Electric Six “Alone with Your Body”

It’s kinda amazing that it took Electric Six ten albums to make a fake Motown song, or more specifically, “white middle class bar band dudes playing soul music.” There’s about two layers of ironic distance in the music, and another added in the lyrics, in which Dick Valentine sings from the perspective of an ordinary lunk with zero sense of romance who’s just really honest about his focus on getting laid. The thing that really makes this song work is that the warm vibe of the music and the “hey, I’m just a simple dude” rhetoric in the lyrics make all of this seem friendly and cute, but the obvious irony punctures that, and makes you wonder why anyone would think this type of guy is anything less than pathetic, juvenile, and predatory.

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Peaking Lights “Telephone Call”

I like the way Indra Dunis seems so guileless as she sings this song. There’s a pretty high level of kitsch in the music and the lyrics, but she’s just straight faced enough to make the whole song seem ambiguous and inscrutable. It’s a very ‘80s new wave move – being silly, but at the same time giving you just enough intensity or seriousness to keep you off balance and wonder if there’s something deeper and darker going on. The deeper, darker stuff subverts the goofiness, but I think it’s more important to realize that the goofiness also subverts the dark and deep side too.

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Swick & Lewis Cancut featuring Tkay Maidza “Wishes”

“Wishes” is the sort of pop song that is so catchy and insistent that it dares to be totally annoying, but that’s sorta built into the sentiment of the lyrics. This is about feeling a very particular blend of ecstatic joy and nagging anxiety after connecting with someone amazing, and not being able to stop yourself from putting them on a pedestal and worrying that they are way, way, waaaay out of your league. Tkay Maidza sounds like she’s attempting to make sense of this in every line, and she’s mostly being positive about it. And thank god for that, because this song could so easily tip into being a more creepy or pathetic thing.

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Deerhoof “Paradise Girls”

One of the best things about Deerhoof is that their music often conveys a joyful physicality. It just sounds like the product of great fun, and the parts click together in this seemingly spontaneous way, even if it’s not improvised at all. John Dieterich’s guitar parts always feel particularly alive, and seem to jump around the beat like a hyperactive child. “Paradise Girls” aims for a sort of pop aesthetic, but because Deerhoof can’t really sound like anyone but themselves, it ends up in a more interesting place. The beat is busy but immediately engaging, and Satomi Matsuzaki pays tribute to female musicians in a way that’s sorta vague in language but highly specific in sentiment. You can hear a smile in every note she sings.

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The narrative around The Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore has always been that it’s this bold departure from the band’s sound, but that’s only half true. Yes, it is an album that avoids the sort of heavy psychedelic rock that the band was best known for, but at the same time, there’s really nothing on the record that wasn’t rooted in what Billy Corgan had already done on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the Aeroplane Flies High, or the soundtrack hits “Eye” and “The End is the Beginning is the End.” In terms of aesthetics, Adore was definitely not a shock to anyone who was closely following the band in that era, and its particular palette of bleeps and washes and “beats” were very much in line with other major artists at the time – U2, R.E.M., Tori Amos, Madonna – were doing to chase a modern, millennial vibe.

Few records sound more 1998 than Adore, and I think that’s actually a good thing about it. It’s very rooted in a particular time and place, but it has a lot of moments that feel like a world unto itself. It was definitely a bold move, though, and I don’t think its relative lack of commercial success should be held against it. It’s basically the ‘90s equivalent of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk – there was really no way Corgan was ever going to top the extraordinary success and cultural impact of Mellon Collie, so if whatever came next was doomed to look like a failure, why not make it arty and personal and uncompromising? Lindsey Buckingham had the right idea.

(Thinking right now about just how much Corgan and Buckingham are alike as people and as musicians. It’s kinda amazing. I wonder if they’ve ever talked.)

The Smashing Pumpkins “Pug” (Matt Walker 2014 Reimagined Mix)

“Pug” has always been my favorite of the Adore songs, though “Shame” and “To Sheila” come close. I love the way “Pug” alternates between menace and sensuality, and how lovely and feminine Corgan’s voice gets on the chorus. The lyrics are similarly moody, with him trying to make sense of a relationship that’s just as full of lust and affection as cruelty and loathing. At some points the song is outright bitter and confrontational, but it rings very true when he shifts over to forgiving and pleading on the bridge. The thing that really gets me in this is how he sings “desire me so deeply, drain and kick me hard,” maybe because the emphasis on “desire me” sounds so much like a command. It’s like he’s trying to control the other person, but mostly because he can’t comprehend them desiring him without being implored to do so.

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Tricky “I Had A Dream”

I feel bad for Tricky sometimes – so much of what he was doing two decades ago has been plundered by other artists, and writers rarely if ever give him credit for being so forward-thinking and influential. He really did himself in by becoming so prolific – that’s a surefire way to alienate casual listeners, especially when you have the bravery to fail and take a lot of weird risks. He keeps making new records, and the general response by my peers has been to do that thing where someone is knocking on your door and you stay totally silent until they give up and walk away. I have not been on board for a lot of what Tricky has done in the later stages of his career, but I do think he’s still good for a few strong songs per record. To some extent he’s spoiled his own reputation, but it’s just so aggravating that he can’t seem to get credit for the truly brilliant work he’s done in his career when an artist like FKA Twigs, who is nothing if not a flagrant Tricky tribute artist, is somehow seen as an innovator by people who don’t really know better. But this is true of Massive Attack and Aphex Twin too – so much of ‘90s electronic music has been recycled, and it’s almost always framed as FRESH and NEW by people with no frame of reference. Well, I guess now I know how all those original krautrock fans felt in the ‘90s.

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Ex Hex “How You Got That Girl”

One thing that sets Mary Timony apart from a lot of other artists, particularly those of her generation, is that in over 20 years, she’s never once revisited the past. She’s never reunited Helium, she doesn’t play oldies in concert, she hasn’t stuck to any of her signature sounds. Every phase of her career is a particular idea with a specific set of musicians, and once it’s over, she scraps the songs and moves on. Her current band, Ex Hex, shares its name with one of her mid-00s solo albums, but that’s about as much as you’ll get from her in terms of looking backwards. The new band is a logical progression from where she was in Wild Flag – fun and energetic, with a distinct late ‘70s/early ‘80s new wave vibe. At first I thought this material was regressive, but I’ve come to feel like that’s part of the charm. Yes, she may be far away from the distinct genius of her guitar playing in Helium, but the simplicity of the arrangements in Ex Hex allow her to really focus on melody and hooks, and that pays off with a handful of some of the catchiest and most immediate songs of her career.

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Thom Yorke “Guess Again!”

The funny thing about Thom Yorke is that he drifted away from rock music because he felt it was banal, but culture has shifted in a way that the electronic music he makes now feels surprisingly ordinary. Yorke’s third album outside of Radiohead, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, is at times alarmingly dull. I don’t know what’s going on with Yorke himself, but the music on this record and the last Atoms for Peace album seems stagnant and complacent to me, as if he’s found this niche where he can concentrate on a cool vibe and not have to put a lot of work into songwriting. I can appreciate where he’s coming from in terms of instrumentation, and there are often cool ideas there, but his singing is on autopilot – there’s melodies, sure, but they feel very unformed and aimless. It’s often just a loose structure for him to make pretty or menacing Thom Yorke noises. “Guess Again!” deviates slightly from this. The melody isn’t quite up to the high standards of the majority of his body of work, but it is definitely there, and serves as a thread holding together elements in a track that might otherwise drift apart. I wouldn’t characterize a lot of the cuts on Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes as failures so much as experiments that don’t quite work because the songwriting isn’t there. No matter what Yorke does, he can’t stop being a guy who thrives on melody, harmony, and structure. When he tries to get too far away from those things, he only reveals his weaknesses. It’s very brave for him to constantly push himself out of his comfort zone, but it’s not always enjoyable to hear it.

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Laetitia Sadier “Quantum Soup”

For a long time I had assumed that the instrumental side of Stereolab’s songwriting was dominated by Tim Gane, but Laetitia Sadier’s solo records indicate that she was either a lot more hands on with that sort of thing in that band, or she internalized their rhythms and aesthetics so much that she naturally writes that way when left to her own devices. This isn’t to say that you can’t tell the difference. Sadier’s music on her own are considerably more relaxed and less busy, and escape the airless, schematic quality of Gane’s work. “Quantum Soup,” the opening track on her new album Something Shines, sounds like a far looser version of late period Stereolab – the telltale sounds are there, but it seems to float on a breeze, and the trajectory of the composition is intuitive and jazzy.

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Aphex Twin “Minipops 67 (Source Field Mix)”

Right around the time Syro was announced, a few fake “leaks” of the album started going around. I can’t remember what it actually was, but if you barely knew Aphex Twin, you wouldn’t really know the difference probably. It’s sort of insulting, really, the thought that an electronic record with no vocals would all basically be the same. When “Minipops 67” was released as a single, it was clear just how recognizable Aphex Twin really is – his catalog is varied, but there’s just particular tones and rhythms that are very him. Mark Richardson’s review of Syro pointed out that his approach to drum programming is every bit as distinctive as how John Bonham played the drums, and I think that’s very true. It’s an interesting thing to consider, too – a lot of what is recognizable about music played on traditional instruments is in the way the musician’s body interacts with the object. It’s a unique physicality and sensibility. With programming, I suppose, it’s more about recognizing the way someone’s mind works. That’s present in live instrumentation too, but it’s more the focus here. Even if you haven’t been lurking around Aphex Twin’s mind for some time, you immediately recognize where you are when you’re there.

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Julian Casablancas + The Voidz “Take Me In Your Army”

Julian Casablancas’ new record barely sounds like what you’d expect of him – it’s deliberately odd and spacey, gleefully perverse, and sometimes he barely sounds like himself as he sings. It’s a genuinely surprising record from someone we’re used to sounding more or less the same every time. A lot of the musical extremes of Tyranny seem to be a reaction against this, and the way working with The Strokes must feel like a creative straitjacket: They’ve got such a distinct sound and specific brand that they can barely do anything outside the formula of Is This It that wouldn’t alienate their fans. This record feels like Casablancas trying to purge a decade’s worth of oddball ideas in one set of songs, and it’s sort of overwhelming, but in a good way. Not every song and experiment works, but when he and his new band click – like on the dreamy yet creepy “Let Me In Your Army” – it’s like he has a new lease on his career.

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King Crimson @ Best Buy Theater 9/18/2014
Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part 1 / Level Five / A Scarcity of Miracles / Hell Bells / Pictures of a City / The Letters / Sailor’s Tale / The ConstruKction of Light / Red / One More Red Nightmare / VROOOM / Coda: Marine 475 / Talking Drum / Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part 2 / Starless // Hell Hounds of Krim / 21st Century Schizoid Man

King Crimson “One More Red Nightmare”

I went to this show entirely because I was curious to see what it would be like, and it was kinda fascinating. I’ve seen plenty of arty rock music in my day, but nothing so formal and academic in presentation. It didn’t have the dynamics of any show I’ve seen before, and in the parts where they weren’t being a heavy rock band, it could be hard to know exactly how to respond to the music.

In observing the band I have a few takeaways:

1) It is strange but wonderful to see Robert Fripp play his parts in person, even if he’s off to the back of the stage and seems more like a technician than, you know, one of the greatest and most inventive rock guitarists of all time. The moments when you could really get a sense of the physicality going into the part he was playing were pretty incredible to behold.

2) I have more patience for drum solos – or triple drum solos, as there are three drummers in the band – than I would have thought. Gavin Harrison, the alpha drummer, was particularly great in the solo section of “21st Century Schizoid Man.”

3) I have absolutely no understanding of the Chapman Stick. Tony Levin played one on about half of the songs in the show, and especially when they’d put a close up of him playing on the screen, I’d just be confused by the physics of that instrument. It just looks like he’s doing random hand gestures and getting an absurd range of sounds out of it. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s rule that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

4) The songs from Red were amazing live, and definitely the parts I enjoyed the most. “One More Red Nightmare” is just an all-time great art metal song, and it’s funny how in a show full of unusual time signatures – I mean, in a SONG full of unusual time signatures – they still know how to make a 4/4 part sound really cool.

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SBTRKT featuring Ezra Koenig “New Dorp New York”

Ezra Koenig’s lyrics here are brilliant – he’s evoking very specific images in New York City, and contrasting them so that middle class Staten Island blurs with big money Manhattan. He’s playing a little game with the listener, but he always is, to some extent. I think if there’s any point to be made here, it’s about the way native New Yorkers attach themselves to the GREATNESS of the city even if that’s not reflected at all in their lives, but the pride really becomes a big part of identity and makes life a little bit better. But really, I think above all else, Ezra is having fun with references, connections, and the simple pleasures of alliteration and assonance.

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Caribou “Silver”

“Silver” is one of those songs where I have to assume the lyrics were written in some way as a response to the musical arrangement – everything in the song is moving in these slow, sad circles, so Dan Snaith sings about being heartbroken like it’s just being stuck in a painful loop. It’s all about memory as this inescapable thing that even poisons your dreams, and feeling further away from a person who is still somehow taking up all this space in your mind. It’s a gorgeous piece of music, but also one that just has this incredible melancholic undertow and a hazy feeling that reminds me a lot of being on prescription painkillers.

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Hyuna “Red”

I’ve come to really love the K-Pop version of rap, which to me is both a more interesting version of the typical K-Pop aesthetic, and a bizarre reflection of American hip-hop. I love the way an artist like Hyuna can go out of her way to approximate the cadences and lyrical forms of American rap, but when it gets filtered through her voice and aesthetic, it all becomes something else entirely — far more colorful and electrified, and aggressive in a way that doesn’t feel violent or hostile. It’s more like this very extreme expression of the self that is cartoonish and superhuman. It’s taking something that’s always been in rap culture and making it more strange and abstract.

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U2 featuring Lykke Li “The Troubles”

I can’t help but wonder what the response to U2’s new album would’ve been like if they had gone with a traditional release with relatively little fanfare. I know they wouldn’t ever want to do that, but I think this record would’ve been far better received if they undersold it, and were just like “hey, we made a kinda personal record about our youth, check it out or not.” It’s more or less impossible for U2 to reclaim the center of pop music now, and it’s just embarrassing to watch them try, but reinventing themselves as humble artists would’ve at least put the press on their side. They could’ve come up with a narrative for themselves that would’ve adjusted expectations in a way that didn’t set themselves up for failure.

You can see just how much they screwed themselves with this “force themselves into everyone’s iTunes library” strategy just in how every discussion of the record is almost entirely about that. And you know, that’s not because writers aren’t listening to the music – it’s because this gambit is just drastically more interesting than any of the songs on this album. A low key release would’ve at least put the focus on what’s actually going on with Songs of Innocence – it’s by far the most autobiographical record in their discography, and it’s a focused attempt to reconnect with the sound of their first two albums.

Yes, there’s some parts of songs that are clearly meant to emulate acts like The Black Keys, Coldplay, and Mumford & Sons, and that is a rather transparent bid to get radio play, but for the most part it’s an extremely regressive record. I can’t help but feel that part of the reason they are cycling back to their earliest work is because they are running on fumes in terms of writing strong melodies, and so it makes sense to go back to the more vibe-centric sound they had before they really had a solid grasp on songwriting. But I think it’s also a classic strategy where people who are having trouble creating try to reconnect with what inspired them in the first place. This record is basically a concept album about that notion.

This album is disappointing for me in that it’s the first time in their career they’ve released a record and I don’t love at least one track. No Line on the Horizon is probably a worse album, but I really like that title track a lot, and “Magnificent” and “Breathe” are fine by me. This album doesn’t really embarrass, but it doesn’t inspire either. There’s some cringe-y stuff, but for the most part it’s just kinda…competent. When they aren’t trying to pull “please put us on the radio moves,” I mainly just think “oh, I get what you’re going for.” I suppose “The Troubles” is my favorite track – Lykke Li’s vocal part is the most memorable hook on the entire album, and musically it’s a cousin to “One” and “Wake Up Dead Man” and those are both amazing songs. “The Troubles” doesn’t quite measure up, but I feel like this is the sort of music I’d want a 50something U2 to make – dark, mature, contemplative. It’s beautiful and moving in a very relaxed way, and feels quietly confident. This isn’t that hard for them to do, they just need to learn that this mode suits them, and is probably what most people want them to be now. I think at this point, most U2 fans would settle for them not acting like old guys who want to party with people half their age.

This album is already in your iTunes library. I wrote more about this record over at BuzzFeed.

Interpol “Everything Is Wrong”

It’s unfair to project your experience as a listener on to the intention of an artist, but Interpol’s last record suffered a lot because it just sounded like a slog. It just sounded like a band who was exhausted with itself, and it gave little indication that they’d ever come back from that. Frankly, I was surprised they didn’t just break up after they made it. But here we are a few years later, and they’ve returned with a record where they sound genuinely happy to be Interpol, and inspired to write the best Interpol songs they can make. Part of this seems to come from them having to change the way they write after the departure of Carlos D. – Paul Banks had to write all the bass parts, so there’s this new spark between him and Daniel Kessler and Sam Fogarino, as they find a new way to work together and be surprised by each other. But ultimately, the songs work because they’re just so at ease with themselves. “Everything Is Wrong” would fit neatly into either of their first two albums, and that’s a great thing. It has that dark drama and fluttering beauty, that grim drive. They have a very particular thing and nobody does it better, and they shouldn’t let anyone else get ahead of them on that.

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Sloan “Cleopatra”

Sloan’s new album Commonwealth splits into four sides, one for each songwriter in the band. You can look at it like four miniature solo albums released under the Sloan banner, or as a typical Sloan album sequenced so their songs don’t really mingle together. It’s a little of both, probably. The four sides do sound like distinct projects, and some members take advantage of this opportunity better than others. Andrew Scott went all the way with it and wrote one big side-long epic, which definitely makes him the most ambitious member of the group. On the other end of the spectrum, Chris Murphy turned in a handful of good songs that are pretty much business-as-usual for him, and Patrick Pentland is just kinda on autopilot doing his bubblegum riff-rock thing. Jay Ferguson is the one who really shines on Commonwealth. His side, which opens the record, is an elegant pop suite in which he weaves some top-shelf melodies together until it all pays off in a harmony full of callbacks in “Cleopatra.” It’s very inspired stuff, and his is the only side of this I actually wish could be expanded into a full length record. Otherwise, I think Commonwealth is a pretty strong argument in favor of the Sloan guys being a lot better together than apart, and for their songs to play off each other rather than stand alone.

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Sinkane “Omdurman”

It’s interesting to me just how country this song gets without necessarily announcing itself as a country song. The guitar parts are straight up ‘70s country, it’s all twang and pedal steel, and while the organ part definitely calls back to more or less the same era, it’s more ambiguous. It dominates the arrangement, so everything in the track tilts everything towards its warm, vaguely kitschy groove. Ahmed Gallab’s voice is ambiguous too – he’s often an R&B-ish singer, but here his voice is soft and rounded, just sort of lovely and graceful in a way that doesn’t necessarily signal any particular genre. So it all comes together in this way that feels both strange and cozy. It feels like something sent out of time to comfort and reassure us.

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Basement Jaxx “What’s the News?”

Honestly, I can’t help but feel disappointed by the new Basement Jaxx record because 1) the singles leading up to it were so good, but do not appear on it and 2) the bar is always set quite high for Jaxx records. I get why they didn’t put “Back 2 the Wild” and “What A Difference Your Love Makes” on the album – they’ve been around a while, and it’s maybe better to give people something entirely fresh, but a lot of Junto feels a bit too …ordinary? is that it?… for an act who have always been at their best when the music feels overwhelming and gleefully excessive. “What’s the News?” lives up to that expectation, though, and definitely takes it back to the space they explored on Rooty over a decade ago. It’s funny how that aesthetic still feels so radical and new, but maybe it’s because only recently have acts like Disclosure and Rudimental have come close to matching this sort of hyperactive dance pop. The world caught up.

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