Haim “Relationships”

When Haim shared “Relationships” a couple weeks ago they made a point of noting that “this one took us 7 years to crack.” Which is to say, they knew they had an amazing song on their hands and worked hard to fully realize it. I think you can hear all that work in the finished recording, but not in the sense that it feels overthought and overproduced, or that it’s got that stale chewing gum feel to it. It’s the best case scenario for this sort of thing, where if you’re paying attention you can hear all the little smart decisions that add up to a finished product that skillfully balances familiarity and eccentricity.

There’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen for this one – the three Haim sisters, producers Rostam Batmanglij and Buddy Ross, and collaborators Ariel Rechtshaid and Tobias Jesso Jr. I’m not entirely sure who did what, but whoever wrote that fluid, low-key funky bass line is the clear MVP of the song, and I can hear Batmanglij’s skill for building richly detailed yet spacious and airy tracks guiding the track. But all of this sound and structure is just a frame for Danielle Haim’s vocal performance, which is the melodic through line and soul of the piece. She’s singing about feeling ambivalent and frustrated about relationships in general and one that may or may not be falling apart in particular, but with a spark of romanticism that contradicts her most pessimistic lines. The lyrics essentially ask “ugh, why do I even bother with this?” in a dozen different ways, but everything in the music and Danielle’s voice is answering “you know why…because the trouble is worth it.”

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Lady Gaga featuring Gesaffelstein “Killah”

Lady Gaga seems more impressive and iconic these days because we have enough pop music history on either side of her prime breakthrough years to fully appreciate exactly how great she’s always been. She’s a prestige pop star who has maintained a presence in the mainstream despite consistently making art that’s far more tasteful, intelligent, well-crafted, and challenging than the market requires. She may stumble from time to time but she’s always interesting, and her big swings often yield truly excellent songs and performances.

Gaga’s new album Mayhem doesn’t break much new ground for her stylistically, but that doesn’t have to be the goal every time. (As the late Scott Miller once told me, novelty isn’t inherently musical.) This is a record in which Lady Gaga is being Lady Gaga to the utmost extreme, and in doing so she highlights the musical quirks that set her apart from the pop girl pack. I hear it as a flex, a 38 year old veteran superstar throwing down and proving that she can still give us songs on the level of her early classics. The music is too vital to be credibly dismissed as nostalgia and mostly too weird to qualify as pandering, but like her charm offensive media blitz in support of the record, it does prompt you to go “damn, Lady Gaga is so cool, I love her.”

And you know what? Lady Gaga is sooooo cool. I love her.

My favorite of the Mayhem songs is “Killah,” a collaboration with the French electronic producer Gasaffelstein that makes the most of his gift for spiky and stylish neo-industrial grooves. It’s part of a long line of sexy, strutting glamourous pop songs but I mostly hear it as an inspired collision of David Bowie’s Young Americans with Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, with a dash of…hmm, is it Tina Turner or Grace Jones? Like most of my favorite Gaga songs, it’s mixing and merging familiar elements from the past in unexpected ways and scratches an itch I didn’t realize I had. It’s like she’s spent the past 15 years granting long-forgotten wishes I made when I was much younger, and my brain was being forged by the MTV of the late 80s through mid 90s.

Also, did you see Gaga performing “Killah” on Saturday Night Live? The staging, the blocking, the set design, the outfits, the attitude and audacity – it’s one of the very best music performances I’ve ever seen on television.

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Banks “Delulu”

I’m sure plenty of people can and will take “Delulu” at face value, but it’s pretty clearly written as a parody of someone so utterly convinced their situationship with an indifferent guy is leading to something more profound, to the point that she’s frustrated her therapist to the point of being dropped as a client. Banks sounds like she’s having a good time with this song, hamming it up for the fun of it, but also to make it apparent she’s singing in character. But still, there’s enough potent emotion in how she sings “I only wanna be with you, I know we’re gonna see it through” that you could easily not clock the bitter irony of the next line in the chorus being “can’t wait for you to see it too.”

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Panda Bear “Just As Well”

Panda Bear and his collaborators in Animal Collective are masters of taking a basically normal song and giving it a wild and flamboyant arrangement. They’ve done this a lot of different ways through the past 25 years, but this “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if it sounded like thing no one else would consider doing” impulse is the through line in their overall body of work.

In this context, Panda Bear’s new solo record Sinister Grift is among the most regular-sounding music anyone in AnCo has ever produced. But even in a straight forward mode, Panda’s palette is bright and bold and a little surreal. A lot of it sounds like a Margaritaville version of his old classics, or like he’s trying to make something that would feel right on a cruise ship.

I find this incredibly charming, particularly on “Just As Well,” a song so bouncey and bubbly that it’s easy to miss that the lyrics get fairly bleak. He’s mainly singing about feeling “stuck on the inside” and hoping to get out of a rut, and I suppose that eagerness to change is what makes it a Panda Bear song. There’s always some degree of optimism in his work, and a desire to improve as a person.

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Tate McRae “Purple Lace Bra”

My impression of Tate McRae’s earlier music was along the lines of “hey, why shouldn’t there be a new pop artist who is to Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls what The Black Crowes were to The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin?” I don’t see why certain styles shouldn’t continue to exist as part of a larger musical tradition. It’s silly to treat this stuff like it should stay frozen in one cultural moment when so many other types of music are kinda always around.

This take shifted a bit upon spending some time with McRae’s recently released third album So Close to What. The aesthetics have moved up the timeline a bit, and now all the songs sound like a scrambled version of pop aesthetics from the mid to late 2010s. And this makes total sense: McRae is 21, and it’s logical that her taste and frame of reference for pop is basically stuff I heard in Ubers around 10 years ago.

Some of the songs on So Close to What pull from music I have only a vague passing familiarity with, leaving me with low-grade deja vu. Other songs are a little easier to map out – “Purple Lace Bra” pulls a hook directly out of Beyoncé’s “Drunk In Love,” folds it into another section that sounds a lot like Rihanna, and the chorus feels like Reputation-era Taylor Swift spiked with a little bit of Ariana Grande. There’s also a lyrical hook that rephases a memorable part from Olivia Rodrigo’s “Bad Idea Right?” I don’t think the way this song strings together these aesthetics should work, but it does. The “a little from column A and a little from column B” mix-and-match approach turns out to be coherent in this case.

McRae isn’t really known for being coherent. Her vocals are so “cursive” the words often blur together in a way that’s a little like unintentional shoegaze aesthetics. “Purple Lace Bra” isn’t one of her more extreme songs in that respect, and that’s fortunate given the lyrics get a little interesting. She’s singing about getting frustrated with a relationship with a man who pretty much exclusively values her for her body. There’s a lot of resentment in the lyrics – “I’m losing my mind ‘cause giving you head is the only time you think I’ve got depth” – but not enough that she seems like she’s about to dump him. The song takes place at a point on this relationship timeline where the grievance is there, and she’s in the negotation stage of dealing with it. There’s still some room here for the guy to take her seriously, but I’m less hopeful about it than she is.

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The Verve “Drive You Home”

The Verve defaulted to an extremely high level of drama and romanticism in their songs, but even by that standard the emotion in “Drive You Home” is so potent and undiluted that it can be taxing as a listener. You can’t listen to a song like this casually; you have to go into it understanding that you’re probably going to have your heartstrings ripped right out of you. Even if you tune out the vocals and lyrics, Nick McCabe’s lead guitar is so saturated with feeling that you can’t escape its gravitational pull. He makes you feel every little ache, as well as a heartbreak so sweeping and grandiose that it’s almost majestic. And he does this while making every move sound loose and improvised.
 
“Drive You Home” is a song from the perspective of the losing corner of a love triangle. Richard Ashcroft is the other man in this scenario, and he’s hopelessly in love with someone he feels he’s made a profound connection with, but he doesn’t seem willing to fully act on it out of respect to her existing relationship. There’s a nobility in his point of view through the song, but also a deep frustration. He’s not angry or bitter, and his jealously only comes through in a few moments. But he is overwhelmed by the enormity of his feelings for her, and the reality that he can’t have what he wants so badly without potentially blowing up the lives of everyone involved. This is a song where it’d be easier if his feelings were unrequited, if it was all just one-sided infatuation. But the agony of this music is in this incredible romance they’re sharing, what sounds like an intense emotional affair. It feels like he’s trying to pour out all this love in the hope that he runs out of it, to get it out of his system before they can move on with their lives. And while the song does seem to taper off at the end, his passion is present until the last note rings out.

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Tricky & Martina Topley-Bird “Feed Me”

“Feed Me” has an odd sense of gravity to it. There’s a solid bass groove at the center, but the looped chimes sample seems as though it’s always drifting out of frame. It’s like being gently pulled in two different directions, with no sense of which of the two opposing forces is better. There’s a lot of implied distance between the musical elements here, so you feel this vast empty middle space where the vocals sit.

The music establishes a theme that’s further developed in the lyrics, of feeling unable to reconcile contradictions and ultimately embracing the incongruities. Creation and destruction, chaos and order, belonging and estrangement, love and hate, clarity and confusion – life is mostly lived somewhere along the spectrum between these binaries. “Feed Me” exists in some constantly shifting space between these poles, and that weird non-place feels like home.

Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird both seem serene in this song, as though they’ve unburdened themselves of the conflicts that informed all the preceding tracks on Maxinquaye. The primary tension through the record is the question of who’s the seducer and who’s the seduced, but here they come across like equals in a state of equilibrium. Martina recorded her lead vocal when she was still a teenager but she sounds remarkably lucid and sanguine while Tricky hangs in the back, mostly whisper-rapping but fully singing towards the end. She sounds weary but hopeful, wise yet uncertain. She sounds like someone who has figured out how to feel whole.

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TLC “Waterfalls”

I am confident that if you put on TLC’s “Waterfalls” and focused all of your attention on LeMarquis Jefferson’s bass line, you will fall in love. But what would you fall in love with?
 
Maybe you’d fall in love with the character of the bass part and anthropomorphize it a bit: a suave, slick, highly expressive and unpredictable character at the center of the song, seemingly flirting with all the more rigidly defined parts surrounding it. I imagine the bass line as this charismatic and curious figure in conversation with everything else in the song – the beat, those horns, that ultra-juicy wah guitar, the TLC girls themselves. Listen to how the bass seems to slink up to some parts, or back away to give others some space, like when Left Eye starts to rap. This bass line is a funky gentleman.
 
Maybe you’d fall for Jefferson himself, and whatever it is about his mind, body, and soul that manifested this performance in the studio. His bass line was reportedly improvised in the studio, so we’re truly listening to someone stepping into an already brilliant pop composition and infusing it with his personality. Who is this guy? How did he come to be so articulate with this instrument? What is he trying to communicate here? He seems to be operating on pure instinct here and it’s beautiful.
 
Maybe you’ll tap into the vibe of the bass part and fall in love with someone in your real life, emboldened by its loose grace, assured sensuality, and playful spirit. It could unlock your body, brighten your soul, and make the whole world feel more alive to you. It could make you feel a vibrant sort of love that draws others to you.

Could be all three.

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Mariah Carey “Vision of Love”

“Vision of Love” may be the best debut single of all time. It introduces Mariah Carey as a fully-formed artist – a vocal powerhouse who can sing with a lot of nuance, a songwriter with an exceptional gift for melody, a lyricist with a distinct intelligence and clever vocabulary. It’s one of the most consequential songs in pop history, not simply for launching one of the most successful singers ever, but in how it established melisma and multi-octave range as the dominant vocal style of mainstream pop. Whitney Houston put this trend in motion, but it was Carey who set the bar for pop singers at “superhuman.”

Many singers have tried to emulate her, but most have failed. That’s mostly because Carey’s remarkable vocal prowess is always just a means to achieving her ends as a songwriter. A mediocre singer only hears the theatricality, and the flex of hitting the whistle register. It becomes an athletic thing, or an equivalent of how amateur guitarists could get obsessed with Eddie Van Halen’s finger-tapping technique without ever picking up on his skill for writing hooky riffs.

“Vision of Love” isn’t ground breaking in form. It’s a ballad rooted in soul and gospel, somewhat old-fashioned in the context of pop at the dawn of the 1990s. But it’s a masterful composition, dialed-in at every level. Carey wrote the song around the time she was 18 with her early collaborator Ben Margulies, and I can’t imagine they had any idea they were writing something that could become a massive hit at the time. It reaches multiple bombastic crescendoes but is nevertheless a slow burner, and it’s far more musically ambitious than a majority of what was crushing the charts in 1989. Carey and Margulies were nobodies, but were approaching songwriting like they were making luxury products.

“Vision of Love” is a love song, but that aspect of the lyrics is almost secondary to how it expresses Carey’s will to triumph over her difficult and largely unhappy youth. The lyrics are very direct, but also noticeably wordy. Not in the sense that it ever sounds clumsy, but in that you can find yourself surprised by how smooth the phrase “now I know I’ve succeeded in finding the place I conceived” can sound in a song. This is one of the most charming aspects of Carey as an artist – she’s a woman who hears the melodic possibilities in prosaic words like “eventually,” “desperation,” “visualized,” and “alienation.” Pop songs typically land on universality with vague language, but Carey gets there with precision.

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The Field “From Here We Go Sublime”

Axel Willner isn’t the only electronic music producer who has messed around with glitchy samples, but I think he’s the only one who’s ever made the sound of a CD skipping feel like a symphony. “From Here We Go Sublime” is mostly comprised of choppy, staccato sounds that somehow feel soft and hazy rather than sharp and thudding. Willner focuses on tone and texture, giving you the sound of a voice but no indication of what’s being sung, and extends brief quiet moments into lingering ambient hums.

The amazing magic trick of this song, aside from making a simulation of the sound of malfunctioning playback feel incredibly romantic, is in how Willner reveals the source of that romanticism. Halfway through the track the song builds to a moment when you finally hear a bit of the unobstructed source material: The Flamingos’ 1959 recording of “I Only Have Eyes for You,” one of the most distinct-sounding pop hits of all time.

The moment at 2:14 when you finally hear that heavily reverbed “sha-bop sha-bop” gives me goosebumps every time I play it; it’s like clouds suddenly parting in the night sky so you can get a clear shot of a bright full moon. Willner only gives you a few moments of the original song before altering it again, bringing in the “sha-bop sha-bop” a little faster than your ear expects it, and then slowly pushes the composition back into abstraction before it seems to dissolve in your headphones. The title is accurate – the sound is truly sublime.

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The Cranberries “Linger”

I’ve heard “Linger” countless times since I was 14 years old, and though I’ve always liked the song a lot, I’ve passively heard it out in the world far more often than I’ve deliberately put it on. It’s the kind of song that’s always out there in cafes, bars, and shops, and it while you can always feel it shift the air in the room, it sits very comfortably in the background. It’s a song that’s very easy to take for granted. But it’s also the kind of song that will hit you very hard when you’re raw, especially if you’re not expecting it. And it will open up when you listen closely.

The thing about “Linger” is that while the bones of the song are incredibly strong, there is a precise balance of elements in the studio recording produced by Stephen Street that elevates the song from “very good alt-folk ballad” to something that elegantly captures an extremely specific feeling, or more accurately, swirl of conflicting emotions. The studio version renders the drama with remarkable nuance, and creates an atmosphere that immediately conveys a distinctive mix of melancholy and anguish that most anyone will recognize from some moment in their life.

The Cranberries have released many recordings of “Linger” through the years – an early demo, radio sessions, alternative mixes, live performances, acoustic iterations. All of them reach a certain threshold of quality just because it’s “Linger,” but none of them feel right. Mostly, they sound sort of clumsy. The acoustic guitar strum is too loud, parts get shortened or removed, the rhythm feels off. The song is good, but the magic isn’t there.

So what is it about the version produced by Street, the version we’ve mostly been hearing for all this time? There’s something about how delicate and bright the opening guitar notes sound, somehow signaling both fragility and youth. The string arrangement is dynamic; gentle and nearly subliminal in some moments, and overwhelming in others. I like that it’s hard to tell whether particular parts of that arrangement are an actual orchestra or a keyboard setting – it varies the tonality and keeps it from sounding too stuffy. There’s the slide guitar solo, so understated but vaguely heroic. There’s also some tremolo guitar a little low in the mix, adding a subtle shimmer to the piece. Everything is calibrated perfectly; every instrument serving its purpose and disappearing when that purpose is served so the full composition moves through moments of lightness and density.

And then there’s Dolores O’Riordan. She was very young when she wrote this, and only a little older when The Cranberries recorded the song with Stephen Street. She’s captured on tape at a moment when she’s honed her craft to an impressive degree, but she still sounds very raw. She’s singing incredibly direct lyrics, but she sounds so genuinely wounded that even the most banal phrase is saturated with feeling. It’s a stunning combination of instinct and emotional intelligence, rooted in Irish vocal tradition.

“Linger” is a song about a girl knowing her boyfriend is cheating on her and deeply resenting his betrayal, but still feeling hopelessly infatuated with him and invested in their fledgling relationship. You hear the angst so clearly, but also that undiluted affection, which comes through so evocatively in the chorus that you could mistake it for a straight-ahead love song. But ultimately, this is a song about a hurt, humiliated, and lovelorn girl begging for this guy to end things with her because she doesn’t have the strength to end it herself.

It’s very much from the point of view of a young girl who’s experiencing this sort of thing for the first time, and confronting her passivity and disillusionment, but it’s a scenario that can happen at any point in your life. There are plenty of songs that approach these feelings, but it could be that no one could nail this feeling better than a sensitive teenager who can’t grasp the scale of their experience so it all seems overwhelming and massive. You can still feel this way as an adult, but the song gives you direct access to that powerful young emotion.

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Oklou “Thank You for Recording”

“Thank You for Recording” is alluring but perplexing, a song that sounds like it’s either hundreds of years old or from a hundred years into the future. It certainly shows me the limits of my own musical knowledge, as I can’t place any of the classical influences here on a timeline, but I can tell you that Oklou’s conservatory background and grounding in modern electronic production–aided by PC Music’s A.G. Cook on this track–has rather uncanny results. The more buzzy and clanging electronic elements are obviously jarring in proximity to the more delicate and Boroque elements of the song, but I think choosing to use a synth flute rather than an actual flute does more to make this track feel so strange and beautiful. It could be a choice made out of practicality, but the just-slightly-off quality of the sound removes any trace of “authenticity” and earthiness, and complements lyrics in which Oklou sings about getting out of her head and calming herself by watching footage of a tornado. (I think that’s what’s going on, anyway?)

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Jennie featuring Dominic Fike “Love Hangover”

This is not a cover of the Diana Ross classic, but rather a new song with pretty much the opposite sentiment. For Ross, a love hangover is the result of overwhelming passion and she doesn’t want a cure. For Jennie and Dominic Fike, it’s a flimsy explanation for hooking up repeatedly despite seeming to actively dislike each other. It’s another pop tune for the Age of Situationships, and as bubbly as the chorus gets, there’s a lot of cynicism at the core of this song.

But don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a dark or depressing song. The tone is closer to a modern rom-com, and their volatile relationship is played for laughs rather than drama. In rom-com logic, this is just a tumultuous stage before they inevitably truly see one another and fall in love. There’s nothing like that in this song, but the light tone suggests that’s a likely outcome. Maybe it’s not that cynical?

One more thing: There’s a recurring mini-hook in Jennie’s first verse that goes “Who sent you? Who sent you? Who sent you?” It’s melodically interesting, slowing down slightly after a few lines that seem to bounce around frenetically off the beat. But there’s something so funny to me about that line – it doesn’t quite fit in context, and comes off kinda bug-eyed and paranoid. It reminds me a bit of the old Deborah Cox R&B hit with the (unintentionally?) hilarious chorus hook “how did you get here? / nobody’s supposed to be here.”

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Eddie Chacon “If I Ever Let You Go”

“If I Ever Let You Go” has a highly stylized arrangement – incredibly wet reverb on the percussion, somewhat warbling effects on the vocal, a relatively dry primary keyboard that sounds like moonlight. It’s a little disorienting, but absolutely gorgeous. It’s essentially a romantic ballad about gratitude, of understanding how good you’ve got it and hoping you never screw it up. The first half of the chorus is “if I ever let you go…,” a hypothetical he immediately shoots down in the following line: “I will never let you go.” He repeats it a few times over towards the end, as the music drifts off into a woozy psychedelic haze. The song ends feeling a little unsettled and elliptical, but it needs to do that to honor the sentiment. He’s facing the future, looking off to the unknown, and making a vow.

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Elita “Girls on the Internet”

“Girls on the Internet” is a few different types of song at once – a moody goth song with a driving bass line, a pop song with an extremely girlish vocal performance, an indie song trading on layers of irony. The lyrics are straightforward – she’s singing about getting obsessed with girls on the internet, and craving their approval – but it’s never clear what the perspective is. Is this a girl who wants to be like these other girls in some way? Is this a lonely guy? In any case, it conveys both the fascination and frustration of parasocial relationships. These people feel so close to you, they take up so much space in your mind, but they don’t know you exist. They’re everything, and you’re nothing, and you’ve chosen this dynamic. So what does that mean?

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Destroyer “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”

“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” is densely packed with memorable and chin-scratching lyrics by Dan Bejar, even more so than is typical for a Destroyer song. It feels almost as though he wrote an entire album of lyrics, scrapped the music, but jammed all the best Dan-isms into this song instead. The line that immediately captured both my attention and imagination comes about two minutes in: “insane intercourse, constant swapping while I fall asleep in a bass.” It’s quite evocative just in print, but there’s something in the way Bejar delivers the line that renders it very ambiguous in tone. I can’t tell if he sounds prudish or perverted here, it could go either way on any listen. It’s both? He sounds, at bare minimum, fascinated by the “constant swapping.”

But like I said, that’s just one of many quotables in this song. I’m also quite fond of these:

“We are gathered here today to have a real nice time,” pomp dissolving into pleasant banality in the span of a few seconds.

“Absent friends, where’d you go?,” a question I think of all the time these days.

“Mirthless husk floating on an ocean” – it couldn’t be me.

“My life’s a giant lid closing on an eye,” grandiose but also self-diminishing.

“God is famous for punishing” – it’s true!

And of course: “Fools rush in, but they’re the only ones with guts.” Put this on an LED screen in public like a Jenny Holzer aphorism.

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Fernette “Lowlands”

A few weeks ago I went to a show in support of the release of the second issue of the new music magazine Antics, which was booked by the magazine’s co-founder Tatiana Tenreyro. Fernette was the first band on the bill, and when they started playing I was stunned by their distinctive style and presence – it was like seeing Nico sing at a piano bar, but with robot aliens attacking on the periphery – and then I was mesmerized by the songs.

Danyelle Taylor, the singer, has the build and bearing of a 90s fashion model, and a vocal style not far off from Victoria Legrand from Beach House. She seemed intense and emotional, but also aloof and unknowable. She was flanked by Eli Dubois on piano and guitar, which he played both with a casual jazziness, and Rashid Ahmad, who fiddled around with mysterious electronic gear to yield sounds that had the abrasive tones of Autechre but the painterly, poetic quality of Kevin Shields’ guitar in My Bloody Valentine. I’ve heard a lot of things, but I’ve never heard anything quite like this contrast of slick, accomplished, and traditional musicality and total chaos.

The electronic noise aspect of the band is dialed down a bit in the studio recording of “Lowlands,” which was part of the live set. Ahmad’s sounds had a way of cutting through the other musical elements on stage, but in the studio it’s more like a backdrop. His sounds emote as much as Taylor’s voice, if not more so in some moments. The overall effect is odd and profound, like you’re hearing this woman sing out to a glitchy digital ghost that cannot sing back, but can make its presence known.

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Benjamin Booker “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar”

Benjamin Booker’s Lower has a heavy atmosphere and distinctive tonal palette that’s like the musical equivalent of desaturating color to the point that everything’s a bright headache grey. The mix emphasizes sharp textural contrasts, so you get this sort of rough sandpaper sensuality. Booker and producer Kenny Segal’s scuffed-up aesthetic brings out the humanity in the songs, as though they’ve scraped up layers to unearth hidden loveliness and unfiltered feeling.

Booker, who was previously more of a retro soul/blues guy, now sounds like an R&B singer hidden in a thick fog of shoegaze guitar and funky drumming. When that fog lifts a bit, as it does on the gorgeous ballad “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar,” he sounds isolated and vulnerable. And of course, that’s what the song is basically about – a guy stepping out of his comfort zone in an attempt to find what he badly wants, and feeling desperate for someone to truly perceive him. You hear the awkwardness and loneliness in the music, but more so, a feeling that he’s getting closer to the light. He’s almost there!

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Snapped Ankles “Raoul”

After listening to this song twice I knew I had to immediately pass it along to my friend Chris. Chris pretty much only likes music that goes hard. He recently said “my lack of tolerance for music that doesn’t slap will sometimes isolate me” because he had to turn down going to a Waxahatchee show on account of their total inability to slap. Chris loves post-punk, and he loves DFA. He loves synthesizers and songs where you get both the unforgiving lockstep of a drum machine and the physicality of live drums. He loves an intense guy singing, or even better, speak-singing. And yes, he loved this song.

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Thandii “Past”

There is no getting around how much this song sounds like Portishead. Like, it’s the main selling point. I always feel a bit guilty describing an artist’s music in terms of how much it sounds like someone else, but in this case I’m almost certain that “sounding like Portishead” was the goal, from the groove on up to the vocal performance. But here’s the important thing: This is a good Portishead song. If Portishead were to return after many, many years of silence with this song, people would be pretty happy with it. And that’s a pretty high bar to clear!

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The Beach Boys “Do It Again”

“Do It Again” is a Beach Boys single from 1968, at the tail end of the most critically celebrated and commercially successful period of the act’s career. I’ve never gone too deep on The Beach Boys, so even in spite of it being a modest hit that appears on a lot of their greatest hits compilations, I never heard it before a few weeks ago. I encountered it while listening to a recent episode of Andrew Hickey’s A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and the experience of hearing it for the first time was a little profound. It’s not just that “Do It Again” is a great song, but that it feels like a Beach Boys song made to my exact specifications. I have no idea how I avoided this song for so long, but finding it now felt like a miraculous little gift.

“Do It Again” is essentially the result of a post-Pet Sounds/“Good Vibrations” studio wizard version of The Beach Boys self-consciously trying to reconnect with the carefree surf music that was their bread and butter in the first phase of their career. It’s basically the best of both worlds – simple, innocent joy rendered a little bit strange by studio experimentation. (Check out the severe delay effect on the drums!) It’s everything I like about The Beach Boys compressed into a little over 2 minutes – unusual sounds, sweet harmonies, earnest happiness tinged with vague melancholy.

Mike Love’s lyrics are extremely direct and openly nostalgic for aimless days spent at the beach with beautiful girls. I don’t think Love had anything to say besides “Remember how fun that was? Let’s get back together and do it again.” But even if he sounds optimistic, there’s a sense in the music that it may not be so easy to get back, and that recreating happy moments from the past isn’t as satisfying as just finding new happy moments.

The song feels more poignant now, nearly 60 years after its initial release. Sure, people still hang out on the beach in California and there’s plenty of surfers, but Love’s utopian vision of the Southern California coast is particular to the mid 20th century. It’s post-war boom time USA, not too far out from the cultural creation of the teenager. It’s a vision of California as the promised land, a triumphant paradise at the end of Manifest Destiny. It’s kids goofing off at the edge of the continent, looking to the horizon and expecting even more. I think if I could have experienced something like that – a triumph you can feel but don’t think too deeply about to consciously understand – I would only dream of getting back to it too.

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