In some ways it feels unfair and dismissive to say that a song like this or a lot of the better Bruno Mars songs of the recent past are “retro.” I think it might be more accurate to say that this sort of funky pop – openly indebted to Prince, Michael and Janet Jackson, and James Brown in particular – is something people always want and can’t get enough of, but it’s just in very short supply. Not just anyone can do this sort of thing. It takes a lot of songwriting magic and expertise, and a performer with an extreme level of charisma because you can’t really pull off working in this zone otherwise. Janelle Monáe has that star power, can come up with a song like this, and we are lucky for it. Truly blessed.
“Make Me Feel” has a Prince groove, but a chorus that nods to Michael Jackson’s best hit single. It’s a song full of bold moves, but that (meta)contextual stuff isn’t as compelling as the actual feeling of it. Monáe’s lyrics and vocal melody are about 25% nervous anticipation, and 75% crushed-out strut. Her lyrics in the past have been a bit more conceptual or guarded, but this is raw, genuine lust. She sounds relaxed and free, and only the tiniest bit anxious about how anyone might perceive her.
Margaret Glaspy’s songwriting is rather terse and economical, and I wonder if it’s the result of meticulous editing or a disposition in favor of blunt, effective simplicity. “Before We Were Together” is lean and tight, and moves at an impatient pace that makes her lyrics about finding the nerve to tell off an ex seem all the more urgent. It comes off like a fresh thought, an epiphany she’s having there right in the moment, and the sentiment is basically a second of consideration before spitting it out. Glaspy’s voice fills up a lot of the song, and the way it stands out in the negative space conveys both strength and a lonely isolation.
Kevin Barnes’ work has a sort of internal logic in which electronic music and funk roughly correlates to manic hysteria, and more straightforward psychedelic rock loosely translates to either playful innocence or violent catharsis, depending on the tone. I like most everything Barnes makes to some extent, but I’m most attracted to his funky hysteria – Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping are his masterworks, and I’m very fond of the groovier passages on Paralytic Stalks.
The new Of Montreal record White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood belongs to this end of the Barnes spectrum, and pushes familiar vibes from Hissing and Skeletal into new, more expansive directions. Barnes has mentioned that one of his inspirations for this set of songs was extended 12″ mixes of songs from the ’80s and ’90s, and I absolutely hear that. It’s not just that the tracks are long, but that the grooves play out at a very leisurely pace, and the digressions feel more like logical destinations for the music than the often sudden jarring shifts of previous Barnes compositions. As a result, this music feels a lot more serene and grounded than usual, even as his lyrics express a lot of paranoia, confusion, and exhaustion.
“Sophie Calle Private Game” is basically a love song – or an infatuation song, or a seduction song, depending on the section. Or maybe it’s really an anxiety song, since so much of it is about trying to make sense of his desires, keeping himself from being too impulsive, and attempting to stay in control of his narrative. The chorus is very funky but fraught with caution and mixed emotions, but the groove eventually mellows out considerably in the last few minutes, where the lyrics move beyond “should we hook up?” to some point after consummation. (“You whispered ‘don’t be vulgar’ while I was making you cum” is quite a lyric, by the way.) This is one of my favorite Barnes tricks – showing the gradual evolution of a relationship over the course of a single song.
Khalid and Swae perform “The Ways” from a position of genuine awe and humility. They’re both swooning for a “power girl” whose strength, beauty, and intelligence inspires them to rise up to her level. It’s a love song where respect and eroticism are tied together, and the power of a woman is not a threat to masculinity. Khalid’s vocal is warm and gentle, and he slips comfortable into the quasi lover’s rock mood of Sounwave and BADBADNOTGOOD’s track. Swae Lee is a revelation here – significantly more mellow and vulnerable than I’ve heard him on Rae Sremmurd songs. He’s very convincing in this lover boy sweetheart mode, both here and on his new solo track “Hurt to Look,” and should definitely continue working in this lane.
Richard Russell’s album as Everything Is Recorded is essentially a “producer + guests” record, but the way he cycles a set of collaborators through the songs makes it feel much more like the work of a specific, deliberate ensemble than a compilation with a general aesthetic. “Mountains of Gold” is a crucial hub track on the record, with three crucial recurring collaborators – Sampha, Ibeyi, and Kamasi Washington – converging to do their things over the piano vamp from Grace Jones’ version of “Nightclubbing,” and Wiki from Ratking turning up to contribute a rap that ties together the narrative threads of Sampha and Ibeyi’s lyrics. Russell structures the song like a posse track, stringing together these seemingly disparate artists’ parts together so elegantly that they all complement each other perfectly and the composition is balanced and smooth.
The main guitar part in “Side Tracked” is a lot more ’70s R&B than most people would expect from Born Ruffians, but it suits them well, particularly as the song is produced by Richard Swift and this vintage vibe is very much his comfort zone. But it’s not a straight pastiche. Rather than do some sort of awkward Dap Tone thing, they take a very British Invasion approach to the vocal melody and harmonies. The chorus is the most plainly beautiful thing this band has produced, and I love the way Luke Lalonde’s voice rises up on “siiiiiide” to drop off abruptly on “tracked” is like this thwarted catharsis in a song about trying to deal with estrangement.
Caroline Rose’s vocals throughout her new record Loner have a distinct and captivating cadence – usually conversational in tone, often a bit wry and funny, always very empathetic and human. That empathy is particularly strong in “Jeannie Becomes A Mom,” a mid-tempo synth pop track with a slick cosmopolitan groove about learning to deal with the limits that get placed on all of our lives. And of course, the harshest limit is time. Rose’s character is young but feels time slipping away rapidly – “the world don’t stop.” I love the way the music relates to the lyrical theme, with the beat seeming to jog in place as the attack on the keyboard hook feels like time clicking away. It’s a pleasant feeling of inertia. Even better is the way Rose sings the “now you’re in real life” refrain with a lot of sympathy but also a touch of frustration and a dash of ambivalence.
“Incidental Boogie” has the sexy mechanical strut of Goldfrapp in their Black Cherry/Supernature schaffel phase, and without paying much attention it comes off as a sleek funk song about BDSM. If you pay attention… well, it gets a lot more complicated. Remy’s character in the song is a woman who is trying to rationalize being the victim of domestic abuse, and is making her new man out to be a real sweetheart since he leaves no marks so she can go to work without any fuss. This is grim stuff, especially when it’s clear that this woman doesn’t really have a frame of reference aside from this sort of abusive romance, and is conditioned to be bored without it. The verses are at some points genuinely uncomfortable – “Life made no sense without a beating, you see?” – but the chorus offers a glimmer hope in her dawning realization that this sort of thing isn’t really doing much for her.
This is a collection of the finest non-hit pop songs from the 16 year history of this site. (Well, actually, one legit hit made it through because it fit in nicely.) It’s basically nothing but world-class bangers.
You can experience it as an Apple Music playlist, a Spotify playlist, or as an expanded download version featuring 16 extra songs that are not available on streaming platforms. I’ve marked the bonus songs in the track listing for the download set below.
Sleigh Bells “Crown on the Ground” / Maria Magdalena “CVMC (Cada Vez Mas Cerca)” / Friendly Fires “Hurting” / The Rapture “Whoo! Alright – Yeah… Uh-Huh” / M.I.A. “URAQT” / Ce’cile “Rude Bwoy Thug Life” / Redinho “Playing with Fire” / CSS “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” / Spank Rock “Sweet Talk” / Stazi “Love Is Lethal” * / Yellow Note vs. Pukka “Naked, Drunk, and Horny” / Armand Van Helden feat. Spalding Rockwell “Hear My Name” / Cut Copy “Saturdays” / Quarks “I Walk” + / QT “Hey QT” / Peaches “Dumb Fuck” / Heloise and the Savoir Faire Dancers “Odyle” / Tracy and the Plastics “Henrietta” * / Junesex “Gets Close to Mine” / Mouse on Mars “Mine Is In Yours” / LCD Soundsystem “Yeah (Crass Version)” / Ladytron “Destroy Everything You Touch” / Of Montreal “The Party’s Crashing Us (I Am the World Trade Center Remix)” / Futon “Gay Boy” + / Dog Ruff “Jon E Storm” * / Chicks on Speed “Shick Shaving” * / Avenue D feat. Cazwell “The Sex That I Need” / Gene Serene “Electric Dreams” / Vanessinha & Alessandra “Gira” * / United State of Electronica “La Discoteca” * / Planningtorock “I Wanna Bite Ya” / Nouveau Riche “Take Me Home” * / Hilary Duff “Danger” / SEVENTEEN “Change Up” / Britney Spears “How I Roll” / MNDR “Cut Me Out” / Skrillex “Stranger” / Sophie “Lemonade” / Saint Pepsi “Better” / Sky Ferreira “I Blame Myself” / Lolita Storm “Dancing with the Ibiza Dogs” * / Chairlift “I Belong In Your Arms” / Au Revoir Simone “Through the Backyards” / La Big Vic “All That Heaven Allows” / Rework “Not Quite Like Any Other”
* = Not on either Spotify or Apple
+ = On Apple, but not Spotify
Marit Larsen’s solo debut Under the Surface was released in her native Norway in March of 2006, nearly eight months before Taylor Swift released her own debut in late October. Larsen and Swift’s aesthetics overlap a lot, particularly as Swift phased out the more overtly country rock elements of her debut in favor of the sort of hyper romantic, vaguely twee princess-y vibe Larsen was chasing from the start. I wonder if Swift ever actually encountered this music. It seems possible, but who knows. It’s just clear to me that on all the levels that truly matter – approach to melody and arrangement, lyrical fixations, an apparent fascination with fairy tale aesthetics – they are kindred spirits. But, like, Taylor Swift is one of the most famous pop stars in history, and Larsen is virtually unknown in the United States outside of being a member of the short-lived early ’00s teen pop duo M2M.
This is a shame, as I am certain that there are literally millions of people who would love her solo work – but especially Under the Surface – if they ever had the chance to hear it. “The Sinking Game” is a big favorite for me, and it’s a great example of the sort of earnestly romantic quasi-country rock she excels at making. It’s a very graceful piece of music, particularly during its instrumental bridge section, but it’s really a song about abandoning poise and allowing yourself to open yourself up to big, messy emotions. A lot of Larsen’s early songs describe love in somewhat passive terms, but this song is about willfully leaping into it. It sounds scary and joyful at the same time, and every breaking into the chorus feels like a dive into the unknown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
