This track by Budgie & Samiyam is a gorgeous frame for Earl Sweatshirt’s older, richer voice – the tone is classy, sophisticated ‘70s soul, but warped just enough to feel surreal and slightly shabby. The shift into the sliced vocal loop midway through is a brilliant touch, and I’m always a sucker for rap songs that switch the beat up in the middle. Earl’s performance is understated, but his lyrics are as strong as ever, but now they hit with the authority of a dude who is finally out of his teens.
This is the kind of extremely romantic song only a teenage songwriter and performer can truly nail. I swear I mean this without condescension! There is nothing immature or cringe-inducing about this song – it’s just got a purity of feeling and concern about the perception of others that peaks in adolescence, even if it often carries through life. This is basically about being in love and feeling misunderstood by everyone around you, and how that alienation makes that love grow stronger. That “you and me against the world thing” is always going to evoke a powerful feeling in me, but the part of this song that really chokes me up is the way she dismisses all these horrible townies who’ve got her down: “I don’t think they know what love is.” She’s frustrated, but also pities them for it.
Knxwledge’s remixes keep large chunks of his source material intact while absorbing it into his drowsy, stoned aesthetic. This track is made out of Joe Budden’s “Get No Younger,” but the energy level is dialed down pretty drastically. It’s not chopped and screwed – if anything, the music feels like it’s gone in a more psychedelic direction. When you hear this in the context of the full mixtape, it just feels like you’re in some weird mental state where everything sounds and feels a little different. But unlike most scenarios where that happens, you can actually replay and rewind this.
First off, I want to mention that I’ve been writing this site since 2002 and this is maybe the third or fourth time ever that I’ve featured an artist based in the Hudson Valley, which is where I’m from. This is a duo from New Paltz, and much respect to them for being from New Paltz instead of moving down to the city. The Hudson Valley is a pretty smart place to start a band these days – you’ll pay a lot less rent, get more space to practice, live near a lot of cool little arts communities along the Hudson, and still be close enough to play in NYC all the time. Look into it.
“Breathless” might be a pretty different song if Diet Cig lived in NYC rather than New Paltz. Alex Luciano is singing about getting her first apartment and enjoying the freedom of it all, but having the “wow, I’m an adult!” feeling severely undermined by, like, not having a lot of the basic stuff you need for an apartment, like kitchen supplies and shower curtains. This is nothing you can’t fix with a relatively inexpensive visit to Target, but wow, I’m sure a lot of you will recognize this feeling. The part that really gets me is when she’s worried about feeling lonely, and hopes that you’ll come hang out with her and watch The Simpsons with her on the floor. That’s just so sweet and real.
Father John Misty describes his new record as a concept album about someone who just happens to have the same name as himself, and has many of the same life experiences. That’s a very clever way to disrupt any suspicion that it’s a “confessional” singer-songwriter record, even though it basically is. It’s also a great way to distance himself from the parts of the record where he comes across badly, like on this track, where he viciously tears apart the personality of a girl he despises but is fucking anyway. His words are deeply misanthropic, but it seems like the intention of the song is mostly to reflect on “his” misogyny, and wonder just how much of his sexual attraction to her is directly connected to his contempt for her. My read on this is that the character – or the songwriter, whatever – wants to think he’s hooking up with her because he hates himself, but the reality is that he thinks too highly of himself and only gets off on feeling superior to women. In this case, he’s going for low-hanging fruit.
Fleetwood Mac @ Prudential Center, Newark NJ
The Chain / You Make Loving Fun / Dreams / Second Hand News / Rhiannon / Everywhere / I Know I’m Not Wrong / Tusk / Sisters of the Moon / Say You Love Me / Seven Wonders / Big Love / Landslide / Never Going Back Again / Over My Head / Gypsy / Little Lies / Gold Dust Woman / I’m So Afraid / Go Your Own Way // World Turning / Don’t Stop / Silver Springs /// Songbird
I saw Fleetwood Mac two years ago, back when they were touring without Christine McVie, and it was a really great show. This show is part of their first tour with McVie since the late ‘90s, and was definitely better – but how could it not be with all those McVie hits back in the setlist? You really get a sense of how important Christine is to the band when you see them live – she doesn’t have the intense charisma of Stevie Nicks or the wild energy of Lindsey Buckingham, but her more refined and soulful aesthetic balances out the mood. Also, while Stevie’s songs are the most nakedly emotional and Lindsey is the musical genius of the group, Christine is the one with the greatest talent for crafting immaculate pop hooks.
This really came through when they played her songs from Tango in the Night – “Everywhere” is this perfect balance of effervescent harmonies and soaring melody, while “Little Lies” is this relentless cycle of musical and vocal hooks that’s still quite moody and ethereal. I didn’t quite expect the latter song to be the one that impressed me most in the show, but it just seemed like everyone was especially psyched to be playing it. It’s also the Fleetwood Mac hit that most takes advantage of the band having three distinctive lead singers, as each of them has their own part in the chorus.
The vocal sample at the start of this track sets up the idea of traveling a great distance with Moses promising to lead the Israelites across the desert, and the music follows through by sounding like a journey. The track has a strong sense of lateral progression, and moves through a few distinct phases while keeping a rhythmic thread through the piece. I’m particularly fond of the bit midway through with the slick lead guitar and a bass part that suddenly sounds quite confident. That’s like the part on the arc of a learning curve where you’ve done enough to feel sure of yourself as you move along.
Jessica Pratt’s second album benefits greatly from the way it was mic’d. It sounds like there might have been only one used, or maybe two, but it all comes across like it was recorded live to tape in an apartment. You can really feel a sense of space in the sound, and not only in the faint tape hiss. It feels extremely intimate and remarkably fragile. You can hear little errors in her guitar playing here and there, and at some points, actual warping in the tape. (It’s funny how nostalgic that sound feels now, I almost never hear it but I used to hear it almost every day.) Pratt sounds so totally alone on these songs, and that solitude sets her free – this is very much the sort of record that benefits from the emotional vulnerability a person can have when no one else is around to witness it.
I listened to this A.G. Cook remix of this Charli XCX song before I ever heard the original mix, and going back to that proper version is horrible for me now because it just sounds so slow and lethargic. Cook’s mix keeps the structure of the song almost exactly the same – it’s a fantastically well-written pop tune – but speeds it all up to the manic tempo and childlike timbre of PC Music. I think this really unlocks the song, and emphasizes all the best hooks whereas the original downplays everything. I realize that this is maybe the pop music equivalent of dousing a dish with hot sauce, but I am also a person who will pour hot sauce on most things.
It’s easy to feel trapped in your life if you’ve bought into a story you’ve told yourself since you were very young, and the only way out of it is to write a new story for yourself. Stuart Murdoch’s character in “Play for Today” starts off feeling lonely and isolated, and trapped in a life story he suspects is very dull. This is contrasted with Dee Dee Penny’s character, who seems no less stuck in life, but takes some pleasure in creating a people-pleasing look and persona for herself, and using her imagination to cope with her buried frustration and hostility.
They agree on a few things:
1. life is a secret
2. death is a myth
3. love is a fraud – it’s misunderstood
4. work is a sentence
5. family’s a drag
6. this house is a trap
Very pessimistic indeed. This all takes a turn in the second half of the song, as the music shifts from this upbeat but strangely hollow mid-‘80s New Order pastiche to something like a new wave gospel tune. As the backing vocals chant “author, author!” the two characters meet and begin to write themselves into new roles. Dee Dee’s character prods Stuart’s to let go of his whole “lonely sad king” routine, because it’s doing him no favors, and is smothering her. As the song ends, the two make an effort to live as though they’re a couple in a movie romance, because as Stuart sings, “we’re braver when we’re on the sacred screen.” It’s a happy ending.
I love when artists throw you a real curveball. Like, who knew that the almighty king of chillwave would be a power pop natural, and could effortlessly channel the best of Matthew Sweet, Electric Light Orchestra, and Todd Rundgren? This is a pretty big stylistic leap for Toro Y Moi, but it’s not jarring since the slick aesthetic of his earlier work is applied to this creamy classic rock vibe. He’s definitely aware of the nostalgic quality of this music, and he foregrounds that in the lyrics with a nod to Weezer, references to doodling in the margins of school papers, and the half-joking idea of making “another hit for the teens.”
Björk labels this track as “five months before” in the packaging of Vulnicura, as in it was written nearly half a year before she and Matthew Barney permanently split. It’s basically a song in which she observes a change in their dynamic, and wonders what to do – call him out on his moodiness, wait it out, stew in frustration. It’s a very passive sentiment, and that carries through most of the album, with Björk addressing the dissolution of a very long relationship as though it’s just something happening to her, rather than something she is directly involved in. I think this rings emotionally true to an extent, especially if you’re the one being left behind. But there’s a strange void in this music, this empty space where the singer’s complicity would be. Is she actually blameless in all this, or is it just too painful to address?
That repeated line – “I see myself as iconic, in that my downfall is kinda ironic” — is so wonderfully arrogant, but delivered in a way that isn’t especially confident. It mostly just sounds pessimistic to me. I really do like the idea of seeing yourself as iconic, even if no one else does – it’s empowering, but also just something a lot of people have to do to convince themselves that their ideas and art will matter to other people.
I love the way Aphex Twin records acoustic sounds – it’s mostly quite dry, but the parts with minimal or natural reverb sound as though they were recorded in a cramped, confined space. This track feels particularly claustrophobic, with the most echoey sounds seeming as though they’re unidentifiable objects clanking off metal pipes.
There’s really not a lot of lyrics in this song, but it’s such a vivid sketch of a girl with a crush on a guy in a band. It sounds like an exciting situation but it’s actually pretty ordinary, and Girlpool does a great job of making it clear how accessible and normal this guy is despite seeming cool and somewhat unattainable – like, he’s telling stories about his mom as he walks her to her car. Not glamorous, but definitely a guy you fall for.
Erase Errata: The other amazing all-female punk band that returned from a looooooong hiatus with an excellent, vital new record this week. I hate that they are so overshadowed, but that was always the case – even when they got some attention, it wasn’t all that much. Erase Errata haven’t been entirely gone since they released the wonderful and highly underrated Nightlife in 2006 – there were a couple singles, and Jenny Hoyston has released some solo work along the way – but the version of the band that exists today sounds like one that’s made a few evolutionary leaps while they were out of the spotlight. Hoyston in particular has become a far more impressive guitarist, and has developed a lot of interesting textures for her choppy post-punk rhythm style. “Watch Your Language” is all harsh mechanical tones, and reminds me of the severity of early ‘00s Wire, and even a bit of Tom Morello’s style in Rage Against the Machine. This quasi-industrial aesthetic suits Erase Errata very well, and complements the seriousness of Hoyston’s lyrics and stern vocal affect.
I really wasn’t feeling Robyn’s work with Royksopp last year, not because it was in any way bad, but because it just sorta predictable and dull to me. A lot of that has to do with the production style, which was very beat heavy and air tight – it just felt very overbearing and unfun to me in a way the best Robyn songs do not. This collaboration with the producer Kindness is very much in the opposite direction. There’s a lot of negative space in this arrangement, and the song moves in this stop/start pattern that mirrors the unsure tone of the lyrics. The music implies a lot of space but an intimate scale, and this does a lot of favors for Robyn’s voice and her lyrics – she always excels at getting across the subtleties of rather ordinary relationship drama. Here she’s singing about struggling to make a true romantic connection, and you can hear the frustration in her voice. She wants a transformative emotional reaction, but it’s not happening. But she’s there, fighting through that numbness to find a true, meaningful feeling and it’s beautiful.
It makes some sense that the song on No Cities to Love that feels the most like a classic Sleater-Kinney song, or a least something that would’ve fit in perfectly well on Dig Me Out or The Hot Rock, is also the song that’s a message addressed to all the old fans who had to live without them for a decade. Corin Tucker is a bit apologetic for letting people down, but definitely not for any actual decisions she made – “the situation was justified,” and it absolutely was. Playing live is fun but touring is a grind, and it’s not compatible with being a mother, or at least it isn’t without a huge support system. This isn’t the song where the stress and burden of motherhood is addressed – that’s the opening song “Price Tag,” which sung is from the perspective of a cash-strapped single mom – but it’s definitely a song that comes from the other side of that experience. There’s certainly a maternal quality in the way she phrases the sentiment of the song, and explains her reasons for backing away. I think a lot of the passionate spark to this song, and the record in general, comes out of being so excited to do this thing again after walking away from it for totally mature and responsible reasons. Tucker never had to write a song explaining herself and she definitely didn’t need to apologize for her band’s hiatus, but I think No Cities to Love gains something from this transparency, and I’d rather hear this come from her directly rather than read this sentiment into the subtext.
There’s a point in “Leaving Los Feliz” where Tame Impala singer Kevin Parker – in character as a jaded guy hanging out at a party for rich hipsters in Los Angeles – says that he’s pretending to shoot a documentary in his head of what’s going on around him. And to some extent, that’s what a lot of the Uptown Special record feels like – all these wealthy, cool, glamorous dudes reporting on what it’s like in their world. The lyrics for this song, and most everything else on the record, were written by Michael Chabon, and he does a great job of balancing out a novelist’s instinct for evocative detail with the economy necessary to get across an idea in the limited space of a pop song. We get just enough information to have a very specific idea of who this guy is and who he’s with, and just enough to understand that he’s being an unreliable narrator, and deluding himself if he thinks he’s ever going to willfully abandon this lifestyle.
Now that I’ve heard this I just wonder why it took so long for there to be a Southern rap track built around the faux-Terry Riley synthesizer intro of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” It works very well, especially because Extraordinaire left in the more squiggly part of the melody as a periodic fill rather than going with a straight loop. Killer Mike sounds great on this because Killer Mike sounds great on pretty much anything, but Extraordinaire’s own verse is what makes this song shine – he sounds ambitious and hungry, very eager to prove that he belongs there with Mike, and not just as the guy making the beat behind the scenes.
If you’re just going on his music, it’s hard to imagine that there’s much time when Kevin Barnes ~isn’t~ being the ultimate manic depressive intellectual queen bitch of the universe. The past couple Of Montreal records were odd, transitional works – most of Paralytic Stalks sounds like an actual nervous breakdown set to music, while Lousy with Sylvianbriar seemed to me like a self-conscious regressive move. The thing that really sticks out to me about those records is just how vicious Barnes gets. He’d let that kind of aggression out before, but there are points on those albums where his anger is so raw that it feels like something we shouldn’t be hearing. The worst parts of me related to this stuff a lot, and I have complicated feelings about that.
Aureate Gloom is the first record Barnes has made since his marriage ended. Given the emotional horror zone of the past four OM albums, it’s hard to imagine how it survived that long. I’ve only heard the two songs that have been pushed as singles so far, but it’s not anywhere near as hysterical as what I had expected. “Empyrean Abattoir” has some frantic tangents, but it feels somewhat grounded to me. There’s a hostility here, but it’s tamped down. Whereas a lot of OM songs feel like they’re coming from a place of immediate overwhelming emotion, this sounds more like where you end up after you’ve exhausted your mind thinking about something for too long. There’s a touch of defeat in his voice, but also some relief that something has run its course.
