Vampire Weekend “Capricorn”

The first four Vampire Weekend records have a very clean tonal palette, to the point that the debut and Contra in particular can feel a little antiseptic and fussy. That wasn’t a problem, really – that crisp just-so quality was a big part of the group’s personality and felt like a musical manifestation of the faux-preppy vibe they were going for. They started with a polished sound that many bands work their way towards from scrappy beginnings, so it makes some sense that their evolution would follow the reverse trajectory and feel comfortable embracing big loud noises on their fifth record Only God Was Above Us.

This is Vampire Weekend, so when I say “big loud noises,” I don’t mean they just slammed on some distortion pedals and played some riffs. The most discordant elements of the new singles “Capricorn” and “Gen-X Cops” are very tightly controlled and carefully chosen tones that hit very precise marks in the mix. The bursts of what I think are heavily processed keyboards that start midway through “Capricorn” are genuinely surprising and lend a sense of danger and precarity to song that, up until that point, sounds like a pretty standard Ezra Koenig ballad including a piano break that sounds perhaps a little too much like the one from “Step.” (I can’t tell whether that’s an intentional thematic callback, which Koenig is wont to do and makes some sense as both songs are about aging, or if it’s simply a songwriter writing like themselves.)

That noise, which sounds like an oddly sensual version of a BZZZT WRONG button in a game show, doesn’t entirely come out of nowhere. The percussion is presented with an exaggerated room sound that makes the whole song feel like it’s in soft focus. The air feels different in this song relative to previous Vampire recordings – dry and cold, filling a space that’s somehow both more and less claustrophobic. Koenig sounds distant as he sings about someone – a version of himself? – getting older and increasingly frustrated in trying to find answers, or pieces of the past that resonate with his particular place on a timeline. There are no answers in this song but there is some advice: “I know you’re tired of trying, listen clearly – you don’t have to try.” Is that the same as giving up? Not sure, but the music signals so much weariness and potential disaster that it’s at least asking someone to take a break and not be so hard on themselves.

Buy it from Amazon.

Atarashii Gakko! “Hello”

The Japanese girl group Atarashii Gakko specialize in extremely high energy tunes with a bratty, punky snarl so it makes sense they’d shine in a song that seems like it was built to be their own version of Le Tigre’s immortal “Deceptacon.” There’s other ingredients in this soup – I hear a little “Burning Up” by Madonna, a touch of the Afrika Bambaata/Johnny Rotten song “World Destruction,” the early Beastie Boys in general – but the thing that puts this over is the attitude in the Atarashii Gakko girls’ vocal delivery. They seem a little cute and flirty, but mostly intimidating and fearless.

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Goat Girl “Ride Around”

The guitar parts in “Ride Around” have a sludgy tone and churning rhythm that feels sickly and uncomfortable. The hesistant feel of the percussion only exacerbates that, at some points bringing to mind the kind of cautious movements of someone who feels like they’re about to puke. This is all very unpleasant and probably not the most enticing way to describe a song, but it really works as a vibe and matches the lyrics nicely. If you’re gonna sing “The way it goes, I think you’re kinda gross / me and you, I think we could be close,” it shouldn’t be in a song that goes down easy, right?

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Cheekface “The Fringe”

Cheekface is a godsend for anyone out there who misses Cake, or ever wished Calvin Johnson had made a late 70s/early 80s style power-pop record, or wanted to know what a hybrid of They Might Be Giants and Talking Heads might be like. But despite aesthetic similarities to some very specific artists of previous generations, Cheekface has their own personality. A lot of that comes down to the way they mix and match the recognizable elements, like they simply found a new way to style that droll Johnson/John McCrea vocal affect into a fresh new outfit. The personality also comes through in Greg Katz’s lyrical fixation on recognizable hipster archetypes as they manifest in the present day – a frustrated guy deciding to make himself a local character in a town full of surveillance cameras, guys who are frustrated that their friends “getting square,” dudes who are “dispassionately vaping” while watering plants, and in the case of “The Fringe,” an artist who seems to be motivated to create unappealing art to gain some clout. The jokes are pretty good, but the replay value is a direct result of the band taking structure and arrangement very seriously.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Yungatita “Pick At Your Face”

“Pick At Your Face” sounds bright and bratty and effortless as Yungatita seem to tumble through a series of very strong melodies. It’s a song about feeling listless, ugly, and disheveled, but more in a “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t ya kill me” way than a “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here” way. The band go big and bold on the chorus, but also very cutesy – as 90s-coded as this gets, the backing vocals have a post-Kidz Bop quality that’s much more in line with strains of 2000s indie that aren’t particularly cool at the moment. But you know, songs this good have a way of changing minds about aesthetic choices that are a little cringe at face value.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Unessential Oils “Distrust the Magician”

I didn’t really notice there was singing on “Distrust the Magician” until I’d heard it a few times, mainly because it’s so easy to zone out and get lost in the song’s groove and heavy vibe that a lot of the details and structure gets blurry. That’s sort of the point, though closer attention to individual components of the arrangement is rewarded, particularly if you’re focusing in on the lead guitar or the pulsing keyboard drone filling in the background. The performance feels lose and at least partially improvised but the palette is very considered and precise – guitar tones that sound light and lovely but also gritty and grey, percussion with just the right level of dry crispiness, a mix that feels spacious but allows the guitar parts to overlap into a lattice with a very tasteful density.

Buy it from Secret City Records.

Liquid Mike “Small Giants”

Liquid Mike’s new record sounds like a musical stew made from ingredients exclusively sourced from a CD bin marked “$4 used alternative,” but the element of their style that grabbed me is how much of the vocal and lead guitar melodies remind me specifically of Matthew Sweet. But you know, if Matthew Sweet was more of a dirtbag delinquent? I have no idea whether or not the members of this band even listen to Sweet, but that Sweet-ness is a touch of harmonic polish that levels up the more straight ahead pop-punk aspects of a song like “Small Giants.” It suits the lyrics well too, amping up the golden sunny nostalgia of a song that romanticizes being a young loser.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

The Last Dinner Party “The Feminine Urge”

The Last Dinner Party sound as though they’ve somehow never heard music besides indie-aligned records from the United Kingdom, like they were bred from childhood to take their place in a lineage of clever, somewhat stuffy bands including The Smiths, Pulp, The Charlatans, Catatonia, Camera Obscura, The Long Blondes, The Pipettes, Florence and the Machine, and so on. They have enough craft and charm to fit into that RIYL list, but thus far I’m having trouble locating something specific to them in their songs. They execute tropes rather well, the lyrics are fairly sharp, and they’re capable of writing a genuinely strong hook like the fluttery ascending melody in the chorus of “The Feminine Urge.” This can be enough, and lord knows plenty of bands working in the same milieu can’t pull any of that off. But I’d like to feel like this band can do more than just effectively reassemble the ideas of other bands.

Buy it from Amazon.

Boeckner “Lose”

One of the oldest conventions of this blog is using a line from a song as the title of the post, ideally something abstract and evocative. Sometimes I don’t have a lot to work with, but in the case of “Lose,” it’s like top to bottom cool abstract evocative lines. “Living blind in isolation,” “every star in retrograde,” “this is a city of doorways,” “the vanishing neighbors,” “some Eldritch strange eraser,” and that’s just the first verse. Dan Boeckner built the song to feel like a speeding car, the lyrics feel a little like quick glimpses out the window as you zoom away from somewhere, not necessarily towards someplace in particular. It’s hard to shake how doomed this song feels – everything is crumbling around him, he was bound to lose his love – but Boeckner sings with so much heart and go-for-broke intensity that it overpowers any of his cynical impulses.

Buy it from Sub Pop.

Omni “Plastic Pyramid”

I’m a big fan of songs in which singers interact like they’re talking to each other, particularly when the lyrics aren’t particularly obvious and it’s like listening in on a very strange conversation. That’s the case in “Plastic Pyramid,” a twitchy post-punk song that seems to conflate fast fashion with travel in which Omni’s Philip Frobos trades lines with Izzy Glaudini of Automatic in a listless “are they on a bad date?” tone. (Love the way she seems to audibly roll her eyes at the question “are you hydrated, baby?”) in Glaudini was a terrific choice for this role – she’s always got this droll cool girl quality, but the song allows her to embody boredom, passivity, and vague contempt at different points.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Drahla “Default Parody”

Here’s another post-punk song. I read a tweet today by the English music critic Tom Ewing who was lamenting how post-punk started as a framework for experimentation and pushing beyond genre constraints, but its cyclical revivals treat the sound as a genre like any other. It’s iterative rather than explorative. I think this is a good point, but I don’t think the intentions of the artists who establish a genre ever really factor into how other artists end up playing with their conventions. Every genre convention wasn’t conventional at some point.

Drahla are very good at what they do even if what they do isn’t at all original. I think the post-punk aesthetic is something that’s mostly interesting depending on the energy of the execution, how much musicians throw themselves into the deep end of the sound. “Default Parody” has a cool groove and appealing deadpan vocals, but it clicks mainly because the guitarists sound like they’re having a great time wringing the sickest, most abrasive sounds out of their instruments. Even if a lot of the song feels rigid and mechanical, those guitars make it all sound wild.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Bullion featuring Carly Rae Jepsen “Rare”

I hear “Rare” in terms of temperature – the bass is at a low simmer, the synth textures and Bullion’s voice have a slight chill. Neither is at an extreme, but the contrast is still quite sharp. His voice and cadence feels very formal and polite to me, he sounds like an introverted and cerebral person trying to reason his way though something quite emotional. Carly Rae Jepsen isn’t that much warmer in tone on this track, but she comes across as more present and down to earth. You get the feeling that she’s trying to acclimate to his vibe, trying to feel things as he feels them. With this in mind I quite like the ambiguity of the chorus – “deep in the heart, deep in the heart” – because it sounds like they’re trying to make love work, but at least one of them has to dig deeper and work harder for it to click.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Sleater-Kinney “Small Finds”

Corin Tucker’s lyrics in “Small Finds” jumble up hunger, sex, and violence in a way where it’s unclear whether she’s singing about animals or humans. It’s all primal urges and survival instincts, but it’s also totally unapologetic pleasures. Tucker’s fierce and uninhibited voice is perfect for a song with these themes, but so is Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s guitar attack, which is about as gnarly as they’ve ever sounded. I can imagine them approaching the same idea with a more cerebral and ironic angle, but I think going for wild vulgarity and brutality is the more honest and compelling move.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bad Tuner “24 Hours”

“24 Hours” isn’t just the first great Big Beat song to come along in a long time, it’s a Big Beat song that stands up to the very best of The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, or The Crystal Method in their late 90s prime. This track is a dense ecosystem of dynamic shifts crafted to keep you moving and it’s so effective that you can feel helpless to it, like Bad Tuner is remotely hijacking your body or just throwing you around like a doll. The aggression isn’t limited to how hard the beats slam – the vocal clips are furious and defiant and confident in the power of resisting “those in power,” and the textures and random sounds owe a lot to The Bomb Squad at Public Enemy’s peak. There’s no getting around how this is a style rooted in another era but this doesn’t feel retro to me, more like a new artist harnessing the power of old techniques to make something fresh and forceful for this moment in time.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Idles “Grace”

Some songs sound like they’re driven by an idea – some kind of mission – that pushes the artist out of their comfort zone. “Grace” feels very different from any Idles song I’ve heard before, much more delicate and far less monochromatic without losing the post-punk tension at the core of their sound. The song sounds like pastel light breaking through a grey haze, some softness and beauty contrasted with harsh and rigid mechanical utility. Joseph Talbot is singing about love on a grand scale, about true solidarity for humanity at large. The verses read like a prayer but the song overtly rejects religion, or at least the institutional structure around it. The idea here, simple as it is, is laid out in the chorus – let go of institutions, let go of the things that control us, embrace love. Talbot is hardly the first to propose this, but he and his band make an excellent case for it here.

Buy it from Amazon.

박혜진 Park Hye Jin “Bklyn Babe”

Park Hye Jin has a gift for writing keyboard parts that give me extreme deja vu, like I’m hearing something that I half-remember from over 20 years ago and can’t place at all. The keyboard tone and melody of “Bklyn Babe” reminds me of mellow trip-hop and softer EDM from around the time I was in art school in the late 90s/early 00s, or maybe it’s more like the indie rap from the same period. I like that this is just on the edge of my own knowledge, and how any nostalgic value for me is shifted into something more vague by the limits of my memory. I like her vocals on this too – the English parts are mostly just a vulgar approximation of “Brooklyn attitude,” the Korean parts basically incoherent to me but rapped with a sort of petulant confidence.

Buy it from Amazon.

Faye Webster featuring Lil Yachty “Lego Ring”

Lil Yachty leans very hard on vocal processing and effects, but in a way that’s less like the sleek aesthetics of AutoTune auteur T-Pain and more like a shoegaze guitarist enamored by pedals. He’s compensating for some technical weaknesses, sure, but the heavy distortion has a way of highlighting his humanity and emotional vulnerability. On “Running Out of Time” he sounded like a guy reaching beyond his natural skills to express himself like a robust soul singer, which made the longing in the song a little more poignant than if it was sung straight.

Yachty is tapping into something a little different on “Lego Ring,” a collaboration with his childhood friend (!!!) Faye Webster. In this context he’s alternately a duet partner and accompaniment, sounding more like a keyboard than a singer. This is a sharp contrast with Webster, a singer who’s always exceptionally good at conveying warmth, humor, and fragility. He sounds like a sad digital ghost haunting her song, and she sounds like she’s dimly aware of his presence, or lack thereof. They both sound lonely and lost, like they’re reaching toward each other but there’s no way to connect.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

The Smile “Friend of A Friend”

The Smile’s debut album was full of tight, wrenching grooves that felt like an internal pressure twisting the music into knots. The second Smile record Wall of Eyes goes much looser with music that feels as though it’s responding to outside pressures. “Friend of a Friend” feels very light, often to the point of feeling like it’s helplessly gliding on strong unpredictable winds. I listen to this and I imagine a small, lithe figure pushed by and pushing against outside forces as they attempt to maintain some grace and dignity despite some stumbling. Thom Yorke sounds weary but bemused, Jonny Greenwood lends some cinematic grandeur with a string arrangement that evokes an unstable atmosphere and powerful gusts of wind, and Tom Skinner’s drums convey the feeling of trying to maintain balance. It comes together as one of Yorke and Greenwood’s best compositions in years and a welcome return to the odd gravity and muted majesty of A Moon Shaped Pool.

Buy it from Amazon.

The KLF featuring Tammy Wynette “Justified & Ancient (Stand By the JAMs)”

I would love to read an audio transcript of the call The KLF made to Tammy Wynette in Tennessee to say “Tammy, stand by the JAMs.” What kind of pitch do you have to make circa 1991 to get a country star to jump on a pop-house song with surreal lyrics about the KLF’s mythology about the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu largely pulled from The Illuminatus Trilogy? How do you explain the concept, or why these weirdos from the UK would specifically want Tammy Wynette to sing it?
 
We have answers to some of these questions. For one thing, we know Wynette sang it mainly because she just liked the song and was game for some silliness. ”I fell for the track the moment I heard it,” Wynette told Entertainment Weekly in 1992. ”It had a perfect melody, but I didn’t really understand what they were talking about.”
 
That’s the point of the song, really. It does have a perfect melody and it’s immaculately composed and produced. All the weirdness is there mostly so The KLF could find out what they could get away with, in a semi-academic way. Is being catchy and fun really enough? Is pop music more exciting or rewarding when there are incomprehensible or confusing aspects of it? If a song is powerful enough, can a nonsensical mythology become as compelling as existing religions?
 
My own answer to all of those questions is YES. It might be YES in part because of this song, which was a big hit around the time I started taking music very seriously as a kid. I had no context for Tammy Wynette when I was 12, I only knew from the song itself that it was sorta weird that this twangy soulful country lady was singing about going to “Mu Mu Land.” The KLF were playing a game that invites the listener to play along, to fill in the gaps, to imagine a whole secret arcane culture centered on the untrammeled creativity and hedonism of raves. For a few minutes, they pull you away from the mundane and offer you some magic.

Buy it from Amazon, sorta.

Richard Marx “Don’t Mean Nothing”

You listen to music as a kid with very few reference points. Whatever you hear early on ends up becoming the beginning of musical history as you know it, and songs that anyone with even a little context would clock as derivative exist entirely on their own merits even if you hear it side by side with whatever they’re emulating. This is why it took me decades to notice this Richard Marx song, a big radio hit when I was a kid, is basically the young Marx writing his own version of a Don Henley song, right on down to the recording featuring Eagles alumni Joe Walsh on guitar and Randy Meisner and Timothy B Schmidt on backing vocals.

“Don’t Mean Nothing” specifically feels like the final Eagles album The Long Run, or Henley’s solo stuff from the 80s, like “Dirty Laundry” or “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.” It’s in the studio gloss, the way every part of the song sounds like it’s very brightly lit, and how the guitar sounds as though it’s being played with sarcastic airquotes.

But most of all it’s in the lyrics, which aim for very Henley-esque sort of cynicism. It’s written from the perspective of a Hollywood insider who’s telling some up and comer about how it all really works. A lot of it sounds like the truth, but just enough of it sounds like an agent buttering up a fresh-faced talent to make you get that we’re listening to an unreliable narrator. If everyone has an angle and wants a piece of you, surely he must as well? He seems pretty eager for you to sign that dotted line.

This is Marx’s debut single and it was written well before he was famous, so it seems safe to say he was probably writing about his own experience of entering an industry full of people he can’t really trust. You hear Marx’s youth and drive to be a star in his voice, so much so that it’s at odds with the snarkier aspects of the song, though not in a bad way. It’s a complication that adds depth in any interpretation. Is the earnest vocal performance indicating that we’re hearing the advice from the singer’s perspective and sensing his skepticism? Is it more about this agent guy putting on a sunny public persona to soften a harsh message? The truth spoken by a living lie.

The bridge is what really makes this song click, both musically and lyrically. The first half of it is as overtly melancholy as this otherwise very cheery song gets – “Hollywood can be so lonely, make you the winner of a losing fight.” But then it shifts back into brightness and optimism very abruptly – “but the party is never over because the stars are always shining, doesn’t matter if it’s day or night.” You could take it as the punchline of the lyrics, but Marx sounds so sincere that it plays like the heart of the song. Whether you’re hearing that from the young talent or the agent or Marx’s personal perspective, it’s the part of the song where you really get that this song is coming from a love of Los Angeles and a real excitement about getting a chance to play this game.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Doobie Brothers “Minute By Minute”

“Minute By Minute” opens with a keyboard intro that moves frantically but has a very chill tone, an appropriate overture for a song about trying to play it cool despite very fraught emotions. Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers aim for a classic Motown feel and structure but filtered through their style and the cutting edge studio technology of the late ’70s the music takes on a slightly stiff and neurotic vibe. It still swings, but only so much. It’s perfect for getting across the mood of the guy in this song, who’s struggling with a lot of contradictions.

Hey, don’t worry, I’ve been lied to
I’ve been here many times before

He’s putting on armor from the start. He’s trying to tell you that he’s hardened by his past experience and has a lot of options, that the stakes are actually pretty low and he doesn’t have a lot of expectations. But what you really hear in McDonald’s phrasing is a guy who’s been hurt before and is hurting right now, but he’s playing it off as no big deal but not doing a great job of it.

Girl, don’t you worry, I know where I stand
I don’t need this love, I don’t need your hand

He’s trying to make it sound like he’s not a sucker, and that he’s not broken the rules by catching real feelings. It’s very “doth protest too much.”

I know I could turn, blink, and you’d be gone
Then I must be prepared any time to carry on
But minute by minute by minute
I’ll keep holding on

And there it is. He knows he’s playing a game he can’t win, but he loves to play it and is just trying to prolong this game for as long as she’ll allow it. He can’t have what he really wants with her, but what he has in the moment is close enough. He can imagine a better situation, but he can’t imagine someone better than her.

You will stay just to watch me, darlin’
Wilt away on lies from you

Here’s where the bitterness comes through. He’s playing the victim, but also swearing that he won’t give her the satisfaction of getting one over on him. He’s trying to get any kind of upper hand in the situation. McDonald’s phrasing gets a little more strained here, making him sound kinda pissy in the most soulful way possible.

Can’t stop the habit of livin’ on the run
I take it all for granted like you’re the only one

This ties back to “It Keeps You Runnin’,” a previous song with The Doobie Brothers that sounds like it’s written about the same situationship from earlier on the timeline. It’s pretty much the same emotional dynamic, but written with more hope that he can persuade her to settle down. Not a lot more hope, though – as much as he’s exasperated by her willingness to be lonely, there’s no end to her “running” in sight.

Livin’ on my own
Somehow that sounds nice

I love the way McDonald sings “somehow that sounds nice” like he’s muttering an aside to himself, as though he’s just in that moment considering something that might be good for him.

You think I’m your fool
Well, you may just be right

These days you’d probably call yourself a simp instead of a fool, but it’s all the same. He’s so enamored of her that he can’t make any sort of good decision despite knowing better. If this is what a simp believes, how do the simps survive?

Call my name and I’ll be gone
You’ll reach out and I won’t be there

The key changes on the bridge, pushing McDonald towards a higher pitch and more strident tone and he imagines a consequence to her stringing him along. It’s a spiteful fantasy of withholding the thing he wants so much once she decides she wants it too.

Just my luck, you’ll realize
You should spend your life with someone
You could spend spend your life with someone

Oh, did you have someone in mind?

Buy it from Amazon.