April 16th, 2021 2:04am
The music in “Cry and Party” is essentially the result of Nick Hakim doing a “yes, and…” with poetry written in advance by Roy Nathanson. Hakim’s composition complements the conversational flow of Nathanson’s words but also serves to illustrate his notions, conjuring up a big boisterous party with a slinky bass and cheerful horn groove while some pre-party sadness seems to linger in the air. Hakim and Nathanson evoke a wonderful atmosphere here, without using all that many elements they sketch out a space that feels very specific. I can picture this room, I can imagine people moving through it, and I can see the guy Nathanson is speaking as kinda static off in a corner.
April 15th, 2021 9:28pm
The groove of “Cluttered World” rumbles along in a holding pattern, a steady core for a song that’s otherwise fairly chaotic. The rogue element is mostly the piano performance, where even the most delicate parts seem haphazardly bashed out by someone with a good sense of which notes to hit but minimal respect for the instrument. Pat Mahoney’s vocal is nearly as wild a presence as he affects a Nick Cave-ish manic crooner energy, belting out key lines at the ends of verses for dramatic emphasis but also hitting less expected lines with raw emotional phrasing in a way that makes the song feel a bit shaky and drunken. It suits the song well – he is, after all, singing a strange love song about connection and affection in a world where everything is finite and the clock is always ticking.
April 14th, 2021 11:27pm
Izy is a trio of young men from Melbourne who play neo-soul like grizzled veterans –always a crisp and tight pocket groove, but also loose enough to let every part feel breezy and spontaneous. “They Don’t Care” sounds like they were aiming for a very D’Angelo-on-Voodoo sort of feel and mostly got there, though they’re not as strong with atmosphere. Ryo Montgomery’s guitar is the focal point here, carrying the main melody with a warm tone and elegant but not terribly fussy jazz inflections. The lead vocal and harmonies are strong too, but whereas the music seems to flow quite naturally from the players, the vocals seem like they’re working a bit too hard to sound American. It’s hardly a deal breaker, much less a problem for this particular song, but I suspect they’ll level up if they can figure out how to perform in this style with more personal vocal styles.
April 13th, 2021 1:50pm
“Save Me” has the feeling of being unable to fall asleep in an incredibly comfortable bed. The feel of the track is loose and relaxed in a jazzy coffee shop sort of way, but the composition is spiked with bits of anxious energy and features a lead vocal that’s a bit like lying there unable to turn off your mind because it’s stuck in obsessive loops. Drea the Vibes Dealer is singing about a pure love that’s tied up in interpersonal complexities, her lyrics seem to move through the steps of logic and clauses while always coming back to simple, blunt messages. The backing vocals, apparently also performed by Drea, are a brilliant touch – a nod to girl group innocence, but also an echoey ambiance that complements the more spacey jazz elements of the song.
April 9th, 2021 1:11pm
Gilligan Moss sound extremely familiar but are in fact something that feels very new to me – a sort of retro music seemingly made to bring back to the wistful twee vibes and aggressively cheerful grooves of the 2000s. The aesthetics on their debut record have not been gone for long, but just long enough to feel both potently nostalgic and vaguely wrong, like we’re not quite ready to reconnect with this sort of joyful innocent optimism just yet. “Ferris Wheel,” a song that feels particular to the early Obama era, is even premised on nostalgia on a lyrical level as Rebecca & Fiona reminisce on a failed romance in a carnival setting. The relationship isnt necessarily what’s being romanticized here, though – it’s more a yearning for a sense of mindless freedom and seemingly unlimited possibility. In that sense, it’s a perfect song for the waning days of the pandemic, as people impatiently wait to regain that feeling and jump impetuously into anything like good old-fashioned fun.
April 9th, 2021 12:32am
“And Groove” contrasts two deliberately mechanical elements – fast and precise programmed beats and a vocal sample loop – with a keyboard part that feels loose and soulful, like India Jordan sat down and improvised a chord progression on the spot while the tape was rolling. I’m not knowledgeable enough to identify the make and model but I love the tone they are using, a bit like Fender Rhodes but not quite as expensive-sounding? The finale of the song is unexpected but appropriate – the beat and loops drop out and you just hear the keyboard unaccompanied, playing out the chords for an extra 30 seconds.
April 7th, 2021 11:43am
One bit of film critic wisdom I hear repeated a lot is the idea that a movie shouldn’t overtly reference a far better film because it’s basically asking the audience to think about how much better than film is than what they’re watching. I don’t think that logic totally applies to music – nods to other songs in the form of interpolations and samples mostly just integrate warm feelings towards the source material into one’s reaction to the new song. The more analogous thing is probably when an artist with bad or middling material covers much better artists, since you have more of a stark contrast of their attempt at songwriting and the compositional talent of someone else.
I bring this up because one of the several samples floating around in Sofia Kourtesis’ “By Your Side” is a man announcing The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It’s not a sample of the song, just someone mentioning the existence of this widely beloved pop classic. This ought to trigger the problem that happens with referentiality in film, but it doesn’t – for one, Kourtesis’ own composition is very beautiful and highly effective as a dance track, so it succeeds on terms entirely unrelated to The Flamingos’ song. The nod to “I Only Have Eyes for You” doesn’t undermine anything about “By Your Side.” Being reminded of the Flamingos song in a non-musical way has the effect of drawing a line between these two seemingly unrelated works, highlighting the way these two very different songs share a similar sort of heavenly romantic ambiance.
April 6th, 2021 1:43pm
“Sometime” is built on a beat that’s steady and forceful but has a loose bounce to it, like someone dribbling a basketball down the court. The bass sounds slippery and sneaky, like it’s trying to hide behind the beat but it’s far too big to be obscured by it. In all this, there’s Merril Garbus’ voice, or more accurately, her voices – the high end swirling and soaring like gusts of wind, the low end more closely tethered to the rhythm, not quite rapping. The aesthetic is very recognizable as Tune-Yards but with anything that would register as “twee” removed so it’s reduced to blunt rhythm and a thin atmosphere of harmony. I was a little put off by the extreme neuroses of the more recent Tune-Yards records but “Sometime” seems to be reacting against that somewhat as Garbus sings about developing a sense of historical context for the present, confronting the uselessness of a reflexive pessimism about the state of the world, and being able to forgive yourself for your complicity in bad things without necessarily letting yourself off the hook.
April 1st, 2021 1:45am
On a groove level “Fixer Upper” has the twitchy and anxious brutality of The Fall, but in the place of Mark E. Smith’s abstracted invective you get an overly cheerful guy rambling on about his new house in the suburbs and demonstrating himself to be exactly the kind of well-to-do fool who would, say, vote yes on Brexit. It’s a joke, obviously, but it’s played very dry and James Smith’s commitment to the bit of embodying a clueless dork with money to burn makes him come across more like Steve Coogan than anyone in the post-punk lineage.
“Nigel Hitter” is a song that’s caught between the exhaustion and wear-and-tear of doing something all the time and the dullness of doing nothing all the time, a jarring lifestyle transition that was once mainly available to touring musicians but suddenly is relatable to a much larger portion of people on the planet. The fun of this song is that the music doesn’t try to convey either sort of tedium described in the lyrics, but rather a burst of energy and inspiration on the other side of the grind. The rhythms are energized, the chorus hits like a bolt of unexpected joy.
March 31st, 2021 1:14pm
“Alexa!,” a perky and snarky song about Amazon’s ubiquitous personal assistant AI, is right on the edge of novelty song status. The humor in the song is mostly observational or sly references to bugs in Amazon’s system, but as the song moves along it’s more like a biting critique of the product and its cultural implications than just a joke. The small and silly tone of the song is a Trojan horse for darker ideas about pandering to the wealthy, technology-induced cultural hegemony, and nonstop corporate surveillance, just as the benign and often malfunctioning device is a Trojan horse for Amazon’s more ambitious plans for gradually taking over everything it possibly can. Tom Greenhouse’s vocal performance is perfectly balanced here – he sells the quips, but doesn’t lean to hard into the subtext. He trusts you to get it.
March 30th, 2021 2:06am
Florence Shaw’s voice is cold and deadpan as she recites her words, which are not sung or rapped, but certainly performed with more musicality than “spoken” would suggest. She fits perfectly into her band’s grooves, which sound like music to play while driving down a highway in some kind of post-apocalyptic horror film. The tension in the sound comes and goes, but there’s always a feeling of blank-eyed forward momentum.
Just calling this song “Strong Feelings” is a little funny – yes, she’s writing about a powerful attraction to someone, but that’s all buried beneath momentary distractions, self-deprecating asides, and the outside world becoming so awful that it ruins the mood entirely. The best example here is the way the direct and unguarded phrase “kiss me” is quickly blurted out after her droll reading of the line “I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours.” Shaw is good at conveying the mundane details of furtively hiding her feelings, but leaving her reasons to your imagination. Why is she repressing this, what is she afraid of? Probably the usual stuff, but presented in this way something that ordinarily is just about low self-esteem can come off as sort of darkly glamorous.
March 26th, 2021 2:12pm
“September 13th” has a very casual and informal sound that makes it seem as though Yaya Bey just happened to walk into a room while someone was playing a little keyboard riff and started to sing, and someone else was like “oh, we’re doing a song now?” and improvised some percussion. There’s some conspicuous overdubs but they don’t break the loose feel of the song, which has a lost-in-thought quality as Bey works through her feelings after being dumped. She’s not wrecked by the situation, but she’s certainly feeling stuck and lost – the crucial bit here is the repeated thought “when I get out of this hole that you dug for me…” The choice of “when” over “if” in that sentence says a lot about her and the feeling of this song.
March 25th, 2021 5:03pm
“Formula X” sounds like a sleek late ‘90s R&B song caught in a paper jam, a copy of an idea warped and bent up and crushed by faulty mechanisms to the point that it becomes something entirely different in the process. This suits the lyrical premise nicely, as Miho Hatori questions the impulse to repeat expected patterns of behavior and consumption in order to yield a happy life. The implication is that invidualism, self-knowledge, imagination, and creativity is much more satisfying and authentic – the ability to approach the question of love and “answer in your own way.” The song sidesteps didacticism entirely, with Hatori singing her lines with a touch of doubt and insecuritiy, and the suggestion that she can be as much of a programmed robot as anyone else, even if she ends up becoming a more surreal version of one.
March 25th, 2021 1:55am
“Hey Lou” is a song about Lou Reed sung from the perspective of his wife Laurie Anderson, who mostly just seems exasperated by his sloppy and mean spirited behavior, and exhausted by having to look after him and deal with the social messes he makes. This all checks out with everything I’ve ever read about Reed – as well as my own brief professional experience with the man – so I think the actual bold move for Liz Phair in this song is singing from Anderson’s POV, as there are some assumptions about her which she might not think to be fair and she is still alive to hear this. But even if it’s an unfair portrayal of their real life relationship, the song isn’t necessarily about them so much as the idea of them, and they’re really just standing in as archetypes of a particular toxic relationship dynamic. This song makes me suspect we’re actually about to get the Liz Phair record I’ve been wanting for ages – the one that approaches the relationships of people in middle age or older with the same sharp critical eye that the younger Phair brought to dissecting the relationships of people in their 20s on Exile In Guyville and Whip-Smart. Fingers crossed.
March 23rd, 2021 7:48pm
Jack Antonoff does some interesting production tricks on “Dark But Just A Game,” mostly in extreme contrasts betweens textures and tones that in some cases work like a musical equivalent of rack focus in cinema and in others feel more like quick cut shifts in perspective. This feels appropriate to the subject matter – Lana Del Rey is singing about the tragic glamour of Hollywood once again, but this time wondering if her own experience of fame can avoid the obvious well-known narratives of decadence and doom. Antonoff plays on the “maybe, maybe not” feeling of the lyrics by moving between what sounds almost like a parodic version of Del Rey’s classic noir-gone-trip-hop aesthetic and a brighter, quasi-Beatles feel, and not always in a straight A-to-B-section progression. I particularly like the way he constrasts a cleanly mic’d shaking tambourine with a digital bass drum that’s EQ’d so low it sounds like it’s pasted in from a completely different song. It sounds like the present accidentally bleeding into the fantasy of the past, like a boom mic or some modern trash showing up in the frame of a glamorized period piece.
March 18th, 2021 6:37pm
Dontmesswithjuan sings a phrase near the end of “Slumber” that works as a description of the song itself: “magnificent scene at really small scale.” Asta Hiroki’s track evokes a microscopic smallness, the sort of ultra zoomed-in detail that effectively removes all recognizable context. The music feels extremely slow and hazy but the beat is actually fairly busy, snapping and clicking along beneath the thick atmosphere of the keyboards and Dontmesswithjuan’s breathy vocals, which are mixed loud enough that it seems as though they’re whispering directly into your ears. The lyrics are poetic and seem profound, but still wash over you with the music, as though you’re not really meant to fully comprehend what you’re being told.
March 17th, 2021 9:03pm
“Flower Girl” feels very relaxed but not exactly untroubled, though the tensions and concerns aren’t being deliberately buried in a pleasant haze. It’s more like a state of equilibrium, and the lyrics invite someone – the “flower girl” – into this mindset, as though this is a vibe that can potentially be shared. It’s a warm and generous both musically and lyrically, as though Lionel Boy is just doing their best to bring people – not just the flower girl, but like, especially the flower girl – into this peaceful easy feeling. The guitar and keyboards set a lovely ambiance but the most effective part of the song is most definitely the bass, which thumps gently as if to subtly encourage you to match your heart rate to this tempo.
March 16th, 2021 9:01pm
The keyboards in “Maybe Chocolate Chips” are played with an exaggerated portamento effect that makes it sound very warped and woozy but also quite bright, as if you’re listening to scrambled rainbow lasers. This combined with the soft, gentle voices of the women of Chai, make the song seem cute but also a little awkward and very introverted in tone. This makes sense for the lyrics – they’re singing about the bass player learning to appreciate her moles, so there’s some residue of embarrassment along with opening up and being vulnerable. Ric Wilson shows up for a mid-song rap verse that’s as sweet as everything else. He’s basically there to offer support and reinforce the self-love, just a really wholesome dude who shows up out of nowhere to be very kind.
March 16th, 2021 8:24pm
“The Revolution of Super Visions” hinges on a question repeated in a funky refrain: “Do you look at yourself and find nothing?” The music calls back to the psychedelic of Sly and the Family Stone and Funkadelic, and Jane Weaver’s phrasing owes something to the way Sly Stone and George Clinton could position song lyrics as a sort of conversation with the listener in which their worst impulses are challenged and their best qualities are affirmed. Weaver pokes at the listener’s insecurities while trying to build them up, to be the sort of confident, self-loving, fully actualized person they could be if they could deprogram what they’ve picked up from culture. She’s not being didactic – more is conveyed by suggestion than explication in the words – but her positive intention is very clear. It’s nice to hear a song that is earnestly rooting for you to become a better and happier person rather than asking you to be or expecting you to have already figured this out.
March 12th, 2021 1:20pm
It’s been interesting to me how while Taylor Swift has been a major star for well over a decade now it’s only been in the past couple years that her influence as a songwriter has become very apparent in other musicians. This makes some sense, as the songwriters coming up now are those who grew up with as a formative artist. I mostly hear Swift’s influence in particular melodies and cadences paired with an introspective wordiness – for example, listen to the bridge into the chorus on this Rosé song, which could fit neatly into any of Swift’s pre-Folklore records. As to be expected from K-pop, “On the Ground” isn’t all just one thing but more of a well-seasoned stew of pop elements from different periods, with a particular emphasis on reinterpreting sounds from the 2000s. Sure, there’s Taylor Swift in the mix here, but I also hear a lot of…Natasha Bedingfield?
Rosé is best known as a member of Blackpink and this is her first push as a solo artist. The song is sung entirely in English and is as accessible as pop singles can get, so clearly Rosé and the Blackpink machine are aiming very high here with this ballad/bop hybrid. The lyrics, which are basically about realizing you need to be grounded and not lose touch with your roots as you experience success, hit a good balance of pathos and sentimentality. Squint a little and it’s almost one of those “wait, fame is awful!” songs alt-rockers always did in the ‘90s after having a hit.
