Lake Street Dive “I Don’t Care About You”

It’s funny how once particular retro sounds become popular enough, they end up belonging to multiple eras. A few years ago a soul-rock tune like this would’ve seemed like an outlier, but with the massive success of an act like Alabama Shakes, it’s now just a good example of what popular rock music sounds like right now. Not complaining, though! This is a very well-made song from top to bottom, and Rachael Price’s vocals are terrific in conveying a feeling of wounded pride as well as putting on a big theatrical show. This is the type of band that trades on people being like “wow, but the pipes on that singer!,” and Price certainly delivers on that.

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Tricky “Diving Away”

One of the most distinctive qualities of Tricky’s music is his tendency to have his raspy, muttering vocals shadow a melody sung by a conventionally good singer. In the early days of his career this typically highlighted the ever-shifting dynamic between himself and his singer and real-life partner Martina Topley-Bird – the power play between the singer and the svengali; the older man and the younger woman; the dominant and the submissive. In other cases, like this loose adaptation of an old Porno for Pyros song, it’s more like creating a beautiful proxy for himself. This track makes me think of all the times I’ve ever fantasized about being able to shape-shift into a traditionally attractive body, and what I’d do with that privilege even if I had it for just a little while. I think even in a fantasy scenario like that, it’d be hard to not just be myself with all the hangups and fears I’ve built up from a life of not having that form. This track is like that – as lovely as the voice up front is, the seams are showing. It’s a broken mask.

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Flume featuring Vince Staples and Kučka “Smoke and Retribution”

Flume’s arrangement for “Smoke and Retribution” is jagged and unstable, with the beat and pretty much everything else in it reacting against a harsh keyboard part that sputters and bleeps like a malfunctioning alarm. It may be the freshest, most original rap track that I’ve heard in a few years, and the kind of thing that would only come from a hip-hop outsider like Flume. Vince Staples’ verses ground the song, and his emotional performance adds to the extreme dynamic of the track. The contrast gives the impression of someone trying to stay focused in a chaotic world, and the only relaxed moments come when the song shifts into sung parts by Kučka, which quickly shift from introspective to miserably fatalistic.

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Massive Attack featuring Tricky “Take It There”

It was sad to read a bunch of aggregated news items about this song that didn’t even mention why it’d be significant that Tricky would be on this track. I suppose that even though so much popular and cool music today owes a massive debt to the work of Bristol acts like Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead, it’s all been more or less written out of the story, and what amounts to a Blue Lines/Protection reunion after more than 20 years is somehow not particularly noteworthy. Deeeep siiiiiigh! I don’t think any topic triggers a “get off my lawn” anger in me more than everyone under 30 having virtually no awareness of Tricky.

“Take It There” doesn’t sound like a reunion. There’s so much overlap in Tricky and Massive Attack’s aesthetics that they sound like they’re lurking around in the space they’ve always been. If anything, that space has become darker and more claustrophobic with time, and more like where Tricky was in the late ‘90s. The low piano chords in this track sound oppressively heavy, like a weight bearing down on the rest of the music that forces the beat to drag. Tricky and 3D rap in the odd way they do – a bit hazy on the rhyming, but just enough on beat to qualify. Their rasps are even deeper than ever, as though whatever darkness they had growing in them in the ‘90s has metastasized. There’s an ascending guitar part in the second half of the track that shakes off some of the weight, but it never stops feeling hopeless.

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Sunflower Bean “Come On”

There are certain types of rock songs that are clearly written to be played live, in which all the dynamic shifts are there to specifically jolt an audience. These kind of songs are most typically found on debut records, which are typically written and workshopped extensively in concert before being recorded, and so it’s not a big surprise that a lot of bands lean on that material for the rest of their careers. (Look at the setlist for most any reunion tour – most acts strongly favor playing the songs from their early years, which they also probably have better memories about, and whatever the last record was before the breakup is either ignored or barely touched.) “Come On” is definitely this sort of song, and is basically a bunch of time-tested moves artfully strung together into a piece of music that seems to just glide by you like a speeding car. The best bit is the rather Peter Buck-ish arpeggio played on the chorus, which contrasts with a chunkier guitar riff and the “right now” vocal hook.

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Rihanna “Love on the Brain”

Rihanna’s new album has no bangers, an awkward flow, few obvious hits, a spectacularly botched release via Tidal, and a total absence of Kanye West despite him being attached as the record’s “executive producer” up until very recently. But it does have a couple of the best ballads of Rihanna’s career. That’s not the most difficult bar to clear – ballads have never been her strong suit as a pop star – but I’d rate “Love on the Brain” and “Higher” near the top of her catalog in terms of songwriting quality and vocal performance. She pushes herself a bit further on “Higher,” but “Love on the Brain” is the true revelation, with her getting across just the right mix of vulnerability and toughness on an old school soul track. She reminds me of Millie Jackson on these tracks, particularly in how she leans into the low grit of her vocal range, and how a line like “it beats me black and blue but it fucks me so good” echoes Jackson’s incredible 1973 hit “It Hurts So Good.”

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Bullion “Never Is the Change”

I’ve missed a couple stages of Bullion’s development as a songwriter and producer, but I’m happy to catch up with where he is now on this single. “Never Is the Change” is rather like Hot Chip at their best, at least in terms of being this very groovy dance track with vocals that are disarmingly lucid. It’s that thing of addressing emotional topics in this calm, thoughtful way, and while it can seem a bit aloof, it’s not indulging the sort of “I’m a robot-man making electronic music bleep bleep” routine that somehow never dies. (That shtick always strikes me as being influenced by Kraftwerk in only the most painfully literal ways.) The most interesting thing to me about this song is when he gets away from the microphone and plays this extended keyboard solo that’s very expressive, but also slightly awkward in an endearing way. The vocal and lyric sets up the idea, but I think the solo is where he really expands on it and gets across a deeper feeling.

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Space Captain “Two”

There’s a lightness and elegance to this song that’s at odds with its lyrical sentiment, which from the start is telling you to “keep your crippling fear, let nobody come near you.” This could be cheap irony, but it comes out sounding rather sincere, making it more like a lullaby for the severely anxious than a bleak joke. The trajectory of the song suggests something a lot deeper, too – it starts out in this weightless, jazzy zone before drifting into cosmic psychedelia, and climaxes with this spiky riff that brings out all the nervous energy and bad vibes that up to that point in the track had only been mentioned in the lyrics.

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Ty Segall “Emotional Mugger/Leopard Priestess”

This song is like a sculpture carved out of a big block of midrange, with jagged chunks of treble jutting out in all directions. This is about as menacing as psychedelic rock before it shifts into metal – it’s still got that hard psych vibe, but it’s very much a bad trip. It may be mostly treble, but Ty Segall’s guitar and synth parts are all very distinct, and overlap and contrast in ways that emphasis their melodic and rhythmic qualities. Segall takes a few different approaches with this voice, sometimes forcing it down to below his normal range, and other times embracing the tinniness of his tenor to approximate that “I have destroyed my mind” Ozzy quality from old Black Sabbath records.

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Little Shalimar featuring Killer Mike, Bun B, and Cuz Lightyear “Savage Habits”

In the Pitchfork review of the Rubble Kings soundtrack, Jonah Bromwich says that this song “doesn’t quite pound in the way you might hope” for a track featuring both Killer Mike and Bun B. I think I know what Bromwich is getting at, but at the same time I’m pretty sure “Savage Habits” is a better song than the sort of generic banger one “might hope” for. Little Shalimar’s arrangement gives Killer Mike and Bun B plenty of space for some prime alpha male chest-thumping, but offsets that with a strange looped sample – I think it’s a violin? – that induces a sick, paranoid feeling. That trilling sound just kinda gnaws at you, and while it doesn’t undermine the vocal performances, it does contrast sharply in a way that subverts the toxic masculinity on display. The sung chorus retains some of the aggression but amps up the melancholy, shifting away from the intimidating style of Mike and Bun for something more obviously tragic.

Get it for free from the Adult Swim site.

This is the fourth in my series of 1980s survey mixes, which are moving backwards in time from 1989 to the start of the decade. These compilations are designed to give more context to the music of the ‘80s, and give a sense of how various niches and trends overlapped in this cultural moment.

With this set we officially enter the middle of the decade, which I believe is the part that is best remembered today, at least in terms of cultural signifiers and cheesy songs that never seem to go away. This is an exceptionally dorky crop of songs, and while a lot of it stands on its own pretty well, it can feel a bit overwhelming or even stifling all together. It’s actually pretty understandable how flagrant rockism could thrive in this era – every song that feels even a bit raw and edgy seems like a miracle in this context.

Thanks to Chris Ott, Paul Cox, and Chris Conroy for their assistance in curating this set.

If you want to go back to previous collections in these series, they’re all right here: 1987, 1988, and 1989. The 1985 survey will be ready sometime in late February or early March.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Peter Gabriel “Sledgehammer” / Genesis “Invisible Touch” / Paul Simon “You Can Call Me Al” / Nu Shooz “I Can’t Wait” / Prince “Kiss” / Cameo “Word Up!” / New Order “Bizarre Love Triangle” / Stacey Q “Two of Hearts” / Janet Jackson “When I Think of You” / Robert Palmer “Addicted to Love” / Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark “If You Leave” / Crowded House “Don’t Dream It’s Over” / Howard Jones “No One Is To Blame” / Madonna “Live to Tell” / Heart “These Dreams” / Cocteau Twins “Love’s Easy Tears” / The Smiths “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” / Sonic Youth “Expressway To Yr Skull”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Pet Shop Boys “West End Girls” / Bananarama “Venus” / Duran Duran “Notorious” / The Bangles “Manic Monday” / Wham! “I’m Your Man” / Kool and the Gang “Stone Love” / Dolly Parton “Think About Love” / The Moody Blues “Your Wildest Dreams” / Talking Heads “Wild Wild Life” / R.E.M. “Fall On Me” / Big Black “Kerosene” / Killing Joke “Adorations” / The Art of Noise “Paranoimia” / Beastie Boys “Paul Revere” / Boogie Down Productions “South Bronx” / Cyndi Lauper “True Colors” / Berlin “Take My Breath Away” / Depeche Mode “Stripped” / Arthur Russell “Let’s Go Swimming”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Lionel Richie “Dancing on the Ceiling” / Jermaine Stewart “We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off” / Samantha Fox “Touch Me (I Want To Feel Your Body)” / Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith “Walk This Way” / Huey Lewis and The News “Hip to be Square” / Slayer “Angel of Death” / Metallica “Master of Puppets” / Megadeth “Peace Sells” / Peter Cetera “Glory of Love” / Whitney Houston “The Greatest Love of All” / Whodini “Funky Beat” / Schoolly D “Saturday Night” / Teena Marie “Lips to Find You” / Tina Turner “Typical Male” / Eurythmics “Missionary Man” / The Jets “Crush On You” / Zapp “Computer Love”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

James Brown “Living In America” / Farley Jackmaster Funk “Love Can’t Turn Around” / Mantronix “Bassline” / Five Star “Can’t Wait Another Minute” / Siouxsie and the Banshees “Cities In Dust” / Human League “Human” / Wang Chung “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” / Belinda Carlisle “Mad About You” / Primal Scream “Velocity Girl” / Public Image Ltd “Rise” / Big Audio Dynamite “C’mon Every Beatbox” / Erasure “Oh L’Amour” / Alabama “She and I” / Hank Williams Jr “Mind Your Own Business” / Van Halen “Why Can’t This Be Love?” / Kenny Loggins “Danger Zone” / Eddie Money “Take Me Home Tonight” / The B-52’s “Girl From Ipanema Goes To Greenland” / Mr. Fingers “Can You Feel It?”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Europe “The Final Countdown” / Falco “Rock Me Amadeus” / LL Cool J “Rock the Bells” / MC Shan “The Bridge” / The Descendants “Enjoy” / Dag Nasty “Circles” / Gang Green “Alcohol” / Rites of Spring “All Through A Life” / Lee “Scratch” Perry and The Upsetters “All Things Are Possible” / Oran “Juice” Jones “The Rain” / Simply Red “Holding Back the Years” / Bruce Hornsby “The Way It Is” / The Feelies “Let’s Go” / XTC “Grass” / We’ve Got A Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It “Console Me” / fIREHOSE “Chemical Wire” / Shop Assistants “I Don’t Want To Be Friends With You” / The Fall “Living Too Late” / Elvis Costello and The Attractions “I Want You” / Hüsker Dü “Hardly Getting Over It” / Randy Travis “On the Other Hand”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Eric B. and Rakim “Eric B. Is President” / Kool Moe Dee “Go See the Doctor” / Lovebug Starski “Say What You Wanna Say” / Biz Markie “Make the Music With Your Mouth, Biz” / Regina “Baby Love” / Mike and The Mechanics “All I Need Is A Miracle” / Mr. Mister “Kyrie” / Gene Loves Jezebel “Desire (Come and Get It)” / Iggy Pop “Real Wild Child” / The Georgia Satellites “Keep Your Hands To Yourself” / John Cougar Mellencamp “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to ‘60s Rock)” / Echo and the Bunnymen “Bring On the Dancing Horses” / The Go-Betweens “Spring Rain” / The Chills “Pink Frost” / This Mortal Coil “Come Here My Love” / Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “The Carny” / Dead Or Alive “Brand New Lover” / Cutting Crew “(I Just) Died In Your Arms”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

Volcano Suns “White Elephant” / Billy Joel “A Matter of Trust” / Murphy’s Law “Beer” / Embrace “Money” / Sly Fox “Let’s Go All the Way” / Stetsasonic “My Rhyme” / Wired “To the Beat of the Drum (On the Burn Mix)” / Robert Owens “Bring Down the Walls” / El Debarge “Who’s Johnny” / Bronski Beat “Hit That Perfect Beat” / Adonis “No Way Back” / A-Ha “The Sun Always Shines On TV” / Bon Jovi “Livin’ On A Prayer” / Chris De Burgh “Lady In Red” / Chris Isaak “Blue Hotel” / Giant Sand “Thin Line Man” / The Mekons “Hello Cruel World” / James “So Many Ways” / The Housemartins “Happy Hour” / Game Theory “Erica’s Word” / Carly Simon “Coming Around Again” / New York Mets “Get Mets-merized!” / Kronos Quartet “Purple Haze”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Queen “One Vision” / Steve Winwood “Higher Love” / Michael McDonald “Sweet Freedom” / The Pretenders “Don’t Get Me Wrong” / Doctor and the Medics “Spirit in the Sky” / Boston “Amanda” / The Damned “Eloise” / Sigue Sigue Sputnik “Love Missile F1-11” / Pointer Sisters “Goldmine” / Half Man Half Biscuit “All I Want for Christmas Is A Dukla-Prague Away Kit” / The Lyres “No Reason to Complain” / Cleaners from Venus “Living with Victoria Grey” / Roxanne Shante “The Def Fresh Crew” / Timex Social Club “Rumors” / Steve Earle “Guitar Town” / Cowboy Junkies “Baby Please Don’t Go” / Billy Ocean “There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)” / Dionne Warwick featuring Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Gladys Knight “That’s What Friends Are For” / Linda Rondstadt and James Ingram “Somewhere Out There” / Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam “All Cried Out”

Teen “All About Us”

Teeny Lieberson’s sense of melody has been strong from the start, but improves with every new Teen record, to the point that we now have a song like this which could easily pass as a Girls Aloud tune. (High praise, trust me.) “All About Us” is a rather harsh break up song that dissects a man’s unawareness of his own sexist impulses, and asks him to own up to his “lack of confidence and sexuality” rather than blame it on her. I like how blunt this song is, and honestly, if you’re going to try to get through to men who’ve convinced themselves that they’re “nice guys,” you have to be this direct and question their assumption that they’re not “that type of guy.” As much as this song can sting, I don’t think Lieberson is coming a cruel place at all – it’s more about resenting having to delude oneself to deal with someone, and deciding it’s better for everyone involved to break out of delusions altogether.

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Anchorsong “Oriental Suite”

Anchorsong’s music bears a striking resemblance to that of Four Tet, at least in the sense that they’re both working within the same set of rhythmic, melodic, and textural parameters, and have similar ideas about how a song should progress. There’s a shared internal logic, and a similar way of conveying a lot of soulfulness and emotional nuance in the tiny fragments of the human voice. “Oriental Suite” is mainly focused on its instrumental melody line – I think it’s some sort of mallet instrument? – but those vocal snippets give the song its depth. It’s rarely anything more than a syllable, but it suggests a mindset somewhere between focus and distraction, like fading out from the world around you to zone out on some random thing in your line of sight.

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30/70 “Local Knowledge”

30/70’s new album Cold Radish Coma is similar in tone and style to beloved classics by Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and Lauryn Hill, but the execution is stranger and more abstracted than anything they’ve put out. On a structural level it’s closer to what someone like Flying Lotus does, with fragments and songs blurring together into a single extended jazzy stoner suite. “Local Knowledge” can stand on its own, but even outside the context, it’s like a microcosm of the larger piece in the way the proper pop song structure is buffered on both sides by more elliptical passages. The main chorus hook of “Local Knowledge” is just glorious – it hits you with this feeling of great relief, like this trigger that can make your body immediately go loose and relax. This is the centerpiece of the record, and you can feel the mood shift carry over into the tone of the album’s second half.

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Rozi Plain “Actually”

The tones in this song remind of cold metal pressed to your hand, and the odd not-quite taste of frigid air on your tongue. I imagine this woman standing on a hill, and wind is whipping about but not enough to seem particularly dramatic. And she’s just thinking about all the little things, and is surprised by what her own brain decides is important in that moment. Him? That? What? The whole song feels like a clear sober thought coming into focus, and ends on a vague epiphany: “Don’t get over it / this is actually it.” And I think “this” is just the state of just being, and breathing, and touching cold things and feeling the wind and thinking little thoughts.

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Eerie Summer “тогда было все по-другому”

As you can maybe tell by the title of this song, Eerie Summer are a band from St. Petersburg, Russia. A majority of their songs are sung in English, but this one is not. This is good old fashioned lovelorn indie-pop, and even if the words are not in English, the translated lyrics conform to the conventions of the genre. I’m not sure why I’m even vaguely surprised by that – if you’re attracted to this particular vibe, you’ve almost certainly bought into the sentiment as well as the sound. Going on the translation I have, this is song is basically a girl trying to figure out where she stands with someone she’s been hooking up with – “I thought that you can save me / this is stupid, mmmm sorry / I like everything we do when we are together.” I’m not sure whether something is being lost in translation, but I like the way those ideas flow together, and how the bashful apology goes straight into a more forthright statement about enjoying their company. It’s such a relatable sentiment for a song, but you just wanna be like “hey, chill out, it’ll be fiiiiiine.”

Buy it from Bandcamp.

DJ Paypal “Slim Trak”

DJ Paypal’s music comes out of the Chicago footwork tradition, which is another way of saying it’s so fast and frenetic that it’s hard to imagine anyone but the most athletic people dancing to it. A lot of that stuff can be difficult to hear out of context, and I say that as a person who strongly favors fast tempos – there’s often just a sonic whiplash effect, and an obnoxiousness factor that isn’t far removed from a lot of musically similar drum n bass and dubstep. DJ Paypal’s stuff goes down smoother without sacrificing the key elements of the style, and I think a lot of that comes down to avoiding cheap edit effects and having a solid sense of musicality and harmony. “Slim Trak” is ultimately a frenzied samba, and it comes out sounding like a weird dream version of Brazilian music where it’s all slightly wrong and surreal in your memory. It also requires little to no context – it works as pop music on its own terms, and having any awareness of footwork or any sort of Brazilian music is just a bonus to anyone’s experience with it.

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David Bowie “I Can’t Give Everything Away”

It seems reductive to say that Blackstar is a record about aging and mortality – there’s a lot more going on both thematically and musically – but I think the most powerful moments on the album address these ideas from a vaguely unsettling perspective. He’s morbid, but not particularly welcoming of his inevitable fate. There’s a sense of clarity setting in, and in wrapping up loose ends, but a refusal to be maudlin or willing to let go of anything so easily. “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” the melancholy but serene finale, has Bowie singing about the necessity for boundaries and his right to be opaque about private matters. You can read this song a few different ways, but I think it’s really a statement about his entire life and body of work – it’s always him, but it’s not. Bowie was a pioneer of bringing an actor’s concept of performance to rock music, and even if there’s a distance to that, it’s just as draining as a more “confessional” approach. You give a lot to your audience, but you draw a line somewhere. Maybe this is his way of apologizing for that distance, or just explaining it. Perhaps the idea of holding on to the things he can’t give away is, for him, a way to keep being alive.

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Thao and the Get Down Stay Down “Nobody Dies”

The rhythms in “Nobody Dies” are steady and strong but feel a bit loose and rickety all the same, like it’s just a bunch of scaffolding keeping Thao Nguyen’s voice aloft in a place where it probably shouldn’t be. And that suits the theme of the song rather well – she’s singing about the bravery that comes from not even thinking about impending disaster, and how that is both exciting and foolish. And selfish too, because risk often involves other people too. I love the instrumental bridge near the end – the solo is all shaky treble that doesn’t quite flow. That section is like a tightrope walk, and those high frequencies feel like nerves. It’s the most thrilling part of the song, but it’s over very quickly.

Buy it from iTunes.

No Joy “Burial In Twos”

One of the best things about No Joy’s extraordinary and sadly underrated More Faithful is the way the band implies a sense of depth in their music. They exaggerate dynamics to the point where the music will have this 3-D movie effect, with sounds seeming to surge out from the speakers. The loud, heavy guitar parts on most shoegaze records come off fairly flat, with most of the dynamic sacrificed as the tone is pushed into the red, but in a song like “Burial in Twos,” that sound has a dimension to it that suggests a far greater scale. But the vocals that go with it are very delicate and intimate, so the contrast implies something even more resonant – a huge burning emotion that’s building up inside you that feels like it’s going to rip you apart, but you can’t let it out. You get a similar effect on a lot of the greatest My Bloody Valentine songs, but I think while that band is about being lost in sensuous feeling and transcendental lust, No Joy is more about the cathartic release of repressed desires. It’s like some silent war in a shy person’s mind.

Buy it from Amazon.