November 5th, 2020 1:11pm
“Yucca” is built around a looped guitar part that sounds desolate, despairing, and cinematic, like it drifted in from a nearby Godspeed You Black Emperor session. Harry Fraud keeps the track simple and lo-fi, giving the guitar part ample space to resonate while an understated beat supports Meyhem Lauren’s vocal. Lauren’s verses are all bluster and jokes, but in this context it comes out sounding hollow and haunted, like a guy trying to keep a brave face while he walks through some broken post-apocalyptic landscape.
November 4th, 2020 9:17pm
There’s seven credited writers including Ariana Grande on “My Hair,” but the one whose presence feels most obvious to me Grande’s frequent co-writer, the R&B singer-songwriter Victoria Monét. The contours of the melody sound very Monét to me, and the arrangement fits into her general neo-soul wheelhouse. The jazzy chords and the verse melody fits Grande’s voice perfectly – you can tell how much she likes singing around the curves of it, and how that elegant slide into the chorus flatters the most mature and sensual aspects of her technique. Like pretty much everything else on Positions this song is overtly horny, but the lyrics get into a very particular aspect of intimacy for her as she gives detailed instructions to her partner on when and how to touch her hair. The specificity levels up the song a bit, making it feel more like a window into a person’s actual life rather than just some sexy boilerplate.
November 3rd, 2020 12:11pm
I stumbled into this song on Spotify and was immediately very excited by it, but confused and frustrated by all the text associated with it being in indecipherable wingdings. I was thinking about how self-defeating it is for some new artist to make something so well-composed and brilliant, like if Four Tet went kinda rave-y, and made it so impossible to know anything about them. I went out of my way to figure out how to copy/paste the wingdings from Spotify and then I found out that…well, it actually IS Four Tet. This shouldn’t be too surprising to me as Kieran Hebden has reached a very Aphex Twin/Luke Vibert stage of his career in which he’s been using a handful of alternate names to release his music, but it is disappointing in that I would have liked for this to be someone totally new. This is very plausible as music heavily influenced by Hebden rather than actual Hebden music – the melodic keyboard part is very him, but the track feels less dense and more symmetrical than usual. The vocal loop fits in with his M.O. but it’s less artful than his usual sample manipulation – rather than odd cuts and intervals, it’s more of an unbroken hypnotic repetition. But these are observations, not criticisms: This song is as direct and effective and fun as he ever gets.
November 2nd, 2020 1:04am
The most incredible thing about “Look Over Your Shoulder” is that it features Kendrick Lamar and Busta Rhymes rapping at the top of their game along with samples of a young Michael Jackson from the climax of “I’ll Be There” and you could take all three of those voices off the track and it would still feel overwhelmingly emotional just with the piano chords and strings in Nottz’s instrumental. The gut-punch of the song is in how he contrasts this very melancholy and nostalgic vibe with a very innocent sweetness and hope, and that’s just amped up by the presence of Jackson’s earnest and empathetic voice. Kendrick and Busta approach their verses from different angles but I love that both connect to the sentimentality of the music by talking about their commitment to rap as an art form. When given a track that has this purity and love at the core of it, they both think of the one thing they clearly love more than anything else in the world.
October 30th, 2020 1:26am
There’s some things about “Stayback” that very obviously point in the direction of a heavy Prince influence, but the most Prince-ly thing in the song is fairly subtle – that line where Omar Apollo sings about wanting to switch bodies with the person he’s in love with. A lot of people can be a funky minimalist, sing falsetto, or rip a hot solo, but not everyone can approach that desire for a freaky, unreal intimacy that twists gender and crosses boundaries. It’s all the more interesting in that this isn’t a “I’m so into you I want to be you” song, but more of a breakup song. The desire to switch bodies is a desire for control, to somehow give himself closure by treating this other person like a puppet. Weird stuff.
October 28th, 2020 11:50pm
“Walls” is a song that exists in a limbo zone between a relationship falling apart and fully moving on from it. It’s part of an emotional journey but only just the longest, most boring part of the trip, like indefinitely cruising down a featureless interstate of the soul. This sort of thing but be tedious in fiction but it’s perfect for a song, particularly one like this that so perfectly evokes an emotional palette with well-mixed shades of ennui, regret, bitterness, and affection.
Tom Petty’s lyrics strive towards a warm-hearted clarity, like he’s just trying to be reasonable and patient as he processes it all. But the song resists its own attempts to put feelings in perspective – sure, some days are diamonds and some days are rocks, but that’s just what you say in the verses. The real feeling of the song is in that simple, beautiful chorus where he can’t quite get over this person with a heart so big it could crush this town, and he has to admit that one way or another he’s gonna crumble along with all those walls.
October 26th, 2020 11:32pm
“Straight to the Morning” is a joyful disco/house track with lyrics about partying all night and into the next day. It functions perfectly well at face value, but this being a Hot Chip song, there’s some subtextual layers of pathos under the boppy beats and bright chords – scratch the surface just a little bit, and it’s a song about aging. This is three middle aged men singing about going out all night, and how saying all of this feels a bit different in the context of being older. When Alexis Taylor announces “we’re going out tonight,” it comes across as announcing something that’s more of an event than a regular occurrence. The idea of dancing all night seems a little more daunting than it would be for guys in their 20s. When Joe Goddard sings “it’s a small slice of heaven,” the joy feels a bit more hard-earned. When the ever-droll Jarvis Cocker says “we’ve only just begun to get it on,” the words sound a little overly optimistic. But this song isn’t a joke at their own expense, it’s a song arguing that there shouldn’t be an arbitrary age limit for dancing and having fun. If anything, they’re arguing that there’s always a time for this sort of release.
October 25th, 2020 9:42pm
There’s a musical shift in “Love and Hate in a Different Time” that’s so sudden and surprising that mentioning it here before you hear it ought to be preface by a spoiler warning: The part where this solemn but groovy soul number moves into an instrumental break and instead of a piano or guitar solo, there’s a wild analog synth part that tosses out melody in favor of what sounds sorta like an R2-D2 freestyle. It’s an inspired choice, but it also does a good job of grounding this song which in many ways feels rooted to the 1960s in the present. That tether between then and now is musically interesting but also serves the concept of the song, as singer Jacob Lusk tries to make sense of how peaceful coexist always gets disrupted by people who insist on yanking everything back to a previous state of discord.
October 23rd, 2020 1:08pm
The character in “Incapable” is reckoning with her life and asking herself if she’s incapable of love, and while she seems proud to have never had a broken heart it’s also clear she’s beginning to realize that being so protective of herself has cheated her of bigger, deeper feelings and connections to other people. The music plays out like a slow epiphany with Richard Barratt’s keyboard grooves starting off with a hesitant orbit around the beat, but gradually growing more urgent and the track gets more dense with sounds. It’s a brilliant concept for an icy disco number – it seems like the perfect setting for this type of person, and the momentum of it suggests the drama of a real-time epiphany.
October 21st, 2020 1:34am
Moodymann is best known for making soulful house music, and the majority of his excellent new record Taken Away is in that lane, at least in terms of bpm rates. “Do Wrong” goes another way, framing its often spiteful breakup lyrics with a humid funk groove and snippets from Al Green’s “Love and Forgiveness” that provide both atmosphere and bitter irony. It’s a thick and swampy song with a rhythm that seems to bop up and down, and at some points sounds as though it’s sinking down below its implied surface. There’s an evil vibe to this song, but as much as the lyrics address someone else, the darkness of it feels more like it’s directed inwards. It’s like that great Carrie Fisher quote: “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
October 19th, 2020 3:21pm
It’s been interesting hearing James Blake evolve over the past decade from a mostly instrumental electronic musician with buried R&B tendencies into a more of an actual R&B artist with the aesthetics of an instrumental electronic musician. These days he’s somewhere at the center of that spectrum and it really works for him – he sounds like he’s fully comfortable as himself now, and it’s a sound that conveys equal parts sensuality and introversion. “Do You Ever,” like a lot of Blake’s best material, focuses in on the aspects of being vulnerable and intimate that hit the raw nerves of insecurity and doubt. He’s singing about a relationship that now, with some hindsight, was a lot better than he thought it was at the time. He gets anxious with the question of whether or not they think of him still, and maybe if they think of him fondly too. He sounds a little desperate and needy, but in a very relatable way – he’s looking for validation, not just for his past self but for his indulgence in this nostalgia.
October 16th, 2020 3:58pm
“Pale” is essentially a song about feeling so self-conscious that every sensation feels a bit off, every emotion is uncertain, and every situation feels either unreal or too real. Helena Deland sounds forlorn and a little shellshocked as she sings about an awkward intimacy, as though she’s just lying there asking herself – does this feel good, isn’t this supposed to be nice, why can’t I feel comfortable in my body? The music mostly sounds like a melancholy daze, but there’s a bit of a sexy tension to it as well. All the questions in the song aren’t resolved, but answers to the questions “can this feel good, do I feel good” don’t seem to be entirely negative.
October 15th, 2020 12:58pm
“I.D.C.A.S.” is short, simple, and spiky – mostly just one menacing keyboard riff and creepy ambience supporting a vocal by Heno that’s mostly rap and a little bit of dancehall toasting, but has a very punk energy. The title is short for “I don’t care about shit,” but that’s a bit misleading – he’s talking about having the discipline to not panic about things he can’t control, and to keep focused on things he can change. This would be a good idea at any point in time, but feels especially relevant now when so many people drive themselves mad with anxiety to the point that they can’t really function or contribute in a meaningful towards improving material conditions for themselves much less anyone else. This is not a song about embracing apathy or nihilism – if anything, it’s shaking out of the apathy and nihilism that comes from obsessing on powerlessness and intractable situations.
October 14th, 2020 2:26am
“Erica” fades in and then fades out, a brief groove that’s like a fragment of a sentence with ellipses on both ends. Kiina’s track is all elegant simplicity – gentle percussion supporting an electric piano riff, loose enough to feel improvised on the spot but sliced and treated just enough to introduce some question as to whether or not that gorgeous keyboard tone is actually sampled from something else. Goya Gumbani’s rap is mellow and introspective, perfectly matched to the tone of the piece but also a little subdued. It’s the rare hip-hop track where it sounds as though the rapper is trying not to upstage the beauty of the track, and so he sort of melts into it.
October 11th, 2020 9:45pm
Lex Amor exists in the nebulous but familiar zone; the center of a Venn diagram in which dancehall, rap, and trip-hop overlap in the most organic and intuitive way. “Odogwu,” a freestyle performed over a drowsy but subtly dynamic track by Josette Joseph, has an aesthetic kinship with ‘90s-era Massive Attack and Tricky but it doesn’t feel like some retro thing – it’s a different sort of stoned feeling and tinged with a different sort of melancholy that feel very rooted in the moment. I wouldn’t call those classic trip-hop records optimistic or sunny, but there’s a feeling in them like they’re boldly facing the future and whatever is coming. “Odogwu” feels more hesitant and wounded, like Amor is hoping to find a shortcut around whatever the next doom may be.
October 9th, 2020 12:53pm
The Nix is a spinoff of Franz Ferdinand, and while this new production duo featuring former member Nick McCarthy is covering different musical ground, there’s an aesthetic continuity in their focus on groove and air of wry sophistication. “The Drop” is a dance track with the energy of an action film sequence that cuts quickly as a way of boosting momentum and making the actions of the protagonists feel particularly decisive and intuitive. The razzle dazzle of the song is mainly in the sexual tension implied by the contrast of the male and female vocals – he’s projecting a casual confidence bordering on jaded indifference, and she’s playing up a mix of sultry and sassy. Again, very action film!
October 8th, 2020 1:46pm
The arrangement of “There’s A Crumb” conveys constant movement but not much in the way of forward momentum – it’s more like jogging in place with a vague frustration that you’re not sprinting ahead. Courtney Garvin’s vocal tone is muted and monotone as she sings about a social anxiety that keeps her from communicating, and it sounds like it’s something of a mystery to her even if it makes some emotional sense. The vibe of the song isn’t that heavy, but the feeling of “wait, what is going wrong, why can’t I do this” is strong. It’s a low-key twitch of angst that’s buried a bit below the surface in the hopes that people don’t notice you not functioning like you ought to.
October 7th, 2020 3:20am
“Throw Stones” is a song about suppressing rage that has a graceful and mostly placid tone while layering in elements of tension and unease. It’s not always subtle – after the first chorus there’s a sudden harsh tone like a “WRONG!” buzzer, and it’s like an involuntary facial tick that reveals a flicker of unrestrained anger before regaining composure. Nana Adjoa’s lyrics are direct but her vocal performance is very carefully modulated – polite, but just a bit vulnerable. Passive aggressive, but a little ashamed of that. It’s a song that struggles with the idea of anger, recognizing the emotional truth of it while despising cruel and destructive impulses.
October 5th, 2020 2:55am
In a better timeline, Stewart Lupton would have at least been able to complete the comeback he started with the one EP he released under the band name Childballads in the middle of the 2000s. He was in the process of reinventing himself as a sort of mid-60s Dylan figure, and I think he was doing it convincingly. Obviously, a lot of people aim for that, but he genuinely possessed the raw charisma and skewed poeticism to pull it off. A few more songs trickled out, including a couple from a radio session I produced for a public radio show in 2008 and another EP with a backing band called The Beatins in 2009, and after that he went totally silent until his death in 2018. It’s unclear how much music he made in the last decade of his life, but a 5 song compilation of lost Lupton songs has surfaced on Bandcamp and the most recent track is from 2010.
“Three Chord Mansion” is from his Childballads phase, and I dimly recall it being played when I saw them live a couple times back then. It’s a loose and groovy number featuring Betsy Wright on vocals and keyboard, and it sounds like it was recorded live to tape with the exception of Lupton’s vocal overdubs, in which he doubles his part in a lower register. The live feel suits Lupton well – it captures his ragged spirit without any studio dilution, and the recording centers the raw chemistry he had with Wright. She sings a backup vocal part that tips over into a lead if just by virtue of the strength and confidence of her voice, like she’s there to provide this traditional passionate country rock vocal while he plays it cool. It’s lucky to have this recording now, but also so frustrating – they sound like they’re just starting to figure out this dynamic. I’m sure whatever volatility that resulted in things falling apart is also what makes this sound so vital and present, but it’s hard to get around the “what if?” of it all.
October 2nd, 2020 2:33pm
“Goodbye, Goodnight” opens with a plodding, heavy riff straight out of the grunge era but as the song slides into its chorus it finds a bit more grace. I like the way this form works with the lyrics – Elise Okusami’s verses are flustered in dealing with someone reading too much into her behavior, but when she shifts gears she’s casually dismissing them with the title phrase. You feel the weight lift off her back, and even if the conventions of pop songwriting dictate that she retrace the verse and chorus a second time the backsliding feels natural and the instrumental at the end hits like the proper catharsis.
