May 8th, 2018 5:15pm
It wouldn’t take much to turn “Pay No Mind” into a proper rock power ballad. If you strip away all of the very Beach House-y stylistic elements, that’s pretty much what you’re left with, right on down to the lyrics. And while I’d love to hear someone try that out, it’s just really nice to hear Beach House make such a conventionally lovely song. Victoria Legrand’s vocal performance is typically understated, but Alex Scally’s guitar carries the emotion, effectively selling the romance of her words with a dreamy guitar tone just a few steps removed from Prince on “Purple Rain.” The song doesn’t go for a “Purple Rain” sort of grandeur and melodrama, though – like most any Beach House song, it never moves into another gear and seems to extend a single feeling into one long, meditative moment.
May 4th, 2018 12:24pm
Boy Pablo’s songs render melodramatic teenage emotions – specifically the sort of romantic angst that comes from minimal experience mixed with cultural expectations established by pop culture – with a refined elegance that makes it all sound kinda suave. It’s like if Seth Cohen was writing lyrics for Bryan Ferry. “Losing You” is sleek and gorgeous, and sounds like it comes from a better, sexier world that we only ever glimpse in TV shows and movies. It’s the kind of song that winks at you and suggests you play it by the pool at a boutique hotel. And you’re just like, jeez, are you even 20 years old?
May 3rd, 2018 1:46pm
I’m not going to lie to you: There is no better way of describing this song than by saying it is ~~extremely chillwave~~. If the original wave of chillwave was about making music that sounded like a nostalgic but vague memory of ’80s pop, “Shadow You Become” sounds like a nostalgic but vague memory of chillwave itself. The production is paper thin and exceptionally woozy, and the sentiment is sweet and romantic but also weirdly passive – this guy is singing about wanting to find “the person that I’ll love” and figuring he’ll only find them if he goes to sleep. The melodies are what make this song, particularly the main guitar motif that’s been processed to sound so high and tinny that it sounds like the sound of a musical toy.
May 1st, 2018 2:05am
MorMor has a lovely voice, but I’m more into his chord changes and taste in tones. “Whatever Comes to Mind” is built upon a dreamy organ drone and crisp guitar chords that move at a relaxed, leisurely pace. It sounds like he’s trying to evoke heaven itself, or some blissful approximation of it here on earth. The vocal melody is gorgeous too, rising up with passion on the chorus but resisting cheap melodrama – he never does anything corny that could break the spell of those tranquil chords. He’s singing about searching for some kind of certainty from within or without, and his voice conveys an earnest and optimistic belief that he’ll find it. He doesn’t seem particularly bothered that he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
April 30th, 2018 12:12am
“Beating My Head Against A Wall” is a fun, Ramones-style punk tune about something a lot of us have spent too much time doing over the past few years: Arguing with someone you fundamentally disagree with and has no respect for you or your point of view! Truly, it’s a miracle that Jeff Rosenstock can make this sound like a good time. But I can suppose you can make any deeply frustrating experience if you use it as fodder for a hyper-catchy bop. Also, I think part of what makes this song work is that Rosenstock is not coming from an aggressive place here – he’s exhausted mainly because he’s giving patience, respect, and courtesy but not receiving any.
April 29th, 2018 1:51am
The Rock*A*Teens’ music from their original run in the ’90s was awash in a heavy reverb that made their songs sound nostalgic and majestic, and accentuated the grandiosity of Christopher Lopez’s wildly emotive voice. “Go Tell Everybody,” the first song to be released from the first record of their recently initiated second run, dials the reverb down significantly. It’s not totally dry, but it’s very clean and direct – if they were trying to evoke the past on the old songs, they’re now going for a more urgent and present feeling. Lopez’s voice is still the main attraction: He’s way up front in the mix, and still sings with the maximum level of conviction you can hit before ending up in Joe Cocker territory. The lyrics seem to be sung from the perspective of Jesus Christ, urging on the proselytizing of the apostle Bartholomew. It’s an interesting topic for a breezy, summery rocker, especially when you consider that his evangelizing eventually leads to his horrific murder.
April 26th, 2018 1:36am
“Pressure” sounds remarkably similar to some of the deeply obscure American indie/punk DIY singles collected on the old Homework CDR compilations from the early 2000s. It’s in the voice, it’s in the nervous energy, and especially in the way the melodies wind tightly around the rhythm and hooks seem to leap up slightly ahead of schedule. I love the lead guitar melody that punctuates the chorus – or maybe the better word is bisects it, since the song accelerates into another different chorus on the other side of it. I’m particularly fond of that one, especially the way the phrase “night to night suicide all of the time” spills out over the chords. The lyrics are basically words of empathy and support for someone struggling with anxiety and depression, but the tone isn’t dark or maudlin. It’s a very fun sort of commiseration and catharsis.
April 25th, 2018 1:30am
Sloan is a band comprised of four singer-songwriters with their own distinct but complementary aesthetics. It took me a long time to notice this, but one of the ways their styles overlap is in how each of them writes lyrics. By and large, their songs tend to be addressing someone – their relationship with that person is usually left ambiguous – and the tone is usually critical, though seldom confrontational. They always sound like they’re negotiating for peace, making a case for cutting someone off, or talking someone into something. In the context of the albums it often sounds like they might be passive-aggressively singing to each other. I wouldn’t be shocked if a significant chunk of the Sloan catalog is about the interpersonal dynamics of the band.
“Don’t Stop (If It Feels Good Do It)” is a Chris Murphy composition, but its title and hook is a callback to a Patrick Pentland song from their 2001 record Pretty Together. I’m not sure how significant that connection is, but it doesn’t seem like a coincidence. At any rate, this song slots right into my Grand Unifying Theory of Sloan – the verses are all Murphy chiding some overbearing person with a poor sense of boundaries, but the chorus is just good time rock vibes that defuse the mood. It’s a very fun song, so it’s hard to tell how seriously you’re supposed to take the negative lyrics. Murphy never seems particularly angry. If anything, he seems bemused.
April 24th, 2018 11:43am
“You Hate the Title” is so sunny and catchy that I’d believe it if you told me Sadie Dupuis wrote it as an audition to become a professional jingle writer. The perky tone suits her melodic style and brings out a playful sweetness in her voice that makes it so that this song about dealing with criticism comes out sounding good-natured and self-aware rather than peevish and wildly insecure. This is mostly an expression of mild exasperation with someone who basically likes what she’s doing but can’t help but complain about the details. At first this sounds like it’s about the audience, but I think it’s more likely about collaborators and producers – you want to please them, you want them to do their job and push you, but you’re also just trying to do your thing as honestly as you can.
April 23rd, 2018 1:26am
“Mekong Glitter” is an ambiguous tribute to Gary Glitter, one of the most unsettling figures in the history of pop music. The song focuses on the darkest phase of Glitter’s life after he was released from prison in the U.K. for possessing child pornography and he flees to Cambodia and Vietnam to avoid the scrutiny of the British public and fully embrace his despicable urges. (He ended up getting busted in both of those countries too, and getting deported back to England.) Insecure Men channel Glitter’s distinctive and truly brilliant glam-shuffle aesthetic but fill the negative space with buzzing distortion. It sounds like someone lit “Rock and Roll Part 2” on fire, or like a villainous Glitter strutting through hell. And like, of course, this sounds incredibly cool and that’s also very upsetting.
“Mekong Glitter” is a song that deliberately pokes at you and tries to make you feel uncomfortable. In the breakdown, Saul Adamczewski asks us “Why don’t you ever ask why?,” and it’s hard to parse exactly what he’s asking, but it resonates and effectively stirs up guilt. Why do people like Gary Glitter do the things they do? Why is he seemingly unrepentant? Why does does it feel like we’re turning a blind eye to his crimes and the people he’s victimized whenever we hear Glitter’s songs and acknowledge that a lot of them are absolutely amazing?
April 23rd, 2018 12:47am
1. The verses in “Mr. Tillman” are sung from the perspective of a concierge at a hotel where Father John Misty – a.k.a. Josh Tillman – is staying and behaving like an inebriated paranoid wreck for days on end. It’s played as a dark comedy, and part of the joke is the way the concierge’s polite language puts a sunny spin on Tillman’s disturbing behavior and just barely conceals their impatience with him as the song goes along.
2. Note the contrast of the meter in the verse and the chorus: The concierge’s obsequious dialogue tightly wraps around melody and flows between measures, suggesting a formal and uptight demeanor. The chorus, from Tillman’s perspective, is relaxed and loose. He sounds blissful, oblivious, and delusional.
3. This isn’t the first time Tillman has written a song about himself as a very unsympathetic and unlikeable character. It’s hard to say how much either this or “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment” is about him – probably a fair amount, with some degree of artistic license. He clearly delights in playing with the audience’s perception of him, being a guy who records under a pseudonym/persona and sings songs about a guy who has his real name. He’s inviting you to doubt how “real’ those songs are, which strikes me as a way of covering his ass. Is he a drunken train wreck, like in “Mr. Tillman”? Is he attracted to women who bring out his worst misogynistic impulses, as in “…Our Apartment”? I don’t know the guy. Maybe?
4. It’s interesting to write a song about yourself going on an out-of-control bender and writing it mostly from the perspective of the people who have to look after you and clean up your messes. He’s being treated like a coddled baby – at one point the concierge offers to bring him a Regalo, one of those safety gates for small children, to keep him from hurting himself. On one level, this is like an admission of guilt after the fact for being a burden on other people. But it’s also a judgment on himself, for giving into the rock cliché of being a spoiled baby-man. And then there’s another layer where he’s alienated by his awareness that the concierge in sycophantic and concerned entirely because it’s their job. If his self-destructive behavior is the result of feeling disconnected and lost in a world full of fake people who don’t care about him, this only proves him right to feel that way.
April 20th, 2018 12:12pm
“Bratt” flies by in just over two minutes, a plaintive ballad accelerated by a very late ’90s sort of drum loop. The percussion sounds so huge that the atmosphere created by the keyboard and guitar parts feels like it’s happening inside of the rhythm, contained within and echoing off of walls implied by the snare hits. Haley’s voice is in there too, high enough to cut through the treble and gentle enough to signal confusion and vulnerability. The lyrics suggest a messy, questionable relationship with someone with substance abuse issues, but also a real affection and commitment to that person. It’s clear enough to get across the idea, but ambiguous enough that some lines come off as vaguely sinister.
April 20th, 2018 1:39am
“Overdwelled” is an unusual sort of breakup song: It’s not particularly sad or angry, and mostly fixates on humiliation and embarrassment. The lyrics are part cringe humor, part coping with failure and pain by finding a way to laugh at it. Karen Meat’s whole record is based on this sort of proud vulnerability and radical candor, but filtered through a wry and self-deprecating sense of humor. And while I’m typing out a lot of words that signal something deeper and darker, the main vibe of this music is fun. Arin Eaton’s voice has a playful drawl that adds an extra layer of charm to her immediately catchy melodies, and the arrangements are bright, bold, and ever-shifting. There are legitimately surprising turns in their songs. In the case of this one, it’s the faux-jazz lead piano part that comes out of nowhere to accent the second half of the fourth verse. It’s a great balance of strong pop craft and random “hey, what if we do this!!!” impulsiveness.
April 18th, 2018 1:57am
I think it’s a human impulse to look for commonalities between ourselves and other people, especially people we don’t really know. I’m very aware of every celebrity born in the same year as myself – Claire Danes, Aaliyah, Chris Pratt, Robyn, Heath Ledger, Aaron Paul, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, Vincent Kartheiser, Norah Jones, Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish – and of people who grew up in the Hudson Valley, and celebrities who are Leos, and anyone who was blogging in the early to mid ’00s. In “Famous Tracheotomies,” Will Sheff focuses on other celebrities who had tracheotomies when they were infants. It’s like he’s trying to make sense of this formative trauma, and figure out whether there’s more to this connection than just happenstance. That’s what this impulse really is, right? Trying to make sense of something that’s ultimately quite random. He’s looking at Gary Coleman, Dylan Thomas, Mary Wells, and Ray Davies and trying to figure out whether this life-or-death ordeal was as meaningful to them as it was to him.
Sheff’s lyrics are direct and plainspoken, and his voice is fragile but not melodramatic. There’s an immediate intimacy to this song, like you’re just there with him as he’s telling you something incredibly personal and it just happens to be set to music. The song gets a bit more groovy and gathers momentum, but the tone remains conversational up to the point it drifts off from Ray Davies’ story into quoting The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset.” I think that move could be cheap in some cases, but here it’s quite beautiful. It’s a moment where it doesn’t matter if there’s truly some greater significance to this random connection, it only matters that Sheff is finding inspiration in it.
April 17th, 2018 12:48am
“I Don’t Have To” is a bittersweet breakup song that starts off with a splashy, funky drum into that suggests the arrival of a more lighthearted and groovy tune. The direction of the song shifts a bit but the percussion is consistently bold and high up in the mix – it’s as expressive as it is functional. As Sibille Attar sings about deciding to break off a relationship, the drums push her to be firm and assertive. The drums are loud and crisp, but also sorta wild and loose, which highlights the uncertainty in her voice. There’s an “it’s now or never” urgency to this track, and when she belts out the title phrase, she sounds like someone who is confronting and overcoming a terrifying obstacle.
April 16th, 2018 12:08am
Eleanor Friedberger’s fourth album Rebound is the first of her solo records to feel completely removed from the singular aesthetic of The Fiery Furnaces. The esoteric humor, the odd approach to narrative, the strange cadences and restless tempos, the impulse to pack songs with as many ideas as possible – that’s all gone. The Eleanor of 2018 favors a more relaxed vibe and significantly more straightforward lyrics. The songs have a more spacious, airy sound, and her voice – always so certain and decisive in tone – now conveys the humble curiosity of a spiritual seeker.
This is a dramatic creative shift, and I know some of my friends who were never huge Furnaces fans have connected with this record. And that makes sense: Anything that could have ever annoyed people about her old material is missing from what she’s doing now, and it’s pretty easy to like the mellow, groovy vibe of this record. But for me, it’s a bit more complicated. I appreciate and enjoy where she’s at with this music, but I can’t help but focus on the lack of the aspects of her work that I find the most exciting and intriguing.
She’s still great with melody. “Make Me A Song” is a gentle, jaunty number with an understated hook – “I could love you more” – that’s sweet but slightly ambiguous in context. This is essentially a song reflecting on other people’s faith and passions, and searching for a similar inspiration. And though she seems to lack direction, the music itself conveys a sense of peace and self-acceptance that suggest she doesn’t have to look far to find what she might already have.
April 12th, 2018 1:06am
Me’Shell NdegéOcello’s new album Ventriloquism is a collection of covers of R&B hits from the mid ’80s through the early ’90s, and her selection is heavy on songs that I reconnected with in a huge way when I was working on my survey projects over the past couple years: “Don’t Disturb This Groove” by The System, “Nite & Day” by Al B. Sure, “Sensitivity” by Ralph Tresvant. An interesting thing about the record is that while NdegéOcello is extremely comfortable working in funk and R&B modes, she has arranged all of the material to take the emphasis off of these elements of the songs. There’s a very particular aesthetic to the record – it’s a very moody and atmospheric vibe, and heavy on acoustic guitar and understated percussion. Some of the songs sound like they’d work in the soundtrack of a modern Western.
To be clear, this isn’t that awful clichéd thing of someone taking an old hit and making it slow and acoustic and dreary. NdegéOcello’s arrangements are far more thoughtful, and occasionally swerve into very peculiar creative decisions, as when he take on “Sensitivity” suddenly shifts gears into a jazzy vaudeville section. But no matter where she goes with the songs, she is incredibly faithful to the melodies. NdegéOcello’s project here isn’t simply an aesthetic exercise in arranging old songs, but more about her efforts to show the listener how well-written these tunes are, and how their quality is not rooted entirely in genre or cultural moments. She’s trying to rescue these songs from the lazy ways culture frames this music. Your response to the track listing of Ventriloquism is supposed to make you go “Oh yeah, I love that song! And that one too!,” and the recordings are there to show you a new way to appreciate them.
April 11th, 2018 2:34am
Cardi B reminds me of a line written by a pre-Sonic Youth Kim Gordon in Art Forum in early 1983: “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” This is true of most rappers, but I think it’s particularly true about her. Everything about her – that booming voice, the ferocious lyrics, her life story – is a display of superhuman self-belief. Even in the context of a genre defined by scrappy outsiders, her narrative stands out as being about a woman who didn’t ask for permission and became huge through sheer force of will. She’s an instant icon of unapologetic female confidence and aggression, and exactly what pop music needed in this moment. She also stands in stark contrast with a lot of what’s going on in rap today – it’s not as though there’s a total lack of swagger out there, but who else is delivering this sort of classic hip-hop self-empowerment at this level right now and with this degree of intensity? There was a void in the market, and Cardi filled it.
As much as Cardi B delivers on rap’s core values, she’s also a subversive figure who recasts the stripper – so often a decorative and subservient character in hip-hop lyrics – as the dominating, money-making, trash-talking protagonist. “Bodak Yellow” and “Bickenhead,” her finest strip club anthems, convey a ruthless competitive drive and a desire to bend the entire world to her will. “Bickenhead” is particularly explicit but not at all sexy. She’s in total control of these men, and it’s not even eroticized in a BDSM way. She makes these guys sound like total rubes, and the raw confidence and power in her voice is so potent even someone as extremely un-Cardi B-like as myself can get a slight contact high. I’m sure you can relate.
April 9th, 2018 1:15am
Kali Uchis’ debut album Isolation is so eclectic that it’s actually difficult to discern whether it’s the work of a restless and wide-ranging artist, or if it’s more that the label just wants to try working a few different lanes of promotion to see which one sticks. It’s probably a bit of both. Uchis has a strong voice and is good with phrasing, so she fits comfortably into most anything her absurdly long list of collaborators can throw at her, but I’m particularly fond of the songs that feel more 20th century than 21st century. She shines on a few songs that feel a bit jazzy or nod in the direction of Quiet Storm, but I’m most impressed by how she handles “Flight 22,” a lovely and achingly sincere neo-soul ballad that’s nearly on the level of Alicia Key’s sublime “If I Ain’t Got You.” Interscope would be foolish not to work this song as a single, even if doesn’t quite fit in with what gets played on the radio right now. Get it on TV somehow. Put it in a movie. Something like that.
April 9th, 2018 12:53am
You get just over a second of intro in this track before it throws you into the deep end of a high-hat clattering drum loop and MF Doom’s verse, and it just keeps going through two more verses from Esoteric and Inspectah Deck. And like, look, I have relatively broad taste in rap like most any reasonable music listener in 2018, but this sort of thing is always going to be the thing that really knocks me out: a quick succession of clever rhymes from multiple rappers over a grimy, up-tempo track, and with a chorus that exists almost entirely to punctuate verses. Doom and Deck turn in strong performances on this song but are about what you’d expect – the former is charmingly mush-mouthed and sharp-witted, the latter exudes a menacing intelligence in seemingly effortless rhymes. And Esoteric? Well, it’s impressive how many Guardians of the Galaxy references he packs into 41 seconds on the mic.
