Fluxblog #260: 2000s survey playlists • Fiona Apple • Theophilus London • Pokus • Orion Sun
I've taken the time to put the 2000s surveys – which were initially made to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the site and were compiled with the original "just things I liked or noticed" rules – on Spotify with new sequencing and expanded to meet the "document of a year across genres" guidelines. Of course, a rather depressing amount of great obscure music that I covered back in the day is not available on streaming platforms, so they're somewhat compromised in that sense. Here's the links 2002-2009, and 2000 and 2001 will be finally come out sometime soon, so I will have surveys for every year from 1970-present.
2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009
April 20th, 2020
The Looming Effect And The Parallax View
Fiona Apple “Ladies”
The big frustrating thing about loving Fiona Apple’s music is that she takes so long between records, but the immediately apparent thing about her new album Fetch the Bolt Cutters is that these particular songs simply couldn’t exist as they do without all that time for reflection and emotional processing. Whereas most of her old songs seemed like documents of raw emotions in the moment, the new songs are written with the perspective of memoir. But this isn’t self-mythologizing – she’s writing about her life with a critical eye, and in reflecting on the past she allows herself to shake off some of the burden of its weight on her psyche. The title phrase is her metaphor for cutting your way out of a trap you’ve made for yourself, and she’s singing this all as a woman who’s already made it out.
I love the way the record is sequenced in thematic clusters, and how an idea set up in one song is expanded on from another angle in the one right after it. My favorite example of this is in the “Newspaper”/”Ladies” diptych at the center of the album, in which Apple considers the social obstacles placed between women who’ve been romantically involved with the same men. “Newspaper” approaches this with suspicion and anger – “I wonder what lies he’s telling you about me to make sure that we’ll never be friends” – as well as an admission of envy and obsession. Like a lot of the songs on the album, it’s in some way her noting in retrospect how she fell into a trap and making a note of it for future use, as though she’s an emotional cartographer letting us all know where to expect treacherous terrain. That song is fraught and tense, but it’s resolved somewhat by “Ladies,” which considers this dilemma with a looser sound, a more relaxed state of mind, and a lyrical emphasis on empathy and generosity. She still finds herself cut off from these seemingly great women she wishes she could know firsthand, but she at least has shed the angst and jealousy.
There’s a lot of levity in the verses of “Ladies,” and lots of vivid images and details that she sings with delightfully off-kilter rhythms and cadences. Apple, as always, is a genius of phrasing with a very distinctive style, and as deliberate as she is in writing these meticulous lyrics and melodies, it all rolls out so fluidly that it feels more intuitive and improvisational. The refrain in which she calls herself a “fruit bat” in a sweet melody at the top of her vocal range is an unexpected contrast that further lightens the mood of the song, but that moves straight into a more solemn bridge where she arrives the song’s magnanimous conclusion: “Nobody can replace anybody else, so it would be a shame to make it a competition / And no love is like any other love, so it would be insane to make a comparison with you.” It’s basically the moral of the story, and she makes a point of singing it plainly and with direct language. But as much as she believes this very reasonable thought, the song doesn’t stop at this realization and honors the feeling rather than just “solving” it. The ending circles back to the premise of both “Newspaper” and this song, as she simply repeats the phrase “yet another woman to whom I won’t get through” with a steadily deepening degree of disappointment.
Buy it from Amazon.
April 21st, 2020
Dozens Of Nights In The Cold
Theophilus London “Marchin'”
Theophilus London’s new record is filled with impressive guest spots – two tracks with Tame Impala, features from Raekwon, Dev Hynes, Lil Yachty, and Ariel Pink – and on each of those collaborations the singer adopts their distinctive aesthetics and essentially sounds like he’s the guest. “Marchin’,” one of the few songs on the album that has no features is also the best by far, and allows London to be fully at the center of a joyful calypso/dancehall number about love and devotion. It’s a bit like when an actor is cast well but slightly against as a romantic lead – everything sweet and warm and likable about them is centered, and their little peculiarities ground the fantasy they’re providing of idealized romance.
Buy it from Amazon.
April 22nd, 2020
Attempt Try Experiment
Pokus “Pokus Two”
The best way I can describe Pokus aesthetic is that it’s like if the rhythm section of Fugazi was playing with a keyboard player who sometimes sounded a bit like Sun Ra when he was messing around synthesizers and overdriven electric organs in the late ’70s and other times was more along the lines of late ’90s IDM-aligned electronic music. It’s an extremely cool sound, and the band does enough with it to hold attention through a six track suite. The recording has a good live feel to it – there’s a firm structure to the bass, but it sounds like the keyboard parts are at least somewhat improvised in the moment and you can feel the chemistry between the three players.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
April 23rd, 2020
The Day Is As Long As An Hour
Orion Sun “Lightning”
“Lightning” is built around a one chord drone that blinks on and off in slow motion so it feels like falling into a meditative trance but then snapping out of it when you become aware of the trance. Tiffany Majette sings with emotive, soulful inflections but keeps with the drowsy and dreamy tone of the music enough that her lyrics come across like the thoughts of someone who’s half asleep and drawing deep connections between memories, imagination, and emotions. My favorite line here is the aside near the start where she reflects on how the house she used to live in is now “just a property building winning tenants.” The wistfulness and low-key resentment in that line grounds everything else she sings, which moves more towards broader feelings about a disappointing relationship, so even a line as common as “I thought that love lasts forever” feels much more specific.
Buy it from Bandcamp.