James Blake “Life Round Here”

Even when he’s singing a fairly straight forward R&B ballad, James Blake can’t help but give every song this vague, elliptical quality. It gives his music a strange quality, like someone who is yearning for a powerful emotional and physical connection, but can never stand to look you in the eye or speak in complete sentences. This is sexy R&B for people with serious social anxiety, or a fear of letting anyone in. “Life Round Here” is about as direct as Blake gets without just covering someone else – Joni Mitchell, Feist – and while I understand the gist of the drama, it’s still like trying to understand an emotional exchange while only seeing only one person’s subtle, pained facial expressions.

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Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Despair”

Karen O is iconic because she’s so good at projecting this badass, arty tough girl vibe, but she’s a great pop singer because she knows how and when to drop that pose and be vulnerable. Not just, “I’m going to sing a ballad now,” but like, truly wounded and shaken, raw nerve emotion. “Despair,” the big ballad on their fourth album, is a return to “Maps” territory, but it’s not a love song. It’s a little more powerful than that, somehow – she’s singing about years of pain and neuroses, and how it’s all been manageable through a powerful connection to someone else. This is her saying, basically – I could not make it without you. This is love, but it’s beyond romance. It’s something crucial, and there’s no other way of getting through – or even appreciating – that consuming feeling of despair.

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Fleetwood Mac @ Madison Square Garden 4/8/2013
Second Hand News / The Chain / Dreams / Sad Angel / Rhiannon / Not That Funny / Tusk / Sisters of the Moon / Sara / Big Love / Landslide / Never Going Back Again / Without You / Gypsy / Eyes of the World / Gold Dust Woman / I’m So Afraid / Stand Back / Go Your Own Way // World Turning / Don’t Stop /// Silver Springs / Say Goodbye

1. It’s hard not to notice that Stevie Nicks’ voice has deteriorated a lot with age, but Lindsey Buckingham’s voice has maybe actually improved. Stevie has the natural star power, so she doesn’t have to work the audience as much as Lindsey, who seems far more eager to please. He’s a hammy guy with a huge amount of energy, and he throws everything he’s got into every song.

2. Lindsey is a fascinating figure to me because he subverts so many expectations of male rock stars – he isn’t macho, he isn’t androgynous, he isn’t aloof, he isn’t glamorous, he isn’t some walking riddle. He doesn’t map on to any archetype, though he’s got some things in common with contemporaries like Jackson Browne and James Taylor. He’s an obvious control freak who has written some of the most passive-aggressive music I have ever encountered, and that may sound like a diss, but it’s not. Lindsey’s songs are powerful because he’s always trying to negotiate his way through romantic problems because he’s such a big believer in LOVE, and respects his partner too much to not make everything a dialogue.

Fleetwood Mac “Say Goodbye”

3. Fleetwood Mac are all about selling you on their story. The newer or more obscure songs in this set were introduced in the context of Stevie and Lindsey’s grand romance, which ended nearly 40 years ago. This has been a big part of their show for years, and it’s sorta fascinating to watch them play out these very rehearsed sentimental moments sprinkled through the set. The one that rang most true was at the end, as Lindsey introduced the Say You Will song “Say Goodbye” as a number about finding closure with Stevie after many, many years. It’s a pensive acoustic ballad, more like his recent solo work than classic Mac, and while the sentiment is very direct, its emotions are as tangled as its busy arpeggiated notes. Most people break up and move on. But imagine having to form an even closer connection after your relationship is through, and your past relationship being crucial to your greatest artistic successes together. And that success keeps you together, and that success makes you constantly revisit these moments from the past. Lindsey Buckingham has been married for years, but he knows damn well that when he’s gone, that relationship will get at best second billing to his epic drama with Stevie. It’s a strange thing to reckon with.

4. Also, so much Tusk! I was so happy with that Tusk section of the setlist. And “Second Hand News” and “Dreams” and “Eyes of the World,” and the new song “Sad Angel” was really good too, sorta like “I Don’t Want to Know.” I wish I could have enjoyed “Landslide” more, but it’s hard when you’re surrounded by tone deaf grandpas groaning the words loudly out of time.

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The Knife “Wrap Your Arms Around Me”

“Wrap Your Arms Around Me” is one of the most unsettling songs about romance and lust I’ve ever heard, partly because its sound implies being crushed by an enormous weight, and mostly because the singer’s urge for affection is reduced to biological imperatives and social status. There is nothing idealistic here, nothing lofty or emotional, nothing we’d recognize from how pop culture frames any of this. Instead, we have Karin Dreijer Andersson’s raw voice singing dryly about “the urge for penetration,” and making the common hope of “feel love and build a house with you” seem completely detached, like a set of computer commands. The line that really gives me shivers is the repeated lyric “free the unborn child at the castle,” which…I’m not sure if I really need to explain why that sounds so disturbing, right? It is precisely where this song tips from an uncomfortably bleak vision of sex to a nightmare about procreation.

FYI, I wrote a big thing about The Knife’s new album over here.

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The Flaming Lips “Sun Blows Up Today”

This is The Flaming Lips’ “YOLO” song: Three minutes of joyful, pogoing festival pop with lyrics about the whole world getting together to enjoy the spectacular destruction of the sun, and the world. Wayne Coyne has spent most of his adult life thinking about spectacle and communal activity, and this is the logical conclusion to that thread, to think of literally the spectacle to end all spectacles. But unlike The Terror, the album this song is connected to but does not technically appear on, this is a cheerful and direct piece of music, not something stewing in dread and bad vibes. I suppose there’s some irony to it, but then again, maybe not – Coyne is absolutely the sort of person to greet the end of the world with open arms as long as it’s a good, trippy show.

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Fol Chen “A Tourist Town”

Fol Chen began messing around with dense, electronic pop with “Cable TV” on their debut album, and back then, it was kind of an outlier song for them. Now they’re doing that stuff full time, and their third album, The False Alarms, is like 10 variations on that theme – a clinical deconstruction of Minneapolis funk and early Timbaland, with lyrics that present a fairly mundane existence in evocative detail. There’s a few meta conceits here, and it works – there’s always an implication that the music is an interpretation of the pop songs you encounter everywhere or remember from your past, and it’s all a part of how everyday experiences are shaped. “A Tourist Town,” the best track, filters this sort of bewildered narrative about travel and drinking too much through sounds that sets up expectations for fun and relaxation, but also encourages that state of mind.

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Tyler, the Creator featuring Hodgy Beats “Jamba”

If Tyler isn’t acting out or being a troll, he’s sorta uncomfortably self-absorbed and overly concerned with what his fans think of him. But that’s just how it goes with that personality type – you’re either putting up a front and playing a character, or revealing the least appealing aspects of yourself when it’s time to let your guard down. I don’t mind Tyler being neurotic – sometimes it’s pretty compelling, like on “Colossus,” where he’s freaked out about being mobbed by fans – but he’s just a lot more fun when he’s goofing around. “Jamba” is playful and sly, and I kinda love hearing this straight-edge kid fantasize about having a bad time smoking weed with his friends. I recognize a lot of what I was like as a teen in this song, and honestly, that’s a super rare thing for me.

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Iron & Wine “Grace for Saints and Ramblers”

I never cared for Iron & Wine’s sad acoustic songs, and will probably always have a bit of residual distaste for that end of their catalog – that stuff was popular at a time when I was distancing myself from anything that struck me as overly dreary or straining for woodsy authenticity, and it’s hard to shake off ingrained biases from nearly a decade ago. But I really like Sam Beam’s more recent work – he’s blossomed into a sophisticated songwriter with an effortless command of melody and a taste for arrangements that borrow from the best of 70s lite FM and folk pop. “Grace for Saints and Ramblers” isn’t far off in tone or style from the best cuts from 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean, but it feels brighter, looser, and more cheerful. It reminds me a bit of when Elton John would bring in elements of Philly soul and Motown on songs like “Philadelphia Freedom” and “Grey Seal,” and I’m very fond of how the clutter of imagery and references in the verses is cleared away for the chorus, “it all came down to you and I.”

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Telekinesis “Empathetic People”

Michael Benjamin Lerner does pretty much everything in Telekinesis, but he’s a drummer first and foremost, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the percussion is often the most expressive element of his compositions. Listen to “Empathetic People” – the riffs and hooks are up front, but that passionate, insistent beat is what makes it feel urgent and emotional, not the guitar tone or his gentle tenor voice. He can’t help but sound sweet and even-keeled as a singer, so his drumming brings out the emotional urgency in his songs, especially the ones that are so firmly rooted in anxiety.

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Kacey Musgraves “Merry Go ‘Round”

It’s really hard to pull off a song that is this cynical in its depiction of dreary small town life while still being empathetic toward the people who live there. Musgraves sings from the perspective of someone who is eager to get the hell out of town, but fully understands the inertia that keeps people from moving on and potentially finding something at least just a bit better. She can’t help but seem a little disappoint in everyone’s lack of ambition or will to overcome their vices, but she sings with the sadness of someone who has given up on helping people she cares about with stern tough love.

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Fear of Men “Ritual Confession”

This is a song which is apparently based on the relationship between Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir that asks the listener to cheerfully sing along with the line “hell is other people though,” and I say: Yes. This is a wonderful mixture of breezy melody and slightly unnerving lyrical imagery, with singer Jessica Weiss casually tossing off phrases like “the taste of blood you read about” like it’s all innocent lines from a childhood diary.

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Wire “Doubles and Trebles”

If this sounds to you like “classic Wire,” it’s because it basically is – this is a new version of “Ally In Exile,” a song from around 1980 that was never completed, but appeared on the live record Document and Eyewitness. But while the structure of it is very 154, the sound is about what you’d expect from Wire since the early 2000s – blunt force, but with a tone so clean and processed that it sounds antiseptic. This approach suits the song very well, because Colin Newman’s voice seems so cold and detached that his lyrics about a spy panicking as his cover is blown that telling the story in the first place seems like an exercise in sadism. But, you know, Wire is like that.

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Phosphorescent “Ride On/Right On”

There’s a lot going for this song purely in terms of texture and sound, but the thing that really makes it is those little wordless whoops Matthew Houck throws in to punctuate his verses. It shakes up the song a little, and makes it clear that he’s having fun even when the arrangement starts to feel slightly static and you start to realize that his lyrics about hooking up are very ambivalent. With just a few little gestures, Houck flips that ambivalence and sense of kinda jogging in place seem just fine, like a rut he doesn’t mind being in. Which is basically the whole point of this, on an emotional level.

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Alan Braxe featuring Spimes “Time Machine”

Alan Braxe makes very sentimental dance music, at least in the sense that he’s always making these tracks that make you feel like you’re remembering some piece of music from your past that you love deeply but can’t quite place. A lot of artists have run with that idea over the past several years, but Braxe pulls this off with a lot of grace, particularly on a track like “Time Machine,” which sticks to a low bpm to make you feel like you’re listening to the most perfect moment from the most perfect prom in history, and living in that moment indefinitely. This evokes such a strong and uncomplicated notion of romance, it just kinda zaps you back to what you thought love and romance should be when you were just a kid.

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Kate Nash “Part Heart”

Listen to the bass in this – it’s that Kim Deal rumble roll, but flattened out to evoke the feeling of having all the joy sucked out of your life. Kate Nash sings like she’s gone dead inside, but there’s a slight smirk to her delivery, as if she’s kinda enjoying this bitter, empty feeling in the wake of a relationship going sour. You can hear the hum of her guitar, like it’s lying in wait, and you can feel a catharsis coming but the measures keep going by. When it finally comes, and the distortion kicks in and her voice becomes more emphatic, it doesn’t actually change much. See just comes out and says it too – “It doesn’t matter how loud I play my music, I still feel the same.” That bass line starts to feel like mental block, and what sounded like a smirk before now just sounds like empty spite.

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Marnie Stern “You Don’t Turn Down”

We should all try to do something even 1/1000th as great as the middle section of this song, which sounds a sudden flood of anxious thoughts behind held back by blunt guitar riffs and the defiance in Marnie’s voice when she sings “I’m losing hope in my body.” The dynamics in this song are amazing, with the heaviest bits coming after lulls that drag out the anticipation a few beats longer than what you’d expect from a rock song. But that’s the real point of this song – it’s all about steeling yourself for that onslaught of panic, and doing whatever you can to fight back.

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Justin Timberlake “Pusher Love Girl”

“Pusher Love Girl” is a corny song comparing a hot girl to drugs, but it’s important to remember that Justin Timberlake, no matter how cool he seems sometimes, is an inherently corny dude. And that’s fine! I think this is the best song he’s ever recorded in part because he’s doing nothing to obscure that, and just taking a simple premise and an appealing melody allllllllllll the way. This song doesn’t need to sound as fancy as it does, it certainly doesn’t need to be extended to 8 minutes, but Timberlake and Timbaland make it work on a moment-to-moment level, giving you a lot of cool little hooks and sounds so it never gets static, and just keeps moving in this breezy, comfortable lateral progression. If you’re going to do slick and deluxe, this is the way to do it. And you could argue that they take the sound of this song very far away from the strung-out junkie conceit in the lyrics, but it’s pretty obvious that these are the sort of drug metaphors a non-junkie would make.

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Veronica Falls “If You Still Want Me”

Veronica Falls are almost stubbornly basic on a musical level, with an approach to instrumentation, vocals, and pop song structure firmly rooted in early ’80s English indie rock, but their tunes are often strong enough that their connect-the-dots method of indie pop is totally justified. They are very good dots! In this way, they’re a lot like Dum Dum Girls, where a high level of craft and commitment to an aesthetic trumps what can come across as a very limited artistic imagination. But where Dum Dum Girls shine brightest when singing about a vulnerable, almost uncomfortably pure love, Veronica Falls excels when they navigate a more bleak vision of romance. “If You Still Want Me” is paranoid and confused, with Roxanne Clifford and James Hoare’s voices crossing in a disconnected conversation about whether or not their characters could have any sort of relationship after enduring some sort of trauma. The song conveys a sense of danger, with Clifford singing “if you could have me, would you still want me?” with the dim realization that any answer to that question will be a little terrifying.

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Giant Drag “90210”

I’m not really sure why this song is called “90210,” maybe it’s just some self-effacing way of distracting the listener from noticing that this is actually a rather poignant tune. Annie Hardy is addressing a guy who seems to be doing okay in life, but is actually kind of a wreck – he doesn’t know how to be alive and in the moment, so there’s always a nagging feeling that thing don’t feel right. And that’s a horrible, insidious feeling, especially when you don’t have a frame of reference for how to feel or what to do with yourself aside from planning. Hardy sounds so kind and generous in this song, each melodic twist seems to amp up the empathy. She doesn’t have advice other than “take, take,” which is pretty vague, but seems right: Take what you’ve earned, take what you want, take the love people want to give you even if your instinct is to shut it out.

Buy it from Giant Drag’s BandCamp page.

David Bowie “The Next Day”

“The Next Day” isn’t a song about death, it’s a song about survival. But survival in this song isn’t a matter of staying alive, but narrowly escaping death at seemingly ever turn. It’s about coming so close to the end that you become convinced that your luck will run out at any moment, and that the world is conspiring to snuff you out. Listen to how easily this song tips from gallows humor to hysteria, with Bowie kinda losing it on the first verse before going back into a defiant, proud chorus where the most triumphant thing he can say is that he’s “not quite dying.” It’s grim, but he sounds so determined to live that every “next day, and the next, and another day” is a joy, if just to spite the reaper.

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