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Alicia Bridges “I Love the Nightlife (Disco Round)”

“I Love the Nightlife (Disco Round)” is for a lot of obvious reasons associated with disco but the bulk of the song doesn’t quite fit the genre, coming closer in style and tone to an Al Green slow burn R&B number. The verses establish context and stakes for the carefree chorus as Alicia Bridges sings from the perspective of some exhausted woman in a fading relationship who’s sick of all the arguing and appeasing and just wants to have some fun. It’s not a break up song but it’s certainly a song about being on the verge of a break up, particularly as it’s clear that a lot of her hope for going out is meeting someone a lot more exciting. Bridges’ voice swivels from solid Green emulation in the verses to a more flamboyant style on the bridge and chorus, over-annunciating the word “action” as “ACK-SHUNNN!” in a way that’s so gloriously silly it pushes the whole song over into the realm of the sublime.

“I Love the Nightlife” rejects seriousness but is rendered as a sort of emotional realism in which every line carries the weight of a full life experience, a high defined by the lowest lows. Bridges is trying to shake off the tedious details of “this broken romance” but everything she sings is a reaction against it whether she’s resentful of being strung along by someone with “women all over town,” or declaring that she doesn’t just want to give some action – she wants to get some too! The pettiness in the song doesn’t run too deep, it’s more like using dissatisfaction as a starting point for determining what would actually make you feel satisfied. The whole song blooms when the chorus hits, it’s the sound of someone making an active choice to prioritize pleasure and become who they want to be. A lot of disco in the 70s and dance music ever since has been about this promise of escape, but few songs have dramatized it so well with this graceful genre switch-up from verse to chorus.

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Satya “Oakland”

“Oakland” is a fairly tight 3:30 pop song that moves with a very light touch and an unhurried feel, perfectly evoking both a relaxed and natural dynamic with someone and a strong gravitational pull towards them. Satya’s vocal is very low-key in her cadences but there’s a fire in her phrasing, making her sound like someone who feels calm and controlled in the moment but is on the verge of being overwhelmed by passion at any moment. The more rhythmic vocal parts are the hook here but the soul of this is in the melodic nuances – lead guitar parts that move between hesitance and eloquence, a warm bass groove that tightens up for an unexpected bridge, vocal harmonies towards the end that leave the song feeling open-ended. There’s not a lot of tension in this song, but that feeling of “what happens next…” is so potent.

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Flying Lotus featuring Devin Tracy “You Don’t Know”

Devin Tracy sings about unrequited love in “You Don’t Know” as though he’s plagued by intrusive and involuntary thoughts, totally passive to a strong attraction to an indifferent person that may as well be like the moon’s affect on tides. This could easily be an anxious or angry song but he and Flying Lotus convey the feeling with a delicate grace, letting the feeling of love be central to the song rather than the frustration. It certainly gives the listener a sense of why this is so hard to pull away from – there’s a lovely sway and warmth to this music that seems more likely to elevate a person than pull them down.

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Fresh Pepper featuring Dan Bejar “Seahorse Tranquilizer”

The novel conceit of Fresh Pepper’s debut record is that all the songs are in some way set behind the scenes in restaurants. There’s a lot of ways to approach this subject matter in music that would explore the stress and tensions that come up in a restaurant – consider the way the music supervisors of The Bear edited a live recording of Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” into a setpiece depicting a kitchen falling into chaos – but Fresh Pepper instead aim for a lite jazzy vibe so serene and relaxed that it comes across as surreal or sarcastic. A lot of the record feels like an odd dream with a very specific setting, with odd details about “new ways of chopping onions” and “mushrooms in the frying pan” floating by without much context. The aesthetics of this record are heavily indebted to Destroyer’s Kaputt and so Dan Bejar’s presence on “Seahorse Tranquilizer” feels totally natural, maybe even inevitable. Bejar doesn’t quite play along with the album concept but that actually works just fine in the context – he basically sounds like an interesting patron at a fine dining establishment, and the two other voices seem to respond to his presence like servers. They gush to him about how they “harvest insane roses” for the tables, and he seems to humor them while basically lost on his own trip.

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Anna Butterss “Doo Wop”

“Doo Wop” sounds like it’s rather pointedly adjacent to a lot of genres and styles but actually exists in some undefined space between them all, and this strikes me as much a set of interesting musical choices as an expression of displacement. And I want you to know that I arrived at this impression before I learned that Anna Butterss is an Australian who’s been living in the US for a long time! There’s just something about the sort of interstitial limbo she’s conveying here that feels like moving through surroundings that are interesting and pleasant but feeling disconnected on some deep level, as though your body is trying to tell you that you’re not where you belong. Butterss’ bass carries a lot of the feeling here, rumbling through little melodic runs in a way that sounds almost conversational. You can glean some meaning, but it’s like listening to someone speak another language and pulling meaning from the cadences.

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Muna “Solid”

“Solid” has a very ‘80s shoulder pads energy to it, the sort of pop song you might expect to find buried on the second side of a Sheena Easton record. Muna really lean into the aesthetic but stick to a more contemporary type of studio gloss, enough so that a younger listener might not even realize there’s any throwback quality to it at all. The hooks are strong but the lyrics are what make this one – they start by announcing the object of their affection is a woman who refuses to be projected upon, but then spend the rest of the song idealizing her as a superhumanly capable person who’s “using her hands, she’s pulling the levers.” It’s funny but also just really sweet to have this song that’s just like “damn, my girl gets things DONE.”

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Soccer Mommy “With U”

They released four advance singles from the new Soccer Mommy record and somehow none of them was “With U,” a lovesick power ballad that’s by far the most obviously commercial song on the album. Sophie Allison manages a tricky balance here – the song goes as big and sentimental as Taylor Swift in Red mode, but her vocal delivery signals the shyness and insecurity that comes through in most of her songs. In lesser hands that might undermine the sweep of the song, but Allison commits enough that it sounds like someone who’s pushing through their reflexive defensive moves to sing something that feels enormous to them. I like her lyrical angle here too – she’s singing about feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of her feelings in the context of a long term relationship, expressing feelings a lot of people could easily file under “codependent.” But that’s so judgmental, really, and what she’s singing isn’t toxic or anything like that. It’s just being honest that investing that much in anyone is scary, and she doesn’t feel like she wants another option.

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Flasher “Nothing”

“Nothing” hits me hard in two different but not unrelated sweet spots – harmonies that overlap in atypical ways and offer multiple perspectives on the lyrics, and lyrics about actively trying to change who you are and how you perceive yourself and the world. Flasher make the song more complicated as it moves along, starting with a rather straight forward mission of self-improvement before layering in the notion that this guy wants to change to please someone else, and then the passive aggression starts slipping in. By the time the bridge hits the tension boils over – “I’m in the basement, nothing is taking / so if you hate me, why don’t you replace me?” – and the female counterpoint vocal just voices a vague disappointment. The finale of this song is incredible, the sort of thing I find myself rewinding to hear several times in a row. The harmonies pile on as the frustration mounts, and the female voice gets louder and more passionate but still a little distant in the mix. The sound is lovely and cathartic, but the lyrics are just two people crumpling as they face futility – “when it’s all or nothing, you can count on nothing.”

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Sophia Scott “Leather Skirt”

Contemporary country music absorbed the aesthetics of ‘80s mainstream rock some time ago as part of an ongoing cycle of country pulling in sounds once they feel old enough to seem like classic Americana. This manifestation of arena rock can be hit or miss but “Leather Skirt” is definitely in the first category and basically sounds like a woman who’d be objectified in a Def Leppard or Mötley Crüe song deciding to do it herself and make her own rock anthem about how hot she is. There’s a bit of twang in Sophia Scott’s voice to make it scan as “country,” but I think that comes through more in the lyrics which lean on that genre’s conventions of performing femininity with a heavy wink and openly transactional attitude. Scott’s lyrics are straightforward – she’s singing about how great and useful it is to have a good leather skirt, and how she feels wearing it, and what she gets from wearing it. There’s no twist to this, and the endorsement is so strong that it feels like a song that should somehow contain affiliate links to online retailers of leather skirts.

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Jockstrap “Concrete Over Water”

“Concrete Over Water” is a tricky song to write about in as much as a lot of the initial thrill of it is being genuinely surprised by the musical choices made along the way and I’d really rather not spoil that for you. But the arrangement is an ever-shifting thing in which the sections of the song feel like different physical locations, as though we’re following Georgia Ellery’s voice through some elaborate house or varied landscape. Another way of looking at this is that the music responds to her voice, which sticks to a coherent and steady melodic structure and is quite stunning in its natural beauty in a way that’s at odds with some of the more eccentric sounds that pass through the composition. When it comes down to it, this is a case where a band had a very lovely song that could have been played in a normal style but they went a few steps further and made something more strange, beautiful, and theatrical.

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Tim Bernardes “Mistificar”

Tim Bernardes’ string arrangement for “Mistificar” sounds a bit uncanny to me, clearly indebted to lush and melodramatic mid 20th century aesthetics but somehow just off-kilter enough to make it feel deliberately anachronistic in the present moment. This is a song about embracing a sort of magical thinking as an essential part of romance, to let down one’s guard and just be corny and starry-eyed. Bernardes pushes against cynicism in his lyrics here but not so much that he’s trying to bury some part of his nature. It’s more that he’s allowing himself to appreciate things he on some level understands to be an illusion because it’s fun and because it’s part of what brings you to set the foundation for satisfying romantic partnership.

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Doechii “Persuasive”

“Persuasive” is basically a love song about weed, and not even in a “if you really pay attention…” sort of way as the chorus starts “she’s so persuasive, that marijuana.” It sounds like the sort of music that you’d typically pair with lyrics about obsessive lust, though lust is still very much on the table if they’re willing to be a third. The core of the sentiment here is really about someone feeling as though some elements of themselves are being unlocked – sensuality, hedonism, grace – while every bit of anxiety and awkwardness is at least temporarily locked away. And if our hope for romantic love is to find someone who brings out the best in us and mitigates the worst in us, who’s to say this isn’t truly love for Doechii?

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Tchotchke “Don’t Hang Up On Me”

The melodies and structure of “Don’t Hang Up On Me” feel so particular to the 1970s that it can be a bit hard to believe it was actually written and recorded in the recent past. And while that statement can be true of a lot of songs that come out, Tchotchke’s music feels all the more unlikely because the melodic style they’re drawing on feels much more extinct than other strains of ‘70s music that are still prevalent like disco, funk, punk, and hard rock. This comes more from a squeeky-clean but kinda glam 70s power-pop aesthetic where the ultimate aim of any song is to pack as many hooks into two to three minutes as possible. (A good example of what I’m talking about is this wonderful but very obscure mid 70s song “Champagne and the Starline,” which I posted here ages ago.) Even the vocals feel out of time, high pitched and hyper-femme in an arch sort of way, signaling a wink to the listener even as the lyrics confront genuine romantic angst.

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The Range “Ricercar”

“Ricercar” is in essence an elaborate rework of Tamar Braxton’s “My Man” that zeroes in one particularly raw chunk of the song as sung by a fan on Instagram. The Range’s arrangement takes a totally different shape, particularly once he starts layering in breakbeats, but it’s all framing this heartbroken and embittered sentiment. What he does here is a little like when there’s one bit of a song that really gets under your skin and so you rewind to that part over and over. This is like building a shrine to a moment like that, and meshing it thoroughly with your own sound and point and view. It’s a totally new piece of music, but also a work of rather intense fandom.

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Liam Gallagher “Moscow Rules”

I first heard “Moscow Rules” totally aware that the song’s primary author is Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend but even if I went in unaware I find it hard to imagine I wouldn’t have suspected that by the first chorus. Koenig’s melodic style is unmistakable to me even when he’s clearly aiming to emulate Paul McCartney, as he definitely is on this song. And like, if you’re asked to write for Liam Gallagher why wouldn’t you do that? “Moscow Rules” has a generous melody well suited to Liam’s matured voice, but also gives him something to work with that’s notably different from what Noel ever wrote for him even if they’re both inspired by the same muse. Noel certainly never pulled this sort of pathos from Liam’s voice, but it could be that he’s simply grown into being the sort of singer who can believably convey the alienation, paranoia, and abject loneliness of a Cold War era spy. I prefer to hear this as more of a metaphor though, where it’s not literally a spy but rather someone who’s found themselves embracing and internalizing rules like “everyone is potentially under opposition control” and “lull them into a state of complacency.”

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Fontaines D.C. “How Cold Love Is”

Grian Chatten sings the phrase “how cold love is” over a dozen times through this song and every time it feels a little bit brutal, like he’s this exhausted and weary guy telling you a truth you’re not ready to hear and he simply doesn’t have the pity or patience to sugar coat it for you. But it’s clearly more his truth than anyone else’s, as he sounds like someone reciting a mantra to snuff out any lingering fire in his heart. The music feels as stark and unforgiving as Chatten’s vocal, with sorta unremarkable chords played at a slightly odd cadence so it sounds sorta like they’re hammering icicles into the ground. It comes together to sound like something from the late Britpop era pushed to strange angles, making Oasis moves sound more like Joy Division moves.

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Automatic “Skyscraper”

There’s a line from Richard Linklater’s Slacker derived from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies that was made more famous by R.E.M. when Michael Stipe worked it into the hit “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”: “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.” That feels very relevant to Automatic, particularly in this song in which Izzy Glaudini’s deadpan vocal and cold observation of the wealthy sounds like she’s withdrawing in disgust in real time. The focus in “Skyscraper” is on the way the extremely wealthy put a distance between themselves and the underclasses as an escape from reality, but it’s a precarious situation – if things go wrong, it’s a much steeper fall. Glaudini zeroes in on this fear of failure and the way it becomes a prison that can spoil the aspiration to ascend above the rest. In the climax of the song, the one part of the song that’s a little more harmonically rich than the stark skeletal sound of the rest of the track, she perks up the melody just to reach a bleak conclusion: “You’re lost in the fog, your skin fits so tight now you can’t move it all.”

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Grace Ives “Lazy Day”

Grace Ives’ track for “Lazy Day” sounds urbane and sophisticated in a distinctly mid to late ‘90s way, like the sort of music you’d imagine for a hip but upscale bar in that era. But it’s not a total match as the implied scale of the music feels more small and private, and the sentiment is closer to what we’d call “self care” today. Ives is singing with a lot of self-awareness about being stuck in a cycle – “I got addicted to the hurt, then the healing” – and the song seems to exist in the healing part of all that. She’s just trying to chill out and enjoy herself, to feel comfortable in her body. Every emphasis in this song is on taking every little bit of pleasure available, and as the song moves towards its conclusion she sounds low-key ecstatic and then mildly contented.

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Phoenix “Alpha Zulu”

“Alpha Zulu” is a terrific comeback single for Phoenix in the sense that it sounds like a hyper-concentrated version of their aesthetic – the quintessence of the band delivered with exacting efficiency to make anyone who likes them at all go “oh yeah, Phoenix, I like them.” They’ve always been precise technicians of pop and this song delivers a sequence of hooks in well-timed intervals, most likely the result of a careful editing processing but in practice a smooth conveyor belt of catchy moments that build up to one of their finest choruses. The biggest hook is in the lead up though, that rhythmic chunk where Thomas Mars is almost like a Gallic Busta Rhymes with his “woo ha, singing Hallelujah.” He’s singing about preparing for catastrophe there; the rest of the song is more cryptic and full of imagery – “your Mona Lisa immortalized, décapitée,” “I must have died at 51 in 1953,” “a hologram waiting for the tie-break.” As with most of Mars’ lyrics from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix onward there’s always a sense that he’s writing in code, little things that he and maybe his wife will get, but there’s always the alternate explanation of this just coming from a playful use of English when it’s his second language.

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Wilco “Mystery Binds”

Wilco’s Cruel Country is a gift to long-suffering Wilco fans who desperately wanted Jeff Tweedy to get back to making warm country rock records like AM and Being There again. I like but don’t love those records so of course I zero in on the outlier – “Mystery Binds,” a moody and more electric number more in line with the stark and aloof vibes of more recent Wilco records. The song moves like it’s trying to sneak out of a house, a soft chug that leads up to an elegant and vaguely familiar lead guitar hook played by Nels Cline. Tweedy’s lyrics seem to approach misery as a shared experience, like some kind of Jungian collective unconscious, but love as a more solitary thing. It seems true in as much as the person telling you this seems to pass on his sorrows freely, but clings jealously to love like he can’t risk sharing it and thus can’t receive new love. This music feels a bit cursed, but it’s rather lovely.

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