October 8th, 2009 8:23am
Rebekah Raa sets up romantic ideas and then knocks them down as she attempts to reconcile the difference between idealized, dramatic love and the relationship she knows in real life. It’s not that she’s totally disappointed by her experience — it’s pretty clear that she appreciates moments of genuine, spontaneous connection — but it certainly seems that she is concerned that she and her partner are not invested enough in what they have and are simply killing time together. The sound of the song is appropriate to the subject matter: Relaxed and comfortable, but with a creeping restlessness and agitation that is never resolved.
October 7th, 2009 6:44am
Instead of thinking “Wow, Dizzee Rascal did a song with Armand Van Heldnen, how weird?,” why not come away from this track with the thought “Why isn’t Armand Van Helden doing more rap records?” While it is true that not every MC feels at home in dance music as Dizzee — his high water mark remains “Lucky Star” with Basement Jaxx — there are plenty others who would shine in this context, and sure the world could do with more of music of this variety, right? Van Helden and Dizzee both do their respective things on “Bonkers,” and without even really meeting each other halfway, they snap together perfectly. The song is a good time, but at its core Van Helden’s track and Dizzee’s vocal are stressed-out and manic, and the piece gets its weight and punch from the way the negative feelings clash with the goofy bits.
October 6th, 2009 8:36am
I’m not sure what song Think About Life are sampling here, but I love it, and greatly enjoy the effect of including a sped-up soul sample in a non-rap context. I’m not totally sure what kind of song this is, actually, but it’s a glorious, groovy musical mutant. There’s a wonderful optimism in the sound of this, this passion and desire that spits in the face of obstacles and pessimism, and dares to keep pushing higher and higher. Some songs bring the sunlight, and this one is a bit like someone grabbing the sun and tossing it at your head.
October 5th, 2009 9:09am
Would so many kids be willing to embrace nerdiness — at least on a superficial level — if “brain” was not a slang term for blowjobs? Who knows, but I love it. “Dorkin'” is about dancing and receiving oral sex, but it feels genuinely dorky. Part of that comes from the unapologetic poppiness of the track, but it is mostly conveyed by the vocal style, which comes off like a grinning, not-quite-wholesome version of the Clipse. When Stakk Money says “I get so much brain it don’t even make sense” in the chorus, he actually sounds a tiny bit surprised by his good fortune. Normally this would just be empty bragging from an overprivileged alpha male, and it still basically is, but something about this guy makes me think “Wow, good for you, kid!”
This may be a case of writing what you know. Mi$Z spends the entire track discussing her fashion aesthetic, and the ways her over-the-top cuteness and style influence the men and women in her social circles. It’s adorable. My favorite bit is when she boasts that she’s the reason trends begin, which feels so charming and honest. She may have a lot of reasons to be fashion-forward, but the one that comes through loud and clear in that moment is the desire for validation from her peers for her creativity and personality on her own terms.
October 2nd, 2009 8:35am
At about 2:34 in “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine,” you can hear my favorite bit of sonic detail in any song that I have encountered in recent months. Though I am open to the possibility that it could be some kind of synthesizer, it is very clearly the sound of cell phone interference. I know that distinct sound mainly from being in my friend’s car — it’s the noise made when signals from his iPhone disrupt the music on the stereo. It’s a very evocative thing to hear, in and out of context. It’s like a sudden headache made audible, and it imposes on you like an unwanted guest. It’s mundane, but also sort of otherworldly, and I’m sure that if you were to look at a visualization of the sound waves, it would appear unusually jagged yet boxy.
Like the rest of the songs on Embryonic, “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine” seems as if it were designed to simulate a bad trip, or an otherwise deeply uncomfortable state of being. The bass looms especially large, lurching along at a frequency that pulls up memories of nausea and cramping. The beats mostly stomp and crush, as if the drums were just the feet of some gigantic monster. Bits of treble fire off, like tiny synaptic lasers in a sci-fi gun battle somewhere deep in the brain. This may all seem unlistenable in print, but the songs themselves are marvels of paranoid psychedelia, and even the most overbearingly grim compositions have a cool, calm center and elements of beauty amid the darkness and murk. It’s ugly and even a bit depressing, but The Flaming Lips have created a fantastically vivid musical nightmare.
October 1st, 2009 8:55am
The bass is what pulls this song together, and it’s certainly what carries it along, but it’s not necessarily what draws my attention. I’m more interested in the piano chords that seem to pass through the composition like some kind of sad, drunk apparition, and the way the drum fills seem overly stiff in contrast with the fluid grace of the bass parts. Sarah Assbring is singing about a crumbling, failed long term relationship and it makes sense in this context — the music feels exactly like the strange emotional space of a consistent, comforting pattern that has been gradually ruined by ongoing bitter conflicts.
September 30th, 2009 9:22am
There is a generosity in the very sound of Erlend Øye’s voice, but it’s understated and rather matter-of-fact so he always comes off as a sweet, romantic diplomat. That’s certainly the role he plays in “Mrs. Cold,” a sparse, gentle ballad in which he negotiates a conflict with a lover who is putting up a chilly, defensive front. There are lines that could seem condescending in another context, but Øye delivers them without any trace of ill will, and a clear respect for the person he is addressing. He doesn’t back down from his point of view, but he seems open and willing to listen and forgive. Pop songs tend to favor a more hysterical and stubborn approach to relationship troubles, but I quite like and relate to this forthright yet mellow approach to communication.
September 29th, 2009 8:11am
Basement Jaxx are known euphoria merchants, but the best songs on their new album are melancholy, angst-ridden, and utterly lovesick. “My Turn” is a desperate plea for reconciliation that nevertheless retains the color and bump of a classic Jaxx production, if not the manic intensity. The up tempo elements are not at odds with the sentiment of the lyrics. Instead, the sound serves to highlight the optimistic, open-hearted love of the song’s protagonist, and make it abundantly clear how much he yearns to make things right. Maybe he’ll feel more crushed and hopeless later on, but in this moment, he is still convinced that there’s still a chance for all of this to work out, despite the complication and frustrations. It’s very sweet.
September 28th, 2009 8:00am
Phoenix @ Central Park 9/26/2009
Lisztomania / Long Distance Call / Lasso / Run Run Run / Fences / Girlfriend / Armistice / Love Like A Sunset parts 1 and 2 / Too Young / Rally / Consolation Prizes / Rome / Funky Squaredance // Everything Is Everything / Playground Love / If I Ever Feel Better / 1901
I will try to be very polite about this: Based on the turnout for this show, it is safe to say that Phoenix is officially a mainstream band now.
I have not seen them perform since they were touring for Alphabetical. Aside from the shift in fan demographics, the major difference between then and now is that they’ve loosened up a bit. They’re still slick and professional, but their show feels more spontaneous and “rock” now, which goes along with their general change of direction and emphasis. (Well, also, they stopped throwing baguettes into the crowd. Tough economy for everyone these days, I guess.) This was a fun set, and the audience was certainly enthusiastic for the material from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, but I felt a bit removed from the experience, despite having a lot of emotional energy invested in some of these songs. Let’s just blame this on my head being elsewhere, and that I happened to be surrounded by some very obnoxious audience members. The band certainly put their hearts into it.
The lyrics of “Rome” read like an interior monologue with minimal context, but there’s more than enough there to suggest potent waves of doubt, jealousy, regret, and nostalgia. It is so bittersweet, especially in the way it suggests that as much as it is clear that the romance is over, it will be impossible to fully extricate himself from this person. It’s your fault, it’s their fault, it’s someone else’s fault, it’s just the way it goes. At least the song can find the beauty in feeling so defeated.
September 24th, 2009 8:59am
Love as an adventure, love as a struggle, love as a triumph over loneliness, insecurity, and mathematical probability. “Explorers of the Heart” celebrates all of this, and its form mirrors the arc — doubtful, melancholy verses building up to a chorus that bursts with a hard-won joy. Some songs shoot for euphoria, but that isn’t quite what’s going on here. Instead, you get the sense that as incredibly happy the singer may be, she also is a bit exhausted, and more than a little amazed that she managed to beat the odds and win despite all the obstacles and adversity.
September 23rd, 2009 9:51am
Some singers rely on lyrics that convey their meaning with directness and precision, but Yukimi Nagano is the type to let her words roughly sketch out a feeling that she embellishes with her voice. This approach puts more faith in the unique effects of music — you could say what you need to say if you have to, but singing can successfully communicate nuances that writing and conversation will typically fail. “A New” is not exactly inscrutable, but you can better intuit the connections between Nagano’s lines, and sense her wonder and confusion as everything she understood about someone is upended, and she attempts to sort it out. Are things better? Are things worse? Has nothing actually changed? It’s hard to say, but I’m sure that she doesn’t know, and that’s the point.
September 22nd, 2009 9:46am
“Fallen Over” is the latest in a slow trickle of solo singles from Rose Elinor Dougall, and each song has proven the former Pipette to not only have a great knack for propulsive, melancholy pop, but also a great skill in penning vivid, disarmingly straightforward lyrics about romance. There’s a trace of Morrissey in the melody of this number, but Dougall isn’t going for dark wit, and her self-deprecation is mainly in the interest of expressing earnest desire. Despite the fact that this is a song about the clumsiness of two people falling in love, the music is glorious and graceful, underscoring a confidence and faith the singer won’t admit in her words.
September 21st, 2009 7:54am
There’s something in the Victorian English Gentlemens Club’s music that makes me want to indulge in mischief. Their songs are frantic and dynamic, but also focused and direct, evoking the buzz of paranoia and the thrill of transgression. On top of that, the group vocals tend to imply a feeling of camaraderie, as if you’re just part of a jolly crew of kids up to no good, desperately seeking fun in a boring, stifling world. “Bored In Belgium” is explicitly about escaping a dull existence, attempting to find relief and release, and though it’s unclear whether that is entirely possible, the song itself is certainly an amazing catharsis.
September 17th, 2009 4:23am
of Montreal @ Santos Party House 9/16/2009
Set #1: Mingusings / Suffer For Fashion / Sink The Seine / Cato As A Pun / Forecast Fascist Future / Requiem For OMM2 / Rapture Rapes The Muses / Id Engager / Faberge Falls For Shuggie / For Our Elegant Caste / Touched Something’s Hollow / An Eluardian Instance / Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse / The Past Is A Grotesque Animal Set #2: We Were Born The Mutants Again With Leafling / Bunny Ain’t No Kind Of Rider / Beware Our Nubile Miscreants / My British Tour Diary / She’s A Rejecter / Love Hangover (with Solange) / Heat Wave (with Solange) / Oslo In The Summertime / Anderson Cooper 360 chant –> very long jam including bits of Sweet Child O Mine, Suffragette City, Daytripper, She’s Like The Wind, Footloose, and Don’t Let Me Down
These are the setlists from the stage. As you can see, the band deviated significantly from their plan for the second set of the night.
This was not a public show, but rather a Fashion Week event put on by various sponsors. As such, I think the band was in an odd mood, and far more inclined to fuck around than they would be at a show full of paying fans. The first set was fun but certainly not the band at full power, and I don’t blame them — they were performing for a crowded room mainly comprised of people with minimal investment in their music. There were excellent moments — “Grotesque Animal” was particularly unhinged — but overall, the quality of the songs trumped the pleasure of the actual performances. By the time the band came out for a second set, Kevin Barnes was clearly pretty far gone for whatever reason, and basically seemed insane for the remainder of the evening. “Bunny…” was a total trainwreck, albeit in an amusing way, and from there on, the performance became increasingly odd and loose until the group surrendered to their impulses and basically just jammed out on classic rock nonsense while Barnes’ wife and her friends writhed around onstage. It was wildly indulgent, and totally hilarious. Also, uh, Solange showed up for a while there. Huh.
September 16th, 2009 9:20am
The chorus of “I’m The Police” ends with an admission: “I want to control the way that she feels.” Leone is singing from the perspective of someone in the middle of a protracted fight with a long term partner, and he’s trying to run out the clock on her anger and get back in her good graces. The thing is, he’s only deluding himself into thinking that he has any control over her — he’s not wrong to back away and let her be upset, but all the same, he’s not being nearly active enough in the situation to be remotely manipulative. Even if your intentions are good, any attempt at controlling another person is going to end up in folly, and most likely the other person feeling terribly insulted once they suss out your motives. This isn’t lost in the song. There’s a great deal of levity in Leone’s arrangement, which at once makes it clear that this situation is more of a spat than anything horribly serious, and sells the right tone for his hapless yet well-meaning protagonist.
September 15th, 2009 8:07am
The original version of “Guys Eyes” from Merriweather Post Pavilion is glowing and lush, just gushing with optimism and goodwill as its vocals overlap in and out of phase like a Beach Boys harmony re-arranged by Steve Reich. This alternate solo arrangement by Panda Bear has a very different feeling, and flips the mood of the song without altering its essential sentiment. If anything, Panda is offering a different perspective — whereas the album recording comes off like a person deciding to accept the love and pleasure in his life, this take seems more like a man yearning for connections that elude him. Both versions come from an open and loving heart, but the solo arrangement sounds so….solo. Lonely, melancholy, confined to a wide empty space. He keeps singing about what he wants, and while all that seemed well within grasp in the Animal Collective recording, that mantra in this performance just sounds like painful, thwarted, impossible desire.
September 14th, 2009 8:40am
Wild Beasts @ Union Pool 9/11/2009
This Is Our Lot / All The King’s Men / The Devil’s Crayon / We Still Got The Taste Dancing On Our Tongues / The Fun Powder Plot / His Grinning Skull / Please Sir / Hooting and Hollering / Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants / The Empty Nest
I’ve been listening to the Wild Beasts for a few years now and in that time I had focused so much of my attention on the vocals that it never occurred to me just how much they emphasized their rhythm section in their compositions. This is very hard to miss when watching them in concert. For one thing, their drummer is just astounding — he’s freakishly nimble and highly adept at playing detailed rhythm patterns without calling attention to himself or distracting from the melodies. In most cases, the lead singer of a selection is the one playing the bass, which serves as the primary instrument, unlike most rock bands, for whom that instrument would most certainly be a rhythm guitar. This leads me to believe that the songs are being written from the bass up, which could explain both their melodic richness, and their taste for leaving a lot of open space in their arrangements to place an emphasis on the low end.
I cannot recommend seeing this band in concert strongly enough. As wonderful as the songs are on record, I don’t think you get the full idea of their character or a full sense of their level of craft as musicians. Their set is both unambiguously fun and heart-meltingly lovely, and I find that this combination of silly and romantic is quite hard to come by. Also, it’s worth noting that the singers look exactly as you’d want them to: Hayden Thorpe has a shabby, roguish affect that suits his hobo-with-the-voice-of-an-opera-diva style, and Tom Fleming — the guy with the deep, heroic tone — looks like he should be riding around on a horse in a suit of armor.
September 11th, 2009 10:36am
We can easily identify the big emotions, the primary colors of feeling. But just as we mostly see the world in impure shades and hues, we mostly experience emotion as odd hybrid syndromes of thoughts, feelings, and motivations. We’re often overcome by mixtures of sensations that are incredibly difficult to catalog and process, and I think to a large extent, this is why we make and appreciate art, particularly music — it’s perhaps our best way of articulating and understanding so many of the emotional experiences that go beyond our regular vocabulary. In the case of this Volcano Choir song, I would be very hard pressed to tell you exactly what this mood is, or what it means, but I hear it and recognize it, and can go to that place by hearing it. Not even a specific feeling, but the movement from one state to another, and knowing that sequence but not exactly the context for it. This is wonderfully articulate music, but at the same time, totally inscrutable and undefined. If a lot of music can be taken as stylized representation, this seems more like an abstracted realism where we are so close up that we can hardly suss out the subject of representation.
September 10th, 2009 8:38am
When I listen to Le Loup’s new album, which is stylistically quite different from their far bleepier debut, I have little doubt that the Animal Collective — and specifically the Person Pitch album — have had a large impact on how these artists are approaching their music. It’s not a rip-off, and there are plenty of ideas to their own credit, but the sensibility with regards to rhythm, tone, texture, harmony, and mood is unmistakably of a piece with the Avey Tare and Panda Bear aesthetic. This is by no means a complaint or a slight on Le Loup — these are good ideas to run with, and they take them in different, usually more conventional places. The group have become much better with melody, and even better at placing lovely, semi-familiar tunes in misty, lightly kinetic arrangements that evoke a light-headed state of mind somewhere between inscrutable, unquestioned happiness and inexplicable, ineffable melancholy. “Beach Town” skews closer to the latter extreme, but the general tone of the record is evident: Feeling overcome by emotions you can hardly comprehend, and trying to process them without thinking your way out of the sensation.
September 9th, 2009 7:40am
1. If you’ve never been very ill or known someone who has struggled with a serious illness or injury, it can seem a bit facile when you hear people say that someone going through something like that is very brave. It sounds like a cheap platitude — and sometimes it is — and from a distance, their “struggle” looks a lot like passivity. The thing is, the bravery isn’t in taking medication, or going through physical therapy or whatever treatment is being prescribed, but rather in being forced to reckon with your mortality, and seriously consider your faith in science and religion. It’s in coping, and finding the strength to fight, or the courage to give up. That’s what “Hope” is about.
Michael Stipe sings most of the song in the second person, but nearly every line describes what he understands to be going on inside his friend’s mind, which is not necessarily the same thing as that person’s interior monologue. The only time when he speaks for himself is when he admits to feeling powerless and confused — every other moment finds Stipe marveling at the bravery of his friend. I don’t think there’s another character in the entire R.E.M. songbook that Michael sounds more in awe of than the person he’s singing about in “Hope.”
2. Sometimes I wonder how much better things would’ve been if “Hope” was less of an experiment for R.E.M., and was instead the template of their post-Bill Berry sound. Sure, other songs on Up nudge in a similar quasi-electronic direction — “Falls To Climb,” “Airportman,” and “Parakeet” come to mind — but “Hope” is the most elaborate and sophisticated by far. The arrangement is a carefully composed array of rhythms, melodies, and textures that swirl around Michael’s steady vocal performance, an interpolation of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” The constant movement is necessary in keeping the track from feeling too repetitive and samey, but also in achieving the song’s sense of calm in the midst of uncertainty. “Hope” has a certain boldness to its sound, but its beauty comes in the subtle touches — a stray piano line, a buried acoustic guitar strum, a turn of phrase, the stunned empathy in Michael’s voice. It’s one of the most impressive compositions of the band’s career, and perhaps the single best argument in favor of the group carrying on as a trio following the departure of Berry.
3. I’m not going to front: I still get a little bit excited when I hear Michael sing my name in this song. (”They did the same to Matthew / and he bled ’til Sunday night.”) I can’t remember too many specifics, but I think it may have actually been a key influence in terms of my decision to phase out calling myself “Matt” in favor of my full given name. (Well, that and the fact that “Matt” doesn’t exactly suit me.)
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