Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Veruca Salt “It’s Holy”

Veruca Salt never really went away – though most of the band’s original lineup had departed by 1998, Louise Post essentially released a series of solo records under that name through the past decade. The original band is back together now, and they put out a new single a few weeks ago for Record Store Day. It’s not too special for ’90s bands to reunite now, so let’s get to the actually exciting news: Veruca Salt’s two new songs are both excellent, and it’s like they just snapped back into exactly what made them such a good, fun band in the mid-90s. Gordon and Post’s music on their own was never anything too special, but they clearly just have a real spark when they’re together. Creative chemistry is a weird and unpredictable thing, you know? The lyrics of “It’s Holy” seem to acknowledge this, both in terms of an excited “we’re back!” feeling, but also just being thrilled to reconnect with each other, and their inspiration. This doesn’t sound like an old band doing their old thing; this sounds very young and passionate to me.

Buy music by Veruca Salt from Amazon.

The Voluntary Butler Scheme “Brain Freeze”

The Voluntary Butler Scheme is a one-man band project, but doesn’t sound much like one – there’s a spark to the interplay between the guitar, drums, and horns in his tracks that feels very live, like it’s something that’d come out on Daptone Records. The sound leans a lot on ’60s soul, but Rob Jones’ voice is pure English pop – affable and polite, but sorta distant too. “Brain Freeze” sounds perky and warm, but Jones’ cryptic lyrics keep you at a distance. It seems to be a song about feeling ambivalent about what it takes to make a lot of money, but it’s just vague enough that it also seems like a strange display of affection.

Buy it from Amazon.

Girl Talk & Freeway featuring Waka Flocka Flame “Tolerated”

It’s a little weird to me that Girl Talk didn’t jump into hip-hop production sooner – sure, mashups are his THING, and he clearly makes a good living as a DJ, but he’s so good at energetic track-building that it seems like he would’ve been pushed into it once he became a legit star. I don’t think every rapper would be at home in a Girl Talk track, but Freeway fits in perfectly, and his shouty rhymes are ideal for this sort of blaring, heavy composition. Their entire EP is excellent, but “Tolerated” is the one that really gets across that “ridiculously excited!!!” Girl Talk vibe while also conveying genuine menace. This is fantastic summer music, or maybe more accurately, pre-summer music.

Download the EP for free from DatPiff.

Tune-Yards “Find A New Way”

“Find A New Way” starts with Merrill Garbus singing about feeling creatively stuck, and someone telling her to just “find a new way” to sing. You’d only tell her that because she makes being a bold, idiosyncratic singer seem so easy. She cycles through a lot of doubt in the song, but the part that really gets to me – perhaps more so than anything else I’ve heard recently – is the point in the song where she belts out “when I see you changing, you make me think that I can change too.” I like this because it accepts change as a positive, often necessary thing, and that seeing it happen in others is usually the best way to see that possibility for yourself. A lot of people are terrified of change, and that’s a whole other thing. This is about the anxiety of wanting change, but having no idea how to do it, and feeling frustrated by that. It’s easy to tell anyone to “find a new way,” and it’s just as easy to know they’re right. It’s just usually extremely difficult to actually find that new way, especially when you’re all on your own.

Buy it from Amazon.

Tink featuring Jeremih “Don’t Tell Nobody”

I was only dimly aware of Tink before I heard this song; now I feel convinced that she’s going to become a star and that this song ought to be one of the “songs of the summer” for 2014. There’s a light, breezy feeling to the R&B side of this track – everything feels a bit weightless when Jeremih sings the hook, and the keyboard tones indicate a chill vibe even if the vocals are all about conflict. Tink’s performance goes against all that – she sounds anxious and angry, but never so much that seems like she’s freaking out. There’s a nice sense of emotional scale here, so while she genuinely seems hurt by this dude who’s sleeping around on her, she also comes off as strong and unwilling to put up with his shit. Or, she is until their fights turn into sex and they get sucked into the cycle all over again.

Jamie xx “Girl”

Jamie xx’s music is easy to enjoy, but it’s difficult to articulate what exactly is so good about it. A lot of electronic artists occupy a similar space – a mellow groove indebted to hip-hop with some sort of vocal sample looped through it as a hook – but aside from Four Tet, not many pull it off quite as well. “Girl,” one side of his new single, feels a bit more full than what he’s usually up to, but it doesn’t quite escape his usual minimalism. As sedate as it is, it seems a little more dramatic than what he’s done in the past — there’s some vague gesture towards some kind of cinematic emotion here, even if it’s “cinematic” in a very indie film sort of way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Damon Albarn “Lonely Press Play”

I suppose that if you came to Damon Albarn’s music in the very late ’90s through the ’00s, you probably think of him mainly as a guy who is mostly bleak and moody, and makes music with a sort of grayish tonal palette. But I became a fan of Albarn’s music in the mid ’90s, so I mostly think of him as an artist who thrives on on-tempo tracks and an extremely bright tonality, and have spent a lot of time just wishing he’d snap out of this glum funk he’s been in for better part of the past 15 years. Albarn’s first solo record is the most bleak album of his career, and essentially sounds like a very accurate musical expression of clinical depression. Some of it is quite good, but a lot of it just feels listless and dull – too much of the same sort of half-hearted melodies over the same sort of grimy, minimalist arrangements. I’m not really sure what’s going on in Albarn’s life, but the emotion of this record feels very authentic to me, even if I don’t personally connect with a lot of it.

“Lonely Press Play” is one of the tracks that works, and makes the most sense as a “solo” track: It’s not tremendously different from what Albarn has done in his many other projects over the past few years, but it seems dialed back a bit, and a little less guarded. He’s often projected his anxieties on other characters or obscured them with oblique language in the past, but here he seems like a person who has simply stopped caring about putting up any kind of front.

Buy it from Amazon.

Iggy Azalea “Work”

Iggy Azalea is a good rapper, but I can’t listen to hear voice without feeling like I’m listening to someone do an impression of a badass female emcee. She always seems to be concentrating very hard on getting the affect just right, to the point that her performances feel more stiff than they probably should. And this makes sense – as a white woman from Australia, she probably feels like she has a lot to prove to a mainstream rap audience in America, and she clearly has no intention of being a niche act. She puts a lot of effort into telling her unique origin story in “Work,” but it’s undermined a bit by a delivery that feels a lot more generic than it should. I don’t think she even needs to abandon this affect, I just wish the mask slipped a bit more, or that she had more vocal quirks that you just couldn’t hear anywhere else.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Both “The Inevitable Shove”

Aimee Mann and Ted Leo’s first album as a duo is a study in two artists with very distinct styles trying to find a middle ground where their individual quirks complement each other. This doesn’t always work out – the songwriting is as solid as you’d expect from these total pros, but their voices don’t really work in harmony. There’s definitely times on the record where it feels a bit like you’re listening to Aimee Mann sing along to a Ted Leo record in her car, or vice versa. Their voices work really well in contrast though, especially when they are trading off verses in a way that highlights their distinct vocal styles. “The Inevitable Shove” is a great example of this – Mann is typically relaxed and sardonic in her affect, but Leo handles all the parts that call for earnest, emphatic emoting. You really get the thing you’d hope for on a team-up like this, which is basically the sense that these two very different cool people are hanging out together in the same song.

Buy it from Amazon.

Lana Del Rey “West Coast”

The most fascinating thing about Lana Del Rey is the very thing that makes her infuriating to many people: She’s a total enigma who refuses to give her audience anything other than a vivid, distinct, highly stylized aesthetic. Her mask never slips so it’s impossible to tell when she’s being serious and when she’s just fucking with you, and while I find that tension very exciting and thoughtful, people who yearn for earnest authenticity in their pop music – or even an identifying human being at the center of it all – are left wanting. But I like Lana as a trollish provocateur, and she’s done enough music and videos at this point that there is no doubt in mind that she’s a very intelligent artist with a lot to say. The ironies and contradictions are the point, the distance between “the real her” and what she embodies is meant to be foregrounded. A lot of Lana’s art is about embracing glamour as a way of making life more thrilling, and implicitly asking “Why wouldn’t you want to make your experiences feel more sexy and cinematic?” “West Coast” is very much about this frame of mind, and how the mythology of Hollywood enhances the excitement of being around – or away from – another of her bad boy love interests. Everything and everyone is an archetype in a Lana Del Rey song, but in context, it’s not a dehumanizing thing. If anything, she’s coming from a position that by turning everything into a story, the world feels more alive.

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Sunny Day Real Estate “Lipton Witch”

It’s strange to think that Sunny Day Real Estate reunited after nearly a decade, wrote and recorded “Lipton Witch,” and then completely lost the will to carry on. I mean, I get it on an interpersonal level, but artistically… surely they noticed that this was one of the very best songs they’d ever done together, right? “Lipton Witch” has an urgent, explosive sound that the band largely abandoned after Diary in favor of knottier compositions or more pensive material. The song is all forward momentum and catharsis, with Jeremy Enigk singing vague, conspiratorial lyrics in his usual tortured rasp, but sounding more triumphant than defeated. If this is truly the end of the band, “Lipton Witch” works well as a final statement: Musically, it brings them full circle, and tonally, it sounds like a happy ending. Or, you know, as happy as they’re going to get.

Andrew Jackson Jihad “Temple Grandin”

Andrew Jackson Jihad has been around for about a decade, so they’re hardly new to sounding remarkably similar to The Mountain Goats, but wow, they sound remarkably similar to The Mountain Goats. Sean Bonnette certainly has his own voice and lyrical style, but the music sensibility is very close to where John Darnielle has been over the past several years – a very particular way of playing acoustic guitar, a very particular sort of melodic phrasing, an emphasis on lyrics above all other things. Bonnette isn’t on Darnielle’s level on that front – not a lot of people are, really – but his words are very vivid and rooted in the kind of bitter, ironic tone of a lot of ’00s emo rock. “Temple Grandin” is both oblique and extremely specific, with words that bring up a lot of bile and ideas about cruelty and convenience, but don’t take shape as a specific narrative. It’s just one of those things where you wouldn’t want to be the person addressed in the song.

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Total Control “Flesh War”

My friend Maria sent this to me recently because she knew I’ve become very interested in new wave, and hey, this sounds like new wave! And yes, it does sound like new wave, or at least the more grim Joy Division/New Order/Depeche Mode end of it. But it’s NOT actually new wave, because this is a pastiche of a specific style, whereas actual new wave was about idiosyncratic artists being as distinct and strange as possible while also making bold, accessible pop music. It’s not about a particular style so much as it’s about individuality and imagination. This is a really great song – to me, this mainly sounds like a song that should’ve been on one of the last two Interpol records – but it’s a very post-00s kind of rock song because it’s just making no effort to be distinctive beyond reminding people of other music they probably like. And like, even as much as Interpol is heavily indebted to Joy Division, they really do have their own thing going on if just because Paul Banks is such a bizarre lyricist and singer. As appealing as “Flesh War” is, I’m not really picking up anything special about their personality. I’d like more of that from them – they clearly have the fundamentals down.

Here’s the Total Control page on Soundcloud. Their album is out in June.

Thee Oh Sees “Encrypted Bounce (A Queer Sound)”

“Encrypted Bounce” sounds like Can if they were from sunny California instead of dark, dour Germany – the relentless groove and bad-trip vocals are there, but the guitar parts relieve the tension of the rhythm rather than add to it. The bottom end is pretty heavy, but most of this track feels completely weightless, with all the trebly parts seeming to float upward like helium balloons let loose. I find this song to be really comfortable – there’s just something very calming about the certainty of that beat and the incredible looseness of just about everything else going on in the song.

Buy it from Amazon.

TEEN “Rose 4 U”

The first two releases by TEEN were frustrating to me because while I was very impressed by some aspects of the band – Teeny Lieberson’s voice, her particular melodic sensibility, the band’s taste in keyboard tones – the songs were, for the most part, too stiff and inert. But now that they’ve got a new bass player, it all totally clicks. Boshra AlSaadi has a very warm and funky style, and it loosens everything up and keeps their treble-heavy music from sounding too flat or brittle. “Rose 4 U” makes the most of the band’s new dynamic – everything in the song pivots off AlSaadi’s groove, in sometimes very unexpected ways. I especially love the way it keeps building as it moves along, and when everything drops out to foreground the vocal harmonies, it comes back feeling vaguely Motown-ish in the finale.

Buy it from Amazon.

Mica Levi “Lipstick to Void”

Under the Skin is one of the best films I have seen in many years in large part because Mica Levi’s score is so effective in evoking the terror of confronting something truly alien and unknowable, and in pushing the viewer to see our world through the perception of an indifferent alien. Much of it is ambient, but the most powerful parts are variations on a melody rendered in scratching, trilling, oddly tuned strings. You can hear a version of the primary theme for the first two thirds of the film at the 4:14 minute mark of this track – it’s beautiful, but also something that feels off and vaguely grotesque.

Levi’s mostly atonal music is like a saw that severs the listener from a sense of recognizable humanity – much of it inspires a feeling of numbness that is different from how numbness usually comes across in music. It’s very alert, and very cerebral – the brain is active, but the emotions are dead. There are emotional cues in the music, but it feels scrambled somehow, or modulated in ways that signal a completely different frame of reference for experience.

Buy it from Amazon.

Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks “Strange Colores”

I love how any time Avey Tare goes into a project thinking that he’s going to simplify things, the result is never actually simple, but just a version of what he does that’s shifted slightly in a different direction from what he’s done before. His Slasher Flicks material benefits from collaborating with new people – Jeremy Hyman is certainly a better drummer than Panda Bear, and Angel Deradoorian’s bass and harmony parts depart from the usual framing of his melodies and rhythms – but ultimately, you could play any of these songs for someone and they’d think it was a new Animal Collective album.

I think of Enter the Slasher House as a refinement of the musical ideas Avey was working through on Centipede Hz. Both are pretty direct and emphasize a “live band” dynamic, but the Slasher Flicks material successfully cuts out the overstuffed midrange frequencies that made Centipede Hz feel so cluttered and disorienting. This isn’t to say that there’s a LOT of space in these new songs, but enough to have room for melodic bass lines and silences that give definition to bursts of sound. “Strange Colores,” my favorite, isn’t “simple” by any stretch, but it does feel blunt and focused, so the bright melodies and thumping beat makes the song feel as joyful as it ought to be. I think that if this one was on Centipede, it’d be just as good as a song, but would’ve probably had a bit more sound getting in the way of those elemental things.

Buy it from Amazon.

Miley Cyrus @ Barclays Center 4/5/2014
SMS (Bangerz) / 4×4 / Love Money Party / My Darlin’ / Maybe You’re Right / FU / Do My Thang / #GETITRIGHT / Can’t Be Tamed / Adore You / Drive / Rooting for My Baby / You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go / Summertime Sadness / The Scientist / Jolene / 23 / On My Own / Someone Else // We Can’t Stop / Wrecking Ball /// Party in the USA

What the hell do I say about this? I feel like in a lot of ways you’re better off looking through my Instagram to get a sense of what it was like to see this show. It’s thoroughly brilliant on a visual level – in some ways very Tumblr and in other ways very Tim & Eric, and far more indebted to the work of Jeff Koons than anything Lady Gaga has ever done. It’s overwhelming, surreal and ridiculously fun, but also very emotional. Cyrus has a fantastic voice and is an extremely charismatic performer, and knows how to dial back the spectacle and do justice to the ballads in her set. The only song in the set that had no major visual component was “Wrecking Ball” because why the hell would you get in the way of that song, or specifically that chorus?

I figure that a majority of the people who are going to see Miley Cyrus on this tour have never been to a concert before. This is such an amazing first concert experience to have, but it sets up such unreasonable expectations of other shows, both in terms of glorious bizarre spectacle, and the intense enthusiasm of the audience. I’ve seen quite a lot of stuff over the years, and honestly, this was second only to Nine Inch Nails’ Tension and Lights in the Sky shows in terms of being a complete work of art, both in terms of musical performance and visual design. I’m going to be thinking about this show for a long time.

Miley Cyrus “Do My Thang”

The last time I wrote about Miley here I had to literally flip a coin to decide whether I was going to write about “My Darlin'” or “Do My Thang,” which are my two favorite songs in her catalog. “My Darlin'” won, and I wrote about how thoroughly heartbreaking it is. But “Do My Thang” is easily in the highest echelon of my favorite recent songs; I have listened to it a fairly ridiculous number of times over the past seven or eight months. I think of this song as being the essence of Bangerz-era Miley – in terms of genre, it’s bouncing all over the place and shouldn’t work on a structural level, but yet it does. (The concert arrangement brings bluegrass into the equation to make it even more dizzying.) I really love her voice on the rapped parts – she’s very good with expressive inflection and brings a LOT of character to rhymes that would otherwise be kinda meh. I wish I knew how many times I’ve rewinded to hear her do that “I’m a southern belle, crazier than hell” part over and over. It’s a high number.

But as with a lot of Miley’s music, the bonkers stuff sits side by side with some very intense emotion. This song turns on a dime to big, belty balladry, and at least half the time sounds like Adele if she had a “bad bitch” mode. The beauty of what Miley is doing right now lies in how well she fuses irony with raw, earnest emotion, to the point that it often seems like there’s no fusing at all. It all just exists in the same continuum and nothing contradicts anything. Silly enthusiasms, sexual displays, romantic yearning – it all overlaps here, just as it does in our lives.

Buy it from Amazon.

EMA “So Blonde”

This song is meant to be about the commercialized image of the “sexy blonde,” but if I hear it, I only have one blonde in mind. There’s just no way I’m not going to like a song that sounds like flawlessly executed fanfic about Celebrity Skin-era Hole. Courtney was on more or less the same topic at that time too – the idea of Los Angeles and the way Hollywood creates people in its image that it can chew and spit out – but I think she did it with a greater sense of stakes. EMA’s music is certainly passionate and emotional, but the songs often feel aloof and judgmental, whereas Courtney was a lot more interested in diving headfirst into things that a lot of artists today would just dismiss as “problematic.” But there’s a pretty big difference between talking about a complicated idea from within it and observing it from a distance. And that’s not to say EMA’s perspective isn’t valuable – a lot of the song (and the video) is about the way we passively absorb signifiers from culture – but it’s a lot less urgent and emotionally powerful.

Buy it from Amazon.

White Hinterland “Sickle No Sword”

I interviewed Casey Dienel for a piece about White Hinterland I’m writing for BuzzFeed yesterday, and she mentioned that one of the things that pushed her towards singing in a loud, emphatic R&B/gospel style was an experience where she sorta reluctantly sang a Beyoncé song at a karaoke party and totally nailed it. She used to sing more like this when she was younger, but had strayed from it out of embarrassment or a need to express a different sort of feeling, but it felt good to her, and physically comfortable. You can really hear that in “Sickle No Sword” – her earlier work was more restrained, but this sounds like a person who is completely at ease with themselves and not afraid to really belt it out. I think one of the reasons this style of singing endures and connects with so many people is that there’s just no way to hedge on emotion – you can’t go halfway with this, and you can’t put up a wall between yourself and the listener. It’s not simply about a display of technical prowess, though that’s in the mix. You hear a song like this – or a song by Beyoncé, or Aretha Franklin, or Otis Redding, or whoever – and you’re listening to someone be brave in their expression. I think we’d all like to be that way, or at least experience it vicariously.

Buy it from Amazon.