Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Eric Church “Chattanooga Lucy”

Eric Church’s Mr. Misunderstood is a “surprise record,” and the product of rapid creativity – ten songs written and recorded in less than a month. You can hear that in the music, particularly in the way a song like “Chattanooga Lucy” has this feverish immediacy. Like a lot of country musicians, Church is a musician with a high level of craft, but nothing about this song feels fussed over or over-considered. It’s exciting to hear a guy trust his instincts so much, and to go out on a limb stylistically and come out with a funk/gospel/country hybrid that doesn’t seem forced in any way. The urgency of the track suits the “forbidden fruit” theme of the lyrics really well, too – you get the sense that when he’s singing about hooking up with this girl that he’s risking a huge mistake at any moment, and that just gets him more excited.

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One Direction “Hey Angel”

“Hey Angel” sounds like every song on The Verve’s Urban Hymns album distilled into one epic, lovelorn ballad, and it’s a great look on the boys of One Direction. Richard Ashcroft’s music may be a lot more dark and depressive than what you’d normally get from 1D, but his aesthetic was always hyper-romantic and melodramatic, and that suits them perfectly. Like pretty much all the best 1D songs, this is basically a song in which a bunch of cute boys sing about their admiration for some ordinary yet outstanding young woman. Now, look, the guys in One Direction and their various collaborators aren’t idiots, and they know this formula is something that makes them insane amounts of money. Flattery gets them everywhere. But I really don’t think it’s that cynical, and I think they sincerely respect the audience and aren’t bullshitting when they drop a chorus that goes “Oh, I wish I could be more like you! / Do you wish you could be more like me?” It’s exciting to hear respect and admiration be the focus of pop songs, particularly since that’s in short supply when it comes to the music of other major male pop stars today. You’re sure as hell never going to get this from misogynist uber-creeps like Drake and The Weeknd. And even if 1D is truly coming from a place of greedy cynicism, I just can’t see any downside in a lot of girls growing up listening to songs in which desirable young men sing about how cool girls are and how much they wish they were like them.

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Kate Boy “Northern Lights”

Kate Boy sounds a little like if The Knife had decided to chase pop stardom after Deep Cuts instead of, y’know, going full goth, exploring avant garde opera, and creating abrasive electronic agitprop. This isn’t a bad thing – as much as I love and admire what The Knife became, there’s always that part of me that wishes they would’ve made some more pop music because they were so good at it, and so far ahead of the curve. (Seriously, people are catching up with where they were in 2003 in 2015.) “Northern Lights” is superficially quite a lot like The Knife in terms of rhythm and tonality, but the song itself feels more common. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily – Kate Akhurst has a good sense of melody and drama, and it’s interesting to hear a more conventional piece of music get a Knife-like makeover. It’s a spikier, more aggressive sound, and that icy vibe always has a way of disrupting any sense of traditional binary sexuality. Twelve years late, and it still sounds like the future.

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Boots “Only”

This song feels like a cousin to Radiohead’s “Nude,” and falls into a similar aesthetic territory in which terror, depression, and anxiety is rendered in this oddly graceful and sexy way. A lot of that comes from how the arrangement feels like a jazzy R&B ballad that’s been gutted to the point that only the scaffolding remains, and the way Boots’ voice has the echo of someone alone in a big, bombed-out empty space. He’d sound lonely and desperate even if he wasn’t being very literal in the lyrics and singing “I am the only one alive / that is the only thing I know,” but I appreciate him going in hard on the post-apocalyptic vibe. There’s maybe too much post-apocalypse in tv, movies, and comics, but you really don’t get much of it in music.

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Aurora “Half the World Away”

This is an old Oasis song, a b-side from the “Whatever” single that eventually become better known than the a-side in that “Noel Gallagher couldn’t stop relegating his best tunes to bonus tracks at his peak” way. The original was sung by Noel and has a ragged charm to it, as though he just rolled out of bed and casually knocked it out on his acoustic guitar and electric piano. This cover by a young Norwegian singer takes a more refined approach to the song – her voice is more traditionally beautiful, and there’s gently swelling strings that give it a Disney-ish sentimentality. If this version nudged any further in any direction it’d be a bit too twee or mawkish, but the balance is just right and it’s quite moving. Gallagher’s original comes from a very sincere place, but there’s a bit of an ironic shrug to it, as though he’s not ready to be totally vulnerable but doing his best. This version totally owns the conflicted emotion of the song, and my heart breaks a bit every time I hear her sing “I’ve been lost, I’ve been found, but I don’t feel down.”

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Grimes “Artangels”

I can feel a bit jealous when I listen to “Artangels” because the feeling of love and excitement that Grimes is describing is so perfect and powerful, and I wish I had it in my life. This is a love song to her muse – sometimes it sounds like a person, and in the chorus it’s definitely the city of Montréal – and the feeling she’s so high on is inspiration and creativity. The music captures this feeling perfectly. On a superficial level it feels a bit like the intoxicating rush of a crush, but it’s really more about gratitude for unlocking something inside your mind, and feeling like you’ve been liberated in some way. It’s a precious feeling but it comes and goes so easily, and the fear that her muse could abandon her comes through in the music along with the joy. My favorite part is when she sings “everything I love is consolation after you.” It’s just a lovely sentiment, but also her way of saying that there’s nothing more important to her than art, and nothing more crucial to her sense of self than creativity. I can relate.

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Gems “Soak”

It drives me a little bit crazy that we still don’t really have something to call this type of music, aside from maybe recycling the term “indie pop,” as my BuzzFeed colleague Reggie Ugwu did recently. (I don’t approve of this, as indie pop has been a specific thing for a long time, but beggars can’t be choosers.) But you know this sound — the clicking beats, the unobtrusive keyboard tones, the tasteful minimalism, the sensual vibe, the vague R&B-ness of it, the way the female and male voices hint at sexual tension but seem strangely noncommittal about it. This is the “sexy” music of many people you’d call millennials, and it sounds like the music that’d play at the “Blasé Olympics” described by Alana Massey in her excellent essay Against Chill. Gems is good at this genre, and “Soak” is a good song, but it reflects a culture that I find sad and alienating and unimaginative. The singers are describing passionate feelings, but not conveying them. What I hear is people trying to connect but holding back too much. Or maybe it’s more like they’ve chilled these fiery emotions in music that just makes them lukewarm.

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Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts “Support Tours”

I imagine the audience for a song about the specific things that make touring as an opening act so awful is fairly tiny, but I’m certainly in it. “Support Tours” is basically a very interesting and funny blog entry set to music, but it is in fact musical – Lewis’ words flow along a strong melody line, and his cadence and inflections add shades of irony, sadness, and bemusement to his lyrics’ jokes and truth-bombs. I particularly like when he gets to the part about graduating to headliner level and it being his turn to screw over some other band, and it’s like a defeated shrug. The entire song is just like “hey, this all sucks, but what can you do?”

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Hinds “Chili Town”

Hinds is a band of charming, effortlessly cool Spanish girls, and “Chili Town” is their most charming and effortlessly cool song. I’m sure there are people who would hear this and actually wish they’d put a bit more effort into it – it always sounds like one thing could go wrong and collapse at any moment, and their voices have a…sorta casual relationship with the notion of singing in tune. But that lead guitar part really nails a relaxed yet vaguely nervous feeling, and I don’t know if these lyrics about being so flirty and bratty to mask underlying feelings of uncertainty and impatience would come off as perfectly if they didn’t sound so very cool. The lyrics are fantastic too, full of vivid language like “amazing feelings juice,” “my laugh is oversized,” “saliva mixed with lies,” and “I am swimming in the dark because all your friends are sharks.” I like that they just state the subtext of their actions in the song, because in the actual moment, they’re just doing everything they can to keep it buried because they want some dude to catch a hint.

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Car Seat Headrest “Times to Die”

A thing I really love about Will Toledo’s music is how often the songs sound like they’re being made up on the spot. This is a major feature of Car Seat Headrest’s live show, where I’m pretty certain I have literally seen them improvise new material on stage, but it’s apparent in a song like “Times to Die,” which has a very eccentric, nonlinear structure. It is in fact a highly structured song with very deliberate lyrics, but the feeling in the recording is that Toledo keeps remembering that he has more things to talk to you about, and so he keeps adding a bit more time to your trip, like “Fuck it, let’s drive another few blocks.” He’s got a lot on his mind, though! “Times to Die” is about him getting signed to Matador, and the Book of Job, and feeling like your friends have more adult lives than you, and grand ambitions, and the peculiarities of organized religion and sacraments, feeling on the outside of things, literally dying, metaphorically dying, and probably seven or eight other things. He piles on the hooks and bridges and asides and ideas as though this is the only song he’ll ever write, but the beautiful thing is that this is all coming from a hugely prolific songwriter who’s got an entire other record in the can as his Matador debut comes out this week. He’s very interesting, to say the least.

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Peaches “Dumb Fuck”

Peaches sings this song from the perspective, more or less, of the sort of person Heather Havrilesky has been telling people to be over the past few years of her Dear Polly column. Which is to say, she’s being direct and honest and not buying into the insecurity-masquerading-as-politeness that allows tepid dudes to keep on being flakey and indecisive with impunity. Peaches isn’t fucking around here – she wants to define the relationship, or move on. She doesn’t really want to dump the guy, but she’s flustered by how dense he’s being. So what do you do if he doesn’t have a clue? You just call him a dumb fuck over and over until the exasperation turns into catharsis. Yet another great lesson from the teaches of Peaches.

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Eleanor Friedberger “False Alphabet City”

“False Alphabet City” is basically a song in which Eleanor Friedberger deals with the frustration of having nostalgia for a version of a neighborhood that doesn’t really exist anymore, and feeling like maybe you don’t really belong in that space anymore. This could easily be a more maudlin or angry song, but the feeling of the music is very relaxed, and at least to me feels like going home. Everything sounds familiar – the shape of things, the sense of space, even if the details are off. It sounds like a much looser version of the aesthetic The Fiery Furnaces had on Widow City and I’m Going Away, with the more rigid rhythmic structures swapped out for groovier bass parts and a lot more hi-hat. You can’t really go back but you can get close enough sometimes.

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Beach House “One Thing”

It’s easy to write Beach House off as a one trick pony; they have a very narrow aesthetic and never stray from it. Releasing two albums in the span of a couple months might seem like overkill, and maybe it kinda is, but it’s a clever move in that it highlights just how different their records can be while essentially being iterations of the same thing. Thank Your Lucky Stars sounds more open and airy than the highly claustrophobic Depression Cherry, and it feels more dirty, worn, and scuffed-up in comparison. The previous record sounded like hiding from the world; this one is more about being weathered by it. Also, unlike the three Beach House records before it, Thank Your Lucky Stars sounds like it’s made by people willing to make eye contact with you.

“One Thing” is the most abrasive and beautiful thing on the record, and maybe their entire catalog. It’s built on a chugging chord pattern, and centers on guitar rather than keyboards. There’s a wonderful ambiguity to the mounting tension – is it fear, is it anticipation, is it lust, is it violence? Is it all of it at once? It’s a very sexy and romantic song without being obvious about anything, or even slightly sentimental. Victoria Legrand’s lyrics hint at a tension and some kind of sexual and emotional entanglement, but the lack of clarity seems to be the point. It’s never clear exactly what’s happening, and that’s why it’s such a powerful experience, or strong feeling.

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This is the second in my series of 1980s survey mixes, which are designed to give more context to the music of that decade. Most versions of ‘80s history focus on specific niches and canons, but mostly ignore or write off parallel and overlapping cultural trends. My goal in doing this project is to highlight all the different things going on from year to year, to better understand the original context of familiar songs and to highlight a lot of the music that has faded from cultural memory.

There’s a lot going on in 1988, but the thing that really hit me was how much of what was going on at that moment was in some way transgressive or deliberately abrasive. I think that’s all a very obvious reaction against the ultra-glossy music of the mid-‘80s and the hyper-conservative politics of the Reagan era. A lot of that vibe is still going strong in ’88, but if you listen to this set, you can feel the overall mood shifting towards the aesthetics of the early ‘90s, particularly in terms of alt-rock and hip-hop.

A word about chronology: I am trying to stick to the things that were actually released for the first time in each year, but am allowing some major records that were promoted over a few years to be represented in both. That’s why George Michael, INXS, Guns N’ Roses, Belinda Carlisle, and Michael Jackson are featured in this set. UB40’s “Red Red Wine” was originally released in 1983, but the mix included here was issued in 1988 and became a #1 hit in the United States.

Thanks to Sean T. Collins, Chris Conroy, Chris Ott, and especially Paul Cox for their assistance in putting this set together. The 1987 set should be ready to go sometime in November before Thanksgiving. You can find the 1989 survey mix here.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Sonic Youth “Teen Age Riot” / Public Enemy “Bring the Noise” / Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock “It Takes Two” / Salt-n-Pepa “Push It” / L’Trimm “Cars with the Boom” / Lita Ford “Kiss Me Deadly” / R.E.M. “Orange Crush” / Guns N’ Roses “Paradise City” / Erasure “A Little Respect” / Wire “Kidney Bingos” / Sugarcubes “Birthday” / Bobby Brown “Every Little Step” / Marley Marl featuring Masta Ace, Craig G, Kool G Rap, and Big Daddy Kane “The Symphony” / Tracy Chapman “Fast Car” / Lucinda Williams “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad” / Dwight Yoakam “I Sang Dixie” / Metallica “One”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

N.W.A. “Straight Outta Compton” / Eric B and Rakim “Lyrics of Fury” / Jane’s Addiction “Mountain Song” / Slayer “South of Heaven” / EPMD “You Gots to Chill” / Ultramagnetic MCs “Ease Back” / Front 242 “Welcome to Paradise” / The Fall “Big New Prinz” / Morrissey “Every Day Is Like Sunday” / Anthrax “Antisocial” / Samantha Fox “Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)” / Paula Abdul “Straight Up” / Red Dragon “Duck Dance” / Slick Rick “Children’s Story” / The Dead Milkmen “Punk Rock Girl” / Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Deanna” / The Bangles “In Your Room” / Belinda Carlisle “I Get Weak” / Brenda Russell “Piano in the Dark” / U2 “All I Want Is You”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Enya “Orinoco Flow” / Cocteau Twins “Carolyn’s Fingers” / When In Rome “The Promise” / George Michael “Father Figure” / Boogie Down Productions “My Philosophy” / D.J. Magic Mike and The Royal Posse “Magic Mike Cuts the Record” / Talking Heads “(Nothing But) Flowers” / KMFDM “Don’t Blow Your Top” / Teddy Pendergass “Joy” / MC Lyte “Paper Thin” / Matthew Shipp & Rob Brown “Sonic Explorations (Section 4)” / Glenn Branca “Symphony No. 5 – Second Movement” / My Bloody Valentine “Lose My Breath” / Pixies “Where Is My Mind?” / Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians “What I Am” / Michelle Shocked “Anchorage” / Kip Hanrahan “Gender” / Kronos Quartet “Four, for Tango”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

Information Society “What’s On Your Mind (Pure Energy)” / Johnny Kemp “Just Got Paid” / Pet Shop Boys “Always On My Mind” / Prince “Alphabet Street” / Natalie Cole “Pink Cadillac” / Ornette Coleman “Bourgeois Boogie” / Prefab Sprout “The King of Rock and Roll” / Highway 101 “(Do You Love Me) Just Say Yes” / Throwing Muses “Mexican Women” / Pere Ubu “George Had A Hat” / Butthole Surfers “Ricky” / Bongwater “David Bowie Wants Ideas” / Jungle Brothers “Straight Out the Jungle” / Billy Ocean “Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car” / George Harrison “Got My Mind Set On You” / Patti Smith “People Have the Power” / Unrest “Christina” / The Church “Under the Milky Way” / Cowboy Junkies “Sweet Jane”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Fugazi “Waiting Room” / Dinosaur Jr “Freak Scene” / Big Daddy Kane “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’” / S’Express “Theme from S’Express” / 2 Men A Drum Machine and a Trumpet “Tired of Getting Pushed Around” / Ministry “Stigmata” / Inner City “Good Life” / Duran Duran “Good Life” / Robert Palmer “Simply Irresistible” / They Might Be Giants “Ana Ng” / 2 Live Crew “Move Somethin’” / Kid N Play “Gittin’ Funky” / Siouxsie and the Banshees “Peek A Boo” / Sly & Robbie “All Aboard” / Scritti Politti “Boom! There She Was” / Michael Jackson “Man in the Mirror” / George Strait “Baby Blue” / Poison “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” / Neil Young and The Bluenotes “This Note’s For You”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Living Colour “Cult of Personality” / New Kids on the Block “Hangin’ Tough” / Eazy-E “Boyz N The Hood (Remix)” / Bomb the Bass “Beat Dis” / My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult “…And This is What The Devil Does!” / Run-D.M.C. “Run’s House” / UB40 “Red Red Wine” / Admiral Bailey “Jump Up” / Kylie Minogue “The Loco-Motion” / Leonard Cohen “First We Take Manhattan” / Elton John “I Don’t Wanna Go On with You Like That” / A.R. Kane “Crazy Blue” / James “What For” / The Travelling Wilburys “Handle with Care” / The Go-Betweens “Streets Of Your Town” / The Mighty Lemon Drops “Inside Out” / A Guy Called Gerald “Voodoo Ray” / Womack & Womack “Teardrops” / INXS “Never Tear Us Apart”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Mudhoney “Touch Me I’m Sick” / Danzig “Mother” / Ciccone Youth “Into the Groove(y)” / Joan Jett and the Blackhearts “I Hate Myself for Loving You” / Game Theory “Room For One More, Honey” / Let’s Active “Bad Machinery” / Julian Cope “Charlotte Anne” / Sam Phillips “I Don’t Want To Fall In Love” / Kathy Mattea “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” / Megadeth “Liar” / Napalm Death “From Enslavement to Obliteration” / Halo of Flies “Drunk (In Detroit)” / Royal Trux “Zero Dok” / Pussy Galore “Adolescent Wet Dream” / Soul Asylum “Down On Up To Me” / The Timelords “Doctorin’ the Tardis” / Ice-T “High Rollers” / King Tee “Act A Fool” / Sir Mix-A-Lot “Posse On Broadway” / Sade “Paradise” / The Beach Boys “Kokomo” / Y Kant Tori Read “Cool On Your Island” / k.d. lang “Sugar Moon”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Daniel Johnston “Walking the Cow” / Beat Happening “Indian Summer” / Galaxie 500 “Tugboat” / Doug E Fresh “Keep Risin’ to the Top” / Stetsasonic “Talkin’ All That Jazz” / DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince “Parents Just Don’t Understand” / Pretty Poison “Catch Me (I’m Falling)” / Trevor Sparks “Bye Bye Love” / Fishbone “Ma and Pa” / Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 “Mr. Tuna’s Big Old Place” / The Primitives “Crash” / Caifanes “Te Estoy Mirando” / Camper Van Beethoven “Eye of Fatima (Pt. 1)” / Felt “Apple Boutique” / Pantera “Down Below” / Ultra Vivid Scene “Mercy Seat” / Spacemen 3 “Walking with Jesus” / The Smithereens “Only A Memory” / MC Hammer “Turn This Mutha Out” / Diamanda Galas “Double-Barrel Prayer” / GG Allin “Anti Social Masterbator” / Bobby McFerrin “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”

Deerhunter “All the Same”

Deerhunter’s Fading Frontier feels like coming out of a very dark part of your life and appreciating that the worst is over, but not quite knowing where that leaves you in the moment. You’re not all better, you’re still working on taking care of yourself, and peace isn’t the same as happiness. “All the Same” opens the record and sounds like the winter gradually shifting into spring; there’s something in the chords that implies brightness with a slight chill, and something in the rhythm that feels tentative and cautious. The lyrics are all about a shift in perspective, or a shift in expectations – realizing some things don’t matter to you anymore, observing change in other people, figuring out that your weaknesses can become strengths. The song is all liminal space, and it hinges on knowing that things are changing but having no idea where it’s all headed. A lot of Deerhunter’s music in the past has been about similarly passive states, but I think this time around, it’s a little more optimistic. Just not a lot more.

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Yacht “I Wanna Fuck You Til I’m Dead”

The style of this song reminds me a lot of pop music from the late ‘90s and early ‘00s; it has a very particular type of gloss and punchiness to it that comes off as oddly aggressive. Back then, I think there was this general vibe in pop that the stakes were too high, and you had to beat people down with your hooks and the crispness of your beats. It was sink or swim. This Yacht song doesn’t have that subtext, but I think on some level it mines that perky intensity to really hammer home the deeply unsubtle message of this song, which is clear from the title. There’s a poetic quality to the words in the verses, but it’s all euphemisms and flirtation – this is just a proud expression of lust, and while it can be a little harsh on the ears, I really appreciate the boldness of this on every level.

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Neon Indian “Dear Skorpio Magazine”

“Dear Skorpio Magazine” is a crush song, and even if you couldn’t understand the lyrics you’d still probably pick up on that in the way the tempo goes staccato in the verses, like a heartbeat spiking with rising nerves. Alan Palomo’s arrangement and production style makes the song sound like it comes from an ‘80s in the future, which as it turns out is a pretty romantic vibe. The quality is mostly in the writing, though, and the way it moves you through these melodic moments like they’re a physical space, and you’re just some silly teenager wandering in a loop around a mall, just hoping to get another glimpse of the one you fancy so you can excitedly report to whoever will listen that you “made eyes!”

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Electric Six “Two Dollar Two”

One of the best things about Dick Valentine is the obvious delight he gets from sicking like a fucking badass. There’s always several layers of irony in what Electric Six does, but as much as he’s mocking the fragile artifice of American masculinity, that hamminess is 100% real. I think that’s a lot of why I find this band so compelling – they really love what they do and embrace the inherent ridiculousness of ego and bluster. Even if it’s based in stupidity, there’s something admirable about creating an identity for yourself that’s based in swagger and pride. “Two Dollar Two” is a great showcase for the power of Valentine’s voice and his incredible commitment to the bit. Remember when Courtney Love sang “I fake it so real I am beyond fake?” That’s him now, though given his obsession with poking holes in a macho front, maybe he’s actually faking it to un-make it.

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Janet Jackson “Gon’ B Alright”

Janet Jackson works through a lot of grieving and uncertainty over the course of Unbreakable, but she wraps up the album with this celebration of love and joy in the style of Sly and the Family Stone and The Jackson 5. Janet’s only touched on ‘60s and ‘70s R&B styles a couple times before in her career, and in the case of a song like “Whoops Now,” she was going for a more light and feminine sort of song. This pushes her in a very different direction, with several multi-tracked versions of herself covering a variety of timbres ranging from androgynous to overtly masculine. She does a lot of this pitch-shifting on the record, in part because it’s just so uncanny how much she sounds like her brother Michael when pitched down just a bit. It’s her way of channeling him, and bringing him back to us. I think if anyone else could do that, it’d just feel creepy and wrong, but with her, it’s genuinely poignant. I love the way “Gon’ B Alright” feels like Janet paying tribute to her brothers, and after all this time getting her turn to be a member of the band rather than just a baby sister.

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Born Ruffians “Stupid Dream”

If you squint a bit, you can pretend this is a brand new Vampire Weekend song. I know that’s unfair to Born Ruffians, but at the same time that is VERY HIGH PRAISE coming from me. And a big step up for them – their songwriting has really leaped forward since the last time they came around, and while you can hear a lot of VW in “Stupid Dream,” there’s a lot of interesting borderline abrasive textures that you might not find in one of their tracks. I love the way the main guitar riff comes in so hot but still has a crisp, clean tone, and the way the bass groove seems to elbow its way to the front of the arrangement for the verses. Luke Lalonde’s vocals are a revelation here, his performance is so vibrant and extroverted, and his frustration in singing “I am not the cream of the crop, and I am never rising up” is so present and real even if he maybe shouldn’t feel that way.

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