December 22nd, 2021 11:37pm
Big Thief is a band that has always thrived in capturing a live sound on record. “Spud Infinity” arrives at a point in the group’s trajectory where the sophistication of their songwriting and the casual chemistry of the band members have intersected so that the composition sounds as though it’s magically manifesting in real time. It’s an illusion of spontaneity, sure, but their playing is breezy and loose enough that the ease of it all isn’t the lie. “Spud Infinity” sounds like the band started from the notion of taking the term “cosmic country music” very literally, and writing a country rock song pondering philosophical matters like “what’s it gonna take to free the celestial body?” Adrianne Lenker’s voice and lyrics are playful and thoughtful, grounding questions about one’s significance in the greater scheme of things in colloquialisms and quirky metaphors while soberly advising anyone listening to throw themselves into the moment and express their love plainly to anyone they care about. She’s considering everything that can possibly be on the grandest possible scale, but arriving at the conclusion that what matters most is what’s immediately in front of us.
December 21st, 2021 11:34pm
“Daffodils” starts off as a sort of Lana Del Rey-ish postmodern ballad but within 20 seconds the song starts shifting into very different gears – a bit of Eilish-ish bubblegum industrial, a fair amount of hip-hop through the distorted aesthetic gloss of hyperpop. The song and its arrangement are gleefully chaotic, and Madelline’s lyrics conveys a volatile sense of self that’s swinging wildly between paranoid anger and unapologetic egomania. I’m particularly fond of the way she’s playfully engaging with narcissism in this song, embracing the swaggy highs of genuine self-love while also projecting a coked-up delusional mindset.
December 10th, 2021 2:29pm
“Señorita” is a brutal sort of mutated funk, a track that pulls from many genres but only really sounds like Arca. But like, a fully realized Arca – aggressively sexual and unapologetically self-mythologizing, more song-y than ever while unafraid to throw in a truly abrasive noise break in the middle of a club song. The bulk of the track reminds me of two things that were hot around the same time that I would’ve never thought to conflate – the caustic and clanging electro-punk of Mutsumi, and the staccato rapping style of Missy Elliott.
JPEGMAFIA has said that he became a rapper because no one wanted to rap on the tracks he built and “What Kinda Rappin’ Is This” is a very good example of a composition which I would imagine as being perplexing to even fairly adventurous vocalists. Like, opening with nearly a minute of a zonked-out drone with chords that seem to slowly stumble through the haze? And then some loop that feels like it belongs on an Animal Collective recording? Once a beat comes in it’s still disorienting, with waves of R&B vocals often blasting over his rap. He’s basically doing a rap equivalent to what Kevin Shields was doing with rock three decades ago – take a familiar genre and flip it inside out so that interesting tones and textures that would fill out a song are pushed into the foreground.
December 9th, 2021 3:55am
“Silk Chiffon” has a hook so potent – “life’s so fun, life’s so fun, got my miniskirt and my rollerblades on” – that the rest of the song can’t help but feel like it was built around it like a delivery system for this nugget of pop perfection ideally suited to the TikTok era. And it’s not even the chorus! That part of the song brings the music to a cathartic moment but it isn’t quite as memorable, feeling more like a structural inevitability than the best part of the song. But beyond that one incredible hook “Silk Chiffon” has a very specific and recognizable late ‘90s mood, like Sixpence None the Richer or Paula Cole reconfigured into something proudly queer, but also openly neurotic. When Phoebe Bridgers shows up in the second verse of the song it’s almost like she’s going full self-parody as she announces “I’m high and feeling anxious inside the CVS.” It’s a line that’s just as much a knowing wink as it is something recognizably vulnerable and human, and it just makes her declaration of lust and infatuation more poignant. As the song moves along Muna and Bridgers double down on the sappy corniness, making you feel that this sort of goofy joy is very very hard won.
December 7th, 2021 2:56am
Coldplay has maintained commercial relevance for a very long time now, and a lot of that is because the band have worked very hard to maintain their position as one of the world’s most popular rock bands. But anyone can want to do that, the interesting thing about Coldplay is that as they’ve adapted to the whims of the pop market they’ve always sounded exactly like themselves. Some of this comes down to Chris Martin having a pleasant and immediately recognizable voice, but it’s more about how he is a nearly unrivaled expert in writing uplifting and romantic songs that make a listener feel like they’re living in a movie. There’s always going to be a space in pop culture for the sort of feelings Martin evokes, and as it turns out it works just as well in the context of ecstatic festival EDM as it did when they were working the U2 Junior lane.
Teaming up with BTS was a brilliant move both commercially, in that doing a song featuring the K-pop icons was basically a guaranteed hit, and artistically in that there probably is no Western rock band with an aesthetic that could fuse with BTS so seamlessly. “My Universe” is bright and bouncy and overflowing with a very earnest love. This song is the unashamed extreme of the nearly psychotic optimism and melodramatic movie romance that characterizes all their major works. BTS’ presence intensifies the wholesomeness of the song, balancing out Martin’s middle aged corniness with a more youthful guilelessness. It’s sorta miraculous for a song that’s essentially the merger of two powerful corporate brands to sound as devoid of cynicism as this does.
December 3rd, 2021 1:40am
“Coffee & Clouds” sounds calm and unbothered, like music meant for a tracking shot of someone strolling down a beautiful street on television in a very “life is good!” moment. Bambie’s lyrics complicate the mood without disrupting it – in the verses she’s dissecting her past behavior, but in the chorus she melts into affection and infatuation. There’s bits of this song that sound almost deliriously happy or blissfully content, but she never really shakes off the acute self-awareness. It basically just goes from being really in her head about being in her head, to being in her head and just loving the vibes.
December 2nd, 2021 3:13am
Subculture’s track for “Valley of Def” sounds like a descent into a seedy, sexy underworld with a heavy ambiance that’s equal parts jazzy noir and stoned paranoia. Pearl de Luna’s vocals are purred and slurred in a way that reminds me of Martina Topley-Bird on the early Tricky records, while Goya Gumbani’s verses are rapped with a cautious sort of calm. He doesn’t sound relaxed, but he does sound focused and thoughtful as he seems to navigate his way through terrors from both within and without.
CLBRKS has an odd and immediately fascinating voice – a clear and obvious English accent, but with the hard nasal honk of New York rapper. In “Forwhatitsworth” he’s framed by the sort of soul samples you’d expect to hear on say, a Ghostface or classic Kanye record, but DWEEB’s production style chops it all up very coarse and uneven. It makes even the most graceful moments feel raw and unstable, so both the music and the vocal end up sounding like a slightly uncanny version of a rap style that’s mostly quite familiar.
November 30th, 2021 2:59am
The lyrics of “Rootwork” fixate on geography and death, and both overlapping in catastrophes and aftermaths. Skate Key senses ghosts all around him – relatives whose absence reshapes the family dynamic, communities built on the legacies of the long gone, traumas that get passed down from people he could never know. It’s a morbid song but there’s a touch of serenity in Skate Key’s soft rasp, and grace in the way he bows out of the song to let Iblss’ gentle woodwind loop run out for a few measures at the end.
“Recall” evokes a vaseline-on-the-lens melodrama in the way it bends and blurs what sounds like a vocal pulled from a mid-20th century ballad – not sure what, probably shouldn’t narc on it either way. It feels both melancholy and placid, particularly as the beat settles in and the music drifts out into jazzy keyboard noodling. It’s more of an interstitial than a full song, but it conveys a lot of feeling in just over a minute.
November 25th, 2021 4:34pm
Taylor Swift is beloved for her break up songs but as good as she is at articulating the anguish and disappointment of falling out of love, I think she’s even better at writing about being in love. “State of Grace” and “All Too Well” are widely understood to be written about the same relationship, and for me the latter song is made more potent by existing in the context of the former, which seems to be written midway through the happy early phase when she’s still riding the high of infatuation but has enough perspective to identify what is special to her about this connection. A lot of that is the surprise of it all, of having a vision of what she wanted and then finding something that’s actually better than she could have imagined for herself.
The primary version of “State of Grace” is a rock song with an arrangement heavily indebted to U2. The music charges forward like she’s confidently zooming into the future, she sings with an earnestness that makes the song feel like a devotional. The acoustic version strips out the rock and drastically slows the momentum, making the listener hang on every chord change. This arrangement makes the song come across like more of a meditation, but also like someone desperately trying to hold on to every moment before it passes, acutely aware that something precious and finite is slipping away. The original arrangement sounds like someone memorializing their life in the moment, but the acoustic version implies a more retrospective view in which the phrase “and I never saw you coming” feels like the sentiment most firmly rooted in the moment it is being sung.
Swift seems blown away by the clarity of her own emotions in “State of Grace” and chalks it up to meeting this person – it’s very “once I was blind, but now I see.” It’s like they’re a key unlocking something in her, and the expansion of her perspective is so overwhelming that she gives them credit when in truth it’s probably more to do with herself naturally maturing. Hearing her evoke this feeling she’s ascribed to this other person makes sense of the betrayal that came out in “All Too Well” and the pettiness given voice in “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” “State of Grace” is an expression of her investment of faith, and it’s so pure and beautiful that who can blame her for resenting having that faith broken and having to come back down to reality. She made someone her religion, and they left her forsaken.
November 24th, 2021 12:57am
The most novel aspect of Keys N Krates – they’re a trio including a drummer who play electronic dance music live on stage – is lost on a studio recording where you’re basically just hearing electronic dance music that’s centered on keyboards and samples. But even still, you can feel the difference a live drummer makes even when the snare hits have the tonality of a drum machine. Adam Tune keeps “Original Classic” in a tight pocket but adds a bit of a bounce and relaxed swing to the groove that mellows out the more intense keyboard hook. Juicy J and Chip both lean into expressing a casual confidence in their verses, the former sounding as though he’s just strolling through the song while on vacation.
November 23rd, 2021 3:17am
Oasis’ shows at Knebworth in 1996 are a crucial part of the band’s legend, an event that is demonstrably the apex of the band’s success. Over the course of two nights they played for around 250,000 people, with the capacity for each show roughly amounting to playing two stadiums at once (or about 7 simultaneous Madison Square Gardens.) The show itself is basically a greatest hits – almost everything from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, about half of Definitely Maybe, a bunch of non-album tracks that may as well have been A-sides, and two songs that would later end up on Be Here Now, the famously bloated album that brought their level of success down to merely “quite popular.”
“It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” is one of those Be Here Now songs, clearly written from the perspective of someone riding high on an extraordinary hot streak. It would be easy to snark on this song for how its “I’ve only just begun, I will NEVER FAIL!” bravado ended up on a record that sorta flopped out, but it would miss the point that this sort of defiant optimism is really just Oasis in their default setting. “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” was basically Noel Gallagher moving back into Definitely Maybe sun-sheee-iiiine mode, but whereas songs like “Rock N Roll Star” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol” were written from the POV of aspiring rock stars, he was at this point the real deal and was now giving advice on how others can live their own dream. The verses are very “believe in yourself and just do it, mate!” but Liam Gallagher sings it with the reassuring conviction of someone who knows for a fact that this kind of thing can actually work out sometimes. Noel can’t help but slip in a few lines that suggest how fleeting success can be, but that just adds to the YOLO spirit of the music.
The Knebworth shows have been bootlegged in radio broadcast quality audio for many years now, but it was wise for the band to officially make it part of their discography. It’s useful for lore, but even beyond that there’s a real spark to these recordings. The sheer magnitude of the audience stokes the band’s ego but also puts them in a sort of do-or-die position of needing to bring the goods. You can hear tensions between Liam and Noel throughout the set, but that’s part of the performance – if they don’t do a bit of that, a quarter million people would go home feeling a little cheated. And you definitely want to hear it here, on a live document of a band at their absolute pinnacle. It may be all downhill from this moment on, but this moment was like the summit of Everest.
November 19th, 2021 2:24pm
Lady Wray sings “Games People Play” from a bit of a remove, looking on at someone else making the same mistakes she’s already made in youthful relationships with a feeling of resignation – this is just what people do, the “silly shit you do when you’re young.” There’s empathy in the song and warmth in her voice, but more than anything you hear lingering pain in her phrasing and a determination that she won’t be repeating any of this as an adult. The arrangement is full of classic soul moves but there’s a chilliness to the tone, mainly in the trebly lead guitar part that runs through the center of the composition. The reverb is lovely ambiance but emphasizes the aloofness of the song, suggesting a physical and emotional distance between Wray and the music.
November 19th, 2021 12:59am
As the title suggests “Luvaroq” is heavily indebted to the Lover’s Rock subgenre of reggae, to such an extent that I swear I’ve heard some version of this before but I can’t quite place it. The track is all warm, womb-like bass and tastefully applied bits of treble, like the lead organ part that in context has an effect roughly equivalent to a loosely strung line of Christmas lights. Elujay and Serpentwithfeet trade off vocals, each of them pleading to their love interest to not to dump them. They’re not exactly offering the best arguments for this in their lyrics – Serpentwithfeet in particular seems like he’s kind of a dick to his boyfriend here – but there’s an earnestness in their singing and a gentle purity to the music that makes a strong case in their favor.
November 17th, 2021 9:07pm
Constantine Anastasakis is very good at a very ‘90s alt-rock move of contrasting bright notes with a heavy and burbling low end that makes the whole song feel a bit nauseous. It’s an underrated way of expressing anxiety – a more jittery rhythm feels right for a more high-strung personality, but the sounds in “Ice Cream Girl” are more particular to someone with lower expectations in life and less inclination to want to control everything. Despite the sickly tone the song really works as pop, particularly as Anastasakis’ voices drifts up into falsetto on the sing-songy bridge into the slam-the-fuzzbox chorus.
November 16th, 2021 12:53am
The keyboards in “Van Gogh” are pitched up to the point that it has the cartoonish plasticy tinkle of children’s music, making the song feel a bit like a perverted lullabye that involves bragging about fucking a girl on a Van Gogh painting. Like a lot of artists in the recent past Aminé is basically singing with rap cadences but unlike fellow travelers like Lil Uzi Vert or Playboi Carti, there’s a pleasing softness in his voice that really sells the flirtatiousness in this particular song. There’s a real himbo energy to this one, just the perspective of a silly dude who wants to party and get laid and he makes it all sound kinda sweet.
November 12th, 2021 2:28pm
The musical elements of “Open Eyes” are always shifting but there’s still a sense of stillness to it, as though no movement could disrupt its equilibrium for more than a few seconds. As the song progresses it moves towards a powerful feeling of peacefulness, not necessarily in a lack of tension but in conveying patience and acceptance. Duendita sings with a voice that acknowledges turmoil and traumas, but she sounds as though she’s filtering out the dark feelings in an effort to get to a more pure state of grace. At the end of the song when her voice starts getting digitally warped it’s almost as though she’s singing in tongues, though I think it feels more psychedelic.
November 11th, 2021 10:20pm
It continues to be impressive how much Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally can do within the seemingly narrow aesthetic confines of Beach House. The general feel and core palette of their music has been essentially the same for eight records in a row, the variety and artistic growth is mainly in the textures, details, and tonal balances. It’s a bit like musical Fabergé eggs – the format and aesthetic is consistent but the ornamentation is unique every time. “Once Twice Melody,” the title track of their eighth record, is one of the more striking variations. It sounds like a pastoral English folk song blurred out by a dense fog of their familiar keyboard drones. The brighter keyboard tones seem to sparkle through it, lending the track a vaguely mystical aura. Lagrand’s vocal performance is as sedate as ever but her phrasing feels a bit stiff and formal, making her sound like some sort of prim but gentle authority figure as she sings lyrics that allude to mid 20th century erotic works Belle du Jour and Histoire de Melody Nelson. It’s not sexy, per se, but it does add a light lasciviousness to the music.
November 8th, 2021 9:17pm
“Talking to Myself” feels very relaxed and sensual, a song where most everything in the vocal performance and the arrangement is signaling a pleasant mixture of stoned and sultry. The lyrics run contrary to all that as Sandy Davis sings about feeling foolish for an emotional investment in someone who doesn’t value her affection or compassion. She feels so shut out that she feels like airing these grievances is just talking to herself. Listening to the song with a more clear idea of what’s being expressed shifts the tone a bit – the melancholy undercurrents are more exposed, and the more breathy parts of her vocal read more as sighs of exasperation rather than anything to do with pleasure.
November 7th, 2021 4:03pm
Aimee Mann’s new album Queens of the Summer Hotel is a set of songs written for a stage musical adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted, a project that’s fallen into limbo in the wake of the pandemic. It makes a lot of sense why Mann would be asked to do such a thing – through her career she’s always had a keen insight into fragile and volatile emotional states, and approaching characters at their lowest lows with respect and empathy. In terms of substance the material on this record could just as well be another Aimee Mann record, so the main difference here is in style – strings and horns that evoke a very 20th Century sort of stuffy melodrama, but played without a trace of sappiness. “You Fall” is particularly stunning in its starkness, opening in medias res on a woman who’s trying to hold it together and present as a normal person but on the precipice of succumbing to despair. Mann’s lyrics are cooly observational but her voice conveys a calm compassion. This song is coming from a place of being keenly aware, likely through personal experience, of how easy it is to fall apart – she’s not about to judge this woman or anyone else.
November 5th, 2021 1:36am
The first few songs SOPHIETHEHOME released were all firmly in R&B territory, kinda like homemade semi lo-fi Erykah Badu music. “Natural Disaster” is a fascinating swerve into the indie rock lane while maintaining a similar vibe – her vocal style is mostly the same, but it’s recast in a song built upon a rumbling alt-rock bass line that I’d guess is aiming for Nirvana or Kim Deal energy but actually sounds just like “A Salty Salute” by Guided by Voices. It all comes together sounding very natural, as though this thick, heavy bass and clattering cymbals are there as a defense mechanism for this sensitive, vulnerable R&B ballad about feeling like you’ve totally screwed up a relationship and exhausted yourself emotionally. It’s too early to know whether this is a stylistic eureka moment for SOPHIETHEHOMIE or just a one-off creative cul de sac, but either way it’s very evocative and interesting.
