Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Cassandra Jenkins “Candy Crane”

This is a lovely track all around, but please take note of the lead guitar, which has the low-key melodic elegance of peak George Harrison. It’s a fabulous complement to Cassandra Jenkins’ vocal performance, bringing out the warmth in her voice without compromising the steady, deliberately calm cadences of her melody. Her voice implies a very adult perspective – what’s done is done, but there’s more to do, so let’s do it. The refrain of “play till you win” is the most resonant bit, coming off both optimistic and bitter, but above all, pragmatic.

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Very Fresh “Cool Kids”

“Cool Kids” is basically a litany of social pressures, and the joke is that as Cindy Lou Gooden moves up the timeline from being a teenager into adulthood, it only gets more anxious and manic. She sings it all with a snide Jello Biafra-ish affect, broadly signaling contempt and dark humor, but not necessarily dismissing the actual feelings underneath the frenzied need to fit in and do what is expected. It’s presented as a joke because it is funny, but also because feeling like you need to do everything just right by a certain time or you’re an uncool failure is 100% ridiculous. Gooden is giving everyone permission to admit it and laugh at it and, hopefully, break free from it.

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Sandscape “Artifical Rush”

“Artificial Rush” is the sort of song that sounds as if it can only exist at night, and that it’s deeply inappropriate to put it on in daylight hours. And this isn’t even really because it’s so obviously meant to be boudoir music – the very sound of it evokes the amber hues of street lights and the not-quite-stillness of a city at night. This is particularly well-crafted atmosphere, full of interesting sonic details that follow the curves of the song rather than overwhelm it. Eliza Shaddad’s voice is understated through the entire thing, picking up a bit for the chorus but always staying in this low-key seductive mode.

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Hanni El Khatib “Gonna Die Alone”

I feel like the phrase “die alone” is most commonly associated with being a frustrated single person, but this song by Hanni El Khatib goes to a darker place than that. This is more about paranoia, and feeling like everyone is out to get you one way or another, and just wondering when it’s all going to finally end. There’s a bit of humor in this – you can tell he’s smirking in some lines, and the tone of the music is fairly loose and fun. But despite that, the core of this really is anxiety and terror, and this powerful feeling that you have no control over your destiny, and that no one is willing to help you. It’s an incredibly fatalistic tune, but pretty funky too.

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Rose Elinor Dougall “Closer”

Rose Elinor Dougall’s voice has always signaled a thoughtful introversion, even back when she was one of the Pipettes. Back then it subverted the band’s retro girl group aesthetic – she came off like the sort of ostensibly shy girl who’s always about to say something a bit cutting and wry when people aren’t looking. Her solo work has been a lot more mellow and demure, so it’s interesting to hear her move in a slightly more danceable direction with her new record. “Closer” is still fairly reserved as far as dance rock tunes go, but there’s enough of a groove and hook to it that the music nudges her to be a little bolder. But only so much – this is a song about passively waiting for someone to make a move, and she sounds a lot more impatient than insistent.

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Syd “Shake Em Off”

“Shake ‘Em Off” reminds me a lot of Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s mid-‘90s material, at least in that it’s got this very similar push-and-pull between lushness and minimalism; warm sensuality and aloof distance; clever artsiness and pop hooks. Syd’s voice is very much at home in a track like this – there’s always a lot of shades of ambiguity in her phrasing, so Hit-Boy’s production makes that an asset rather than a liability. It is interesting that Syd’s singing about being sure of her decisions and confident that she’s about to become a star, but the overall tone of the music is quite ambivalent. I don’t think she’s undermining her self-belief, but I do think adding these shades of uncertainty feels emotionally true.

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Letherette “Villim”

“Villim” sounds like it should be soundtracking a sequence in a movie that’s dark and frightening, but also a bit surreal. A late night journey, an encounter with something alien, lost in a forest. Something like that. The string parts – sampled, I’m guessing, but I have no idea – are overtly cinematic, but the magic in this is the way they’ve chopped up these chiming sounds so it sounds quite lovely, but clipped up just enough to feel slightly unstable.

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Priests “JJ”

Katie Alice Greer sounds thoroughly appalled throughout “JJ,” starting first with herself for having “such awful taste” in men while looking back on some regrettable ex. Then she shifts that over to the ex, whose “bad attitude” pose extended to thinking she was disgusting. And then she pulls back a bit further to shaking her head at a society that conspires to make her or anyone else feel like they “deserve” to be treated like shit. It doesn’t take the blame off anyone for insensitive behavior, but it does put everything in context. Would we undermine ourselves and be attracted to things we know on some level will hurt us if we didn’t have toxic messages in our lives? Is this nature or nurture? Anyway, fun things to think about in a danceable punk song song!

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Thundercat featuring Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins “Show You the Way”

When I learned about this song I was like “wow, Thundercat got Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins on a song?!?” And then I heard it, and you can hear Thundercat expressing the same thing in the song itself. What luck, right? This is how you know you’ve made it. This is how you find out that you are exceptionally smooth. This is one of your slickest bass lines going to Yacht Rock Heaven. So I’m of two minds about the kitschy announcements of each singer throughout the song: The joke is funny the first time, but not so much on repeat listens, and the schtick gets in the way of the vibe and sentiment of the music. But it comes from a place of very genuine joy and admiration and surprise and wonder, and who can blame this guy for being so hype about landing either of these dudes, let alone both of them? Certainly not I.

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Ty Segall “Break A Guitar”

There has been no shortage of dudes drawing on Black Sabbath riffs over the past – oh, hmm, 40 years or so? – but a lot of the time, it’s just aimless sludgy riffage without much charm. Ty Segall does it right by keeping that sort of heaviness and bombast connected to the more delicate and tuneful aspects of psychedelia. In his hands, the riffs don’t just sound like the lumbering thuds of a giant, but are nimble like a musclebound football player who moves with an unexpected speed and grace. Segall is never breaking any new ground, but he’s always refining approaches to things other musicians do quite lazily, and he makes rock that some might write off as retro feel fresh though sheer force of will and vitality.

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Gabriel Garzón-Montano “Sour Mango”

Gabriel Garzón-Montano’s melodies are bold and immediately charming, but rendered in layers of muted pastel tones that keep a relatively busy song like “Sour Mango” from feeling too rich and heavy. There’s a nice feeling of weightlessness in this song, with the vocal and instrumental harmonies hovering around a crisp beat that keeps a steady groove but feels more like scaffolding for melody. Garzón-Montano’s voice is soulful but not showy – it’s the most vibrant aspect of the song, but doesn’t overwhelm the low-key, relaxed feeling of the overall track. I’m particularly fond of the vaguely siren-like keyboard part that carries through the piece as a crucial part of the harmony and serves as a nearly subliminal hook that sticks around in my head after the song’s over.

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Japandroids “Arc of Bar”

“Arc of Bar” is a skyscraper of a song, building upwards towards the heavens with each verse as if the band was on a solemn mission to go get a beer with God Himself. A lot of beers. This is the most epic drinking song I have ever heard, and maybe the only one I’ve encountered that makes drinking booze seem like some kind of defiant, heroic duty. Brian King’s verses are wordy and deliberately grandiose, but the chorus is exactly the sort of cathartic, mindless bombast Japandroids does best: “Yeah yeaaaah! / YEAH YEAH!!!” This is seven minutes of theatrical rock music designed to make people go wild at a concert, and is such a convincing advertisement for inebriation that it’s a huge boon to the bartenders at every venue this band plays for the rest of the career. But as much as this song sets up a good time, it’s lost and confused and tortured at its core. It’s constantly grasping upwards at something – grace, glory, redemption? – but never getting a hold of anything. So it just keeps going higher and higher until it inevitably falls down.

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Delicate Steve “Nightlife”

Delicate Steve plays guitar like a lead singer, so it works out nicely that there’s no singer in his band. His lead parts carry the central melody of the tunes, but even if it works as a substitution for a traditional rock singer, it doesn’t necessarily feel like one. Steve’s parts are highly expressive and instantly memorable, and frankly, convey a lot more personality than most indie rock singers. The songs on This Is Steve are so catchy and well-composed that they’d probably be hits if they had singing in place of Steve’s leads, but they’d lose a significant amount of charm, and distract from the colorful, idealized alternate reality suggested by the music. “Nightlife” in particular sounds like some better, more cheerful world where seemingly disparate elements from twangy rock and reggae blend together seamlessly and it’s totally chill and casual.

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Foxygen “Avalon”

If you are a musician skilled in mimicry, glam rock is your friend. There’s never any need to be authentic, and you’re only limited by a lack of shame and/or a lack of funds. Foxygen gave up on shame years ago, and now they’ve got the budget to back themselves up with a large orchestra, so you’d better believe they went well over the top on their new record. “Avalon” is gloriously artificial, bouncing around between ‘70s touchstones both unimpeachably cool (Bowie) and perennially tacky (Meat Loaf), and like, actual musical theater. This is theatrical rock that sounds like it aspires to actually becoming gleefully dorky Broadway razzle-dazzle, as though the record won’t be truly finished until it’s a jukebox musical. It’s all kinda-sorta a joke – on some level they’re goofing on musical tropes as much as they’re embracing them, and I am certain you’re meant to smile and go “wow, they really did that!” when you listen. But there’s no way you invest this much time and craft and personality into something you think is bullshit, unless bullshit is your absolute favorite thing in the world. And with these guys, I think that could be true.

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The xx “Say Something Loving”

The xx have become significantly less minimalist on their new album I See You, integrating the samples and muted dance music aesthetics of Jamie xx’s solo material while still sounding exactly like the xx. The shift isn’t drastic – pretty much all of this still can be described as “minimal” compared to most other things and the music still is all about creating a powerful sense of intimacy. Romy and Oliver, both openly queer in real life, still sound like a very intense straight couple when they sing to each other. But the sound is brighter, less static. The world implied in their songs feels a lot bigger than just the two of them in close quarters.

“Say Something Loving” is about finding love again after being starved for affection for a long time, and the conflict between feeling happy and grateful for this good fortune, and terrified that you’ll screw it up somehow. “I wasn’t patient to meet you,” Oliver sings. “Am I too needy, am I too eager?” They articulate these anxieties but don’t let those feelings overtake the song, keeping the emphasis on the warmth and affection. They evoke a specific moment a lot of us have experienced: Getting exactly what we want but spoiling it by thinking the whole time about how it’s going to go away.

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Joan of Arc “This Must Be the Placenta”

Tim Kinsella is very playful in his approach to lyrics, and seems to layer his work with sly references to music, literature, and art both obscure and famous as if to make it all a code for someone nearly as clever and tasteful as himself to crack. But it doesn’t stop there. Kinsella has a gift for juxtaposing vividly strange phrases with lines that start out like self-aware jokes but have an agonizing emotional resonance. You get all of that in “This Must Be the Placenta” on top of a track that manages to feel wobbly and seasick despite a steady, in-the-pocket groove. There’s a lot of great lines in this one, but the one that really sticks with me is “I’ve had a 26-year-old girlfriend since the day I turned 11.” It’s funny, but also so strange and provocative as it sits in my mind and I try to unpack that thought. I like to think that it’s not the same girlfriend, but that his desires have shifted from aspirational maturity and yearning for maternal attention to looking for an equal to wanting to reverse the original dynamic. Another phrase that gets repeated is “all along unknowingly I acted out the plan,” and in light of that, the “26-year-old girlfriend” bit seems more like a joke he’s barely in on.

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Alexander F “Soft Coffins”

“Soft Coffin” is a song that does its best to be kind and reassuring to some anxious, depressive person, but doesn’t seem to actually understand what this person is going through. It’s sympathy and love, but not exactly empathy. And while that’s not ideal, it’s something I think all of us feel from time to time when someone we care about is hurting themselves one way or another and we just want them to stop and to acknowledge they are loved. Alexander F’s song has the hallmarks of an uplifting arena rock song but the underpinnings of something more uncertain and twitchy, and the lyrics spike sweet sentiments with jokes to mitigate the tension and to keep it from being prescriptive. It sounds like a very recognizable mix of kindness and awkwardness and exasperation.

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Chavez “Blank in the Blaze”

Chavez songs share a similar formal logic in which tension is introduced and then doubled or tripled before it is released. Matt Sweeney and Clay Tarver’s guitars on the new song “Blank in the Blaze” alternate between melodic part that tighten up like coils of metal wire or riffs that clench up like fists. The approach is exactly the same as when they more regularly produced music 20 years ago; this could easily be an outtake from Ride the Fader. There are some bands who could come back after a long hiatus and end up feeling different, but it makes sense that Chavez would snap into their distinctive groove, since the band emerged from a set of clear formal rules and restraints. And all of those rules are there just to make sure that you get exactly what’s at the end of “Blank”: a soaring sensation of triumph tempered by a feeling of exhaustion and lost.

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Run the Jewels “Call Ticketron”

Run the Jewels have been great from the start, but I think it’s taken them a bit to transition from “project” to full-time collaborators. The intensity and chemistry has always been there, but Killer Mike and El-P sound emboldened by the realization that RTJ has becoming the defining work of their long careers, and seem thrilled to give the people what they want. These are guys who’ve built their reputations on projecting confidence, but they’ve never seemed as sure of themselves as they do on these new songs. It must help to know when you’re writing songs exactly how excited people will be to hear them, and what will make people lose their shit when you perform live. “Call Ticketron” is one of the songs that seems built specifically for the live show – there’s the “l-l-l-live from the Garden” refrain, sure, but it’s more in the way the track contrasts its vast negative space with a rhythm that tightens up a lot before releasing the tension. El-P and Mike switch up their approaches to the beat through the song, with the former lurking around it at the start, and the latter ratcheting up the tension in his last verse by packing in the syllables and leaning into internal rhyme.

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Nine Inch Nails “Burning Bright (Field on Fire)”

Trent Reznor approaches record formats like a painter – some works are large canvasses, others are diptychs or murals, and a few here and there are miniatures. Not the Actual Events is in the latter category along with Broken and the first How to Destroy Angels EP. As with those previous small scale works, it’s a complete thought with a distinctive aesthetic. The songs have the raw garage punk urgency of The Slip, but it’s far more cluttered and abrasive, and mostly avoids the melody and harmony at the core of even Reznor’s heaviest music.

Not the Actual Events is a deliberate mess; it’s a calculated replica of a chaotic state of mind. It starts off with a punk song that cuts out just as it starts to accelerate, as if the song just crashed into a wall, and then lurches though a middle section that sounds lost, desperate, and confused. Reznor and Atticus Ross go wild with texture – there’s a lot of clashing and overlapping planes of sound, and stuff that sounds like Joy Division strangling My Bloody Valentine guitar parts to death. Reznor’s voice is present through the whole thing, but it’s often obscured or nearly incoherent as he recites lyrics that are closer to free verse than his usual rhythmic and melodic cadences. The themes aren’t far off from where he was last time around on Hesitation Marks – he’s afraid of backsliding into old habits and destroying the life he’s built, and overwhelmed with paranoia about a world in decline. It all ends with a sort of thwarted catharsis in which Reznor finds the strength and clarity to push back against all of this anxiety, and he gives himself some space for a clear, relatively calm vocal melody to cut through the blaring guitar. But in the same song where he’s singing about being forgiven and free, he’s telling himself “you’re not really what you know you are.” It doesn’t feel like a victory.

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George Michael “Praying for Time”

“Praying for Time” is a song from 26 years ago, but its lyrics are extremely resonant in this rather dire time we’re entering at the end of 2016. George Michael is singing about a world in which empathy is in very short supply, but fear and greed is rampant, and there’s this pervasive feeling of dread because it seems clear that the worst is yet to come. But again, this song is 26 years old – it’s always been this way. And there’s some hope in that, because it shows us that there’s a future, even if that future is full of the same human failings that have plagued us for centuries. The chorus is about just that: “It’s hard to love, there’s so much to hate / Hanging on to hope when there is no hope to speak of.” George Michael had no answers, and wasn’t trying to tell anyone things would be OK. But he was imploring everyone to make an effort to be kind, and to lift up those who need help, and to make the best of what time we have left. I don’t think he was asking for too much.

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