Fluxblog #316: Post-Brexit Post-Punk | Faye Webster • Burial • Courting • Sorry
Plus: The Smashing Pumpkins and a history of speak-singing in alternative music
I wrote an article for NPR about the new wave of post-Brexit post-punk bands that all feature some variation on spoken-word vocals, with a focus on Squid, Drying Cleaning, and Black Country, New Road. You can listen to all the artists mentioned in this piece and many others in Narrators, my ongoing Spotify playlist documenting this aesthetic.
This week’s playlist is Speak-Sing, Remember: Spoken Word In Alternative Music, which I made while working on the NPR article to fill in a history of this style going back to the late ‘60s. It’s not meant to be 100% definitive, but it covers a lot of ground. [Apple Music | Spotify]
This week’s episode of Fluxpod is entirely about Billy Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins from 1991 through 1999 and features Julia Gfrörer, the writer and artist of the graphic novels Vision, Laid Waste, and Black Is the Color, and co-host of the podcast Lament Configuration. You can find it on all the major podcast platforms and on the Fluxblog Patreon, where subscribers can also get this month’s freeform radio podcast among many other bonus episodes.
The Same Jokes Over And Over
Faye Webster “Cheers”
The songs on Faye Webster’s last album Atlanta Millionaires Club all had a certain lightness to them, a gentle breeziness that came with its pedal steel atmosphere and low-key soul grooves. “Cheers,” the first song released from her follow up, is a hard swerve away from that vibe. Webster remains a warm and lovely presence on vocals, but the music has a nervy, off-balanced feel that’s mostly a result of an overdriven low end that seems to rattle and potentially shatter the more delicate instrumentation layered on top of it. Webster sounds cautious, and in the lyrics she comes off as someone doing her very best to be diplomatic and even-handed as she describes what sounds like a good relationship that’s stuck a rut. Her lyrics are direct and sincere, but she leaves a lot of room for subtext – her phrasing lets slip just enough uncertainty that it’s easy to imagine a parallel comic book thought balloon with an anxious interior monologue like “Uh, I think? Is this good? I want it to be good…but am I settling??”
Buy it from Bandcamp.
We Must Shock This Nation
Burial “Dark Gethsemane”
“Dark Gethsemane” is essentially a rave track but it plays out like cinema, with sequences as scenes moving gradually through escalating climaxes towards a bold and emotional conclusion. It’s an incredible flex, not just in terms of Burial’s technical mastery but in conveying a powerful message without a trace of corny didacticism. The song is always moving so the through line is mostly in the repetition of vocal samples. In the first half the message is “don’t get cynical,” pitched up enough to sound angelic but not change the wounded and weary inflection of the sampled singer. The second half of the piece is built around the phrase “we must shock this nation with the power of love!,” apparently lifted from a church sermon. The repetition here is both artful in iteration and totally blunt in effect, the syllables in SHOCK and POWER and LOVE cracking on impact every time. The velocity picks up in this section but the way Burial ratchets up the intensity still doesn’t quite prepare you for the conclusion. After some blaring horn fanfare the sample is stripped of effects and paired with bludgeoning rock bass line that changes the tone completely. The last minute is brutal but passionate, and earthy in a way that contrasts with the more ethereal qualities of the early portions of the track. It sounds like all the lights have come up, and it’s all suddenly quite immediate and real.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Just A Little Bit Cynical
Courting “Popshop!”
“Popshop!” is a song expressing a bone-deep cynicism about the music industry from a band who’ve released a grand total of 7 songs to date. But like, you’d have to be a fool to think otherwise, right? The song is basically having a laugh at the notion that they’re willfully entering this rigged game if just because being a band is fun. Sean Murphy-O’Neill delivers his punchlines with a good-natured tone, coming off more like a clever guy with a wry take than an asshole shooting his mouth off. There’s quips at the expense of others – “if you stream ‘Shape of You’ you’re going straight to hell” and a goof on Belle Delphine selling her bathwater – but most of the humor is at Courting’s expense, since he’s so skeptical about achieving fame and fortune that the loftiest achievable goal in the song is a band outing at a chain British holiday resort.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
A Model Got Lost In The Abyss
Sorry “Cigarette Packet”
There’s a lot of songs that simulate an anxious twitchy feeling – I should know, as I have written about hundreds at this point! I remember back in the late 2000s a friend pointing out how often I wrote about anxiety songs and it being a real “wait…he’s right” moment because I’d simply not processed that as a recurring thing and I don’t think I’ve ever self-identified as a particularly anxious person. But in the context of all those songs the twitchy angst of “Cigarette Packet” feels distinct, the throb of it sounds more like it’s signifying withdrawal tremors and strobe lights. Asha Lorenz sounds like her mind is racing but she’s totally bored by it, zooming through a bad night out in her head before it even happens. It’s a bad, sickly vibe but it’s so catchy that it’s a pleasure to hear, which I suppose is the exact right aesthetic for a song about a compulsive need to do something that you know won’t be good for you.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• I strongly recommend the recently launched Nymphet Alumni podcast, particularly this week’s episode in which the three young women who host it analyze the “MILF-ification” of Billie Eilish. They’re incredibly sharp critics with a deep knowledge of fashion history and they have a way of being totally brutal in their read on things but in a “harsh truth” way rather than any sort of malice. I burned through all six episodes of their show this week, it’s definitely one of the best podcasts of any genre going right now.
• I also recommend Loud & Quiet’s interview podcast Midnight Chats, particularly the recent episodes featuring thoughtful conversations with St. Vincent and Jarvis Cocker.
• Vulture has an extensive oral history of the Madonna documentary Truth Or Dare compiled by Matthew Jacobs.
• Ilana Kaplan wrote a really interesting piece about fictional bands and their real life fanbases for Ringer.