Olivia Lane “So Good It Hurts”

“So Good It Hurts” is a country rock song that opens with an unexpected cold and brutal sound, not far off from the BDSM cyborg vibes of Goldfrapp in electro-glam mode. It’s a strange contrast with the rest of the song, which isn’t far off from Shania Twain at her most pop, but it doesn’t clash either. It just sets up an unusual tightness in the verses that makes the more traditional by-the-book chorus feel more jubilant. The whole song is just Olivia James singing about how hot her boyfriend is, so in that context it’s like the verses are all horny tension and the chorus is ecstatic gratitude for being blessed with this rugged but well-dressed country hunk. The details are specific enough to make anyone outside of the country cultural bubble go “uh, really, that’s what you’re into?” but it’s all very endearing and good-natured.

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んoon “Lumen”

“Lumen” is essentially an R&B song, but んoon’s arrangement is so peculiar in its rhythms and contrasts of textures that it comes out sounding sorta alien. It’s like Aaliyah/Timbaland music reinterpreted as post-rock – two concurrent off-kilter turn-of-the-millennium aesthetics merged into something both sleek and slightly awkward, but entirely mesmerizing. The band convey absolute confidence on this track, with every unusual choice played with an elegance that smooths out the tentative feeling of the beat.

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Letherette “Hornty”

Letherette’s music is like a much hornier version of J. Dilla, like it’s all deliberately constructed as sex music. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s all a tribute to the sensuous, luxuriant sex music of the 70s – everything they do is so rooted in those aesthetics that it’s hard not to approach this music as something that’s so earnestly enamored with its source material that it moves beyond the point of kitsch. “Hornty” is a particularly smooth track that holds up better as a discrete composition than most of Brown Lounge Vol. 5, which is clearly intended to be experienced as a suite. It’s a real “does-what-it-says-on-the-tin” sort of song: It’s obviously a horny reconfigured jazz song featuring horns. Would you want it to be anything else?

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Animal Collective “Daily Routine” (Live in Las Vegas, May 30 2009)

The version of Animal Collective that recorded and toured in support of Merriweather Post Pavilion was a trio – Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist – performing almost entirely with electronic instruments. This isn’t unusual, but the band’s approach was. The core of the band’s music was rooted in folk and psychedelic rock, but they mutated it all by forcing it all to work within the limitations of their instruments and, more specifically, what could be done when approaching machines that were not necessarily designed to be played “live” with the improvisational spirit they would bring to guitars and drums.

The studio versions of the MPP material are very focused on conveying Avey and Panda’s songwriting, which by this point in their career had fully matured structurally and melodically. The live versions were far more chaotic, sometimes seeming as though they could collapse or deviate wildly off course at any moment. Ballet Slippers, the new live album collecting recordings from this period, isn’t always easy to listen to, as the more improvisational elements of the performances are more compelling in the moment and sometimes rather tedious outside of that context. But even still, the energy is there – often disorienting, vaguely mystical, sometimes mesmerizing, and totally dazzling when those gorgeous melodies settled into the foreground.

“Daily Routine” translated particularly well to the stage as the trio could click together well in the more traditionally structured chunks of the song, and the composition allowed a lot of space to drift off into ambiance and abstraction in the second half. This coda sequence is rather lovely in this performance and emphasizes a sensuous shoegaze quality that’s less pronounced in the studio recording. The song’s lyrics are written from the perspective of a young parent getting used to the seismic lifestyle shift of caring for a child and the anxiety around trying to do it right, but in this wordless sequence Panda’s voice conveys a mix of joy, love, and fear that’s beyond what could be communicated with words.

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Divino Niño “Coca Cola”

Divino Niño have a rowdy sort of elegance on stage that plays up their casual charisma and clever guitar playing, but their studio recordings have a different feeling – hazier, nostalgic, and much more introverted in tone. A song like “Coca Cola” certainly benefits from the hyper-romantic atmosphere of this production aesthetic, but it’s frustrating to listen to their record after seeing them live and feeling like their personality and energy is lost in the translation somewhere, or just overpowered by reverb and synths. But either way this song nails a specific feeling of being young and desperate to make something happen if just to alleviate boredom.

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Lulileela “Dive”

I’m not sure exactly where Lulileela is coming from in terms of her musical influences but to my American ears “Dive” sounds sorta like the quasi-80s hyper-romantic aesthetics of M83 at their commercial peak, but with the rock boy melodrama cut out and the slick sophistication dialed way up. Her voice is soft and airy, but her bass playing is very loud and assertive in the mix, driving the song while also providing popping flourishes along the way. A lot of artists aim for this mark but don’t nail it the way she does here, and I think it comes down to her composing like a bassist. Anyone with the right keyboards and presets can go for this sort of atmosphere, but not everyone can lay down a groove as dynamic as this. She centers the drama of the music in the hips rather than leaving it all to your head.

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Beck “Everlasting Nothing”

This is an excerpt from my review of the new Beck album Hyperspace for NPR.

The record ends with “Everlasting Nothing,” a majestic ballad that’s among the best songs Beck has ever released. “I woke up in a movie, didn’t know if it was my whole life,” he sings over a stately guitar rhythm. “When it ended, I laughed before I cried.” A verse later, he imagines his rebirth as “a standing ovation for the funeral of the sun,” sounding less blunt and plainspoken and more poetic and abstract — that is, more like himself.

As the song progresses it grows grander in scale, and finally peaks with the ecstatic glossolalia of female gospel singers. The effect is similar to “The Great Gig in the Sky,” in which Pink Floyd used a similar arrangement trick to convey a cosmic notion of death and the afterlife. But whereas Clare Torry’s voice was foregrounded on that song, the gospel vocals in “Everlasting Nothing” are distant in the mix, like a siren call to oblivion that Beck is tuning out for the time being, choosing to stay grounded as he faces the unknown. It’s not quite a happy ending, but it’s at least a dramatic ride into the sunset, capping all the gloomy resignation with some sense of direction and purpose.

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Jubilee featuring Maluca “Mami”

I always favor cultural omnivores as electronic dance producers. I’m not dialed into the ongoing narrative of this milieu to care much about the concepts, aesthetic purity, or subcultural contexts of microgenres, and I find it much easier to connect with the sort of DJs who have internalized every trick in the book for getting people to dance and are ruthless in their pursuit of delivering thrills. Jubilee is very much this type of producer, and while her record Call of Location doesn’t sound quite like my beloved Basement Jaxx, it’s very apparent that she’s cut from the same cloth. The record is all energy and joyful eclecticism rooted in a deep love and history with the music she’s drawing on. It’s not hard to dissect the mix of grime, Miami bass, and dancehall that comes together on “Mami,” but the song is so effective on a raw physical level that examining it that way is besides the point. She’s connecting the dots between these things, but mostly just in a “by any means necessary” approach to moving you.

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Boards of Canada “Aquarius” (Version 3/Peel Session 1998)

The voices in “Aquarius” are all sourced from Sesame Street clips from the ‘70s, but only the bit of a child’s voice saying “yeah….that’s right!” signals itself as such. The rest either sounds remarkably like a numbers station or melts into incoherence, another texture in a psychedelic funk song that’s halfway between nostalgic vague familiarity and the unknown. In the context of Music Has the Right to Children “Aquarius” feels like a piece of a larger musical collage pulled from some Jungian collective unconscious of Gen X childhood. This version of the song – ostensibly recorded live in session for the BBC though I cannot tell exactly what constitutes “live” for this sort of music – feels somewhat looser and warmer, and somehow takes a different shape in isolation while being just about the same in structural terms. There’s a little more urgency to the rhythm and a bit more pop to the bass. When the numbers start falling out of sequence the mischief of it feels more pronounced, like you can tell that on some level the BoC brothers were enjoying the chance to mess with people’s heads in real time for once rather than well after the fact.

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Deerhunter “Timebends”

A lot of the time, even with an artist I love and have followed for many years like Deerhunter, I put off listening to stand-alone or pre-album singles. It’s just a matter of prioritizing, and I don’t particularly like the drip drip drip drip approach to releasing songs in advance of a full record because then you hear the record in full and it feels more like a compilation. So it took a few weeks to get to “Timebends,” but I heard it at precisely the right time on a day when its lyrics about feeling emotionally flat would really click with my experience in the moment. It felt like that joke where someone in a video is aware that the song is narrating exactly what they’re doing and what’s going on around them.

“Timebends” isn’t the first time Bradford Cox has stretched out the length of a song, but it’s the first time he’s written something that’s so deliberately epic. It sounds like the goal here was to make a perfect finale for live shows and built in as many fun instrumental tangents as possible, right on down to a drum solo. It’s over-the-top but not in a way that undermines the drama of the song and the way Cox seems to be mourning the loss of a part of himself and questioning whether anything has actually been improved. It’s a little sad, but mostly just…blank. It’s very “it is what it is.”

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Taeyeon “하하하 (LOL)”

This is basically like a K-Pop version of Portishead, but who knows if that was even what these people were aiming for. One of the things I like a lot about K-Pop is that very often the maximalist aesthetic results in the writers and producers tossing a dozen different musical ideas into any given song and ending up with something fresh and distinctive if just by the novelty of the contrasting elements. “LOL” leans on a lot of trip-hop and post-Weeknd R&B aesthetics but there’s so much else going on in the song, particularly in the final third when you’re getting hand claps piled on “orchestra hit” keyboards piled on groovy organ and topped with a glossy guitar solo. Taeyeon’s vocal suits the femme fatale vibe of the music, especially when she laughs to the beat in a way that sounds very much like she’s taunting the listener.

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Lapalux featuring JFDR “Thin Air”

“Thin Air” has a very peculiar dynamic that’s more like a three-act structure than what would normally make sense for pop or dance music. The first section is tense and atmospheric, the middle section is a chaotic dance break, and the third returns to a more vibe-y aesthetic but gradually lets out all the tension like a deflating balloon. That up-tempo section is only about a minute long but is incredibly compelling – it ought to feel cathartic but the textures are all harsh and buzzy so it feels more like an anxious chase sequence. Everything in this song is just a bit off in an intriguing way, and the climax seems early and abrupt so the soft, glowy, sensual resolution lingers slightly longer than you might expect. Maybe it’s meant to be like a reward?

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Neon Indian “Fallout”

Like any genre made up by music critics, chillwave is both silly and poorly thought out AND a very useful way of categorizing an ephemeral aesthetic. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny but you see the word “chillwave” and you know exactly what the sound and look of it is, and how it connects to a specific moment that feels very innocent and optimistic from the perspective of late 2019.

Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo didn’t run away from the aesthetics that made his project one of the defining pillars of chillwave along with Washed Out and Toro y Moi, but he did do a lot to expand its expressive range and dynamic possibilities. “Fallout,” the first single released from his post-Summer of Chillwave album Era Extraña, is emotionally heavy in a way that feels very removed from the stoner vibes of Psychic Chasms, which never got much deeper than conveying ennui or a vague pensiveness. In “Fallout,” Palomo kept the thick atmosphere of his first wave of songs but applied it to a composition with a much darker palette and an overtly romantic sensibility. The song vaguely resembles Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” but its sentiment is almost the exact opposite, with him trying to convince himself to fall out of love with someone who he’s realized is all wrong for him.

The most intriguing lyric of the song is the line that gives us the best sense of who the other person is – “are you still carving out a man, is that the plan?” It seems to be the type of person who wants to “fix” a partner and make them into the kind of person they want to be with, and being on the other side of that can be quite taxing. You always feel like you’re disappointing and never good enough, or that the person you are in the moment isn’t as worth loving as a person you might never actually become. Palomo’s vocal isn’t very expressive, but it suits the dejected tone of the lyrics, and when he sings “if I could fall out of love with you” in the chorus, he sounds like someone who doesn’t believe he has the strength to break it off or become this person he’d so badly like to be for them.

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Slow Club “Two Cousins”

I originally wrote about this song twice – once on this site and only scratching the surface of it, and again on Pitchfork in the context of a review of the album it’s from, Paradise. I’m coming back to it now as I’m going back through favorite songs from the past decade.

It’s generally understood that listeners make their own meanings for songs, but this one for me is an example of deliberately only hearing what I want so I can hammer it into what I’ve needed it to be. And what I’ve needed it to be is so specific and personal I don’t really want to get into it, but it’s really just tapping into the core of what this song is actually intended to be about, which is estrangement. Rebecca Taylor’s lyrics put that feeling in the context of family, but those are the bits I’ve learned to tune out in the interest of utility. What I’m really interested in here is the way she sings it all – you can hear a lot of guilt and regret in her voice. She sounds defeated, like she knows there’s just no fixing what’s gone wrong.

This song is from the summer of 2011 and from the distance of autumn 2019, the song resonates in a slightly different way. Back then relating to this song was urgent and rooted in events of the recent past, but now it’s all stuff I have to strain to remember. Things that were once incredibly important are vague memories now, and people become strangers. So now the part that really cuts deep is the end of the chorus, in which Taylor imagines crossing paths again in the future: “I look into your eyes / you don’t know who I am.” And that’s where I am now – a stranger to even this old version of myself. It’s about a different sort of loss now.

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Ali Barter “History of Boys”

Ali Barter’s Hello, I’m Doing My Best is mostly made up of songs about a sober person looking back on their life when their drinking was out of control with a mix of shame and confusion, like they’re just trying to piece together exactly how things got so bad. Some of the songs get very bleak, but “History of Boys” is light and nostalgic about messing around as a rebellious teen. The dark bits are still in there – she sings about blacking out in the chorus – but the lyrics and the rambunctious pop-punk style of the song honestly acknowledge the fun to be had at the top of the slippery slope. And while this is formally very much a pop-punk song, the arrangement resists the predictable patterns of that genre by putting off its hit-the-pedals chorus a bit to coast out on a pre-chorus that feels more stark and uncertain before slamming into the inevitable.

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Lilith “Figure 1 Repeated”

“Figure 1 Repeated” is a song about noticing the patterns of another person, and the sort of repeated behaviors that aren’t fully obvious to you until you’ve observed a few cycles firsthand. So it makes some thematic sense that the music itself moves in subtle circles, like a sad little train moving along an elliptical track. Hannah Liuzzo sings with a low-key melancholy tone but her words and phrasing come across as more reasonable than overtly emotional – she’s coming from a very analytical place, and seems more invested in fixing or adjusting the situation than breaking the pattern. It’s a very accommodating frame of mind, one that notices a problem but just wants to figure out how to work around it.

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Stone Temple Pilots “Silvergun Superman” (Live at New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, New Haven, CT, 8/23/1994)

“Silvergun Superman” is a freaky hybrid juggernaut, like if mid-period epic Led Zeppelin merged with David Bowie in his glam-boogie phase but was recorded with the aesthetics of grunge. It’s the logical outcome of the Stone Temple Pilots collective rock obsessions, and made distinctive by the slightly odd angles and tangents of the DeLeo brothers’ guitar parts and the slippery charisma of Scott Weiland.

It’s still so difficult to get a handle on what made Weiland such a compelling presence – he had the look and the voice, sure, but also a peculiar balance of raw sincerity and eagerness to obscure himself in personas and poses. At the time this mercurial identity was considered crass and inauthentic and was subject to merciless ridicule, but now it’s clear that he was acting out genuine fandom and trying to protect himself. This is most obvious when he’s singing the more aggressive and macho STP songs – he’s play-acting masculinity, and in his own way critiquing what would later be commonly known as “toxic masculinity.”

The more glam and arch STP got, the more it seemed like we were getting the “real” Weiland, and that’s probably true to some extent. But it’s also pretty clear that the songs confronting his self-loathing and struggles with addiction were deeply felt. And so while a cheeky glam song like “Big Bang Baby” is still a very good time, a song like “Silvergun Superman,” which is sly and winking AND extremely bleak in its portrayal of life as a junkie seems like the greater triumph. Weiland’s lyrics are very vivid in this song as he sketches out scenes of pitiful lows with a touch of sentimentality and grapples with paranoia in a way that grounds terrible decisions in the context of loneliness and a deep need for connection.

This live recording of “Silvergun Superman,” included in a full 1994 concert included in the recent deluxe reissue of Purple, doesn’t change much about the song but presents it in a state that’s a bit more loose and raw than the album production by Brendan O’Brien. The DeLeo brothers really shine here, particularly in the final third when Robert’s bass part gets a bit more fluid after mostly thudding through the main riffs and Dean gets to emulate the graceful shredding of Jimmy Page on the outro.

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Destroyer “Crimson Tide”

“Crimson Tide” isn’t far off from Dan Bejar working in his Kaputt mode, but it’s a more stark version – there’s no richness to the sound, no sax flourishes. It’s a lonelier version of the sound, and one that calls attention to its artifice in a different way. Whereas the songs in this general style on Kaputt and Ken were openly winking at Roxy Music and New Order, this song is more like going out of your way to set up a fog bank and dramatic lighting and then traipsing through the scene wearing a trench coat. It feels more overtly theatrical, and more about placing a spotlight directly on him as he shares his cryptic wisdom.

As always, Bejar’s words call out for annotation as he calls back to previous Destroyer songs as well as tunes by the likes of The Cure and Kenny Rogers, and his best lines come across like he’s saying something so personal he’s the only one who could ever really understand it. And then there’s the jokes: blowing bubbles, a funeral going completely insane. It’s all gallows humor, bitchy asides, and a half-hearted attempt to throw you off from noticing just how much of this song is about physical frailty and fear of death.

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Dua Lipa “Don’t Start Now”

“Don’t Start Now” is essentially a disco song and there is a retro quality to the production, but despite certain musical signifiers, it’s not necessarily a nod to actual ‘70s disco. This is, instead, a pop song that’s calling back to previous iterations of chart pop calling back to the disco era. In other words, this is much more Kylie Minogue than Donna Summer. To some extent this is just what happens with any genre, as signifiers and conventions are passed down over the years, less as a manner of direct homage but to assert “this is THAT kind of song.”

But unlike with various forms of rock music which are always being produced in some form, calling back to disco – particularly in its original pre-electronic form – comes in waves as the vibe falls in and out of fashion, so the evolution is a bit weirder and usually very Column A + Column B. So in the case of “Don’t Start Now,” the chorus hook is very “UK chart pop in the 21st century,” the bass line is very “Daft Punk trying to make their own Chic song six years ago,” and the lyrics seem specifically indebted to Robyn’s brand of “crying while I’m dancing” pop catharsis. (And then there’s some disco strings, gotta love some disco strings!) It’s all very considered and a whole team of people put this together, but it all comes together quite naturally. It’s rather elegant in its vaguely haughty funkiness, and ends up sounding like something that just needs to be.

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The 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s Monster is out this weekend, and I’m very proud to say that I wrote the liner notes for the set, with new interviews with Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck, and Scott Litt. My liner notes appear in two versions of the reissue – a 2CD version featuring the remastered album and a substantially altered full album remix by Scott Litt, and a 6-disc set featuring those discs along with demos, a previously unavailable live show from 1995, and a Blu-Ray featuring the Road Movie concert film, all the videos, and hi-res audio. (It will also be available on vinyl.) It’s a beautiful set that is designed to give you a lot of new ways of looking at this brilliant and unique album. I think one of the coolest things about this set is that between my liner notes, the demos, and Litt using so many alternate takes and unearthing buried elements of the music, you will get a very deep understanding of the band’s creative process at the time.

I think the most stunning “new” piece of music included in the set is Litt’s remix of “You,” which has always been one of my favorite songs on the record. In one of his boldest remix decisions, he cut out all the percussion on the first third of the song. It changes the atmosphere of the music significantly, and makes it even more haunting and emotionally charged than before. Here’s that remix, along with what I wrote about the song many years ago.

R.E.M. “You” (Scott Litt Remix)

It’s a bad idea to try to pin any sort of narrative on Monster — simply put, one does not exist — but in the context of the album, “You” is the logical conclusion to its general theme of obsessive, unrequited love. By the time we get to “You,” the cuteness of “Crush With Eyeliner,” the coyness of “King of Comedy,” and the earnestness of “Strange Currencies” are all distant memories, and even the destructive self-loathing of “I Took Your Name” and “Circus Envy” has run its course. At this point in the record, the singer’s religion is thoroughly and irrevocably lost, and all that is left is an aching emotional void and a lingering, undead desire.

Peter Buck’s guitars dominate the track, with an eerie pulse emphasizing a sense of post-traumatic shock, and a heavy, slashing rhythm evoking nothing less than total emotional devastation. Michael Stipe’s vocal performance is intense yet slightly disconnected, lending even his most benign sentiments a creepy, unhealthy tone. The song contains some of the most evocative images of Stipe’s career as a lyricist — “all my childhood toys with chew marks in your smile,” “I can see you there with lunar moths and watermelon gum” — but the peculiar specificity of the words only highlights the song’s desperate, deranged sensibility.

As the track comes to an end, Stipe repeats the word “you” with increasingly urgency as the music hits a chilling peak. It sounds like an act of self-nullification, as though he could only think to destroy himself by focusing his entire existence on someone else. When the song begins, Stipe’s character seems physically disconnected from his body and the world, and in its final moments, his mind seems to disappear as well.

(Originally posted on Pop Songs 07 on April 4th 2007.)

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Lake Ruth “Extended Leave”

Lake Ruth singer Allison Brice is an excellent lyricist in a very understated sort of way – she’s always writing these very closely observed character studies from a bit of critical distance, as though she’s reviewing someone else’s existence in a specific moment. The music, which feels cool and precise is its rhythms and textures, emphasizes the sense of clinical detachment.

“Extended Leave” is a snapshot of someone who seems to be under a great deal of pressure who reacts by skipping out of work and getting paranoid about the passage of time. Brice fills in easily observable details – “you grow obsessed looking at your watch” – but the specifics of the situation are vague. It’s a bit like watching a stranger and imagining the story they’re living. The “why?” of everything is maddeningly vague, but imagining what’s really going on and driving them emotionally is a sort of empathy, I suppose.

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