March 3rd, 2020 3:54pm
Meg Remy’s craft hasn’t changed much since her creative and commercial breakthrough on 2018’s In A Poem Unlimited, but her style has shifted towards a refined aesthetic that removes all distractions from her evocative and economical lyrics, her elegant melodies, and the expressive soulfulness of her voice. “Denise, Don’t Wait” aims for a Phil Spector/Brian Wilson sort of aesthetic but with a dry tone and uncluttered arrangement, which connects the song to a history of teen ballads but without any implied nostalgia or sentimentality. Remy’s lyrics suggest a troubled young woman – a teen mom, I think? – who feels abandoned and alienated by everyone in her life, most especially her own mother who’s too embarrassed by her to show her any sign of empathy. The chorus is beautiful but haunting as she sings about how “in another 24 hours from now I’ll be gone” with deliberate ambiguity, leaving you to wonder what the definition of “gone” might be in this story.
March 2nd, 2020 8:54pm
“I can’t tell you how hard I tried to love what I can’t describe,” Julia Steiner sings, as though she’s surprised by her own level of open-hearted optimism in this song. The lyrics of “My Hands Grow” mostly come across like reporting the details or a dream that, despite a lack of linear logic, resulted in a deeper and more joyful understanding of the world. The music is sunny but laid back, and feels a bit like the song might have been a little more bright and overbearing at first but the band opted to make it more gentle and chill. Steiner sounds so earnest, especially in the moments where it seems like she’s just trying to will a good vibe into reality. The closing line strikes me as particularly poignant: “I know that it’s hard to feel my love, just trust that all we’ve learned tonight is real.”
February 27th, 2020 1:51pm
David Roback, the man who composed all the music for Mazzy Star, passed away earlier this week at the age of 61. He’d been a figure in the L.A. neo-psychedelic scene for years before forming Mazzy Star at the very end of the ‘80s, but his work in that band in collaboration with singer Hope Sandoval is his most inspired and historically crucial, particularly as their song “Fade Into You” became a crossover hit in the mid ‘90s. The sound of Mazzy Star, and of that song in particular, was not unprecedented, but it was rare and distinctive in a mainstream context. It was overwhelmingly romantic and unmistakably sexual; erotic in ways that were heightened in dramatic terms but not sensationalized or prurient. Gen Xers greeted the song as the perfect thing for their crush tapes and make-out mixes, and it’s never really gone away. There’s an entire lane of indie music built upon the foundation of what Roback and Sandoval accomplished on their first three records, and even Taylor Swift draws on their influence – what is her recent hit “Lover” if not “Fade Into You II”?
Mazzy Star was the synthesis of two perfectly simpatico romantics. Sandoval seemed mysterious and aloof, and sang everything like an old soul trapped in the role of the ingenue. She always sounded like she’s overcome with feelings, but too shy to express it outside of the implied hyper-intimacy of their songs, and even then, only just scratching the surface of everything in her heart. Roback played often simple parts with a poetic feel. He could make a churning drone sound remarkably sensual, and bent the notes of his leads in ways that suggested a depth of feeling beyond the expressive range of words.
“Disappear,” one of his finest compositions, displays most of his finest moves and is an especially good example of how effectively he could build a potent atmosphere. The song opens their third album Among My Swan, and within ten seconds you’re just fully transported into their world. The sound makes the air feel different, it makes time feel like it’s slowing down. You put these records on to enter Roback and Sandoval’s world, and hope to feel more like how they feel, and if you’re lucky, absorb some of their sentimentality and romanticism into your own life.
February 26th, 2020 6:39pm
One risk of hearing a song performed live before it is released as a studio recording is that you can end up being disappointed by the decisions the artist made when finalizing the arrangement. This is somewhat the case for my relationship with “Friday,” the outstanding opening song from Real Estate’s fifth album that is nevertheless a bit of a let down for me in that the version I’ve seen them play on stage is far more bass-centric, and much closer to the vibe of Air’s “La Femme D’Argent” from Moon Safari. The bass part is still there and quite good, but more subtle in the mix as the more recognizable elements of Real Estate’s aesthetics – jangling guitar treble and Martin Courtney’s soft, sensitive voice – are foregrounded. And I get it, I do – this is what Real Estate do! This is their entire thing, and this mix is very good on its own terms. But I think it could still use more warmth, and it wouldn’t hurt to lean harder on its most remarkable melodic element. I don’t think that would have taken the focus off of Courtney’s melancholy tone and lyrics about searching for a new path, but rather just cast it in relief as the music subtly shifted away from the band’s comfort zone.
February 25th, 2020 10:07pm
“Flat Dog” starts off sounding like a chugging but glossy blues rock number along the lines of The Black Keys but with Korean lyrics but by the time the first verse is through the implied scale of the piece seems to expand exponentially. It sounds cosmic but also very Beatlesque, like something a young George Harrison might have come up with if he had swapped places with Eric Clapton in Cream. Oh Hyuk’s sensibility may be a lot more rock and retro than his colleagues in the K-Pop world but there’s still a sort formal kinship here in the way he’s scrambling decades of pop music history, cherry-picking the coolest moves, and putting it all back together in a way that feels just a bit off. It’s a funny balance of studio nerd obsessive reverence and a total irreverent approach to the context of it all.
February 24th, 2020 1:07pm
“Stressy” is built around the sort of processed breakbeat that was just about the coolest thing in the world in the late ‘90s but is hard to come by now – hard and fast and full of clattering cymbal ambiance, like “Tomorrow Never Knows” but more shambling. Hanni El Khatib uses this as the basis for a garage rock song with the psychedelic sample aesthetics of The Chemical Brothers and The Dust Brothers. “Stressy” expresses a teeth-gritting angst and has a rather dark tonal palette but it sounds like catharsis to me, with all the shifts in rhythm relieving a physical tension rather than tightening up. It feels more like “and now I don’t fucking care!” than freaking out.
February 19th, 2020 6:25pm
Archy Marshall’s early songs as King Krule followed tighter, more traditional songwriting trajectories but as he’s moved along he’s drifted towards less obvious structures that nevertheless follow intuitive emotional paths. “Underclass” sounds almost improvisational, like Marshall’s just writing a jazzy ballad along with his train of thought as he ponders his feelings about a relationship that keeps drawing him in despite his apparent ambivalence. The form suits the theme in as much as his character here is passive and seems to just go along with the moment despite his better judgment, and so you get this contrast of more tentative chord changes at the start, and a more loose and swaying section with a saxophone lead once he loosens up a bit. The most interesting trick of the song is in how Marshall conveys all this uncertainty in a song that still sounds incredibly romantic and sexy. “Little did I know I had this feeling,” he sings near the end of it, as if he’s confused to discover the reasons why he falls so easily under this person’s sway.
February 18th, 2020 2:07pm
“April” is a song about months going by while you’re stuck in an emotional stasis, hung up on a relationship that’s long over but is idealized in your mind beyond all reason. Lili Trifilio sings the song with a plaintive but slightly defensive tone, as though she’s a little embarrassed to feel this way but honors her emotion too much to side against the part of herself that might be like “oh, please, shut up about this, this isn’t healthy.” Maybe the sentiment here is a bit pathetic, but only if you’re looking at it without much empathy or the emotional intelligence to notice it’s all just processing an experience to learn what you actually want and need. Not for nothing, but the most melodically and emotionally resonant bit of this song is when she’s declaring what she wants in the future: “Sometimes I just want somebody that reminds me that they’ll always love me.”
February 17th, 2020 9:19pm
There’s never been any shortage of fey indie-pop bands aiming for a sunny-yet-melancholy twee sensibility, but there has been a relatively low number of bands who I feel have the songwriting skill to nail this type of song rather than just sort of set a vibe and call it a day. “When You Were Here and I Was Sad” is nearly perfect iteration of this type of song, from the contrast of the bright and crisp lead guitar lines and the more hazy ambiance of the chords in the chorus to the particular lilt in Valerie Zhu’s voice as she sings her instantly memorable verse melodies. This band is clearly steeped in the history of their subgenre and have learned all the right lessons from all the right bands – I would be pretty surprised if these people are not Velocity Girl fans – yielding an expertly crafted song within a tradition.
February 16th, 2020 10:44pm
Tame Impala started off as a band that fit rather neatly into the box of “retro psychedelic rock band” but have gradually mutated to the point that their songs all seem to exist in the blurry space between genres. “Is It True” is mostly grounded in a Liquid Liquid/ESG post-punk space disco aesthetic, but the ambiance is as hazy and psychedelic as anything Kevin Parker’s ever done in this band. It’s sort of shocking to me that this song wasn’t selected as a single for the new record since the hooks are immediate and bold, whereas the last couple singles were a lot more vague and sedate. It also helps that the lyrics register more clearly than usual, as Parker tends to sing in a high coo that blends into the midrange occupied by his many layers of keyboards and guitars. He’s singing from the perspective of someone who isn’t quite ready to make long-term promises to someone who seems to have fallen in love with him, and while you could certainly read this as a sort of fuckboy anthem, I feel like this comes from a more sensitive and gentle place. He’s not willing to set up expectations he can’t deliver on, but he’s not exactly unwilling to see things through. It’s a “let’s wait and see and not ruin the moment” sentiment.
February 13th, 2020 1:06pm
“This Heat” is the extremely crisp and rhythmically tight sort of post-punk, the kind that sounds as though it’s a mathematically precise chart of someone’s real-time anxiety that’s been transposed to musical notation. Deeper aren’t reinventing any wheels here – if this is a vibe you enjoy, it will sound immediate familiar and welcome – but they execute this mode of music at a high level. A lot of this comes down to Deeper being as adept with writing melodies as they are with creating a tense rhythm, and the way the vocals sound a lot like The Cure’s Robert Smith in the best possible ways, drawing on the raw humanity and open-wound melodrama of his trebly yelps. It cuts straight through the more schematic elements of the music to keep you focused on the angst at the core of it.
February 12th, 2020 4:22am
“Yell Oh” is immediately apparent as a Pi’erre Bourne composition even before his signature “Yo Pierre!!” drop comes in around 20 seconds into the track. The piano hook is just so extremely him – the tone has the uncanny quality of a cheap keyboard in preset piano mode, and the repeated melodic hook is almost too busy to allow space for rapping. There’s also the way the drum programming sounds as though it’s tilted at a diagonal from the vocal, leaving the music feeling a bit drunk and stumbling. The use of bass here is particularly inspired, with a low rumble that vibrates under the track in a way that makes it feel as though all these other elements stacked on top of it could fall over and crash like a Jenga tower if the frequency gets any deeper.
February 11th, 2020 3:38pm
“LCR” would feel wired and panicky in most any arrangement given its fast and jagged central guitar riff, but Melkbelly’s James Wetzel pushes the song to a frazzled extreme with his dizzyingly busy drum fills. The rhythm is constantly shifting but even in relatively quiet moments there’s no sense of stillness, only a jittery pause before bolting forwards again. But as the music signals anxiety, singer Miranda Winters sounds as unaffected and chill as a young Kim Deal while singing about observing people but feeling totally disconnected from them. Is she just bored, maybe? Or could it be it’s more like she’s traumatized and numb by whatever intense experience the music seems to be reacting to?
February 10th, 2020 5:40pm
The weight of “It Don’t Hinder Me” shifts around – a bit airy at the start, and stridently stomping in the more theatrical second half to emphasize the singer’s strength and pride. Angelica Garcia, a Southern Californian of Mexican and Salvadorian heritage, is singing about the cultural details of her youth that make her feel homesick, and the context that gives her a sense of self. There’s a vibrant specificity to her lyrics, particularly as she recalls bits of her past that weren’t exactly fun or glamorous. But she’s making a point of claiming it all, because every bit of it made her what she is, and this is a song about being proud. This sort of thing could easily be sentimental or tacky, but Garcia’s witty delivery and the punky bluntness of the rhythm keeps it all in check.
February 6th, 2020 7:46pm
There’s really no getting around mentioning that The Heliocentrics are doing a Silver Apples thing with this song, right? The Silver Apples aesthetic – that crisp in-the-pocket percussion, the woozy vocal, the sci-fi synthesizer – is so distinctive that anyone who emulates it can’t really do so without it being a sort of tribute. It’s a great sound, though, and this band does a great job in interpreting it, particularly in the way the drum performance integrates a bit of the feel of Can’s Jaki Liebezeit circa Tago Mago. “Burning Wooden Ship” sounds like an excursion into the cosmos, especially as the percussion drops out and the song drifts off course in the middle section. When the song clicks back into its tight rhythm, it’s like the whole thing falls back into gravity.
February 5th, 2020 7:50pm
The best way I can explain the appeal of “Circle the Drain” is like when people make approximations of popular fast food and commercially produced snack items with superior ingredients. In this case the fast food item is a rock-pop ballad in the mode of the very late ‘90s/early ‘00s: think Michelle Branch, Avril Lavigne, maybe a little Vanessa Carlton. The song evokes that general feeling but doesn’t go as heavy on the gloss or sentimentality. Soccer Mommy’s Sophy Allison is reaching for a more accessible – and at this point, highly nostalgic – style, but still retains a lot of her indie aesthetics. (To keep up the metaphor, consider this the artisanal ingredients.) She’s also a lot darker in her lyrics as she sings frankly about crippling depression, and without reaching any sort of conclusion or teachable lesson. The sort of misery she sings about here is an ongoing suck on her body and soul, and the best she can come up with in the short term is just “trying to seem strong for my love, for my family, and friends.”
February 4th, 2020 3:42pm
Believing in yourself, allowing yourself to want what you want, and giving yourself person to do and be what you want all requires a leap of faith that can look delusional and arrogant when viewed from any direction. “Feel the Way I Want” plays on that ambiguity, both celebrating its character’s decision to throw herself into her desires and ambitions and looking askance at her, vaguely dubious of whether she can actually follow through on some big talk. But that bit of doubt is mostly just subtext – the synthy bounce of the song conveys a blithe confidence, and Rose sings her choruses with a joyful sincerity and delivers her verses with a touch of weight and tension, rooting her resolutions in a history of conflict and low self-esteem.
February 3rd, 2020 7:18pm
The Tara Clerkin Trio are mostly a jazz group, but their music bleeds into other neighboring territories – vibey electronic music, artsy indie music, psychedelia. “In the Room” starts off slow and pensive with a simple saxophone figure repeating like drawing in steady, calming breaths for about two minutes. After that the song clicks into a mellow percussive groove with a clipped, hypnotic vocal pattern. This shift feels a bit like clouds parting to let in some fresh sunlight after a bit of rain. The pressure changes, the mood lifts. It’s incredibly lovely and calming, and only gets more so as the song drifts out and the percussion dissipates as that original sax pattern gets softer and softer.
January 31st, 2020 3:37pm
“Your Girl” is a wistful folk-pop song in the tradition of Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs – crisp and clean in structure, but earthy and wholesome in aesthetics. Basia Bulat’s perspective is somewhat ambiguous in this song, shifting between a first-person testimonial about how she’s become hesitant to fall in love after some difficult experiences and choruses in which she’s addressing someone else about how they’ve let down their girl. It could just be that she’s talking to the one who wronged her, but there’s a suggestion of elapsed time. It could be advice to a friend, a warning to an ex that they’re keeping up the same mistakes, or maybe it’s just her reliving the same old traumas. But it’s notably that the song isn’t bitter or angry, just resigned to the seemingly inevitable catastrophes of people getting close to each other.
January 30th, 2020 1:24pm
I will admit to you that I feel a bit corny sharing the only song with vocals on a consistently great and inventive new jazz record, but just listen to this – it’s so lovely and gentle, it seems like it’s radiating warmth and benevolence! The feel of the track is easy going but there’s a slight tension in the groove, a bit of resistance to the call to slow down and enjoy the moment in the lyrics. Ruby Parker, the composer’s daughter, sings a very Dirty Projectors sort of melody with serene tones, as though she’s just moving with the waves of the rhythm. There’s a passive feeling to the song, but only in the sense of learning to calm down, trying to trust the universe, and letting that make you feel free.
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