Thunderheist “Sweet 16”

“Sweet 16” is a song about a teenage girl who finds her way into a nightclub, but it’s rapped from the perspective of a slightly older woman. It’s hard to get a read on how that woman feels about the girl — at various points throughout the song, she seems dismissive, competitive, appreciative, and nostalgic, because you know, maybe she did the same thing at that age. It’s a surprisingly nuanced character sketch in a song that hardly requires that sort of detail, as its steady thumping bassline and Pavlovian dancefloor triggers (disco string hits, synth sirens, electronic claps) are powerful enough to rattle a body into involuntary movement when played at a sufficiently loud volume.

Buy it from Turntable Lab.

Cymbals Eat Guitars “And The Hazy Sea”

The most obvious thing about Cymbals Eat Guitars is that their epic, widescreen indie rock bears a striking resemblance to that of Built To Spill and early Modest Mouse. The most impressive thing about them, however, is just how comfortable they sound playing around with a sound those bands defined on albums like The Lonesome Crowded West and Keep It Like A Secret. This isn’t just a case of some young band wearing their influences on their sleeves, and offering up a lesser version of their favorite records — these are strong, creative players stretching out and finding their own niche within a rich yet largely unmined aesthetic territory. The band use more or less the same musical palette and techniques to convey scope and sprawl, but they navigate the suggested space differently. Whereas Modest Mouse simulated the feeling of driving down endless interstates and Built To Spill express the inner life of an introvert on a monumental scale, Cymbals Eat Guitars’ songs tend to be more dramatically volatile, and move like the tides of a vast ocean of emotion.

“And The Hazy Sea,” the opening track on their debut album Why There Are Mountains, elegantly transitions from moments of screaming intensity and gentle, placid movements marked by shimmering guitar leads, fluid bass grooves, and tinkling keyboards. The composition is all drift and sudden catharsis, but despite its odd shape, the piece overflows with melodic flourish. The keyboard parts are particularly lovely in the way they seem to sparkle like sunshine on the ocean, and clever in that they offer melodic counterpoint without cluttering the song with redundant timbre and texture a la the guitar overdub overkill of Built To Spill.

Buy it from iTunes.

Jenny Wilson “The Wooden Chair”

As much as “The Wooden Chair” slinks and throbs, the composition nevertheless evokes a feeling of being confined within a tight space, either physically or emotionally. The arrangement is sparse and immaculate, focused almost entirely on a shifting array of simple rhythmic motifs that move around Wilson’s vocal melody, giving her ample negative space to fill with subtle yet highly evocative phrasing. The lyrics mirror the claustrophobic sensation of the track, suggesting a desire to get away from a messy emotional situation, but also a sense of inexplicable immobilization. The frustration peaks on the chorus, which feels about as cathartic as a song can get while still conveying confusion and indecision.

Buy the single from Amazon, buy the album from Dotshop.

Apollo Ghosts “Ghost, Get Out Of My Apartment”

Though it comes as no surprise that a song about a guy bitching out a passive-aggressive, voyeuristic apparition would be more than a little goofy, it is something of a revelation that it would also be quite tender and moving. Even when paired with a sad, creaky guitar part that sounds as though it was lifted from some almost-familiar record from 50 years ago, the singer’s silliness on the verses doesn’t quite prepare you for the sweetness and aching sincerity in his voice on the chorus, which soars just when you expect him to go flat and understated. The genuine, slightly pained emoting opens the song up a bit, and draws out its subtext — sure, he could be going for the literal here, but it seems a bit more plausible that the ghosts haunting the singer are more along the lines of unpleasant memories and emotional baggage from his past.

Listen to the entire album on the MBV site, and then buy it directly from the band.

Apollo Ghosts “Ghost, Get Out Of My Apartment”

Though it comes as no surprise that a song about a guy bitching out a passive-aggressive, voyeuristic apparition would be more than a little goofy, it is something of a revelation that it would also be quite tender and moving. Even when paired with a sad, creaky guitar part that sounds as though it was lifted from some almost-familiar record from 50 years ago, the singer’s silliness on the verses doesn’t quite prepare you for the sweetness and aching sincerity in his voice on the chorus, which soars just when you expect him to go flat and understated. The genuine, slightly pained emoting opens the song up a bit, and draws out its subtext — sure, he could be going for the literal here, but it seems a bit more plausible that the ghosts haunting the singer are more along the lines of unpleasant memories and emotional baggage from his past.

Listen to the entire album on the MBV site, and then buy it directly from the band.

Shout Out Out Out Out “Guilt Trips Sink Ships”

I wonder if there is a cultural reason why so much of the music that is fashionable today features vocals that have been obviously treated with studio effects, often severe enough to transform the natural sound of the performer. Perhaps many of us relate to the subtext of a person burying their identity, or altering it in a way to become more acceptable to others. Maybe it’s to do with how we have the option of living much of our lives in a mediate state, in which we are offered the opportunity to construct our identities as we please on the internet and in games. Either way, it’s difficult for me to hear things like severe autotune, vocoder, or extreme reverb applied to the human voice without thinking that the singer is trying to hide and/or become someone or something else.

Shout Out Out Out Out, a synth-funk band from Edmonton, use what sounds like a vocoder on a majority of their songs. In context, it seems rather matter of fact, as though the band have hired a big clunky sci-fi robot as their lead singer. In using this effect, the group draw on a long history of robo-voices in electronic dance music, but whereas this sound can often feel harsh and cold, their digital voice is mellow, soft, and relatively warm. As “Guilt Trips Sink Ships” unfolds and builds toward a series of ecstatic crests, the robotic voice manages to feel both precise and cheerful, emphasizing the composition’s feeling of relaxed bliss.

Visit the Shout Out Out Out Out website.

Dianne & Carole “Feelin’ The Pain”

“Feelin’ The Pain” is a pained soul ballad, but it’d be hard to pick up on that if you tuned out the vocals and only paid attention to the rhythm section. The melody is plaintive, but the beat is all busy Latin funk, with groovy bass parts lifting the listener out of the sad bits and into an up-tempo fanfare that shifts the song’s self-pitying melancholy into a sort of ecstatic melodrama. I’m especially fond of the organ sound on this thing, and the way it melts into the strings, horns, and percussion to get this perfect, brilliant musical and emotional tone.

Buy it from Amazon.

Electric Six “Lovers Beware”

“Lovers Beware” begins as a tale of banal office romance, but its narrative rapidly escalates until it becomes a hysterical, paranoid nightmare about a corporation hell bent on driving them apart, even if it means murdering the male half of the couple. In a traditional romantic tragedy, family would the institution standing in the way of love, but it makes sense that in modern life it would more likely be a supremely unforgiving human resources department enforcing a faceless company’s elaborate, restrictive rules of conduct. The song itself is a turbo-charged rock ballad with a fist-pumping chorus, and a lead vocal from Dick Valentine that acknowledges the silliness of his premise while selling its tragedy with genuine conviction.

Buy it from Amazon. Also, wow, look over here.

The Traveling Inner Lights “Let’s Have A Family Prayer”

I’ll be honest with you, I’m not the type of person to get excited about the prospect of a “family prayer.” Nevertheless, upon hearing this amazing live recording of the Traveling Inner Lights from 1961, the concept suddenly became a LOT more appealing. The band sound exceptionally warm and joyous on this song, and as the group settles into a brisk vamp, the gravel-voiced lead singer becomes increasingly unhinged in his ecstatic exhortations to worship his lord and savior. There’s something especially mesmerizing about the vamp section — it almost sounds as though they are emulating the sound of a skipping record, with the vocal harmony and guitar rhythm settling into a very tight groove. It’d be very interesting to hear some modern acts play around with this sort of arrangement and performance, while not necessarily while working in the gospel genre.

Buy the Art of Field Recordings Volume II from Dust-to-Digital Records.

Lady Sovereign “So Human”

Around the time this blog began, there were a lot of dancehall acts making amazing new songs out of the “Cure Riddim,” which was basically just a slightly modified version of the Cure’s “Close To Me.” On the other end of this decade, Lady Sovereign has released her own variation on the track, further proving its remarkable malleability. However, unlike Ce’cile and Tanya Stephens, both of whom virtually ignored everything from “Close To Me” aside from the sound of the music itself, Lady Sov integrates bits of Robert Smith’s lyrics into her verses, making it feel a bit like a cover at some points. The melancholy tone of the original also affects her lyrics and vocals, making her come off significantly more introspective, defensive, and low-key than she did on her earlier records.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

The Lonely Island “Incredibad”

Well, it looks like the best Beastie Boys song in eleven years was outsourced to three dudes from SNL. Stranger things have certainly happened, like, for example, when those same three comedians lost their virginity simultaneously to a guy from Mars.

Buy it from Amazon.

Kylie Minogue “Boombox (LA Riots Remix)”

You know what’s weird? I don’t think twice about Kylie singing about a boombox, but for some reason, when she sings the words “give me your cd,” that’s the thing that strikes me being somewhat anachronistic. I guess I’m just not used to hearing people romanticize cds in song just yet. Obviously, the lyrics of “Boombox” have a nostalgic quality, but not in a fuddy duddy sort of way. It’s essentially a song about wanting to hear new, exciting music, and desiring the immediacy of blasting it out of portable speakers. The music is very pumped-up and frenetic, even by Kylie remix standards — aside from a lovely, relatively mellow bridge, every other part of the song seems locked into a “maximum bounce” setting. There’s something sort of ruthless about this music, as if it’s just hell-bent on exhausting the listener with pleasure, but hey, that’s why we listen to Kylie in the first place, right?

Buy it from Amazon.

Broken Spindles “I’ve Never Been This Afraid”

The most striking thing about “I’ve Never Been This Afraid,” aside from the fact that it boasts a central guitar hook that sounds sorta like Keith Richards reinterpreting Tago Mago-era Can, is the way virtually everything in the song’s arrangement rings out with precise definition and clarity. Only the vocals seem to be in soft focus, but as far as rhythmically murmured and moaned vocals go, these are front and center, lucidly narrating the singer’s awareness of his own terror as the music articulates his emotional state as it gradually shifts into full-on panic.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Shortwave Set “Glitches ‘n’ Bugs”

It’s sort of an odd thing to hear a groovy, somewhat anthemic rock and roll song with a fairly positive attitude about illness and injury. The lyrics take a rather cold, abstract view of sickness that likens most maladies to the glitches and bugs in computers, i.e., the sort of unfortunate setbacks that can help to identify problems in the system, and force us to adapt or upgrade. Both vocalists are a bit dry and aloof, but they nevertheless convey an optimistic outlook, particularly as the chorus offers comforting words without a hint of condescension or false hope.

Buy it from Wall of Sound.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart “A Teenager In Love”

Let it be known that I don’t have the greatest affection or sentimentality for the twee indie-pop of the late 80s and early 90s. It was never my scene, and honestly, I kinda dislike most of it to this day, mainly for the crimes of being boring and amateurish. This is not to say that there aren’t songs and bands that I enjoy within the genre, or that I have ill will for fans of the music I don’t care about. In fact, the apparent intensity of the Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s devotion to the genre is part of what make their best tunes work: They care so much about the music that they love that they put in a great deal of effort to measure up to their heroes.

Whereas most other latter day acts working within the same aesthetic over-embrace the whole “I’m shy!” thing to the point that absolutely nothing in the music asserts itself properly, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart come off like a band that actively wants to sound great, if not actually be stellar musicians. The rhythm section lays down brisk beats while the guitars and keyboards glimmer and shine, effortlessly falling into the romantic shorthand of ’80s pop without seeming cheesy or overworked. In this comparatively confident context, the sweet, understated vocals achieve their desired effect, conveying character rather than laziness and apathy. Not all of the band’s songs are winners, but when they hit upon a good melody and rhythmic hook as in the sparkling “A Teenager In Love,” they not only pay tribute to the lovesick fey pop that they admire, but they also enter its canon.

Buy it from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Walk Into The Mirror”

“Walk Into The Mirror” is essentially a post-modern hippie song, but it is not especially snarky or ironic. Instead, the song finds Stephen Malkmus paying tribute to a particular strain of idealistic, optimistic, inclusive sort of rock and roll from the 60s, adapting its language to fit his own concerns, and engaging in a meta-commentary on hippie-dippy aesthetics in the present tense.

The tune starts off with a few lyrics that lay on the flower child vibe thick and heavy, but it’s an intentional cliché, and Malkmus trusts the listener to both recognize the affectation and take its sentiment at face value. Within a few lines, communal creation of music is compared to work songs and spirituals, but through a rather unpretentious allusion to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Only one line later, and the guy is flipping the rosy, nostalgic view of 60s rock established at the start of the song, and bringing up the fact that much of that music was about jilted love, which is of course the primary topic of all pop music.

There is no clear point to be made about the 60s in the song, aside from perhaps acknowledging that the varying conventional wisdom about the era and its music is shaped by hagiography, fiction, commercialism, and kneejerk bias. We definitely need to approach this sort of art with a bit of critical distance if just to avoid getting suckered into drinking Baby Boomer Kool-Aid, but I think the implied argument here is that it’s also okay to engage with this sort of earnest sentiment on its own terms. Its rhetoric still has use, not just on a philosophical level, but as a valid mode of expression in rock and roll.

As much as the verses toy with the idea of “the 60s,” the chorus comes across like an evergreen Malkmus-ism about an escape into the surreal. In context, the notion of walking into the mirror does have something of a hippie flavor, but I think that mostly comes down to the way the song foregrounds the roots of his own lyrical tics. Between the hopeful vibe of the melody and the assertive momentum of its beat, the question asked in the chorus has a very obvious answer: Don’t you want to walk into the mirror? Oh God, yes! I hardly know what it would entail, but I very much would like to walk into the mirror, thanks for asking.

Buy it from Bleep.

A couple months ago I got to interview Stephen Malkmus for Pitchfork, and after a bit of a wait, the feature has been published on the site. I’m very proud of how it came out, and I’m super grateful for the opportunity to do a nice long interview with my favorite musician. The conversation spans his entire career, from the beginning of Pavement on through his current work on the next Jicks album, with a particular focus on Brighten The Corners. We spent a fair chunk of the interview discussing his motives and methods in regards to the songs that never get properly finished, or get cut from the albums, which is something I had been wondering about as a fan for quite some time. If you’ve been curious as to why “Walk Into The Mirror” didn’t make it on to Real Emotional Trash, you’re in luck — I made a point of specifically asking about that song, and he gave a pretty good answer.

Thieves Like Us “Drugs In My Body”

“Drugs In My Body” sounds very young to me. Some of that comes through in the voice, which delivers a slightly impatient sing-song melody with a soft, boyish tone. The rest of it is in the wired thump of the arrangement, and the way it alternates between a restless though graceful groove, and just bouncing in place. The songs comes off like a young man’s earliest experiences with nightlife. He’s been at it just long enough to feel like he knows the rules, but he’s still sorta clueless in his pursuit of a girl, and ends up spending most of his time just wandering around, taking drugs, and distracting himself from whatever is on his mind. The music is effective mainly because it so perfectly captures our protagonist at a halfway point in his mind, right at the intersection of self-induced oblivion, and the awareness of what he’s doing, and what he’s trying to escape.

Buy it from Amazon.

N.A.S.A. featuring Kanye West, Lykke Li, and Santogold “Gifted”

One of the running themes of Joe Matt‘s comics is his obsession with crafting personalized porn videos by dubbing and editing his favorite scenes into a single tape designed to maximize his arousal. It’s very creepy, but certainly pragmatic in its way, and if you transpose the concept to pop music, you essentially have the blueprint for Girl Talk’s albums — no budget, guided by OCD impulses, and focused on efficiently producing nonstop pointless pleasure.

On the surface, N.A.S.A.’s The Spirit of Apollo seems to have a lot in common with Girl Talk. There’s a similar joy in the pile-up of familiar voices, and both acts share an interest in putting rock and pop artists into the context of well-known rappers and hip hop-centric beats. The taste overlaps quite a bit, but their methods are drastically different: If there is any real world analogue for N.A.S.A., it’s those fabulously wealthy Russian oligarchs who pay big name artists millions to perform at their private parties. Though the cavalcade of superstars on The Spirit Of Apollo mostly turn in good performances and the juxtaposition of certain artists can be inspired, it’s very hard to get away from the impression that the project is driven by much more than money, connections, and a vain desire to pack in as many top-drawer guests as possible, as if it were more of an awards show than a pop album.

“Gifted,” one of the album’s clear highlights, starts off with a strong though formulaic rap from Kanye West that matches the style of his verses from Graduation, and hits most of the same talking points from that period. Still, despite the nagging sense that we’re listening to a studio outtake, West’s charisma and instinct for simple, propulsive rhymes allows the song to build up enough momentum to allow Lykke Li to really glimmer and pop on the chorus. Santogold’s performance is neither here nor there, and so Li gets to dominate the track from the moment West disappears, which works out rather well given that the timbre of her voice nicely complements the particular synth tones in N.A.S.A.’s arrangement.

Buy it from Amazon.

Fight Like Apes “Jake Summers”

“I’m a simple man. I just want a band with synthesizer and girls yelling that sounds like McLusky. Is that so wrong?” – Mike Barthel, on Idolator yesterday.

No, it’s not wrong at all. In fact, upon hearing Fight Like Apes for the first time over this past weekend, it felt like I was getting a correct answer to a question I hadn’t even thought to have asked.

Fight Like Apes specialize in bold, urgent pop songs that lean hard on the propulsive dynamics of post-Pixies alt-rock while stripping out the guitars and replacing them with colorful synth textures. (In this way, they are more like Future of the Left, Andy Falkous and Jack Egglestone’s keyb-centric post-McLusky band, than McLusky proper.) To sweeten the deal, the band deliver strong hooks with a powerful oomph, and boast a lead singer who can neatly transition from yearning arena balladry to spunky, shouty bits and thrilling, wordless exclamations.

“Jake Summers,” a song seemingly penned about a character from a largely forgotten tv show by the creators of Saved By The Bell, covers a lot of territory in just under four minutes, careening from one thrill to another while barely calling attention to its odd, slightly asymmetrical structure. The lyrics are wonderful too, full of amusingly specific language with a particular focus on taste and scent. The band certainly get bonus points for writing a line as silly and damning as “You’re like Kentucky Fried Chicken, but without the taste!” and then making it one of the most fist-pumping moments in any song I’ve heard in the past few years.

Buy it from Fight Like Apes.

Dominique Leone “Tension”

Dominique Leone’s melodies tend to be rather playful and bouncy, but even when his tunes approach the manic energy of Max Tundra, his textures are slightly muted, and he sings in a way that suggests a relaxed, easygoing demeanor. This contrast is particularly effective in “Tension,” a song that deals with the ritualized anxieties and predictable mood swings within an established, functional relationship. From verse to chorus and instrumental interlude, the tone of the piece bounces from distress to resignation and restlessness, but there’s hardly a trace of anger or resentment. Sure, he sounds a bit pained with his voice pinched and compressed on the verses, but the warmth that comes through on the lively, rounded melody of the chorus makes it rather clear that this is a song coming from a place of patience and unconditional love.

Buy it from Amazon.

Franz Ferdinand “Lucid Dreams”

One of the running themes in Franz Ferdinand’s music is an awareness that music and the social culture around it can provide an valuable escape from the more dreary aspects of life, and that framework gives us the raw materials to reinvent ourselves and reshape the narrative of our lives. In other words, the band have been making a case that hedonism and imagination are essential coping mechanisms for dealing with life, and ought to be embraced lest we give in to boredom and horror.

“Lucid Dreams” takes the band’s themes — both conceptual and musical — to the furthest extreme of their career to date. The lyrics express a desire not only to fully escape reality, but to reshape it within the mind to something more like a utopia. Of course, there is a catch: The escape is fleeting, and the alternate reality is constructed by a flawed mind, and so the limits of one’s own awareness and the depths of one’s neuroses are imposed on the supposedly perfect world.

In terms of the musical arrangement, the structure of the song is like a flowchart of the band’s development, starting with a charming power pop introduction before leaning into a more intense variation on their standard dance-rock template, and then concluding with an electronic acid climax and resolution that pushes them into an uncharted territory of their aesthetic. In context, the transition into the electronic section — which, I should mention is rather similar to the trick LCD Soundsystem pulled in “Yeah” — has a way of signaling a slip into another state of mind, as if casting off the vestiges of rock music has taken the music to a more “pure” place that mirrors the utopia in the singer’s mind.

Buy it from Amazon.

Rivers Cuomo “My Brain Is Working Overtime”

Rivers Cuomo was a guest on Fresh Air with Terry Gross last week. It’s a very interesting interview. He’s very candid, and as strange as he can be, he comes off as being mostly quite unaffected and clear-headed. One thing that is apparent upon listening to him talk about all these different phases of his life and career is that he’s the kind of dude who feels compelled to take his every pursuit to a logical extreme. He seems to fundamentally reject the notion of doing anything halfway, and I greatly admire that about him, even when it leads to either creepy extremes in his personal life, or over-embracing the notion of democracy and collaboration to the point that it sidelines his own worthwhile efforts from Weezer albums in favor of less compositions by his band mates.

Anyway, one of the more interesting things for me came near the end of the interview, just after Terry plays a clip from “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived,” and slips up by referring to it as “The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived.” Cuomo is quick to correct her, noting that he intentionally made the title phrase grammatically incorrect because it “sings better.” He’s correct too — just try singing the song each way, and it becomes very clear that while “who” fits the meter, it does not sound as good, and the slight percussive sound from hitting the second t in “that” just feels better as the words form in your mouth.

The fact that Cuomo is very conscious of this sort of thing is telling, particularly in light of how simplistic his language has become in his later works. This isn’t to say that he was at any time especially clever or wordy, but more to highlight that especially on Make Believe, his lyrics seem designed to be as melodically aerodynamic as possible, often at the expense of anything that would be normally recognized as “good” writing.

I’m not clear on when “My Brain Is Working Overtime” was written, but it certainly seems to fit in with this type of thinking. The language is incredibly plain, and the focus of the writing is clearly placed on following the melody and expressing a simple, highly relatable sentiment. There is no poetry to this at all, but I do appreciate its economy, and emphasis on clarity. The words hardly matter, to be honest — all of the charm in the song comes through in its hooks, which may be somewhat familiar and predictable, but are nonetheless very well-crafted and enjoyable, like most quality Weezer tunes.

Buy it from Amazon.