March 16th, 2020 8:59pm
There is a voyeuristic quality to Tennis’ music, in that they are a married couple and Alaina Moore seems to mostly sing autobiographical lyrics about her life with her husband and collaborator Patrick Riley. There’s never anything particularly revealing in the lyrics but a song like “How to Forgive,” which is about letting go of anger built up towards a partner, makes me wonder what it’s like to work in this sort of arrangement. It must be odd to work on a song that’s putting you on blast, right? It’s likely this song was written after a conflict was resolved and a lot of things had already been discussed, but it’s still an interesting form of shared catharsis. I suppose it’s also notable that this is not at all an angry song – the music is deliberately sweet and girlish, as if to sugar the pill of negative emotions, and Moore’s lyrics are mostly just her questioning the logic of dwelling on anger. It’s very very conciliatory, and I wonder if that would be the case if the song was not written and performed with her partner.
March 12th, 2020 3:23pm
“Blueberry Beads” is tightly composed but heavily atmospheric, with John Carroll Kirby leaning hard on sustained piano chords and a constant patter of cymbal hits to evoke a misty haze in the negative space between lower pitched riffs. The feeling of it reminds me a lot of Herbie Hancock on his Sextant record, which aimed for a fusion of spiritual jazz and hard funk. It’s a very cosmic vibe, but there’s also a heavy earthiness to the arrangement, mostly in the way Kirby keeps a very deep and lurching low end. This only ends up exaggerating the brightness of the high notes he plays, so the lead accents pop like lights on a dark skyline.
“Blueberry Faygo” sounds about as colorful and fizzy as its title suggests. Lil Mosey’s chorus is so catchy it borders on sounding like a jingle, and Callan’s track has the bright and joyful sound of early Kanye West productions. This largely comes down to Callan’s very clever use of a sped-up sample from Johnny Gill’s early 90s hit “My My My,” which was produced by LA Reid and Babyface. It’s interesting to hear a Babyface track get the “Chipmunk soul” treatment – it’s not tremendously different in effect from a 60s or 70s R&B cut through this filter, but his particular slickness and smooth chords hits differently. The track feels extra breezy.
March 11th, 2020 9:21pm
A very large amount of rap is built on the premise of wish fulfillment but with Lil Uzi Vert, the dreams of endless money, flashy clothes, expensive cars, and unlimited sex seem warped and surreal. A lot of it’s in his low-key Afrofuturism, or the way he openly wants to be a cartoon beyond the limitations of reality. But it’s mostly in the extreme elasticity of his voice, which seems to glide through busy melodies and bounce through speedy rhymes with uncommon grace. His style and cadence is unmistakable, and his melodies are as robust as they are eccentric. “Venetia” is pretty much boilerplate on a lyrical level – he’s just boasting about being rich and spending money, you’ve heard it all before – but with the combination his voice and Brandon Finessin’s sparkling synths, you get something magical and effervescent. Maybe it’s the same logic behind the value of the designer clothes he’s singing about in the chorus – OK, sure, they’re just shoes and shirts, but high levels of craft and personal flair can elevate even the most mundane things.
March 10th, 2020 5:51pm
Denzel Curry is blessed with a perfect voice for rap – commanding in tone, wildly expressive, convincingly aggressive, crisp diction. He’s very aware of this and knows how to use it well, pulling together tricks accrued from 40 years of rap history, but mainly focused on the 90s. He’s not as overtly retro as a Joey Bada$$ or focused in mimicking one specific rapper like Action Bronson, but he does sound like you could drop him into a lot of classic rap records from the 90s and seamlessly blend in. “Diet_” highlights the most aggro side of his style, with his voice shifting into a full-on holler as he gets worked up through the verses. Kenny Beats’ raw production style seems to egg him on, nudging him towards increased theatricality. The odds are good that Curry is just starting to hit his stride, but if he’s actually reached a peak on his new EP and last year’s Zuu, it’s a higher pinnacle than most ever achieve.
March 9th, 2020 2:21pm
I’ve always quite liked Cornershop but have the feeling I’m always missing about 25% of their songs in the sense that Tjinder Singh’s music is so heavily coded with shibboleths hyper-specific to Indian culture, British culture, and his own personal canon of music history. Singh’s songs benefit from annotation but succeed just as well on pure sensation, as the best of them are rich with groove and melody, and radiate a warmth somewhat at odds with his often cynical and sarcastic lyrics. “St. Marie Under Canon,” the lead-off song from the band’s first proper album in over a decade, leans hard on the group’s long-established fascination with ’60s psychedelia and early ’70s glam. It feels instantly familiar, but the contrast of the ambling Dylan-esque organ riff and the crashing Iggy-ish urgency of the beat suggests a tension beneath the nostalgic vibes. Singh’s words play off that, juxtaposing prosaic but highly specific imagery with a constant threat of institutionalized violence.
March 6th, 2020 4:02pm
“Are You Feeling Sad?” is a very noble sort of song, the kind that exists on every level to console the depressed and stimulate joy. It’s basically a very mid-90s type of house/R&B hybrid, but with a relatively relaxed tempo that sounds uplifting rather than overbearing. The keyboards have a bright tone, but they use it somewhat sparingly so every chord change feels like a little jolt of serotonin. Yukimi Nagano and Kali Uchis keep their lyrics simple and direct, offering words of encouragement and kindness to someone who seems to be mourning a loss. Uchis is at her best here when she grounds her words in her own experiences – “my sorrows have a million layers and I’ve been told I wear them well” – and finding peace in simple pleasures, like feeling the sun on your skin, and the smell in the air after rain.
March 5th, 2020 8:51pm
Samira Winter’s aesthetic falls somewhere on the psychedelia scale between Broadcast and Tame Impala – keyboards that seem to glow like neon tubing and crisp fill-heavy percussion, but contrasted with a cold vocal tone that signals a shy intelligence. “Say” is thick with appealing atmosphere but the real draw is in the bass groove, which is lightly funky in a very early ‘90s sophisticated European pop mode. The song is adjacent to shoegaze with its emphasis on abstracted sensuality, but there’s no soft-focus haziness to this. Winter’s arrangement is remarkably clear and vibrant, and every little detail pops rather than blurs together.
March 4th, 2020 1:50pm
I wrote about Stephen Malkmus’ new record Traditional Techniques for NPR Music. Here’s an excerpt from that piece about my favorite song on the album:
The album’s finest track, the country ballad “The Greatest Own in Legal History,” is one of Malkmus’ prettiest compositions ever — and also the moment where this record’s folky aesthetics make a sharp intersection with his Pavement mode. Writing from the perspective of a depressed, sleep-deprived small-time lawyer, attempting to land a young client with the promise that he can’t possibly lose the case, he sings in a plaintive lilt: “I’ll be there to vet the jury / Make sure there’s a couple softies on our side / They’ll see their own kids in you / Their empathy will go a thousand miles wide.” The character tries to seem noble, but there’s an overwhelming pathos to him that makes his boldest declarations ring hollow, like he’s hoping you’ll buy his shtick even if his heart’s not fully in it. Malkmus is writing with a fair amount of irony here, but not enough to undermine the ache at the center of this song. If you were ever going to sit at home and cry to a solo Malkmus tune, this is the one.
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.
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