Fluxblog #271: Sault • Drea the Vibe Dealer • Mr Muthafuckin' eXquire • Vampire Weekend • Pop Smoke
July 5th, 2020
Mr. Liar Got A Secret Now
Sault “Monsters”
“Monsters” is one of the first songs I’ve heard in 2020 that sounds like it’s offering a new aesthetic direction for the coming decade rather than sounding like something that’s just leftover from the past two years. The combination of sounds in this song are immediately striking – heavy layers of overdriven keyboards contrasted with the sort of crisp, slick groove that’s become Sault producer Inflo’s signature sound, and a vocal that’s so wet with reverb that the song’s straightforward melodic hooks have a ghostly, somewhat uncanny feel. This suits the lyrics very well, rendering spiritual but overtly political BLM-adjacent sentiments with an abrasive edge and a touch of supernatural power. The super-saturated sounds and the clean, dry tones are balanced perfectly in the mix so the opposite textures complement each other rather than clash or lose definition. It takes a lot of skill to make a song feel so raw and blunt, but also sophisticated.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
July 6th, 2020
Just Waiting To Unfold
Drea the Vibe Dealer “Catastrophe”
“Catastrophe” is stacked with the sort of ear-catching bits that someone could sample and extrapolate into another song entirely – the slinky guitar part at the top of the song, the chiming chords at the start of the chorus, the ba-da-boop keyboard sound that punctuates the hook, the slight drag on the beat. Drea the Vibe Dealer is truly dealing in strong vibes here, and this extends to how she records her vocal so her jazzy phrasing slurs slightly in heavy reverb without sacrificing the nuances of her singing. Maybe the best way to put it is that it’s sort of painterly – photorealistic, but smudged and blurred a bit for style.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
July 7th, 2020
No Words Define Your Legacy
Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire “Black Mirror”
Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire is a tremendously versatile rapper, as adept with over-the-top raunch and bravado as he is with aggressive political music or more introspective and philosophical work. “Black Mirror” is in the third category, with him reflecting on his childhood in Bed-Stuy, the physical and psychological tortures that Black slaves endured in America, and as he puts it in his own description of the song on Bandcamp, “Black masculinity and the role males play in the growth of younger men.” His performance matches the wistful tone of MadLib’s track, which recuts an old Stylistics track into melancholy abstraction. The second half of the song is a tribute to eXquire’s late uncle, a man he credits with setting him on the course of becoming a rapper. He’s clearly in awe of the man but doesn’t portray him as some untouchable hero but rather as a complicated person who taught him to respect himself and take pride in what he does. This could easily just be pure sentimentality, but eXquire ties together all these thoughts to arrive at a core theme: Pride is important, and it has to be modeled and passed down somehow.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
July 9th, 2020
Copper Goes Green
Vampire Weekend “2021” (Live in St. Augustine, Florida 2019)
Father of the Bride is full of lyrics that have taken on new meanings during the pandemic – “I don’t want to live like this but I don’t wanna die,” “things have never been stranger, things are going to stay strange” – but the track that’s most transformed in the new context is “2021.” The song, just over a minute and a half long, is brief meditation on time and patience. It’s all questions and incomplete thoughts, the space between weighing options and making decisions. The core question – “I could wait a year but I shouldn’t wait three” – changes over the course of the song, the second time Ezra Koenig sings it the second part becomes “couldn’t wait three.” He’s thought about it enough in that space to realize the damage the wait would do to him, but it still doesn’t sound like he’s fully committed to anything else.
The live arrangement of “2021” is quite different, and extends the length of the composition by an extra three minutes that mostly elaborates on the lovely guitar melody that breaks up the more minimal and vibey piano-centric verses. I prefer this version, largely because it focuses on my favorite melodic part and emphasizes the “lost-in-thought” character of the song. The harmonic aspects of the song are much deeper too, and when you move through the instrumental break before reaching the final verse it feels like an emotional journey, as if you’re flash forwarding through entire potential timelines full of good and bad possibilities. Whereas the studio recording is so elliptical it doesn’t suggest any end to a holding pattern, the live version suggests an eventual path out of this purgatory. In a moment when we’re all waiting around to find out what our lives might be like in 2021 for reasons Koenig could have never foreseen, the more hopeful version of the song feels like a gift. The suspense of waiting is excruciating, but it’s not forever.
Buy it from Amazon.
July 10th, 2020
20K All In A Day
Pop Smoke “Yea Yea”
Pop Smoke was murdered only a few months ago, he was only 20 years old. His voice on record comes across as much older than that – raspy and weathered, with a cadence that suggests relaxed patience rather than youthful exuberance. “Yea Yea,” from his recently released posthumous major label debut, is a showcase for that loose, unhurried delivery. He raps a lot about luxury, but the most luxurious thing on display is that vocal delivery and how it conveys the absolute confidence of someone who knows he doesn’t have to work too hard to impress anyone. I wouldn’t say he sounds care free here, you can hear traces of stress and strain in his voice and in his words. But when paired with SephGotTheWaves and Hakz Beats’ mellow, guitar-centric track he projects almost a zen “be here now” vibe even when he’s mostly just listing off models of guns in the chorus.
Buy it from Amazon.