February 14th, 2013 12:50pm
Jarvis Cocker has released some very good material on his own, but listening to this track – the only thing he has recorded with Pulp since about 2000 – you really hear how important the other members of the band were in terms of getting that proper Pulp vibe. I think the essence of it is just getting a precise balance of crisp, clean sound, and then implying a low-level filth. The best Pulp songs tend to sound both sordid and luxurious, like smut that’s meant to look classy. “After You” has that feeling for sure, and the lyrics follow suit, as Cocker narrates a night out that mingles utter banality with a yearning for utter depravity.
February 12th, 2013 3:33am
This song sounds like the main keyboard riff from Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” got lost and took a turn into some sleazy, dangerous neighborhood in an old video game. There’s a great sense of mischief to this piece, as if the band are messing around and looking to see what they can get away with musically and lyrically – I mean, not for nothing, but they’re singing “Satan is Lord” over and over. There’s a dark vibe here, but it’s not totally convincing. It’s not really supposed to be, though – this is a very camp song, and while its core appeal is very physical and urgent, there’s definitely a wink to it.
February 11th, 2013 1:39pm
Kevin Shields had a lot of time to dream up new versions of his band over the past two decades, and mbv gives us a chance to hear a bit of all of them, while still holding together perfectly as a coherent, cohesive album-length suite. “New You” is Shield’s version of a pop song, with clear hooks, a bouncing groove, and relatively audible lyrics. But despite that structure, the execution is unmistakably MBV, making it more of an impression of pop than a direct approximation of anything in particular. This is part of why the song is so wonderfully evocative – I hear traces of 20 years of pop and R&B in its rhythms, melodies, and tones, but no real connection to anything specific. It’s a pop song that exists just outside of pop, and outside of time. It is the perfect collision of the new and the familiar, which is why it has such an odd frisson: It manages to be simultaneously thrilling and lulling. I can’t adequately describe what I feel when I hear this, but on a musical level, it’s a lot like déjà vu.
Lyrics are sorta beside the point in My Bloody Valentine songs; Shields primarily writes lines as framework for singing long vowel sounds and for suggesting an emotional or physical context for the music. This is true of “New You” to some extent, but the lyrics that do come through are pretty interesting. Here’s what Belinda Butcher is singing at the conclusion: “What can I say, how can I feel, too? / All kinds of new you.” Every time I hear that, it means something just a bit different. Sometimes the questions sound like an imposition, sometimes they come off like indecision. Is the you the singer, or the person being addressed? Is the idea of a new version of the self good or bad? I’m inclined to hear this as a positive song, and embrace “all kinds of new you” as infinite possibilities for improving your character and outlook on life. But it’s still so open to interpretation. It’s like Shields found a way to make his lyrics as much like a Rorschach blot as the sound of his guitars and synthesizers.
February 7th, 2013 1:03pm
Neither member of Buke and Gase actually plays guitar, but yet, they’re one of the few genuinely interesting new guitar bands to pop up in recent years. Both players are using modified versions of ukelele and bass, but playing them both more or less as you would a guitar, albeit with a different tonality. If you didn’t know this, you’d just assume this was straight up guitar being played by someone thoughtful and clever. They actually remind me a lot of mid ’90s Soundgarden, with their odd tunings, unexpected phrasings, and peculiar meters applied to straight forward pop-rock frameworks. They don’t have a proper drummer so you don’t get that extra layer of complexity or power, but that works out for them – a song like “Houdini Crush” is dense enough, and anything else thrown into the mix would compromise the moments when this feels sorta weightless and misty.
February 5th, 2013 4:29am
I’ve felt weirdly hesitant about Charli XCX and Icona Pop for the past year or so – I like them both, they’re very obviously my sort of thing, but I haven’t embraced them the way I certainly would have in the early days of this site. I think to some extent it’s a matter of songs like “Nuclear Seasons” and “I Love It” not necessarily fitting in with my life at the moment, but mostly that I’m just holding out for an actual body of work to properly assess them as artists. I can love random songs and singles, but I’m not about to invest. Charli XCX seems to be on the verge of something though – there’s a clear aesthetic to her work, a persona is forming. She’s kinda mean, kinda sentimental, kinda mall-goth. This song, her latest single, leans hard on the “mean” side. I mean, this is a song that ends with lines “All alone, you’re dumb / You’re dumb, you messed it up / ha ha ha.” Depending on the circumstances of your life, that’s either gonna be a little exhausting, or totally exhilarating.
February 4th, 2013 1:35pm
Unknown Mortal Orchestra lean hard on room sound in their recordings – mic’ing the space to capture the ambient noise in the studio as they play, a classic trick for getting a live, spontaneous feeling on tape. I love this method, and it’s perfectly suited to their music, which always has a lot of silence between the beats and the notes. “So Good At Being In Trouble,” the closest they’ve come to writing a straight-up old school R&B song, is at least 40% negative space, a groove that leaves you hanging on for every syllable, bass note, and snare hit. There’s a wonderful sense of implied space here, not just in the music, but from the singer and his subject. You can hear it in his voice, and then in the mix – he’s got some distance, he’s moved on.
February 1st, 2013 12:55pm
This song is totally gorgeous and sexy on the surface level, but have you noticed the lyrics? Oooof, so douchey. It’s basically a guy talking about how he can’t decide whether he actually loves this girl, and kinda stringing her along and demanding that she remind him why he should love her. It’s funny, though, how this position seems more reasonable in the context of this song than if, say, it was someone writing it out. You get more context – the sexual connection contrasting with the disconnection and apathy. He doesn’t sound like a guy who doesn’t want to love her, or like he’s trying to mess around with her. He just sounds like he doesn’t have a clue.
January 31st, 2013 12:55pm
The sound of this song seems to spike upward – vertical, like tall buildings. But the real momentum is a jagged lateral movement, like you’re walking around through a city. There’s an aggressive front to the music – harsh guitar tone, big blocky beats, a vocal that borders on being rapped – but I feel like this is a very affectionate (or at least accepting) song about city life. The end point of this song is very positive, with Thao embracing a chance at constant reinvention and revision of how one views themself and their surroundings. That checks out with my experience.
January 29th, 2013 12:56pm
If you write or talk about music a lot, you end up throwing around a lot of phrases that suggest that a song is warping your mind in some way, but at least in my experience, that’s all hyperbole. I can only think of a few songs that genuinely do something strange to my brain, and seem to hijack my thoughts and physical responses. This new single by The Knife is one of them. It feels like a very convincing simulation of actual insanity. It goes from tense to more tense to almost unbearably tense, and it feels like a vice grip on your mind, crushing your thoughts until it’s just this super-compressed anxiety and dread. As far as I can tell, this is a song about questioning one’s identity and gender, and that’s perfect for this track. It’s as if they’re just trying to show you what it’s like to be unsure of who or what you are, but taken to an extreme, where you just lose your mind from all the pressure.
January 28th, 2013 12:31pm
Foxygen are in their very early 20s, so it makes sense that their version of ’60s pop music would be mutated by having access to lots of it, but not quite knowing how it all fits together. It’s affectation and style totally unmoored from time and context, and the mishmash ends up sounding way more modern than your typical faux-Stones music. “Oh Yeah,” their finest and funkiest song, is like some explanation of their project overall, as Sam France sings about the amazing and glamourous world inside his mind – artificial and imaginary, but spilling out into his real life whether or not it’s a bummer to everyone around him. Just go with him on this.
January 25th, 2013 1:02pm
I love songs like this, which circle through a set of motifs and melodies that never seems to fully overlap and harmonize. It’s like a form that never becomes entirely solid, a phantom tune you can sense but not grasp. There’s echoes of a lot of familiar things here – Sleater-Kinney circa Hot Rock, Young Marble Giants, Throwing Muses, Cat Power’s “He War,” the literal twin harmonies of School of Seven Bells – but it’s still a tricky thing to pin down. It’s not some copy, and there’s a high level of craft on this, and their entire debut record. It’s interesting stuff because on one level, it’s just very tuneful and accessible, but on the other, it asks your mind to fill in more gaps than you usually get from straightforward pop music.
January 23rd, 2013 12:56pm
Tegan & Sara have written a bunch of really sharp pop songs over the past decade, but this one sounds like the culmination of all time, effort, and creative and technical progress. This is just a wonderfully structured piece of pop songwriting – it piles hooks upon hooks, but with a lot of intelligence about pacing, dynamics, and surprise. The big cathartic moments feel both urgent and inevitable, even if you play the song on repeat and know exactly what’s coming, they hit you like “ahhh yes, thank you for doing that!” The culmination thing goes for the lyrics too – it can be tricky to make lyrics this direct in language and intention seem clever, but they pull it off, and successfully balance out the trappings of a a self-conscious mind with, quite plainly, raging horniness.
January 22nd, 2013 3:05am
This is a song about realizing that even the dullest moments of your life are precious, and recognizing the value of a longterm partner. Under normal circumstances, this would push my emotional buttons a bit, but knowing that this was almost certainly inspired by Ira Kaplan’s recent health issues, it’s even more intense. He sounds rattled but genuinely happy too, this calm voice in the center of a track that is both serene and oddly pulsing and sterile. The sound of it reminds me of the way a hospital can feel, with this uncomfortable clash of stillness and urgency.
January 18th, 2013 12:59pm
On a purely melodic level, this is one of the most pleasurable songs I’ve ever encountered. There are runs of notes and phrasing in this, like the “you can put some money on it, you can place a little bet” turn, that just light up my brain with immediate joy. It goes beyond just “oh I like this,” it’s some kind of spontaneous brain chemistry thing. In a catalog full of brilliant melodies and remarkable formal skill, this stands out as one of Stuart Murdoch’s finest compositions – elegantly crafted, but intuitive in its hooks to the point that it may feel a little “dumb.” The lyrics are pretty silly too, which I imagine was either intentional, or Murdoch just surrendering to the tone of the music. There’s just no point in forcing melancholy into something so bright and relaxed.
I have known this song for nearly 15 years now and only just recently occurred to me that there is a huge irony in using “the rollercoaster ride” as the refrain and title of this song. The mood is still and gentle, it sounds like a slow rainy day and that’s before you notice the lyrics about the rain. It’s a song about misfit introverts who’d rather stay in; the image of the rollercoaster represents all that makes them uncomfortable in the outside world. Murdoch’s empathy runs so strong in this song, the verses sketch out personalities and predicaments, and the music feels like a big kind hug for each of the subjects.
January 17th, 2013 12:48pm
The characters in Stuart Murdoch’s songs are very vivid and interesting, but also sort of pointedly mundane and down to earth. The protagonist of “Lazy Line Painter Jane” is playing at being a sort of sexy antihero, but it isn’t quite working because it’s just too obvious that her promiscuity is more to do with loneliness than a libertine spirit, and her caustic sense of humor is just a way of distancing herself from other people. It wouldn’t take much for this song to seem judgmental, but it’s actually quite warm, and it’s clear that Murdoch has a genuine affection and respect for this woman. She’s the kind of person that you know is kind of a mess, but you’re rooting for them.
“Song for Sunshine” is by some distance the best song in the Belle & Sebastian song that was not penned by Stuart Murdoch, though I should say that Stevie Jackson has written other fine songs, like “Chickfactor” and “The Wrong Girl.” Stevie has a good ear for melody, but he’s only a modest singer, which hobbles his material somewhat. “Song for Sunshine” works in large part because it takes advantage of the full vocal force of the band, and lets Murdoch carry much of the harmony without having him take a lead. The song is a 70s funk pastiche in the vein of Parliament/Funkadelic and Stevie Wonder, but it’s not about an ass-shaking sort of funk. This is more a post-hippie gospel funk – generous with melody and harmony, and with an incredibly kind-hearted lyrical message about accepting one’s blessings in life.
January 16th, 2013 12:57pm
“The Ghost of Rockschool” is such a strange and misleading title for this song, I can’t help but imagine that Stuart Murdoch went with it because it distracts the listener a bit from some plainly religious lyrics about his relationship with God. But as clear as that is, the song takes some odd tangents. It starts off with the idea of the “free ride of grace,” which is this very Protestant notion that grace is a gift from God, but shifts to what I suppose is a vision of his own afterlife, and some sort of psychedelic experience. He also sings about a woman with “no soul to discern” who “was put there to tempt you like the perfume of flowers.” This is pretty harsh, but all the same, she seems to be the reason he’s seeing God in everything around him, and why he’s turning to his faith. There’s no reconciliation of this conflict in the song, it’s just left to the grace of God as the song builds to a gorgeous, gentle crescendo.
This one is like listening in on a series of conversations, or looking in on a series of scenes, and piecing together a story. I’ve always taken this as a dialogue between a sad sack guy and some troubled girl, and them both trying to figure out whether they should make a go of things, or just kinda…do not much at all. Both sides are in some in-between space – he’s cleaning up after a party, she’s on a late night train – but their minds are the future, and hoping for some proper situation. Is it “a boy, a girl, and a rendezvous”? An “interesting way of life”? Or, the path of least resistance, “deny yourself the benefits of being alive”?
January 15th, 2013 5:37am
The words of this song are from one point of view, but the perspective of the song is from another. The words are what you say and think when you embrace loneliness and feel fine with the walls you put up between yourself and everyone else. You tell yourself that you don’t feel anything, and you’re happy to be alone. You might not even be lying to yourself about that. Stuart is singing those words from the other side of that mentality, and with a joy and humor that reveals how flimsy those walls really are, and how easy it can be to just knock them down and get on with your life.
It’s funny how Belle & Sebastian lyrics can often be overtly Christian in their themes and reference points, but they’re rarely pegged as a Christian Band. I think this is because Stuart Murdoch is never dogmatic, and always conversational in tone, and his faith is presented as just something that informs the world view of his stories. “If You Find Yourself Caught In Love” is as didactic as he ever gets, but it’s still this breezy song in which he’s mostly just telling the listener to either be thankful for the love they have in their life, or to take charge and find it for themselves. There’s a digression where he condemns war and brutality, but it’s just taking a simple message and increasing the stakes. The lines about surrending one’s will to God can be a bit much for a nonbeliever, but at its heart, the song is really just paraphrasing a far more famous tune: “All you need is love / Love is all you need.”
January 14th, 2013 4:18am
This is the first Belle & Sebastian song that I loved, and the second that I ever heard after “The Stars of Track and Field,” which immediately precedes it on If You’re Feeling Sinister. I bought the record in late 1996 or early 1997, I can’t quite recall when or how, but I was an early adopter based on something I read, either in Spin or CMJ. I bought a lot of stuff back then based on good buzz in print, which is strange to think about now – I mean, when was the last time you went out of your way to spend $18 on a CD of music you’ve never heard because someone in a magazine wrote a short blurb saying that it was good? I imagine that for a lot of the younger people reading this that has never happened once in their life.
At the time I first heard Sinister, it was absolutely unlike anything else in my record collection. The sound of the music was familiar, but just outside my frame of reference. It sounded smart and exotic and delicate and comfy and just a bit pervy, and the melodies were incredible. I’m not sure if I would’ve placed it at the time, but the piano part in “Seeing Other People” was an echo of Vince Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts cartoons, but the lyrics seemed to flash forward to what could be those characters’ awkward, possibly homosexual fumblings in late adolescence. The specific experiences described in the song, of “kissing just for practice” and taking a lover “for a dirty weekend,” was never much to do with my own life, but this bittersweet song about these two people who can’t sort out the meaning of their intimate relationship resonated with me then, and still does today.
“Listen Johnny, you’re like a mother to the girl you’ve fallen for, and you’re still falling.” That line stings. If it was sung from the first person, it’d be a pathetic “friend zone” whine, but this is coming from someone on the outside looking in. From their perspective, it’s a sad scene – some self-destructive woman who can’t help but to take advantage of some hapless man’s kindness, but is in no position to return it. But he doesn’t seem to care about that, since her drama lends some urgency to his otherwise boring life. Murdoch’s tone is sympathetic, but his concern is less for this guy’s broken heart and more for his lack of dignity.
January 11th, 2013 1:00pm
Hospitality @ Bowery Ballroom 1/11/2013
Eighth Avenue / The Right Profession / Friends of Friends / Going Out / Betty Wang / Nightingale / Experience / Liberal Arts / Sleepover / Julie / The Birthday / The Drift / Monkey / All Day Today // Half An Apple / Argonauts
The musicians in Hospitality have a level of skill and craft that isn’t tremendously obvious to the casual listener, and so they’ve very easy to underrate or overlook. They’ve all got chops but play together seamlessly rather than showboat, putting the songs at the forefront. More often than not, this approach yields better bands and better songs, but I don’t think many people come away from Hospitality’s debut thinking mostly about the harmonic structure and rhythmic interplay in their songs. It took me a solid year to really grasp what they’re doing in this music and get beyond the “this sounds a little like…” game, and it took seeing them in concert to get a handle on their dynamic. The album is recorded very plainly, but it somehow obscures the flashier elements of their songs. There’s more drama to their sound in concert, particularly in the new songs, which rock with more flair and sometimes approach a Television-like grandeur. This is exactly the right direction for them – less twee, more assertive and epic. It was already right there, it’s just a matter of what’s being emphasized.
January 10th, 2013 1:03pm
A$AP Rocky is, above all other things, an aesthete and a fashion maven, so it should come as no surprise that he has excellent taste in rap production. On his proper record, Long.Live.A$AP, this ranges from sinister, cinematic RZA-isms, chopped and skrewed vocals and rugged-yet-glossy cuts by Hit-Boy to trendier moves like collaborating with Skrillex. On a purely musical level, the most impressive cut is “LVL,” a Clams Casino production that takes the abstracted CD-skipping sound of The Field and finesses it into a viable rap track without sacrificing any of its ambient qualities. A$AP’s technical skill is most obvious in a track like this, where the beat is almost subliminal and his voice carries the rhythm rather than rides it. He varies his cadence and pitch brilliantly, keeping his parts stable but dynamic as the track shifts between sections that come off like slightly different stages of being stoned out of your mind. As with the rest of the record, though, A$AP’s lyrics are the weak point – if he’s so forward-thinking about tracks and thoughtful about his flow, why are his words nearly always sorta banal? There’s nothing bad about his lyrics, it’s just rap boilerplate as opposed to something more distinctive. It’s not a problem for the music, but it’s just a question it’s hard to avoid when this aspect of his craft seems stunted in comparison to everything else he does.
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