Vince Staples “When Sparks Fly”

I’ll admit that it took me a while to get that this isn’t a regular love song, but rather Vince Staples doing his own take on Nas’ “I Gave You Power” – the lyrics are from the perspective of a personified gun, and this time around it’s a romance. Staples is clever enough to make this work perfectly well as a single entendre but his lyricism really shines in the double meanings, particularly in the extended protection/glove metaphor midway through the first verse. Frano’s track is all atmospheric sensuality and sex though, so I wonder if Staples felt a little too self-conscious about writing a straight-up love song. It’s more interesting and certainly more macho as the gun thing, but I feel like the song is actually more resonant without that layer of ironic distance.

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Banks “I Still Love You”

“I Still Love You” is a song that explores the cognitive dissonance that comes from when you go from extreme intimacy with someone to becoming total strangers. She’s yearning to reconnect with them but seems mainly interested in the small details – what’s their current favorite song, do they still smoke weed, do they have any bruises on their body right now? Banks sings in a fragile tone at the top of her register, sounding as though she could break into tears at any moment. But she’s more nostalgic than sad here, and the piano figure at the center of the piece signals a touch of brightness and optimism. She’s just looking for a similar level of connection and this relationship is simply the last time she felt something she craves. She acknowledges the “issues” with this other person, and I think that’s her way of reminding herself that she might be better seeking out what she actually needs with someone else. The song sort of knows that it’s a momentary indulgence.

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Supershy “Happy Music”

Tom Misch’s debut as Supershy is a lush disco track that superficially resembles The Avalanches’ classic “Since I Left You,” at least in as much as both song expertly evoke the idea of some glamorous 20th century party you can imagine but never attend. The song bangs and thumps in all the ways you’d want it to but the main attraction is definitely in the more delicate aspects of Misch’s arrangement, particularly in his deftly harmonic use of vocal samples. This works as a straightforward piece of…well, happy music… but there’s just enough melancholy lingering in the atmosphere of the mix to emphasize that this is, for most of us, an impossible nostalgia.

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Bruce Horsnby, Ezra Koenig, and Blake Mills “Sidelines”

The lyrics of “Sidelines” make some direct references to life in the early phase of the pandemic but even if Bruce Hornsby’s words stayed focused on the opening images of a judge heading to Salem it would sound very much like a quarantine song. It’s in the odd stillness, the cautious twitch in the rhythms, a stunned and dazed feeling that permeates the track. Hornsby’s lyrics are a scatter of images and ideas that suggest a mind trying to piece together a situation through stress and distraction, and then through some filter of vague paranoia. Hornsby and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig find some grace and beauty in this odd moment, singing a slightly jagged melody that pushes upward like a prayer at the end of the chorus. We’re far enough away from this moment in time to recognize what this grace and beauty actually is – it’s the sudden authentic humility of truly having no idea what’s about to happen and allowing yourself to feel that scary but sort of freeing feeling.

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Keshi “Limbo”

The first third of “Limbo” is a delicate and meditative sequence in which Keshi sings wordlessly in a gorgeous falsetto over very gentle acoustic guitar and piano. It opens the song in a very placid sort of melancholy before the beat comes in and his vocal switches into a semi-rapped cadence, and he starts laying out exactly why he’s so upset. It’s a little like spotting a guy brooding on his own, and then going up to him like “hey, you want to talk about it?” Keshi really lets it all out here – mostly he’s wrestling with competing feelings of hyper-confidence and self-loathing, and struggling with a drinking problem that he doesn’t seem to have fully treated just yet. The best part of the song is when he switches back to pure singing for a post-chorus hook where he admits “this is all that I am, I only show you the best of me.” But of course, in writing and singing this song he’s allowing himself to show the mess in his life while still holding on to grace and beauty.

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Wet Leg “Being In Love”

The magic trick of the Wet Leg roll out is that while the songs on their record were written around the same time, they were fed to us in a sequence that filled in the character of the band and made it look like real-time creative growth. They were introduced as inscrutable and mischievious weirdos with “Chaise Longue,” but as the songs came out the lyrical POV became more apparent – they’re writing songs about being young women who want to have a good time but keep running into all the odd and annoying ways a good time can be spoiled by other people. There’s a raw vulnerability in a lot of their songs that wasn’t apparent on the aloof and opaque “Chaise Longue” but the playfulness of that song carries over to even their most fraught heart-on-sleeve numbers, so it all clicks together nicely.

“Being In Love” hit me as an instant classic the moment I heard them play it at their show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn in December. The lyrical conceit is simple but very strong – Rhian Teasdale is singing about a powerful and debilitating anxiety, but deciding that she doesn’t hate the feeling because it strongly resembles the feeling of falling in love. The song, which has an energy halfway between that of Wet Leg forebears Blondie and Elastica, really sells the crush feeling but the lyrics subvert the form by completely removing the romantic element. You could listen to it and make it about a person, but it would be missing the point.

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Maggie Rogers “That’s Where I Am”

The bones and sentiment of “That’s Where I Am” are pure classic VH1 adult contemporary but the arrangement is all blaring distorted bass, huge breakbeat drums, and guitar chords that sound like they’re being played on light switches. I think in its own way it would be bold enough for Maggie Rogers to unashamedly write something along the lines of “Unwritten,” but it’s even more interesting to take that song and push it into this loud, stomping musical territory. She’s basically taking a very inspirational sort of song and reinforcing it with an arrangement that makes it sound like this massive, unstoppable force. It’s a brilliant move for a song she deliberately wrote to convey a triumphant happy ending, and I love that it’s also merging a very femme sound with a very hyper-masculine sound in a way that feels far more natural and complementary than contradictory.

Rogers’ lyrics describe a peaceful feeling on the other side of years of romantic drama. There’s enough plot points here to fill out a pretty solid 90 minute rom-com, and even though the chorus is written from a place of acceptance and perspective, she still sings about the more fraught and confusing moments in way that honors those feelings. The part that really slays me is when she questions how much this guy’s ex knew about their profound connection – “Did she know that we were together somehow? / you never touched me, but I felt you everywhere.” It takes a lot for someone to write a thing like that and sing it in a way that doesn’t sound at all delusional, but she pulls it off.

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Pavement “You Are A Light” (Live in NYC 1999)

Pavement was a restlessly creative band through the majority of their existence between 1989 and 1999, so the previous four deluxe reissues of their albums were stacked with non-album songs and unreleased material that was mostly of very high quality. Stephen Malkmus was moving so fast and with so much confidence that a lot of songs that would be the best thing a lot of bands could ever hope to write were relegated to b-sides or totally cast aside and left unfinished. But with Terror Twilight there’s really not a lot of extra songs and so the extra material on this reissue is very focused on charting the progress of the songwriting from demo to rehearsal to revision, and ultimately how some of the songs changed on stage. It’s very interesting but not tremendously listenable, and certainly not for anyone but the most obsessive fans.

Listening in on process is demystifying, and Pavement is a band that really thrives on mystique. There’s one demo in this set for “Billie” that actually kinda wrecks something I’ve cherished for a long time, a live recording of that song in St. Louis in which Malkmus seems to freestyle an entire perfectly formed verse off the top of his head. But no, it wasn’t off the top of his head, it was just a verse from the original draft that he’d replaced. I guess it’s cool to know that, but the idea that he could improvise so well was both rooted in plenty of other evidence supporting this and also just a fun thing to hold on to. It’s like finding out that sometimes Michael Jordan was getting lifted up on wires to slam dunk.

One of the most interesting songwriting journeys documented on this reissue is the gradual evolution of “You Are A Light” culminating in a live recording from a show I actually attended at Irving Plaza in Manhattan. As a tape collector it’s never been news to me that “You Are A Light” is best as a live song, nor has its origins been a mystery to me – there’s other early versions of the song that are not included here, including one that has the line variation “you..are a Sprite drinker…” that I always sorta anticipate in any version of the song. This set fills in a lot of steps along the way, including an extra long rendition laid down at Larry Crane’s Jackpot studio. I appreciate the lyrical variations as Malkmus improvises his way through rehearsal, particularly “I opened up my mouth, out came the words you despised.” But the magic doesn’t really happen for the song until Malkmus fully works out how the guitar parts fit together and how to really land the solo. By the time they lay it down with Nigel Godrich the song is perfectly formed, but on stage it gets a little more room to breathe. The song truly has some of the most beautiful guitar parts he’s ever written.

“You Are A Light” is one of a few songs on Terror Twilight where Malkmus is obviously sabotaging his lyrics a bit because he can sense the music wants to be more overtly sentimental than he was comfortable being at the time. You can hear him struggling with this in all the variations as he gradually edits out everything that seems like a song about a relationship in favor of telling a story about a weird senior trip abroad and nudging the chorus away from the far more romantic “you are the light becoming the day.” Since this song exists in many forms I don’t really mind that he ran away from the more open-hearted lines even if I actually favor them, and I think shrinking away from sentimentality was very honest and as a relatable impulse in and of itself. He wouldn’t be as afraid of it today, and hearing him be more open in later material is part of what makes having a long term fascination with an artist a fulfilling experience. They grow, you grow, and perspective shifts. I feel like I’ve been on all sides of this song at this point, and I’ve got a lot out of every version of it. I hope they play it on the tour this year so maybe I can get some new variations on it.

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Broadcast “Lights Out” (Evening Session 1997)

The studio recording of “Lights Out” on Work and Non Work is lovely but relative to this live session recording it feels colder and more distant. To put in terms from the song’s lyrics the studio version feels as though you’re the stranger on the other side of the glass as Trish Keenan waves to you, and this Evening Session version feels like you’re right there with her in her lonely little room. The recording implies intimacy, but only in terms of proximity as Keenan still seems aloof and unknowable as she sings about a loneliness and boredom so pervasive in her character’s life that it hardly even sounds melancholy. It’s more like an emotional equilibrium in which circumstances don’t seem likely to improve, but they’re tolerable enough as far as available options go. Keenan sings as though vague disappointment was simply the baseline of all feeling, and the music somehow conveys a drab existence while also sounding quite fascinating and stylish in the approximate musical equivalent of mid-century modern furnishings.

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Destroyer “It Takes A Thief”

Labyrinthitis mostly provides the sort of things we’ve come to expect to hear on Destroyer records: New Order-ish synthpop rendered entirely in overcast tones, some atmospheric guitar songs that feels like a fantasy of a romantic experience, and lots of Dan Bejar doing his wry Dan Bejar thing. (I am particularly fond of how he delivers the line “Now, what do you call it when every part of said bird is used?” with total gleeful depravity.) “It Takes A Thief” is the surprising outlier, a bright and groovy number that somehow gracefully contrasts sophistipop touches with slapstick sound effects over a chunky bass line. It’s a song that probably would’ve fit in well on a New Pornographers record in tonal terms, though I think bringing more harmony to this may defeat some of its charm. I like the way Bejar sounds silly and playful here, like he’s the bewildered star of a comedy about a band that takes itself very seriously.

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Father John Misty “The Next 20th Century”

“The Next 20th Century” is a song only Father John Misty could write. In fact, it may be the most “Father John Misty” song he’s written, the one where he perfects his very particular way of stacking a world weary cynicism upon dark humor and sick ironies without it collapsing in on itself or negating the very sincere longing and despair at the center of it all. He’s practically daring the listener to take him the wrong way from the opening line, but if you make it through to the concluding verse his POV is very clear: This is someone who sees the same old tragedies in each new disaster and doesn’t believe there’s any real escape from the world we’ve all been making for centuries on end. Even romance and fantasies are infected by the rot, even the purest true love is burdened by the weight of historical context. “And now things keep getting worse while staying so eerily the same,” he sings, really getting to the bitter core of the song. Everyone is waiting for some brutal apocalypse, but we never get the punishment we crave. It’s worse to live in the anticipation.

There’s a deliberate cinematic quality to the arrangement “The Next 20th Century,” with little nods to westerns and melodramas along the way. The song is aiming for a very 20th century sort of grandeur, but true to concept, the song itself sounds more like an endless plateau rather than some dramatic vista. The instrumental spaces between verses are the most striking musical elements of the piece, particularly in how each verse is punctuated with a very different sound. After the first time, it’s a glorious and melodic string sequence. After the second time, it’s a thunderous distorted guitar solo. The space between the third and fourth verses is mostly just a simple keyboard part plinked out in a way that makes it sound very small and tinny in the middle of this grandiose track. It’s a very effective moment of calm but also something that foreshadows the feeling of impotence expressed in the following verse.

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Disclosure & Raye “Waterfall”

Like a lot of electronic production duos Disclosure work through a lot of collaborators but it’s usually pretty easy to tell you’re listening to them – there’s always a very particular bounce to the keyboards, like it’s springing up off the beat with a precisely calibrated degree of force. The best Dislosure songs are energetic and joyful but also a little relaxed; for the most part they convey a casual level of fun and a low-key sexiness. The English singer Raye makes the most of this aesthetic in “Waterfall,” a song that tries to keep its effusive praise of a new partner at least a little coy until the chorus hits and then it’s just waves of unmitigated euphoria. It’s not too far removed from what they did with their breakthrough hit “Latch” years ago, but the anxious tension in that song is replaced here by a willingness to let the song hit an uncomplicated high.

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Oliver Sim “Romance With A Memory”

The xx is a band with a sound so narrow and specific that while there’s a lot of room to work within that aesthetic, there’s also a lot of creative directions that simply wouldn’t work. It’s a situation that gives its members license to do very different things on their own, and in this song Oliver Sim moves confidently into a sort of minimalist neo-soul direction. The minimalism isn’t just in the track, which is produced by Jamie xx but has the crisp warmth of a Richard Swift production, but also in Sim’s vocal which indicates its soulfulness in understated gestures. He starts one of the verses with the line “Handsome, all I wanted to be was handsome,” and that’s exactly the word to describe his voice here. It’s the sound of a casually attractive man, and he’s presenting himself as the romantic lead of this little drama. The catch is that this is a song about a romance that only existed in his head, and he’s wrestling with the notion that this guy has had more of an impact on him as this mostly fictional character than he probably would have if they’d actually kissed and connected. He wonders if this is some kind of punishment, but the sting in the song is him coming up to the realization that he’s more engaged by fantasy than reality even if it’s less fulfilling.

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Soccer Mommy “Shotgun”

I didn’t know Daniel Lopatin produced this song until after I’d heard it several times, but that bit of contextual information made a lot of sense of the part of this song that threw me for a loop the first time I heard it, and still kinda does now. It’s in the shift from verse to chorus, the way the texture of the sound completely changes on a dime from this dingy grunge bass line with a sorta plodding beat to this burst of melodramatically mood synthesizers that don’t sound as much like actual 80s new wave music as it sounds like The Smashing Pumpkins’ late 90s approximation of that aesthetic in the Adore/Machina era. The heart of the song is in that sudden shift more than it is in either tonal palette. Sophie Allison is singing about a relationship that sounds kinda bleak and depression on those verses, and in the chorus she’s romanticizing the situation. She’s pledging that she’ll be there no matter what, even if she’s aware of how self-destructive it is. She’s covered similar ground before on “Yr Dog,” but that song was pretty much the opposite and declaring that she’s had enough of this sort of thing. But you go back to that sudden kick into the keyboard endorphins and it all makes sense why she’s getting dragged back in. She and Lopatin really nail that effect here.

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Tyler, the Creator “Come On, Let’s Go”

People like to say they “feel seen” in art now, and I suppose this happens rarely enough for me that I never consider it to be a virtue worth seeking out. But here we are with an entire Tyler, the Creator song about being a punctual person totally aggravated with someone else for running late and potentially screwing up your plans, and… yes, I relate to this quite a lot! The song is played as a joke, but only up to a point. The frustration and anger here is exaggerated from comedic effect but still very real, and the deeper tension in the song is a nagging question of compatibility: “Although we in love we are NOT the same.” Tyler made the track with Pharrell and the music plays up the impatience with pulsing tones that shift over into clattering beats, all these little sounds that convey annoyance without tipping over into sounding annoying. I recognize this very well, though I should say it’s not necessarily the most positive way of “feeling seen.”

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Charli XCX “Yuck”

Until the chorus hits “Yuck” could easily pass for a Dua Lipa hit, a groovy quasi-disco number with an urbane gloss and lyrics focused on love. But once that chorus comes we’re firmly in Charli XCX territory – a little bratty, a little silly, and deliberately subverting pop expectations. The premise of this one is very clever: she’s into this guy, but he’s too into her and laying it on thick with romantic gestures she finds utterly nauseating. It’s just as relatable as a typical love song but covering more specific ground, particularly as the lyrics and the whole feeling of the song nudges toward an unstated question: Why the hell do I even feel this grossed out? Is this a matter of taste – bro, can you please just be cool? – or more about self-sabotage, insecurities, or anxieties about being smothered? There’s a lot going on in this song that could easily just be taken as a joke.

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Omar Apollo “Tamagotchi”

“Tamagotchi” is essentially an acoustic ballad about trying to hook up on the road but tricked out by The Neptunes so that the Spanish guitar takes a secondary role to classic Williams/Hugo syncopated drum programming with an emphasis on a booming bass drum. The guitar part feels a little cold and crystalline, so the shift into chords on the outro feels like a sudden warm breeze coming through the track. Omar Apollo tips between rapped and sung parts that mostly stick to bragging about designer clothes and trying to get laid, but he follows the lead of the chords and gets rather tender on that outro, layered with lovely harmonies and comically – but effectively! – contrasted with the widely sampled “DON’T STOP! POP THAT POP THAT!” bit from Luke’s “I Wanna Rock.” That last thing probably shouldn’t work, but the Neptunes really work their magic by making it click right into the arrangement.

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Red Hot Chili Peppers “Poster Child”

I like to imagine Anthony Kiedis alone in a room memorizing his own lyrics, particularly for a song with a dense rhyme scheme like “Poster Child.” It’s a funny image, but I’d genuinely like to get a sene of how seriously he takes the craft of doing something so goofy yet carefully balanced against the fluid, casual funk of the rest of his band. Kiedis’ vocal is actually the tightest element in the song, everything else feels exceptionally breezy and light in a way that’s unusual for Chili Peppers singles. John Frusciante’s presence after many years away is very apparent – he was always the guy bringing a bit of elegance and grace to the band’s hypermasculine physicality, and in this case you find everyone else just trying to flow with his mellow energy. Kiedis’ words are mostly silly doggerel but I appreciate the musical and cultural canon he’s sketching out here, and his apparent pledge to do his best to get on the level of what he loves.

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Guerilla Toss “Happy Me”

The songs on Guerilla Toss’ excellent new record Famously Alive are bright and bold in a way that’s half cathartic and half confrontational, as though they’re daring the listener to embrace a positive mindset in the face of seemingly insurmountable anxiety, despair, and dire external circumstances. Kassie Carlson sings from the point of view of someone actively fighting through all this and has managed to break through to the other side, and is now rushing back to tell everyone else – this can be done! “Happy Me” is the climax of the record and the point where the lyrical theme running through all of it is stated outright over a groove that seems to sparkle and gleam before moving into a more triumphant mode at the end. Guerilla Toss successfully pull off a tightrope walk in this music – one false move and they could fall into a cheerful, saccharine abyss. But they keep the sound just weird enough to avoid a very 00s sort of goofiness, and the lyrics based in dark realities enough to keep it from being just hollow inspirational chatter.

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Folly Group “I Raise You (The Price of Your Head)”

To some extent this song feels like a delivery mechanism for catchy get-everyone-in-the-club-screaming-along chorus, but my favorite parts here are actually the verses in which Sean Harper speak-sings a vocal flow that playfully glides around the beat he’s laying down on the drums. Harper’s lyrics come across like a polite and cerebral diss track in which he essentially tears into a sell out performer. The line that really knocks me out is more a sick burn on this person’s audience than anything else – “strange work to consider your finest / that catalyzes such shyness from the spineless.” This song’s dynamics will surely prevent it from ever getting that kind of response – the groove has post-punk twitchiness but krautrock drive and steadiness, and the bit where they stop cold for a second on a Harper singing “the world stops” is a clever way of pulling more of a rap production move in a rock song.

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