June 12th, 2019 6:04pm
It probably wouldn’t be all that exciting to hear 18 hours of process recordings by most artists, but Radiohead in the late ‘90s is an exception. This is partly because they were willing to take big swings in terms of arrangements, and it’s just interesting to hear them, say, try “Karma Police” with a dub reggae groove and give up halfway through. But it’s mostly because this archive of material is a document of them denying a lot of their own instincts and impulses in the interest of pushing towards a bolder evolution.
This takes a few different forms in the archive. In some cases, you get recordings of Thom Yorke seemingly improvising songs off the top of his head and you can hear the sort of melodies and chords he reaches for when he’s not really thinking and acting on a sort of muscle memory. There’s also a lot of full-band improvisations and abandoned songs in which in retrospect it’s pretty obvious they’re just getting various influences out of their system, whether it’s yet another standard 80s-style alt-rock song, or them going into a funk jam for 11 minutes just to see if anything cool happens. Then there’s just a lot of rejected arrangements and approaches to songs – you really get a sense of how “Airbag” evolved in particular, and how they pushed it from a rote “High & Dry”-esque ballad into something that still sounds quite futuristic and progressive over 20 years later.
Then there’s “Lift.” It’s pretty clear they knew that “Lift” was a very commercial song, but one where if it was indeed successful would push them in a rather square direction that would ultimately become Coldplay’s entire lane as a band. It’s a beautiful song in any arrangement, and triggers big emotions even as Yorke seems to undermine his own song with odd lyrics when the melody seems to call out for something more sentimental and direct. There’s a few versions of “Lift” in the minidisc archive, including an unmastered studio recording that is batched along with the full unmastered OK Computer and most of its b-sides, suggesting that the song came awfully close to being included or released on one of the singles.
The recording of “Lift” I’ve posted here is the best of all the known versions; the one where they get out of their own way and just let the song be as big and emotional as it wants to be. They’re leaning into every musical impulse they’re trying to get away from in this period, and it’s beautiful and unguarded. Thom sings with earnest passion, and Jonny Greenwood is unashamed to pile on a ton of synthesized strings to tug at your heartstrings. Maybe this, like that funk jam, was just a way of getting some impulses out of their system. I get why they felt a need to discard this and move on, but I’m very glad we have this recording now. It’s absolutely wonderful on its own terms.
June 11th, 2019 2:41pm
L-Vis 1990 is typically more of a garage/funky club producer, but on this track his aesthetic has shifted into a quasi-‘90s R&B space to great effect. “Caught Up” has a smooth, casual groove built around synth chords that cycle between a highly filtered loop and airy tones on the chorus. Brook Bailli manages to sound both frustrated and sweet in her vocal as she tries to work out whether or not she wants to hold on to a relationship, and basically lays out her terms for what she’d accept from her partner if they want to stay with her. There’s a lot of confidence and maturity in the song, but the pragmatism can’t hide the wounded feelings that carry through in her voice and in the general tone of the song. You really get the sense she’d rather do anything but try to be practical about this.
June 10th, 2019 5:56pm
The new Prince compilation Originals is another bit of wish-granting from the genies combing through the late songwriter’s vaults – a whole album full of his original recordings of songs he gave away to his various protégées and associates. It’s very exciting to hear him sing classics like “The Glamorous Life,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “Jungle Love,” and “Manic Monday,” but it’s immediately apparent upon hearing all of them why he decided to give them to other singers. You can hear him not feeling quite comfortable singing them, like he can tell he’s written something that’s not meant for his particular voice.
“Manic Monday” is a particularly good example of this. The song was originally slated to become a duet with Apollonia for an Apollonia 6 record, but he waited until 1986 to pass it along to The Bangles, who made it a hit. Prince selected The Bangles based on his love of their minor hit “Hero Takes A Fall” and offered the song to them, confident that they could do the song justice. Contrasting his original with their version shows that his instincts were correct. Their particular blend of glossy pop and neo-60s psychedelia matched the vibe of the instrumental, and Susanna Hoffs’ voice was just plaintive enough to convey wistfulness and ennui, but not an overbearing sadness. Prince sings this demo a bit too long to give himself much room to be very expressive, and the tempo is a bit plodding compared to the much zippier arrangement by The Bangles. The song itself is impeccable, but you can hear him be a little frustrated by it. I find this interesting just as a document of artistic humility – he probably did want to keep an obvious hit like this for himself, but was aware of his own limitations and wasn’t afraid to let someone else shine on it.
June 6th, 2019 4:28pm
Lil Rich’s arrangement for “Hard Bottoms & White Socks” signals a lot of vulnerability in its soft electric piano chords and slow, unhurried beat. It’s the sound of leaving yourself wide open and moving at your own pace – confident, but with no defenses up. YG follows the vibe by laying out verses that detail the complicated feelings that go into ambition and artistic confidence. He’s got a lot of ideas and resents the people who place limits on him, and he’s proud of his accomplishments but clearly doesn’t feel like he’s done enough. When he boasts, it sounds like self-affirmation more than a declaration. There’s a few subtle notes of doubt in YG’s voice, but there isn’t anything he expresses that contradicts his faith in himself. He’s just being open about the anxieties that drive this feeling.
June 5th, 2019 2:58am
J.Lamotta Suzume has a lovely and expressive voice, but her more compelling talent is in her skill as a composer and producer. “If You Wanna” is a remarkably graceful neo-soul number arranged and recorded with a slickness on par with what Steely Dan and Gary Katz got up to at the end of the 70s, or where D’Angelo was at around Voodoo. The record is extra dry but mixed so everything has incredible presence, particularly the drums and electric piano. The crispness of the snare hits contrast with the softness of Suzume’s voice and the swoon-y quality of the horns. It’s not just that this is a luxurious and sensual sound, but that it’s such a perfect articulation of an overwhelmingly sweet feeling. You hear this and just end up with a lovey-dovey contact high.
June 4th, 2019 3:27am
“Sumdim” doesn’t even make it to the two minute mark. That’s kinda annoying, honestly – the groove is so strong and the vibe is so extremely pleasant that I’d like to hang out in this feeling at least another minute or two longer. It’s an interlude, and kinda like the most memorable part of a trip being some random moment along the way to a destination. But this also sounds like THE destination – there’s a strong beachy/poolside feeling to this, and I’m suckered in without being a beachy/poolside person at all. It’s hard to say why I even have this impression. There’s just something watery about the bass and some of the synth sounds burbling in the mix, and that high pitched lead keyboard part just feels like that particular light you get in Southern California.
June 3rd, 2019 1:38am
“Don’t” starts off sounding so harmonically and texturally rich in its first 30 seconds that I wouldn’t have minded if it just vamped in that mode for a couple minutes or so. From there it only gets more elegant and lovely as the song glides from groovy verse to weightless chorus, and then into an extended instrumental coda led by violin. This is a remarkably ambitious piece of music, but even in spite of a string coda and some heavy lyrics about the state of the world, it mostly just sounds smooth and effortless. It’s all feel and feelings, and the odd contours of the composition only really stand out if you’re looking at it from a distance.
May 30th, 2019 6:56pm
“Yellow Belly” falls in the middle of Flamagra, a suite of songs that shift unpredictably between smooth grooves and agitated funk. This track is particularly odd – it’s a bit like stumbling into a room you’re not supposed to be in and witnessing some kind of odd sexual role-playing you can’t quite fathom. Flying Lotus’ track feels a bit like a Missy/Timbaland production thrown entirely off balance, and Tierra Whack raps like she’s deliberately trying to make you feel disoriented. When the song gets explicitly sexual at the end, it’s more slapstick than porno.
May 30th, 2019 1:34am
“Mirroring” delivers the expected sensations of dream pop and shoegaze, or whatever you want to call music that sounds like it exists in a world where the only record label that has ever existed is 4AD. But there’s an interesting tension in Johanne Swanson’s lyrics that undercuts the romantic haze of the music, and an insecurity at the core of it that bleeds out into every texture. Swanson sings about a relationship that’s intimate enough that they begin to mirror one another, and she can’t seem to tell how she feels about this. There’s a strong implication that she can’t understand how she appears to someone else, and then is perplexed by why someone she loves would want to be more like her. The uncertainty and ambiguity really makes the song, and the structure emphasizes the open-ended feeling by starting and ending as if bracketed by ellipses.
May 29th, 2019 4:28pm
The keyboard tones in “Potions” feel slightly uncanny, like if flickering neon lights had a sound. The producers Jimmy Edgar and Machinedrum make the song feel spacious and chilly, like a large loft with over-aggressive air conditioning. It’s basically an R&B song built around a track that’s not too far removed from where Autechre was in the late ‘90s, so Dawn Richard’s fairly straightforward vocal feels a bit aloof if just for being in this context. The lust and emotional rawness is there, but it seems like she’s at a literal physical distance from the groove. I’m not sure if this is what anyone was going for, but she sounds like someone trying to put on a sexy pose and be engaging, but also protect their heart as much as possible.
May 27th, 2019 2:53pm
Steve Lacy says at the top of “Like Me” that he didn’t want to make a “big deal” out of coming out as bisexual in this song, but then it goes on to be a 9 minute suite, so go figure. The composition of the music is ambitious, but the tone of his lyrics are low-key, which is more to his point. He’s just meditating on how something as simple as being attracted to a variety of genders can be interpreted as something more complex and create so many unnecessary complications in his life. It’s a bittersweet song, and while he’s mostly talking about his own experiences, the real feeling in the music is a desire to connect with other people. When Daisy joins in for her own verse, the loneliness lifts and the verses shift from monologue to dialogue, and when they sing the chorus together it goes from lament to commiseration.
May 23rd, 2019 4:20pm
I have no investment in The National, and have only liked scattered songs through their discography, mainly because their music tends to be so drab and monotonous. So it’s interesting to find that “Rylan,” one of the brightest and most dynamic songs they’ve ever released, is one that they had written many years ago but only recently completed. The work in tinkering with this song paid off. The beat is crisp and vital rather than plodding, the chords seem move rather than linger. As my friend Emily put it in her review of this record, the addition of other voices makes Matt Berninger’s deep, sad voice seem less dreary – as she puts it, it’s like adding a bit of salt to a chocolate chip cookie to make all the other flavors pop. The relatively light tone suits the subject matter well. He’s singing about a precocious child and observing their charms and challenges, and honoring the complexity of their character in a way that’s somewhat rare in songs about kids. This feels significantly warmer than a typical National song, and also a little more optimistic. They’re not sugar-coating anything, but hoping for the best.
May 22nd, 2019 4:56pm
Carly Rae Jepsen has made “having a crush” her brand through rigorous determination – she’s barely ever off-message. Even the darker and more complicated feelings that bubble up in her songs are part of a fantasy of romance – it’s the way rom-coms always need a bit of drama and tension in the lead-up to make the sappy parts work the way they ought to. This makes some sense of why her modest but intensely devoted audience tends to be young adults rather than teens – the idealized melodramatic love she sells is a regressive notion, it’s about being an adult who is fully aware of how disappointing this stuff gets IRL and wishing it could all have the supposed simplicity of teenage infatuation. (Revisionist history, nearly always.) Actual teens are usually in a hurry to feel older and more mature and gravitate to more “adult” experiences, or whatever they perceive that to be with their frame of reference. Hence the current popularity of Billie Eilish.
“Everything He Needs” is light and blissful even in terms of the CRJ discography. Just hearing it will make your body feel a bit lighter – it’s like the whole thing is floating on a light breeze on a sunny day. Something about it just screams “listen to me on a boat, or by a pool.” The main hook is lifted from a song Harry Nilsson wrote for Popeye, which strikes me as a rather inspired place to lift, but the most appealing structural elements of the song are original – the chords, Jepsen’s relaxed and gentle phrasing on the verses, and the pitch-shifted countermelody in the chorus. It’s all so incredibly sweet that you can just sorta gloss over how much the lyrics sound like someone convincing themselves that the person they’re into is more into them than they probably are.
May 21st, 2019 1:26pm
“Young Enough” is essentially Charly Bliss rewriting LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” into a yearning love song, the sort of thing it’s not hard to imagine playing during a particularly sappy moment in a modern rom-com. This is not faint praise. “Young Enough” is a slow burn that steadily builds to a well-earned climax while side-stepping obvious moves and sentimentality. It’s nostalgic, sure, but it’s not about overly romanticizing a failed relationship or punishing yourself for making a mistake. It’s remarkable how much compassion this song has for both sides of the situation. There is a significant musical debt to LCD here – and to New Order before them – but the most important thing Eva Hendricks takes from “All My Friends” is from the song’s most important statement: “I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life.”
May 19th, 2019 9:16pm
“Women In Fiction” is like a critical essay in song form, in which Catherine and Anna Wolk examine the often shallow and idealized depictions of women in stories created by men. There’s a lot of nuance in this critique, as well as humor and a strong yearning to connect with something on a page or a screen as a way of validating one’s own existence. The arrangement of the song is gorgeous in its balance of graceful synth pop and delicate chamber strings. Wolk sings with a lovely but prim voice that reminds me a lot of a young Natalie Merchant. It’s a similar mix of unapologetic overt femininity, introverted thoughtfulness, and low-key erudition. It’s just the right tone for the lyrics too – serious and incisive, but coming more from a place of idealism and empathy than spite or rage.
May 16th, 2019 8:37pm
“Mother’s Mother’s Magazines” starts off feeling quite similar to Vivien Goldman’s post-punk classic “Launderette,” with its awkwardly funky bass groove, creaky atmosphere, and a wry sensibility. But Cate Le Bon doesn’t settle there. The song becomes more jaunty as it moves along, ending on an extended vamp in which horns honk rhythmically alongside keyboard lines that seem to wiggle and squiggle like worms. Le Bon somehow makes this weird, borderline unpleasant sound feel vaguely soothing. Maybe it’s in the way any word sounds nonsensical through repetition, or how the absurdity in the track is so jolly and inviting. It’s like entering someone’s eccentric but ultimately comfortable little home.
May 15th, 2019 9:02pm
The tone of “UFOF” is so ambiguous that its loveliest qualities feel vaguely uncomfortable and ominous. This unsettled feeling suits the lyrics, which are largely about mystery and miracles, and how much not fully understanding things allows for both humility and magic. Arianne Lenker’s voice falls somewhere between the elfin intonation of Joanna Newsom and the conspiratorial whispering of Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino, and her words render apocalyptic visions and romantic moments in vivid detail. It’s hard to get a read on her mood – she seems to find some beauty in chaos and a measure of terror in tenderness, and is intrigued by pretty much everything in between.
May 14th, 2019 2:36am
I’ve been listening to Imperial Teen since their first album came out in the mid ‘90s, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out what it is about them that makes them distinctive among indie/power pop bands: It’s the constant suggestion of seediness and odd sexual energy. The queerness of the band has always been overt, but that dirty, furtive quality is more subtextual. It’s in the playful but nervous energy in the tunes, and the way they can create this tightly-coiled tension in their grooves that screams “barely repressed horniness.” “We Do What We Do Best,” the first single from their sixth album, is indeed them doing what they do best. They chant that title phrase as one of the key hooks and the cockiness suits them well. Their synth tones are on point here too – a bit filthy, a bit dorky. It’s in a direct lineage of pervy new wave going back to The Cars and Soft Cell.
May 13th, 2019 3:14pm
“Miles” is Jamila Woods’ attempt to channel the energy of Miles Davis, and though there are musical nods to his early ‘70s aesthetics, it’s more about his persona and legend. Woods sings bold words with a righteously contemptuous tone, and in approaching his absolute confidence she gives herself permission to feel self-assured and powerful. She’s playing out a role but you can sense she’s truly feeling it – the swagger is real, the soulfulness is not a put-on. The funk in the music carries through to her voice, and though it’s not a visual medium, you can feel her movement. It’s a willful transformation that’s both spiritual and physical.
May 9th, 2019 7:11pm
“Atlantic Oscillations” calls back to an era of disco-era dance music when everything sounded extremely expensive. The bass groove is down and dirty, but the strings and piano accompaniment sparkle like fancy baubles, and the mix has the dry, crystal clear aesthetics of 70s studio wizardry. I’ve heard a lot of artists attempt this vibe over the years but Quantic nails it, largely if just because the composition is on the level of its sonic ambitions. The groove is right, and the melodies are graceful and glorious. It sounds like a pleasure machine built by an expert hedonist.
