June 10th, 2015 12:39pm
The title of this song is a lie. This is a full-on emo/pop-punk rant about an ex, but unlike the majority of the music in that genre, this is a woman tearing into some obnoxious dude in great detail. Everything in this song is so vivid, from the opening about this guy telling her not to hold his hand in front of his friends to the bit about him saying he’s an anarchist but holding on to his day job. This is basically a Fall Out Boy song in terms of style and structure, but it’s so refreshing to hear these genre conventions turned back on to suburban punk guys – always a far better target of scorn and mockery than the poor young girls who break their hearts after they get tired of being treated like shit.
The title of this song isn’t a lie, but it’s not quite what you probably expect. It’s a song about friendship, but specifically one that has become rather strained, largely because of some guy she’s dating who is a total creep. I love that the core emotion in this song is a feeling of want to protect a friend, but trying to be mindful of boundaries. So, instead of directly fighting with her boyfriend or lecturing her about him, she tells him to “fuck off” in her sleep.
June 9th, 2015 12:39pm
“That Battle Is Over” seems to exist in a strange liminal space – between form and formlessness, between deliberate sexiness and a resistance of sexualization, between the personal and the political. Jenny Hval’s lyrics move through a series of provocative and interesting thoughts, but the connection between all of them is sorta loose and free form. It’s less like an essay and more like just getting lost in thought and letting one idea to lead to another. This makes her points seem all the more profound, particularly as her mind draws a line from media-induced paranoia and hypochondria to the way capitalism thrives on people’s dissatisfaction with themselves, and ultimately, how capitalism’s illusions of choice can make you think that “feminism is over” when patriarchal structures are still in place. The song is like one long epiphany set to a beat and organ drone that signals “erotic” to me, in part because of how commonly this aesthetic was used for intentionally sexy music in the late ‘80s and ‘90s. I love the tension between that vibe and Hval’s words, and the implication that a song dealing with persuasion and seduction on a cultural level should itself sound persuasive and seductive.
June 8th, 2015 1:59am
A very overrated aspect of music culture, particularly online music culture, is chasing after baby bands and hyping them up. It’s the music culture equivalent of the people who rush to type “FIRST!” in a comments section, and it’s more about people trying to accumulate social capital than anything else. An underrated thing is waiting for one of those baby bands to make the jump from promising or pretty good to becoming actually great. No Joy have done this with their third album More Faithful, and it’s a thrill to hear a group of musicians step up and really find their voice.
The first two No Joy LPs were good but not particularly distinctive shoegaze records. This is fairly common in the indie world – shoegaze is a very seductive aesthetic, and you can make superficially beautiful and cool-sounding music in that genre without a lot of technical skill. It’s also a great genre for shy singers, since you can get away with burying your voice under all the noise.
More Faithful is a shoegaze record too, but it’s anything but lazy and bashful. This is an album made by musicians who understand that the best music in this genre – i.e., the work of My Bloody Valentine – is all about sensuality and subtle tonal contrasts applied to strong, melodic songwriting. The record is full of gorgeous sounds and interesting textures, and even better, there’s so much depth implied by the mix that sometimes it seems as though it’s coming at you in 3-D. (I’m particularly fond of the way the apply a severe slap echo on just the word “stop” in the chorus of “Chalk Snake.”) I’ve had a promo of More Faithful for a few months and it’s been in my regular rotation all of that time, and I’m still finding new nuances to love in it after dozens of listens.
“Moon In My Mouth” is the song on More Faithful that I’ve obsessed over for months. It’s a very well-written piece of music, but feels oddly amorphous. It’s performed in an unusual time signature, and though the melodic elements seem to orbit something, it’s not clear what that something actually is. It’s disorienting, but in a very lovely way. One of the best things about “Moon In My Mouth” is though the overall sensation of it is sort of vague, its component sounds are very specific and clean. The extreme clarity of the guitar parts remind me of how Peter Buck’s guitar was recorded and mixed on R.E.M.’s Murmur. There’s something so stunning and surreal about hearing something so crystal clear at the center of an arrangement that otherwise quite atmospheric. Jasamine White-Gluz’s vocal performance is wonderful too – breathy at some points, but very crisp and emphatic in the chorus. I’m so glad she didn’t hold back in singing the song, because that her passion doesn’t compromise the intimacy of this music. It amplifies it.
June 4th, 2015 12:11pm
“Half Life Crisis” is the kind of song that’s so straightforward and melodically pleasing that you don’t really pick up on how lopsided its structure is until you actually give it a close listen, or look at it laid out on a page. The first chunk of the song is a string of verses separated by brief instrumental refrains that seem to get more ornate as the song moves along. Then the song shifts into an extended outré section that tilts the main melody somewhat, and introduces a lead guitar part that sounds very George Harrison to my ears. It’s a very lovely and elegant piece of rock music that distracts you somewhat from lyrics that are so sharply critical of someone that it’s hard to imagine it’s not about a very specific person. O’Rourke is singing about someone who’s been knocked down a few pegs after believing themselves to be a big star, and though his words aren’t outright hostile, it’s pretty clear that he’s savoring the schadenfreude.
Maybe about 40% of this song belongs in the shoegaze genre, but the rest of it – wow, I don’t really know how to classify that. There’s a few different categories of psychedelic music floating around in “Sewn Up Sunrise,” but they never really collide. Moving through the song is like passing through weather systems, and though you have to get through some stormy sequences, the end of the journey is pretty chill and relaxing. I love the lead guitar part at the end – it’s just a bit jazzy, and fits nicely with a groovy bass line that carries the song but sometimes feels slightly disconnected from the atmosphere.
June 3rd, 2015 1:07pm
Damaged Bug is John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees. The difference between the two projects is that Thee Oh Sees is more of a traditional rock band where he plays electric guitar, and Damaged Bug is more of a studio band where he plays synthesizers. There is otherwise not that much difference between the two – Dwyer’s melodic sensibility is the same, though I think keyboards bring out the best in him, at least in terms of writing melody. Dwyer straight up mimics Silver Apples and Can in a few Damaged Bug songs and I love him for that, but I’m most excited by a song like “The Frog,” which I think could’ve easily been a guitar-based Oh Sees tune, but in this form benefits from the odd neon ambience of these droning synth tones. It’s a very cartoonish sound contrasting with a song that feels more earthy, so the overall compositions exists in some implied uncanny valley between those two extremes.
“MCMXIV” is a travelogue song, with Julia Steiner jotting down bits of experiences and observations in a trip through the midwest. It doesn’t really add up to a coherent narrative, but there’s an emotional through line in the chorus – “I had no idea what to think about you / you had no idea how much I needed you.” The whole song is built around that sort of confusion, of knowing a feeling is incredibly powerful and important, but not really having a sense of what that feeling actually is. The feeling of dislocation makes the emotional experience more literal – moving through space with purpose, but not connected to it at all. Just passing it by, taking in it, and letting it sink in later on.
June 2nd, 2015 12:28pm
This recording may be labeled as a “demo” version, but don’t mistake for anything remotely minimal or skeletal. This is a fully produced song complete with a string section, and the main difference between this and the final, official recording is that the album version has even more strings, and goes even bigger than what is already quite huge the first time around. This is about what you’d expect from Florence Welch – she’s a woman with an enormous and powerful voice, and her band and producers are constantly challenged to find ways to appropriately showcase it. I prefer the somewhat less ornate version of “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” for two main reasons – the mix on the album version sounds oddly sterile and featureless to me, and I’m not crazy about its extended string coda. It’s also nice to hear a recording of this band that allows the song to feel big without every element of the arrangement competing with Welch’s voice for power and intensity.
The song is terrific either way, though, and stands out as one of the best things Welch has written. The majority of the tracks on her new record are, as Douglas Wolk puts it, breakup songs “from the point of view of someone who is absolutely convinced that her breakup is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to anyone.” But this one is coming from a different place – it deals with the struggle of a long distance relationship, but more than anything it’s a love song about cities in general, and Los Angeles in particular. It’s interesting to hear a voice that mainly deals in songs about broken love and quasi-religious themes be used to express awe for a skyline. It should probably happen more often! I know this feeling well, and it’s a powerful thing.
June 1st, 2015 12:41pm
A lot of the appeal of Jamie XX’s music is that it’s an extremely introverted version of music designed for extroverted situations – dancing in clubs, going to parties, being at festivals. It’s dance music, but at a remove from the physical experience, focused almost entirely on the sensation of sound and the expression of feelings. “Loud Places,” a song with his XX bandmate Romy Madley-Croft, brings all of the subtext in Jamie’s music to the foreground. It’s about being an introvert looking for intimacy, and dealing with these “loud places” as a necessary part of finding someone to be alone with. Jamie’s music evokes the feeling of being alone in a crowd, and when the sample drops in the chorus, the feeling of a snippet of music overlapping perfectly with your emotional state for just a moment. That bit in the chorus where Romy and the sample sync up is truly beautiful – it’s the sound of unexpected connection, even if it may not be the sort of connection she went looking for.
May 29th, 2015 12:25pm
Pixies @ Kings Theater 5/28/2015
In Heaven / Andro Queen / Ed Is Dead / Nimrod’s Son / Indie Cindy / Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) / Here Comes Your Man / Bagboy / Crackity Jones / Isla de Encanta / Gouge Away / U-Mass / Tame / Snakes / Caribou / Magdalena 318 / Subbacultcha / Brick Is Red / Hey / Silver Snail / No. 13 Baby / The Holiday Song / Greens and Blues / Cactus / La La Love You / Where Is My Mind? / Vamos // Wave of Mutilation / Debaser
I decided to go to this show at the last minute, almost literally. I had an interest in seeing this show for a while, but I was reticent about it because the ticket prices were kinda high. I looked the show up on Stubhub an hour before it began and discovered that people were slashing their prices quite dramatically, and scored a pretty good ticket that was $80 including the original service charges for just $20! The venue is about a half hour from where I live in Brooklyn, and I got there just before they got on stage. Very solid spur of the moment decision.
I know a lot of people hate that Kim Deal is no longer in the band and that the Pixies have a new album, but those things don’t really change the fact that the Pixies are excellent live and that Black Francis is one of the best rock singers of all time. Look at that setlist – even if you can’t stand the new songs, there’s still 22 Pixies classics in there. I think the new songs are OK for the most part – certainly not on the level of the original run, but above average for late period Black Francis material. I truly love “Greens and Blues,” though, and think it’s one of the best songs he’s ever written. I was vaguely nervous they wouldn’t play it, and pretty emotional when they did. (I wrote more about that song and the conundrum of the Pixies over here.)
As for the Kim thing: You can’t replace her as a presence on stage, and it’s not the same without her. But Paz Lenchantin does a fine job of playing her bass lines and singing her parts, and she’s close enough to replicating everything that you don’t really think too much about it during the set, and some people might not totally realize it’s not Kim. (The girls next to me actually asked me if that was Kim up there near the end of the show; they were genuinely unsure about it.)
May 28th, 2015 12:33pm
This song was introduced to me as being like a post-Grimes thing, and I can definitely hear that on the surface, but to my ears this track is rooted mainly in late-80s, freestyle-influenced bubblegum. It’s also a direct descendent of the spirit of a lot of Janet Jackson’s music of that era, as it’s intensely joyful music about experiencing the excitement of infatuation. You can’t make this sort of pop music without having a totally uncynical view of love and romance – you just can’t fake pure optimism, no matter what key you’re singing in. That said, a song like “Do2Me” can work pretty well as a substitute for that crushed-out feeling if it’s completely absent from your life at the moment.
May 27th, 2015 12:53pm
The most interesting tension in A$AP Rocky’s body of work is the push and pull between his stoner aesthetics and obsession with elegance. Those aren’t opposite things, but they do contrast in interesting ways – so much of both of Rocky’s albums is like this impeccably crafted haze, and he just sorta struts through it with casual grace. He has exceptional taste in sound – maybe a lot of that came from Yams, but I’m inclined to think he’s internalized that influence by now – and I think he’s got a better and more adventurous sense of how to frame his voice than any rapper of his generation aside from Kendrick Lamar. “Excuse Me,” mainly produced by Jim Jonsin, is flat-out gorgeous and flips a sample from a Platters Christmas album into a composition that’s both stately and haunting. I love the way Rocky sounds with the backdrop of droning, sustained tones from an extended sample. He’s done this before, namely on “LVL” from his debut, and it really complements the subtle melancholy in his voice.
Smurphy’s music is low-key bewildering – it’s very odd and disarming, but also so ambient and comfortable that you can just kinda shrug off the parts that straight-up sound like frogs croaking in a swamp. “Aquarius Risinn” is about as songy as she gets, with a breakbeat coming in midway that feels a little like something that could’ve been on a mid-90s DJ Shadow or Tricky record. But the vibe is different, trading the smokiness and grime of that era for something that feels brighter and more…watery? I suppose that’s it, maybe? This is all so wonderfully abstract that any attempt to put this into words is kinda futile.
May 26th, 2015 2:18am
I remember feeling very disappointed when I first heard dubstep music because the name of the subgenre implied that it’d be like dub reggae. And like, for the most part, nope. But this track is kinda what I would’ve imagined – a French producer doing his own version of classic dub with modern DJ equipment and elements pulled from miscellaneous electronic subgenres that have popped up over the past decade or so. “Dead and Bury” mostly lingers in that pleasantly stoned, head-nodding space you’d expect from a dub track, but there’s a tonal shift with a pitched-up vocal part that comes in about a minute and a half in that moves the song into a far more emotional place. It’s a really beautiful moment, and unexpected in the best way.
May 25th, 2015 1:51pm
It sounds as though Maya Jane Coles made the main keyboard part in this song to be a deliberate anxiety trigger. I certainly can’t hear it without feeling some kind of fight-or-flight instinct kicking in, or feeling trapped in some difficult situation. Catnipp’s vocals on this track taps into that vibe, and pushes into into a scenario in which sexiness and danger blur together, and the threat of violence is both terrifying and truly exciting. This is extremely bleak music, but it’s hard to deny its sexiness and strange gravity.
May 21st, 2015 12:54pm
“Shame” is a rock song, I suppose, but it sounds like it was built out of spare parts from a junk heap than any typical rock instrumentation. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s really well executed in this track, and does a lot to create a sense of desperation and anxiety that carries over to the lyrics. Everything seems broken, everything seems like it could just collapse at any moment. And that sensation is exacerbated by the velocity of the beat – you end up feeling like you’re being chased by someone or something, and this is the worst possible time to be so vulnerable.
May 20th, 2015 1:06pm
Courtney Barnett @ Bowery Ballroom 5/19/2015
Canned Tomatoes (Whole) / Elevator Operator / Lance Jr. / An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York) / Small Poppies / Dead Fox / Depreston / Debbie Downer / Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party / Avant Gardener / Kim’s Caravan / Cannonball / Pedestrian at Best // Being Around / Pickles from the Jar / History Eraser
Courtney Barnett and her band have a different energy live than on record – the arrangements are streamlined for a trio, the bass is chunky and heavy, and Barnett’s delivery is looser and more playful. I really appreciate the relative precision in the studio – the songs are too good to not be presented as well as possible – but the looser, more playful approach is closer to the spirit of the songs, and who she is as a person. She’s one of the rare musicians who actually reminds me a lot of Stephen Malkmus, and has a similar sort of effortless swagger and clever way with words, and a guitar style that’s oddly refined for someone who seems to swing her instrument around like a cool toy. She has excellent chemistry with her bass player and drummer, and they have a great way of balancing the more tossed-off bits with the sections where they really lean in and rock the fuck out of a song. The only odd thing is that they’ve got a few songs in the set that feel like excellent set-closers and finales – “Small Poppies,” “Canned Tomatoes,” “Kim’s Caravan” – and yet the song she goes out on, “History Eraser,” is a song that just kinda comes and goes. Maybe she’d rather not be so dramatic, but like, there she is, being quite dramatic in the show! But that’s a pretty minor complaint.
Chastity Belt also played on this bill, and as it turns out, their music sounds a bit different live. The structure, style, and spirit is the same as what you get on record, but there’s a lot more space in the sound. The studio recordings place a lot of emphasis on Julia Shapiro’s rhythm guitar, but on stage it’s very apparent how graceful and nimble the bass and lead guitar parts are, and how well the band performs as an ensemble. They come across like a very well-rehearsed band, not in the sense that their performance feels stiff in rote, but in that they seem to really understand each other as musicians and have an obvious rapport. The style they’re developing is very interesting, especially in the contrast between Shapiro’s blunt phrasing and Lydia Lund’s lovely, ringing lead parts. That comes together well on “Cool Slut,” which is provocative and defiant, but also rather pretty and chill. It’s basically a song in which Shapiro is giving people permission to be on the same cool vibe as her band, and it seems foolish to turn her down or get in their way.
May 19th, 2015 11:47am
If you listen through John Dwyer’s catalog, there’s a clear arc in which he’s writing and writing and playing and playing and recording and recording, and there’s a point somewhere around Thee Oh Sees’ Putrifiers II came out in 2012 where it sounds like it got easy for him. Not easy in the sense that it became boring or rote, but easy in that his music seems like the result of pure instinct for rhythm and melody. The best Dwyer songs sound like he’s surrendering to a groove and trusting himself to respond fully in the moment. A lot of Thee Oh Sees songs sound as though they could’ve been fully improvised even when that’s not the case, and that’s part of Dwyer just being so present in the performances, and seeming totally thrilled by dynamic shifts. His frequent “whooooo!” exclamations seem like a vocal tic at first, but it’s clear over time that it’s the most honest expression in his music. A song like “Web” is just this cool roller coaster he built for himself to ride.
May 18th, 2015 1:28am
Fight Like Apes have been missing for some time now, long enough that I think I just assumed they had broken up. Well, close enough – the rhythm section quit, and though the one guy who did a lot of backup vocals is still around, he’s barely singing at all now. As a result, the band’s third album, Fight Like Apes, feels more like a MayKay solo album. That’s not a bad thing, though – she’s charismatic and great with melody, and though she’s toned down the band’s more abrasive characteristics this time around, she has not abandoned their peculiar sense of humor. One of the best things about MayKay is how she fills her songs with odd jokes and weird images, but then hits you with something very raw and sincerely emotional. It always seems to come out of nowhere, and sometimes fully overlaps with the strangest lines. “Pop Itch” sounds like a sideways version of Talking Heads “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” and channels some of that song’s mix of absurdity and poignancy. But as always, MayKay is self-effacing and perhaps a bit self-sabotaging – the most memorable bit of the song is a non sequitur that has her repeating the name “Jabba the Hutt” for comedic effect.
May 14th, 2015 12:32pm
Unknown Mortal Orchestra started out as a band no one knew anything about, and that lack of information only made their music feel more strange and misplaced in time. But now that UMO has a third album, all that has changed. Ruban Nielson, who essentially IS the band, was so open in this interview with Pitchfork that he’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from where he started. A lot of the interview, which feels far more like a segment on This American Life or a Modern Love column than a profile of a rock musician, is about he and his wife exploring a polyamorous relationship with a much younger woman from Japan. This experiment and the resulting emotional fallout is the basis for pretty much everything on his new album Multi-Love. (Funny how a title that seemed ambiguous at first now looks so totally literal.) I’ve had an advance copy of the record for a little while and, as with the previous UMO records, enjoyed it greatly on a purely musical level. Nielson is so great with melodic, rhythm, texture, and ambient vibe that it’s easy to just kinda gloss over lyrical content. But going back over the record with this context in mind is a revelation – the songs are all stuck in a weird space between bliss and anxiety. “Ur Life One Night” in particular shifted a lot in my mind, with my brain focusing in on all the question marks in the lyrics. This is about what I’d expect this unusual emotional situation to be like: Exciting and sorta simple on the face of it, but complicated and confusing in execution. This music just sounds like trying to feel relaxed and groovy and happy while constantly negotiating and dealing with neuroses.
May 13th, 2015 12:51pm
I sometimes wonder what it’d be like if The New Pornographers made an album in which Neko Case and Kathryn Calder contributed songs along with Carl Newman and Dan Bejar. It’s a bit hard to imagine with Neko – her solo aesthetic is a lot earthier and more depressive than New Pornos, and I’m not sure if her inclinations as a songwriter are well suited to maximalism in arrangement. Calder’s solo music also tends to be a lot more melancholy and intimate, but I think she could do it. “Take A Little Time” wouldn’t need to change much to fit in on a New Pornos record, though I think it’s probably better off in this more ethereal form. I like the way she balances the urgency of the tempo with a hazy psychedelic arrangement and a chilly vocal timbre that feels like being lost in thought in some busy, hectic environment. Calder thrives when she can convey delicacy and interiority – this as true in the New Pornographers, where she can signal fragility in a way the three other vocalists cannot, and even more so when she’s on her own and that introverted character is at the center of the music.
May 12th, 2015 12:06pm
I didn’t like the mix of this song at first because everything was blaring to the point of obscuring the lyrics, and I interpreted it as this very contrary indie/punk move to put the vocals lower in the mix. But having heard it in the context of The Most Lamentable Tragedy, it’s clear that this is intentional, and crucial to the theme of the song – you just don’t do a punk song about feeling like only the loudest things make you feel anything at all and not dramatize that sensation. “Dimed Out” is a fun and often funny song, but it’s also a very accurate expression of the manic stage of manic depression. All the thoughts are sharp and urgent, but warped by a sort of false intensity. You lose all sense of emotional dynamic, and only the extremes seem true. In this song, that feeling is exciting and empowering, because that’s often how it feels in the moment. The burnout comes later on, but for the duration of “Dimed Out,” it’s all adrenaline and catharsis.
May 11th, 2015 12:43pm
I imagine a lot of people will check out Kasami Washington’s The Epic based on the hype around it and not fully grasp why people are freaking out over it and declaring it the start of this bold new era of jazz when to the layperson’s ear it just sounds like…well, three CDs worth of jazz. Washington’s music isn’t some bold, obvious break from the past – it’s drawing on a rich history of jazz and jazz fusion, and the musical vocabulary in use is pretty traditional. It stands out from the recent history of jazz in ways that are more about spirit and context. Washington and his large band comprised of astounding players from his Los Angeles scene don’t seem beaten down by the public’s indifference to jazz, or jazz culture’s tendency towards becoming a museum of itself, or striving for relevance by adapting sounds from hip-hop and electronic music. Washington’s not trying to reinvent anything – his boldness is in writing and conducting jazz music that insists that the music is as vital and exciting now as it was in the mid-20th century. Instead of being defensive about jazz, Washington spends about three hours showing you all the things he can do with it, and giving the listener the kind of thrills that can only be had in this genre.
Washington’s music is accessible too, mainly because he’s an excellent songwriter with a great ear for melody and rhythmic hooks. There’s nothing intimidating about compositions like “Leroy and Lanisha” or “The Next Step,” and the more ornate, epic tracks are more about dazzling you with a sense of near-cosmic scale rather than empty gestures of ambition. Best of all, Washington isn’t afraid to give us a few vocal tracks featuring Patrice Quinn that work as straight-up pop music, albeit with the extended structure of jazz. “Cherokee” is full-on 70s jazz-funk, a sunny ballad that seems like it was designed to be played at cocktail parties and lounges. “Cherokee” bears a strong resemblance to “Am I the Same Girl” a.k.a. “Soulful Strut,” and wears that on its sleeve with a horn chart that lightly paraphrases a hook from that song. Like the majority of tracks on The Epic, it just overwhelms you with pleasure and good vibes, and manages to evoke the best elements of the past without feeling like a soulless pastiche or a work of musical academia.
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