March 16th, 2023 3:13pm
One thing I find very appealing about the resurgence of drum and bass ultra-fast beat programming is that in many cases the music being made has a very chill vibe, so bursts of frantic percussion either serve as a sharp contrast with everything else in the arrangement or an element that becomes chill despite itself. It makes sense to me as I’ve always felt this sort of percussion in an ASMR way, it sparks a sort of pleasing tingling sensation in my brain. It’s also like finding calm within chaos – the beats may come at breakneck speed, but there’s still a steadiness within it.
Nia Archives’ music seems like the result of a mission to seamlessly and cleverly work drum and bass programming into different types of songs, like a contestant on a cooking show tasked with being creative in their use of ingredients with seemingly limited utility. “Sunrise Beat Ur Head Against Tha Wall” does both of the things I described above – bursts of percussion drop in out of nowhere but the dynamic shift isn’t too jarring because they end up feeling just as meditative as the considerably more relaxed piano part or the warm, soothing quality of her voice. The contrasts are extreme, but the overall sensation is much closer to equilibrium than chaos.
March 15th, 2023 12:32pm
There are two aspects of “Lean Beef Patty” that I find striking and surprising – the first being the way JPEGMAFIA’s track has this very abrasive and frenetic IDM-ish sound that’s pretty close to the more accessible end of the Autechre catalog, and then how low he and Danny Brown’s voices are in the mix relative to the beats and keyboards. By the time Brown shows up on the track the keyboards are so loud he’s nearly drowned out, as though his voice is a secondary element in the composition like on a shoegaze record. This is a wild thing to do with a larger than life rapper like Brown, but then again you’d need someone with a bold voice like his to stand up to the chaotic volume and density of JPEGMAFIA’s track.
March 10th, 2023 12:36pm
The first verse of “Contact” describes hearing loud bass-heavy dance music at a party as a surreal experience, a pure and intense sensation that disrupts a sense of time. The music captures that feeling by nudging its 90s-style beat loop into slight distortion and filling out the mix with synthesizer parts that feel a bit eerie and detached, like you’re somehow hearing the beat up against the speakers but everything else is a room away. The sound suggests dissociation but Kelela’s vocal is very present and grounded as the song turns from describing the feeling of being at the party to trying to seduce someone who’s clearly too distracted by their loneliness and stress to surrender to the moment.
March 9th, 2023 1:14pm
“Impurities” is a love song, but more specifically it’s a song about feeling loved and learning to see yourself from the point of view of someone who adores you and accepts many things about yourself that you do not. Arlo Parks’ arrangement feels airy and dreamy, like she’s so dazzled by this moment and this feeling that she’s floating outside herself and finding a new awareness. Her vocal performance is calm and gentle, particularly in the refrain “I radiate like a star, like a star, like a star,” which is the most melodically satisfying part of the song and the point where she sounds most elated and self-assured.
March 8th, 2023 6:07pm
There’s an old Electric Six song I like a lot called “One Sick Puppy” with a bridge that goes like this: “Jesus was a guy who said some stuff long ago and he had a rich dad who wouldn’t chill or let him go.” “Messy In Heaven” starts from a similar premise with a killer opening line – “I heard Jesus did cocaine on a night out” – but takes the idea of a rich kid Jesus a lot more seriously, with enough space in the lyrics to portray him as a cokehead party boy, as a leader, as a miracle worker, and as a guy slowly destroyed by all the expectations people put on him. Venbee sings all of this with a mix of reverence and pity over a drum and bass track that includes a bit of plaintive acoustic guitar, much like the Roni Size classic “Brown Paper Bag.” You get the thrill of the club, you get the swallowed sorrow, you get some brief moments of uplift.
March 6th, 2023 9:42pm
“Late Now” sounds extremely early 90s to me without necessarily feeling like a retro thing, which is maybe just the result of taking a familiar kind of breakbeat loop and bass groove and rendering it with modern tools. It’s probably also to do with Shiv’s R&B approach to vocals that adds a richness and depth that wouldn’t quite be there if the same melody was sung by a white guy from Manchester, England. I love the way this song feels both casual and heavy at the same time, and the way Shiv mirrors that contradictory dynamic by singing in a tone that’s very emotionally engaged but also sort of dismissive, as though she’s acutely aware that this person dragging on her feelings doesn’t need to be that important. Not anymore, anyway.
March 3rd, 2023 2:50pm
“Superglue” does a nice trick of contrasting a very simple and obvious chorus about having a powerful crush with verses that put this pure ecstatic feeling in the context of guilt, economic status, and family dynamics. By the second time Coupdekat hits the chorus it sounds the same but feels much different, with lines about “I don’t know what to do” and “I’m stuck to you” seeming more helpless and frustrated than joyful or playful. The ambivalence carries through the rest of the song, with her sounding like she doesn’t quite know how to process any of this but fully invested in the thrill of it whether it turns out to be a good or bad thing.
March 2nd, 2023 3:13pm
“3 Boys” is a rather retro soul ballad with a more modern lyrical perspective as Omar Apollo sings about struggling to embrace non-monogamy because he’s so hung up on his feelings for Boyfriend #1 that he can’t really appreciate Boyfriends #2 and #3. I’m sure there are people who hear this and hate that this song is basically an ENM guy yearning for monogamy, but the conflict between logical pragmatism and raw emotion is what makes this so heartbreaking. He sounds so frustrated in every part of this situation, including the part where his actual desires conflict with having all the cake and eating it too. He can’t decide whether his feelings and attachment are an annoying inconvenience or the best thing he’s ever experienced.
February 28th, 2023 9:00pm
“Moonlight” doesn’t sound just like Kali Uchis’ breakthrough hit “Telepatia” but it seems pretty obvious that it was written as a next step from the vibe and sound established on that track. Benny Blanco and Cashmere Cat evoke a similar sort of stoned funk but nudge the mood into more overtly romantic territory. This is perfect for Uchis, who moves between a breathy and flirty tone on the chorus and a more bold and sultry tone on the verses. She reminds me a lot of Sade in those parts – self-possessed and sultry, but also keenly aware of how serious and complicated things can get between two people in love. This push and pull between romance as momentary pleasure and source of heavy drama is the core of this song. It’s about 80% laid back sexiness, 20% awareness that the stakes are high.
February 28th, 2023 2:25pm
I’m sure Damon Albarn recruited Bad Bunny for the same reasons he pulls any talented artist into a Gorillaz project – the promise of a fun collaboration, an interesting aesthetic combination, a new energy to pull into the Gorillaz universe. But there’s just no way he didn’t go into making this song knowing that the magnitude of Bad Bunny’s success on streaming was such that this song was almost guaranteed to become one of his most popular songs ever just because Bad Bunny showed up. This song doesn’t have to be all that good, it barely even has to work. But it does work, largely because Albarn’s taste in musical harmony diverges just enough from usual Bad Bunny productions to cast the rapper in a different light, and his Gorillaz-era mix of easy breezy vibes and understated but pervasive melancholy mixes well with Bunny’s blend of vulnerability and bravado. The lyrics center on a metaphor of the sun coming out during a storm, and a lot of what makes this click is they’re both a little bit sun and storm here.
February 23rd, 2023 2:43am
It’s amazing how shameless a lot of artists can be about directly emulating the fairly specific Tame Impala sound, but I never really mind because the songs are usually pretty good. Everything besides the chorus in Cuco’s “Best Disaster” sounds strikingly similar to Tame Impala, to the point I’m certain I would’ve been fooled if it had been presented to be as a new Tame tune. Those marks are nailed but it’s the deviation that makes this song work on Cuco’s terms. The song swings into ballad mode on the chorus and shifts focus to Cuco’s voice, which sounds love-dazed and extremely vulnerable, as though he’d be crushed if you told him “nah” after he sings “this could be your favorite song.” But he also sounds sweet enough that his subsequent invitation to “put the world on pause” and be “the best disaster” together is kinda convincing.
February 20th, 2023 7:00pm
“4am” sounds like it is haunted by the ghost of some half-remembered 80s pop song. Mike Paradinas gives us bits of vocal and keyboards that sound like another song bleeding through his own more modern composition, a bit like radio station signals overlapping. Or maybe it’s more like how beautiful vegetation can grow around broken machinery or architecture, something lovely merging with the form of some busted thing.
I love Skrillex for his energy and because his aesthetic is basically the music equivalent of dousing everything in hot sauce. “RATATA” spins an entirely new song out of a memorable bit of Missy Elliott’s classic “Work It,” which she flips into more of a dancehall toasting vibe to suit Skrillex’s frantic beat. Elliott isn’t a stranger to this kind of tempo but she sounds ferocious and unleashed by Skrillex’s track, like she’s just trying to match his enthusiasm level.
“Badman Sound” is an absolute beast of a track, a mutant bass house/dancehall hybrid built to push a room into frenzy mode. After listening to this many times over I realized my favorite bits were the drum parts that deviated from the thump – a drum fill that sounds like it’s yanked out of a rock record, and a snare build that sounds like 500 drumlines in unison.
February 17th, 2023 12:49pm
I think that if someone had played this for me and told me it was a coulda-been shoulda-been song from the late 90s or early 00s I would have believed it. Crushed are incredibly dialed into the adult contemporary by way of alt-rock aesthetics of that period, particularly in the quasi hip-hop drum programming, ostentatiously laid back bass line, and a clear, bold vocal performance that sounds like someone earnestly channeling Sarah McLachlan or the more restrained side of Alanis Morissette. This may be a pastiche but there’s no wink to it. This is real heart-on-sleeve stuff, a ballad about being given the chance to start again after a break up that embraces the “main character” grandeur of that feeling while being brought down to earth by the casual feel of the groove.
February 16th, 2023 5:21pm
“Don’t Let It Get to You” is built around a soft piano part that seems like an eternal loop of someone pausing and then stepping back, forever trapped in a pensive moment. It’s a song that seems to exist in the space between the aftermath of something and the start of some other, unknown new direction. Andy Shauf keeps the lyrics minimal, mostly setting up the POV of someone getting used to the notion that someone they knew would leave has left, and letting that piano part and occasional synthesizer buzzes carry the feeling of emptiness, light confusion, and vague relief. That buzzing sound is a particularly inspired part of the arrangement – it’s a sharp contrast with the acoustic guitar and piano, and makes the whole song feel more disoriented and lost.
February 15th, 2023 12:57pm
The first few times I heard this song with absolutely no context the lyric that jumped out to me was “everybody’s saying we’re in love for what that’s worth,” sung in a vague and inscrutable tone. Is this something that’s so self-evident that it’s boring? Is she unsure of the situation? Is everybody dead wrong? Does she feel any sort of way about this?
A bit later I read that this song was written from the perspective of an AI and I can see how this makes sense. Yuné Pinku’s lyrics sketch out a simulated consciousness that responds to stimuli and has some intentions and imperatives, but doesn’t have much else filling up the spaces between incoming data and pre-coded responses. The character experiences “fun” and “love” as facts and doesn’t interpret much beyond acknowledging “this is happening.” Pinku’s track is like a little dance club snowglobe the AI exists in, singing dance music clichés over the chorus and engaging with existential thoughts like “it’s fake to die, we’re all still alive” like they’re just logic puzzles.
February 9th, 2023 1:42pm
A lot of guitarists let their guitar speak for them in solos but everything Ira Kaplan gets out of his instrument in “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” is like the result of a brutal interrogation. He slaps, slams, batters, and scrapes the thing up. A lot of the sound is just impact, but then he starts to coax more coherent melodies out of the thing. All of this is in contrast with a sedate but slightly tense groove and a demure vocal performance that makes Kaplan’s playing seem all the more unhinged and violent. The overall effect is an odd mix of soothing and abrasive, and the chaos in the guitar becoming a pleasant or at least interesting localized sensation while everything else in the mix numbs you out. It’s thrilling music to zone out to. Yo La Tengo have existed for four decades and this has long been a part of Kaplan’s style but what they achieve here feels special and new, like different aspects of their sound were always on course to finally converge like this.
February 7th, 2023 11:31pm
Kimbra doesn’t work in a funk mode all the time but my favorite music she’s done is almost always in this lane. There’s a fair number of groovy songs on her new record A Reckoning but “LA Type” is the big funk number, louder and heavier than anything else around it. It reminds me a bit of Nikka Costa’s music from the very early 00s – glossy and a little twitchy, essentially a showcase for the biggest and sassiest aspects of her voice. There’s a lot of songs about not being into Los Angeles but I think the tone of this song makes the lyrics click, since there’s a bit of a wink to it that keeps it from being too judgy as she explains to someone she can’t really get into the Hollywood lifestyle. The lyrics are more about the dynamic she has with the person she’s addressing – she doesn’t want to let them down, but she’s still basically rejecting them and their world. The two rap verses at the end are basically rebuttals, with Tommy Raps playing it defensively while Pink Siifu doubles down on exactly the kind of seduction she’s passing up.
February 2nd, 2023 10:43pm
“Pants” is about as catchy as a song can be while also being actively and intentionally disorienting. It mostly sounds like an indie-punk song, something that might have been released on Dischord or Kill Rock Stars years ago, that has some been concussed. Everything wobbles, there’s no straight lines, but there’s still a clear shape and structure to the sound. Another way to put it – imagine a song being planned on an old VCR, but the tracking is way off. In any case it’s a song that feels like trying to drop out of reality but not quite making it all the way out.
February 2nd, 2023 1:36am
A decade ago I would not have guessed that Mac DeMarco would become such an influential guitarist and that basically an entire lane in indie rock would develop largely based on his and Kurt Vile’s respective vibes. But it makes sense to me now – his style is distinct but not tremendously difficult to emulate, and the feel of his music is seductively relaxed and low-key. In retrospect when he first hit it was like “new indie guy archetype just dropped” and a ton of guys threw up their hands like “ooh ooh, he’s like me!”
Five Easy Hot Dogs, his fifth record, is entirely instrumental and that just feels like a natural conclusion to me. It’s basically a travelogue, each song written and recorded on a road trip. It sounds like the soundtrack of a guy drifting along and passing through, no particularly heavy emotions but a lot of undefined wistfulness. Songs like “Chicago” convey a curious mindset, like it’s the music you’d play when you’re checking things out and trying to really click into the groove of some unfamiliar place.
January 30th, 2023 10:19pm
Lil Yachty shifting from trap to post-Tame Impala psychedelia on his new record Let’s Start Here is an odd pivot but it totally works because he’s clearly way into the genre and had the resources to hire on a lot of talented indie artists including Patrick Wimberly formerly of Chairlift, Magdalena Bay, Mac DeMarco, Alex G, and members of Unknown Mortal Orchestra and MGMT. In some ways I’m surprised a major label supported a big swing like this, but I can see how Steve Lacy’s success gave everyone involved some confidence that they were on the right track and if this works out Yachty could become a festival staple. I’m rooting for him!
“Running Out of Time,” like all the best songs on Let’s Start Here, takes the Tame Impala vibe as a starting point for music that ends up heading off in other directions. In this case all the gravity is pulling towards R&B, particularly in the guitar parts that remind me specifically of Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” though I’m not sure if it’s actually the same chords. (Similarly there’s a touch of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Running Away” in the song’s DNA.) Yachty’s voice is limited but he commits to the bit well enough that when he reaches up for higher notes here he at least indicates where someone like Stevie Wonder or Frank Ocean would go with the melody. But it’s hard to imagine singers like that pulling off his drowsy affect here, which suits the spaced-out introversion of the music. As with Lacy on his hit “Bad Habit,” there’s an underdog vulnerability in his performance that makes it all resonate beyond the raw appeal of the groove.