April 4th, 2013 10:53am
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.
April 3rd, 2013 11:53am
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.
April 2nd, 2013 3:26am
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.
April 1st, 2013 3:28am
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.”
March 28th, 2013 11:57am
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.
March 27th, 2013 3:21am
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.
March 26th, 2013 12:19pm
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.
March 25th, 2013 1:59am
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.
March 22nd, 2013 12:08pm
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.
March 21st, 2013 11:44am
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.
March 19th, 2013 3:38am
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.
March 18th, 2013 1:59am
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.
March 14th, 2013 12:24pm
“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.
March 13th, 2013 12:29pm
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.
March 12th, 2013 12:07pm
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.
March 11th, 2013 3:13am
“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.
March 7th, 2013 4:03am
It is sort of amazing to me that more rock music doesn’t sound like this song, because songs like this sound like so much fun to play – very loose and groovy, catchy, a bit heavy. I can barely make out any words in the vocal melody, but the only thing they’re saying that really matters is that “whooooo!” before slamming into the heavy bit. The bass carries a lot of the structure, but the guitar is so incredibly expressive, with little creaks and crackles on the verses, and that really amazing part where the notes sound like little arrows pointing diagonally across the song.
March 6th, 2013 3:54am
Mike Milosh’s voice is extremely feminine; I honestly would not know that he was male were it not for reading press about his album. It’s the main draw of Rhye – gentle, lulling, and overwhelmingly affectionate. It’s also weirdly numbing, like a powerful narcotic that puts a space between yourself and the world. And I assume that in this way they’re evoking an old Roxy Music idea – love is the drug – but sometimes it seems like the record is smothering you with its woozy warmth and aggressive tastefulness. I suppose it’s up to you to decide whether you’re into that – not much of this speaks to where I’m at personally, though “Open” is so gorgeous and sweet that I can’t help but crumble a bit every time I hear it.
March 5th, 2013 11:52am
One thing I’ve noticed in a lot of the quasi-R&B music that has become big in indie-ish circles over the past couple years is that the artists all favor elliptical song structures to more standard, fleshed-out compositions. Take this song, for example – it comes across as a pop song, but it’s trimmed down to pretty much the parts you might sing to yourself in the shower, and it’s so repetitive that it might be the only part you remember, or like to sing. There’s something very clever about this – it’s approaching a generally lush pop genre with the crude sensibilities of punk – but I dunno, I favor formalism more and more as I get older. I don’t think this approach works all the time for Autre Ne Veut or for others in his cohort, but it comes together on this song, and intensifies a single emotion rather than dilute it with digressions.
March 4th, 2013 2:00am
If you spend a lot of time listening to a particular artist over time, you become very well acquainted with their default patterns, rhythms, and tones. Thurston Moore’s patterns locked in by the late ’90s; he’s been playing variations on a fairly limited set of themes with Sonic Youth and on his own ever since. This isn’t a complaint, it’s just an observation. I love Sonic Youth so deeply that even the least inspired Moore noodlings and strums will feel warm and inviting to me. I’m a mark for this, make no mistake. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel disappointed by his new band Chelsea Light Moving, and the sense that he’s just sorta jogging in place, and working with musicians who aren’t doing much to push him out of his comfort zone.
Sonic Youth is amazing because the default patterns of each member complement each other so perfectly, but with this band, you get default Moore without that added complexity. I don’t mean this as a slight on the other members of Chelsea Light Moving – they’re perfectly solid players, but listening to the record, I just get the sense that they’re too psyched to be playing with a living legend to actually collaborate with him or challenge him in a meaningful way. So the record ends up sounding pretty good overall, but only really great when they get out of his way and let him be loose and chill on a song like “Heavenmetal,” which probably would’ve been a lot more rigid and a lot less wistful if it had passed through Sonic Youth. The punky stuff doesn’t do as much for me, maybe because it feels more nostalgic than urgent. Hearing Moore sing “be a warrior and love life,” perhaps as advice to himself, seems more true in this moment.
