February 20th, 2013 12:46pm
I imagine I wasn’t alone in cycling out of The xx’s second album rather quickly – their music has a very specific utility, and if it doesn’t fit into your life and state of mind at the moment, it’s easy to shrug it off. The circumstances of my life haven’t changed that much in the past few months, but I was curious enough to revisit the album, and was surprised by how much more vibrant it seemed compared to when I first heard it. My earlier impression, based on hearing it about seven or eight times through, was that the music was missing the dramatic tension and subtle dynamic shifts that made their debut compelling, and that it just sounded like a couple of codependents doing nothing but whispering to each other in bed for hours on end.
Coexist does suffer a bit for being so consistently quiet and wispy, but it is dynamic, albeit in extremely subtle ways. The best way to think of it is that the songs represent an emotional landscape rendered with a monochromatic palette. There are no radical shifts, but each slight variation in hue or gesture signals a small change in feeling. This isn’t just musical minimalism, it’s emotional minimalism too – everything is brought down to some small, essential level where everything in the world is shut out except for the intimacy between two people represented by the vocalists.
February 19th, 2013 1:12pm
I used to think of Phoenix as an underdog band, and now they’re the sort of group that can headline major American festivals. This is great, but it’s also sort of risky – their biggest hits came out nearly four years ago, and there’s some chance that people are now overestimating their appeal in 2013. That’s sort of cynical, but it’s a valid concern, so Phoenix really need to come back strong to make this all work. I’m not totally sure if “Entertainment” is the best way to do this – it’s catchy and has a similar “I am living out an awesome scene from a stylish movie” vibe as “1901,” but it has a strange, vaguely uneasy momentum to it. This works on conceptual for the song, which seems to be about Thomas Mars being a passive witness to people getting excited about him, but I can’t help but listen and wish that it would hit with a greater force, and rock without hesitation or ironic distance.
February 18th, 2013 1:10pm
The keyboard sounds in this song are harsh and very high in the mix, to the point that the treble crowds out most of the low end. But despite that, it’s a very graceful piece of music, with the parts rising and crashing like tides against a very busy rhythm. The keyboards have that “laser gun” tonality, but the way this track is arranged, you feel like you’re in the middle of a sci-fi shootout, which just amps up an urgency that would be there in the vocals and beats regardless. Still, there’s something kinda serene at the core of this – some kind of calm and certainty surrounded by chaos.
February 15th, 2013 12:45pm
James Blake spent a lot of his debut album sounding a bit timid, as though he knew how amazing his music became when he added his voice, but he wasn’t sure just how much singing he should be doing. This song, the first single from his second album, has him firmly committing to being a singer, and it’s fantastic. His vocal style is essentially modern R&B, but his tonality and tics reveal traces of indie and goth – there are points in “Retrograde” where he sounds like a strange but wonderful mish-mash of Robert Smith and D’Angelo. Blake’s vocal style has gone more mainstream, but his production aesthetic is still very arty and strange. His use of silent space in tracks is very evocative – is this intimacy, or loneliness? – and he’s good with odd keyboard tones, like the harsh drone that seems to saw its way through the second half of the track.
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”?
