October 23rd, 2023 8:45pm
The studio recording of “Feather” is good because the songwriting is strong, but the sound is a little too tight and rigid in the way so much modern pop music is – everything quantized to death, too much direct-input sound, no sense of space or texture. This live-in-studio recording of the song for a Spotify session is a major improvement that remedies that airless stiffness. The arrangement is pretty much exactly the same but the disco-ish groove has a better feel to it, there’s enough room sound to give the track some ambiance, and a little more looseness makes Sabrina Carpenter’s conversational tone and pithy punchlines land a lot better. Carpenter is very charming in this song, roasting an ex without getting too mean, placing her focus both lyrically and musically on the relief of being rid of someone rather than stewing on the ways they sucked.
October 13th, 2023 3:38pm
What makes a song relatable? There’s a lot of music now that people connect to quite deeply with very literal and direct lyrics, all expressing sentiments that people can point to and go “that’s me.” This makes sense, and pop music has always had this sort of utility. It clicks with me sometimes, but I find what really resonates for me the most is music that conveys a feeling that’s immediately understood but hard to explain, and with that I only really need a few lines that get under my skin.
“3D Country” – aka “4D Country” in its extended version – is one of those for me. Something about this particular blend of low-key grooviness, wounded soul, and wistful tone sounds like my life feels these days. It’s a little hard to follow the lyrical threads, which include lines about cowboys and soldiers in Rome, but the gist of it is clear enough as Cameron Winter belts out lines about needing to leave the life he’s known behind and lamenting how difficult it is to live life on your own. It’s a song about loneliness and loss and knowing you’ve made mistakes, but in the context of feeling stuck in some nowhere zone of your life. The guy in this song has made a decision to move on to his “second life,” but isn’t sure where his path is headed. There’s no resolution, just the understanding that he couldn’t keep going on as he was.
October 11th, 2023 11:36pm
“Landlines” opens the new Armand Hammer with a bold gambit – a rap track with no beat whatsoever, and Elucid and Billy Woods’ free floating verses providing the only discernible rhythm in what is otherwise a grooveless sound collage by JPEGMAFIA. And it works! It’s basically the opposite of a regular rap song, with the rappers creating a musical shape and the “music” such as it is responds to their rhythm and vocal texture. It’s also just very evocative, making these two men sound extremely disconnected and displaced, like they’re just spinning around in a void.
October 11th, 2023 1:48am
A few months ago I wrote this about Earl Sweatshirt’s style and I stand by it:
Earl Sweatshirt’s voice is deep, his cadence is precise, and he often writes in odd meters that disrupt expectations. He tends to use this as a distancing device – he frequently sounds cold, or dismissive, or fully misanthropic to the point of shutting everyone out. This is interesting, but what makes him compelling is the way he slips in little moments of vulnerability or warmth that break up the flat affect.
Sweatshirt is in fine form on “Mancala,” as is The Alchemist, who spins a whole track out a piano sample that signals “holding on to one’s dignity and humanity in the face of adversity.” Earl’s verse is meticulously composed but written to sound very raw, to the point that he maintains meter at one point by almost saying a word but then immediately doubling back to restart the sentence like he’s backspacing and editing in real time. Vince Staples’ verse is a sharp contrast with Earl, the temperature of his voice much closer to the warmth of the chopped up gospel chords, though not as warm as the actual gospel choir that enters the song at the very end.
October 6th, 2023 6:57pm
“Kiss Her Kiss Her” is emotionally fraught but musically fairly placid, a romantic song from the perspective of someone being left out of the action whether by choice or pragmatism. Kazu Makino’s lyrics seem to come from the perspective of someone who is urging someone – their partner, their crush, their friend? – to pursue another woman, even as she insists “it’s gonna end in tears.” But whose tears? Ambiguity serves this song well, particularly in giving the sense that Makino is portraying an unreliable narrator who’s clearly trying to stifle themselves and come across as magnanimous despite some strong negative feelings.
October 6th, 2023 1:28pm
There is perhaps no musician better equiped to articulate the particular mix of sorrow, frustration, and fatigue of learning about yet another mass shooting than Jeff Tweedy, a guy who always sings in a warm but weary tone. “Ten Dead” sounds like late period Beatles on two hours of sleep, with Tweedy singing in a shellshocked near-monotone in the verses as he relays what he’s heard on the radio: “Ten dead, ten dead, now there are ten dead.” You get no context, you get no sense of what’s going on. All you get here is an empty feeling in the gut that you try to fill with the disgust and sadness you know should be there but is hard to access through the numbness of repetition and the abstraction of the situation.
October 5th, 2023 3:54pm
“Marbles” is a song about feeling alienated by a language barrier and the difficulty of learning a new language after another is so embedded in your psyche and body that you never think about how it works. This is an interesting idea for a song, particularly one that’s built on a rather mechanical-sounding funk groove. Vanishing Twin conjurs a very spooky and surreal sound here – psychedelic and mysterious, very physical on the low end but cerebral to the point of feeling hopelessly lost in thought on the high end. It’s a very stoned sort of song, but the kind of stoned that has your mind drift out on logical tangents that sidestep regular thought processes.
October 3rd, 2023 8:20pm
The beauty of The Clientele’s seventh album I Am Not There Anymore is in how it sounds like a self-contained world made of some other person’s memories, so listening to it feels a bit like jumping into a stranger’s brain and trying to make sense of how they draw connections between feelings, personal iconography, and how they interpret their past. Alasdair Maclean doesn’t make this easy – he’s generous with melody and vivid detail, but avoids being literal or linear in favor of something more like dream logic. For me this approach feels a lot more personal and intimate than someone actually spelling it all out for you, in part because it feels more like connecting with how someone actually thinks and less like how you might build a story about your life.
A lot of the mysteries suggested in the lyrics come across as mysteries to himself as well – like, what is the garden eye? Why does it seem so ominous, but also like an image conjured by a child based on how they interpret something mundane in a garden? It feels significant in that “Garden Eye Mantra” shifts from gorgeous and breezy chamber pop with a dubby beat to something far more heavy and menacing when it comes up, like dark clouds rolling in midway through a clear day. The same part recurs near the end of the record at the conclusion of “I Dreamed of You, Maria,” but in a more relaxed form that suggests some kind of resolution. I take it as a personal mythology or superstition from childhood, first presented in the emotional reality of a kid and then later on as a fading memory of something long outgrown.
September 28th, 2023 6:05pm
If there is a “Heaven” I suppose everything there would sound like it’s in “Dilla time,” as it does in this song. The exceptionally loose groove suits Cleo Sol’s voice rather well, with more than enough space for her to go low-key and nuanced in her phrasing and have you hanging on every syllable she sings. I’m sure Sol and Inflo put a lot of thought and labor into making this song sound totally off-the-cuff, like they just improvised their way into this pure expression of romantic gratitude. The song is all feel – the comfy warmth of the groove, the brightly toned and perfectly understated organ and guitar lines, Sol singing like her heart is overwhelmed by totally undiluted love.
September 26th, 2023 8:01pm
Sometimes the more “normal” Animal Collective gets the more their essential eccentricity comes through. “Gem and I” feels somewhat familiar with its cocktail vibe and somewhat kitschy vocal harmonies but the distinctive tics and jumbled reference points of the AnCo players push it firmly into oddball territory. Panda Bear shines the brightest on this one – he’s the one laying down the beat and giving the song an odd sort of swing, and he’s the lead vocalist carrying one of the best melodies the band has written for a while. The lyrics seem to be about Animal Collective as a unit, both in terms of the pleasure of playing together and the challenge of finding new things to say and do while working with the same guys. “Another tip to the golden years,” he sings, more than two decades into this collaboration. “We’re probably in it.”
September 25th, 2023 7:21pm
The first several times I heard “I Don’t Like My Mind” I didn’t pay very close attention to the lyrics and just took in the sound of it, which feels essentially like Mitski doing her own variation of Angel Olsen in reverb-heavy country ballad mode. The mix is incredible – her voice loud and clear, the accompaniment slightly blurred into abstraction. I was so taken by the emotion of it all that I just did not notice that the chorus is about eating an entire cake alone. This is funny and unexpected, but also a level of specificity that makes her lyrics about struggling with impulse control and general misery feel a lot more grounded and real. It’s a punchline at her own expense, but also, like, a genuinely concerning detail that suggests some things a lot darker than she’s willing to spell out in the song.
“Belleville,” like the rest of Laurel Halo’s excellent new record Atlas, sounds like a very specific kind of nowhere. It’s mostly a piano instrumental but the piano part sounds semi-improvised, as though someone was passing through a house, spotted a piano, and sat down to play for a few minutes. But this is really more of an ambient track so you hear the room as much as the music, making it sort of like an installation art piece that you can only hear and infer what else is in that space. There’s vague traces of violin, non-musical sounds made by the body as the instrument is played, some hint of weather outside. A minute and a half in there’s a sudden burst of layered vocals that brightens the sound considerably and adds implied depth as it sounds like it’s in “focus” while everything before it and around it is considerably hazier.
September 15th, 2023 4:49pm
Laufey is at the center of an interesting musical venn diagram – a songwriter and performer with roots in classical who mainly writes jazz vocal song with the lyrical POV of a contemporary indie singer-songwriter. “California and Me” is a song at the dead center of that diagram, a jazz ballad with old Hollywood orchestration and a vocal that laments the end of a situationship with great sadness but also a little humor in the more clever lines. I admire the elegance of her craft, she’s so precise and economical and she tugs on a listener’s heartstrings in a way that’s very gentle but highly effective. “California and Me” is calibrated to make you feel the exact flavor of loneliness she’s feeling, but it’s nuanced enough to get that as sad as she is about feeling left alone part of her feels optimistic about whatever may come her way in the wake of this. Close a door, open a window…
September 13th, 2023 8:57pm
The characters populating the lyrics of Electric Six songs are mostly creeps, rubes, charlatans, and losers. In this respect they’re like a Steely Dan for the 21st century, but with the noble and romantic loser archetype replaced by a more pathetic and deeply uncool version. “Born to Be Ridiculed” is from the POV of one of those guys, a hapless fool who’s come to realize they can’t avoid putting themselves in situations that bring them humiliation and/or the disdain of strangers. But as far as E6 characters go, this guy isn’t that bad and the appeal of the song is how the rockabilly energy of the music and Dick Valentine’s vocal performance make him seem very accepting of his fate. He sounds like he’s owning it. He sounds like he’s almost unafraid.
September 12th, 2023 6:58pm
DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s new album Destiny is an incredibly bold body of work, even beyond its epic but somehow not entirely exhausting four hour run time. The general tone and structure of the record is similar to the luxurious party vibe of The Avalanches’ classic Since I Left You, but with most of the nostalgia-button-smashing musical references and textures coming from about 1997 through 2002. (That Avalanches album came out in 2001, so it’s one more reference to the era.)
Destiny sounds like a paradise constructed specifically for people born between 1978 and 1985; an older Millennial’s imaginary world in which 9/11 never happened and the later Clinton-era boom years extended into infinity. It’s also like having your brain flooded with a thousand happy memories at once, overlapping and bleeding into one incomprehensible but ecstatic song. “Honey” is basically the overture of Destiny, establishing the tonal palette, musical themes, and general ironic-yet-entirely-earnest sensibility of the record within eight minutes. It also acclimates your ear to Sabrina’s skill for building dense layers of sounds, often to such an extent that the music becomes overwhelming and it feels a bit like you’re listening to four different songs at once that share the same beat.
September 8th, 2023 3:06pm
“Spring Bug” is obviously about the spring, but the idea in this song – being excited about a change of seasons at least partly for nostalgic reasons, and reconnecting with older versions of oneself by reenacting favorite experiences – is applicable to all the seasons. If anything, in we tend to think about this with regards to summer and autumn with music, so Helena Deland is sticking up for an underrated part of the calendar. Underrated, maybe, but definitely the most symbolically rich as a period of rejuvenation. The tension in this gentle and easygoing song seems mainly in the contradiction of feeling reborn but running into previous selves. The past doesn’t die as you keep living, but it might ask to sit down next to you for a few minutes on a park bench while you look out at budding flowers.
September 7th, 2023 8:45pm
There’s never been a shortage of guys trying to be Bruce Springsteen at any point in my time on this planet. Zach Bryan is one of the only singer-songwriters I’ve ever heard who’s stepped into the Boss’ zone and possesses the charisma, energy, and songwriting craft to not just pull it off but find their own voice in this lane. “Fear and Friday’s” is one of Bryan’s most overtly Springsteen-esque songs but I feel like the Bruce-ness of it is mostly in the melody and delivery of the chorus.
That’s the part of the song that really gets to me. Bryan is singing about a relationship with a very fickle woman who’s clearly nowhere near as invested in him as he is in her. “I got a fear, dear, that it’s gonna end,” he sings, displaying an earnest vulnerability that’s not whiney or needy or acting like he’s owed something. When the chorus ends on “you only love me like you mean it when it’s after dark,” it’s not some petulant Drake burn. He sounds like a guy who’s quite happy for that after dark hook-up, but disappointed that it probably can’t be more because he wants to give more.
Bryan’s new album opens with another song called “Fear and Friday’s (Poem)” that doesn’t have a lot to do with this song besides providing a bit of context for the shared title: “I think fear and Fridays got an awful lot in common, they’re overdone and glorified and they always leave you wanting.” In other words, like another great songwriter once sang: “Don’t expect, don’t expect, don’t expect, don’t expect.”
September 6th, 2023 7:17pm
“No Way” sounds immediately familiar, as though it’s a song I’ve known for 20+ years but haven’t heard in about 17 years. It’s brand new, but the “it all comes rushing back” happens anyway. I’m not sure what song or songs I’m trying to remember. Is it a particular chord change, something specific about the guitar tone, something about how it swings from loose and casual to emphatic and cathartic? The Ratboys are working firmly within genre here – indie rock with a little alt-country flair – so this kind of mild deja vu is par for the course. The charm of “No Way,” and certainly what makes it interesting beyond mere recognition, is in how the band sound very excited to have written this kind of song. A song this catchy, a song this easy to click into emotionally, a song that sounds like it’d be fun to play for an audience who knows the words to the chorus. It’s a song that approaches a breakup from two valid positions at once, gracefully moving from befuddled shrug to bold declaration that this sort of thing won’t happen again, or at least with them.
September 4th, 2023 3:43pm
BabyMINT are a Tawainese girl group spinning out of a idol competition show called Next Girlz, and they have made one of the most aggressively weird pop singles I’ve encountered in a while. “Hellokittybalahcurrihellokitty美味しい” combines extremely twee girly energy with K-pop maximalism and an AG Cook/Sophie flavor of hyperpop, resulting in something adorably berserk. The song begins with an interactive challenge in which the song speeds up every measure, but then it bounces around between different high energy modes like the song itself is daring you to keep up with it. It’s kind of a stunt song, but it holds together amazingly well and the novelty does not wear off much after repeat listens.
August 31st, 2023 3:46pm
“Cadillac (A Pimp’s Anthem)” is essentially an answer record, with Victoria Monét claiming the classic pimp trope for women in a way that’s aspirational for some of the audience and affirming for the rest. This is a clever enough high concept, but the magic is in how effortlessly Monét fits into this mode, this mood, this whole motif. Her voice sounds great paired with that dank and slinky bass line, which is generic enough to indirectly reference a lot of funk and rap classics but to my ear is most directly evocative of Outkast’s “SpottieOttieDopalicious.” It’s sort of like musical cosplay but it really flatters everything about her voice and taste in melody, and it embraces fantasy enough that a line like “we women been winning since from the beginning of your whole life” rings true in this context even if in real life it’s kind of a… debatable notion.
August 30th, 2023 6:09pm
“Dark Dancing” is a demo that Fievel Is Glauque decided to release as-is rather than fully flesh it out, and I think that was a wise decision in that this recording captures something I find distinct and interesting about them. That is, they write these sophisticated little songs steeped in jazz and mid-20th century adult-oriented pop but perform them very loose and off-the-cuff, which ends up highlighting their eccentricity and adding a touch of rawness and naivete that would typically be lost in a type of music dominated by slick professionals. There’s a twitchiness to their music too, particularly in Ma Clément’s vocal cadences. “Dark Dancing” has a lovely melody but the notes bunch up in odd ways, often moving a bit diagonal from where you think they’ll go. This approach could be abrasive, but for the most part it’s not, as Clément’s cool and calm voice makes every move seem totally rational.
