PinkPantheress “Do You Miss Me?”

PinkPantheress started her career attempting to make music with a Kaytranada feel to it, and here she is on this song actually collaborating with him. She says she missed the mark on her own, but her instinct was always correct – his elegant grooviness meshes perfectly with her taste for jumpy late 90s beats and complements the cool tone of her singing voice. It makes me think of food – a very hot and spicy dishes cooled by a bit of cream, or something sweet given more dimension by a sharp saltiness. Her lyrics take a similar route, contrasting a genuine lovey-dovey feeling with intense possessiveness and jealousy that comes through midway in the song. The dark turn only makes sense with the stakes set by how deeply she’s into the person she’s addressing, but the sweetness doesn’t quite stand up to the sourness by the end.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Cool Greenhouse “Hard Rock Potato”

“Hard Rock Potato” is a lyrical snapshot of an odd pandemic moment – Redditors playing the stock market game as a goof, trading apps making it all feel like a video game. Tom Greenhouse speak-sings it all with an arch deadpan – you’d never mistake him for being serious, but he’s committed to the bit enough for the sarcasm to hit just right. As with the band’s previous song “Alexa,” Greenhouse is in interesting thematic territory by fixating on how new tech trends become most absurd the moment they become widespread enough to become fairly mundane. Greenhouse pokes at the absurdity and has a laugh, all the while his band lock into a very mid-80s The Fall kind of groove.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Roc Marciano & The Alchemist “Quantum Leap”

The Alchemist’s track for “Quantum Leap” has such a strong nocturnal vibe that it feels wrong to listen to it in daylight. It’s mostly in the keyboard part, this warm and rich tone that evokes the amber hues of city street lights. Roc Marciano is well suited to a track like this and performs with a casual grace, giving off the energy of someone who’s very confident and comfortable in their skin and knows they have the upper hand in a situation. Marciano’s bragging about his stature and success through the song but he sounds thoroughly relaxed and often very deadpan, particularly when he opens a verse with “uhh, I made murder sexy.”

Buy it from Roc Marciano.

Whitmer Thomas “Most Likely”

Whitmer Thomas’ primary lane is comedy but he’s an accomplished songwriter whose songs flirt with comedic premises and punchlines but mostly veer away from novelty territory. This sets him apart from the likes of Bo Burnham, whose music is always a pastiche of some kind in service of a joke, and puts him firmly in an indie rock tradition. If you squint your ears a bit “Most Likely” could pass a Wilco song – a little brighter in tonality than most Jeff Tweedy compositions, but with a similar grain of voice and a Charlie Brown-ish mix of humor and melancholy. The song is basically Thomas running through sad sack sentiments – What if there was a room at every party where you could just watch a movie? What if he’s too sentimental for when he was too broke to get a therapist? How do you get over imposter syndrome? The song is overflowing with neuroses but the phrasing and tone make it clear at every moment that he’s making himself the joke here, and he’s doing so because he’s got enough perspective on himself to know when he’s being silly. And in showing himself being silly, he’s giving people some room to laugh at themselves a bit too.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Muni Long “Crack”

Songs like “Crack” are annoying to write about because I will feel like a dork no matter what angle I take in describing or even acknowledging the very explicit lyrics. I figure pure descriptive bluntness is the best path: This is a song in which a woman tells her new partner that they’re about to become hopelessly addicted to her pussy. It’s been done before, but Muni Long nails the tone by dialing it in to about 70% confident sexuality and 30% subtle vulnerability. The latter comes through more in musical moves and Long’s phrasing, these little touches that indicate some lightly percolating fears – Is she overselling this? Will they agree with her assessment of her skills? Does she seem desperate? But none of that is close enough to the surface to undermine the overt sexiness of the song, it’s all just layered in to make it feel human.

Buy it from Amazon.

Spoon “The Devil & Mr. Jones” (Adrian Sherwood Reconstruction)

The only thing that’s surprising to me about Spoon having Adrian Sherwood create a dub version of their most recent album Lucifer on the Sofa is that it’s taken this long for Spoon to actually have a dub version of any thing. You can hear the influence of dub on their studio work going back to Kill the Moonlight, to the point that the final mix some songs in their catalog sounds like a dub version of a more normal rock recording. Sherwood, one of the great icons of dub, does some great work with Spoon’s raw material and in the case of “On the Radio” and “The Devil and Mr. Jones” pushes the songs to become something much better than on the original record. The latter song takes on an entirely different character with Sherwood at the boards, unlocking some ska vibes that were only lurking beneath the surface of the original arrangement. There’s a lot of heavy reverb and psychedelic warping in the mix but the song is pretty much intact, even if Britt Daniel’s voice often gets abstracted to the point of pure sound. It works as a Spoon song, it works as dub – pretty much the ideal for a remix.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Max Tundra “Lights” (A.G. Cook Remix)

Within a few minutes of having the thought “I wonder if the hyperpop people know about Max Tundra?” I had an answer in the form of this remix, which comes from a mini-album of remixes and covers of Tundra’s songs that was released earlier this year. (I totally missed it despite following Tundra on social media, but it’s easy to miss these sort of things.)

Tundra’s three albums from the 00s are singular in their aesthetics – extraordinarily tuneful songs gleefully subverted by his odd glitchy programming and clever lyrics, playful in spirit but meticulous in construction. It’s easy to draw a line from these records to what A.G. Cook has been doing over the past several years, especially the early days of PC Music which really went in on pushing the sounds of modern pop production to grotesque and silly extremes. It makes a lot of sense that Cook reworked “Lights” in particular – if there’s any clear precedent to his music, a blueprint for his sound, it’s this song. The remix is only a mild update, the structure and novel conceit of it are fully intact.

The vocal part of “Lights” is sped-up and clipped, it sounds a bit like playing only the vocal of the song at double speed and losing some syllables along the way. The lyrics are dense and diaristic, Tundra veering between poetic language and quotidian detail as he describes the day jobs he worked to pay for his music making and being so deep into studio mode that the only romantic imagery that come to mind is in the beauty of the lights on his array of equipment. It’s lovely but awkward, and some of the meta tension of the song is in how vulnerable Tundra is willing to get in the lyrics, but also defensive enough to distract attention from the actual words he’s singing.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Saay “Mind Ur Business”

“Mind Ur Business” belongs to a pop tradition of songs expressing something like “actually, I’m doing great without you and breaking up was a good idea!,” a type of song that’s become particularly ubiquitous over the past ten years or so. Saay, singing in both Korean and English, comes across as more relieved than aggrieved, and the song’s very ‘90s R&B groove conveys confident low-key sexiness with only a trace of melancholy. It’s not a flirty kind of song but you can feel her reconnecting with that part of herself, or more broadly settling into a true comfort in her skin after spending some time having to adjust for someone else whether they asked for it or not.

Buy it from Amazon.

MorMor “Days End”

The first half of “Days End” makes MorMor sound like he’s dwarfed by the sound, as though he’s crawling through some huge tunnel of bass groove and percussion, singing out his angst only to have it echo off the walls back at him. That all drops out for the second half in which it’s just him and layers of ambient keyboards – he sounds free, he sounds like he’s singing directly into your ear, but he still sounds trapped in his feelings. The temperature of the song shifts along with the implied space of it, the warmth of all that bass replaced by the chill of the keyboard tones. There’s a before/after thing going on here too, the lyrics suggesting the that second half is where he lands once he accepts the person he’s singing to has truly left him. It sounds like a very lonely sort of freedom.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sault “Safe Within Your Hands”

Sault released five free albums this week, a volume of material that demands to be digested gradually though there are plenty of songs spread through the records that immediately announce themselves as career highlights for the mysterious British R&B collective. “Safe Within Your Hands,” off the heavily gospel-centric Untitled (God), had me from its first few jazzy piano notes. This is a gospel song with the slinky sexuality of D’Angelo on Voodoo; one that uses the old Christian pop trick of making lyrics ambiguous enough to either be about romantic love or a relationship with God to its advantage. When the choir sings “your love is all I need for the day” it feels like it could be about either but I hear it as both – finding your way to the higher power in love and sex, physical and emotional intimacy that blurs into religiosity.

Get it from Sault.

Dry Cleaning “No Decent Shoes for Rain”

Florence Shaw mostly sounds like she’s bemusedly reading a notebook full of random phrases she’s overheard, or trying to recite from memory the most awkward exchanges she’s had in the past week. This is an odd voice to build a band around but it makes sense in the context of Dry Cleaning’s compositions, which are dynamic enough suggest cutting between different scenes in a film. In a song like “No Decent Shoes for Rain” it all clicks together to feel like music that operates on dream logic, all jumbled up in neuroses and absurdity and spliced up sense memory and potent emotional resonances that don’t fully make sense. Should “I’ve seen your arse but not your mouth, that’s normal now” feel as weirdly poignant as it does here? Probably not, but they make it feel like something anyway.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Phoenix feat. Ezra Koenig “Tonight”

Phoenix are the only rock band I can think of whose genre would be best described as “romantic comedy.” The romance part is obvious enough just by hearing most of their songs – sometimes the feel is more flirty, sometimes more longing, later in the catelog more often the lived-in feeling of long term partnership – but it’s always there, some ambient field of affection and attraction permeating every measure. The comedy comes through in the details of Thomas Mars’ lyrics, typically an English-as-second-language stew of evocative phrases, oddball syntax, and little bits of French. Mars zeroes in on little absurdities and comic moments, grounding big emotional moments or interpersonal tensions with, in the case of “Tonight,” a silly refrain like “who let the boys spill their entrée?” This is a bit of levity before moving on to the more emotionally fraught line “dinner is served, can’t you see we’re not opposites?” I can clearly imagine this playing out as a scene in a film, but it feels more efficient in musical abstraction. The plot doesn’t matter as much as the feeling.

“Tonight” feels a lot like Phoenix’s biggest hit “1901,” mainly in the way the grooves circle each other – one guitar figure suggesting a hesitant movement forwards, the rush into the chorus cutting loose and embracing a carefree acceleration. I’m intrigued by the decision to include Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend to sing this with Mars as a duet. The implication is not so much that they’re singing to each other but more as different aspects of the same person in conversation, dramatizing the lyrical hook “I talk to myself and it’s quite surprising.” This also underlines the unspoken tension at the core of this song – he’s overly familiar with his internal monologue, but he’s singing to someone who can still be a mystery to him.

Buy it from Amazon.

Yo La Tengo “Fallout”

This song sounds as though the members of Yo La Tengo were challenged to make something that would answer the question “what’s so special about Yo La Tengo?” and absolutely nailed the assignment. Yo La Tengo have written a lot of different types of songs through the years but this one really gets to the core of their identity – Ira Kaplan’s distinctive guitar tone and the way he strangles notes out of his instrument in a way that introduces a bit of manic violence to a fuzziness that would otherwise feel cozy, the contrast of a low-key nearly deadpan quality in the vocals with an obvious warmth and sincerity. “Fallout” sounds like it’s in the sweet spot of their mid-90s run of albums Painful, Electr-O-Pura, and I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, but it doesn’t sound like a self-conscious return to anything. It’s just the logical outcome of moving from the cut-and-paste construction of their last full album to something very live and raw, and this is just what they’re like when they get in that mode. It’s muscle memory, it’s core competencies, it’s a musical identity honed for over 30 years.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Say Sue Me “Elevate Me Later”

This version of Pavement’s “Elevator Me Later” – aka “Ell Ess Two” – does the best cover move, which is to fully honor the melodic and structural character of a song while totally changing its feel. Say Sue Me transform the song into a melancholic bossa nova tune, a move that makes total sense in retrospect the moment you hear how the chords and melodies fall into this template. The original from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain aimed for a sort of antsy melodrama – emphasis placed on “those who sleep with electric guitars” and “the city we forgot to name” – but this one feels more like the gentle shrug of someone who’s learned to lower their expectations, the emphasis placed on “so why you complaining? Ta!” I love the busy high note noodling they added around the groove here, it fills out the space in the song nicely while bringing a bit of nervous energy to the mix.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Genesis Owusu “Get Inspired”

I like the lyrical conceit of “Get Inspired.” Genesis Owusu gives voice to all the reasons making art can seem silly when there are so many problems to be faced in the world every day and then shrugs it off – sure, OK. He concedes a little, but only just to dial down the scale of his message to some bit of useful and realistic advice: get inspired. Owusu’s punchy rhythmic cadence sells the tough love and the irony, the track pulls some tricks from the likes of TV on the Radio and Devo to project a manic urgency. He’s not telling you how to get inspired, but he’s nudging you towards the why of it all. How is anything positive big or small supposed to happen without that spark?

Buy it from Amazon.

Taylor Swift “Sweet Nothing (Piano Remix)”

The Taylor Swift songs that have connected with me the most over her past few records are the ones that offer a window into her steady long term relationship with Joe Alwyn, her songwriting collaborator on a handful of songs including “Sweet Nothing,” my clear favorite on Midnights. Swift is famous for writing about big tumultuous romantic dramas, but songs like this and “Invisible String,” “Peace,” and “Lover” find something deep and affecting in much smaller moments. These are the songs with the biggest stakes and she focuses on the fragility of this happiness in each of them, and in the case of “Sweet Nothing” and “Peace” she dwells on how her extraordinary life puts this intimacy in constant peril. The sweet low key romantic scenes in this song get crowded out by paranoia in the chorus – “they said the end is coming, everyone is up to something” – and a fear of slimy entertainment industry creeps in the bridge. But the point of the song is that this relationship is her refuge from all that, something solid and real and dependable in a life otherwise full of conflicting pressures and people who know who she is but don’t really know her.

I like both versions of “Sweet Nothing,” though I strongly prefer the “piano remix” found on the Target edition of Midnights. The song is something of an outlier on the album both musically and thematically so the arrangement of the proper album version has the neon lights palette of the rest of the record. The piano part sounds cuter, the high notes twinkling like little Christmas lights. The “piano remix” shifts everything closer to a Folklore palette, though the strings and woodwinds that add color and weight to the arrangement have a tonality I don’t think she’s approached before – gracefulness but not grandeur, downplaying drama but highlighting a wounded humility. I’m glad Swift thought enough of this song to make sure it was included on the main version of the album, but this more low key and earthy version feels more “accurate” to the mood and sentiment of the piece.

Buy it from Target.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard “Iron Lung”

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have been churning out records at a dizzying pace for a decade but I’ve only recently jumped into their body of work. But the timing seems right as I’ve hit them at an inflection point in their career in which their songwriting has reached maturity at the same moment they’ve fully embraced jamming out and merging their psychedelic aesthetics with jazz fusion. “Iron Lung” is a perfect example – immediately hooky and sophisticated in its grooviness, but set up to give the band room to explore within the structure. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of someone incapacitated in a literal iron lung, so there’s some irony in the music being all about movement and passage. But the idea seems to be that the body is broken but the mind is free to roam, and the Gizzard boys’ guitars take this guy hovering near death to the edges of the universe.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Scout Gillett “444 Marcy Ave.”

“444 Marcy Ave” moves between two very ‘90s modes, starting with a stark and intimate strummed section that sounds a lot like PJ Harvey at the start of that decade or Cat Power at the end of it, but then shifting into a groove that’s more like Tori Amos after she got very into making Matt Chamberlin do live drum parts that sound like filtered loops. Scout Gillett, who is not to be confused with the similarly named Scout Niblett but probably will be, sings with a slightly ghostly affect that emphasizes her lowest and highest notes without much space between. The song sounds like a very dark and sordid place, though I can say as a Brooklyn resident this address is just some apartment building in South Williamsburg. She makes it feel more like some bleak abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere, but I might just be getting that from the subtle banjo counterpoint with the groove.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Customer “Floorboards”

It was only a matter of time before the sort of talky post-punk from the UK and Ireland that I’ve been documenting in my “narrators” playlist would start bubbling up in the United States and this debut single from the NYC band Customer is truly the best case scenario for such a thing. But then again, these guys are something of a ringer in that one of the members, Nicola Leel, is Scottish, so maybe it’s more like one of these types of bands just started in New York instead? In any case “Floorboards” is a remarkably confident debut that position Mallory Hawk as a charismatic presences within the first few seconds and just zips along to a shouty fist-pumper chorus that hinges on the provocative phrase “get your phantom limbs off my neck.” Hawk doesn’t waste time with narrative specifics and instead focuses her lyrical energy on evoking a terrible and recognizable feeling – you’re done with someone, you’ve moved on, but you’re still haunted by them having the nerve to be out there existing in the world.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Dorian Concept “Let It All Go”

“Let It All Go” is basically the mission statement for Dorian Concept’s new record, in which the electronic producer deliberately avoids digital perfection in favor of layering live keyboard parts in a way that comes together to sound like a live band rather than an electronic producer. I’m not totally clear on the process here but a lot of what makes this composition work is the feeling that parts are responding to others in real time, even if it’s just improvising in overdubs. There’s a slightly awkward throb to the groove, but the song sounds like it’s always got a new idea, like it’s just floating through a series of minor epiphanies.

Buy it from Bandcamp.