Fluxblog #263: No Joy • Deradoorian • Caribou • Victoria Monét • Chicano Batman
I have a new public playlist on Spotify that's sort of a condensed, simplified version of a freelance curation project I recently did that was essentially mapping out the aesthetic of indie and DJ music that explored a sort of kitschy post-sampling approach to mixing up genres from 1995 to 2004. You can check that out here, and I'll let you know when the full project with all the writing and context is public.
Also, just as a reminder, you can support Fluxblog – which is just me, a person getting by on freelance money – by donating on Ko-fi.
May 11th, 2020
If You Love Somebody
No Joy “Birthmark”
One of the great pleasures of watching artists evolve over long stretches of time is in noticing how their aesthetic shifts along with their capabilities, and influences that were once only implied become overt as others that were on the surface recede. No Joy started as a more blunt and primitive version of a shoegaze band with blaring guitars and buried vocals, but all along suggesting a delicate sentimentality and sophisticated melodic sensibility. As the band has become more of a solo project for Jasamine White-Gluz, the music has gradually moved towards foregrounding what was once obscured while maintaining an artsy haze and exaggerated sense of spacial relationships in the mixes. On Motherhood, the forthcoming new album by No Joy, White-Gluz has refined her aesthetic to the point that anything she does now sounds fully like her even when she’s emulating elements of trip-hop, nü-metal, and ’90s adult contemporary pop. It’s always been in there, she’s now just making it more obvious – no shame, just beauty and feeling.
“Birthmark,” the lead track off Motherhood, consolidates all of White-Gluz’s major musical threads from the past six years into one gorgeous and emotionally direct pop song. When I hear the song the word that comes to mind is “clarity” – in the arrangement and mix, in the vocal performance, in the lyrics, in the abstract sense that it sounds like a musical approximation of a crystal chandelier. The ways she’s implied nonlinear vagueness and a collage-maker’s sense of textural juxtaposition is all there, but it’s more in the service of articulating the complexity of a feeling rather than in masking or muting it. She’s not being at all ambiguous in singing openly about love, but the way she does it is up for interpretation: What kind of love, and how intense is it?
Buy it from Bandcamp.
May 12th, 2020
It Felt So Real In My Head
Deradoorian “Saturnine Night”
“Saturnine Night” is like one of the chugging quasi-motorik Thee Oh Sees numbers remade with goth aesthetics, with Angel Deradoorian singing about “innocence in my death” and “purifying the shadow of the soul” through heavy reverb. The dark vibe and the insistent groove suits Deradoodian well, allowing her room to embrace the less overtly pretty aspects of her singing voice, in as much as her voice is naturally musical and gorgeous. Letting the rhythm section carry the structure also gives her space to use her guitar mainly for atmosphere, pulling this closer to her more ambient works than the more folky side of her catalog.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
May 13th, 2020
You Can Start Feeling Glad
Caribou “New Jade”
Dan Snaith’s music is so much about sensation and hypnotic grooves that it’s easy to overlook his lyrics, but on his new record as Caribou he’s working with an interesting set of themes – the way life can seem to open up or close off with the end of relationships, and how this is more obvious to someone observing a situation than one living inside it. The two most stunning tracks, “Home” and “New Jade,” are both sung from Snaith’s perspective and addressed to women getting out of bad relationships but struggling with grief. The hooks in both songs come from sampled female voices, but the verses he sings in his gentle, unassuming voice are basically pep talks assuring them that they are moving on to better things. Snaith conveys a pure, unselfish empathy in this music, and manages to avoid laying it on thick either lyrically or musically.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
May 14th, 2020
Give Me All Of Your Emotions
Victoria Monét “Moment”
I love the low-key ego of this song, and the way Victoria Monét sings from the perspective of being treated like a prize with a matter of fact tone. She’s basically saying “OK, you fantasized about me for ages and now you’ve got me, so what are you gonna do?” As elegant and romantic as the music is, the song is ultimately about an awkward situation in which the thrill of pursuit disappears and the pressure to be present and deliver on a promise sets in. Monét alternates between nurturing and demanding phrases, asserting control over the scene as much as she would like to have everything click into something magical and effortless as the string parts that seem to float into the mix like something out of a Hollywood love scene.
Buy it from Amazon.
May 14th, 2020
A Mercenary With Perfume
Chicano Batman “Pink Elephant”
The main guitar hook in “Pink Elephant” is played by Chicano Batman but presented like a sample, as if it’s mixed with quotation marks around it and moved off to the side from the persussion groove. This trick in making a band sound more adjacent to hip-hop goes back to the late ’90s, but this doesn’t necessarily feel like a trick so much just how the band has internalized a sense of “good production” going back to their childhoods. You could definitely have recorded this song with more depth and warmth, but the feel of this relies a lot on the beat sounding thin and the guitar part seeming choppy and a little too trebly. It’s crucial to the ambiance, and any implied nostalgia is tied up in second-hand uses of sounds rather than full fidelity.
Buy it from Bandcamp.