Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks “Strange Colores”

I love how any time Avey Tare goes into a project thinking that he’s going to simplify things, the result is never actually simple, but just a version of what he does that’s shifted slightly in a different direction from what he’s done before. His Slasher Flicks material benefits from collaborating with new people – Jeremy Hyman is certainly a better drummer than Panda Bear, and Angel Deradoorian’s bass and harmony parts depart from the usual framing of his melodies and rhythms – but ultimately, you could play any of these songs for someone and they’d think it was a new Animal Collective album.

I think of Enter the Slasher House as a refinement of the musical ideas Avey was working through on Centipede Hz. Both are pretty direct and emphasize a “live band” dynamic, but the Slasher Flicks material successfully cuts out the overstuffed midrange frequencies that made Centipede Hz feel so cluttered and disorienting. This isn’t to say that there’s a LOT of space in these new songs, but enough to have room for melodic bass lines and silences that give definition to bursts of sound. “Strange Colores,” my favorite, isn’t “simple” by any stretch, but it does feel blunt and focused, so the bright melodies and thumping beat makes the song feel as joyful as it ought to be. I think that if this one was on Centipede, it’d be just as good as a song, but would’ve probably had a bit more sound getting in the way of those elemental things.

Buy it from Amazon.

Miley Cyrus @ Barclays Center 4/5/2014
SMS (Bangerz) / 4×4 / Love Money Party / My Darlin’ / Maybe You’re Right / FU / Do My Thang / #GETITRIGHT / Can’t Be Tamed / Adore You / Drive / Rooting for My Baby / You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go / Summertime Sadness / The Scientist / Jolene / 23 / On My Own / Someone Else // We Can’t Stop / Wrecking Ball /// Party in the USA

What the hell do I say about this? I feel like in a lot of ways you’re better off looking through my Instagram to get a sense of what it was like to see this show. It’s thoroughly brilliant on a visual level – in some ways very Tumblr and in other ways very Tim & Eric, and far more indebted to the work of Jeff Koons than anything Lady Gaga has ever done. It’s overwhelming, surreal and ridiculously fun, but also very emotional. Cyrus has a fantastic voice and is an extremely charismatic performer, and knows how to dial back the spectacle and do justice to the ballads in her set. The only song in the set that had no major visual component was “Wrecking Ball” because why the hell would you get in the way of that song, or specifically that chorus?

I figure that a majority of the people who are going to see Miley Cyrus on this tour have never been to a concert before. This is such an amazing first concert experience to have, but it sets up such unreasonable expectations of other shows, both in terms of glorious bizarre spectacle, and the intense enthusiasm of the audience. I’ve seen quite a lot of stuff over the years, and honestly, this was second only to Nine Inch Nails’ Tension and Lights in the Sky shows in terms of being a complete work of art, both in terms of musical performance and visual design. I’m going to be thinking about this show for a long time.

Miley Cyrus “Do My Thang”

The last time I wrote about Miley here I had to literally flip a coin to decide whether I was going to write about “My Darlin'” or “Do My Thang,” which are my two favorite songs in her catalog. “My Darlin'” won, and I wrote about how thoroughly heartbreaking it is. But “Do My Thang” is easily in the highest echelon of my favorite recent songs; I have listened to it a fairly ridiculous number of times over the past seven or eight months. I think of this song as being the essence of Bangerz-era Miley – in terms of genre, it’s bouncing all over the place and shouldn’t work on a structural level, but yet it does. (The concert arrangement brings bluegrass into the equation to make it even more dizzying.) I really love her voice on the rapped parts – she’s very good with expressive inflection and brings a LOT of character to rhymes that would otherwise be kinda meh. I wish I knew how many times I’ve rewinded to hear her do that “I’m a southern belle, crazier than hell” part over and over. It’s a high number.

But as with a lot of Miley’s music, the bonkers stuff sits side by side with some very intense emotion. This song turns on a dime to big, belty balladry, and at least half the time sounds like Adele if she had a “bad bitch” mode. The beauty of what Miley is doing right now lies in how well she fuses irony with raw, earnest emotion, to the point that it often seems like there’s no fusing at all. It all just exists in the same continuum and nothing contradicts anything. Silly enthusiasms, sexual displays, romantic yearning – it all overlaps here, just as it does in our lives.

Buy it from Amazon.

EMA “So Blonde”

This song is meant to be about the commercialized image of the “sexy blonde,” but if I hear it, I only have one blonde in mind. There’s just no way I’m not going to like a song that sounds like flawlessly executed fanfic about Celebrity Skin-era Hole. Courtney was on more or less the same topic at that time too – the idea of Los Angeles and the way Hollywood creates people in its image that it can chew and spit out – but I think she did it with a greater sense of stakes. EMA’s music is certainly passionate and emotional, but the songs often feel aloof and judgmental, whereas Courtney was a lot more interested in diving headfirst into things that a lot of artists today would just dismiss as “problematic.” But there’s a pretty big difference between talking about a complicated idea from within it and observing it from a distance. And that’s not to say EMA’s perspective isn’t valuable – a lot of the song (and the video) is about the way we passively absorb signifiers from culture – but it’s a lot less urgent and emotionally powerful.

Buy it from Amazon.

White Hinterland “Sickle No Sword”

I interviewed Casey Dienel for a piece about White Hinterland I’m writing for BuzzFeed yesterday, and she mentioned that one of the things that pushed her towards singing in a loud, emphatic R&B/gospel style was an experience where she sorta reluctantly sang a Beyoncé song at a karaoke party and totally nailed it. She used to sing more like this when she was younger, but had strayed from it out of embarrassment or a need to express a different sort of feeling, but it felt good to her, and physically comfortable. You can really hear that in “Sickle No Sword” – her earlier work was more restrained, but this sounds like a person who is completely at ease with themselves and not afraid to really belt it out. I think one of the reasons this style of singing endures and connects with so many people is that there’s just no way to hedge on emotion – you can’t go halfway with this, and you can’t put up a wall between yourself and the listener. It’s not simply about a display of technical prowess, though that’s in the mix. You hear a song like this – or a song by Beyoncé, or Aretha Franklin, or Otis Redding, or whoever – and you’re listening to someone be brave in their expression. I think we’d all like to be that way, or at least experience it vicariously.

Buy it from Amazon.

U2 “Invisible”

“Invisible” seemed like the beginning of a new album cycle for U2 – it debuted in a Super Bowl ad and was performed on the first episode of Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show – but now it seems more like a very expensive false start. Not long after “Invisible” came out they announced that their next record wouldn’t be out til 2015, though it was widely assumed to come out in April of this year. It’s unclear whether “Invisible” will appear on their next album in some form, or if it’s just a stand alone single in their discography.

U2 have ostensibly been writing and recording their 13th studio album on and off since 2009, but they seem particularly insecure and indecisive about what the record should be. Their creative process for the majority of their career has been to write in the studio and endlessly revise material until it feels right, or they’re literally forced to stop working and put something out so they can go on tour. Given that this method has birthed the majority of their best work, it’s hard to argue with results. But it’s not a very disciplined way of working, and this extended gestation for the new record is evidence that they probably should figure out a new way of doing things.

It likely would not take so long for them if they weren’t so paralyzed by the desire to write a few surefire mega-hits. I’m sure there is some pressure on them from their label et al, but it can’t possibly be as much as the pressure they put on themselves. I really admire that U2 want to be a relevant force in pop culture, and I think this drive kept them big after a lot of their peers – R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode – completely gave up on having big hits to play to their cult and follow their muses. But the reality is that U2 haven’t had a major hit since “Vertigo” in 2004, and ten years later there isn’t much of a space for them in mainstream culture. They can’t get on pop radio, and rock radio – the thing they need most to score a real hit – basically shrugged off “Invisible” in favor of younger acts like Bastille, Imagine Dragons, Passenger, and Lorde.

U2’s previous album, No Line on the Horizon, sold over a million copies in the United States alone, which shows that the band can sell a LOT of records to their faithful core audience even if they have no hits. It’s safe to say that whatever they put out next will sell about the same. And frankly, they should be happy with that. In this day and age, any record that can sell a million copies is a minor miracle. And let’s be really really real: Everyone knows that a U2 record is just a peg for an extraordinarily lucrative world tour that will sell regardless of whether they have new material or not. U2 are understandably afraid of being a nostalgia act, but they really need to be at peace with the reality that most of the audience thinks of them that way no matter what they do, and realize that this situation gives them license to be as weird and indulgent as they want to be with their new music.

“Invisible” is a pretty good U2 song, but it’s very obviously the sound of a band hedging their bets and desperately hoping that being familiar is enough to inspire excitement in their audience. This strategy paid off in 2000 when they released “Beautiful Day” after a decade of fairly arty material, but it makes no sense now. If they’re going to recycle a strategy from their past, it has to be the Achtung Baby gamble. They need to make a record that sounds distinct and uncompromising. It has to be something that sounds like them being “hey, we’re all over 50 and we’ve got tons of hits and we don’t give a fuck anymore, we’re gonna do whatever we want.” Ideally, it should be something that allows The Edge to truly cut loose and remind people that he’s one of the most inventive and influential guitarists of his generation. This is what would excite their base and attract the interest of lapsed fans and younger people who may have never taken them seriously. They need to stop sounding desperate for approval, it is very unattractive. No one wants to hear the musical equivalent of a combover.

Buy it from iTunes and your money will be donated to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS.

Kylie Minogue “Sexy Love”

“Sexy Love” is such a Kylie Minogue song that when I first heard it, I thought she was literally recycling a riff from two albums ago. It’s hard to imagine anyone else performing this song, and the rest of the tracks on Kiss Me Once feel about the same – wheelhouse Kylie, with little variation and no surprises. This is good in that even if she’s working with a few dozen writers and producers, she has a very defined aesthetic, but it’s kinda bad in that I really like Kylie but find the record to be sort of a dull listen as a whole. It all just feels like something I’ve heard before, but not as compelling. “Sexy Love” is good enough to stand out as a quality pop tune, but it doesn’t quite stand up to stuff like “Wow,” “Love At First Sight,” and “Sweet Music” even if it has a lot of superficial similarities. I don’t think I’d really want Kylie to make an effort to sound un-Kylie, but I suppose I’d at least like the tonality of the track to not feel so familiar. Even just some subtle textural difference would go a long way towards making this feel like 2014 instead of 2003.

Buy it from Amazon.

Pixies “Greens and Blues”

On some levels, it is disappointing or even upsetting that there’s new Pixies music at all. They had a small, unimpeachable catalog and a very clean creative arc and career narrative, and that sort of thing strongly appeals to the OCD nature of fans and critics. It’s nice for things to start and end. It’s nice to not dilute “the brand” with weak material.

But the Pixies are actual human beings who are working musicians, and they’ve got to pay bills just like the rest of us. If you look at the situation objectively, they didn’t really have a choice. The market has made it abundantly clear to Black Francis that lots and lots of people are eager to pay to see Pixies shows, but not so much Frank Black shows. People are even less interested in new Frank Black records. It’s safe to say that David Lovering and Joey Santiago don’t have a better gig lined up. Kim Deal left because she did have another option, but that other gig is basically just going on a really long reunion tour with The Breeders where she just plays their most popular records in full. (If you think that is in any way cooler than actually making new music, please reconsider your priorities.) So if the Pixies have to keep touring indefinitely, they needed to make new music or lose all dignity by just playing the same set over and over again for the rest of their lives. If Black Francis was going to write any new songs, they’d have to be Pixies songs. And here we are.

The songs on the three Pixies EPs that have been released in the past few months aren’t nearly as awful as you may have heard. For the most part, the songs are just OK or actually pretty good if you’re not grading them against classic Pixies material, i.e., some of the greatest rock songs ever recorded. Only one of them, “Indie Cindy,” is actively embarrassing. The rest is the work of a songwriter who is past his prime but still knows how to write a decent song, and is deliberately working in mode that evokes the sound of his glory days. The new Pixies songs are very much Pixies songs, and really, the only key element of that band’s aesthetic that he’s not working with here is Kim Deal’s backing vocals. But really, Kim’s voice is barely on Trompe Le Monde, so this material is really just picking up where they’d left off.

The absence of Deal’s voice isn’t catastrophic, but it strays from something that made Pixies extremely compelling – the implied sexual tension between this nerdy, aggressive dude and this smiling, distant woman. This is what makes Doolittle such a perfect and unique rock album – on top of the melodies and dynamics, the songs just dig into this odd psychodrama about lust, body horror, and self-loathing. That tension isn’t in the new Pixies music, and it’s not really replaced with anything else. It’s mostly just music for music’s sake.

The two best songs from the EPs are “Blue Eyed Hexe,” which is the most loud and aggressive track, and “Greens and Blues,” a ballad that Black Francis has said was in some ways intended to replace “Gigantic” in the band’s setlist now that Kim has left the band. There is a superficial similarity between “Greens and Blues” and “Gigantic” – similar bass line, it rises and falls in about the same way – but it has a very different mood. It’s more melancholy, it’s less bold. It’s a very well made song, and feels very “Pixies” while feeling like something that he might not have written back then. As far as I can tell, it’s about meeting some kind of mer-creature or an alien, but it still feels like it’s coming from a more adult place than a lot of the classic Pixies songs. It really captures a feeling of not really belonging to the world, but sorta wishing that you were.

Buy it from Amazon.

The War On Drugs “An Ocean in Between the Waves”

I don’t drive and I’m not in cars very often anymore, so I haven’t really had a chance to hear this song in ideal conditions. This is such a car song – it’s all forward momentum and lateral progression and restrained longing, like someone found a way to fuse Bob Dylan and Dire Straits to Neu! and Kraftwerk. The only other thing quite like this is Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” but that’s a lot more dramatic and gritty. This is remarkably clean smooth, to the point that it’s actually sorta surprising that a record like this is getting embraced by indie rock people. But indie people are typically major introverts, and boy is this ever a song you can just recede into and shut out the world as it goes right by you.

Buy it from Amazon.

Liars “Mess On A Mission”

A funny thing about Liars is that while they are notable for changing their sound a lot from record to record, the structure of the songs themselves don’t change that much. They have very particular and identifiable melodies, rhythms, and cadences that they come back to over and over. This isn’t a bad thing at all – if anything, I really like those sounds, and enjoy the ways they keep finding ways to make them seem fresh. (They’re a lot like Clinic in this way.) “Mess On A Mission” is SUCH a Liars song, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel quite like anything else they’ve done. All the parts that might have come out very harsh or murky on previous Liars records are rendered very bright and bouncy on this track, which gives the song a very odd sort of intensity. It’s intentionally schizoid – the lyrics are all about false pretenses and separating fact from fiction, it’s all very confused – and the sound of it really puts you in the mind of someone who’s on edge and unsure of everything around them.

Buy it from Amazon.

2NE1 “멘붕 MTBD”

As a person who is only fluent in one language, I am always fascinated by songs that switch languages on a dime. This is very common in K-Pop, and it’s part of what makes that genre feel a bit surreal for English speakers, because you’re constantly tilting from a language that doesn’t register to moments that feel like completely “normal” Western pop music. I’m always curious why the English parts are in English – is it so people like me can get clued into what the song’s about, or is it so they can get away with saying things that maybe wouldn’t go over so well in Korean? Is it purely about the sounds of the words? Is it about directly mimicking Western influences? There’s some English scattered through CL’s rapped verses here, but the English part that really stands out is the end – “How beautiful is this life? / How painful is this life?” Is that sentiment just something that sounds more sad and pretty in English?

Buy it from Amazon.

Saint Pepsi “Mr. Wonderful”

Saint Pepsi’s music always feels shiny and optimistic, like it’s coming to us from some other world that’s just far more chill than the one we’re in. I think you can definitely take this music at face value and embrace that relaxed, cheerful vibe, but the name “Saint Pepsi” suggests that there’s a bit of irony to it all, and it’s meant to evoke the idealized version of reality in advertising. And if that’s true, it doesn’t even have to be a critique of advertising – in a way, it’s more pointed if it’s just a reflection of a cultural desire to live in a perfect, comfortable, sexy world. You put on a Saint Pepsi track and you’re halfway there.

Buy it from Saint Pepsi’s Bandcamp page.

Skrillex with Diplo featuring G-Dragon and CL “Dirty Love”

“Dirty Vibe” delivers on the promise of its components – frantic Diplo club beats, the maniacal energy of Skrillex, and skewed K-Pop rapping from G-Dragon and CL. It is wonderful and hyperactive to the extreme, and it’s basically a club rap track that is moving so fast it feels like it might collapse or disintegrate at any moment. I’m particularly interested in G-Dragon and CL’s performances here – as far as I’m aware, this is the first time they’ve rapped entirely in English specifically for an Anglo audience. Both of them sound great, but rapping in English makes it easier to hear just how much they rely on pastiche, or their interpretation of what American rap sounds like to their ears. G-Dragon can’t help but seem like a weirdo even with this handicap, but CL ends up sounding a LOT like late ’90s Lil Kim. But that’s also totally awesome? I’d really like for both of them to play around with this more; I’d particularly like G-Dragon to become a name in the US if just because we need more flamboyant dandy pop stars.

Buy it from Amazon.

Coldplay “Magic”

The interesting thing about Coldplay’s new songs isn’t so much that they’ve moved away from their “U2 Jr.” style so much as dropping that earnest arena rock vibe has revealed the core of their music since day one: They excel at writing romantic songs. Chris Martin is all about passionate Hollywood-style romance, and while that can be cheesy, he knows exactly how to make an audience swoooooooon and does it without any shame. “Magic” is a lot more stark and restrained than a typical Coldplay song, but it’s a heart melter, and approaches a very adult sort of love and commitment without making it seem at all dull or unsexy. Martin seems very confident here – not in a swaggering way, but in a “this is who I am and I’m happy with that” way. He also sounds like a guy who has written enough arena-sized hits that he doesn’t really need to write more of them.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Lydia Loveless “To Love Somebody”

I really don’t mean to diminish Lydia Loveless as a singer or as an artist, but it’s almost impossible for me to listen to her new record without thinking “wow, this sounds exactly like if Stevie Nicks made an alt-country album.” The vocal similarity is striking, though she sings with a force that comes a bit closer to Neko Case or Miranda Lambert. This is all a very, very good thing, obviously – Loveless’ performances are full of emotion and grit, and even if her voice resembles more famous singers, she comes off as a very vibrant and dynamic person. “To Love Somebody” leans more to the rock side of “country rock” with that big chunky riff at the center of it, but Loveless’ voice bridges the gap – brassy, but incredibly plaintive.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bart Davenport “Dust in the Circuits”

Bart Davenport is something unexpected: An expert soft-rock craftsman who basically sounds like a version of Morrissey who opted to sell out circa 1985 to tone down his general vibe and pander to lite FM radio. Maybe that sounds a bit mean, but this aesthetic totally works – you get a very Smiths-like melodic and lyrical sensibility, but it’s all filtered through this clean, relentlessly pleasant production style. “Dust in the Circuits” is a song about romantic frustration built upon an elaborate and somewhat corny set of computer metaphors – “always out of the loop, never mind the network” – but it’s all very charming and sweet. This is very proudly dorky music, but it’s also gently subversive, with Davenport always finding small ways to add a thought or turn of phrase that seems to be at odds with the innocuous style he’s embraced.

Buy it from Amazon.

Schoolboy Q “Los Awesome”

I love the way Schoolboy Q’s chorus seems to bounce off Pharrell’s track like it’s a trampoline – even the down beats sound like they’re up in the air. The synth tone is fantastic too: just fuzzy enough to seem a little jagged and abrasive, but still clean and precise enough to have that classic Neptunes feel to it. “Los Awesome” isn’t that intriguing on a lyrical level – it’s a pretty basic ode to gang banging – but Q’s one of those rappers who makes every syllable sound exciting, so this track is really all about an overwhelming and energetic sound. It’s very hard to resist.

Buy it from Amazon.

Wild Beasts “A Simple Beautiful Truth”

Wild Beasts’s fourth album Present Tense is a lateral progression from where they were on their previous record, Smother: They’re still exploring this slow, atmospheric, sensual aesthetic, and if anything, they’ve only become slower, more atmospheric, and more sensual. They’ve filed off their rough edges, so the music can seem a bit tepid at first, though Hayden Thorpe in particular can’t help but throw in some peculiar lyrics and vocal tics when he sings lead. On the whole, I don’t feel as engaged by this record as I have by the band’s more eccentric and energetic earlier work, but it’s certainly effective and intriguing on its own terms. This is band obsessed with exploring the vulnerable side of male sexuality, so it makes sense that they would take this sort of musical turn. I particularly like “A Simple Beautiful Truth” – it’s rather brief and relatively up-tempo, and the chorus contrasts the roguish tone of Thorpe with the more heroic tone of Tom Fleming as they sing about how you can only find true love by confronting fear.

Buy it from Amazon.

Real Estate “Had To Hear”

Real Estate didn’t change that much on their third album, but their music has come into a sharper focus: Suddenly the vocals are as crisp and assured as the clean, Peter Buck-ish guitar parts, and the lyrics articulate specific thoughts and feelings the band had previously let the music carry on its own. Martin Courtney’s lyrics are simple and direct, but leave a good amount of room for ambiguity. He always seems a bit ambivalent – about what’s going on in his life, where he is, how he feels. The in-between-ness suits Real Estate well; this is music for the times in your life where things basically seem ok but you’re confused by either feeling too much of some ill-defined emotion, or freaking out because you’re searching for a feeling and nothing seems to be there.

Buy it from Amazon.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks @ Bowery Ballroom 2/26/2014
Chartjunk / Scattegories / Lariat / No One Is (As I Are Be) / Brain Gallop / Rumble at the Rainbo / Shibboleth / Cinnamon and Lesbians / Out of Reaches / Tigers / Vanessa from Queens / The Janitor Revealed / Houston Hades / J Smoov / Baby C’mon / Surreal Teenagers // Father to a Sister of Thought / Kite in a Closet

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks @ Music Hall of Williamsburg 2/27/2014
Cinnamon and Lesbians / Spazz / Lariat / Planetary Motion / Share the Red / Jo Jo’s Jacket / Shibboleth / The Janitor Revealed / Senator / Asking Price / Stick Figures in Love / J Smoov / Jenny and the Ess-Dog / Houston Hades / Church on White / Forever 28 // Outdoor Miner / Stereo / Harness Your Hopes / Wild Thing

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks “Shibboleth”

Last night I felt so sick and exhausted that I was seriously having trouble standing up sometimes, but there was just no way I was going to miss a Malkmus show. It was worth it! The show in Williamsburg was one of the best Jicks shows I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot over the past decade and a half – playful, surprising, energetic. Despite my state, it didn’t stop me from wilding out to “Stereo” and “Jo Jo’s Jacket” – there’s just no way I could ever stifle my overwhelming joy at seeing those songs played live. The previous night was quite good too, but a bit more sloppy – SM clearly hasn’t memorized the words to “Surreal Teenagers” yet though it’s been in the live set for about four years. Going in to these shows I was most excited about seeing all the Jagbags songs, so I felt a tiny bit guilty freaking out so much over the Pavement songs – I am always thrilled to hear some of my favorite songs of all time, but I honestly would’ve been just fine if he’d played more Jicks songs instead. The new songs were fantastic live, by the way – “Houston Hades” and “J Smoov” were particularly slick and groovy, and “Shibboleth” is even more kinetic and abrasive.

Buy it from Amazon.

Broods “Pretty Thing”

A lot of what makes a pop song really stick comes down to some musical element that’s immediately identifiable, but sorta hard to explain without a very specific vocabulary for what’s happening on a musical level. In this song it’s that oddly clipped, sorta swirling wordless vocal hook at the start of the track. The other parts of the song are very well structured and fantastic in their own right – it’s kinda like a more upbeat version of the xx – but that’s the bit that really grabs you and then sticks in your head. The guy in this band produced and cowrote Lorde’s “Royals,” and you can hear his fingerprints on both. There’s something very stark and dry to his style – he’s very good at letting instrumentation frame a melody rather than carry it.

Buy it from Amazon.