September 9th, 2016 11:51am
“Twines” is so mellow that it doesn’t totally register at first. At least this was the case for me – the first few times I heard it I picked up on the “warm bath” vibe and enjoyed that, and then the melodies sunk in deeper and deeper with repeated listening. The vocal performance on “Twines” is lovely, but it’s secondary to the gentle glow of the chords and the assertive but laid back snap of the beat. I’m more fond of the solo section of this song, in which a synthesizer and a saxophone get at some feelings that words wouldn’t do justice. I read that this band was aspiring to evoke “the sound of love,” and I think they nailed it. Or more specifically, this is the sound of romance – I just imagine two very graceful people in an elegant place with beautiful lighting. It’s aspirational, you know?
September 7th, 2016 11:41am
Maybe you remember White Williams? They put out one record nearly a decade ago, it was sorta like if The Strokes were also Neu!, or if Devo were also Kraftwerk. Really great vibe, but they basically disappeared and were largely forgotten. Motion Graphics is essentially the second coming of White Williams – same main dude, but with a totally new aesthetic. After a few years of working as a sideman in Co La and Lifted, Joe Williams has evolved into a rather elegant vaporwave composer. The punk elements of White Williams have been phased out, but that nervous physicality is still there in his music in less obvious ways. In “Lense,” it’s present in the bright keyboard chords that seem to splash out dramatically in an otherwise still and tranquil composition. It’s not a violent sound, but it does seem somewhat haphazard and graceless, and counter to his careful, lovely vocal tone through the piece. It doesn’t totally undermine the elegance of the overall song – if anything, that obvious humanity makes it seem more alluring.
September 6th, 2016 3:26am
About two thirds of the way through this song the tempo suddenly decreases, and this fairly perky riff rock tune becomes very, very drowsy. It sounds like the song is just strolling along and then gets hit by a tranquilizer dart to the neck from some sniper in the distance. It’s a weird move, but I like it, and how it connects to these stoner-ish lyrics about movement and sleep. The solo in the sleepy section has a nice melody, but the performance feels vaguely staggered and unsure, as if the guitarist is literally nodding off and just trying to stay awake long enough to get to the next note. This could come off like a mess, but the band makes it all feel like a pleasant daze.
September 5th, 2016 5:27pm
“Normal American Kids” is not the fun sort of nostalgia where you make a version of the past that flatters you and is edited carefully so you only get the fun bits. This is Jeff Tweedy, a man on the edge of 50, remembering what it was like to be a teen in the early ‘80s and…well, I don’t think he’s embarrassed, per se, but it’s not exactly flattering to realize how much of your formative experiences were driven by fear and anxiety. The young Jeff of “Normal American Kids” is a sullen stoner who needs to distance himself from the “normal” kids, and spins feelings of alienation and confusion into an elitist pose. This is a beautiful song, one of the loveliest of Tweedy’s impressive career, but it really gets under my skin because I was that sort of kid too. Not a stoner, but definitely someone who built an identity around opting out things. You get older and realize that being “normal” isn’t the worst thing you could be, but it’s hard to shake reflexive cultural elitism and feeling like you don’t belong anywhere once it’s burned deep enough into your mind. I think that’s where Tweedy is coming from here – he’s tracing a line from his youth to the present, and finding a peace with how things have been and how he’s turned out.
September 1st, 2016 10:49pm
I’m with Arianna on this one. “Possum Kingdom” is also my favorite song from the perspective of a vampire, my favorite song that makes the phrase “do you wanna die?” sound like a flirt, and my favorite song about seducing someone with the promise of immortality. And look, “Possum Kingdom” doesn’t have much or any competition in any of those categories, but even if it did it would almost certainly still be the best.
On a surface level, “Possum Kingdom” is a generic alt-rock song, but as much as it is a very representative example of the form, it also feels like an outlier. Alt-rock rarely had this sort of seedy swagger, and generally stayed closer to vaguely morose grandiosity or a stoned, vaguely ironic or shrugged-off version of “rocking out.” The Toadies’ sound isn’t quite ~sexy~ but it’s definitely sexual, and the song is one of very few notable mid-‘90s alt-rock hits to be sung from the perspective of a person who believes they are sexy. (Low self-esteem was very big back then.) There’s a heavy touch of black comedy to the lyrics, but the music doesn’t totally undermine the character’s predatory horniness, and the result is a bit like a ‘90s version of Twilight with Trent from Daria cast as the hunky teen vampire.
August 30th, 2016 3:26am
Gavin Rossdale has had an extremely charmed life, but it’s still a bit unfortunate for him that his band arrived in exactly the window of time when they would get the least respect. Worse still that those biases have carried on long after people stopped caring about whether or not they were another corporate rock Nirvana rip-off fronted by a guy who looked like a male model, but more handsome. I am certain that if Razorblade Suitcase came out today, it would be warmly received, and the people most likely to have dismissed it back in the day would be the first to welcome a record so full of dynamics cribbed from Nirvana, Pixies, and PJ Harvey records that they just went ahead and had Steve Albini record it for them. In 1996, this type of music was in surplus and we could shrug off the uncool stuff. In 2016, there’s a lot more of it than there was for a long time, but it was a loooong draught.
Rossdale was great with dynamics and hooks, but pretty iffy when it came to lyrics. It’s hard to imagine that the bizarre syntax and mangled phrases of Sixteen Stone were written by someone for whom English is their first language, but it was the ‘90s and it didn’t take much for a hot dude to make a word salad like “Glycerine” seem deep to teenagers. With this in mind, “Swallowed” is notable for two reasons: 1) The lyrics are actually pretty good for the most part 2) they’re direct and vulnerable in a way that Rossdale habitually deflected up until that point. He’s singing about feeling alone in a crowd, and just wanting to be with the one person he can’t be with. When he sings “I’m with everyone and yet not,” he sounds a bit guilty for not appreciating the good times he’s supposed to be having. Ignore the biographical details about him feeling shitty on a tour for a massively successful album, and this is an incredibly easy song to relate to, especially if you’ve ever endured a long distance relationship. At the end of the song, he’s done being oblique and just says exactly what he means: “I miss the one that I love a lot.” It’s a very real moment from a guy everyone assumed was just a hunky poseur.
August 29th, 2016 1:14am
There are so many reasons Everclear do not get the respect they deserve, and some of them are maybe fair: Art Alexakis has a reputation for being an abrasive dick, and they really threw themselves into the deep end of the corporate rock market with gusto at a time when naked careerism was reviled. Then there are unfair reasons, like weird ageism about Alexakis being noticeably older than everyone else in the scene, and a bias against their subject matter focusing almost exclusively on lower middle class people who’d proudly claim to be “white trash.”
Everclear arrived at the beginning of a major class divide in rock music that’s essentially torn the genre apart and made it less relevant over time – there’s the indie-derived music on one side for the educated and well-off, and the aggressive, unapologetically hedonistic, or unambiguously uplifting rock aimed at the radio and working class people. As you move into the 00s, the yuppie side of rock music starts to disown “rock,” and move away from its signifiers. Kid A is ground zero for that, and we haven’t seen the end of it. For a great many people, rock music – along with mainstream country – is kinda embarrassing because it’s the music of the uncool poor and working class. But classism is a thing we rarely talk about in the United States, so people rarely have the self-awareness to notice they have this bias in the first place. Sure, people will be all about Bruce Springsteen’s working class boosterism, but almost anything speaking for that audience since the early ‘90s is somehow beneath contempt.
“Electra Made Me Blind” sets the stage for Sparkle & Fade, a record full of songs about broke losers and recovering junkies trying to make it the world. Alexakis’ character is leaving a small town and heading for a “new life in old L.A.,” and he’s fighting through reflexive pessimism just enough to feel good about things. It’s not a complicated song but the dynamics are very impressive – the band makes every moment feel as urgent and physical as possible, and the refrain of “I KNOW! I KNOW! I KNOW!” sounds like Alexakis banging his head against a wall in frustration. The main feeling of this song is the thrill of escape, and listening to it on its own feels like freezing yourself in a moment of high hopes and ambition before having to find out what all the obstacles ahead of you are going to be.
August 27th, 2016 3:05pm
Like pretty much all other Americans, I had ignored The Tragically Hip through their entire career. I knew about them. I knew they were hugely popular in Canada, but were at best a cult act in the United States. I was dimly aware of a song of theirs called “Butts Wigglin’” in the ‘90s, and must have decided they were basically another Barenaked Ladies and did not give them any thought at all until just recently, when they played their final run of shows after their frontman Gord Downie was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. After reading a few rather heartfelt tributes to the band, I decided to actually listen to them. As it turns out, they’re…not like the Barenaked Ladies. Their music generally falls into this post R.E.M./U2 aesthetic – really, more like Live than either of those two bands – but even the most blah songs are lifted up by Downie’s words, which are genuinely poetic and thoughtful, and uniquely obsessed with Canadian culture and life. The song that really grabbed me and got under my skin was “Ahead By A Century,” which turns out to be their biggest chart hit. It’s a little like encountering R.E.M. for the first time in 2016 and being like “wow, you guys, this ‘Losing My Religion’ song is just terrific!” But that’s how it happened.
“Ahead By A Century” has a peculiar emotional resonance, mainly because the band is mixing overt sentimentality with this sort of oblique tone. The main guitar part is lovely but would be extremely cloying if it weren’t played in an open tuning that brightens the first half of the riff but darkens the hammered notes at the end. Downie’s words fall in an intriguing gap between the universal – small moments in our youth that in retrospect are crucial to our development into adulthood – and the enigmatic in their strange specificity. You relate to the broader experience of having had experiences, but it’s hard to say what these particular vignettes are supposed to add up to. But then, if someone pushed you to explain why odd little moments from your own life have stuck with you, you’d probably have a hard time explaining them too.
The most ambiguous thing about “Ahead By A Century” is the chorus, and the question of who Downie is addressing, and what “you are ahead by a century” actually means. It’s such an evocative phrase – self-effacing and guilt-ridden, but also full of awe for whoever it is he’s singing about. This is never resolved in the song, but he adds “and disappointing you is getting me down” at the end of the last chorus, which at least clarifies that the phrase is intended to communicate a feeling of inadequacy. It’s such a potent feeling, but Downie doesn’t oversell it. He’s presenting a complicated set of feelings but refuses to connect the dots, just trusting the listener to recognize this pattern of thoughts and emotions.
August 26th, 2016 11:46am
Vince Staples’ lyrics have an incredible density – verbose and highly detailed, sure, but he has a talent for layering meaning in his verses so his songs are like narrative high rises. There’s a lot going on in “Loca,” enough that it’s hard to keep the “plot” straight, in as much as this song could be taken as a linear series of events. It’s more about the accumulation of moments – frenzied hookups, hustling for money, bouts of panic and depression, racial tensions, good memories tied to mom, bad memories tied to dad. DJ Dahi’s track signals paranoia, but also traces of lust and rage, and it frames Staples’ vocal performance without getting too matchy-matchy. Kilo Kush’s vocals are what really pop here – she’s so relaxed and playful compared to Vince, and she seems like a tether to softer feelings, or just sanity in general.
August 25th, 2016 3:06am
There’s something in the sing-song lilt of Noname’s voice that makes her verses feel both playful and a bit sad at the same time. She always sounds like she’s making an effort to stay optimistic and kind, and that effort is wearing on her more than she’d like you to notice. In “Sunny Duet” she plays the part of the woman trying to be patient with a man who’s trying to get his act together and be on his best behavior for her, but the surest sign this isn’t going to work is the complexity of her thoughts in comparison to his. Noname’s two verses touch on vulnerable confessions, nostalgic recollections, philosophical musings, while theMIND’s parts plead in such a low-key way that you wonder how much he’s invested. That’s the thing they both have in common, I guess – there’s a yearning for connection on both sides of this song, but also a vague ambivalence that’s hard to get around.
