February 24th, 2014 5:41am
I was a little slow to embrace Speedy Ortiz because I’m automatically skeptical of any contemporary band who is frequently compared to the likes of Pavement – they almost never sound or feel much like Malkmus – and I distrust the part of me that would be enthusiastic about something because it sounds a lot like the music that was popular when I was a teenager. But Sadie Dupuis and her band really do sound like that stuff, and their execution isn’t merely a matter of knowing the right moves: If their new EP Real Hair came out in 1994 instead of 2014, it would’ve been on par with a lot of the best indie and alt-rock that year. Dupuis’ tendency to write vocal melodies that mirror her guitar parts is very Malkmus-y, but the rest of her band take their cues from the alt-rock side of things, so a song like “Everything’s Bigger” feels more like Veruca Salt than Pavement.
Dupuis’ melodies on “Everything’s Bigger” are very strong, and I love the way they seem to wind loosely around the chords. This flatters her voice, and showcases the expressive, conversational quality of her cadences. Perhaps coincidentally, she calls attention to her own vocal patterns in the song as she wonders why she’s so creeped out by someone who mimics her mannerisms. She seems annoyed by this, but also sorta defeated and compromised.
February 21st, 2014 12:57pm
“Wave” is placed at the center of Beck’s Morning Phase, and this makes a lot of sense: Every other song on this incredibly calm and sober album seems to connect to this track’s egoless, mindful state. There’s a mournful quality to the droning string arrangement and a note of vague sadness in Beck’s voice, but more than anything, this song is expressing a state of zen detachment: “If I surrender and I don’t fight this wave / No, I won’t go under / I’ll only get carried away.” It gets under my skin a bit because as much as it’s a statement of peace, it also feels a little to resigned, as though he’s about to just walk out into the sea and deliberately give in to the undertow.
I wrote more about Morning Phase here.
February 19th, 2014 1:29pm
Cam’ron has had an interesting career of constantly shifting back and forth from critical darling to underdog, and this time around it looks like he’s about to get back in critical darling mode. A-Trak’s chipmunk soul aesthetic suits Cam well – all his best stuff is in that milieu, and the implied warmth of old R&B complements the self-deprecating humor of his rhymes. He’s a little bit sleepy on this track, but it works: Even toned down a bit, he’s got an easygoing charm that feels noticeably different from where hip-hop is at this moment.
February 18th, 2014 3:06am
There’s something very odd about the production on Eric Church’s new album: It’s very clean and professional, but some parts seem slightly off, so perfectly normal things will seem a bit uncanny. It’s exactly the right way to present Church – his whole deal as a country musician is basically being a mainstream country guy who’s just a bit different from the rest. Iconoclastic, but only up to a point. The funny thing about The Outsiders is that part of what Church does to stand out from the pack is occasionally dip into heavy, grungy rock, and he’s basically in the one part of pop culture where that actually would seem like a progressive move to people. But I think he’s better on a song like “Like A Wrecking Ball,” where he’s just doing a low key romantic tune and coming off as totally sincere and unpretentious. The odd bit in this song is the somewhat excessive reverb on his voice – the rest of the album isn’t like that, so it’s clearly an intentional move. But it works, and adds a touch of something a little unexpected to an otherwise very straight forward tune.
February 13th, 2014 2:02pm
To the best of my knowledge and memory, Mary Timony is the only notable indie/alt artist of the ’90s who has never ever looked backwards in her career. No reunions and no oldies in her setlists, just a steady stream of new, finite projects. This has a way of obscuring the natural progression of her overall body of work – there’s definitely an internal logic to her evolution. The funny thing is that her new band Ex Hex isn’t much to do with her album Ex Hex from 2005, which filtered grandiose rock through post punk sensibilities, as much as it’s a sensible next step from what she was writing in Wild Flag. The Mary Timony of 2014 has a more relaxed and groovy sound, and is very pop, but in a “early 70s mainstream rock” sort of way. “Hot and Cold” is sly and feels a bit flirty, and moves along a “Sweet Jane”-ish riff with an unapologetic swagger that seems like a pleasant side effect of playing off Carrie Brownstein all the time for a few years.
February 12th, 2014 1:41pm
No, not the Scottish band Bis, sorry. This is a Japanese idol group who seem to be obsessed with contrasting extreme cuteness with abrasive, grotesque ugliness. That visual aesthetic is very apparent in the video for this track, but it’s more interesting how it comes out in the actual song. “STUPiG” is an extraordinarily harsh industrial track, but the vocal melody is full-on cutesy J-Pop, and the chorus is especially sugary. The song is like this absurd jolt of manic energy, and the trebly melody only makes the heavy digital noise feel more brutal.
February 11th, 2014 1:47pm
It makes some sense that it took Bob Pollard a long while to write a very wry song about being a big shot in a very niche part of music culture – he’s alluded to it before, but I think he now has a pretty unique perspective on the ways it’s both very satisfying and completely hilarious. This is not a bitter or angry song – he’s mocking himself and others a little bit, but I think the key is the humor, and being honest about the ways being a big fish in a small pond is very appealing.
February 10th, 2014 1:30pm
Good lord, this song! This isn’t completely out of the ordinary in terms of trap and Baile funk, but the way this all snaps together with that very Destiny’s Child-ish melody is just incredibly exciting. The level of energy and enthusiasm here is just off the charts, to the point that it’s very hard to imagine a language barrier being a problem for anyone who hears this thing. Who would really need to understand the words when it’s so effortlessly amping you up just to drop down HARD like a particularly intense theme park ride?
February 6th, 2014 1:27pm
When I first heard this Vertical Scratchers record I knew absolutely nothing about the band, so I had a moment mid-way through the first or second track where I was just like… is that John Schmersal? And yes, of course it is, because who else on earth sounds like that dude? Though this new band sounds very much like John Schmersal music, it doesn’t feel like Enon or Brainiac at all – the Vertical Scratchers stuff is far more simple, fast, and brief. He took everything distinct about his melodic style and cut out everything that could distract you from it, to the point that the songs have the tight, relentless structure of jingles. I might still prefer the hyperactive excesses of Enon, but this is a really interesting move for a guy to make this late into his career – it’s like he’s the Benjamin Button of spazzy indie guy and has grown into regression.
February 5th, 2014 1:49pm
I made a joke yesterday about how this new Sun Kil Moon record sounds a little like a very dour Adam Duritz solo album, and I didn’t necessarily mean that as an insult. Mark Kozelek’s voice is similar, much more restrained – the emotive excess is dialed back, and there’s more grit in his tone. But I think there’s a similar investment in the richness of words – Kozelek is a better lyricist, though – and in conveying a direct, unvarnished emotion. “I Love My Dad” is the song that stands out for me, partly because it’s more up-tempo than a lot of the other songs, but mostly because I don’t hear a lot of guys sing so honestly and lovingly about their father. This is a very nuanced and not always flattering tribute to his dad, and it goes into a lot of concrete details about his experience, but I think in doing that it gets at a LOT of men’s relationships with their father. They are rarely perfect and are often aloof or send confusing messages, but there’s always that part of you that only really remembers the really good advice they’ve imparted.
February 4th, 2014 2:05pm
Gardens & Villa changed their sound so much between their first and second records that they could’ve fully justified changing the name of the band. Their debut was very stark and desolate – I described one of the songs as sounding “sorta like the Shins dying slowly in the middle of an endless desert” back in 2011 – and the new one is basically an American spin on gloomy Thatcher-era synth pop. I particularly like “Bullet Train,” which I think is very in touch with the aims of the best ’80s synth pop acts in the way it filters funk and soul moves through this icy palette and uptight sensibility. There’s some really great chilly keyboard tones in that – so cold that it feels like a blast of frigid air over the groove.
February 3rd, 2014 1:34pm
I haven’t really decided how I feel about St. Vincent’s new record. I feel a little disappointed in that she hasn’t done much to change from where she was at on her previous album, but I like that she’s refining a very distinct style, and she pushes all of her tics to the extreme on most of her new songs. It’s more twitchy, more synthetic, more aloof. It works, but as she moves in this direction, the music feels less and less…human. And that’s a big part of her art – she’s clearly obsessed with the idea of the uncanny valley, and making affectless normalcy seem jarring and absurd. But maybe that works a little better with visuals? A lot of what made her older work, particularly Actor, so exciting was how there was this very human anxiety under it all, and a lot of the art was about that being buried.
“Digital Witness,” one of the best new songs, puts all that anxiety right on the surface, and the lyrics are a fairly judgmental portrait of someone whose intense FOMO has ironically metastasized into full-blown social media addiction and a distance from active life. But even if she sings the song in the first person, I can’t shake the feeling that any anxiety in this song doesn’t come from the character so much as Annie Clark being anxious about people like this existing. It’s fear of the new normal.
January 29th, 2014 1:36pm
Sophie Ellis-Bextor has spent the vast majority of her career making dance pop for the U.K. market, sort of like a b-list homegrown version of Kylie. Her new record is a change of direction for her – she’s abandoned dance beats, and has embraced a very stately and grand sort of orchestral pop. It works pretty well for her: She’s always had a prim voice that I never found too compelling in the context of dancey stuff, but fits the orderly, uptight tone of this music. “Runaway Daydreamer” isn’t nearly as deep as it’d like to be, but the melody is just lovely and even if it has the trappings of “mature pop,” it’s still very bubblegum at its core.
January 28th, 2014 1:45pm
For some reason I didn’t really notice that TV on the Radio actually released a couple singles last year – I thought that blogs were just posting live videos of unfinished songs and I generally ignore that kind of thing. But no, “Million Miles” came out for real last summer, and it’s one of the best songs they’ve ever done. It’s a ballad that mourns the ending of a once lovely relationship, which is a topic they’ve touched on before in Tunde Adebimpe’s “You.” But whereas that song expresses confusion as to how and why it happened, Kyp Mallone’s perspective is both far more sentimental and hugely pessimistic. By the end of the song he’s so defeated by realizing that all love eventually fades away that he’s swearing it off forever – “Don’t you let love break your heart / Givin’ all your power to a flame that falls apart.” But in context, you can sense that his words are very hollow, and he’d easily fall in love all over again without hesitation.
January 27th, 2014 1:56pm
I love the way this track sounds as if Mouse On Mars are poking and prodding the soundtrack of a vintage video game til it screams, or bouncing it off the walls like a rubber ball. They’re geniuses of making you feel like you’ve been tossed into some insane cartoon world, and the rules of animation apply to pretty much everything except for you. Everything’s bending and shifting and bouncing around you, and you just have to dance around it somehow.
January 23rd, 2014 1:39pm
It’s funny how artists who seem very concerned about us all losing touch with some kind of authentic humanity never seem all that bothered by all the ways previous generations have made life “inauthentic.” It’s always about whatever the popular technology is around at the time – in the 80s and 90s it was always people convince that television was destroying everything, now it’s all about the internet and social media. No one ever wants to roll back the clock much further than what they remember of their childhood, or what they imagine their parents or grandparents’ lives to have been like based on what they’ve gleaned from…media. The video for this song really hits this idea home – the music is very “we’re all like computers now, maaaan,” but the footage is very nostalgic for the late ’80s and early ’90s. I can’t tell whether the band is thoughtlessly undermining itself, or they are intentionally contrasting these ideas to make a point. I do think the song is far, far better than the video, which is so shoddy and devoid of imagination that it threatens to ruin the music by association.
January 22nd, 2014 3:09am
It occurred to me the other day that the songwriter Dee Dee from Dum Dum Girls has the most in common with is actually Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian. They both adhere to a very classic sense of pop songwriting and structure, and their respective catalogs follow a loose timeline of trends in 20th century pop, as though they could not consider doing different sorts of pastiche out of chronological order. Too True is the Dum Dum Girls’ ’80s album, and the aesthetic suits Dee Dee very well. In the broadest sense, the record is like a Bangles album produced for 4AD, or if The Go-Gos merged with The Cure. She’s always done best with songs that have a bit of romance, and the rich, echoey ambience of ’80s pop is ideal for that. A lot of the songs on the record are about some transcendent emotion or lust cutting through the murk and gloom of life. “Too True To Be Good,” a particularly Cure-ish number, really drives this idea home — it’s basically about being fascinated with a woman who makes you feel more alive until you start to suspect she’s draining something from your life.
January 21st, 2014 3:59am
Adult Jazz is a self-deprecating name, I guess? Because this is certainly an adult type of pop music, and while it’s not jazz, the musicians are definitely invested in a balance of precise chops and loose, expressive performances. “Am Gone” reminds me a lot of Grizzly Bear – it’s there in the melodies and guitar tone, and in the way they let melodies and percussive sounds linger in the air. It’s a very beautiful song, but sort of hard to peg emotionally. Though that’s sort of the point – the lyrics are full of ambivalent phrases and questions, and the singer opens the song by telling you straight up that they have a history of running away from problems, but aren’t doing much better by taking a new approach as a “forgiver.”
January 16th, 2014 1:17pm
Loneliness is that corrodes your life very slowly, gradually dissolving your hope for connection until it’s entirely gone and you forget it was ever there. “Hi-Five” is about life after the hope is gone, and all you’ve got left is this void you’ve given up on ever filling. It’s a sad, bitter song, and the joke is that at the end she recognizes the same loneliness in someone else and sarcastically offers a high five while feeling like she’s stuck with them, as if life was just one long draft and you just get stuck with other unwanted people in the end.
January 15th, 2014 1:33pm
“Unconditional Love” is as happy as the songs on Against Me!’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues get, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was actually the last song written for the record. Most of the record is focused on the intense anguish of experiencing dysphoria, or struggling to shift your identity and relationships with people you’ve known for years. “Unconditional Love” isn’t a resolution of any kind, but it’s a little further along the process of change and upheaval – it’s at least at a place where unconditional love is being offered by those closest to you, and realizing that while that’s good and useful, it’s just not enough to make it. If self-loathing runs deep enough, it blocks out everyone else’s love. You disqualify it, you doubt it, you twist it into something else. But even in knowing that, the song still feels a bit jolly and triumphant. “Unconditional love” is still a lot more than Laura Jane Grace was expecting.
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