Operator Music Band “Koma”

It’s pretty easy to parse Operator Music Band’s influences, or at least their lineage – elements from well-respected acts like Devo, Stereolab, Broadcast, Neu! and Add N to X are all right there on the surface. But as other bands have demonstrated, simply referencing or borrowing from the right artists isn’t enough. Part of what makes this band click is that they’ve embraced a very dynamic and tactile approach to music that can often feel more cerebral and static. “Koma” moves between moments of energetic rocking and more blissful grooves, and keeps moving forward with urgency until they deliberately hit the brakes and come to a full stop at the end. But even that sets up further momentum, as Dara Hirsch counts down the final seconds.

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Fog Lake “Side Effects”

The first half of Fog Lake’s Dragonchaser is a pleasant, spacey haze – acoustic guitars jangling in icy reverb, with an androgynous voice murmuring lyrics that strongly suggest the name of the record isn’t some D&D thing. But a bit over halfway through the record, everything perks up considerably. The guitar gets a bit jauntier, the vocals are much more clear, the melodies are stronger, the recording sounds more deliberate and professional. And the lyrics follow suit, shifting perspective from a hazy, numb moment to looking back on “the days we lost.” It’s a powerful musical and thematic shift, but taken out of context record’s two centerpiece songs “Medicine Road” and “Side Effects” work as discrete expressions of melancholy and regret. Both songs are about missing an intimate connection with someone they had to get away from, but I think the latter is particularly good at contrasting nostalgia and affection with memories of pain and despair.

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No Joy “Hellhole”

I feel like a lot of the artists who’ve made shoegaze music in the past decade and a half have set a very low bar for themselves. It’s a style where you can get by on very little, and artists who legitimately pushed the genre forward, like A Sunny Day in Glasgow in the mid-00s, were mostly shrugged off in favor of far less interesting and imaginative bands. No Joy have evolved into both the best shoegaze act of their era, and also something a bit beyond those parameters. (Of course, they also get underrated and unrecognized by the culture industry.) Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd have staked out an interesting musical space for themselves – increasingly bold vocal harmonies crashing into shifting planes of abrasive rhythm guitar and ambient noise. A song like “Hellhole” manages to sound fragile and brutal at the same time, and the way they contrast these elements suggests that those extremes aren’t as opposite as they might seem.

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Goldfrapp “Anymore”

Goldfrapp have spent their entire career vacillating between meditative, delicate ballads and glammy dance pop, mostly doing one style at a time per record. As the time between Goldfrapp’s records increase, so does the space between these phases, and so “Anymore” is the first proper banger this band has released since 2010. It feels very refreshing. The song, a straightforward dance tune about lust, feels confident and slightly nostalgic, as though Alison Goldfrapp is reconnecting with some part of herself that had gone dormant for a time. The glee in this song seems directly connected to the feeling of “oh yes, I’d forgotten how this felt, and didn’t realize I still could.” It’s a familiarity that is not taken for granted.

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Lana Del Rey “Love”

The key to Lana Del Rey’s music is that she understands that certain types of sadness and yearning are very satisfying feelings, sometimes more so than most positive emotions. This is especially true when you’re terrified of actual intimacy – being with someone is scary, but pining for them lets you experience the rush of love without the parts that make you uncomfortable and insecure. “Love” is sung from a remove, with Lana observing young people doing young people things, and experiencing innocent, earnest passion for the first time. There’s a bit of envy and loneliness in her voice, but you can tell she’s invested in these other people and their happiness. Even if she’s afraid on some level that she can’t have this or can’t anymore, she doesn’t begrudge them for these simple joys. She seems to like the tragic romanticism of being the outsider on the periphery, the wounded person who can claim some distance from these people with their ordinary lives. She gets to feel like the special one, even if it’s an empty feeling.

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Ivy Sole “East”

Ivy Sole’s voice comes off rugged and tough at the start of this track, matching the tone of the track, which is forceful and abrasive from the first seconds. She’s announcing who she is, she’s situating herself in rap, she’s recontextualizing tropes. (She’s right, a trap is basically a startup.) But as she moves along, the front drops a bit, and the defenses come down, and the words get increasingly vulnerable and sincere. Sole is just telling her story here – nothing too dramatic, so she focuses on the details that made her who she is today. The chorus comes out of the song quite naturally, but its soft, sentimental tone is quite a shift from where this song begins. I don’t think either part is more real – it’s just a very honest snapshot of a fully formed person.

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Anna Wise “Coconuts”

Anna Wise’s previous EP was like an awakening – reckoning with sexism and body image, turning against societal bullshit holding her back. “Coconuts,” from her second EP, is further along: Less dogmatic and aggressive, but coming at the same ideas from a far stronger and more assured perspective. The song is relaxed and meditative, with muted horns framing her chill delivery of lyrics that lay out hard truths. Like, say, you don’t have to beholden to other people’s vision of you. And, on a larger scale, the “rules” will change over time. But in the meantime, stick with the good people, and support them. “Coconuts” is low key and not totally obvious, but I think it’s a lot more powerful than what Wise was doing last year. It sounds like the love she wants to encourage.

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Cassandra Jenkins “Candy Crane”

This is a lovely track all around, but please take note of the lead guitar, which has the low-key melodic elegance of peak George Harrison. It’s a fabulous complement to Cassandra Jenkins’ vocal performance, bringing out the warmth in her voice without compromising the steady, deliberately calm cadences of her melody. Her voice implies a very adult perspective – what’s done is done, but there’s more to do, so let’s do it. The refrain of “play till you win” is the most resonant bit, coming off both optimistic and bitter, but above all, pragmatic.

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Very Fresh “Cool Kids”

“Cool Kids” is basically a litany of social pressures, and the joke is that as Cindy Lou Gooden moves up the timeline from being a teenager into adulthood, it only gets more anxious and manic. She sings it all with a snide Jello Biafra-ish affect, broadly signaling contempt and dark humor, but not necessarily dismissing the actual feelings underneath the frenzied need to fit in and do what is expected. It’s presented as a joke because it is funny, but also because feeling like you need to do everything just right by a certain time or you’re an uncool failure is 100% ridiculous. Gooden is giving everyone permission to admit it and laugh at it and, hopefully, break free from it.

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Sandscape “Artifical Rush”

“Artificial Rush” is the sort of song that sounds as if it can only exist at night, and that it’s deeply inappropriate to put it on in daylight hours. And this isn’t even really because it’s so obviously meant to be boudoir music – the very sound of it evokes the amber hues of street lights and the not-quite-stillness of a city at night. This is particularly well-crafted atmosphere, full of interesting sonic details that follow the curves of the song rather than overwhelm it. Eliza Shaddad’s voice is understated through the entire thing, picking up a bit for the chorus but always staying in this low-key seductive mode.

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Hanni El Khatib “Gonna Die Alone”

I feel like the phrase “die alone” is most commonly associated with being a frustrated single person, but this song by Hanni El Khatib goes to a darker place than that. This is more about paranoia, and feeling like everyone is out to get you one way or another, and just wondering when it’s all going to finally end. There’s a bit of humor in this – you can tell he’s smirking in some lines, and the tone of the music is fairly loose and fun. But despite that, the core of this really is anxiety and terror, and this powerful feeling that you have no control over your destiny, and that no one is willing to help you. It’s an incredibly fatalistic tune, but pretty funky too.

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Rose Elinor Dougall “Closer”

Rose Elinor Dougall’s voice has always signaled a thoughtful introversion, even back when she was one of the Pipettes. Back then it subverted the band’s retro girl group aesthetic – she came off like the sort of ostensibly shy girl who’s always about to say something a bit cutting and wry when people aren’t looking. Her solo work has been a lot more mellow and demure, so it’s interesting to hear her move in a slightly more danceable direction with her new record. “Closer” is still fairly reserved as far as dance rock tunes go, but there’s enough of a groove and hook to it that the music nudges her to be a little bolder. But only so much – this is a song about passively waiting for someone to make a move, and she sounds a lot more impatient than insistent.

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Syd “Shake Em Off”

“Shake ‘Em Off” reminds me a lot of Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s mid-‘90s material, at least in that it’s got this very similar push-and-pull between lushness and minimalism; warm sensuality and aloof distance; clever artsiness and pop hooks. Syd’s voice is very much at home in a track like this – there’s always a lot of shades of ambiguity in her phrasing, so Hit-Boy’s production makes that an asset rather than a liability. It is interesting that Syd’s singing about being sure of her decisions and confident that she’s about to become a star, but the overall tone of the music is quite ambivalent. I don’t think she’s undermining her self-belief, but I do think adding these shades of uncertainty feels emotionally true.

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Letherette “Villim”

“Villim” sounds like it should be soundtracking a sequence in a movie that’s dark and frightening, but also a bit surreal. A late night journey, an encounter with something alien, lost in a forest. Something like that. The string parts – sampled, I’m guessing, but I have no idea – are overtly cinematic, but the magic in this is the way they’ve chopped up these chiming sounds so it sounds quite lovely, but clipped up just enough to feel slightly unstable.

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This is the second in the 1990s survey mix series, which will come out monthly in chronological order through this year. It’s important for the ‘90s to be presented in order, because the story of music in that decade is basically a trilogy in which each act ends in tragedy – the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the murders of Tupac and Biggie, and the toxic masculinity run rampant at Woodstock ’99. You can find the 1990 mix here.

1991 is the proper beginning of the ‘90s aesthetic, though it’s not fully formed just yet. There’s still plenty of the glossy, optimistic post-80s vibe that was all over the 1990 survey, but the darker, earthier, and more abrasive tones that would come to dominate the early part of the decade are abundant here. It’s worth noting that a lot of the “sea change” albums of this year – Pearl Jam’s Ten, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Primal Scream’s Screamedelica, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, U2’s Achtung Baby, and 2Pac’s 2Pacalypse Now – came along near the end of the year. Everything changes after the summer, and the vibe is set for the next five years at least.

Thanks to Paul Cox, Rob Sheffield, Sean T. Collins, Chris Conroy, and Chris Ott for their valuable assistance in putting this set together.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit” / U2 “The Fly” / Siouxsie and the Banshees “Kiss Them for Me” / Throwing Muses “Red Shoes” / My Bloody Valentine “To Here Knows When” / P.M. Dawn “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” / Lenny Kravitz “It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over” / The KLF “Justified and Ancient (Stand by the Jams Mix)” / Mariah Carey “Emotions” / Amy Grant “Baby Baby” / Paula Abdul “Rush, Rush” / Toad the Wet Sprocket “All I Want” / R.E.M. “Losing My Religion” / Metallica “Enter Sandman” / Fugazi “Reclamation” / Pearl Jam “Alive” / Guns N’ Roses “You Could Be Mine” / A Tribe Called Quest “Scenario” / Naughty by Nature “O.P.P.” / Cypress Hill “How I Could Just Kill A Man” / Massive Attack “Unfinished Sympathy” / Temple of the Dog “Say Hello 2 Heaven” / Boyz II Men “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Michael Jackson “Black or White” / Prince “Cream” / Shanice “I Love Your Smile” / The Divinyls “I Touch Myself” / EMF “Unbelievable” / Red Hot Chili Peppers “Give It Away” / Blur “There’s No Other Way” / DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince “Summertime” / Del tha Funkee Homosapien “Mistadobalina” / De La Soul “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’” / Cathy Dennis “Touch Me (All Night Long)” / Big Audio Dynamite “The Globe” / Matthew Sweet “Girlfriend” / Pixies “U-Mass” / Hole “Teenage Whore” / Slint “Good Morning, Captain” / The Smashing Pumpkins “Rhinoceros” / Pavement “Debris Slide” / Roxette “Joyride” / Heavy D and the Boys “Now That We Found Love” / Another Bad Creation “Iesha” / Color Me Badd “I Wanna Sex You Up” / Negativland “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” / Mark Cohn “Walking In Memphis” / Bonnie Raitt “I Can’t Make You Love Me”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Primal Scream “Movin’ On Up” / Jesus Jones “Right Here, Right Now” / N.W.A. “Alwayz Into Somethin’” / 2Pac “Brenda’s Got A Baby” / MC Lyte “When In Love” / 3rd Bass “Pop Goes the Weasel” / C&C Music Factory “Things That Make You Go Hmmmmm…” / Gerardo “Rico Suave” / Pizzicato Five “Baby Love Child” / Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch “Good Vibrations” / Nitzer Ebb “Godhead” / Orbital “Belfast” / Enya “Caribbean Blue” / Vanessa Williams “Save the Best for Last” / Mr. Big “To Be With You” / Garth Brooks “Shameless” / Extreme “More Than Words” / The Field Mice “Tilting At Windmills” / The Tragically Hip “Little Bones” / Brooks & Dunn “Brand New Man” / Genesis “Hold On My Heart” / Ween “Dr. Rock” / Kyuss “Son of a Bitch” / Scorpions “Winds of Change” / Natalie Cole & Nat King Cole “Unforgettable”

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Primus “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver” / Ministry “Jesus Built My Hotrod” / Anthrax featuring Public Enemy “Bring the Noise” / Soundgarden “Slaves & Bulldozers” / Morrissey “Sing My Life” / Voice of the Beehive “Monsters and Angels” / Hi-Five “I Like the Way (The Kissing Game)” / Kool Moe Dee “Rise N Shine” / Geto Boys “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” / Moby “Go” / The Commitments “Chain of Fools” / Londonbeat “I’ve Been Thinking About You” / Pet Shop Boys “Where the Streets Have No Name/Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” / Lords of Acid “The Most Wonderful Girl” / Rozalla “Everbody’s Free (To Feel Good)” / Troop & Levert featuring Queen Latifah “For the Love of Money / Living for the City” / Sarah McLachlan “Into the Fire” / Live “Operation Spirit (The Tyranny of Tradition)” / Sam Phillips “Now I Can’t Find the Door” / Trisha Yearwood “She’s In Love with the Boy” / Tom Petty “Into the Great Wide Open” / Spin Doctors “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” / Crash Test Dummies “Superman’s Song” / Phranc “Gertrude Stein” / Liz Phair “Divorce Song (Girlysounds version)” / Spacemen 3 “Big City”

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Stereolab “Super-Electric” / Shudder to Think “Red House” / Unrest “Yes She Is My Skinhead Girl” / Nation of Ulysses “You’re My Miss Washington DC” / Bongwater “The Power of Pussy” / Mercury Rev “Car Wash Hair” / Teenage Fanclub “The Concept” / Dinosaur Jr. “The Wagon” / Fishbone “Everyday Sunshine” / Autoclave “Go Far” / Heaven to Betsy “My Red Self” Sebadoh “The Freed Pig” / Superchunk “Seed Toss” / Ugly Kid Joe “Everything About You” / Screeching Weasel “Guest List” / Susana Hoffs “My Side of the Bed” / Crystal Waters “Gypsy Woman” / Queen Latifah “Latifah’s Had It Up 2 Here” / Jodeci “Forever My Lady” / Gang Starr “Who’s Gonna Take the Weight?” / Keith Sweat “Keep It Comin’” / Public Enemy “Can’t Truss It” / Coil “Answers Come In Dreams II” / Slowdive “Celia’s Dream” / Sun City Girls “The Court Magicians of Agartha”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

Van Halen “Poundcake” / Ice-T “O.G. Original Gangster” / MC Hammer “Too Legit to Quit” / Vanilla Ice “Ninja Rap” / Mr. Bungle “Squeeze Me Macaroni” / Type O Negative “Xero Tolerance” / Uncle Tupelo “Gun” / Therapy? “Meat Abstract” / Jawbox “Consolation Prize” / Sting “The Soul Cages” / Randy Travis “Oh, What A Time To Be Me” / George Strait “If I Know Me” / Widespread Panic “Mercy” / Martika “Love…Thy Will Be Done” / Kirsty MacColl “Walking Down Madison” / Talk Talk “After the Flood” / Ned’s Atomic Dustbin “Kill Your Television” / Nice & Smooth “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow” / White Trash “Apple Pie” / Urge Overkill “The Kids Are Insane” / Scrawl “Please Have Everything” / The Judybats “Don’t Drop the Baby” / Blake Babies “Take Me” / Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 “Four O’Clocker 2” / Unwound “You Speak Jealousy”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

George Michael and Elton John “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” / Catherine Wheel “Black Metallic” / Drivin’ and Cryin’ “Fly Me Courageous” / Cannibal Corpse “Meat Hook Sodomy” / Sepultura “Arise” / Tesla Edison’s Medicine” / Jimmie Dale Gilmore “After Awhile” / Alan Jackson “Don’t Rock the Jukebox” / Mekons “The Curse” / The Ocean Blue “Ballerina Out of Control” / Chris Whitley “Living With the Law” / American Music Club “Sick of Food” / fIREHOSE “Walking the Cow” / AMG “Bitch Betta Have My Money” / Ice Cube “Steady Mobbin’” / Leaders of the New School “Case of the PTA” / LFO “LFO” / Linton Kwesi Johnson “Story” / Hoodoo Gurus “Miss Freelove ’69” / Sonny Sharrock “Little Rock” / Billy Bragg “Sexuality” / Chapterhouse “Falling Down” / Take That “Do What U Like” / NOFX “The Moron Brothers” / Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson “Beauty and the Beast” / Reba McEntire “For My Broken Heart”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Madonna “Rescue Me” / Lisa Stansfield “Change” / Electronic “Getting Away With It” / Erasure “Chorus” / L.A. Style “James Brown Is Dead” / Consolidated “Friendly Fascism” / The Fall “Shiftwork” / Alice Cooper “Feed Me Frankenstein” / Pennywise “Living for Today” / Entombed “Sinners Bleed” / Butthole Surfers “Hurdy Gurdy Man” / Tin Machine “You Belong In Rock N’ Roll” / Queen “These Are the Days of Our Lives” / Skid Row “Monkey Business” / Monster Magnet “Pill Shovel” / Screaming Trees “Bed of Roses” / Crowded House “Weather with You” / k.d. lang “Barefoot” / Elvis Costello “The Other Side of Summer” / Bratmobile “Girl Germs” / The Field Mice “Tilting At Windmills” / DJ Quik “Born and Raised In Compton” / Christopher Williams “I’m Dreaming” / L.A. Guns “Over the Edge” / Deacon Blue “Your Swaying Arms” / Daisy Chainsaw “Love Your Money” / Julian Cope “East Easy Rider” / Curtis Stigers “I Wonder Why” / Michael Bolton “Time, Love, and Tenderness” / Bryan Adams “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”

Priests “JJ”

Katie Alice Greer sounds thoroughly appalled throughout “JJ,” starting first with herself for having “such awful taste” in men while looking back on some regrettable ex. Then she shifts that over to the ex, whose “bad attitude” pose extended to thinking she was disgusting. And then she pulls back a bit further to shaking her head at a society that conspires to make her or anyone else feel like they “deserve” to be treated like shit. It doesn’t take the blame off anyone for insensitive behavior, but it does put everything in context. Would we undermine ourselves and be attracted to things we know on some level will hurt us if we didn’t have toxic messages in our lives? Is this nature or nurture? Anyway, fun things to think about in a danceable punk song song!

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Thundercat featuring Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins “Show You the Way”

When I learned about this song I was like “wow, Thundercat got Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins on a song?!?” And then I heard it, and you can hear Thundercat expressing the same thing in the song itself. What luck, right? This is how you know you’ve made it. This is how you find out that you are exceptionally smooth. This is one of your slickest bass lines going to Yacht Rock Heaven. So I’m of two minds about the kitschy announcements of each singer throughout the song: The joke is funny the first time, but not so much on repeat listens, and the schtick gets in the way of the vibe and sentiment of the music. But it comes from a place of very genuine joy and admiration and surprise and wonder, and who can blame this guy for being so hype about landing either of these dudes, let alone both of them? Certainly not I.

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Ty Segall “Break A Guitar”

There has been no shortage of dudes drawing on Black Sabbath riffs over the past – oh, hmm, 40 years or so? – but a lot of the time, it’s just aimless sludgy riffage without much charm. Ty Segall does it right by keeping that sort of heaviness and bombast connected to the more delicate and tuneful aspects of psychedelia. In his hands, the riffs don’t just sound like the lumbering thuds of a giant, but are nimble like a musclebound football player who moves with an unexpected speed and grace. Segall is never breaking any new ground, but he’s always refining approaches to things other musicians do quite lazily, and he makes rock that some might write off as retro feel fresh though sheer force of will and vitality.

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Gabriel Garzón-Montano “Sour Mango”

Gabriel Garzón-Montano’s melodies are bold and immediately charming, but rendered in layers of muted pastel tones that keep a relatively busy song like “Sour Mango” from feeling too rich and heavy. There’s a nice feeling of weightlessness in this song, with the vocal and instrumental harmonies hovering around a crisp beat that keeps a steady groove but feels more like scaffolding for melody. Garzón-Montano’s voice is soulful but not showy – it’s the most vibrant aspect of the song, but doesn’t overwhelm the low-key, relaxed feeling of the overall track. I’m particularly fond of the vaguely siren-like keyboard part that carries through the piece as a crucial part of the harmony and serves as a nearly subliminal hook that sticks around in my head after the song’s over.

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Japandroids “Arc of Bar”

“Arc of Bar” is a skyscraper of a song, building upwards towards the heavens with each verse as if the band was on a solemn mission to go get a beer with God Himself. A lot of beers. This is the most epic drinking song I have ever heard, and maybe the only one I’ve encountered that makes drinking booze seem like some kind of defiant, heroic duty. Brian King’s verses are wordy and deliberately grandiose, but the chorus is exactly the sort of cathartic, mindless bombast Japandroids does best: “Yeah yeaaaah! / YEAH YEAH!!!” This is seven minutes of theatrical rock music designed to make people go wild at a concert, and is such a convincing advertisement for inebriation that it’s a huge boon to the bartenders at every venue this band plays for the rest of the career. But as much as this song sets up a good time, it’s lost and confused and tortured at its core. It’s constantly grasping upwards at something – grace, glory, redemption? – but never getting a hold of anything. So it just keeps going higher and higher until it inevitably falls down.

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Delicate Steve “Nightlife”

Delicate Steve plays guitar like a lead singer, so it works out nicely that there’s no singer in his band. His lead parts carry the central melody of the tunes, but even if it works as a substitution for a traditional rock singer, it doesn’t necessarily feel like one. Steve’s parts are highly expressive and instantly memorable, and frankly, convey a lot more personality than most indie rock singers. The songs on This Is Steve are so catchy and well-composed that they’d probably be hits if they had singing in place of Steve’s leads, but they’d lose a significant amount of charm, and distract from the colorful, idealized alternate reality suggested by the music. “Nightlife” in particular sounds like some better, more cheerful world where seemingly disparate elements from twangy rock and reggae blend together seamlessly and it’s totally chill and casual.

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