December 20th, 2012 1:18pm
And here you are, the world’s most morbid Christmas song, even more so than “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.” Aside from that odd siren-like harmonic effect on the guitar, my favorite thing about this song is the way Eric Bachmann’s lyrics put this tragedy in the context of the most mundane aspects of its aftermath. The dark humor – and also, the pathos – is in how Christmas is mostly ruined by those little things, and not so much the actual murder of the “hero.”
Eric Bachmann’s voice changed a lot between All the Nations Airports and White Trash Heroes, and I felt very let down about that at the time. This is a funny thing, because it’s not as though he had a particularly nice voice to begin with, though there was something about his delivery that seemed to but an armor on his words. He’s a thousand times more vulnerable on the White Trash Heroes songs, to the point of sounding literally wounded as he sings “Slicks Tricks and Bright Lights.” This makes sense – it is, after all, a sad and epic tune about being betrayed by a false image and losing control of your life. I wonder if, on some unconscious level, he was singing about himself and his art. You know, the guy on stage and the songs no longer matching up with who he was, pushing him to move on.
December 19th, 2012 12:35pm
Savages belong to a tradition of extraordinarily tense punk bands with heavily accented female sings, but even in that context, a song like “Husbands” seems especially panicked and urgent. The entire song is just on the edge of hysteria, with lucid thoughts brushing up against abstract visions and a repetition of the title word that blurs the line between terror and arousal. It’s a complicated song to parse, but I’m sure that’s the point – it’s all questions about love and violence, but no answers at all.
December 18th, 2012 12:38pm
On a lyrical level, this song isn’t much different from One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” in that it’s basically a smooth dude telling a girl how wonderful she is, and how she’s not actually aware of her own beauty. Musically, it’s in a whole other zone, skillfully evoking the perky, confident bounce of disco-era Michael Jackson. Like pretty much everything on Bruno Mars’ new album Unorthodox Jukebox, it is shamelessly retro, but in a very welcome way. Mars and his collaborators are resurrecting the sound of early to mid-80s pop, where R&B and New Wave influences mingled and blurred into charming tunes that managed to pack in elements of just about every strain of pop while seeming glossy, light and effortless. It’s a really clever sound to emulate, not just because it’s so enduring, but because it’s so big tent. It’s definitely one of the best ways to get a lot of people on board in a time of major fragmentation in the music market. I don’t get the sense that Mars is thinking about some abstract market share, though – he just wants to make a lot of people feel good.
December 17th, 2012 4:00am
This blues number was recorded in New York City in 1925, right around the peak of Smith’s career. It’s a remarkable recording, not just for Smith’s performance, but for the way the microphones picked up so much of the room’s ambiance. There’s a really strong sense of place and space within this recording, and it’s all the more impressive given that the equipment used to capture it was so primitive. But you know, room mics are room mics – as a technique, it’s almost always going to yield a recording with more presence.
“At the Christmas Ball” is basically a song about the Christmas/New Year’s party season, and it’s more about the debauchery of those events than anything to do with holiday. The song is a bit sad, but in a vague sort of way – the lyrics never let on much about anything bad going on, but Smith sings it with a touch of pain and loneliness in her voice, as if to suggest that this merriment is all just a temporary distraction.
December 12th, 2012 1:39pm
My love of Squeeze is almost entirely focused on their late 70s and early 80s material. This is the case for most people inclined to listen to Squeeze, really. I’ve just never connected with the later material, and to some extent, it’s a matter of getting my Squeeze fix with the work I know I love. Forcing myself to listen to records like Domino and Some Fantastic Place feels like homework. Anyway! This is a song from the band’s forthcoming album, and unlike a lot of late-period Squeeze, it is a dead ringer for their early 80s style. “Tommy” is rigid and formal in tone, and wonderfully melodic in its composition. This is basically what you look for in a band like this – impeccable, McCartney-like craft with the bitter observational wit of Costello. They’ve got their own character and charm, but really, that’s what it comes down to, and I think they’ve reconnected with that spark.
December 11th, 2012 1:47pm
The Smashing Pumpkins @ Barclays Center 12/10/2012
Quasar / Panopticon / The Celestials / Violet Rays / My Love Is Winter / One Diamond, One Heart / Pinwheels / Oceania / Pale Horse / The Chimera / Glissandra / Inkless / Wildflower / Space Oddity / X.Y.U. / Disarm / Tonight, Tonight / Bullet With Butterfly Wings / The Dream Machine / Hummer // Ava Adore / Cherub Rock / Zero
This was a wonderful show from start to finish, though I do think it might have been a better idea to jumble up the running of Oceania. I appreciate the integrity and conviction behind playing the new album in its entirety, but I think that in pretty much any case, it’s less fun to see an album sequence performed on stage. The internal logic of a concert setlist and an album are very different, and there were times when the momentum wasn’t right or it might have been a good idea to toss out a hit to keep the more impatient audience members interested. But aside from that, the Oceania material came off very well, most especially “Pinwheels,” which opened up a lot on stage and showed off the particular dynamic of Corgan’s current lineup of musicians.
I won’t lie to you, though: The most exciting part of this show was the second half, with all of the old hits. “X.Y.U.” was the highlight of the night – twice as maniacal and over-the-top as the album version, and with a creepy extended instrumental section in the middle. “Hummer” was exceptional too, with its optimism sounding even more triumphant in the arena setting. I was most surprised by my response to “Tonight, Tonight.” I often skip that song when I listen to Mellon Collie, but in concert it’s just sort of undeniable, and you realize that its sentiment is the key to understanding what Corgan has been trying to do with his music for all these years. It’s a song that blasts cynicism, and rejects the notion that any creative ambition is too crazy to be considered. I can think of a bunch of times recently when I was talking to someone who was really down on themselves, and I had to fight myself not to tell them “life can change, you’re not stuck in vain” because it’s corny to quote a Smashing Pumpkins song to someone who is genuinely distraught. But man, that line is so true. That whole song is so true.
December 10th, 2012 1:23pm
“Got Paid” is about getting excited to go out on a Friday after getting a fresh paycheck. This is a pretty banal subject for a song, but Katy B makes it work because she’s so effective in expressing her joy and anticipation. This may be boilerplate for a pop song, but it’s for a reason – there will always be room for songs about wanting to escape from the mundane routine of life, and the one that effectively convey the promise of good times will always be a thrill.
December 6th, 2012 1:23pm
Box sets and reissues come out all the time, and they’re always full of early, messy versions of the songs you love. You think you want to hear a demo or a rough take, but with few exceptions, they aren’t anything special, and you put them away after you satisfy your curiosity. The new Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness actually does contain some truly outstanding early demos that are notably different from the final album recordings, but pretty much all of them have been in circulation as acoustic demos for years, and are already in the collection of the sort of hardcore fans who would be willing to pay $$$ for a Mellon Collie box set.
But that’s not all that’s there. Yes, there’s a lot of fetal versions of songs, but there’s a few revised versions of songs. The best and most remarkable of these is a new mix of “Cupid de Locke,” one of the loveliest and most experimental tracks on the record. Corgan hasn’t done anything to change the character of the song besides omitting the spoken word outro, for the most part it’s the same song with a slightly adjusted arrangement. There’s a bit more space in it now, which gives the lovely melodies a bit more space in the mix. It’s less cluttered, more ethereal. The production on the song always sounded a little ahead of the curve, but now it sounds fully contemporary, well over a decade after it was recorded. The song was always meant to be this over the top vision of idealized love, and now that is just a bit clearer.
December 5th, 2012 1:18pm
Animal Collective @ Terminal 5 12/4/2012
Rosie Oh / Today’s Supernatural / Wide Eyed / Applesauce / Honeycomb / Lion In A Coma / Moonjock / Pulleys / New Town Burnout / Monkey Riches / Brother Sport / Peacebone // Cobwebs / My Girls / Amanita
The current incarnation of Animal Collective resembles a traditional rock band, but only vaguely. Their live show feels more physical and urgent with the emphasis on live percussion, but their aesthetic is too distinct to fit in comfortably with the expectations of rock, even when they’re at their most “rock.” This is mostly a good thing, but their show is a good reminder of how the visual correlation of playing an instrument and immediately recognizing the sound the musician is making is a big part of how we process the drama of live performance. For the most part, it’s really hard to tell what any of them are doing on stage and how it relates to what we’re hearing, even when it looks as straightforward as Avey Tare playing chords on a keyboard or Deakin strumming a guitar. This disconnect was especially interesting in the long drone jam phase in the middle of “Pulleys” – usually a jam section is presented as a way of highlighting the players’ musical virtuosity, but for them, it’s four or five minutes of mysterious hums that may or may not be coming from Avey’s keyboard, Deakin’s guitar or Geologist’s whatever the hell he has up there.
Avey switched up this dynamic by playing chords with a clean tone on an electric guitar on “Cobwebs” in the encore. This was a revelation! They had managed to take one of the most mundane sounds in modern music and make it seem exotic and strikingly beautiful in this context. They should play around with this more often in the future – it’s a largely unexplored thing for them, and I am certain they could do a lot with it without ever sounding like anything but themselves.
Also, as an aside: If you are inclined to like this band and have in some way dismissed Centipede Hz, I really urge you to reconsider it. It’s an excellent record, certainly one of their best, and I promise you that once you acclimate to its odd tonal logic, it all snaps together as a skewed pop album.
December 4th, 2012 7:00am
I don’t always read up on the songs I want to write about, but I was curious about this one because the lyrics about sex and death were so evocative. I’d assumed it was all allegorical, but as it turns out it’s the true story of this dude making out with a girl (an internet-famous girl, but that’s besides the point) in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles shortly after attending a funeral service for his grandfather that left him feeling sorta disgusted and unsatisfied. He’s trying to process grief, or even decide whether or not he’s actually grieving, and the sex starts off as a distraction, but becomes a way of embracing life. I suppose in its own ultra-morbid way, this song is kinda YOLO.
December 3rd, 2012 2:00am
This is the kind of love song that totally kills me. Klara Söderberg sings the verses with a stoic tone, addressing her faults and troubles with clear eyes, and generally setting up the reasons why she’d want to have a partner. The chorus is an offer, put in the terms of classic country music: “I’ll be your Emmylou and I’ll be your June / if you’ll be my Gram and my Johnny too.” She sings this part with a degree of sweetness and vulnerability that chokes me up in a huge way. I think part of it is because it’s so earnest and direct, and this kind of sentiment can be weirdly difficult to express, at least if you have trouble letting your guard down. But she’s singing about a sort of connection and partnership pretty much everyone wants, and she’s singing about it from the perspective of someone who wants it very badly.
November 30th, 2012 1:19pm
It took Cody ChesnuTT about a decade to write, record and release Landing on a Hundred, but unlike a lot of records with an absurdly long gestation period, the album sounds like it actually benefited from all that time and work. ChesnuTT’s vocal takes are warm and soulful, and sound as if the takes were recorded very quickly and without too much fuss. The music, on the other hand, is very carefully sculpted – every note of it sounds very considered. There’s a lot of restraint to the compositions – even a fairly melodramatic cut like “Don’t Follow Me” is measured, as if he just tinkered around until he found just the right level of cinematic bombast to get the mood across.
November 29th, 2012 1:36pm
Well, you could certainly trick someone into believing that this is Beach House. But while that band goes for a strange mixture of swoony warmth and aloof self-possession, Exitmusic focus on chillier tones and a more bombastic expression of yearning emotion. “The Night” has a scope to it that practically begs you to describe it as “cinematic,” but you know what? I can’t think of an actual movie that feels anything like this. That said, I can very easily imagine this getting used in a trailer, but that is so not the same thing.
November 27th, 2012 12:38pm
People often point out how much Kevin Parker sounds like John Lennon – it’s so obvious that it’s just kinda hard to ignore. But on a musical level he comes a lot closer to Paul McCartney, particularly in his mid to late 70s period, or noted McCartney imitator Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra. His music is a lot richer than anything Lennon did on his own, so some of the thrill is this kinda fanboy “what if?” situation of imagining that you’re hearing what it would’ve sounded like if John and Paul had actually been working together in the mid 70s. And I know putting it all in these terms diminishes Parker somewhat, but seriously, isn’t it compliment enough to suggest he’s working anywhere near the level of those dudes? He has a delightful grasp on melody, especially when it comes to his fluid bass lines, and a clever sense of structure. The musical curveballs of “Apocalypse Dreams” still take me by surprise, though I’ve heard the abrupt smash cut-style transition near the end several times over by now. I love that this song can start off as this sort of LSD-soaked Motown pastiche, but then shift its perspective a few times over. It’s like a pop song presented as a panorama.
November 26th, 2012 11:54am
I love that the conflict at the center of this song is so simple: She is upset that her friend has been treating her poorly, and that’s pretty much it. There’s no suggestion of anything deeper, or some kind of subtext. It’s just a direct, relatable feeling invested with a lot of energy and spirit. I’m not totally certain what Nash’s musical inspiration for this could be – she might be reaching back to the 60s and garage rock – but the best bits of this remind me a lot of The B-52’s on songs like “Hero Worship.” It’s a similar mix of being knowingly camp and just a little unhinged.
November 21st, 2012 1:07pm
Roc Marciano is not a flashy rapper. He doesn’t have a big voice, he’s not particularly energetic or magnetic. He is very very good with detail, especially when he’s placed at the center of a slow, sad track. The substance of his stories are pretty stock for rap over the past 20 or so years, but his approach is a bit different – he backs away from big drama, focusing instead on small moments that give you a sense of his characters’ daily lives. In other words, his songs are like little indie movies – relatively quiet, meditative and disarmingly low key.
November 20th, 2012 1:12pm
There’s basically three major elements to this composition: Vocals that approximate the shape and tone of pop music but get layered into a lovely abstraction not unlike what you’d get on one of A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s records, the eerie hum of empty space, and a warm bass pulse locked in with a cold percussive snap. These elements kinda dance around each other, you can imagine them switching positions and swapping partners as the track moves along. The ambient quality is nice enough, but it’s the interplay between the spiraling vocals and the understated but strong groove that pulls me in. This could easily have been just pretty; the bass gives it a physicality and sexiness.
November 19th, 2012 7:00am
I never connected with Titus Andronicus before I heard Local Business, or more specifically, this song. Their older stuff was far too Oberst-y for my taste, and I found myself in the vaguely uncomfortable position of greatly admiring them as people but feeling a little confused about what people were getting out of their music. I haven’t really changed my mind about those early records, but now I totally get the appeal of what Patrick Stickles has been doing all along. “In A Big City” is earnest and a little bratty, a slightly off-kilter anthem about growing up in the shadow of New York City. It’s specifically about being from New Jersey, but it’s close enough to the feelings I’ve had growing up in the Hudson Valley that it resonates with me in a huge way. But still, the Jersey-ness makes it a better song – it’s one thing to look on to The City as an outsider, and another thing to be some sort of underdog pariah. This is a song that draws on the underdog pop cultural mythology of Jersey, and the drama of it hinges on Stickles reckons with the way he is perceived in the context of where he’s from. This song is thrilling because he just owns it, and throws himself into the role of the heroic loser heading off to make his way in the cold, indifferent metropolis just across the river.
November 15th, 2012 12:42pm
Mac DeMarco’s guitar style is fluid and so consistently melodic that it seems jarring whenever he actually strums a chord. There’s an airy, inviting sound to his songs – a mellow late night vibe that reminds me of a smoothed-out Neil Hagerty or a more restless version of The Clientele. His new album is a pleasure in small doses – it’s all too samey to hold my attention beyond three or four songs at a time – and a good starting point for an artist who will probably make better things down the line. He’s got the melody and the atmosphere but he needs to work on composition and structure. The free-floating quality of his playing may be more compelling with a stronger groove in the rhythm section – you kinda get close to that on “Annie,” which has a nice mid-Seventies vibe to it.
November 14th, 2012 7:00am
Mouse on Mars are brilliant at taking electronic textures and making them sound incredibly tactile, with sudden shifts and clangs in the music triggering the sensation of velocity or impact. “HYM,” one of the most song-y tracks on WOW, packs enough musical ideas into four minutes to last about half a proper album. The super-compression of the composition may seem like attention deficit disorder, but I take it as both an expression of raw excitement and economical precision. It’s fun to hear these veterans absorb some tricks from dubstep too – it seems a bit sly, but also totally natural. They’ve been on this creative wavelength for a long time now.
