Fluxblog 317: Jessie Ware • Little Simz • Four Tet/Skrillex • Hildegard
Plus a playlist made to simulate the background music in an indie cafe
This week’s episode of Fluxpod features Vanity Fair writer Erin Vanderhoof, who came on to chat about the post-Brexit wave of indie bands in the U.K. and Ireland, including Black Midi, Courting, Shame, Yard Act, Legss, etc. You can read my article about the emerging scene – which is largely focused on Squid, Drying Cleaning and Black Country, New Road - over at NPR. There’s also a bonus episode with Erin in which we talk about a wider range of topics including Stereolab, Steely Dan, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and the Jonas Brothers on the Fluxblog Patreon.
This week’s playlist is PLACE SERIES #1: AN INDIE CAFE, which features eight hours of songs meant to be played on random as chill background music for an actual or simulated cafe environment - some hits, some obscurities, many eras. If you play this at an actual cafe/restaurant/bar or some other kind of workplace, or just at home while you work, please let me know! As the title suggests, this is the first in a new series of playlists designed for particular settings, and there’s another one coming next week that I like quite a bit. [Apple Music | Spotify]
We Make Make It Mutual
Jessie Ware “Please”
The arrangements of Jessie Ware songs always have two main objectives – set up a strong groove and showcase the way her voice can effortlessly swing from icy cool to red hot. I like Ware’s voice, but I find that the songs she’s done that I like the most don’t rely on it to carry the track. “Please” is a good example – as much as her vocal is the center of the song, my ear is more attracted to the particular tone of the synth bass, the trebly atmosphere that drops in on the chorus, or the fairly subtle funk guitar that fills the space between the first chorus and the second verse. This is a song that’s very eager to, uh… please… but it’s not trying to hammer you with obvious jabs at pleasure centers. It’s a little more delicate and precise, and aims for elegance and sensuality over screaming ecstasy.
Buy it from Amazon.
Leave The Dust Behind
Little Simz featuring Cleo Sol “Woman”
The last two times I featured Little Simz on this site was for songs in which she gave performances that were very fast and fierce, songs that came off like a flex to display what she was capable of as a rapper. “Woman” is a very different mode – slower but not softer, contemplative but still rather intense. The energy shift has a lot to do with her working with Sault producer Inflo and his frequent collaborator Cleo Sol, who both lean towards a 70s-by-way-of-90s-but-now approach to slick yet warm R&B. The combination of Simz’ cadences on this track with Sol’s sung vocals brings the general feel of “Woman” pretty close to where Lauryn Hill was on Miseducation – high praise, obviously, but something that seems less like direct intention of homage and more like a set of shared natural inclinations as musicians.
Buy it from Amazon.
Not Just Anybody
Skrillex and Four Tet featuring Starrah “Butterflies”
Skrillex is not famous for being subtle. His best known tracks are absurdly energetic and loud, and his best remixes are like the audio equivalent of dousing a song with hot sauce. “Butterflies,” a collaboration with Four Tet, doesn’t quite do either of those things but that doesn’t make it disappointing. It’s more like a seamless merger of both producers’ aesthetics that results in a straight-ahead dance banger with a somewhat zoned-out atmosphere and a sophisticated approach to manipulating vocals for melodic and textural effect. I think left to his own devices Four Tet would be much less likely to present Starrah’s vocal as plainly as it sometimes is through this song, but the contrast of his more abstract style and leaving whole chunks of this track to be as straight-ahead pop as one of Skrillex’s songs with Justin Bieber is a more “best of both worlds” than “mild compromise.” There is some hot sauce effect going on here – the track thumps a lot harder than Four Tet would normally, but it’s still relatively restrained by Skrillex standards. I suppose this could be interpreted as “maturity” but I hear it more as Skrillex exploring new ways to go hard to avoid repetition and reliance on gimmick.
Buy it from Beatport.
Every Memory Of Your Face
Hildegard “Jour 3”
The conventional wisdom now is that anyone under 40 is mortified by the very idea of talking on the phone, but this hasn’t stopped younger people from writing new songs about it, usually inviting someone to call them. This makes sense in that it’s a steady trope of pop songwriting going back many decades, there’s an undeniable romance to it, and that artists working in an audio medium would likely appreciate a communication medium that is also only audio. There’s also just a pleasing musicality to the word “telephone,” whereas any of the words commonly associated with video calls – Skype, Zoom, FaceTime – are all clunky corporate brands.
“Jour 3” is a romantic song about phone calls that includes a melodic phrase hinging on the word “telephone” right there in the first line. The subject matter feels fresh with the context of people mostly avoiding calls now – as Helena Deland suggests the idea of regular phone calls to maintain a regular connection while she’s apart from her partner her phrasing and half-whispered tone makes it sound as though she’s letting them in on a secret. Like, who knew you could just have an intimate conversation with just your voices over a private telephone line? Crazy, right? Deland sounds a little sleepy but also quite playful, while Ouri’s production captures a telephone aesthetic in the abstract with sounds so small and delicate that it’s like you need to press it to your ear to hear it all.
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• I enjoyed this week’s episode of Rolling Stone’s Music Now podcast in which host Brian Hiatt and Rolling Stone reporter Andy Greene went deep on the history of Genesis and talked about why the band, which appeared to be done for good, is going back on the road.
• Ryan Broderick wrote a great story for Eater about how one person – a magician! – is behind almost all the mega-viral gross out food videos of the recent past.