohio River Boat Song” / Uncle Tupelo “Black Eye” / Vince Gill “Don’t Let Our Love Start Slippin’ Away” / Tia Carrera “Ballroom Blitz” / Aaron Tippin “There Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong with the Radio” / Juliana Hatfield “Everybody Loves Me But You” / Screaming Trees “Nearly Lost You” / Erasure “Take A Chance On Me” / Björn Again “Stop!” / Pigface “Hips, Tits, Lips, Power!” / Utah Saints “Something Good” / Guided by Voices “Weed King”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Van Halen “Right Now” / Soundgarden “Rusty Cage” / Tom Waits “Dirt in the Ground” / Neneh Cherry “Money Love” / EPMD “Crossover” / Diamond D “I Went for Mine” / M.C. Brains “Oochie Coochie” / Bruce Springsteen “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” / Los Lobos “Kiko and the Lavender Moon” / Shudder to Think “Shake Your Halo Down” / Velocity Girl “Crazy Town” / The Breeders “Safari” / Bailter Space “Shine” / Huggy Bear “Carn’t Kiss” / Happy Mondays “Stinkin’ Thinkin’” / MC Ren “Final Frontier” / Spice 1 “Welcome to the Ghetto” / Snap “Rhythm Is A Dancer” / The Soup Dragons “Divine Thing” / Ween “Push Th’ Little Daisies” / Moby “Next is the E” / Leftfield “Song of Life” / Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go?” / James “Born of Frustration” / Richard Marx “Hazard” / Wynonna “No One Else on Earth” / Brooks & Dunn “Neon Moon” / Iris DeMent “Our Town” / George Strait “I Cross My Heart” / The Heights “How Do You Talk To An Angel?”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Tool “Hush” / The Jesus Lizard “Gladiator” / Stone Temple Pilots “Sex Type Thing” / Rollins Band “Low Self Opinion” / Moonshake “City Poison” / Polvo “Vibracobra” / Skinny Puppy “Inquisition” / Eric B and Rakim “Juice” / KWS “Please Don’t Go” / John Secada “Just Another Day” / Lois “Valentine” / Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds “Straight To You” / Mary Chapin Carpenter “I Feel Lucky” / Lucinda Williams “Sweet Old World” / Alison Krauss & Union Station “Every Time You Say Goodbye” / Sugar “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” / NOFX “Liza and Louise” / The Charlatans “Weirdo” / Spiritualized “Shine A Light” / Celine Dion “If You Asked Me To” / Leonard Cohen “The Future” / Codeine “Barely Real” / Curve “Horror Head” / Consolidated and the Yeastie Girls “You Suck” / Shonen Knife “Riding on the Rocket” / Faith No More “Midlife Crisis” / Drive Like Jehu “Hand Over Fist” / Bettie Serveert “Tom Boy” / Pale Saints “Throwing Back the Apple” / George Michael “Too Funky”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Garth Brooks “What’s She Doing Now” / Freedy Johnston “The Lucky One” / Yo La Tengo “Upside-Down” / The Flaming Lips “Hit Me Like You Did the First Time” / Sebadoh “New Worship” / Th’ Faith Healers “Moona-Ina-Joona” / Supreme Love Gods “Souled Out” / Orbital “Halcyon” / 808 State “One in Ten (808 Original Mix)” / Too Short “So You Want to be a Gangster” / Young Black Teenagers “Tap the Bottle” / U96 “Das Boot” / Definition of Sound “Moira Jane’s Cafe” / Nightblooms “Butterfly Girl” / The Boo Radleys “Skyscraper” / Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Not Sleeping Around” / Green Day “Welcome to Paradise” / Samiam “Don’t Break Me” / Jawbox “Cutoff” / Catherine Wheel “Tumble Down” / Medicine “Miss Drugstore” / Red House Painters “Japanese to English” / Pop Will Eat Itself “Get the Girl! Kill the Baddies!” / Die Krupps “High Tech/Low Life” / Coil “Further” / Don Caballero “Unresolved Karma” / The Gits “Absynthe” / Heavenly “Different Day” / Another Sunny Day “New Year’s Honours” / XTC “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead” / Tom Cochrane “Life Is A Highway” / Kenny G “Forever In Love”

Operator Music Band “Koma”

It’s pretty easy to parse Operator Music Band’s influences, or at least their lineage – elements from well-respected acts like Devo, Stereolab, Broadcast, Neu! and Add N to X are all right there on the surface. But as other bands have demonstrated, simply referencing or borrowing from the right artists isn’t enough. Part of what makes this band click is that they’ve embraced a very dynamic and tactile approach to music that can often feel more cerebral and static. “Koma” moves between moments of energetic rocking and more blissful grooves, and keeps moving forward with urgency until they deliberately hit the brakes and come to a full stop at the end. But even that sets up further momentum, as Dara Hirsch counts down the final seconds.

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Fog Lake “Side Effects”

The first half of Fog Lake’s Dragonchaser is a pleasant, spacey haze – acoustic guitars jangling in icy reverb, with an androgynous voice murmuring lyrics that strongly suggest the name of the record isn’t some D&D thing. But a bit over halfway through the record, everything perks up considerably. The guitar gets a bit jauntier, the vocals are much more clear, the melodies are stronger, the recording sounds more deliberate and professional. And the lyrics follow suit, shifting perspective from a hazy, numb moment to looking back on “the days we lost.” It’s a powerful musical and thematic shift, but taken out of context record’s two centerpiece songs “Medicine Road” and “Side Effects” work as discrete expressions of melancholy and regret. Both songs are about missing an intimate connection with someone they had to get away from, but I think the latter is particularly good at contrasting nostalgia and affection with memories of pain and despair.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

No Joy “Hellhole”

I feel like a lot of the artists who’ve made shoegaze music in the past decade and a half have set a very low bar for themselves. It’s a style where you can get by on very little, and artists who legitimately pushed the genre forward, like A Sunny Day in Glasgow in the mid-00s, were mostly shrugged off in favor of far less interesting and imaginative bands. No Joy have evolved into both the best shoegaze act of their era, and also something a bit beyond those parameters. (Of course, they also get underrated and unrecognized by the culture industry.) Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd have staked out an interesting musical space for themselves – increasingly bold vocal harmonies crashing into shifting planes of abrasive rhythm guitar and ambient noise. A song like “Hellhole” manages to sound fragile and brutal at the same time, and the way they contrast these elements suggests that those extremes aren’t as opposite as they might seem.

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Goldfrapp “Anymore”

Goldfrapp have spent their entire career vacillating between meditative, delicate ballads and glammy dance pop, mostly doing one style at a time per record. As the time between Goldfrapp’s records increase, so does the space between these phases, and so “Anymore” is the first proper banger this band has released since 2010. It feels very refreshing. The song, a straightforward dance tune about lust, feels confident and slightly nostalgic, as though Alison Goldfrapp is reconnecting with some part of herself that had gone dormant for a time. The glee in this song seems directly connected to the feeling of “oh yes, I’d forgotten how this felt, and didn’t realize I still could.” It’s a familiarity that is not taken for granted.

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Lana Del Rey “Love”

The key to Lana Del Rey’s music is that she understands that certain types of sadness and yearning are very satisfying feelings, sometimes more so than most positive emotions. This is especially true when you’re terrified of actual intimacy – being with someone is scary, but pining for them lets you experience the rush of love without the parts that make you uncomfortable and insecure. “Love” is sung from a remove, with Lana observing young people doing young people things, and experiencing innocent, earnest passion for the first time. There’s a bit of envy and loneliness in her voice, but you can tell she’s invested in these other people and their happiness. Even if she’s afraid on some level that she can’t have this or can’t anymore, she doesn’t begrudge them for these simple joys. She seems to like the tragic romanticism of being the outsider on the periphery, the wounded person who can claim some distance from these people with their ordinary lives. She gets to feel like the special one, even if it’s an empty feeling.

Buy it from iTunes.

Ivy Sole “East”

Ivy Sole’s voice comes off rugged and tough at the start of this track, matching the tone of the track, which is forceful and abrasive from the first seconds. She’s announcing who she is, she’s situating herself in rap, she’s recontextualizing tropes. (She’s right, a trap is basically a startup.) But as she moves along, the front drops a bit, and the defenses come down, and the words get increasingly vulnerable and sincere. Sole is just telling her story here – nothing too dramatic, so she focuses on the details that made her who she is today. The chorus comes out of the song quite naturally, but its soft, sentimental tone is quite a shift from where this song begins. I don’t think either part is more real – it’s just a very honest snapshot of a fully formed person.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Anna Wise “Coconuts”

Anna Wise’s previous EP was like an awakening – reckoning with sexism and body image, turning against societal bullshit holding her back. “Coconuts,” from her second EP, is further along: Less dogmatic and aggressive, but coming at the same ideas from a far stronger and more assured perspective. The song is relaxed and meditative, with muted horns framing her chill delivery of lyrics that lay out hard truths. Like, say, you don’t have to beholden to other people’s vision of you. And, on a larger scale, the “rules” will change over time. But in the meantime, stick with the good people, and support them. “Coconuts” is low key and not totally obvious, but I think it’s a lot more powerful than what Wise was doing last year. It sounds like the love she wants to encourage.

Buy it from Bandcamp.