September 5th, 2019 4:17pm
Hot Chip have reached a moment of their career where their live show is essentially a DJ set of their greatest hits, and they present this to audiences with a maximum level of pride and zero shame. They are DJs at heart, and despite a lot of strong album tracks, they’ve also always been a classic singles band. Last night at Brooklyn Steel the group opened their show with a parade of some of their most crowd-pleasing songs – “Haurache Lights,” “One Life Stand,” “Night & Day,” “Flutes,” “Over & Over” – in the way a good DJ aims to get people on the floor as quickly as possible. It’s the opposite of how most live bands would sequence a show, with the goal of building towards a climax in the final third of a set. But the DJ logic works, and when they moved from “Over & Over” into the more recent single “Hungry Child,” the audience was primed to greet it as another great banger rather than an untested new tune to be burned off before the real hits.
It seems like part of Hot Chip’s ongoing project is creating a body of work that lends itself to this sort of performance or a killer greatest hits compilation, and writing new songs is a bit like figuring out what sort of songs they need to improve that end result. “Hungry Child” has a particular utility as a more pure sort of house track than they’ve typically made before, and brings in tropes of the genre that haven’t featured on the other hits. I particularly love the gospel-house elements, and the way the neutral but plaintive tones of Alexis Taylor’s voice contrast with an overtly passionate sound.
September 4th, 2019 1:39am
Ghost Funk Orchestra make a jazzy sort of psychedelic rock that I suppose is essentially nostalgic in its major debt to ’60s recordings, but the actual music feels disconnected from any particular time or place, as it’s really just bandleader Seth Applebaum piecing together an imagined past from scraps of old music he finds beautiful and interesting. (As a collector of old magazines, I feel like I’m recognizing some common instincts.) Their new record A Song for Paul has an aesthetic kinship with Broadcast in their The Noise Made By People phase – the music sounds “accurate,” but there’s a slight implied ironic distance and enough modern touches to keep it from seeming like a replica. The most noticeable difference is in the vocal performance, which signals “indie” more than “60s” and contrasts with the more obviously retro funk psychedelia elements like a neon green stripe through a black and white photograph.
September 2nd, 2019 7:39pm
There’s no catch to “Heavenly.” It’s a romantic song about romantic love, with nothing to subvert or undermine that feeling. Greg Gonzalez sings his lyrics with an earnest purity – his voice is soft and gentle, but there’s also a firm certainty in his phrasing. The music conveys lovey-dovey infatuation without a trace of anxiety or impatience. Gonzalez is presenting an idealized version of the sort of intense love that seems to stop time, or at least slow it down to a crawl. It sounds like eyes locking, lips pulling back from a kiss, and the tiniest physical sensations amplified times a hundred.
September 1st, 2019 11:55pm
What must it be like to be a man in a Lana Del Rey song? It’s a lot of mixed messages, for sure. The subject of this song gets high praise at the top of the first verse – “you fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you’” – but almost every subsequent line drags him mercilessly for his mopey vibe, bad art, and tiresome intellectual vanity. The magic of the song is that the core emotion isn’t pettiness or anger, but rather genuine affection and empathy for this wounded mess of a man despite these flaws. She’s definitely frustrated with herself for caring about him, but even when she’s dismissing his behavior – “you’re just a man, it’s just what you do” – she won’t completely write off his humanity.
As with most Lana songs, she’s asking the listener to consider that contradictory thoughts complete each other more often that not. The “man-child” here is aggravating, but he’s interesting, and loving, and allows himself to be vulnerable with her. She probably can do better, but is “doing better” always the point of human relationships? And even if love is just a game to be won, if put under the same sort of scrutiny as the guy in this song would she or any of us come out looking good? Love can’t work unless you’re willing to deal with flaws, and “Norman Fucking Rockwell” is just asking if this guy is worth the trouble and not quite arriving at a conclusion.
August 30th, 2019 12:34am
“Cursed and Cussed” is built on a looped breakbeat that sounds very early ‘90s, the sort of rhythm that drew a line straight through rap, new jack swing, and rave and then filtered into crossover pop in the liminal phase before gangsta rap and grunge shifted the direction of mainstream music. Charlotte Adigéry’s vocal is understated in tone but her lyrics are overtly filthy, sketching out BDSM scenes and repeating “God punishes, I beg for more” on the hook. The funniest bits of the song are when Adigéry jokingly self-censors, as when she stops the word “gloryhole” midway through to sing “hold that thought, climax control.” Adigéry sets a kinky scene, but makes it sexier by giving the audience a little wink.
August 28th, 2019 2:30am
“In the Image” is a piece of music that overflows with empathy and love, and that’s even before you listen to what Beverly Glenn-Copeland is singing over that “Apache” beat. There’s a sort of gently audio glow to this song, like West Coast golden hour light dimming slowly at sunset. Glenn-Copeland’s voice has a calm and loving tone, and nearly every line she sings is either enticing the listener to dance or to accept some life-affirming thought. None of it comes across as a hollow platitude – she sounds grounded in the reality of the world, and her generosity of spirit is entirely sincere. It’s not quite emphatic enough to signal gospel music, but it’s reaching for the same feelings and message. It’s just a bit more blissful and zen.
August 27th, 2019 3:10pm
Anna Waronker’s voice has a very “90s cool girl” quality – exceptionally good for conveying sarcasm, low-key bitterness, and carefully guarded sincerity. That all comes to play in “If You Just Didn’t Do It,” her first song as the singer of That Dog in over two decades. The band’s particular aesthetic of raw alt-rock dynamics contrasted with delicate flourishes mostly contributed by Petra Haden hasn’t changed, but Waronker’s lyrical perspective has shifted somewhat. This song is nothing but tough love, and it opens with her explaining that this is basically a message to someone to whom the best way of getting through to them is through a song. She’s not pulling any punches here – she’s not outright attacking them or calling them a toxic person, but she is making it clear that their self-destructive impulses have made them impossible to be around. The song hits its main point with blunt force: “If you just didn’t do it, then you wouldn’t do it, and you wouldn’t be here right now.” It’s not sensitive, but sometimes the only rhetorical trick that works is a tautology.
August 26th, 2019 12:07pm
“4AM in NY” unfolds as if it is bracketed by ellipses on both sides, a formless melancholy state that seems infinite in the moment. The guitar tone is sleepy and the groove is gentle and low-key, but the lyrics sung by both Anajah and Malik Flint are restless and angsty. The song sounds like a breakup scenario split between two perspectives, which each not fully understanding how invested the other is in the relationship. Anajah is tearing herself apart trying to get a handle on why her love feels so unrequited, but comes to a conclusion that she’s done with it on the chorus hook. Flint, on the other hand, is just as attached but can’t seem to stop sabotaging the relationship out of insecurity and fear. The song plays out like watching them both in real time in split screen, highlighting the irony of their feelings, but also showing us exactly why these two can’t get on the same page emotionally despite their affection for one another.
August 23rd, 2019 1:57pm
The melody of “Sha La La” is warm and familiar to the point that I get a sort of deja-vu feeling when listening to it – where exactly have I heard this before? It sounds very ’60s to me on down to its arrangement, which feels a lot like when Studio One players would adapt American girl group music into ska and rocksteady. Ala.ni’s arrangement leans heavily on a cappella with just a bit of subtle percussion and organ to bolster the architecture of the song. Her voice is sweet and sad as she sings very direct and plain spoken lyrics about a breakup. It’s not angry or bitter, just honest in what she needs her former partner to know about her feelings. She just misses the connection and affection – “someone to hug and trust,” as she puts it. She feels betrayed by their initial promise not to break her heart, but it’s hitting her now that no one can ever guarantee a thing like that. It happened and she’s feeling it, and she’s moving on, sha la la, sha la la.
August 21st, 2019 2:04am
“How You Want It” is an exceedingly horny song in which Teyana Taylor is like a waitress listing off the day’s specials off a menu of sexual action, and suggests a few of her favorite house specialities. The acoustic guitar groove is low-key and the beat is fairly subtle, with a lot of room in the mix for a sultry atmosphere. Taylor sings “what’s the quickest way to turn you on?” over the best melodic hook in the song, and the line leaps out – she’s earnest in her desire to please, but there’s also something a little bit funny and a tiny bit sad about the focus on expediency. Kinda odd to be so urgent in a song that sounds like it’s in no hurry at all.
August 20th, 2019 1:32am
Snoh Aalegra spends most of “Toronto” spends about 75% of “Toronto” trying to invite herself over for a hook up, and the remaining 25% wondering if the other person is also horny. Given how much work she seems to be doing here to get things going, this just might be a coupling of mismatched libidos. But either way, this is a fabulous sexy and sensual piece of music with a sleek, low-key funk bounce that reminds me a bit of late ’80s Prince. Aalegra’s voice is impressively versatile too, singing her verses at the bottom of her register before seamlessly shifting up to the top for brighter notes for a flirty chorus that seems to float up on a breeze.
August 19th, 2019 7:32pm
“Nerve” contrasts a clicky impatient beat with a vocal performance by Anna Wise that’s soulful, serene, and certain. The incongruity is the point – knowing what you need and what you want, and feeling an nagging anxiety and desperate urgency about making it real. The rest of the arrangement is all shifting planes of melody and texture, all of it feeling ephemeral and unsettled. There’s other fragments of vocals in counterpoint – background chatter, a few declarations that break into the course of the verses – but it’s just more distracting thoughts and feelings circling the calm center of Wise’s voice. Hearing her speak the words “but I got to do this for me” doesn’t sound half as confident as hearing her sing any other emphatic statement in the song.
August 18th, 2019 10:27pm
I’m not surprised that Taylor Swift would sound so good in a song that spends about a third of its running time sounding quite a lot like Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” but I am a little surprised that it actually happened. “Lover” is Swift at her most tender and romantic. It’s a full-hearted love song with only minor levels of Swift celebrity meta-narrative to get in the way of being a perfect track for wedding playlists for years to come. As usual her lyrics thrive in specificity of details (“we could leave the Christmas lights up til January,” “with every guitar string scar on my hand”) and pithy aphorisms that nail extremely relatable feelings (“I’m highly suspicious that everyone who sees you wants you”). But aside from those Mazzy-ish verses and the ultra-swoony chorus, the peak of this song comes in a perfectly structured bridge in which Swift shifts from a low-key vibe to high-key Swift-iness in both melody and sentiment. The line about taking “this magnetic-force-of-a-man” to be her lover is delightfully extra, and when she swears to be “overdramatic and true” for him, she’s simultaneously winking to the audience and being extremely earnest. This is not someone who’d ever be chill about this sort of thing and bless her for it.
August 15th, 2019 1:54pm
I don’t have a problem with Sleater-Kinney trying new things, since trying new things have served them well in the past. But it’s funny how “new things” is a very relative notion. Sleater-Kinney are indeed experimenting with “new things” on their 9th album The Center Won’t Hold, but to my ears, it mostly sounds like musical ideas that have been cycled through and chewed up by many lesser bands over the course of their existence. The elements of these songs that sound fresh and vital are the types of melodies and dynamics that have been with Sleater-Kinney all along, and the bits that feel “new” or at least unlike classic S-K sound a lot like drab major label radio rock from the past decade or so. In some cases, like “Ruins” or “Bad Dance,” the production moves work for the songs, albeit in a vaguely cheesy way – you know, like how if you wear certain clothes it will look more like a costume on you than an outfit? On other songs, like “Reach Out,” you get fabulous verses that are weighed down by an uninspired chorus that sounds too much like the bland hooks churned out by pro songwriters to blend in with the overall dynamics of contemporary radio.
Of all the new songs, “Can I Go On” is the one that best connects the particular spirit of classic S-K to a glossier studio aesthetic. It’s fairly light and boppy, and with its tone and processing, it comes out sounding a bit like a song that could’ve been used in an Apple iPod ad circa the mid 2000s. (You know, back when they were busy splitting the planet in half on The Woods.) Carrie Brownstein’s voice is bright and enthusiastic as she sings about feeling grim and drained, approaching the album’s theme of crushed hope and disconnection from a more personal and low-key perspective. It’s a song that answers is its own questions in music as they are expressed in lyrics – she sings “maybe I’m not sure I wanna go on,” but her voice and the energy behind the music make it clear that she very much is, despite it all.
August 15th, 2019 1:43am
Two years ago Poppy was largely a meta deadpan art project largely spun out of the stranger and more surreal bits of YouTube subcultures. These days Poppy has taken a darker turn, but one that still in many ways mirrors trends in both music and visual art. It’s all very post-Billie Eilish now, with more of an emphasis on a goth-y industrial sort of pop minimalism. The satire of the earlier work is still in there, but dialed down to the point where it can function just as well as fully sincere music. “Voicemail” sets up a dark mood with self-consciously scary lyrics, but winks at us with odd lyrical turns – “I called up the police, their voicemail was full,” “Poppy is your mommy, Poppy is your mommy,” and a bit about feeling embarrassed randomly sung in Japanese. These odd bits only emphasizes the overall uncanny creepiness of the song.
August 13th, 2019 5:19pm
The Quiet Temple draw on a lot of psychedelic, jazz, and film music influences but my major reference point for this particular song is Herbie Hancock’s Sextant record from 1973. Hancock’s songs are little more sophisticated but there’s a similar sort of sinister cosmic funk feeling to the music, and a sort of lurch to the groove that makes the entire composition seem tilted or drunken. “Shades of Gemini” leans more on psychedelic rock as it moves towards its climax, building to a heavy crescendo that delivers a musical payoff a bit closer to the realm of Godspeed You Black Emperor.
August 12th, 2019 2:09pm
“Rooting for You” comes from a remarkably healthy place, in emotional terms: Smart enough to know when it’s time to cut a toxic friend out of one’s life, but kind and generous enough to not be especially angry or dramatic about it. Alessia Cara sings no-nonsense lyrics with a lot of warmth, and focuses on a feeling of disappointment when her friend’s issues get in the way of honest communication. The tune has a sunny lightness to it and nods in the direction of a ska groove without fully committing to the genre. The song doesn’t fit into any particular genre, really – it’s that sort of mutt pop that’s a bit of everything and produced with a gloss that makes it difficult to peg down to a particular year. This could be 1998, it could be 2003, it could be 2008, it could be any time since then. As such, it gets to have a vaguely nostalgic feeling about it without recalling any time in particular or feeling at all dated.
August 8th, 2019 4:09pm
“Salted Caramel Ice Cream” is a crush song, but it’s specifically about being into someone who is just a bit out of your league. She’s fancy, she’s a bit posh. She’s aspirational. Joseph Mount sings the song with a cheeky tone – he’s a bit breathy in a campy way, but not enough to make his lust a joke. (Though he’s certainly laughing at himself there.) The song is as light and bubbly as the Perrier he references at the start, and his vocal spikes the sweetness of it all with a salty kick of self-awareness, just like the treat that gives the song its name. It’s so fun and flirty that you can sort of miss that for a good portion of the song he’s stressing out about making eye contact with her and screwing it all up.
August 7th, 2019 9:52pm
The best Battles songs seem exaggerated and surreal, pushing commonplace sounds like drum hits and guitar strums to odd extremes that make you wonder if a human could really play what you’ve just heard. “Titanium 2 Step” does this trick mainly in a bit that sounds like the end of a riff has been suddenly and drastically pitched up before returning to the base tempo. There’s also a cartoonish springiness to the track, like it’s this big bouncy castle of chords and beats that Liquid Liquid vocalist Sal Principato is bopping around in, shouting with incoherent glee the whole time. What a weird and joyful song.
August 6th, 2019 3:29pm
“Identity Crisis” is an ALL CAPS song – bold and bright and loud and so overbearingly catchy that it might drive you a little crazy. There’s no holding back here, it’s all maximalist oomph and pizzazz, and that carries over to its extremely colorful and slyly political music video. The music needs to be this hyper and saturated to match the character and intensity Jarina De Marco brings to the table. She’s all flavor and zero timidity, and her lyrics approach the complexity of colorism within Latinx culture, particularly in her native Dominican Rebublic, with an appropriate blend of anger and pointed irony in order to put a spotlight on a poisonous absurdity. The lyrics and video lean hard on parody, but the song goes way too hard to be either a joke or get too serious.
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