Lunar Vacation “Sick”

I had to see the lyrics of “Sick” in print to pick up on some crucial context – my ear didn’t catch the phrase “luxury apartments” because the melody wraps around the very Wilco-esque chords in a way that puts those two words in separate lines. I initially took this song pretty much at face value – she’s literally sick, she’s in an apartment – but it’s more about looking at real estate for the rich as a harbinger of the apocalypse. And as with a lot of King Gizzard songs fixated on the devastation of climate change, Lunar Vacation are rooting for Mother Nature and not humanity here. “The Earth is finally taking back her children,” Grace Repasky sings, sounding vaguely relieved.

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Jungle “Let’s Go Back”

One of the most distinctive elements of Jungle’s style is the way they stack vocal harmonies so it feels like a warm breeze or like being submerged in hot water. It’s cozy and calming, but also enveloping and elemental. You get a lot of that in “Let’s Go Back,” a new single that isn’t very far off from where the trio got to with “Back on 74” off their most recent record. I hear it more like refinement than retreading a previous song – they’re even more dialed in to this R&B aesthetic that gestures towards mid-20th century nostalgia while having a very 2020s sheen. It’s an interesting contrast with their fellow Brits in Sault, who put a similarly modern gloss on soul and R&B forms, but generally land in much darker territory than the fairly sunny and reassuring vibes of Jungle’s work.

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Ezra Collective “God Gave Me Feet For Dancing”

“God Gave Me Feet for Dancing” opens by quoting “Feeling Good,” which strikes me as a rather bold and pointed way to begin a song about dancing – framing ordinary pleasure in the context of triumph over slavery. “God Gave Me Feet for Dancing” is very laid back but there’s a dark and serious current in it regardless of the interpolation – it’s about a happiness that has to be fought for or claimed in defiance, it’s about connection between people as a survival mechanism. But the laid back aspect is the crucial thing about the song – it loosens you up, it calms you down, it makes you feel a little more free.

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Claude Fontaine “Laissez Moi L’aimer”

Claude Fontaine’s music is a seamless and slightly uncanny blend of Studio One-style reggae, Brazilian tropicalia, and French ye-ye pop. She’s connecting the dots between three distinct strains of charming, relaxed mid-20th century music, and while you could get upset about a white woman from Los Angeles doing this and call it appropriation, I think it’s better to appreciate that this has happened without being the result of actual calamitous imperialism.

“Laissez Moi L’aimer” is pretty much a mid-60s reggae song with ye-ye vocals – two very familiar sounds that click together so logically I’m surprised I don’t think I’ve encountered it before. Fontaine sings it en français, but the lyrics roughly translate to a story about a woman meeting a man she idolizes. She’s very empathetic to him, but reading between the lines I think the encounter has demystified him for her. The refrain suggests that she needs to distance her love of his art from him – “laissez moi l’aimer / malgré vous,” or “let me love it / in spite of yourself.”

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Sophie Hunter “Cha Cha”

Last night I saw Sophie Hunter perform as an opening act for Madelline at the Sultan Room in Bushwick with zero awareness of who she was or what kind of music she’d be performing. I kinda figured it would be a singer-songwriter sort of thing, but no – she’s kinda like if Natasha Lyonne was an early 2000s rapper. There’s a lot of Eminem in her style, but also some Def Jux/Rawkus indie rap vibes, a dash of Missy Elliott, and some Blu Cantrell/Mary J Blige when she leans a little more R&B. She even dropped a Neptunes beat at one point. It wouldn’t say she’s going for a retro thing, but the early 00s-ness of the music was very noticeable to me, in a “the gum you like is coming back in style” sort of way.

“Cha Cha,” Hunter’s newest single, was an immediate ear-grabber and encapsulates her aesthetic and lyrical POV. She’s rapping about being fucked up, about being broke, about feeling like a total loser, and playing it for laughs. A lot of people can do self-deprecating humor, but not everyone can do that while making it sound sort of glamorous and cool. Maybe that’s just the charisma coming through, but the Lyonne comparison isn’t just about how she looks. It’s that “hey, I may be a fuck-up, but I’m way, way cooler than you” affect.

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Muni Long “Make Me Forget”

Muni Long opens “Make Me Forget” by singing “when the one that I’m with ain’t the one that I want,” which sets up an expectation that you’re about to hear a song about unrequited love or being generally romantically dissatisfied. But no. As it moves along it becomes clear that she’s addressing someone she loves who’s not giving her exactly what she’s looking for and she’s essentially trying to talk him up to her level. (“I’m an alpha and I need an alpha man.”) It’s an interesting emotional balancing act – she’s mostly singing about what she wants and how this guy is falling short of that, but she’s also conveying genuine love and lust for him. The song interpolates D’Angelo’s classic “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” which definitely helps get across the sexiness, but I like that in working off those chords and rhythm she seemed to click into how that song emphasizes vulnerability and anticipation.

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Fake Fruit “Well Song”

The guitar parts in “Well Song” are frazzled but not quite frantic, which is well suited to lyrics about feeling exhausted and uninspired. I like how in the verses the higher-pitched and faster guitar part on the left side of the stereo image seems like it’s in conversation with the descending lower-pitched part on the right side, which gives off a very “yeah, I guess, whatever” response. The higher notes here feel a little too bright, like fluorescent lights that give you a headache at an office job. The energy picks up towards the end, but only to resolve in screaming panic that comes across as a very temporary catharsis.

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Geneva Jacuzzi “Laps of Luxury”

“Laps of Luxury” sounds like vintage top-shelf 80s synth-pop – the programming is very Depeche Mode, the vocal melody more along the lines of Pet Shop Boys, the grim but debauched atmosphere closer to Skinny Puppy. Geneva Jacuzzi isn’t straying from genre conventions but she’s got a great lyrical angle on this song, which presents proximity to extreme wealth as something that can scar the soul. The lyrics are very evocative but light on plot detail, so it’s more of a character sketch that leaves you wondering who exactly this woman is and what she’s experienced. “I’ve seen so many things no one should see on the laps of luxury,” she sings in the chorus, inviting the listener to imagine whatever level of depravity they can bring themselves to think about.

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JPEGMAFIA “Either On or Off the Drugs”

There’s countless rap songs in which rappers tell you how great they are, how they’re built different, that they have a vision that can’t be held back. It’s a central trope of the genre, and a lot of the time it’s just innocuous shit-talking and self-mythologizing, making themselves into superheroes or supervillains. But sometimes, as in the case of “Either On or Off the Drugs,” it can come across more like a self-directed pep talk, or trying to understand one’s own artistic drive and motivations. JPEGMAFIA’s voice sounds warm and vulnerable, his cadence isn’t aggressive even when he’s venting frustrations. There’s a casual feel to the song that in some ways makes the boasts land more convincingly – he sounds like he doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone but himself. There’s one part towards the middle of the song where he says as much, but presents it more like an affirmation necessary for the act of creation: “I’m Michael Jackson, I’m dancing in the mirror / the only one who can see me is me / the only one who can believe is me.”

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King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard “Daily Blues”

I was watching an archive of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s random all-acoustic show in Detroit from this weekend and at one point when they were introducing “Minimum Brain Size,” one of them – I think it was Stu? – was talking about the notion of “toxic masculinity” without actually using that now very cringey phrase. He was basically saying a lot of guys in this world need to chill out, and ended by just saying “masculine is good, but just do it right.” I feel like this might be annoying coming from some acts, but the Gizz guys are such dudely dudes that they’re effectively modeling a positive unambiguous masculinity for the audience. It’s kinda like how in the 1990s the Beastie Boys were very effective in showing a lot of guys around my age that there was no contradiction between being a cool bro and treating everyone with kindness and respect.

“Daily Blues” wasn’t played in that show, but its lyrics are very much on this wavelength. Like a lot of the songs on the recent Flight b741, it’s a groovy and harmony-heavy “classic rock” song in the vein of pre-Michael McDonald Doobie Brothers. The lyrics lay out the King Gizz philosophy – strict adherence to faith can be a prison for the mind and soul, “a gaping chasm” between haves and have-nots perpetuates misery worldwide, aggro dudes torment themselves as much as they hurt everyone around them, all the bigots can “go get fucked.” They’re not holding back in their critique of the people making the planet a worse place, but they’re also insistent that empathy and love are essential, even when dealing with your enemies.

There’s a few big call-and-response hooks in the song but the one that really stands out is a part in the middle that they only sing once, though it definitely could have been a heavily repeated chorus – “they’re getting fuck up daily / GETTING FUCKED UP DAILY / they’re getting fucked up daily / GETTING FUCKED UP DAILY!!” This hits like a laddish party boy thing, but in context this is their rationale for showing love to someone you hated. Everyone is dealing with their “daily blues,” and the only way out of it is to show empathy for others’ struggles. It’s a very hippy-ish sentiment, but it’s true.

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Flying Lotus “Garmonbozia”

I’m sure a lot of people would be pretty excited for all the Twin Peaks references in this new Flying Lotus song, but my interest is mainly in the track’s weird, sluggish energy. The keyboard and drum machines sounds feel weirdly…meaty? Like wet meat slowing slapping, vulgar but abstract. I can see why Flying Lotus’ mind went to Twin Peaks here – the music is surreal and vaguely upsetting in a way that’s difficult to articulate, but there’s also a touch of the affected romanticism of David Lynch’s work

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Osees “Drug City”

The conceit of SORCS 80 is that it’s an Oh Sees record with no guitar on it. This isn’t such a wild idea, since John Dwyer has done some guitar-free synth-focused music in the past, but I think the key point here is that it’s a very much an Oh Sees record in form and function. “Drug City” may not have any guitar on the track, but it’s basically a rock song where layers of synths, keyboards, and saxophones are all simultaneously bashing out a simple caveman riff that could just as well be played on a guitar. I love the button-mashing feel of the song with all those instruments slamming down on that riff – it’s so blaring and brutal, borderline obnoxious, but in a good punk way.

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Zach Bryan “The Way Back”

The character Zach Bryan is singing about in “The Way Back” is a classic fuck up – serious substance abuse issues, broken marriage, abandoned family, apparently a big fan of The Killers. He’s tremendously empathetic towards this guy, to the point that the actual subject of the song seems to be how exhausted he’s become caring about him. Bryan sounds like he’s aiming for stoic but incapable of masking his weariness as he sings about the guy and the people he’s hurt in lyrics rich with well-observed details, and even as he sings “but no matter where you’re at, we’ll always find a way back” in the chorus, his faith seems a bit shaky. The choice not to repeat that chorus after the final verse seems very pointed to me – the story ends ambiguously, and with Bryan recounting a dream he had about him. You get the sense that he’s lost the strength to hope things work out, or that it’s already too late.

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Ginger Root “No Problems”

Cameron Lew is a gleeful maximalist, pulling from Japanese City Pop, 70s McCartney and Electric Light Orchestra, 80s Sophisti-pop, and 90s Shibuya-kei to build songs that are dense with musical detail but feel light and fizzy. It really makes you wonder what some of these 20th century forebears of his aesthetic could have also made their elaborate music in digital home studios. “No Problems” presents as bright and groovy, but Lew’s lyrics are neurotically fixated on someone else’s sunny facade, almost unwilling to believe that this other person is as untroubled and happy as they say they are. Do I need to spell out the irony here?

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Fievel Is Glauque “As Above So Below”

The first time I wrote about Fievel Is Glauque a couple years ago I described them as an “intriguing common ground between Gaucho-era Steely Dan, Stereolab, and Tom Jobim,” and that’s even more true now that they’ve graduated to more hi-fi production and more elaborate arrangements. But they also sound nothing like those artists in that there’s almost always some twitchy, chaotic element to their songs that (to varying degrees) undermines their smoothness and sophistication. “As Above, So Below” is essentially a sunny ballad that sounds like it’s from some lost mid-20th century musical but the arrangement is deliberately a little too busy, giving the music a nervous energy you wouldn’t find in actual music of the era. I can see how this would be off-putting to some people, but I find this very intellectually engaging and aesthetically appealing. I feel like the oddness accentuates the loveliness, like how salt brings dimension to the taste of caramel or chocolate.

Ma Clément’s lyrics are intriguing, if a little hard to discern. In this song she’s singing about some very big ideas – the notion of heaven and souls, magical vs natural, science and faith, the possibility that any of us can truly change the world – but with a bit of an arched eyebrow. Not in a dismissive way, but more in a way that signals humility and good humor about very heavy concepts.

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Peel Dream Magazine “Lie in the Gutter”

Peel Dream Magazine would have fit in very well with the early to mid 00s Other Music zeitgeist, even beyond the degree a song like “Lie in the Gutter” is obviously indebted to both Stereolab and Yo La Tengo. You don’t name your band in tribute to John Peel if you’re not highly invested in the idea of having “good taste,” and their forthcoming record Rose Main Reading Room pulls together a lot of tasteful ideas culled from a well curated record collection. And of course, this is basically the same thing Stereolab and Yo La Tengo have done through their careers, so it’s all part of some broader lineage of crate-digging artistry.

“Lie in the Gutter” sounds like a song designed to lure me into a trap. The particular tone of the keyboard drones? The dazed “la la” background vocals? The firm, up-tempo beat that somehow signals “cozy and relaxed”? My favorite part is the slightly singsong melody sung by Olivia Bubaka Black, which is a bit spacey in tone but busy enough to keep my ear engaged. Strong lyrics too – overtly romantic and focused on sensuality, grounded in a broke reality, but yearning for something grand and transcendental.

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Fousheé “Still Around”

Here’s a song with an usual set of tensions – busy percussion, an even busier bass line taking up most of the space, minimal keyboard accents, and a relatively mellow acoustic guitar groove by Steve Lacy that’s so Steve Lacy it made me go “is this Steve Lacy?” the first time I heard it. The mood is fairly placid and meditative, but that aggressive and chunky bass line puts the whole track on edge. It’s almost like transplanting a post-punk bass part into a fairly chill Marvin Gaye song. Fousheé’s vocals stay on the more relaxed side of the composition, emotive in her R&B inflections but still a little reserved. The lyrics suggest a situation where she’s reaching out to someone she loves but is unclear where they stand with her, and whether or not they want to stay in her life. She sounds optimistic and open-hearted, but once you key into the words it’s hard not to hear that bass rumble as her barely concealed angst.

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Maren Morris “Push Me Over”

I didn’t realize this until I looked at the credits, but this is basically a Muna song with Maren Morris on vocals. They wrote it, they’re the musicians on the track, but the lyrics are specific to Morris’ recent experience of getting divorced and coming out as bisexual. Were it not for the last bit, I’d question why they’d give away a pop song as strong as this. Morris sounds flirty, charming, and confident on the track, but in the context of the lyrics it’s kind of a fake-it-til-you-make it thing. She’s singing about trying to figure out how to seduce a woman she’s into, but is unsure of how to make it happen – she’s out of her comfort zone, she feels like she has no map for this. But this isn’t a song about frustration, it’s about the excitement of doing something new. The lyrics get overtly sexual; the choruses feel a little triumphant. It’s a bright and positive song verging on a wholesome energy – Muna always seem to err on the side of late 90s/early 00s VH1 vibes – but not so much that it makes the sexy parts feel corny.

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Jhené Aiko “Guidance”

This is a real “happy ending” sort of break-up song, one in which the singer is relieved to get out of a bad relationship but seems to have minimal lingering anger about it. Which is not to say there’s no trace of negative feeling – she gives you some concrete examples of why this person was wrong for her and one verse ends on the evocative line “you were the match that lit up my path to show me what bridge to burn.” But the emotional focus is on feeling grateful and literally blessed by God, and you can sense Jhené Aiko nudging herself away from her darker feelings as she deliberately pushes herself towards the light.

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Caribou “Volume”

I remember hearing M|A|R|R|S’ “Pump Up the Volume” as a kid, usually in passing on the radio or on television. I had very little context for it but understood that it was extremely cool and futuristic, and everything about it was strange and magical and mysterious that stood apart from anything else I knew up to that point in the late 80s. It was like turning the dial on the radio and receiving a musical message from another world.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is about the same age as me, and had the same experience. He says it was his first experience with electronic music, and I suppose that’s probably true for me as well, depending on how you’d define “electronic music” in an era when almost everything on the radio had was built around drum machines and synthesizers. “Pump Up the Volume” was essentially a dense collage of samples, rooted in the more ambitious end of hip-hop production in that era but with a different vibe altogether. Hip-hop was unmistakably connected to Black urban life in America, but “Pump Up the Volume” was less specific – it sounded like everywhere on the planet all at once, or like a scramble of radio signals from Earth getting mixed in deep space.

Snaith’s rework of “Pump Up the Volume” focuses on one of the song’s most memorable parts, which I can’t confidently identify – a loop of a marimba, or a keyboard on a marimba setting? It’s the part in the song that establishes you’ve entered the song’s odd atmosphere, and after establishing the base tone Snaith immediately starts warping it to create his own little alien world. He retains the “pump up the volume” vocal sample, so it basically comes across as a remix up until around 90 seconds in when a female vocal part enters the mix and it starts to sound like a dance pop song transposed with the M|A|R|R|S composition. I’m not sure whether that pop song is Snaith’s own original material or not, but it doesn’t really matter – the thing that matters is that it’s building on the sense that “Pump Up the Volume” is built to absorb sounds, and Snaith understood that he couldn’t just stop at altering the music. He had to make an offering, something to keep the song’s fire burning.

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Father John Misty “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”

I saw Father John Misty perform an early version of “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” back in 2019 so I know it wasn’t written with the purpose of appearing on his greatest hits album. But regardless, it’s very appropriate for that utility. I mean, even setting aside the joke in the 8th verse about “doing my greatest hits” in Las Vegas, it comes across as a commentary on his career to date. And this being Father John Misty that commentary goes heavy on weary cynicism and bitter irony, and the best jokes are all at his expense. The sound of the track is full-on 70s show biz razzle dazzle – a little disco, a little country, a little Rolling Thunder Revue – and while it’s delivered with a fairly aggressive wink, he didn’t half-ass anything about the arrangement. He’s so totally committed to the bit that it stops being a bit at all. He can’t help but make jokes and be clever, but he’s dead serious about the despair at the heart of this song and so many others he’s written through the years.

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Artemas “You’ve Been A Bad Girl”

“You’ve Been A Bad Girl” sounds like the Venn diagram overlap of The Weeknd and Tame Impala’s aesthetics, which makes a lot of sense since I imagine a lot of young guys today grew up steeped in both artists’ catalogs. The vibe merger sacrifices some of Tame’s chillness and tamps down The Weeknd’s malevolent sex vampire energy, but results in a dynamic pop song that evades easy categorization. Artemas’ lyrics hit a lot of the same buttons as The Weeknd’s – straight guy bedeviled by a hot woman he’s obsessed with – but it’s a little more down to earth. He’s portraying himself as a victim here – “you’ve been a bad girl, I’ve been in therapy picking up the pieces of all the things you said to me” – but only so much, since he’s comparing her to drugs and begging her to “meet me in the bathroom, come get high with me” on the bridge.

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Vampire Weekend “Mary Boone”

If you go on how people talk about music now, you’d get the impression that most listeners aren’t even interested in songs that they can’t relate to, often in very literal 1:1 ways. While it’s always nice to feel like the lyrics of a song are either speaking to you or speaking for you, this has rarely been central to how I engage with music. I tend to prefer lyrics that give me insight into other people’s lives one way or another, and to be honest, I don’t find all that many songs that I can hear and go “yes, that’s me.” But maybe that’s only because I’m rarely looking for myself in other people’s art to begin with.

Case in point, I was listening to “Mary Boone” almost every day for nearly two months before it occurred to me that this song had a powerful emotional resonance with me in part because I have so much in common with the protagonist of the lyrics. It’s probably the only piece of art I’ve encountered that feels like it truly reflects anything about my life as it is right now in 2024.

The guy in “Mary Boone” is an artist in the 1980s or maybe early 90s who feels like he’s on the outside of everything but is desperately yearning to become part of something and contribute to the art world. He feels like he needs external validation – like, say, catching the eye of the hottest art dealer in Manhattan – before he can move forward with anything in his life. So he feels stuck and isolated, and even if he loves making his art he knows it needs to be completed by an audience somehow or else he’s not communicating or participating in the culture.

He’s observing the art world and he feels a parasocial connection to the artists in the scene and especially with Boone herself. He often sounds like he’s in love with her – “well I hope you feel like loving someone soon” – and maybe that’s an intentional ambiguity, like he’ll take any version of getting on the inside that’s available to him. Maybe it’s just as valid and realistic a fantasy as getting on the walls of her gallery. It’s possibly a Stockholm Syndrome sort of thing, feeling some affection for a gatekeeper. Or perhaps it’s just a symptom the parasocial thing, feeling a false closeness to someone who doesn’t even know he exists.

A lot of the reason I didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics of “Mary Boone” is that Ezra Koenig and Ariel Rechtshaid’s arrangement dazzled me from the start. Specifically, it’s the parts of the song that drop in a sample of the drum programming from Soul II Soul’s 1989 classic “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me).” I can’t remember the last time I was so genuinely surprised and delighted by a musical choice, and that delight has hardly faded after hearing it many times over. The arrival of the beat shifts the atmosphere of the song, broadens its implied scale, and adds a lot of emotional depth to the piece.

In the context of the lyrics, the “Back to Life” break makes me think of how this guy feels as he enters Manhattan, heading in from New Jersey or Queens. The drum part is gritty but also signals a specifically urban notion of sophistication – if we think of this song taking place around 1989 or 1990, this would be the cutting edge of popular music.

The first time we hear the break, it’s paired with a melancholic string part that makes me imagine him walking through Soho or Chelsea feeling hopeless and pessimistic. I wish I could explain it, maybe it’s the juxtaposition of loving a place but feeling humbled by it, but this part has had me on the verge of tears a few times over. When the break returns later, it’s contrasted with a bright piano part that feels like a burst of optimism – maybe it really can happen! The third time, most of the elements of the song return and converge for an emotionally ambiguous climax.

There’s also a choir on this song! I like how it lends the song a holy feeling, and makes this guy’s quest to find an audience for his art feel like a spiritual pursuit. At the end of the bridge he tells Boone that she’s the “author of everything, use this voice and let it sing” before the choir takes over from Koenig on the final chorus. He’s not asking to be a star; he just wants to belong, and be heard.

Some notes:

• I think “oh my love, was it all in vain / we always wanted money, now the money’s not the same” would sting in any era, but I think this is a very recognizable sentiment for most anyone working in any creative field in 2024. Koenig delivers the line so that you can register the character’s disappointment in practical terms, but also get that money truly isn’t really what he’s after.

• “In a quiet moment at the theater, I could hear the train” is a real IYKYK line for New Yorkers. Koenig is almost certainly referring to seeing a movie at the Angelika on West Houston. It opened in September 1989, which lines up perfectly with the timeline suggested by the Soul II Soul sample.

• “I’m on the dark side of your room” is such a great image. I love how the turn of phrase playfully deflates the romantic grandeur implied by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the actual moon itself, and makes me picture this guy attending a Mary Boone Gallery opening and being off in some far corner, so close yet so far away.

• I like the somewhat chaotic use of vocal ad libs in the “Back to Life” breaks, but most especially the part near the end where you hear a snippet of the first word of the song – “painted” – but it cuts off. It sounds like it might have been a happy accident, like a file dragged and dropped to the wrong part of the grid. It has a great effect in context – a fake-out for another verse, hearing the protagonist one more time in a way that suggests he’s back at square one, an artful bit of messiness that gives some extra spark of life to a very considered composition.

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