The Magnetic Fields “The Biggest Tits in History”

The core joke of this song is a bit of a groaner – the tits in question are birds, haha – but Stephin Merritt knows that and so the actual humor of the lyrics comes from the strange details he has to write in to reverse engineer a character’s life from the very thin premise. The craft is strong, starting with ambiguous language but by the third verse tossing in details about cloning birds for the government and intercepting drones. The song is sung by longtime Merritt foil Shirley Simms, who delivers the lines with a rock sneer that hits all the marks in getting across Merritt’s droll tone without overtly signaling “this is a joke song,” so it’s easy to imagine someone just half-listening to it and not noticing that it’s not about some extremely busty lady.

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Charli XCX “Claws”

Charli XCX’s new record, which she wrote and recorded within the past two months of quarantine, is the first album in her career that sounds fully like her doing exactly what she wants to do and playing to her strengths, and not absolutely drenched in record industry flop sweat. Without weak attempts at crossover hits or the transparent trend-chasing of the absurd number of features on her previous record, she’s free to get laser focused on her distinctive brand of sing-song melodies and taste for harsh electronic tones and yields a bunch of songs that sound like they could be actual hits rather than merely notional ones.

“Claws,” which XCX made in collaboration with the producer Dylan Brady, realizes the promise of the early PC Music phase in which accessible melodies were layered into fully digital tracks pushed to cartoonish extremes. It’s contemporary pop technique pushed to the point of abstraction, or maybe just a logical conclusion. There’s a campiness to this song, but XCX’s vocal is sweet and sincere in projecting infatuation to the point of guilelessness. The song conveys purity while sounding like a corrupted file.

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Victoria Monét “Moment”

I love the low-key ego of this song, and the way Victoria Monét sings from the perspective of being treated like a prize with a matter of fact tone. She’s basically saying “OK, you fantasized about me for ages and now you’ve got me, so what are you gonna do?” As elegant and romantic as the music is, the song is ultimately about an awkward situation in which the thrill of pursuit disappears and the pressure to be present and deliver on a promise sets in. Monét alternates between nurturing and demanding phrases, asserting control over the scene as much as she would like to have everything click into something magical and effortless as the string parts that seem to float into the mix like something out of a Hollywood love scene.

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Chicano Batman “Pink Elephant”

The main guitar hook in “Pink Elephant” is played by Chicano Batman but presented like a sample, as if it’s mixed with quotation marks around it and moved off to the side from the persussion groove. This trick in making a band sound more adjacent to hip-hop goes back to the late ’90s, but this doesn’t necessarily feel like a trick so much just how the band has internalized a sense of “good production” going back to their childhoods. You could definitely have recorded this song with more depth and warmth, but the feel of this relies a lot on the beat sounding thin and the guitar part seeming choppy and a little too trebly. It’s crucial to the ambiance, and any implied nostalgia is tied up in second-hand uses of sounds rather than full fidelity.

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Caribou “New Jade”

Dan Snaith’s music is so much about sensation and hypnotic grooves that it’s easy to overlook his lyrics, but on his new record as Caribou he’s working with an interesting set of themes – the way life can seem to open up or close off with the end of relationships, and how this is more obvious to someone observing a situation than one living inside it. The two most stunning tracks, “Home” and “New Jade,” are both sung from Snaith’s perspective and addressed to women getting out of bad relationships but struggling with grief. The hooks in both songs come from sampled female voices, but the verses he sings in his gentle, unassuming voice are basically pep talks assuring them that they are moving on to better things. Snaith conveys a pure, unselfish empathy in this music, and manages to avoid laying it on thick either lyrically or musically.

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Deradoorian “Saturnine Night”

“Saturnine Night” is like one of the chugging quasi-motorik Thee Oh Sees numbers remade with goth aesthetics, with Angel Deradoorian singing about “innocence in my death” and “purifying the shadow of the soul” through heavy reverb. The dark vibe and the insistent groove suits Deradoodian well, allowing her room to embrace the less overtly pretty aspects of her singing voice, in as much as her voice is naturally musical and gorgeous. Letting the rhythm section carry the structure also gives her space to use her guitar mainly for atmosphere, pulling this closer to her more ambient works than the more folky side of her catalog.

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No Joy “Birthmark”

One of the great pleasures of watching artists evolve over long stretches of time is in noticing how their aesthetic shifts along with their capabilities, and influences that were once only implied become overt as others that were on the surface recede. No Joy started as a more blunt and primitive version of a shoegaze band with blaring guitars and buried vocals, but all along suggesting a delicate sentimentality and sophisticated melodic sensibility. As the band has become more of a solo project for Jasamine White-Gluz, the music has gradually moved towards foregrounding what was once obscured while maintaining an artsy haze and exaggerated sense of spacial relationships in the mixes. On Motherhood, the forthcoming new album by No Joy, White-Gluz has refined her aesthetic to the point that anything she does now sounds fully like her even when she’s emulating elements of trip-hop, nü-metal, and ’90s adult contemporary pop. It’s always been in there, she’s now just making it more obvious – no shame, just beauty and feeling.

“Birthmark,” the lead track off Motherhood, consolidates all of White-Gluz’s major musical threads from the past six years into one gorgeous and emotionally direct pop song. When I hear the song the word that comes to mind is “clarity” – in the arrangement and mix, in the vocal performance, in the lyrics, in the abstract sense that it sounds like a musical approximation of a crystal chandelier. The ways she’s implied nonlinear vagueness and a collage-maker’s sense of textural juxtaposition is all there, but it’s more in the service of articulating the complexity of a feeling rather than in masking or muting it. She’s not being at all ambiguous in singing openly about love, but the way she does it is up for interpretation: What kind of love, and how intense is it?

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Little Simz “Might Bang, Might Not”

I love the way Little Simz’ vocal performance in this song feels like she’s competing with the beat, like she’s trying to outpace it or outlast it. I imagine it like an elaborate tap dance routine, fast and precise in its movements. It would be enough to carry the song, but the most compelling thing about “Might Bang, Might Not” is the way that performance is contrasted with the bass part, which is fairly simple and seems to wind casually around the groove. The vocal and bass don’t compete for space and complement each other nicely but it still feels like they’re at odds somehow, as though that relatively relaxed but tonally dominant bass part is taunting the more overtly aggressive vocal.

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Muzz “Bad Feeling”

Muzz is a new band by Paul Banks from Interpol, but despite the fact that he sings and plays guitar in this band, they do not sound much like Interpol. Banks still sings as he would normally, but without having to lock into the tight rhythms that define that band’s aesthetic. Whereas Interpol records can feel claustrophobic and oppressive, the Muzz songs feel spacious and relaxed – a deep sigh of resignation rather than a high-strung fit. Banks sings with a wounded, weary tone on “Bad Feeling,” a song built around chord changes that sound like slowly blinking Christmas lights. The arrangement is filled out with un-Interpol sounds, like gentle organ drones and soft female backing vocals and a mellow horn section. The horns are particularly beautiful, capping off the song with a grace that feels redemptive in the context of a song that’s otherwise sounds ragged and exhausted.

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Cindy Lee “Lucifer Stand”

“Lucifer Stand” is built around a keyboard vamp that sounds like a hollowed out version of Goldfrapp in their electro-glam phase. Everything else in the mix seems to echo off the walls implied by that riff, with the vocals sounding especially distant from wherever you are in this. Cindy Lee doesn’t overdo it, keeping the tone from getting too campy in its spookiness, or too deep into horror film soundtrack territory. The context of the song is revealed at the end, as you hear a recording of a woman giving a testimony that ends with her saying she’d rather “spend eternity in nothing” than to spend eternity with Satan. The lyrics take that premise but take the notion of eternity in nothingness with Satan as a beautiful promise rather than a horrifying fate. The song begs for this oblivion – “remove me, if only for a night.”

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Kate Bollinger “A Couple Things”

The music of “A Couple Things” is so loose, smooth, and assured that it’s a little surprising the lyrics are so anxious and obsessed with making mistakes. Kate Bollinger’s voice conveys some vulnerability, but even that seems measured, like she’s answering the concerns of her past self with a display of casual “let it be” chill. It’s not a “nothing matters” sort of chill – there is a noticeable melancholy to her guitar parts – but more a relaxation that comes with perspective on how much anything matters when you’re not focused on the dread and insecurity that goes along with uncertainty and inexperience.

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Knxwledge “amansloveislife_keepon”

Knxwledge has an incredible ear for small moments in songs that can stand up to repetition, and take on a very different character when shaped into an indefinite loop. This cut is essentially a remix of the Patrice Rushen song “Remind Me” that zeroes in on its core keyboard riff and jettisons its traditional song structure in favor of an extended vamp that feels weightless as most of the percussion is emptied out. The bits of beat that remain imply a groove more than they form one, especially with the snare hit that feels more like an accent at the end of the chord sequence rather than like something keeping time. Rushen’s voice is still there, but chopped up so it sounds like she’s just expressing a gratitude for this incredibly smooth groove.

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Bec Plexus “Busy Making Steps”

“Busy Making Steps” seems to convulse in harsh, jagged zigzag motions, like the music is having an allergic response to the song’s candid and angst-ridden lyrics. Bec Plexus’ vocal performance is the most straight forward part of the song – theatrical and arch, but within the boundaries of mainstream pop. She drops key words from her lyrics, in many cases removing the word “I” where the word is implied by context, which is a fairly subtle way of establishing a fractured perspective and alienation from the self. But the song isn’t about gazing into the abyss so much as trying to pull oneself out, and the middle section of the piece in particular comes across like a self-directed pep talk. There’s no suggestion of steady ground in this music, and even the most direct, emphatic, and seemingly triumphant line in the song – “I wanna make a statement but don’t know what kind of statement!” – is an expression of indecision and uncertainty.

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Cleo Sol “When I’m In Your Arms”

Cleo Sol made her new record with the producer Inflo, who also produced the two Sault albums from last year. There’s a very similar aesthetic to this music – classic soul rendered with warm, foregrounded bass and ample negative space that highlights the precision of all other instruments in the mix. “When I’m In Your Arms” is gorgeous stuff – that lead part that sounds like backmasked guitar, the tastefully deployed harp, the gentle percussion accents, that swelling string arrangement that seems to drop out entirely like there’s an on/off switch for the orchestra. Sol’s vocal performance is sultry but understated like classic Sade, and delivers lyrics about a tormented relationship with thoughtful nuance. Every aspect of this recording is done with so much care, and it’s all in the service of highlighting the emotional complexity of the dynamic between these two people.

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Alexandra Savior “Bad Disease”

Alexandra Savior belongs to a long tradition of torch singers, but the sound and lyrical concerns of “Bad Disease” place her in the overlap of a Venn diagram of Portishead and Lana Del Rey. I know it can read like a backhanded compliment to say an artist sounds like two others, but in this case I think you’d agree that it’s both accurate and high praise. Savior’s composition hinges on a slowly crawling bass line that’s both sexy and spooky, and filled out with an understated but potent level of atmosphere on the treble end – just enough to feel cinematic, but not melodramatic. Her vocal pulls off a similar balancing act, with enough pathos in her phrasing so the campiness of her affect doesn’t fully overtake the song. But oh, the camp of it all really is a selling point, particularly as her lyrics describe a sexy but poisonous man in details that make him sound like Nosferatu with a neck tattoo and a leather jacket.

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Orion Sun “Lightning”

“Lightning” is built around a one chord drone that blinks on and off in slow motion so it feels like falling into a meditative trance but then snapping out of it when you become aware of the trance. Tiffany Majette sings with emotive, soulful inflections but keeps with the drowsy and dreamy tone of the music enough that her lyrics come across like the thoughts of someone who’s half asleep and drawing deep connections between memories, imagination, and emotions. My favorite line here is the aside near the start where she reflects on how the house she used to live in is now “just a property building winning tenants.” The wistfulness and low-key resentment in that line grounds everything else she sings, which moves more towards broader feelings about a disappointing relationship, so even a line as common as “I thought that love lasts forever” feels much more specific.

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Pokus “Pokus Two”

The best way I can describe Pokus aesthetic is that it’s like if the rhythm section of Fugazi was playing with a keyboard player who sometimes sounded a bit like Sun Ra when he was messing around synthesizers and overdriven electric organs in the late ’70s and other times was more along the lines of late ’90s IDM-aligned electronic music. It’s an extremely cool sound, and the band does enough with it to hold attention through a six track suite. The recording has a good live feel to it – there’s a firm structure to the bass, but it sounds like the keyboard parts are at least somewhat improvised in the moment and you can feel the chemistry between the three players.

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Theophilus London “Marchin'”

Theophilus London’s new record is filled with impressive guest spots – two tracks with Tame Impala, features from Raekwon, Dev Hynes, Lil Yachty, and Ariel Pink – and on each of those collaborations the singer adopts their distinctive aesthetics and essentially sounds like he’s the guest. “Marchin’,” one of the few songs on the album that has no features is also the best by far, and allows London to be fully at the center of a joyful calypso/dancehall number about love and devotion. It’s a bit like when an actor is cast well but slightly against as a romantic lead – everything sweet and warm and likable about them is centered, and their little peculiarities ground the fantasy they’re providing of idealized romance.

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Fiona Apple “Ladies”

The big frustrating thing about loving Fiona Apple’s music is that she takes so long between records, but the immediately apparent thing about her new album Fetch the Bolt Cutters is that these particular songs simply couldn’t exist as they do without all that time for reflection and emotional processing. Whereas most of her old songs seemed like documents of raw emotions in the moment, the new songs are written with the perspective of memoir. But this isn’t self-mythologizing – she’s writing about her life with a critical eye, and in reflecting on the past she allows herself to shake off some of the burden of its weight on her psyche. The title phrase is her metaphor for cutting your way out of a trap you’ve made for yourself, and she’s singing this all as a woman who’s already made it out.

I love the way the record is sequenced in thematic clusters, and how an idea set up in one song is expanded on from another angle in the one right after it. My favorite example of this is in the “Newspaper”/”Ladies” diptych at the center of the album, in which Apple considers the social obstacles placed between women who’ve been romantically involved with the same men. “Newspaper” approaches this with suspicion and anger – “I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me to make sure that we’ll never be friends” – as well as an admission of envy and obsession. Like a lot of the songs on the album, it’s in some way her noting in retrospect how she fell into a trap and making a note of it for future use, as though she’s an emotional cartographer letting us all know where to expect treacherous terrain. That song is fraught and tense, but it’s resolved somewhat by “Ladies,” which considers this dilemma with a looser sound, a more relaxed state of mind, and a lyrical emphasis on empathy and generosity. She still finds herself cut off from these seemingly great women she wishes she could know firsthand, but she at least has shed the angst and jealousy.

There’s a lot of levity in the verses of “Ladies,” and lots of vivid images and details that she sings with delightfully off-kilter rhythms and cadences. Apple, as always, is a genius of phrasing with a very distinctive style, and as deliberate as she is in writing these meticulous lyrics and melodies, it all rolls out so fluidly that it feels more intuitive and improvisational. The refrain in which she calls herself a “fruit bat” in a sweet melody at the top of her vocal range is an unexpected contrast that further lightens the mood of the song, but that moves straight into a more solemn bridge where she arrives the song’s magnanimous conclusion: “Nobody can replace anybody else, so it would be a shame to make it a competition / And no love is like any other love, so it would be insane to make a comparison with you.” It’s basically the moral of the story, and she makes a point of singing it plainly and with direct language. But as much as she believes this very reasonable thought, the song doesn’t stop at this realization and honors the feeling rather than just “solving” it. The ending circles back to the premise of both “Newspaper” and this song, as she simply repeats the phrase “yet another woman to whom I won’t get through” with a steadily deepening degree of disappointment.

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Car Seat Headrest “Hollywood”

“Hollywood” is blunt and bratty in a way Car Seat Headrest haven’t been before, it’s like Sum 41/Blink-182 energy filtered through Will Toledo’s usual dry deadpan tone and indie rock aesthetics. The song is a duet with drummer Andrew Katz, who delivers his parts with a borderline obnoxious punk shout that is in deliberate sharp contrast with Toledo’s low-key cool guy monotone. The lyrics of the song play off this contrast in different directions – in some cases, Toledo is the chill introverted guy forced to respond to the attention-seeking extrovert Katz, and in others Toledo plays the cold, detached realist puncturing Katz’s delusional dreams of fame and success. It’s the id/ego dynamic of classic Sleater-Kinney blasted out to an extreme, and it comes out feeling like two guys suffering different forms of poisoning from the same source.

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