Werewolf Diskdrive “Hamburgers & Hot Dogs”

This essentially sounds like Liars in electronic punk mode, but with the lyrical concerns of Weird Al Yankovic. This is a throbbing, dirty electro banger about strongly preferring hamburgers and hot dogs (and a few other lowbrow, generally unhealthy foods) over trendy, healthy foods like kale and quinoa. It is gloriously silly, but played totally straight, to the point that it’s a lot more like a “slobs vs. snobs” class thing than a gleefully childish Tim & Eric thing. (They, of course, wrote their own wonderful “Hamburgers and Hot Dogs” song.) But really, it’s the music that makes this so impressive – this does not need to be such a banger, and yet it is. I would love to be at the kind of loud, sweaty party where this gets people going. This really ought to be the “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” of 2017.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

William Patrick Corgan “Processional”

I saw Billy Corgan perform a solo show at the Murmrr Theater – actually the Union Temple of Brooklyn with a makeshift stage – over the weekend. The opening set was his new solo record, Ogilala in full, and the second set was a career-spanning setlist ranging from late period material to deep cuts from the classic ‘90s Smashing Pumpkins catalog. This second set was excellent, and genuinely surprised me several times over. I never expected to ever see him play “Starla” live, much less a gorgeous solo piano version. There was also a lovely piano arrangement for “Soma,” an inspired simplified versions of “Muzzle,” “Annie-Dog,” and “Age of Innocence,” all big favorites for me.

It was a very intimate and generous performance, and it was met great enthusiasm by the audience whether he was playing the new material or songs from his most famous records. (He received at least five standing ovations from the entire audience, including when he first came on stage.) I feel like on some level the motivation of the audience was to show Corgan how much he is appreciated, since he so often seems bitter and misunderstood. He seemed genuinely moved by the love of the audience. He also seemed at peace during much of the performance – there is a serenity at the core of the new songs in particular, perhaps the effect of being a new father. He ended the show with “Farewell and Goodnight” from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and made a point of telling the audience that the song was written with James Iha, and then clarifying further that it was mostly James’ song. There was a lot of affection in his voice when he talked about James, and it was so nice to hear knowing that they had been estranged for a long time.

James Iha plays on the studio recording of “Processional,” and it’s the first song they recorded together since “Untitled,” the final track recorded by the Pumpkins in their original run. The song is low key and lovely, and feels relaxed in a way that Corgan rarely seems, even on his most mellow songs. If you’d asked me to peg which cut on the record featured Iha, I might not have chosen this – it’s so simple and spare that it doesn’t announce itself as a song with a guest star. But I think it’s meaningful that these guys came together for a song that feels so calm and graceful. It’s like a peace offering, or a prayer.

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Beck “I’m So Free”

The surface of Beck’s Colors is glossy and upbeat, as though Beck and his collaborator Greg Kurstin went out of their way to make a record that would sound mainstream and contemporary. They seem most directly inspired by Phoenix – and frankly, a lot of it is better Phoenix music than their own recent album – but the overall aesthetics fit in with commercial quasi-indie acts like Foster the People, Portugal the Man, and Fitz and the Tantrums. There’s also a touch of the tropical vibes that have been all over pop for a while now, and a general chill, stoned Los Angeles feeling to it.

It sounds kinda like Beck trying to make a record for “normal” people, but not quite hitting the mark because he’s an oddball to the core. It’s like the bit in Clifford when Martin Short is asked to make a face like a normal boy and Short makes a series of faces that leap directly into the uncanny valley of human facial expressions. Beck is possibly the greatest and most versatile mimic in the history of pop music, but he can’t will himself to be ordinary. But it’s very interesting for him to try, and I respect that an artist as accomplished and canonized as him would seem this sincerely engaged with contemporary mainstream sounds. In this way, the record is his equivalent to David Bowie’s Let’s Dance – an elder statesman engaging with popular music relatively late in his career, if just for kicks.

The lyrics of Colors tell a different story. Beck’s words are lucid and straightforward, almost entirely setting aside the surrealism of his best known work in favor of more direct and philosophical approach. The lyrics seem to pull back and forth between a dissatisfied yearning and a sort of zen contentedness. It reminds me of George Harrison – cycles of anxiety and vague, formless dread followed by moments of spirituality and perspective.

The song that really jumped out at me both musically and lyrically is “I’m So Free,” which is more rocking than anything else on the record, and has a sentiment that seems to be rooted in his background in Scientology. He’s singing about some feeling of enlightenment, and being “so free” of what seems like what Scientologists would call “suppressive persons.” It’s a bit rattling to hear Beck sing “I’m gonna freeze out these enemies” – he’s never really seemed like a guy with an enemies list, you know? But there’s other lines that suggest he’s casting out negative parts of himself, so perhaps I’m reading a bit too much into this.

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St. Vincent “Fear the Future”

I have always felt like an optimistic person. I may be cynical about a lot of aspects of humanity, but I genuinely feel like humans are always fighting towards a better world. Not a perfect world, but slightly better. Somehow, I still feel this way, though it’s been very difficult recently. There’s a lot of emotional wear and tear on keeping up with the outside world – opening Twitter or Facebook now feels like a direct portal to everyone’s undiluted rage, confusion, and anguish. If you can’t turn off your empathy, it’s completely draining. If this is your primary window on the world, it seems like an unending nightmare. Everything in the world is shut out except for the the horror and the screaming and the fighting. It makes you fear the future.

“Fear the Future” is a bit of an outlier on St. Vincent’s Masseduction, though it’s clearly important enough to Annie Clark that the song title is also the name of her forthcoming tour. A lot of the other songs have a sleek, playful quality to them and directly address sexuality, but “Fear the Future” is more about intimacy. There’s panic and drama in the sound of this track, but Clark’s voice seems cool and centered. She’s singing about love in the midst of terror and violence, of shrinking your world down to “me and you” to keep focused on what matters and to remind yourself there’s more to life than chaos and catastrophe. When the chorus ends on her proclaiming “I fear the future” before the bottom of the music suddenly dropping out, I don’t hear actual fear in her voice. It sounds a lot more like she’s bravely staring the future down to me.

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Hamilton Leithauser & Angel Olsen “Heartstruck (Wild Hunger)”

Hamilton Leithauser voices has always conveyed a lot of romance so it’s nice to hear him go full-on ’50s pop ballad with “Heartstruck.” The sentiment of this tune is overwhelming – they’re really laying the twinkling starlight melodrama on thick in the arrangement, it sounds like it’s meant to be the happy ending of a Hollywood tearjerker. Leithauser’s performance is business as usual for him – ragged and vulnerable, with the emoting dialed up a few notches above what most normal singers would do. Angel Olsen goes a bit further, pushing her voice into an over-the-top trill that sounds more periodic-specific, like she’s just trying to make sure this powerful feeling comes across on a transistor radio.

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King Krule “Biscuit Town”

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to adequately describe Archy Marshall’s voice and it’s quite difficult. There’s so much raw humanity in the tone of it, his phrasing, the cadence, and way it shifts and splashes on the microphone. He’s clearly put a lot of thought into how he uses his voice but the performances always sound entirely instinctive, as if he’s just making up the tune and words on the spot. But at the core of all of this is two things – deep loneliness and the vulnerability of a broken young man. He always sounds desperate for connection, and like he’s trying to cut through the bullshit of social niceties to get to something more real.

It’s no coincidence that he obsesses on urban space in his songs. Big dense cities are the best place to be if you feel a powerful need to be around other people but also want to be entirely alone. “Biscuit Town” opens The Ooz with a dreary rainy weekday night atmosphere. The mood is so precise that I can’t hear the resonance of the chords in the mix without picturing puddles on concrete lit by neon bar lights. “I seem to sink lower,” he sings at the start, and by the end of the record he sounds like he’s sunk entirely. But the album ends on such a delicate and graceful note that maybe the point is that sinking isn’t actually such a bad thing.

Buy it from Amazon.

Thanks for Coming “Zoning Out”

“Zoning Out” is the sound of someone being a bit too hard on themselves. It begins with Rachel Brown explaining why she didn’t accomplish the things on her weekend to-do list in a way that’s maybe 30% apology and 70% self-criticism, and moving on to a catchy chorus of “I will be the worst because that’s what I deserve” that’s about 60% self-deprecating humor and 40% self-loathing. The tune is bold and direct, and the hook is instantly engaging – this may be a young songwriter on Bandcamp, but the songwriting chops are well developed. I could see this shaping into a very strong pop-rock song with a band and good production, but I’m rather fond of this as an acoustic solo performance if just because this is a very pure expression of being all alone in your head and wanting to get out of there.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Uffe “Love Is Everywhere”

I realized recently that one of the things I find off-putting about a lot of popular music from the recent past is there is often no natural reverb in the music at all. This is to be expected with electronic music – there’s often no microphones used except for recording voices, and live instrumentation is either highly processed or directly inputted to the board. I love a lot of music made this way, but too much of it is exhausting to my ears. Whether by nature or nurture, my ears favor a more natural sound – I want to hear impact and movement and physical space. I love recordings that give you a sense of the room, and the physicality of the players. There’s very little of this to be found in modern pop, and it’s part of why so much of it feels so flat and cold. Songs are relying entirely on the singer to project humanity, and those performances are often just as “corrected” and devoid of presence as the instrumentation. This isn’t always bad, and it makes sense for purely digital distribution, but the sameness grates on me. I’m at a point where all I hear is what is missing.

Uffe’s recording of Pharaoh Sanders’ composition “Love Is Everywhere” is the polar opposite end of the spectrum. The bulk of the music sounds like a field recording, like there’s just one microphone in a room picking up the piano and the vocals. It’s manipulated and layered with electronic percussion as it moves along, but the focus is always on Uffe’s piano playing, which is loose and lovely but often imprecise. Uffe is no Joe Bonner, but he’s obviously fine with it – the point of this interpretation of the song is in channeling some of the peace and optimism of Sanders’ original recording. When the other voices join in, you feel their relative proximity. They’re in the same place, singing the same thing, dreaming of the same thing, achieving the same thing. This recording is in some way about that human connection, and the belief that beautiful things happen when people come together.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Wolf Alice “Yuk Foo”

I’ve seen Ellie Rowsell perform “Yuk Foo” live, and I know she can bring the appropriate level of ferocious intensity to it on stage, but I still wonder if she went a bit “method” when she recorded the vocal take on the studio version. She sounds so present in the rage and spite, so fully committed to hurting the person the song is addressed to. There are breakup songs that are like trying to win an argument, or examine a problem. This is not that. This is someone fighting back at slut-shaming by screaming “I want to FUCK all the people I meet” with a guttural bark. This is unhinged, in-the-red fury directed at someone who clearly deserves it, and it is entirely unapologetic. That’s what makes the song so compelling – she sounds like she’s having fun in embracing this nasty, horny, aggressive, messy part of herself. She sounds totally thrilled to be letting go, and in standing up to some controlling, passive-aggressive creep.

I hope the right people find this song.

Buy it from Amazon.

This is the conclusion of the 1990s survey mix series, which I have been presenting monthly in chronological order through this year. You can find the previous mixes here. I’ve made a Spotify version of this survey, though it is missing 27 tracks and has no sound editing for smooth listening.

One of the major lessons of having done so many of these year survey sets is that there’s always a lot of good music made, so even in fallow years or when the zeitgeist is particularly dire, it’s not a total wash. 1999 is, in zeitgeist terms, a pretty grim year. The amount of stuff in this set that I would personally consider to be “not good” or “incredibly boring” is about on par with 1985, which I’d say is the nadir of the previous decade. I’d also say it’s about even with the year we’re in right now, which I feel is among the most uninspiring years for music in my lifetime.

When I say that this is a grim time for music, I assume most of you think I’m talking about the dominance of nu-metal, and that’s…part of it, but by no means all of it. This set opens with two major nu-metal anthems, and while I’m not a fan of either Kid Rock or Limp Bizkit, these particular songs are good and the high points of their careers. “Bawitdiba” may be dumb and belligerent, but it’s a magnificent symphony of idiocy and aggression. That’s true of a lot of the ultra-macho tunes I’ve sequenced near the start of this survey – it’s easy to see how this stuff blew up. It’s all very seductive, and there’s just as much joy in this bratty anger and contempt as in the glossy teen pop that is the yin to nu-metal and rap’s yang in this period.

It’s easy to look back on this now and be like “ewww, so much toxic masculinity,” but really, is the pop music of 2016 and 2017 so different? The nihilistic yet entitled spite of Limp Bizkit, Korn, Kid Rock, Eminem, et al is all around on us on the internet and in politics, and though there’s nothing so aggro in pop music now, the charts are dominated by a different millennial strain of toxic masculinity in the form of preening, self-absorbed fuckboys like Drake, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, The Chainsmokers, and Ed Sheeran. It’s not the same situation, but it’s not that different either. It certainly seems like we’re due for another Woodstock 99.

So what else is going on? A lot of bland pop-punk and emo, and a bunch of meandering post-rock (though I ride for the Godspeed and Mogwai songs featured here.) A lot of folksy sad-boy indie music I never cared about. A boom in electronic music, with an emphasis on IDM and trance. Lots of goofy one-hit wonders who sold millions of albums because the record industry was deliberately snuffing out the singles market in a scheme that took advantage of the economic prosperity of the late ‘90s but set the industry up for a fall as file sharing was just beginning to emerge. A clear division between mainstream and “backpacker” hip-hop that would carry through most of the next decade. A trend towards refined, mannered, and occasionally twee music in the indie realm which in retrospect seems as much like counter programming to the nu-metal thing as it was a deliberate move away from the noisy, shambling indie aesthetics through much of the decade. There’s a lot, I mean a LOT, of terrible midi guitar/harpsichord tones in mainstream pop – see “No Scrubs” and “Bills, Bills, Bills” – and I haaaaaate it. Some of the songs are OK in spite of it, but the sound triggers revulsion in me.

Some personal favorites and notable underdogs: Belle & Sebastian’s “Slow Graffiti” and Sleater-Kinney’s “Hot Rock” were my go-to misery tunes at the time, and I can still feel echoes of my late-teens anguish any time I hear them. Fiona Apple’s “Paper Bag” and Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” are high water marks for two major talents, and signal the arrival of Jon Brion as a significant producer. Similarly, the tracks by Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips, and Home represent the breakthrough of Dave Fridmann as one of the most distinctive producers in psychedelic rock. Beck’s Midnite Vultures and Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile are two of my favorite records ever made, and while I think the songs featured here are very special, I urge you to experience them in full if you’re not familiar with them. Method Man and Redman’s “Cheka” has a playful bounce to it that was described to me at the time as being like ‘50s rock, and that’s always felt very true to me.

I wish more people knew about April March’s hyper-romantic “Sugar” and Sloan’s extraordinarily smooth “Don’t You Believe A Word.” Joan of Arc’s “Me (Plural)” is the highlight of their finest record, and features one of my favorite lines ever: “I’m left confusing me with who you think I am.” If you ever want to make cool girls dance, put on Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon.” The Rock*A*Teens’ “Across the Piedmont” is the song I didn’t know at the time, but now wish I had. GusGus’s “Bambi” makes me want to be in love. Tori Amos’ “Glory of the ‘80s” makes me wish I could cruise around Los Angeles with a young Tori in 1985. I didn’t care for Smash Mouth’s “All Star” at the time, but absolutely adore it now with zero irony. It makes me so happy.

Thanks to Dan Kois, Rob Sheffield, Sean T. Collins, and Paul Cox for their help in putting this together.

DOWNLOAD PART 1

Kid Rock “Bawitdaba” / Limp Bizkit “Nookie” / Rage Against the Machine “Sleep Now in the Fire” / DMX “Party Up” / Jay-Z feat. UGK “Big Pimpin’” / Ol Dirty Bastard feat. Kelis “Got Your Money” / Eminem “My Name Is” / Smash Mouth “All Star” / LEN “Steal My Sunshine” / Fatboy Slim “Praise You” / Beck “Debra” / Macy Gray “I Try” / Basement Jaxx “Red Alert” / The Chemical Brothers feat. Noel Gallagher “Let Forever Be” / Ben Folds Five “Army” / The Flaming Lips “The Gash” / The Magnetic Fields “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure” / Aimee Mann “Save Me” / Fiona Apple “Paper Bag” / Sleater-Kinney “Hot Rock” / Belle & Sebastian “Slow Graffiti” / Royal Trux “Stop” / Sloan “Don’t You Believe A Word” / The Roots “The Next Movement” / Method Man & Redman “Cheka” / Mos Def “Ms. Fat Booty” / Lauryn Hill “Ex-Factor” / Le Tigre “Deceptacon” / Clinic “The Second Line” / Nine Inch Nails “Into the Void” / Joan of Arc “Me (Plural)” / Mogwai “Year 2000 Non-Compliant Cardia” / Pavement “The Hexx” / Blur “No Distance Left to Run”

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Christina Aguilera “What A Girl Wants” / Mariah Carey feat. Jay-Z “Heartbreaker” / Britney Spears (You Drive Me) Crazy” / Shania Twain “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” / Guided by Voices “Teenage FBI” / The Dismemberment Plan “A Life of Possibilities” / April March “Sugar” / The Make Up “Born on the Floor” / Stereolab “The Free Design” / The Rock*A*Teens “Across the Piedmont” / The Rentals “Big Daddy C” / Wilco “A Shot in the Arm” / Bonnie “Prince” Billy “A Minor Place” / Backstreet Boys “I Want It That Way” / Sixpence None the Richer “Kiss Me” / Red Hot Chili Peppers “Scar Tissue” / Pharoahe Monch “Simon Says” / Common feat. Sadat X “1999” / Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg “Still D.R.E.” / Memphis Bleek “Memphis Bleek Is…” / The High & Mighty feat. Mos Def and Mad Skillz “B-Boy Document 99” / Handsome Boy Modeling School “Rock n’ Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This)” / Bloodhound Gang “The Bad Touch” / TLC “No Scrubs” / Destiny’s Child “Bills, Bills, Bills” / Chris Gaines “Lost In You” / Vitamin C “Smile” / Sugar Ray “Every Morning” / Fountains of Wayne “Utopia Parkway” / Home “Truly Judy” / Tricky “For Real” / Tori Amos “Glory of the ‘80s” / GusGus “Bambi” / Sigur Rós “Svefn-G-Englar” / Mercury Rev “Holes” / Shelby Lynne “Dreamsome” / Luna “Superfreaky Memories” / Kool Keith “Livin’ Astro” / MF Doom “Rhymes Like Dimes” / Tom Green “Lonely Swedish (The Bum Bum Song)”

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Built to Spill “The Plan” / Sebadoh “Flame” / Madonna “Beautiful Stranger” / Bis “Making People Normal” / Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci “Poodle Rockin’” / The Auteurs “How I Learned to Love the Bootboys” / Prince Paul feat. Kool Keith “Weapon World” / D’Angelo feat. Method Man and Redman “Left and Right” / The Beta Band “It’s Not Too Beautiful” / Roots Manuva “Juggle Tings Proper” / Aphex Twin “Windowlicker” / Clinton “People Power in the Disco Hour” / Missy Elliott “She’s A Bitch” / Cassius “Cassius 1999” / Moby “Bodyrock” / Q-Tip “Vivrant Thing” / Master P “Step to Dis” / Goodie Mob feat. TLC “What It Ain’t (Ghetto Enuff) / E-40 “Big Ballin’ with My Homies” / Aaliyah “I Don’t Wanna” / Ladytron “He Took Her To A Movie” / Apples in Stereo “Strawberryfire” / U.S. Maple “Breeze, It’s Your High School” / Jim O’Rourke “Ghost Ship In A Storm” / R.E.M. “The Great Beyond” / Songs: Ohia “Love Leaves Its Abusers” / Dixie Chicks “You Were Mine” / Martina McBride “I Love You” / American Football “Never Meant” / Blink-182 “What’s My Age Again” / Jimmy Eat World “For Me This Is Heaven” / Rainer Maria “Rise” / Ani DiFranco “Angry Anymore” / Faith Hill “Breathe” / Smog “Teenage Spaceship” / Godspeed You Black Emperor “Moya” / Björk “All Is Full of Love (Video Version)”

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Baz Luhrmann “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” / Chris Rock “No Sex in the Champagne Room” / Eve “Gotta Man” / Terror Squad feat. Big Pun “Whatcha Gon Do” / Project Pat feat. Noreaga and Tear Da Club Up Thugs “Represent It” / Lil Wayne “Tha Block Is Hot” / Dr. Dooom “Apartment 223” / Peanut Butter Wolf feat. Planet Asia “Definition of Ill” / Raekwon “Live from New York” / Whitney Houston “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay (Thunderpuss Mix)” / Foxy Brown feat. Total “I Can’t” / Mary J. Blige feat. Lauryn Hill “All That I Can Say” / Kim English “Unspeakable Joy” / Vengaboys “We Like to Party!” / Lou Bega “Mambo No. 5” / Ricky Martin “Livin’ La Vida Loca” / Paul Johnson “Get Get Down” / Pete Heller “Big Love (Original Club Mix)” / Mr. Oizo “Flat Beat” / Armand Van Helden & Duane Harden “U Don’t Know Me” / Pet Shop Boys “New York City Boy” / Cibo Matto “Working for Vacation” / LFO “Summer Girls” / Papa M “Roadrunner” / The Folk Implosion “Free to Go” / At the Drive-In “198d” / Foo Fighters “Breakout” / The Get Up Kids “Holiday” / Modest Mouse “You’re the Good Things” / Beulah “Score from Augusta” / Rilo Kiley “The Frug” / Pearl Jam “Last Kiss” / Kenny Chesney “How Forever Feels” / Jo Dee Messina “Stand Beside Me” / Lonestar “Amazed” / Beth Orton “Central Reservation”

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Darude “Sandstorm” / Eiffel 65 “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” / Azzido Da Bass “Dooms Night (Timo Maas Mix)” / Mouse on Mars “Diskdusk” / Leftfield feat. Roots Manuva “Dusted” / Orbital “Style” / Underworld “Push Upstairs” / Primal Scream “Swastika Eyes” / Gramm “Legends/Nugroove™” / Plone “Plock” / Aspen “Are You That Retail Snob?” / Susumu Yokota “Tobiume” / Drexciya “Drifting Into A Time of No Future” / Arovane “pInt” / D’Arcangelo “Shipwreck” / To Rococo Rot “Prado” / CiM “Comfort Control” / Peter Bench “Part IX” / Sturm “Untitled 3” / Rank 1 “Airwave” / GAS “Königsforst 1” / Gouryella “Gouryella (Extended)” / Everything But the Girl “Five Fathoms” / B. Fleischmann “Le Matin” / Proem “Drool Master” / Fantômas “Book 1: Page 4” / Monolake “Ginza” / Phonem “Bitstream”

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Bardo Pond “Walking Stick Man” / Sam Prekop “Showrooms” / Four Tet “The Space of Two Weeks” / Nightmares on Wax “Finer” / Puff Daddy feat R. Kelly “Satisfy You” / Lit “My Own Worst Enemy” / Buckcherry “Lit Up” / Stone Temple Pilots “Sour Girl” / Brad Paisley “He Didn’t Have to Be” / Clint Black “When I Said I Do” / Archer Prewitt “Raise on High” / Pedro the Lion “Be Thou My Vision” / Sonic Youth “Six for New Time” / Fly Pan Am “Bibi A Nice, 1921” / Tarentel “Steede Bonnet” / Terri Clark “You’re Easy on the Eyes” / Counting Crows “Hanginaround” / Santana feat. Rob Thomas “Smooth” / Chely Wright “Single White Female” / Olivia Tremor Control “Hideway” / Death In Vegas “Aisha” / Terrance and Phillip “Uncle Fucka” / Nas feat. Puff Daddy “Hate Me Now” / Silkk the Shocker feat. Master P “Ghetto Rain” / Dido “Here With Me” / R. Kelly feat. Celine Dion “I’m Your Angel” / Enrique Iglesias “Bailamos” / M2M “Don’t Say You Love Me” / Pocket Size “Walking” / Supergrass “Pumping On Your Stereo” / Super Furry Animals “Northern Lights” / And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead “Mistakes and Regrets” / Robbie Williams “Strong” / Sara Evans “No Place That Far” / Scharpling & Wurster “Rock, Rot, and Rule (excerpt)”

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The Faint “Worked Up So Sexual” / The White Stripes “The Big Three Killed My Baby” / Saves the Day “Shoulder to the Wheel” / New Found Glory “Hit or Miss” / Planes Mistaken for Stars “Copper and Stars” / The Promise Ring “Become One Anything One” / Low “Starfire” / The American Analog Set “Weather Report” / µ-Ziq “The Fear” / Blaque “808” / 702 “Where My Girls At” / Busta Rhymes feat. Janet Jackson “What’s It Gonna Be” / Black Eyed Peas “Joints and Jam” / Will Smith “Miami” / Monica “Angel of Mine” / The Divine Comedy “Gin Soaked Boy” / Randy Newman “Shame” / Kahimi Karie “Elastic Girl” / Khan “Body Dump” / Hot Boys “We On Fire” / Korea Girl “Under the Sun” / Citizen King “Better Days” / Deborah Cox “It’s Over Now” / Sisqo “Got to Get It” / Amber “Sexual (Li Da Li)” / Guitar Wolf “Jet Generation” / Further Seems Forever “New Year’s Project” / Piebald “Grace Kelly with Wings” / Superchunk “Hello Hawk” / Chris Cornell “Can’t Change Me” / Blondie “Maria” / Badly Drawn Boy “It Came from the Ground” / Ataris “I Won’t Spend Another Night Alone” / AFI “The Prayer Position” / Burning Airlines “Pacific 231” / The Casket Lottery “Midway” / Tristeza “A Little Distance” / Mark Wills “Wish You Were Here” / Mark Chesnutt “I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing”

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NSYNC “Thinking of You (I Drive Myself Crazy)” / Silverchair “Ana’s Song” / Bright Eyes “A Perfect Sonnet” / Creed “Higher” / Live “The Dolphin’s Cry” / No Doubt “New” / Bush “The Chemicals Between Us” / Korn “Freak On A Leash” / Powerman 5000 “When Worlds Collide” / Orgy “Blue Monday” / Linkin Park “High Voltage” / The Offspring “Why Don’t You Get A Job” / Faith Evans and Puff Daddy “All Night Long” / Jennifer Lopez “If You Had My Love” / Marc Anthony “I Need to Know” / Chante Moore “Chante’s Got A Man” / Stroke 9 “Little Black Backpack” / The Dillinger Escape Plan “Sugar Coated Sour” / Slipknot “Spit It Out” / Ministry “Bad Blood” / Filter “Take A Picture” / Tal Bachman “She’s So High” / 98 Degrees “I Do (Cherish You)” / Brandy “Have You Ever” / Eric Benet “Spend My Life With You” / JT Money “Who Dat” / Groove Armada “I See You Baby” / Ja Rule “Holla Holla” / Tyrese “Sweet Lady” / GZA “Beneath the Surface” / Jamiroquai “Canned Heat” / Moloko “Sing It Back (Tee’s Radio Mix)” / Geri Halliwell “Lift Me Up” / Ronan Keating “When You Say Nothing At All” / Martine McCutcheon “Perfect Moment” / Westlife “Swear It Again” / Pop Unknown “Half of Ninety” / The Smashing Pumpkins “The Everlasting Gaze” / Fu Manchu “Eatin’ Dust” / Turbonegro “Get It On” / XTC “Easter Theater” / David Bowie “The Dreamers” / Fugazi “I’m So Tired”

Kamasi Washington “Humility”

All of the songs on Kamasi Washington’s new record are named for virtues, but it’s funny to me that this one is called “Humility” when it’s so grandiose and swaggering. It sounds expensive somehow, as though Washington’s main saxophone hook was made of elegant golden spirals. Cameron Graves’ piano part contrasts this with a wild, trebly blast of notes that seem to bounce and ricochet off the rhythm. This is a very busy piece of music, but despite all the clatter the emphasis is always placed on the melody, and the composition essentially clicks together like a pop song. This is perhaps Washington’s greatest gift as a composer – to be heavily indebted to decades worth of jazz history, but for that context to not matter so much in how the music is actually heard.

Buy it from Amazon.

Curtis Harding “Need Your Love”

What’s more familiar and nostalgic: The sort of ‘70s soul music Curtis Harding writes and performs, or the crisp, airtight sound of Danger Mouse’s production aesthetic? The latter makes the former sound slightly more modern, but leaves the music in a strange uncanny valley of pastiche – flagrantly retro yet subtly yanked out of time. Danger Mouse’s mix foregrounds the beat and bass so it nearly sounds programmed, but Harding’s warm, throaty vocals keep the song grounded in a messy humanity. He sounds like the real deal, even when he seems to be self-consciously emulating his heroes.

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The Clientele “The Neighbour”

Alasdair MacLean’s voice is dry and understated, but in a way that never betrays the romance in his music. The best songs by The Clientele have a way of making urban life seem both incredibly magical and crushingly sad, and make true human connection and intimacy seem glorious, but against all odds. That’s pretty much what’s going on in “The Neighbour” – no one’s talking to each other, nobody is touching, but everyone is feeling. A guy dreams of following someone home on the chance they might speak to each other, but it doesn’t happen. Someone plays violin in his home at night, and the music is felt strongly by another on the other side of the wall, but they do not speak. The music makes it all sound so lovely and full of possibility, even as MacLean’s words make it clear that these people aren’t seizing the opportunities.

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Lee Ranaldo “Morroccan Mountains”

Lee Ranaldo’s first two post-Sonic Youth solo albums are good but felt oddly ordinary, perhaps because I’d been waiting literally half of my life with the fantasy of hearing an all-Lee rock album. A lot of the songs on those records felt like Sonic Youth but without Kim or Thurston’s presence – that’s sort of exactly what they are, given that Steve Shelley is still his drummer – but the best tracks on the new Electric Trim have an ambitious prog-folk sound that feels like more of a clean break from SY aesthetics.

“Moroccan Mountains” sounds like the soundtrack to a journey, with Ranaldo’s voice like a sherpa guiding us as the song moves along an eccentric upward trajectory. I love Ranaldo’s tuning on this track – I’m not knowledgeable enough to identify it, but there’s a tinny sitar-like effect that’s crisp and bright, but slightly off-kilter. I’m also into the way the drama shifts between different passages, with some segments that are a bit ambiguous in tone moving seamlessly into others that are more overtly melancholy or aggressive. The drama peaks with a directly confrontational section that’s as close as this piece gets to traditional rock, but that’s about halfway through. The rest of it meanders into lovelier, more peaceful moments before reaching its conclusion.

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Godspeed You Black Emperor “Bosses Hang, Part II”

Godspeed You Black Emperor saw the future coming. Their music has always had an apocalyptic quality to it, but pegged to leftist messaging and activism that made it clear this wasn’t some dark fantasy. The music on Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, their 2012 comeback record, was particularly bleak – the centerpiece tracks “Mladic” and “We Drift Like Worried Fire” sounded like the complete and utter triumph of evil, and not in some cool metal way. They are both extraordinary pieces of music, but difficult to reckon with. It’s hard to confront music that crushes hope. It’s even more difficult now, when it feels so real.

This is why the hopeful sound of Godspeed’s new record, Luciferian Towers, is so startling. You expect Godspeed to be dark and pessimistic, especially now. But the sound of the record, particularly the “Bosses Hang” trilogy, is defiant and uplifting. It is not cheerful or even particularly positive, but it does communicate righteous indignation and solidarity. It sounds like it is meant, on some level, to inspire the listener to fight back. I hope this is another example of Godspeed seeing the future coming clearly before the rest of us.

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Chloé featuring Ben Shemie “Recall”

Ben Shemie’s vocals on this track are slurred and only somewhat coherent, like a guy muttering in a state halfway between sleep and consciousness. The words that come out clearly are evocative, but lyrics aren’t really the point here – it’s more about how Shemie’s voice moves over and under Chloé’s arrangement. I like the way the music seems to shape itself around the vocals and vice versa, as if in conversation. The voice, beat, and keyboard parts gradually fall more into synch as the track progresses. It’s lovely, but always sort of tentative in feel, as though this connection could break at any moment. As you get closer to the ending it sounds like you’re just hanging on to something precious just a bit longer.

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Suzi Wu “Teenage Witch”

“Teenage Witch” opens with a lo-fi benediction: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the guys are fuckboys, the girls are sluts.” It’s very provocative and sets the tone lyrically, but doesn’t tip off the ambition of the music. The song is definitely pop, but in a very aggressive mid-‘90s way in which the hooks come at you with a sort of fuck-you violence and an off-kilter funk. Honestly, it’s refreshing to hear a very young artist tap into this sort of energy – I’ve found it troubling how much music in 2017 has been chill or sedate. I realize that there’s a lag to when and how songs get released, but regardless of when Wu recorded this, “Teenage Witch” has a nervy, abrasive, and defiant edge that feels necessary right now. And that chorus feels right too: “I’m too scared to live / too stoned to die.”

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Game Theory “An Overview of Item Response Theory”

The name of the final Game Theory record is Supercalifragile, which is definitely the best album title to come along this year, and a perfect example of Scott Miller’s wit as a lyricist – a mawkish bit of Disney nostalgia broken in half to reveal a vulnerability that was always right there in front of us. I can imagine his delight upon first thinking of the joke, and then a moment of reflection and self-identification: “Yup, that’s me, super Cali fragile.”

Scott Miller was a clever and funny guy. I listened to his music – primarily his Loud Family work, though his Game Theory discography is what made him an indie hero – for a very long time before noticing how much of it is about depression. That didn’t become obvious to me until after he killed himself in 2013, and then it became very hard to not hear it on every record. Anxiety and misery was present in an alarming number of his songs going back to the beginning, and sometimes it was not even a subtextual thing. This is a guy who wrote a song called “Slit My Wrists” with a chorus that goes “what I need is not ways to go on / what I need is to slit my wrists and be gone.” That song came out 20 years before he actually killed himself. He was living with this for a very long time, and even when he stated it plainly everyone just nodded and thought “Scott Miller is a clever and funny guy.” Maybe it was a literary reference or something.

Miller was working on Supercalifragile before he died. It was his idea to revive the Game Theory name – to bring things full circle, I suppose, but also because the name would draw a little bit more attention than making it another Loud Family release. Maybe he wasn’t happy with how it was coming together. Maybe he felt stuck. I have no idea why he didn’t finish it before ending his life, but I figure there were many other factors in making that decision that weren’t directly related to the music he was writing. The record was completed by his friends and fans – Aimee Mann, Ted Leo, Ken Stringfellow, Mitch Easter, Peter Buck, Will Sheff, Doug Gillard, Matt LeMay, Spiral Stairs, and Nina Gordon among others. The songs were in various states of completion at the time of Miller’s death, and a few of them are sung by someone other than him. I find it harder to deal with those. All I hear is his absence.

Supercalifragile doesn’t sound like a cry for help. It mostly sounds perky and melodic but a bit skewed, like almost all of Miller’s music. Reading through the lyrics doesn’t yield much in the way of “oh, now I get it,” but there is a certain calm and distance to his perspective in most of the songs, and a sense that he’s taking stock and tying off some lose ends. He reckons with his sideline careers as a programmer and a music critic, he visits a sick friend in the hospital, he writes a love song for his widow that is absolutely crushing to hear in the context of how he died. “An Overview of Item Response Theory,” an up-tempo psychedelic jangle rocker with a typically obtuse title, is where he flat-out says what he must’ve been wondering at the end: “Is your life worthwhile?” It’s there, clear in the mix, hiding in plain sight like so many other bleak lines throughout his career. I hope that despite how he decided to end things he realized that it was worthwhile. It really was, and the music always will be.

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Nosaj Thing “U G”

There’s two vocal samples here, but your immediate attention goes to the one that takes up the most space – a rhythmic loop of a blues or R&B singer singing “you got” over and over until the words stop registering as words. It’s a great hook, and clicks well with beat. The sample that makes the song actually arrives first – a blurted “yeahhh” that sounds like it was recorded slightly off mic, and serves as the punctuation to a rather mournful two-chord organ riff that opens the track. These elements set up an intriguing atmosphere for the groove, an emotional space that’s somewhere in the vicinity of sadness but isn’t quite there. The beat seems as though it’s running away from this minor key dreariness, but those vocals act like a tether. It gets away, but only so far to get jerked back into position.

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Magic Potion “Rest Yr Skull”

Gustaf Montelius is the type of indie rock guitarist who makes it all sound incredibly easy, as if anyone could pick up a guitar and casually pluck out a slightly off-kilter but immediately pleasing riffs and leads. He’s got this and a mellow, slack relationship with the beat with Stephen Malkmus, but Magic Potion’s similarities to Pavement is more of an aesthetic kinship and shared philosophy than a direct A-sounds-like-B thing. Montelius’ songs have a sort of impish quality, and a melodic style that strikes me as bit more ‘60s. “Rest Yr Skull” reminds me a little bit of Donovan in particular, and has some of his playful qualities, but perhaps a bit more so. The part that really gets me in this song is the guitar solo section, which is so loose that it almost feels tentative and improvised, and manages a weird and lovely balance of wooziness and grace.

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