McLusky “That Man Will Not Hang”

The clever thing about McLusky is that they knew how to express anger, bile, cynicism, and bitterness in vivid and visceral ways, but also knew how to make that genuine feeling also come off as dumb and funny. The best McLusky songs allow you to connect with the guy who is in a sputtering rage on a cathartic level, but also someone pointing and laughing at that guy on an intellectual level. As great and wonderfully specific as Andy Falkous’ lyrics could be, it’s sorta like he was singing in an entire language made up of different inflections of “fuck you.”

“That Man Will Not Hang” is the platonic ideal of a McLusky song – a pummeling bass line, a vicious vocal, and a heavy final sequence that intensifies an already intense song. Falkous starts the song off with a fanciful image – “there’s a story on a thimble on a dimple on a pea” – and proceeds from there to paint a portrait of some pathetic asshole whose greatest crime seems to be that he “introduced me to the joys of doubt” and “gave away his heart like it was his to give away.” Falkous sings about this guy in a way that makes you want to hate him too, but if you listen a bit closer, he seems more like a dumb chump who’s been taken for a ride.

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The Silures “21 Ghosts (Part 1)”

At the time “21 Ghosts” was released in 2003, a techno approximation of a glam rock shuffle was very on-trend in electronic music. Goldfrapp released their signature hit “Strict Machine” around the same time, and artists on Michael Mayer’s Kompakt label were rapidly iterating on the “schaffel” sound. I love this aesthetic – sleek, sexy, intimidating – and wish it would come back in style. In context, this sound came out near the end of the electroclash phase and pushed that sort of cheeky hedonism into a more severe, aggressive, and kinky place. (Not for nothing, but “21 Ghosts” is a song that casually mentions watersports.)

“21 Ghosts” was the result of a collaboration between the French producer Vitalic and the American punk singer Linda Lamb, and appears on a one-off EP called All You Can Eat. There’s two versions of the song, but I strongly prefer this one, which has this violent, urgent feeling to it. I like the way Lamb’s nasal NYC accent contrasts with the harsh, grinding tone of the music – it’s like she’s trapped inside this machine. The lyrics flip between evocative nonsense – “lady fancy knickers likes watersports,” “look out, Argentina just scored another goal!” – and a creepy account of being haunted by precisely 21 ghosts. It’s a horror song, but it’s not necessarily the supernatural element that makes it scary. It’s more about feeling like you have no agency, and that you have no choice but to be passive as outside forces dominate you.

But really, if you wanna TL;DR this, let me just say this: This is one of the greatest bangers to ever be featured on this site. It is one of the best songs of the entire 2000s.

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Spektrum “Don’t Be Shy”

Spektrum’s songs have a dominating, forceful quality – heavy electro-funk so strong that it overrides all physical inhibitions. The boldness doesn’t end at the groove, either. Lola Olafisoye’s vocals and lyrics get absolutely filthy, and at times it seems as though she’s trying to make you blush. “Don’t Be Shy” is an industrial-strength banger on par with the wildest Basement Jaxx tracks and features a particularly sassy and seductive performance by Olafisoye, who spends the entire track enticing you to drop all your reservations and surrender to the music and to do… well, she has some very specific instructions for you. You can just listen to the song to find out.

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Maxi Geil & Playcolt “A Message To My Audience”

In the mid-2000s I saw Maxi Geil & Playcolt play several shows to incredibly enthusiastic audiences, one of them a sold out show at the big theater at the Museum of Modern Art. When I think of this today, it’s like having memories from some parallel world – this band barely existed to anyone besides the readers of this site or people in the art world. And while it was kinda cool to have this world class glam band all to myself and a few hundred other people, it’s sad to think about how many people would have loved Maxi Geil and never got to know about it. This is a band that should have had a level of success at least on par with contemporaries like Bloc Party and TV on the Radio, but they never left their art world bubble. I don’t think they ever really wanted to.

Let me backtrack a bit for you, since the odds are good that you’ve never heard of this band. Maxi Geil was the alter ego of Guy Richards Smit, an artist who has worked in a wide variety of media – short films, comics, stand-up comedy, painting, motivational speaking, internet video, and, of course, rock music. The music that would eventually become Maxi Geil’s debut album A Message To My Audience was originally developed for Smit’s short film Nausea 2, a rock opera about porn stars. The songs were about a lot of things – sex, drugs, commerce, ego – but above all other things, they were about the experience of being an artist.

“A Message to My Audience” is a literal title. This is Smit-as-Maxi singing about the gnawing insecurities and raging egomania that drive his creativity, and his fraught relationship with an audience who approval he craves despite his lack of trust in them or their taste. Smit’s wife Rebecca Chamberlain sings a back up part that responds to Maxi’s melodramatic angst on behalf of the audience, heckling him in some moments and supporting him in others. (“Maxi, stay on message!”) The song sounds absolutely huge, as though they’re trying to play a room about twice the size of a stadium. Anything less wouldn’t be true to the scale of this character’s ego or self-loathing.

There’s a line in this song I think about all the time: “I want the world and I want it now / can’t that be arranged for me somehow?” It’s so profoundly arrogant and impatient, but who can’t relate to that sentiment? Never mind working hard and earning things, just give me everything I want right now! I don’t think there’s any creative person who hasn’t experienced this sort of ridiculous exasperation.

All of Maxi Geil & Playcolt’s music is now out of print and unavailable on the major streaming platforms, though you can find many of their songs on Soundcloud.

I was going to write a new entry about Marnie Stern as part of this month-long retrospective, but upon re-reading some of my old posts about her I realize that I can’t really improve upon what I wrote about her back then. Anything I could say now would just be reiterating the old stuff in a less inspired way. So here’s two old family favorites from Marnie Stern.

Marnie Stern “The Package Is Wrapped”

One of my favorite things about Marnie Stern’s music is that her lyrics very often express this unshakable certainty that we have the power to change our habits, rework our minds, and improve ourselves. It’s not hippy-dippy babble, either. When she sings about rearranging her mind or grabbing victory from the jaws of defeat, it comes from a place of knowing how hard it is to do just that, and the intense focus and discipline required to fundamentally shift one’s way of thinking and living. This subject matter is an inspired and appropriate match for her music, which overflows not only with excitement and energy, but this feeling of anxiety and impatience. That’s part of why her sentiment feels so true — she’s psyching herself up, grappling with neuroses, pushing herself to the limit, and all the while there is this powerful yearning for the end result that comes through in every note. Ultimately, the desire to triumph drowns out every other feeling and thought, and it’s just amazing. I don’t know how anyone could hear this without getting a jolt of adrenaline, or feeling overcome with ambition. (Originally posted 4/28/09)

For about two hours after the show in Brooklyn, I couldn’t get the main hook from “Transformer” out of my head: “I cannot be all these things to you, it’s true.” The lyric is terrific in print, but as with any good song, the music adds a meaning words alone could never convey. It’s all in the way “iiiiit’s truuue!” extends out slightly, as if climbing a steep incline and dropping like a roller coaster. There is anticipation and thrill, but also this maybe-unintentional nod to Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, and having it roll right back down. The thing is, “Transformer” is a song that confronts futility and limitation head-on, and in doing so, sorta games the system, and finds a way toward triumph. In other words, when she sings “it’s true!,” you kinda get the sense that this time, against all odds, Sisyphus wins, and the boulder doesn’t just stay in place at the top of the hill, but instead rolls down the other side and becomes someone else’s problem. (Originally posted 12/1/08)

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Bonus: Here’s a feature-length interview with Marnie Stern that I did for Pitchfork back in 2008. She’s one of the best interview subjects I’ve ever had in my career.

Bossanova “Rare Brazil”

“Rare Brazil” is, in my mind, a classic Fluxblog song. It’s the sort of the song I would use an example of what this site champions, particularly in the ’00s. So it comes as something of a surprise to me that I never actually wrote about it on this site, and featured a different Bossanova song here back in 2006. Huh! Well, here it is now, 12 years later. It certainly still sounds fresh.

There’s about a minute’s worth of singing in this song, but it’s really more of an instrumental. It starts out with a simple bass groove, but it gradually builds into this glorious disco track complete with a Nile Rodgers-esque guitar part, a synth solo that sounds like neon, and an absolutely sublime breakdown. This song sounds incredibly romantic to me, like some incredible night in a place so perfect it can’t possibly be real. I can’t say much more about this, really – it’s too abstract, and very much the kind of music that’s spoiled by words.

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A Sunny Day in Glasgow “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons”

By the time A Sunny Day In Glasgow arrived in the mid 2000s, shoegaze had become a nostalgic style tied to a particular time and place. There were still some shoegaze bands around, but they were mostly dismissed as derivative and inessential. A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s Ben Daniels approached the genre from a skewed angle – he embraced the possibilities of digital technology in shaping the sound of live instruments and vocals, and leaned into the nostalgia by making songs sound like vintage mid ’80s to early ’90s college rock played on warped cassettes. The music on their debut Scribble Mural Comic Journal plays on the tension between familiar and alien sounds, and has a collage-like approach to the juxtaposition of timbres and textures. The sound is always shifting, with some elements having a rough physicality, and others feeling more dazed and ethereal. These extremes overlap in the best songs, as in the instrumental refrains of “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons.”

Jack Parsons is one of the more fascinating characters in mid-20th century American history – a pioneering rocket scientist who was also an occultist and adherent of Aleister Crowley’s new religious movement Thelema. His life was, to put it mildly, completely bizarre. “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons” imagines trying to have a dull conversation with the man – “no more of this Jack, for God’s sake, you’re not the devil” – and “concentrating on the mundane” as a sort of meditative practice. Or wait, is this more an act of self-nullification? It’s hard to say. I like the ambiguity.

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Fight Like Apes “Tie Me Up With Jackets”

Fight Like Apes were a silly and light-hearted band for the most part, but they had a way of sneaking moments of raw emotion into their hyperactive, shouty songs full of references to trash culture. It’s quite a trick, and it works mostly because MayKay Geraghty sang everything with a sort of radical vulnerability whether she was shouting about meatballs or karate or Beverly Hills 90210 or desperately needing to feel loved. I quite like how she uses lines about food and junk and bad smells and weird jokes as a way of grounding big emotions. It kills the idealized romance of it all, and places the feelings in a more down to earth setting – messy rooms, awkward poses, nervous conversation. In “Tie Me Up With Jackets,” she’s circling around a feeling a few times before shouting out the thing that’s really on her mind: “Lovely noise! Lovely noise that makes you love me!” It feels like she’s saying a lot more than she is. You know this is just the tip of the emotional iceberg.

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Max Tundra “Glycaemic Index Blues”

It’s been a decade since Max Tundra released a record, which I suppose makes him the My Bloody Valentine of glitchy quirky English electronic pop music. There was a time when I would have said “ah, a genre of one,” but in recent years A.G. Cook, Sophie, and the PC Music crew have pushed the Tundra aesthetic into more contemporary and postmodern directions. Max’s music isn’t for everyone – it’s incredibly hyperactive and bouncy, like vintage video game music played at double or triple speed. The vocals keep up with the tempo by densely packing the lyrics with witty jokes, mundane observations, and profound thoughts that all somehow fit into intricate rhyme schemes. It’s a lot to take in, but it’s not hard to surrender to the energy of it, or just be in awe of Tundra’s relentless joyful creativity. And despite how self-consciously clever the music can be, it’s also remarkably vulnerable and sincere, particularly when he’s singing about having crushes and wanting to be loved.

Buy it from Amazon.

Note: Here’s a post I wrote about Max Tundra’s song “Number Our Days” that I like a lot, and another reviewing I concert I saw him perform in 2009. I have very little recollection of this show today, but it sounds like I had a very good time.

A Frames “Black Forest II”

A Frames’ Black Forest was largely ignored at the time of its release in 2005 and has only become more obscure as the years go by, but it’s one of the great punk masterpieces of the 2000s. The sound is sharp and sterile, brutal yet elegantly composed. The tone is relentlessly bleak, and obsessed with societal collapse, nuclear annihilation, and the darkest periods of human history with a particular focus on World War II. This music suited the George W. Bush era, but seemed a bit hyperbolic at the time. Thirteen years later, it exactly sounds like the prevailing mood – anxious, furious, and hopeless. Erin Sullivan’s lyrics are blunt and impressionistic, sketching out a loose history of evil and catastrophe going all the way back to the Sumerians of the Fertile Crescent. “Black Forest” appears in three forms at the beginning, middle, and end of the record, and its spiky sound and apocalyptic lyrics suggest the notion that in Sullivan’s mind, every society is doomed to collapse. We’re all killing ourselves over and over and over again, and everything that we build is destined to burn. Maybe that’s why the record opens with the most bombed-out and desolate version of the musical theme, and ends with the most agitated and harsh version – the record begins with the nuked remains of one world, and ends with another entirely inevitable doomsday.

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The Rogers Sisters “Money Matters”

The best songs by The Rogers Sisters offer moments of ecstatic catharsis but never let go of a central tension. Their records came out during the middle of the George W. Bush era, and reflect an anxiety and hopelessness particular to that period – offended and angry, but also resigned and powerless. It’s the sound of getting worked up about something, but then realizing you’ve achieved nothing at all.

Most artists who made anti-Bush music in the ‘00s were roundly mocked for it. Not by right wingers, but by left-leaning indie music critics who felt like any statement made in a song was ham-fisted and gauche. So even The Rogers Sisters, whose lyrics fell in an odd place between direct statement and cryptic suggestion, were criticized at length in the Pitchfork review of their best record The Invisible Deck for being too strident and pedantic. (Brian Howe is a good writer, but the tone of that review is extremely unfair.) I remember feeling this peculiar anxiety too, and thinking that nearly any “political” sentiment in art was awkward, and that somehow any statement of dissent needed to be extensively vetted or something. Everyone was so embarrassed to be caught being anti-Bush or left wing in public, even if that’s exactly what they were. Doesn’t this all seem quaint now? These days you’d be more likely to be dragged for being apolitical.

“Money Matters” is hardly a pedantic song. It’s actually rather oblique in structure and hard to parse beyond its skepticism of the way “youth culture” and indeed most other forms of counterculture require the purchase of goods and services as a form of gatekeeping. Jennifer Rogers sings the song with the bitter pithiness of an outsider looking in – observant and wise, but removed and alienated. It’s not necessarily an anti-capitalist song, at least in as much as Rogers doesn’t see capitalism as anything she can escape, but it’s definitely about the way money and class permeates and corrupts everything, even opposition to such things.

Buy it from Amazon.

Girls Aloud “Biology”

The British girl group Girls Aloud were essentially a front for the songwriting and production team Xenomania, who created nearly all of the groups tracks. Xenomania, led by the producer Brian Higgins, specialize in super-charged pop that’s precisely engineered to deliver as many strong hooks as possible at a relentless pace. Their songs are pure sensation, calculated by expert writers to be melodically dazzling, structurally dynamic, and extraordinarily energetic. There’s a ruthlessness to Xenomania’s approach that carries over to the lyrics, which tend to be either misanthropic caricatures of the lives of rich assholes or what amounts to a sort of “chick-lit” lorem impsum. Girls Aloud had some ballads, but even in those, the emotional content of lyrics seem entirely besides the point. You get the sense that Higgins would wonder why someone would bother to write something emotional or sentimental when you could have a more musically interesting turn of phrase that didn’t mean much but stood out a bit more, like, I dunno, “we’re gift-wrapped kitty cats” or “there’s black jacks running down my back and I say STOP!”

“Biology” is one of Girls Aloud and Xenomania’s finest songs, and it’s a great example of their aesthetic. The song starts off with a stomping blues riff played about three times faster than you’d expect, but then shifts on a dime into a more straight forward up-tempo pop track that just gets faster and more emphatic as it goes along. It’s never quite dance music – there’s rarely elements of house or disco in Xenomania tracks, it’s always more like an extremely glossy and hyperactive sort of rock music. That’s part of why the blues intro and interlude here fit so well, and why the emphasis is played on the loudness of the chorus rather than the sway of a groove.

Buy it from Amazon.

Britta Persson “Cliffhanger”

The word “cliffhanger” is never sung in this song, but it’s an appropriate title for a song that’s so ambivalent and unresolved. Britta Persson is singing from the perspective of someone in a relationship that’s seemingly stuck in a pleasant rut and is wondering if there’s a direction and purpose to it, or if they’re just passively following the path of least resistance. It’s hard to say which option she’d prefer, particularly as she seems to distrust her own emotions. She asks herself if she’s “feeling a feeling because it’s a feeling,” and is dismissive of some woman she read about in free magazine, saying she “doesn’t want to be a teenager forever.” But her feelings do get quite strong – she’s rather emphatic when she sings that she’s ready to move on. But after that, the song reverts to the vague emotional space it starts out in.

This is such a vivid portrayal of a state of indecision, and the anguish that comes from fearing that you could be settling for less than what would make you truly happy. And then, the added anxiety of not even knowing what would make you happy in the first place. And of course, a third layer of feeling guilty for wanting more when things are basically fine and you don’t want to hurt your partner. Maybe “cliffhanger” isn’t quite the right word for this. It’s more of a stalemate.

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Note: I wrote about three songs from Britta Persson’s Kill Hollywood Me when it came out 10 years ago. The first post was about “At 7,” the second was about the title track, and the third was my first shot at writing about “Cliffhanger.” I strongly recommend the album, but especially these three magnificent songs.

As of the beginning of this month, Fluxblog has existed for 16 years. I am going to celebrate this occasion by revisiting a lot of old favorites from over the years that have slipped into obscurity. In some cases I’ll be writing about songs featured here many years ago with a new perspective, and in others, I’ll be writing about songs that I love that I never got around to covering on the site. It’s remarkable how much great music from the past decade is almost completely forgotten today, or doesn’t even exist on streaming platforms. I want to do what I can to put these artists and songs back into the world. History gets erased when no one bothers to write about it.

MGMT “She Works Out Too Much”

“I’m constantly swiping and tapping, it’s never relaxing,” Andrew VanWyngarden sings midway through “She Works Out Too Much.” It would be easy for this to come out sounding shrill and judgmental, but he sounds legitimately bored and exhausted. This song is particular to Instagram, but I think it speaks to something a lot of people have been experiencing with different social platforms in the past two years or so: Is any of this still fun? And what are we getting out of this, besides new ways to feel anxious, insecure, or unsafe?

I personally ran into this wall with Twitter, and have stopped reading and participating in that platform altogether. At first it was because I was tired of constantly checking a timeline that was increasingly packed with paranoia, dread, anguish, and in the worst moments, outright hysteria. But once I stopped reading the stuff, I stopped writing tweets as well. I didn’t anticipate how freeing that would be. Twitter is a platform that rewards anger and negativity, so even my fairly benign presence took on a snippy, aggrieved tone. The platform subtly encouraged my worst impulses, but I’ve found that once I stopped having an outlet and audience for bitchy little thoughts, I stopped having so many bitchy little thoughts. I’m better for it, and so is anyone else. No one needs this from me. No one needs this from the vast majority of people.

But I digress. “She Works Out Too Much” is a very light-hearted song, but it’s coming from a sad and dissatisfied place. The central lyrical conceit is the way it contrasts different meanings of the phrase “work out” – in literal terms, a reference to a girl’s endless workout selfies, and in idiomatic terms, “work out” as in a relationship succeeding or not. VanWyngarden’s lines in the chorus are toothless complaints – “she works out too much” – but that’s answered with a cool, relaxed, and weirdly uncanny female voice calmly intoning “the only reason we didn’t work out is that we didn’t work out enough.” There’s a disconnect here, they’re speaking past each other. It’s a great way of illustrating the point that these two people are not compatible, have totally different ways of engaging with the world, and value different things. I appreciate that this song is not angry or accusing. VanWyngarden sounds disappointed. He just wanted it to all work out.

Buy it from Amazon.

Charlotte Day Wilson “Doubt”

“Doubt” has a very restrained and controlled sound, which supports its lyrical sentiment about trying to stop yourself from giving in to your worst romantic impulses for your own good. “I’m done with doubt, I’m done with your game,” Wilson sings at the top of the song, and the slow, steady bass groove underlines her resolve. But given the lush, sexy sound of the track, it’s pretty clear that she knows from the get-go that she can resist the gravitational pull of this person she’s addressing. The key line here is in the chorus – “I’m selfish and dumb for your love.” A fool for love, sure, but selfish…well, that’s intriguing. Selfish to want it? Selfish to need it? Selfish to have these inconvenient feelings in the first place?

Buy it from Amazon.

Camila Cabello “Inside Out”

Camila Cabello is charismatic and has a good voice, but I think the major reason she’s been so successful in the past few months is that her songs pivot away from rigid production and nondescript ambiance of so much mid-10s pop music and embrace things like… chords. The piano chords in “Havana” are crucial to the song’s appeal, and they’re not something that just blends into the mix, or signify cheap sentimentality. You’re meant to hang on the sound of them, to feel the groove and the reverb and the slight imperfection of someone playing a piano in a room. It feels alive in a subtle way that makes it seem vibrant in comparison for doing something that in the grand scheme of recorded music is more normal than not. And she does this without selling “authenticity.” It just is, and it makes the more modern elements like the very Rihanna-ish chorus pop a bit more than if it was presented with the same airless production as everything else. “Inside Out,” an album track I have to assume will be issued as a single sometime this year since it has a very “song of the summer” feel to it, does the same trick by contrasting acoustic piano and steel drums with a glossy approach to the vocal production. All signs point to Cabello being just ahead of a stylistic curve, and frankly, I’m relieved.

Buy it from Amazon.

Caroline Says “Sweet Home Alabama”

This is not a cover of the famous Lynyrd Skynyrd song, nor is it a piece of music that sounds anything at all like Southern rock. The lyrics of the song address being stuck somewhere – “I used to love this town” – so I figure the song is set in Alabama, and the title is ironic. One way or another, it’s some kind of joke.

This “Sweet Home Alabama” has a hazy, drowsy sound that reminds me a lot of Yo La Tengo when Georgia Hubley is on vocals. The song is built out of looped samples, but as much as the song moves in circles, it’s not entirely static. Subtle vocal harmonies and shifts in keyboard tone give the song shape without breaking its spell or upstaging a low-key lead vocal part that adds a dash of dark humor to its clear-headed introspection.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Grace Vonderkuhn “Worry”

In all of my time writing about music, one of my highest compliments that I have for a song is that it has a sense of urgency. I loooooove urgency. I love when musicians sound like they are very present in the moment, and when recordings convey a genuine spark of inspiration and emotional (and physical) commitment. I hear that in this song by Grace Vonderkuhn. It’s there in the way her riffs pile on with this enthusiastic and playful “OK, ya like that, how about this?” feeling. It’s there in the way her band bash out the rhythm with a raw energy that makes the song sound like it’s being played faster than usual even if this is the only version of the song I’ve ever heard. This is the sound of a band that’s putting it all on the line, and that just amplifies the anxious sentiment of the song – the nervous energy is there, but so is the triumphant spirit of overcoming it.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Domo Genesis & Evidence featuring Phonte “Shaq Carried Kobe”

Evidence’s production on this track is extremely smooth and low-key funky, to the point that it sounds like it could plausibly be a lost Dr. Dre loop from the early ’90s. Domo Genesis’ verse slips comfortably into the groove – relaxed in tone, if a bit neurotic and paranoid in sentiment. I’m particularly fond of Phonte’s performance here, and the way he enunciates with a sober clarity that lends resonance to his pointedly political lines and a touch of “no, I’m really not kidding” menace to his boasts. It’s a strong, well-crafted verse from a perennially underrated rap lifer.

Get the full mixtape from Datpiff.