May 26th, 2020 7:31pm
The connecting thread in all of the Owen Pallett songs I like the most is this feeling of being small and powerless in the face of uncaring gods and other forces that keep you trapped and limited by circumstances. This is a lyrical theme in his songs, but also something suggested by the music itself, particularly when he contrasts minimalist sections of his arrangements with a sort of futile grace and grandeur. “Paragon of Order” sounds like a character gradually escaping a prison suggested by a steady single piano chord, but by the time we’ve made it through the more soaring and triumphant parts of the song, it doesn’t feel like they’ve actually made it out of anything.
May 22nd, 2020 12:13am
“One More Year” has a deep resonance with me, so deep that it makes me realize that it’s actually sort of rare that I fully identify with the words of songs in a way that reflects my actual lived experience. Kevin Parker is essentially singing in this song about the cost of committing oneself to a project that becomes a vocation that becomes the center of your existence. He sings the song with some ambivalence about throwing himself so fully into his life’s work, noting that it’s all he’s ever wanted but acknowledging that it hasn’t given him space to experience much else. He’s noticing how many possibilities are being closed off, and while he’s not yearning for anything in particular he still feels some nagging sense of FOMO. “I know we promised we’d be doing this until we die,” he sings, “and now I fear we might.”
But despite the anxieties expressed in the lyrics, “One More Year” feels quite relaxed and soothing in its steady groove and layers of wavy synths. It sounds like it’s coming from outside of time somehow, with Parker looking at his feelings from a perspective that takes them seriously but understands how little it all matters as time continues to pass. The big cathartic epiphany of the song is just Parker deciding to let the worry rest and give himself another year. Another year to procrastinate, another year to do the work, another year to avoid confronting his fears, another year to experience life and see where it all goes. When it comes down to it, “one more year” is the best we can hope for. Just being alive can be enough.
This song feels so right for this year, in which everything feels uncertain and possibilities are closed off and time seems to move differently. There’s one particular line – “we’re on a roller coaster stuck on its loop-de-loop” – that feels like a pretty good metaphor for how the world feels in the spring of 2020. It’s like we’re all just dangling in suspense indefinitely, and everyone trapped in this precarious situation interprets with varying levels of panic and boredom depending on their mindset. Some people, and by “some people” I mean me a little bit, might even feel a thrill at the novelty of it all and the challenge of figuring out how to make the best of it.
May 20th, 2020 3:35pm
Faye Webster is good at conveying an elegant sort of melancholy romanticism in which her voice projects raw vulnerability but the music is very clean and composed. “In A Good Way” sounds low-key glamorous, like a movie star emoting convincingly while retaining all their style and dignity. As with all of Webster’s songs, the lyrics are direct and specific, with her expressing her gratitude to a partner who’s made her feel open to love and joy after feeling cold and cynical about the prospect. Of course, this happiness is overwhelming, and bleeds over into sadness – “you make wanna cry…in a good way.” The chorus is gentle and sweet, and hits the perfect mark between surprise and appreciation.
May 19th, 2020 2:14pm
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.
May 18th, 2020 3:52pm
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.
May 14th, 2020 8:41pm
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.
May 14th, 2020 3:45pm
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.
May 13th, 2020 10:28pm
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.
May 12th, 2020 3:04pm
“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.
May 11th, 2020 2:51pm
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?
May 7th, 2020 2:28am
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.
May 5th, 2020 10:34pm
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.
May 5th, 2020 12:17am
“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.”
May 3rd, 2020 8:45pm
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.
April 30th, 2020 7:51pm
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.
April 29th, 2020 3:03am
“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.
April 27th, 2020 10:50pm
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.
April 27th, 2020 12:26am
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.
April 23rd, 2020 1:54pm
“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.
April 22nd, 2020 9:28pm
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.
