Coldplay “Hurts Like Heaven”

Coldplay’s music has a strange emotional resonance – it conveys huge, universal feelings with minimal detail or specificity, which has a way of making me wonder if the music is really about expressing emotion rather than actually experiencing them. It’s easy to be cynical about this band’s body of work, but at this point they’ve written too many good songs to be written off so easily.

“Hurts Like Heaven,” the opening track on their latest record, is one of their all-time best. It nods in the direction of hits by Belle & Sebastian and LCD Soundsystem, but the scope and emotional focus is very much Coldplay – a touch of melancholy adding flavor to an uplifting, swooning melody. Unlike their current single “Paradise,” which sounds like it was written to be used in the most pompous and overblown Oscar-bait movie trailers, “Hurts Like Heaven” has a lean arrangement that flatters the easy-going yearning of Chris Martin’s voice and the sparkle in the guitar.

As much as this song conveys a world-weary romanticism, it still suggests an odd hollowness. Notably, the most emotionally stirring lines in the song are quotes, bits of (very emo) graffiti that Martin is reading off walls and signs. There’s a few lines about feeling anxious, but otherwise he doesn’t say much. What does it mean to use your heart as a weapon? How does it feel to hurt like heaven? The music gives you no answer for the former question, but does a pretty great job of filling you in on the latter.

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The Society of Rockets “Plastic Stars”

The Society of Rockets’ tribute to the late Trish Keenan is built upon a keyboard part with a tonality that will be immediately familiar to fans of her work with Broadcast. This sound, like a sci-fi warning siren repurposed as an accent for languid melodies, was a key part of that band’s aesthetic: Grim modern and futuristic sounds contrasted with Keenan’s understated melancholy. Joshua Babcock conveys sadness in his vocal performance and melodies here, but he doesn’t even attempt to approach her icy persona. He couldn’t if he tried – for one thing, Keenan was a one of a kind talent. More importantly, Babcock can’t help but express an open-hearted sweetness in his music.

Buy it from Three Ring Records.

Patrick Stump “Coast (It’s Gonna Get Better)”

Patrick Stump seems very eager to impress on his first solo album. This isn’t coming from desperation, but rather a desire to show off a pretty wide-ranging musical skill set – he plays every instrument on the record, and very well at that – and a talent for glitzy, hyperactive modern pop songwriting. Though there are points on Soul Punk when the ambition, performance and general razzle dazzle of the production values are more impressive than the actual hooks, Stump mostly succeeds in his attempt to hold on to the cerebral charm of his Fall Out Boy while fully embracing the aesthetics of R&B-centric chart pop. Listening to the record, it’s clear that this is exactly what he wants to do, and that at the same time, he’s unwilling to give up any part of his personality to fit into another genre. His obvious confidence carries over to the sentiment of his lyrics. He spends a lot of time grappling with the diminished expectations of post-recession life, but he projects his can-do spirit and enthusiasm on the rest of the world, insisting that there is a real possibility that things will get better. It’s escapist, feel-good pop, but he leaves you feeling convinced that something positive is just around the corner.

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M83 “Claudia Lewis”

M83 specialize in a sort of musical nostalgia that does very little to move me, though I recognize the ways it aggressively jabs at the emotional buttons of those for whom the idea of “The Eighties” might have a profound resonance. Their new album, a double disc set, is sprawling and “epic,” but its expanse is mostly numbing – a few setpiece numbers are surrounded by ethereal time-wasters and underwritten bombast. M83 aim for a cinematic grandeur and mostly attain it; it’s just too bad that Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming would be a very mediocre film.

I also have issues with Anthony Gonzalez’s voice – I appreciate that he’s “going for it,” and committing to expressing something akin to passion in his performances, but that doesn’t keep him from sounding like some kind of petulant eunuch. Why is this the default for so much acclaimed indie music right now? It conveys powerful emotion, but no agency. I can see why that a lot of young people today would identify with that, but ugh, I don’t think it’s a positive thing!

This doesn’t mean that M83 can’t nail it here and there. The single “Midnight City” is a very strong and engaging composition that compresses the charm and ambition of the band into four minutes so effectively that it makes the remaining 70 minutes of the album seem entirely redundant. I’m also fond of “Claudia Lewis,” a vaguely funky track that balances its hyper-romantic atmosphere evenly with a few sharp hooks and a vocal performance that, while thin and bleating, gets across some convincing emotional stakes.

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Real Estate “It’s Real”

I quite like this song – it has a sweet sentiment and a gorgeous lead guitar part – but I can’t help but think it’s basically the answer to the question “What if Peter Buck was the only really talented member of Murmur-era R.E.M.?” The rhythm section isn’t bad; just competent and not particularly imaginative. The vocals suit the mood and lyrics, but err too much on the side of wimpy, passive and faceless. I wish the singer committed just a bit more, communicated a bit more personality. This is a song about a guy who is finding the strength to be assertive enough to be clear in expressing his feelings for someone, so it should have a gentle, maybe somewhat shy quality, but I feel like I have no idea who this guy is when he sings. A good vocalist – regardless of their technical skill – reveals something about who they are in their voice. This is lovely and very relatable song, but if it weren’t for the guitar style – which isn’t all that distinct but is nevertheless the main feature of Real Estate – it’s a bit too anonymous.

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Brenton Wood “I’m the One Who Knows”

I love the lightness of this arrangement – the lead guitar is like a delicate filigree, the percussion is a patient tap, the gentle buzz of the organ has a soft, pillowy quality. Wood sings about the adorable intensity of a teen boy who has fallen in love for the first time, and he sounds both bemused and nostalgic for this unguarded sweetness. The refrain “I’m the one who really knows” is a bit ambiguous, but it’s clear enough that he’s just looking back on his own experience as a young man and remembering this earnest, innocent love with great fondness, even if some of it is kind of embarrassing.

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PJ Harvey “The Words That Maketh Murder” (iTunes Session Version)

It’s startling to see the words of this song in print – the tune is so jaunty, it can be easy to tune out the grisly imagery. But once you know what she’s singing, you can’t unhear it, and the horror sits uncomfortably with the rhythm and her odd, high-pitched tone. Of course, the real kicker here is the “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?,” delivered with just the right balance of hopeful naïveté and bitter irony. All the little disconnections in this song make perfect sense — it is, after all, essentially about processing grotesque atrocities and looking both within and without for some way of classifying and understanding what it all means. Is there a context where any of this terrible violence makes sense?

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Bell “Meaninglessness”

Olga Bell has a slippery, wildly expressive voice — she’s all bright notes, and her melodies kinda spiral and swirl around through her compositions. This approach is well suited to “Meaninglessness,” a perky, restless number about trying to keep up with adult life’s endless distractions and demands. I love that this is a happy, upbeat song. A lot of people write about this sort of thing, but they come off as unpleasant, easily overwhelmed cranks. Bell, on the other hand, has an optimistic point of view, and the music is like shrugging off morning grogginess to greet the day with genuine enthusiasm.

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Shudder to Think “X-French Tee Shirt”

The first time I ever heard “X-French Tee Shirt” I was 15-years-old and listening to a local alt-rock radio station in 1994. The station was doing this thing where they would debut a song and listeners could call in to say whether or not it should go into rotation. I was immediately impressed by the tune. Even after all these years, a lot of the charm in the song lies in how it sounds like a big arena rock number thrown off balance, but to my young ears it seemed especially alien. The song ended up becoming a very minor hit, and the video on MTV only emphasized the off-kilter weirdness of the group, with singer Craig Wedren looking like a pervy goateed glam Charles Xavier. I probably bought Pony Express Record a week later after playing the snippet of “X-French” that I taped off the radio dozens of times over.

“X-French Tee Shirt” is a perfect example of a song that is effectively pop in its sound despite having an asymmetrical structure and a peculiar sense of rhythm. The big chorus at the end is very accessible and undeniable in its appeal, but the first half of the song is more interesting and exciting for me, as Wedren’s voice delivers a slinky, effeminate vocal performance at odds with the spiky, brutal staccato thud of his guitar. He’s negotiating a break up, but his words bend into abstraction. He doesn’t tell you very much, but the betrayal, anger and jealous come through loud and clear, particularly when Wedren’s voice drips with dismissive bitchiness as he sings “So what’d you have to do that for? Him?” He’s incredulous at the thought of returning “to us,” and he’s heading out. When the chorus outro comes in, you feel a weight lift off the song – he’s free.

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Though the lyrics on Atlas Sound’s forthcoming album Parallax aren’t particularly concerned with sex, the sound of the record is very sensual and seductive. A lot of this comes down to Bradford Cox’s voice, which has reached a new peak in terms of confidence technical range, emotive power. Though he typically writes from a passive perspective, he has moved away from romantic pining and embraced this persona that seems at ease with being an object of desire. With this in mind, the title of the record makes some sense – he’s writing about a variety of topics, but his confidence has shifted his perspective on everything. He still sounds like the Bradford Cox we know, but you immediately sense the difference.

Electric Six “Psychic Visions”

Heartwaves and Brainwaves, this year’s new Electric Six album, is basically the band’s Depeche Mode record. This isn’t a huge surprise – Dick Valentine often sings a bit of “Everything Counts” at the end of “Germans In Mexico” in concert, and there’s already a precedent set for dark, keyboard-heavy material in the larger Valentine catalog. “Psychic Visions,” the opening track on the album, is delightfully seedy – it’s like “Nightclubbing” cut with “Personal Jesus,” with Valentine’s hyper-masculine voice taking on a weathered, resigned tone. He sounds defeated but bemused by the world around him, and when he sings about psychics and tarot cards, you can hear the pessimism in his voice, but also a willingness to play along with other people’s banal eccentricities, if just for a brief distraction.

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Dum Dum Girls “Coming Down”

I saw the Dum Dum Girls perform a few times last year, and each time I found myself wondering why Kristin “Dee Dee” Gundred under-sang on the band’s recordings though she sang beautifully and confidently in concert. This is not an issue on Only in Dreams, the group’s second full-length album. There’s no holding back on this record; she sings with total commitment and presents the songs with crisp, clean production that pushes the band outside of the indie rock ghetto and into, at least, a theoretical mainstream. This is direct, big-hearted music. “Coming Down,” in particular, is a revelation – Gundred’s voice is bold but delicate, approaching a sort of tough-girl sensitivity that you mostly encounter on old Pretenders records. She’s a bit guarded, but she knows when she has to really go for it — there’s a moment in this song where she aims for an emotionally devastating high note and nails it without seeming the least bit ostentatious.

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DJ Shadow featuring Yukimi Nagano “Scale It Back”

I recently interviewed DJ Shadow for a Rolling Stone video thing. At some point in our conversation, I made a point of asking him about this song. At the time we talked, I had the record but not any liner notes, so I was curious as to how much of this composition was made up of live instrumentation. By his reckoning, this track is about 90% samples pulled from a variety of sources. This sort of blows my mind, but it really shouldn’t – a lot of his best work comes out of this incredible ability to take bits and pieces from all over the place and making it sound like a live, organic performance. “Scale It Back” truly sounds like an excellent band playing live in a room, with Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano right there with them, turning in what could be the best vocal performance of her career to date. Even aside from pulling off this incredible compositional/production trick, there’s something really magical about the sound of this song. It’s low key but overwhelmingly romantic – there’s this sort of sinking feeling to it. It makes you feel as though you’re literally falling in love.

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Megafaun “Get Right”

Though there’s a touch of melancholy and pain in “Get Right,” the song mostly conveys a serene certainty. It’s the sound of confusion and doubt gradually shifting into clarity in hindsight. The melody is gentle, the pace is steady, the tone is relaxed. It feels like it could go on forever, and at nearly nine minutes, it may as well. You can kinda feel the music move on as it goes along though – it’s a peaceful emotional plateau, but you can’t stay there forever.

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Lindsey Buckingham @ Town Hall 9/27/2011

Shut Us Down / Go Insane / Trouble / Never Going Back Again / Big Love / Under the Skin / All My Sorrows / In Our Own Time / Illumination / Second Hand News / Tusk / Stars Are Crazy / End of Time / That’s the Way Love Goes / I’m So Afraid / Go Your Own Way // Turn It On / Treason / Seeds We Sow

Lindsey Buckingham “In Our Own Time”

You can read my full review of this show over at Rolling Stone. Here are a few additional notes:

1) There is nothing at all ironic about my love of Lindsey Buckingham’s music, but I found that the overwhelming earnestness of the performance and the Boomers in the audience made me enjoy the show in a much more bemused way that I would have expected. It’s cute to watch awkward middle aged white folks dancing to songs from Rumours! I mean that sincerely.

2) You have never seen a band look more like a bunch of “cool” uncles than Lindsey Buckingham and his trio of sidemen.

3) At one point, Buckingham said that his drummer Walfredo Reyes Jr was one of his two favorite drummers, implying that the other is Mick Fleetwood. I am wondering if Buckingham considers “making the most ridiculous faces possible at all times” is a key part of being a great drummer. Because oh man…

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I wrote an entire week of Fluxblog entries about Lindsey Buckingham’s body of work earlier this year. Here are links to all of those posts in case you missed it:

• “The Ledge” / “It Was I”

• “Monday Morning” / “Hold Me”

• “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” / “Walk a Thin Line”

• “I Want You” / “Crying in the Night”

• “Second Hand News” / “Time Precious Time”

Wilco “Dawned On Me”

Jeff Tweedy has a lot of strengths as a songwriter, but I’m very partial to his gift for writing sweet love songs within the context of a long term relationship. It’s easy to find a lot of good songs about new love or love that is broken and ending, but Tweedy’s tunes about rediscovering or reaffirming affection after years of ups and downs and prosaic routines is pretty inspiring. I’m not too crazy about The Whole Love at the moment – it’s certainly not a bad record, but most of it doesn’t hold my interest – “Dawned On Me” hits my sweet spot basically by cross-breeding the tone of their classic “I’m Always In Love” with that one hit by Supergrass.

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Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks @ Webster Hall 9/25/2011

Baby C’mon / Spazz / Brain Gallop / Long Hard Book / Tigers / Pennywhistle Thunder / Forever 28 / Independence Street / Polvo / Share the Red / Animal Midnight / Tune Grief / Gorgeous Georgie / Senator / Asking Price / Stick Figures in Love // Planetary Motion / No One Is (As I Are Be) / You Love Gets Me High / 1% of One

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks “Brain Gallop”

1. Following the Pavement reunion tour, Malkmus has returned to the left side of the stage after years of performing in the center with the Jicks. I appreciate this: It suits his personality and emphasizes that despite the “Stephen Malkmus and” commercial consideration, the Jicks are a real band, and one that has existed for a decade now.

2. This was my first exposure to Jake Morris, the Jicks’ new drummer. He’s certainly not in the same class as his predecessors John Moen and Janet Weiss – he simply lacks the former’s raw skill or the latter’s heavy-hitting power – but he’s good with accents and loose grooves. He’s sort of like a tighter version of Steve West, and that brings the sound a bit closer to Pavement. “Brain Gallop,” for example, is the most traditionally Jicks-y song on Mirror Traffic with Weiss on drums, but this performance was much more Brighten the Corners in tone.

3. The new songs are terrific live. As much as I love Real Emotional Trash, some of those songs could drag on a bit in concert. In contrast, this material is very brisk and snappy, with more rocking stuff like “Tune Grief,” “Senator,” “Forever 28,” “Spazz” and “Stick Figures in Love” coming off particularly well. The pacing of the setlist was sorta weird though, with a good chunk of time in the middle given to new material and mid-tempo tunes. If you’re going to have a potentially dull spot, that’s not the worst place to put it, but you could tell how relieved the audience was to hear a fast song when “Tune Grief” came around.

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R.E.M. “Discoverer”

The final R.E.M. album begins and ends with “Discoverer,” an ecstatic song about facing new challenges and adventures with bravery and enthusiasm. It flashes back to the early days of the band and Michael Stipe’s first visit to New York City, recalling the first rush of excitement at the sheer number of opportunities and possibilities offered by the city and the world in general. It all happened for him, too. Stipe and R.E.M. had a phenomenal, unparalleled career and have lived remarkable lives. They did it all on their own terms, with a combination of raw talent, ambition and idealism. “Discoverer,” like a lot of the best R.E.M. songs, is an expression of incredible optimism. This is probably the aspect of the band’s body of work that resonates with me most deeply. Stipe genuinely believes that the future offers us the chance to live better lives. He believes that positive change can happen if we work for it. And he’s right. He’s so right. And that extends to this song, and the end of this band. When this song is reprised at the end of Collapse Into Now, it sounds like a moment of pure, heroic triumph. It’s a beautiful and appropriate finale for their career – moving forwards and embracing new opportunities while radiating genuine pride over what has already been accomplished.

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Tune-Yards @ Le Poisson Rouge 9/20/2011

Do You Wanna Live? / Gangsta / You Yes You / Es-So / Riotriot / Bizness / Powa / Doorstep / Not Dead Yet / My Country // Hatari / Killa

Tune-Yards hasn’t been in heavy rotation for me in the past couple months; it was a thrill to see these songs performed again and be reminded not only of their incredible quality, but of my own connection to the music and lyrics. And the performer! The audience is more crazy about Merrill every time I see her perform — the cult is growing and getting more intense. She really earns this incredible adulation, and the more love the crowd gives her, the more she gives back. It’s so nice to go to a show and see the audience and the artist be so totally into it. Everyone was having so much fun.

Tune-Yards “Powa”

I don’t know much about Merrill Garbus’ life, but I feel like I know a lot about her voice, which might be a separate thing. Garbus sings like a person who, at some point in the not-too-distant past, stopped caring about holding herself back. “Powa” starts off sorta gentle and demure, but as it progresses, there’s a clear physicality to her vocals — a startling, defiant swagger. Unlike a lot of “swagger” you hear in modern pop music, it’s not a put-on or thinly veiled insecurity. It doesn’t sound like control or a desire to be controlling either. It’s more about self-possession, and making a clear decision to be exactly who you are and go for what you want, and take what you deserve after years of feeling unworthy. “Powa” is a song about sex, and it feels triumphant and glorious, like a long-earned reward. There’s still conflict and angst, but it all disappears in moments of pure pleasure, as when Garbus’ voice shoots up into into high notes, yanking us up with her into her giddy stratosphere. You feel her pleasure along with her, but you know that it’s an abstraction. If you really want it, you’ve got to get it for yourself. You’ve got to be more like Merrill.

I’ve lived with “Powa” for a while now, and I’m pretty confident in saying that it ranks among my favorite songs of all time. I feel like I could gush endlessly about it — in addition to what I wrote over a year ago, I know I could go on and on about every detail in the structure, performance and production of this piece. But the thing that really blows me away is this: “Powa” is a song about love and sex that factors in insecurity about one’s body. When you think about how common it is for people to feel awkward about their bodies — if not outright disgusted by them — it is shocking to realize how rarely this comes up in songs about love and sex. Sex tends to be idealized and abstracted in music, in a way it’s not that different from Hollywood or pornography. “Powa” is astonishing not only because it presents the singer as a fully-formed person with body image issues and stress and real world problems, but because it expresses genuine love and gratitude for someone with whom she has true intimacy. Aside from Carole King’s wonderful “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” I can’t think of many songs on this level of quality that articulate this sort of feeling.

(Originally posted 1/4/2010 and 4/15/2011.)

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Gauntlet Hair “My Christ”

It seems like we’re only starting to come out of a phase of indie music dominated by excessive use of reverb, so it’s actually surprising to hear a band play around with those tricks and come up with something that sounds fresh. “My Christ,” one of the best and most tuneful tracks from Gauntlet Hair’s debut album, essentially sounds like a late 80s sort of INXS/Tears for Fears type song that has been pushed to a severe extreme without losing its shape and basic appeal. The distortions here don’t blur the composition – it’s rather sharp and dynamic – but they do sharpen up the treble and exaggerate the impact of the drumming. I get the feeling that a lot of people are going to sleep on this record, which is unfortunate: These guys are figuring out some interesting new angles on late 80s arena rock.

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