October 15th, 2024 8:34pm
BigXthaPlug is one of those guys blessed with a perfect voice for rapping. This can go a few different ways, but in his case, he’s got that Biggie Smalls/Tupac/Killer Mike type of BOOMING voice that signals grit and authority. There’s a sorrow in his voice too, some wounds you can hear through the bravado. “Lost the Love” is essentially a list of grievances – people who have wronged him, people he’s judging, people who’ve disappointed him, people who aren’t showing him enough love. Sometimes this sort of thing is all a big flex, a way to position your greatness, but BigX sounds bitter and frustrated. Sure, there’s some parts where he sounds grateful or humble, but the last line is a matter-of-fact bottom line for the whole song: “Rapping my pain, this is the shit y’all wanted.”
October 14th, 2024 8:31pm
Radiohead album?” and “hold on, so is this basically Radiohead from now on?” But what can you do? Those are big questions for anyone who’d want to listen to this music, and as of The Smile’s third album, the answers seem to be “who knows?” and “kinda, yeah.” You kinda have to work through a few layers of confusion and disappointment to hear the music on its own terms.
As I’ve written before, it’s clear to me that a lot of the appeal of The Smile for Thom Yorke and especially Jonny Greenwood is in getting to indulge in formal experiments without the weight of Radiohead expectations bearing down on them. At the start, it was a way for Thom and Jonny to explore playing bass guitar without having to sideline or reassign Jonny’s own brother Colin. Now it’s Jonny playing around with the possibilities of playing guitar only with a delay pedal. Like a lot of artists, particularly lifelong artists, they’re enjoying self-imposed limitations.
And then there’s the most obvious difference between The Smile and Radiohead – “small teams move more quickly,” as Jonny recently put it speaking to the NME. They can work fast, and they don’t have to mobilize as many forces to release a record or do a tour. Radiohead is a barge, The Smile is a speedboat. If you’re looking at this from the perspective of now grizzled veteran musicians who don’t necessarily need a lot of money, which setup do you think is more enticing?
But still, the context is the context, and the success of The Smile songs come down to “is this up to the standards of Radiohead song, as opposed to solo record quality?” I’d say the trio’s output is about half and half, and “The Slip” is in the “good enough to be Radiohead” bucket. It’s a pretty groovy one, and though it starts out in Thom Yorke synth-centric solo project mode, it ends up moving towards a more Jonny-centric guitar section that feels like a cousin to “Just.”
A lot of the appeal is just hearing Thom be so Thom and Jonny be so Jonny, and how their instincts overlap or gel. This is kinda how it goes when you follow artists for a long time – even if some of the songs are exceptionally good, I’m not coming to this expecting to have my mind blown. I just want to check in with these guys on their journey.
October 11th, 2024 12:14am
My friend Molly passed this along to me, telling me “this feels Matthew-core.” And she’s right, this is exactly the kind of song I’ve been looking out for on this site for over 20 years. Let’s go down the checklist – catchy but abrasive, big heavy beats, random bits of noise, a playful but aloof vocal by some ultra-cool girl, the kind of dance music that’s actually better for walking. The lyrics split the difference between a musical theater “I want” song and the timeless “let me tell you how cool I am” type of song. One of the main hooks is just spelling out the name of their band, which makes them part of a tradition that also includes T. Rex and Pixies. It’s cool stuff. I like hearing cool songs like this. Molly is right.
October 10th, 2024 1:57am
I love Matthew Friedberger’s endless delight in reinterpreting his songs. It seems like for him it’s mostly a formal game, but I think it’s also kind of a flex in showing off the strength and versatility of his melodies and musical motifs. The new Fiery Furnaces album Stuck In My Head is essentially a live-in-studio recording of the band’s 2021 reunion tour show in which everything was arranged for an array of keyboards, bass guitar, drums, and only Eleanor Friedberger on vocals. The Furnaces’ music generally focused more on keyboard than guitar, but the set includes a few very guitar-centric songs like “Chris Michaels” and “Don’t Dance Her Down” reworked for keyboards without losing their shape or energy. The more keyboard-based songs go through more tonal shifts, or in the case of “Quay Cur,” get boiled down to their essence. The “Quay Cur” on Blueberry Boat is a maximalist epic, this version is truncated and pared down, with the parts where Matthew would sing replaced with chaotic instrumental sections. The song still feels huge and dramatic, but far more direct and blunt. I particularly like the shift towards a groovier sound on the Inuit section, and the way they bring in a keyboard motif from “Lost At Sea” at the end, which on the record segues into another part of “Lost At Sea” anchoring the verses of “Tropical Iceland.” The mash-up works perfectly on a musical level, but it’s also a clever little joke – the character in “Quay Cur” is indeed lost at sea.
October 7th, 2024 7:34pm
Congratulations to former Black Midi member Geordie Greep for writing the most Steely Dan-ish lyrics I’ve ever heard outside of anything Walter Becker and Donald Fagen actually made themselves. The Dan-ness carries over to the vocal melody and cadence, but the arrangement mixes in some aggro-prog flavor along with the suave Latin percussion to keep it firmly in Greep’s established lane. The lyrical conceit is brilliant – the first half of the song you’re hearing some freak narrate an encounter with a woman at a bar, making himself out to be some kind of international big shot Lothario, and the second half you’re listening to him set up that meeting in detail with a sex worker. He’s not interested in sex at all, he just needs people in that bar to see him as important and sexy. Greep’s grand but twitchy voice is uniquely suited to this concept, grandiose enough to sell the over-the-top pomposity but anxious and desperate enough to make you first notice that something’s off about this character and then make the leap into full-on comedy in the second half. He sounds so sweaty and skeevy and hilariously pathetic. It’s like when a character actor creates the perfect role for themselves.
“Please Call to Book” is a song that Trish Keenan wrote and recorded on her own as part of some fan contest built around fans sending in lyric ideas on postcards circa 2006, and it was found by her collaborator James Cargill after she passed away in 2011. I don’t recall this contest happening or if any songs from it were officially released, but it’s amazing to me that she’d keep something as good as this on the shelf. It’s a very simple acoustic ballad but I actually hear a lot of Paul McCartney in Keenan’s melody here, so it comes across like a spooky yet sweet cross between English folk and early Beatles. As with most of the material on the two recent Broadcast demo compilations, the recording highlights how extraordinary Keenan was a musician on her own, and while it’s a blessing to get to hear some “new” Broadcast songs, it just makes losing her so young hurt a little more.
October 4th, 2024 9:30pm
I love the simple little trick Kate Bollinger pulls off in this song – singing near the bottom of her register in the verses, and at the top of it on the choruses. It’s not heavy-handed at all and it took me a little while to even really notice, but it’s very effective in marking the broader contrast between those two sections. In the verses, which chug along on a relaxed rhythm guitar part, she’s addressing her friends and assuring them “I think about you more than I’m showing.” The chorus is extremely airy, and feels like she’s rising up into the heavens. Her lyrical perspective shifts, she’s not grounded at all, but she’s experiencing something from on high. Pretty good metaphor for the experience of a fairly normal young person who’s suddenly pulled into a life of touring and minor stardom, right?
“Angel Blessings” is pretty firmly rooted in alt-rock and shoe gaze genre conventions, so it’s more cozy and familiar than musically interesting. (Which is fine, you don’t always need to be original to be good.) But there is something intriguing going on here – oblique lyrical references to living in squalor, fraught sexuality, obscure mysticism, and some lines that suggest drug addiction with some degree of plausible deniability. You can connect the dots a lot of different ways, but the main feeling I get from this song is someone so overcome by desire and need that it’s become a little disgusting to them.
October 2nd, 2024 7:15pm
The Army, The Navy are a folk duo with the same basic set up as Simon & Garfunkel – two singers, one guitar. The interesting thing with them, most especially on “BBIDGI,” is how their melodies and vocal harmonies are much closer in style and tone to mid 90s through mid 00s R&B than typical folk. It’s a little like if an R&B girl group did an unplugged record, right on down to the lyrics about being flummoxed by a very confusing sexual relationship. I hear this as like a reversed version of Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo’s classic “Nothing Even Matters,” which has a somewhat similar melody – instead of two people with such intense intimacy the world disappears around them, this is one woman trying to understand why her connection and intimacy with someone seems to come and go inexplicably. Even with the harmony vocal, she sounds so cut off and alone but so eager to get to where Hill and D’Angelo are in that song.
September 23rd, 2024 10:11pm
Thandii are funk minimalists in the tradition of ESG and Liquid Liquid, though I think their grooves come out feeling less tightly wound and neurotic. “It Only Takes 2” in particular strikes me as being like if Swim-era Caribou made an 80s freestyle song. The stark arrangement keeps your ear focused on the most functional elements of the groove, but it also implies a sweaty, close-counters intimacy that amps up the lust and eroticism at the core of the song.
There are some things that just sound extremely cool, and I’m not sure if trying to describe or explain it would do anything to help my – or anyone else’s – experience with the music. Sometimes you just have to let the cool, mysterious sounds be cool, mysterious sounds that move your body and your mind and not ask a lot of questions. A sufficiently advanced groove is indistinguishable from magic. I could be talking about most anything in “Shitaake,” really, but the part that gets me going comes in almost right away, about seven seconds in. Just put that on.
I don’t know much about this Louis Fontaine record except for that he’s playing every instrument on the track and every song on the album is “inspired by childhood culinary experiences.” I have no idea what his specific childhood experience of chocolate mousse might have been like, but I can hear how this instrumental signals something sweet, rich, refined, and vaguely campy. There’s something a bit childlike about the brighter piano notes and staccato chords that carry the verses, and there’s something distinctly fudgy about the bass tone. I feel like I’m at least halfway towards parsing Fontaine’s synesthesia.
September 20th, 2024 6:19pm
“Avalon” is a song about wanting to be somewhere else. You can go a few different directions with that idea – like, you could focus on conveying discomfort, dissatisfaction, a burning desire to get out of your current setting. The R&B duo Bathe opted for evoking the place they’d rather be. The music is calm, the vibe is positive, the mood is romantic. They’re setting intentions, they’re visualizing a better way of living. There’s still a bit of tension where can hear how the song is tethered to reality, but the beauty of the song is in how they focus on desire.
The Colombian trio Balthvs draw on pretty much the same pool of eclectic international influences as the American trio Khruangbin, to the point that a lot of their music could pass as Khruangbin. But of course, most Khruangbin music sounds just like recordings by artists scattered around the globe who aren’t nearly popular enough to play amphitheaters, so is it actually fair to say they sound alike? I think it’s fair to say they’re fellow travelers, and the success of Khruangbin has opened some doors, which is unambiguously positive for vibey groovy musicians around the world. In any case, “Like Coconut Water” is an especially lovely and relaxing piece of music with a gorgeous reverb-heavy guitar tone. There are some words sung in a gentle voice, but they’re very much lyrics in the “subtitles for the music” vein – images of flowers, fruit, perfect summer days.
September 20th, 2024 2:55am
The keyboard and percussion parts the verses of “Biking” are so soft and subtle that it sounds like they’re nervously and very carefully tip-toeing around the vocal. This suits the lyrics perfectly, as Daniela Andrade is essentially confessing that she’s in love. She’s addressing the “you” that she’s fallen for, but I think a lot of the lines are really about her processing the emotions and being honest with herself. She pushes back against the parts of herself that might be skeptical or embarrassed – “it sounds so needy, but yes, I need you” – and admits that being terrified about this relationship actually feels good somehow. Andrade allows the fear and the elation to sharply contrast but also swirl together and blur as the song moves along. It ends up sounding more lovely than angst-ridden once you reach the ending, which is what you’d hope for in a situation like this.
September 17th, 2024 7:33pm
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.
September 9th, 2024 9:11pm
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.
September 8th, 2024 9:54pm
“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.
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.”
September 6th, 2024 2:28pm
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.
September 5th, 2024 9:09pm
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.
September 4th, 2024 7:37pm
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.
August 29th, 2024 8:57pm
“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.
August 27th, 2024 8:52pm
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.”
August 26th, 2024 8:38pm
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.
August 23rd, 2024 2:15am
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
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.
