Fluxblog 311: New UK Post-Punk | Dry Cleaning • The Cool Greenhouse • Yard Act • Shame
Plus: Steely Dan on Junk Filter, music communities and CDs on Fluxpod
This week’s episode of Fluxpod features Chris Ott, a music writer best known for his Shallow Rewards videos and podcasts and his 33 1/3 book about Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. We go deep on a lot of topics including music gear, CDs, online music communities, and IRL scenes. The second half of this conversation will be on this weekend’s Patreon exclusive episode.
Also, be sure to check out the new episode of Junk Filter where I talk about Steely Dan with the host Jesse Hawken! You can find that episode as well as all the episodes of Fluxpod on all the major podcast platforms.
This week’s playlist is NARRATORS: THE NEW BRITISH/IRISH POST-PUNK, an ongoing playlist that will be covering this unnamed scene defined by post-punk aesthetics and spoken word vocals as it evolves. This contains some artists I’ve covered in the past like Squid, Black Country New Road, Black Midi, The Orielles, Fontaines D.C., and Goat Girl, as well as four artists I wrote about in this week’s set of posts – Dry Cleaning, The Cool Greenhouse, Yard Act, and Shame. As this is an ongoing playlist that I will updating frequently, it only exists on Spotify.
Emo Dead Stuff Collector
Dry Cleaning “Strong Feelings”
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.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Painfully Obvious And Incredibly Boring
The Cool Greenhouse “Alexa!”
“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.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
All I See Is Circles
Yard Act “Fixer Upper”
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.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Shame “Nigel Hitter”
“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.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• This article from Insatiable Critic in 1983 is an interesting glimpse into the rise of fancy ice cream culture in New York City – Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry making waves, also rans Frusen Glädjé and Alpen Zauber getting started, some flavor rankings of many brands that no longer exist.
• I love this Twitter featuring AI-created lyrics for both famous and imaginary artists based on predictive text based on existing patterns. I think Aerosmith should actually do this one for real…
• I wrote about the new issue of Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men series, which is one of the best so far – an emotionally heavy hard sci-fi story featuring almost exclusively characters and ideas from the 21st century.