The Singles Jukebox

Daniel gets us to check in with Japanese boy-band rap…

[Video]
[6.33]

Taylor Alatorre: The tug-of-war between masculine and feminine energies, so central to boy band pop, is especially audible here; probably it’s the language barrier freeing up my other senses to notice. There’s kitsch, but it’s tastefully applied: epic war drums corralled into tidy triplet forms, “hey girl” repeated four times in a soothingly uniform cadence. Like the archetypal bad boy cleaning up his act before a fancy date, the effort doesn’t go unappreciated. They really just wanted to make a good impression, after all.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Pop-rap that never makes it far past “genial,” but it did make me update my list of rappable-over Mario tracks to include the Super Mario RPG factory theme.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I’m a little confused, because although there are plenty of adjectives that seem like they could apply, nobody here seemed particularly “wavy.”
[6]

Dave Moore: I’m almost always useless talking about boybands, which I’m sure says something about me and my particular biases and blindspots that I haven’t bothered to examine deeply enough. This song is close to overcoming my prejudice by way of Atlanta bass, but it doesn’t get the formula quite right, and also hasn’t figured out how to work in something like those jazzy “My Boo” chords to take it over the top.
[5]

Jel Bugle: You see, when I hear entirely sensible dance music, it does nothing for me. Songs like this with lots of different voices, coming and going, just sound more fun. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Can’t front, ’twas fun. JP the Wavy’s verse was forgettable though.
[6]

no blergs » Monday, December 23rd, 2024 9:07 pm

Dorian brings us idol pop of the non-metal variety…

[Video]
[8.57]

Dorian Sinclair: “Kimi ga Mune ni Gunshot” is a moment on the brink of collapse, impossibly spun into something longer. It’s held together by an icy, glitched-out synth pulse, rhythmically insistent but wildly destabilizing thanks to unpredictable metric shifts and increasingly frayed production. The voices may be hushed throughout, but the intensity builds relentlessly, until it finally shakes itself to pieces, dissolving into electronic noise. It may not have been the group’s final single (that was the excellent – and completely different – “Woot!”), but it feels like an ending.
[10]

Iain Mew: The perfect midpoint of Ichiko Aoba and Oxide & Neutrino, and also the sound of bringing The Knife to a gunfight.
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: The makings of an electronic banger, except the energy makes quirky lateral moves in lieu of crescendos.
[7]

Jel Bugle: I like the sharp sounds and the quick glitchy beats and echos. The singing is cool — just repetitively chirping away. Good work focus music!
[8]

Ian Mathers: Right at the beginning I thought for a second I was listening to Flume/Caroline Polachek’s “Sirens” (which I underrated and gave an [8]). But as it goes on and the singing starts, it feels less like the whole thing is splintering apart like “Sirens” does, and more like something ragged but glorious is being shakily assembled. That singing is great too, and as an Anglophone who hasn’t looked up a translation, there’s something kind of neat about only ever recognizing one word throughout (and that word sounding appropriate for the musical setting).
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: The songwriter of this lovely song. Show him some love — anyone who can whip up a classic for near defunct deserves it!
[9]

Dave Moore: A remarkable idol song — has the melody of a much more straightforward song but in the production tries to find a midway point between gauzy hypnagogic pop and staccato hyperpop, and nails the balance. The effect is a banger put off at a distance, observing a bumping party happening through someone’s window while locked outside, but you’re not locked outside of the song; that’s what the song is about. So there’s a lonely little party out in the cold, too. 
[8]

1 blerg » Monday, December 23rd, 2024 2:17 pm

Jel revisits the Japanese idol metal group we’ve really come around to since 2016…

[Video]
[8.00]

Jel Bugle: Perhaps it’s just me who will think this is amazing and should have been a massive global hit. Two massive metal acts combining for a joyous blast of fun — it’s loud, it’s relentless, who could really want anything more or less? 
[10]

Dave Moore: There’s more than a dollop of Eurovision to this, the sort of fake metal that might clean up in competition with more predictable pop simulacra but only really works in context. Take it away from comparative greatness, and it begs for the inflation it would get as a reprieve from some soulless Swedish pop or maudlin ballad. 
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Guiltless Eurovision? Yes please.
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: The trio of Su-Metal, MOMAMetal and MOMOMetal are chirrupy and harsh, but Electric Callboy ably handle the synthpop and metal without fumbling, releasing some perfectly serviceable growls and low tenor singing over the bass. A much more fruitful match than one would anticipate.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Started out as a low [5] when I realized that Babymetal’s gimmick here was not mashing up idol pop with metal as I had recalled, but mashing up metal with the weaker pop of 2010-12: “Party Rock Anthem,” “Dynamite,” “Starships.” Bumped to a low [6] when I realized that “Ratatata” was the kind of gargantuan, kaiju-sized rager that those songs not-so-secretly wanted to sound like. Bumped to a [7] — and not a low one — when I realized how much, during this critical process, I was enjoying actually listening to the thing.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: This song will appear at least once in every Eurovision hereon, and it will never be as good as Käärijä. The borderline Cobra Starship approach to synthpop almost scuttles this iteration, but it does prevail. Perhaps the reason these things work at all is that they go so much further than Cobra Starship or 3OH!3 ever did. With them, the joke always seemed to be told with studied distance and maximum smugness. By contrast, “Ratatata” is just about daft enough.
[7]

Ian Mathers: This had me going for the first twenty seconds, like “maybe this will be bad?” But as soon as the screaming started, I knew I was in good hands.
[10]

1 blerg » Sunday, December 22nd, 2024 12:35 am

Scott brings us some spoken word…

[Video]
[6.43]

Scott Mildenhall: Blackpool isn’t quite all front, but nowhere works harder to sustain the illusion of glamour. No matter how translucent it may be, the commitment cannot yield. That’s one reason why you don’t need to believe in the magic to feel it. Walk the Golden Mile as a kid, and you’ll feel part of a space that exists outside of the ordinary, alongside streams of fellow travellers. Keep walking, and you’ll find it’s almost twice its nominal legth; a joke shop trick in a town full of the things. No doubt, this is a natural place for existential crises and epiphanies at any age. Though they may aim to blind, the Illuminations do their real duty on the detail, just like Yard Act. James Smith’s recollections of crisp-crumbed car coverings and own-brand synaesthesia upended are remarkably vivid and masterfully strung; vacancy giving way to pure articulacy. Carry on walking, and everything connects.
[9]

Julian Axelrod: There are so many elements of this song that usually turn me off right away: British talk-singing, indulgent runtime, mid-song meta reveal, etc. And yet, Yard Act are skilled enough to turn every slight into a strength. The unreliable narrator is more Ira Glass than Alex Turner, the bloat turns into a sprawl, and the dream twist has a charming stoner logic. Something about the band’s bleary vision pulls it all together, and every time the rambling monologue and ramshackle clamor converge into something resembling a groove,  you realize they’ve been in total control from the jump.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: i guess we doin podcasts now
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: Usually they’ll put some wine and cheese out at a book reading. Maybe a little Q&A with the author?
[4]

Jel Bugle: I enjoyed the story, and the sentiment of the importance of family. 
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Cuz this wanker will become a fan by album 2!
[8]

Will Adams: Expertly paced for its first five and half minutes. “Blackpool Illuminations” begins as the kind of meandering, uninteresting story you’d hear from a stranger at the bar, responding with an “uh-huh” if they allow that much silence between sentences. But as it progresses, James Smith’s vocal starts to drift closer to the rhythm, until it locks into place and the rhymes arrive, while the jam-band backing becomes more psychedelic. The end loses me; a drug trip inspires a stab at profundity that the narrator had previously shrugged off, and we get a “fuck the haters” mic drop to end it. Storytelling is a craft; I suppose it’s not so easy to stick the landing.
[6]

no blergs » Saturday, December 21st, 2024 2:02 am

Jacob hands us a love letter to thinkpieces…

[Video]
[8.00]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Perhaps the most romantic song ever written — Jane Remover captures the feeling of having a crush so vast in its magnitude that you can’t help but say something bizarre, overwhelmed by the sheer depth of feeling. She calls herself a thinkpiece and it’s not the most outlandish line here. She quotes an Usher deep cut and it makes perfect sense. All the while, the track sounds like a disorderly succession of radio bumpers intruding upon each other, a jumble of jock jam guitars and schmaltzy R&B synths falling onto the track in a logic all their own. Can you feel that? is the incessant question of the track, displaced from her voice into the booming tones of a mixtape hype man, and the answer is obvious: of course I can. The design of “Magic I Want U” means that you must feel it, enveloping every inch of your experience.
[10]

Aaron Bergstrom: I don’t think I’ve ever used the phrase “it sounds like you just mixed all the different energy drinks together” as a compliment before.
[9]

Will Adams: Jane Remover first piqued my interest with her fantastic remix of Tinashe’s “Nasty.” “Magic I Want U” delivers the same exhilarating turn-of-the-millennium glitchy goodness, like if you passed BT’s “Somnambulist” through a spiralizer, but the turn of phrase “gold in your mouth” that forms its hook reveals a songwriting sensibility worthy of the designation of “magic.”
[8]

Julian Axelrod: I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about VH1’s I Love the ’90s series, a slapdash assemblage of soundbites and nostalgia shards that boiled an entire decade down to a digestible slush. While it hasn’t aged well, it was formative for me, beaming a litany of cultural touchstones into my teen brain via a game of cultural telephone. Jane Remover, who was born less than a year before I Love the ’90s premiered, presents a similar cracked rear view recollection of the sounds of yesteryear; listening to “Magic I Want U,” you’d think Sneaker Pimps and Deee-Lite were the dominant acts of their decade. But where most pop archivists are content to present the reference and call it a day, Jane’s approach has a sonic and emotional restlessness that feels true to the TikTok age. The song hops between hooks and perspectives in a way that’s as much like a YouTube video essay as a friend recapping an argument with their ex. Even before her latest side project was confused for a fictional ’90s band, the vessel seemed to be as crucial to the mission as its message; it’s about who she’s singing as and who she’s singing to, and either one could be you. She could be your new favorite thinkpiece or favorite girl, but Jane Remover’s genius lies in how she collapses the space between the two.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: This is a song that is textually about wanting to fuck a music blogger and I don’t know how I feel about that.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Jane Remover sings “Magic I Want U” like a teen pop icon debuting on TRL: her phrasing is inflected with R&B sass and Cheiron quantization, and you might almost wonder when her band of ebullient backing dancers will appear. “I could be his new favorite thing, his favorite girl,” she daydreams. “Anything to tell me that I’m your number one.” But perhaps she sings it like she’s remembering a long-ago pop song she heard on TRL: murmured and confidential, submerged in digital haze and electronic intrusions. Silly string synth lines and sample pack breakbeats despoil a track that drifts like dust specks in sunlight; this is a homemade blockbuster that stands in a spotlight built from an LCD screen display.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I don’t know what’s going on here: guitar noise, K-pop squiggles, and a vocal whose confidence reassures. Its length keeps it from total triumph.
[8]

Ian Mathers: In theory and often in practice I love a pop move, but honestly, I miss the noise here; I can’t deny the ruthless efficiency of the chorus, but it kind of feels like the bad kind of earworm. And while in theory I love the idea of the cartoonishly “sexy” radio guy voice thing going on in the back, every time I play this I find myself enjoying that bit less and less. I have to live my truth!
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: This sounds like a lower-level technician who snuck onto the grounds of the proverbial pop music factory late at night and started tinkering with all the expensive equipment. Which is what the digital revolution has allowed us all to do, but Jane Remover approaches the scenario with the bygone sense of open-range possibility that you’d find in a Wired cover story from 1998. “Magic I Want U” is built on familiar reference points, but they’re used as seeds rather than blueprints, an organic kind of genrelessness in a time when “genreless” has lost much of its meaning. The song optimizes for both hookiness and elusiveness, foregrounding a set of rubbery vocal acrobatics that refuse to be pinned down for more than seconds at a time. Its dream-like qualities are a byproduct of this looseness in structure, which has a cost in immediacy even as it more cannily reflects the subject matter. “Liminality” and “limerence” may not be etymologically related (I checked), but here they intersect in a satisfying way.
[7]

Leah Isobel: Census Designated used Ethel Cain cosplay to navigate the complex and often challenging array of feelings attendant to transition: grief, defiance, hopelessness, anger, suspension, impatience. But where Ethel Cain songs are about stillness and entrapment, Jane’s work is more essentially about movement and freedom. In her songs, pain is just the inverse of pleasure; a song like “Video” works because its hurt eventually gives way to ecstatic, roaring bliss. Rather than standing monolithically on its own, pain is minimized, the just price for a passage into a better life. “Magic I Want U,” then, is the flipside. Jane returns to the frenetic energy of Frailty cuts like “movies for guys,” but replaces the restlessness with simmering swagger, corroding immediate ear-candy pleasures with spiky and incongruous textures at every edge. It’s cage-captured joy, a dizzying upward spiral into hell. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: goshdarnit call her back.
[10]

1 blerg » Thursday, December 19th, 2024 3:13 pm

Tim takes some of us outside our comfort zone with a British experimental rock group…

[Video]
[6.00]

Tim de Reuse: Lead singer Harry Burgess wryly calls this “a wedding song:” a hesitant, uncomfortable tune about being welcomed into the institution of marriage (with the “law on my side,” getting “smoked out the closet”). Burgess has sung around this theme of unsettling on nearly every release he’s touched in his career; masculine homosexuality versus the looming white picket fence, the desire for authenticity versus the desire to be shaped, the flaws in our notions of community, family, etcetera. True to form, we’ve got lovely, obtuse imagery that juxtaposes the joy of being accepted with the terror of wishing you didn’t hate the thing accepting you. Does it “take the shape you need,” or does it “piss spray of territory?” Is it “filling you up” or “erasing” you? What’s truly excellent here, what really makes me want to ramble on, is how well the form matches the narrative. Nothing is bolted down; everything half-resolves. The melody is plunked out in gritty cluster chords, first on a playful piano and then in horror-soundtrack cello bursts, first on the beat, then on triplets, then on the off-beat, constantly picking up and dropping rhythmic throughlines. Once the energy steps up the drums seem to be synchronized to the rest of the tune entirely by accident, tom rolls scattering away into unintelligible rhythms. Burgess himself flits between a scared yelp and a smug coo, half victim and half detached observer. Yet it’s got enough of a downbeat and an insistence on melody that it demands to be read not as an academic exercise in communicating discomfort but as a pulsing, pop-crescendo object. It forces you to consider a dissonant, pulsing un-melody in the context of a head-nodding kick-snare-kick-snare; to hear a disjointed 3-on-2 polyrhythm and get the accompanying piano riff stuck in your head. Few bands can ride this line; very few can do this kind of thing deliberately in service of such a particular metaphor.
[9]

Leah Isobel: The sound of modernity: “Bittersweet Symphony” turned inside out and burned to a crisp. More like this, please.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The piano line repetitions sustain a modicum of interest in a rather cute track — the vocalist sounds like Jens Lekman.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: What the hell is this twee, herky-jerky, Wiggles-ass vocal? Why do people put this much care and composition into their arrangements, yet fail to realize that the voice is an instrument too?
[2]

Frank Kogan: As this develops, the vocalist cedes the spotlight to the instruments, and the piano (from which you’d expect improvisation) cedes the spotlight to separate blocs of strings. Keeps me interested but — of course — doesn’t attempt to grab me.
[4]

Ian Mathers: No matter how this shifts or settles (or galumphs, as it kind of starts to do when he intones “law on my side, law on my side”) it all feels like one strangely graceful piece. It’s got a shaggy beauty that kind of reminds me of Stars Like Fleas (or their offshoot Family Dynamics), and anyone who can see the old Stars Like Fleas show poster up in my living room knows I mean that positively, even if most people have no idea what I’m talking about. (This is where I would link to the old Stylus review of The Ken Burns Effect, except the internet is not actually forever.)
[7]

Jel Bugle: A little pseudy, and the jerky jazz clank and grind made me feel a little nauseous. Maybe someone else will hear something magnificent here, and that’s the beauty of musical taste. I didn’t even mention the singing.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: “Marquee” feels strangely offbeat, mainly since it shifts in tempo and melody in a way that’s no longer acceptable outside certain corners. It feels unsteady and lurching, feeling its way toward a melody that feels sweet and light but remains earthbound rather than slipping away into the sky. Harry Burgess’s voice, croaky and glum, turns into a chirpy squeak on the sweet ear-candy lyric “Wherever you make home, the deed is done.” Every time you hear that, it’s an anchor in the morass, allowing you the comfort of engaging with music on the level of riffs, hooks, choruses, one-liners, the entirety of popular music. There’s a chorus — “tame emotion, same marquee, found for me” — but it feels tender and gingerly offered, almost as if it emerges as an apology. The “deed is done” line is the response to that apology: a anguished plea to accept that some places you settle, you need to be accepted for your specific impulses and beliefs. But the song ends, dog-eared and mournful, Burgess caging a bird across from him, refusing another the freedom he cannot have for himself.
[10]

no blergs » Wednesday, December 18th, 2024 2:08 pm

Suggested by John, a piece of folk yearning for a slower pace…

[Video]
[6.67]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Tell me truly, what is your dream? I find myself sitting in a field. I find my friends and family among me. There are birds flying nearby, some landing and playing in the field. A hawk flies over, but the songbirds don’t hide. They continue singing. Someone is cooking over an open fire or in a dug pit of coals. A guitar is playing. We are singing. We are sharing. The smell of the food wafts over us. I am no longer sitting but standing, playing my upright bass. The people I love are with me. They are dancing. They feel next to me. We grow tired over and overthinking. In June of this year, a new opportunity came my way. After a year and a half of struggling with a commute, working among petty people for a hundred-year-old company entrenched in the 20th century, spending money on food I could make at home with a little more time, lying to myself and saying I was fine, I found a fully remote opportunity willing to wait until August for me to join. I would have boundaries again. And I have had boundaries again. And I have had time for hobbies again. And I could remember who I am and who I used to be once again. Daydream dies slow. I saw Haley Heynderickx opening for one of my favorite bands, on a night I was already primed for a close encounter with something sublime. She stood on stage, just her and a guitar, and sang, and picked, and filled the room with just herself and her instrument. She made one acoustic guitar sound like a full band and still sang in her mournful alto. She captured this tension I’ve felt for years. I was so enraptured that I felt like I could hear her strings straining against their tuning pegs, moments away from snapping. On “Foxglove”, she does the same thing. She takes this pushing rhythm and makes it meditative. She conjures her daydream and makes it hers. She acknowledges the barriers and the tensions that keep it dying but lets you know it’s dying slowly. It’s still there. It’s fading, but you can still chase it. It goes away like the whisper of a perfectly bowed string, echoing through soft air. Dies slow, dies slow, dies slow, dies slow.
[10]

Dorian Sinclair: “Foxglove” has a timeless quality to it; the echoey fingerstyle guitar, Heynderickx’s warble, and the fragmentary lyrics all feel like they could have as easily been recorded in the 1970s as this year. I just wish that the ending wasn’t quite so abrupt — Heynderickx is singing about daydreams dying slow, but I feel like I’m jolted awake from this one.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The childish daydreams of a musical career die as quickly as foxglove if watered from overhead. Haley, of course, does not have this problem.
[5]

Julian Axelrod: In a year where even the chillest bands have names like Skullcrusher and Being Dead, nobody would begrudge Heynderickx for not going as hard as her predecessors Jimi or Future. And sure, “Foxglove” isn’t a massive departure from the folk pop sound she established on 2018’s I Need to Start a Garden, which was defined by delicate acoustics and aggressive emotions. But the guitar line that twists through this single is the catchiest and most forceful riff she’s produced to date, tapping into an authentic Americana sound that’s refreshing in an era where any artist who can afford a pedal steel player is considered country. It feels like a true duet between the instrument and its player, with the guitar subsiding for her verses and returning to fill in the words she can’t bear to sing. The most thrilling moments are the choruses where everything drops out, like the three-pace count before a showdown between Haley and her discarded daydreams. When that guitar comes back in, you don’t think about her alongside her namesakes or contemporaries. It’s just Haley Heynderickx and the vast horizon.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The songs on Haley Heynderickx’s first album crackled with a certain specificity, the lived-in detail of an old apartment; here on her return, a half-decade on, she is instead fuzzy in her images, sketching a nature scene with just a few well-chosen phrases, swooning with the cello and double bass. She acknowledges the daydream as she sings it; I can’t help but reach for more stable points to hang to here, but in practice even the indistinct is joyful. 
[7]

Isabel Cole: A little mannered, but despite the fact that there are few things I relate to less than wanting to escape city life, when I’m listening I do briefly wish I were sitting with my back against a tree, spreading my legs out on the sun-dappled grass.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I used to go to a smallish folk festival with my family every summer when I was a kid. Even when I first went it had (like a lot of folk festivals) moved away from any sort of genre purity and towards a bit of “the kind of music do boomers who would go to a folk festival would like.” On the basis of the deftly strummed, liltingly sung “Foxglove,” Haley Heynderickx could have been one of the acts there that actually made me go “oh, I get why people would care enough about folk to have a whole festival full of it.”
[7]

Jel Bugle: It’s kind of like old folk records you’ll find in the charity shop filtering through into modern times. Does this make me feel anti-retro? I’m not sure, new music is always produced from the weight of history. This song is pretty, but pretty like an art gallery or Kew Gardens or something, I’d be inclined to have a quick look around, but a big part of me craves sounds more exciting than nourishing/calming. 
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Pleasant, unbothered folk. My musical taste has drifted a little away from this since the 2000s; wish I could transport it back.
[6]

2 blergs » Wednesday, December 18th, 2024 1:20 am

From Will A., rave reviews for a rave revue…

[Video]
[8.00]

Will Adams: I’ve always loved how Kelly Lee Owens uses repetition. She often treats her voice like a synth, gradually opening the filter to increase the intensity of her songs’ phrases. “Love You Got” is Owens’ most pop-forward effort to date; the titular line is situated within a verse, a brief pre-chorus and additional mini-hooks (‘wanting pure euphoria’; “feel it resonate”). The core, though is those three words, looped over and over to hypnotic effect. On paper, this looks like thin songwriting. In practice, it’s astounding, in no small part to how massive the song is. Owens’ production is as laser cut as ever — percussion like ice shards, reverb like wind shears, synth pads like glassy water — but it’s the booming bass that turns “Love You Got” into an inescapable gravity field pulling you to the dance floor.
[9]

Al Varela: You know a song is good when the synth bass is absolutely throttling your speakers. The production of this song alone is magnificent. A gorgeously blended whirlpool of starry-eyed synths, sandy beats, and of course a synth bass that keeps you moving your head throughout the entire runtime. Kelly Lee Owens’ effortless vocals drifting across the track really ties it all together. It’s like the most ethereal experience you’ll ever have on the dance floor, where the mood and the lighting hits just right. One of my favorite discoveries from this year’s Amnesty.
[10]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s strange and deeply lush, layering synths atop each other while looping Owens’ voice. Yet once it breaks from that haze in a breakdown of claps, it simply settles back into a dull, flatly programmed kick snare pattern, with the flurry of claps raining down as a brief filler. 
[6]

Tim de Reuse: Even since her debut, Kelly Lee Owens’ version of tech-house has always struck me as so glassy, precise, and meticulously well-produced as to make itself completely unremarkable: so close to the platonic ideal of its genre that it doesn’t really have the capacity to surprise. The spirited vocal hook doesn’t really change the formula, but it’s nice to have there, I guess. Fun harmonies. Bacon on a competent cheeseburger.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: When I can forget that my primary association with Kelly Lee Owens is a disastrous date that was entirely my fault, her music is almost perfect. “Love You Got” is also almost perfect, except for a big structural problem: the starchy, incessant hook stiffens the track up right when it should surrender to wordless bliss. Oh well, that’s what the remixes are for (whenever they come out).
[8]

Isabel Cole: Feels longer than it is in a good way, stretching time like taffy around its center. For some reason that keeps coming to mind is not a dance floor but a beach at night, dark but for the glint of moonlight on the waves, serene but never still as lines surface, build, crest, and slip back out to sea.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The way this track goes from tension and release back to contemplation is professionalism to commend. Also: it bangs, whether mirror dancing or at the club.
[8]

Kat Stevens: “Ah, Kelly Lee Owens is making The Kompakt Bork noise,” I thought to myself when I first heard this track. An icy echoed brrrr, sweeping through the streets, enveloping the city in a crystalline fog and trapping Kelly and her lover in an endless spiral of euphoric microhouse. I visited Cologne for the first time this summer and finally made my pilgrimage to the Kompakt record shop in 32C heat (could have done with some of those chilly vibes tbh, we had to make do with a nearby ice cream stand). While spending a large amount of Euros in said shop, I had a realisation: the only Kompakt CDs I had bought in the last decade had been from the Pop Ambient series, which on the whole favours birdsong and unexplained humming instead of Bork Bork Bork. Now I’ve got to the end of writing this blurb I’ve had another realisation: that it’s actually The Booka Shade Bork noise that Kelly is making, and Booka Shade weren’t on Kompakt at all! As you were.
[8]

Ian Mathers: The idea of desire lines between people is an intriguing one and if this particular track is content to leave it as a resonant but unexplored idea, Owens’ vocal lines carve their own equivalents, until “wanting pure euphoria” slides into sounding like “dancing pure euphoria” as those dark chords crash around in the back. Maybe I should go out dancing again.
[9]

no blergs » Tuesday, December 17th, 2024 8:25 pm

Taylor exhumes the vaults for How to Dress Well’s first appearance in 10 years…

[Video]
[7.00]

Taylor Alatorre: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Those six iconic words of American jurisprudence were penned by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dean of the Progressive-era Supreme Court and son of the 19th century physician-poet who co-founded The Atlantic. The case was Buck v. Bell (1927), where an 8-1 majority upheld the 1924 Virginia law that allowed for the compulsory sterilization of Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old who was deemed “feeble-minded” after being forcibly impregnated by a member of her foster family. By the time FDR entered the White House, a majority of U.S. states had enacted sterilization laws modeled after Virginia’s, and the first eugenics law passed by Nazi Germany in 1933 used language lifted from the Virginia statute; Holmes’ majority opinion was later cited in the defense of an SS officer at the Nuremberg trials. Of the more than 60,000 Americans sterilized in the wake of Buck v. Bell, disproportionately immigrants and people of color, a sizable though unknowable portion were those who would today be classified as autistic or developmentally disabled. When considering Buck v. Bell, I’ve lately been drawn not to the coldly lucid prose of Holmes Jr., but to the nonexistent prose of the lone dissenter in the case, the conservative Catholic justice Pierce Butler. For reasons unexplained, Butler did not write a dissenting opinion, so one must assume that his traditional religious values left him unable to sign off on the then-ascendent scientific doctrine of eugenics. He was derided in his time as an agrarian relic and a roadblock to New Deal progress, which he most often was. Against one of the foremost judicial atrocities of 20th century America, however, Pierce Butler stood alone, in silent defiance. “Crypt Sustain” is a song about neurodivergence and survival, but it’s also a song about silence and reticence, and the importance of being misunderstood. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the “nature paintings” and line drawings of his late brother Dan, Tom Krell posits that the creation of art is a defining value of humanity; so far so good, most would say. More radical is his suggestion that art has value even when it is not understood, or seen or heard, by anyone other than its creator. This goes further than the typical avant-garde opposition to art as a saleable commodity, as it encompasses those who, for want of ability, are blocked from entry into even the countercultural ranks. The category of “artist,” throughout human history, has been shaped by selection bias: what of those who lacked the means or wherewithal or even the simple confidence to ever put pen to paper or brush to canvas? Did their ideas die with them, and if so, can they be said to have existed at all? “The inside is where the details are,” intones Dan through the static when discussing his visual art. This privileging of interiority over outward-facing expression is at the center of “Crypt Sustain,” beginning with the title: the crypt is the incubator of memory, whether in artistic or genetic form, big enough to house both the famous and the unwillingly anonymous. It is that which we both “carry with us” as individuals and “share within us” as a collective, and the switch between these two verse-ending phrases is laden with meaning. Here is a thunderous affirmation of the notions that “we are all one species” and “we are all connected,” ideas that are mocked not because they are wrong but because their full implications are rarely explored. It is a rejoinder to those who have discomfort in acknowledging that Elon Musk and Greta Thunberg share a similar neurotype; to those would mark off autism as a postmodern fad or a “chronic disease,” to be eradicated within a few generations; to those whose vision of human utility requires the prenatal elimination of Down syndrome; to those whose vision of human progress requires the mauling by dog of a Palestinian man with Down syndrome (“Abyssinian children” is the most poetic form of self-censorship I have ever encountered). But beyond all of that, “Crypt Sustain” is a funereal celebration of all the art that never got seen or created. On paper, the lines about dreams “pulling back” and memories “retracting” come off as appropriately mournful and reflective. On record, though, the tone is a cracked sort of triumph, with high-pitched peals of melody punctuated by power chords of silence, and a wordless minute-long intro that airlifts a lighter-waving Slash guitar line into a secluded mountain monastery. It’s indulgent in the best sense of the word, and it’s how Krell managed to write a protest song against ableism that doesn’t veer into condescension. The climactic explosion of blast beat drumming is, on one level, ludicrously silly — a half-formed theory of black metal as some primeval strain that was here before us and will long after us remain. But if you put aside the postgraduate lenses for a moment, you’re left with a poignant tribute to a “brutally underpaid and overworked janitor,” whose love for this music was as sincere as the artwork he designed for his brother’s newest album. 
[10]

Katherine St. Asaph: In which Tom Krell decides his heroes are no longer Justin Vernon and Derek Menswear, but Chris Martin.
[6]

Alfred Soto: An excuse for cool guitar skronks and crushed-seashell bits of melody, “Crypt Sustain” sustains a tone if not quite a mood.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The raging, seething guitar chords enhanced by Trayer Tryon’s guitar pedals gird the song so deeply that Tom Krell’s thin voice disappears once they reappear. The drums, bass and even the other guitar melodies just cannot cope with the heavy nature of those chords, and so they swallow the whole mix.
[6]

Tim de Reuse: If you’re gonna switch from low acoustic murmurs into jarring noise then you can’t half-ass it. You gotta commit to something that’ll offend the mild-mannered ear. All these slimy guitars, the white noise blanketing the lead synth, the 2015-ass autotune — it’s trying to come off as odd but it’s scared to come off as weird. It’s pulling punches, not terribly inventive, but the worst sin of all is that it’s trying, and this I’m unable to forgive. Even the quadruple-time kick drums that try to kick off the big finale aren’t bassy enough to rattle your skull, so what’s the point? They pass right though me. The whole thing kind of passes right through me.
[3]

Jel Bugle: Quite inspiring in the “if I tried, I could make this kind of music” way. I liked the nice nasty guitar sounds and spoken bits at the start — great stuff. The dude singing was a bit weak, but when his voice got distorted, that was much better. Must be pretty good live. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: I mean this 100% sincerely, and as high praise: this feels like it could have been on the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack.
[9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This is less a pop song and more a great swallowing-up, the kind of grandiose concatenation of sound that would sound ridiculous if each fragment that makes up its whole were not so artfully struck. When you try to find Tom Krell in this, a small force at the center of a maelstrom, you have to really listen to hear what he’s saying; the repeated phrases, the invocations of crypts and meaning, the sense of loss. 
[9]

no blergs » Tuesday, December 17th, 2024 1:41 am

Aaron brings our scores to apexes…

[Video]
[8.11]

Aaron Bergstrom: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by free two-day shipping. So many who should know better take the easy way out, effortlessly flipping the maxim of No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism from a rallying cry (“ignore cheap platitudes designed to sow complacency, we need to dismantle the entire oppressive system”) to an all-purpose excuse (“just buy whatever you want, all companies are evil, change is impossible, lol nothing matters”). On “All My Exes Live In Vortexes,” Rosie Tucker chooses a different path, cracking jokes about bottles of piss without ever letting you take your eyes off the fact that you are complicit in all of this, and so are they, and that merely hoping for a better world changes nothing. We are all willing participants in large-scale dehumanization and environmental degradation, and yet we are still going to die and be forgotten without ever taming our insatiable desire for more. We are going to die and be forgotten without even figuring out the secret to clear skin. Tucker has been asking what modern protest music looks like, and here’s your answer: You can protest your own actions within the context of an absurd yet all-conquering system that survives by metabolizing dissent and doesn’t even deliver on its most minimal promises. But you can also make it funny.
[10]

Dorian Sinclair: There’s a (sometimes true) stereotype that political art — polemical art — is too earnest to be entertaining. But Utopia Now! is a funny album, and “All My Exes Live in Vortexes” is a funny song. This is sharp, punky, catchy as hell, and reminds me of nothing so much as the basement shows I went to in my university dropout years, hanging with the local anarchists in my midsize college town.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Singers who want everything all at once attract me without hesitation. With their harsh guitar and a well-deployed shriek, both telling me they mean their business, Rosie Tucker takes no shit from former lovers who feel as capaciously.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Genna Projanksy plays lowkey throughout this song. She stays parallel to the guitar, receding into the mix as Tucker and producer Wolfy lick away and Becht nimbly spins between prechorus to chorus. But as you listen more and more, you notice certain specific touches. First, the bassline that glues the melody and rhythm together, allowing the guitar to rise a bit higher and begin shredding certain riffs that are pushed to the sides of the mix to add texture. Second, the chugging rhythm of the bass that powers the prechorus forward, feeling heavy and rough each time. Finally, the swirling line played during the breakdown and postchorus, remaining stolid and completing the mix each time. It’s so subtle and careful that you might never notice it unless you’re paying attention.
[8]

Taylor Alatorre: The too-uniform loudness is a good mirror of the way the song stealthily toggles between interpersonal and broader societal concerns, placing them on equal planes of importance — a tendency that’s offensive to some but common to most. Likewise, the constricted vocal melody is made to express powerlessness in the face of entrenched currents, and maybe also the circular futility of assuming that the desire for “everything all at once” is an incurable mind-poison. The guitar at certain points sounds like it wants to break loose from these pop-leaning confines and join a post-hardcore freakout, and vice versa for the chorus, both of which are very Built to Spill-coded things. All in all, the third-best song title on Utopia Now!.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Great tune, kind of like an earnest teenage pop-punk Liz Phair; phenomenal title. But the lyrics need about five more drafts; in trying to address everything all at once they end up muddled and mired in not much at all.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I’m a real sucker for a good opening line, and “I hope no one had to piss in a bottle at work to get me the thing I ordered on the internet” is an all-timer. Fortunately, Rosie Tucker is on a three-album run of perfect lines, and “All My Exes Live in Vortexes” compounds hook upon hook to the point of overwhelm. It’s power pop at its most meticulous, an exercise in building a song like a miniature. They released an album of Tiny Songs last year, and this feels like a very large tiny song, densely packed with details like they have no time to spare.
[10]

Dave Moore: I absolutely love how Rosie Tucker’s words fold in on each other, like little wind-up toys occasionally colliding, and also how their worlds fold in on each other, fretting about climate change and garbage patches and Amazon exploitation bumping into romantic disappointment, a cosmic gumbo of catastrophe and catastrophizing. The song it reminds me of the most is “Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants: Tucker a Linnell for the Tumultuous ’20s, maybe Roaring but not in the way you’d prefer. In the former you listen and think, after a good long while: “aha! a (spoiler alert) nightlight!” On this one, you listen to it and think, after a good long while: “aha! (gestures at everything)!” (Linnell wrote a great song about everything, too, but stuck it on a children’s album.) I like the song doesn’t state outright but recalls in its anxious somersaults what we call in my household the “chocolate cake” — that one mega-obvious and extremely mundane causal activator of your immediate anxiety, despite the fact that sure, maybe the world really is coming apart. In my case it was the literal piece of chocolate cake I’d eaten that sent my blood sugar and anxiety spiraling up together. So maybe today it’s more ex than vortex?
[9]

Isabel Cole: There’s finding something relatable, and there’s hearing or reading or watching something and thinking, Man, I would love to shoot the shit with the person who made that. I’m not sure anything resonated in that particular way with me this year more than Rosie Tucker’s UTOPIA NOW!, and “All My Exes Live In Vortexes” illuminates why. It’s an introspective song by a person interested in the world and haunted, as so many of us are, by some of our more dystopian recurring headlines — Amazon worker exploitation, garbage patches at sea — but also at least passingly aware of topics like research into the distortion of memory over time. Tucker weaves in these details in a way that suggests that if we’re being honest with ourselves, there’s no real separation between the self and the context we occupy. The political is personal, which is burden and blessing alike. The world keeps going while you’re trying to freeze time squeezing your pores in the bathroom (trust me, I would know). You can say that’s exhausting, which it is, but you can also remember that it means there’s always something bigger than yourself to believe in and belong to. That’s where Tucker winds up, turning the idea of wanting everything all at once from an accusation to a rallying cry. It’s not hope, exactly, but it is the surest antidote I have yet found to despair.
[9]

no blergs » Monday, December 16th, 2024 10:35 pm