The Heliocentrics “Burning Wooden Ship”

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.

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Soccer Mommy “Circle the Drain”

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.”

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Caroline Rose “Feel the Way I Want”

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.

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Tara Clerkin Trio “In the Room”

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.

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Basia Bulat “Your Girl”

“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.

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Jeff Parker featuring Ruby Parker “Build A Nest”

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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Andy Shauf “Where Are You Judy?”

In the story cycle of Andy Shauf’s new album The Neon Skyline, “Where Are You Judy?” is the inciting incident: Shauf’s lonely barfly discovers his ex-girlfriend is back in town, and gets it in his head that he needs to see her again. You hardly need the other songs on the record to get a complete experience of it – to be honest, given that I like this song more than the others and I prefer not following up on where the character goes from here, I prefer it on its own. Shauf conveys a lot of information with economical language, first sketching out the character’s romantic notion of why his relationship with Judy ended, i.e., that she was enticed away by the possibilities of flashy experiences somewhere else. He fantasizes about her giving him a call, telling him that she got bored of all that, that what she was chasing instead of staying with him was empty. And, by extension, that what they had together…that was fulfilling. The final chorus turns that flash of egocentric optimism inside-out without changing a word. Instead of wondering where she literally is in the moment, he’s flashing back to her lying in bed with him, her mind a million miles away. “Where are you, Judy?”

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Activity “Calls Your Name”

Activity’s forthcoming record Unmask Whoever is one of the best debut records I’ve heard in a long time – a band arriving fully formed after years of its members doing strong work in other groups (Grooms, Field Mouse) and pulling together a set of tasteful influences in interesting and evocative new ways. The band exists in a very Portishead-ish space between electronic music and bleak art rock, with the single “Calls Your Name” leaning a bit more towards sample-based production and a clicking, twitchy paranoia. The music in this song feels tight and claustrophobic but also overtly sexual, like they were making music on the prompt of “erotic panic attack.” The vocals signal a sort of flirty ennui, the guitar and keyboard parts offer subtle melodicism beneath the rhythmic clatter. It’s not even their best song.

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Four Tet “Baby”

Over the past decade or so Kieran Hebden has emerged as the master of the chopped and decontextualized vocal sample. His approach is both melodic and painterly, applying snippets of voice to the area of the song with both precise intention and gestural grace. He’s never trying to hide the nature of what he’s doing – you can always tell it’s cut up and digitally edited – but the sound is never about the process, it’s entirely about feeling and abstraction. “Baby,” a new song made in collaboration with the singer Ellie Goulding, is a particularly strong iteration on his usual formula and adds an unusual dimension to a Four Tet song in allowing the listener to recognize and fixate on the voice of a pop star. It feels slightly transgressive to separate a pop vocal from clarity and meaning, and to reduce Goulding to just the particular sound of her voice. In doing this Hebden highlights the best aspects of Goulding – the specific brightness of her tone, the way she often sounds like she’s grasping for something, the way she sounds like she’s pushing herself through painful feelings. In framing her voice like this, he’s presenting a very flattering portrait of her as a singer.

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Dreamville & Ari Lennox “Bussit”

Ari Lennox sings sexy, sensual R&B songs with the authoritative cadence of a rapper. Her phrasing is so bold and direct that even her most vulnerable or submissive lyrics can come across like statements or commands. This works particularly well on “Bussit,” a slow jam in which Lennox is taking control of a relationship that’s been hot but a little ambiguous. “You scared of love, but fuck your fear,” she sings in the first verse, not allowing any room for negotiation. The sentiment of this song would probably feel sinister coming from a man, but in this context, it’s a woman who knows what she wants doing her best to cut through a man’s bullshit and anxiety. I suppose this song is an ultimatum, but she’s mostly just asking him to get over himself and commit to something he actually cares about.

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Pearl Jam “Dance of the Clairvoyants”

Over the past two decades Pearl Jam shifted fully over to a jam band model in which the live show – and recordings of the live shows – was the primary focus of everything they did, and new studio albums were sporadically made as a way of bringing new songs into the setlist and having a peg for launching big tours. They only released four albums in this time, which is quite a drop from their frantic pace of writing and recording through the ‘90s. The records have their moments but feel very formulaic, as though the band identified a set of song archetypes they had to iterate on in order to fill out a sequencing arc that was pretty much the same every time. (2002’s overlong Riot Act is an outlier in this respect, but the tracks on the subsequent albums are interchangeable in production style and musical function.)

So with this in mind, “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” the first single from the forthcoming record Gigaton, is quite a surprise. “Dance” doesn’t sound quite like anything the band has ever done – it has prominent synths, a groove that encourages awkward dancing, and a vocal by Eddie Vedder that verges on a full-on David Byrne impression. It’s dark, but also sort of cheeky. (Near the end Vedder sings “I know the boys wanna grow their dicks and fix and file things.”) Even if the description of this seems potentially horrible, it all clicks together very nicely and sounds genuinely inspired. The band seem motivated to push themselves musically and Vedder is clearly inspired by the bleakness of contemporary politics and the oncoming disasters of climate change. His rich baritone is well suited to doomsaying, and when he sings a line like “the past is the present and the future’s no more” it comes out sounding like a prophecy rather than paranoia.

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J-Felix featuring Andrew Ashong “Mind Up”

“Mind Up” is a very restrained and low-key funk track – always groovy, but so uncluttered and relaxed in its pace that it seems to glide by on a light breeze. There is a physicality in the track, particularly in that extra-crisp snare sound, but the emphasis of this track is on the way Andrew Ashong’s vocal floats through the ample negative space. Ashong has a great voice for funk – a bit of rasp, a touch of treble, a pinched delivery on the more rhythmic lines – and he sings lyrics about chasing ambitions that might ordinarily come off as a little trite with subtle shades of doubt and bitterness that ground the words in harsh reality and a sincere generosity of spirit.

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Ultraísta “Tin King”

Ultraísta is a trio featuring Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, the prolific session drummer Joey Waronker, and singer Laura Bettinson. It’s important to note this upfront because it explains a lot about the music – for one, it immediate answers the question of how this random band has a drummer who is working up to the level of style and technical sophistication you hear on this track. It also makes sense of how much this sounds like Radiohead, and in far more subtle ways than you’d usually get from an artist emulating that band. Godrich, who has effectively been a sixth member of the band from OK Computer onwards and also collaborates with Thom Yorke on his solo records, has understandably absorbed the aesthetics of that band over the years. But the interesting thing about hearing him as a musician cut off from all of them is getting the sense of how HIS aesthetics may have formed theirs as well. “Tin King” is a remarkable composition, particularly in the way Waronker’s busy percussion plays off a jumpy bass riff and a keyboard part that resembles Yorke’s Rhodes parts on “Everything In Its Right Place.” Bennington’s voice comes at a clipped rhythm, like she’s constantly chasing to keep up with Waronker, and her tone suggests a strange contrast of exasperation and serenity. Her melody isn’t far off from what Yorke might sing if he was on the track, but it’s not a problem. Any resemblance to Radiohead here is both logical and flattering: If this was in fact one of their compositions, it’d be among the better songs from this stage of their career.

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Mac Miller “Circles”

There’s a lot of ways Mac Miller’s death at the age of 26 last year is heartbreaking and tragic, but the thing that stings the most if you didn’t actually know him is that he was just finding himself as a vocalist in the year or so before he died. Miller was singing more, and leaning in hard on the raspiness of his voice, and contrasting it with more elegant and organic sounds in collaboration with Jon Brion. In a song like “Circles,” which opens his new posthumous which he was working on with Brion at the time of his death, you can hear him confidently settling into a niche as a prematurely weathered man grappling with his demons and failures with a vocal style that communicated remarkable vulnerability and low-key pathos. In his voice and words you get a poignant mix of resignation to life’s difficulties – and the problems he created for himself – but also a glimmer of hope that he can move beyond all that if only he had some time to set things right and get back on track. Surely I don’t need to belabor the point of why hearing him sing a song expressing that mix of feelings is so heartbreaking to hear now.

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Magdalena Bay “How to Get Physical”

Last year Magdalena Bay released an excellent song called “Only If You Want It” which sounded remarkably like Britney Spears in her prime and pushed the obsessive feelings at the center of many of Spears’ major hits to an absurdist extreme. “How to Get Physical,” from their new EP, does a similar trick – it has the sound and feeling of Kylie Minogue at her early 2000s pinnacle, but swaps out the casual lust and slick confidence of that music with a neurotic insecurity. Mica Tenenbaum’s voice matches the joyful/serene cadences of Minogue, but her lyrics describe a scene of feeling total cluelessness as she tries to figure out how to be seductive while dancing with someone but deciding that it’s for the best if she just lets them take control rather than potentially humiliate herself by making a move. I like the way this song places itself in the gulf between the idealized situations of pop songs and music videos and the actual lived experience of awkward, ordinary fans. How many pop songs have you heard where the vocalist is singing about the freedom of dancing? This is just the opposite, where the hook is a shrugging admission that she’s not “made for dancing” at all, so now what?

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Cable Ties “Sandcastles”

Cable Ties specialize in brute force and velocity, two core values of punk rock that can nevertheless get underserved by bands who simply can’t go very hard. Every element in “Sandcastles” is stark and blunt, and played like they’re trying to bruise you on every impact. That’s all great, but the real draw is in the band’s approach to their vocals, which is like replacing the hot/cold dynamic of Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein with a more intense combo of hot backing vocal by drummer Shauna Boyle and a scalding hot lead by guitarist Jenny McKechnie. It’s a righteous sound for a righteous song, as McKechnie’s lyrics tear into over-militant activists who defeat their own goals with aggressive gatekeeping rather than open-minded coalition building. A good song for this year, obviously.

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Selena Gomez “Cut You Off”

“Cut You Off” falls into the same category as a lot of Ariana Grande’s best music: Sophisticated pop music bankrolled by the success of more market-oriented hits. Selena Gomez has great taste in melody – she favors a lot of busy-but-gracefully-light melodic turns, a thing I’m a real sucker for – and she’s shown a consistent interest in understated but stylish use of guitar. This song covers both, along with her draw towards music that conveys a low-key neuroticism. “Cut You Off” is about deciding to fully break it off with someone she’s been with for “1460 days” – so Bieber, then? – while sounding a bit nervous and wishy-washy about actually going through with it.

The distance between the lyrical proclamations and the cautious feel of the music is obviously the whole point here, and the arrangement is a series of contrasts between moments of floaty bliss and gently thudding hesitancy. The guitar solo near the end, performed by co-writer and producer David Pramik, is intriguing in the way it starts off restating the main melody with a touch of bluesy slickness but gets more halting as it goes along, like someone overthinking and getting self-conscious. If the song ended there, you’d be left assuming she backed down from a good idea, but instead it ends by just cutting off. A happy ending, basically.

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Poppy “I Disagree”

Poppy’s gradual shift towards a more abrasive sound has been interesting and only mildly surprising given that even her most bubblegum pop music was rooted in a trolling, “what’s even real, mannnn” questioning of commercial culture and YouTube mediation. But it also makes sense in that the sounds she’s been gravitating to – particularly the nü-metal guitar aesthetics – have only recently become understood as a form of kitsch. “I Disagree” is, on a formal level, basically a Sleigh Bells song with their more AC/DC approach to guitar riffing swapped out for a more Korn/OzzFest vibe. It’s a winning formula, and you really don’t need to pick up on any kind of wink for this to just be effective as an exciting and dynamic piece of music. But all the same, that wink – as well as Poppy’s overt femininity – is crucial for giving those guitar parts a fresh context that highlights everything thrilling about this style while cutting away all the less appealing baggage of sincere hyper-masculine aggression. You could see this is a sort of musical gentrification, particularly in that nü-metal is mostly associated with working class people, but I think what Poppy is doing works and does the original music some favors in retrospect by highlighting the most fun elements and giving those musicians credit for being effective and often deliberately funny.

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Erykah Badu “Time’s A Wastin'”

There are many amazing and beautiful things about this song, but for me “Time’s A Wastin’” has always been about the relaxed keyboard chords at the core of the arrangement and the particular tone of that instrument. I’m not an expert and it’s not specified in the liner notes, but I think it’s a Fender Rhodes? Something like that, at least. It’s a warm, wholesome tone that also suggests something cosmic or spectral beyond the physical realm. Badu is offering wisdom, advice, and encouragement in her lyrics, and the keyboards support that by conveying patience and gentleness even as she calls for immediate and decisive action. The song is basically about coaxing someone out of inertia, and she sings from a place of deep empathy – she’s obviously been in some place before. The implication isn’t that she knows much better and is condescending to this other person, but that she’s got some perspective. In its mellow feel and stately pace the music suggests a panoramic view going back ages, but Badu sings it all like someone firmly grounded in the here and now.

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Blonde Redhead “In Particular”

“In Particular” feels both twitchy and very even, like someone keeping something in a tidy order out of obsessive compulsion. There is an anxiety in this music, but it’s dialed down and kept at bay as Kazu Makino sings lyrics that sketch out a vivid portrait of a depressed person and expressing genuine empathy towards them. It’s a little ambiguous what the singer’s relationship with this person is – is it just platonic friendship, or is this romantic? – but the affection is clear and forthright, and the love is given unconditionally. But despite all that, the song is anything but sappy. There’s no sentimentality to the tone of this piece, and the rigidity of the musical structure makes Makino’s message come across as more logical than emotional: Of course I love you despite your “hysterical depression.” Of course you are special. Of course I am your “only friend.” Why would you ever doubt this?

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