Fluxblog #321: Liz Phair • Japanese Breakfast • Wolf Alice • Lorde
Plus: Dissociation Wave playlist and Guided By Voices on the podcast
This week’s episode of Fluxpod is a 2+ hour conversation entirely about Guided By Voices featuring Jake Longstreth, the co-host of my favorite internet radio show Time Crisis. If you’re not super familiar with GBV I think it will probably still be pretty entertaining, and it does include clips of at least 25 classic GBV songs. You can find the show on all the podcast platforms as well as the Fluxblog Patreon, where I’m right in the middle of a subscriber-only audio essay series about Sonic Youth. This weekend’s episode of that will be about Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star and Washing Machine.
This week’s playlist is DISSOCIATION WAVE: VIBEY CHILL PSYCHEDELIC INDIE 2017-????, an exploration of the zoned-out hazy aesthetics of indie artists who in many cases only seem to exist within the algorithmic music ecosystems. It’s a major strain of contemporary music that I find is rarely approached as a sub-genre or movement though I think it definitely is one. [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
Pick A Place To Start
Liz Phair “Soberish”
Liz Phair’s new album Soberish – her first release in 11 years after scrapping a few songwriting projects, working in television, and writing a book – sounds like it could be an album she and producer Brad Wood made immediately after Whitechocolatespaceegg in the late ‘90s but simply didn’t bother to put out until just now. It feels comfortable and lived-in, and full of textures that would’ve felt modern at that time but now feel a little retro. If you pay attention you can notice how her creative path through the 2000s informs this work but for the most part it sounds like a resumption of the trajectory she was on through the ‘90s. Even aside from the musical palette, the record does something I think a lot of us were hoping she’d get around to while she was silent for a decade: approach the romantic and sexual experiences of a straight woman in middle age with the same nuance, wisdom, and wit she brought to writing about all this as a younger woman.
“Soberish,” a song that moves between a pastoral folk affectation and lightly anxious new wave minimalism, tells the story of a woman getting ready to meet up with a man she’s had a long-simmering long distance romance with at a hotel bar and is finally, hopefully, about to hook up with him. The situation is widely relatable to anyone who’s ever done app dating or had a romantic scenario start online, but I like the specificity of this being a bit deeper in life when the idea of wasting time – “tell me, why do we keep dicking around?” – is more frustrating, both out of feeling a ticking clock on your life and in feeling like you’ve outgrown certain anxieties or don’t have use for elaborate courting rituals anymore. The story of the song plays out as it often does in life, with mild panic leading to brief discomfort and then clicking into the rapport and chemistry that existed before you came up with a bunch of distracting psyche-out narratives. The point of the song isn’t necessarily “it’ll be fine, this worked out for me,” but more to show the full emotional context of the scene and setting up the stakes for the happy ending.
Buy it from Amazon.
The Stakes In The Race
Japanese Breakfast “Savage Good Boy”
“Savage Good Boy” has a bright and earnest sound that masks the bitter irony of its lyrical conceit – it’s sung from the perspective of a billionaire preparing for global environmental catastrophe and callously creating a way for himself to survive comfortably. He’s inviting a woman to join him so he can “take care” of her, to play savior and play house. But really he just wants to own her, to control her, to have her be in debt to him for providing a posh shelter while millions of people suffer or die. The brilliance of the song is in how Michelle Zauner presents this character in a way that allows for some sincerity in his feelings – perhaps he does love her, maybe he genuinely wants to protect her, he probably is totally oblivious to his incredible selfishness. Zauner lets the listener connect and identify with the sweetness so the recognition of the darker impulses and insidious desires of the character are hard to untangle from what initially appears to be warmth and kindness. Not many of us are going to directly relate to a billionaire, but we can see how self-interest and generosity mingle in ourselves and others.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
The Taste Of Someone’s Lips
Wolf Alice “Play the Greatest Hits”
Given that “Play the Greatest Hits” is the only song on the new Wolf Alice record that taps into the wild alt-rock energy I loved so much about their first two albums, I feel like the title is taunting me somewhat: “Oh, we he had to move on artistically, but here’s one for those of you who want the old Wolf Alice.” But then again, they throw themselves into this song so intensely that I don’t think they’re actually bored by this sort of song at all, but rather poured every bit of frazzled energy they had into this one very fast and loud song about the “fast life” that sounds like a car careening towards a brick wall. Ellie Rowsell has a versatile voice but I love her this sort of bratty and frenzied mode – it gives the snarky lines the right amount of venom and makes the lyrics about self-destructive habits come off as more nihilistic than self-pitying.
Buy it from Amazon.
A New State Of Mind
Lorde “Solar Power”
“Solar Power” is a song of low-key joy in which Lorde casually sidesteps the widespread expectation that she continue to play the part of the “sad girl” rather than explore less fraught elements of human existence. There’s a weird impulse for many to assume that singing about pleasure and fun and shirking responsibilities is vapid, but I think that comes from people not believing happiness can be as nuanced and deeply felt as a million shades of misery. “Solar Power” is hardly a dumb song – there’s a lot of evocative little details in setting the scene, some witty asides, and a belief in the healing power of feeling close to the natural world that borders on religious fervor. The second half of the song borrows from the ersatz gospel of early ‘90s songs like George Michael’s God Tier classic “Freedom ’90” and Primal Scream’s breakthroughs on Screamadelica, and that sort of secular spirituality really works for the themes here. Join her in praising the sun!
There’s no shortage of young artists who now, intentionally or not, sing with the peculiar and specific inflections Lorde sang with on her first two records. The most obvious and famous example is Olivia Rodrigo, who is at this moment one of the most successful and hyped pop stars going. It’s notable that the sort of affectations these singers have internalized aren’t really on this new Lorde song, though she still sounds exactly and unmistakably like herself. I don’t think this is accidental, either in the sense of her avoiding sounding like her own imitators or in that she’s a thoughtful singer who was never going to stay in one gear. But I hear this and get the impression that she’s essentially telling the rest “fine, you can keep that affectation – I’ve got a lot more phrasing tricks to work with.”
Buy it from Amazon.
Over on my House of X site I wrote about the end of Jonathan Hickman’s first (or second?) phase of his X-epic, as well as some mini-reviews of recent arcs on New Mutants, Excalibur, and Hellions.
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• Craig Jenkins of Vulture conducted a very tense but interesting interview with Sleater-Kinney, who can’t help but feel defensive as they promote their first album in a long time without Janet Weiss.
• Nymphet Alumni did a great episode on the topic of Olivia Rodrigo’s “state mandated pop album.”
• Bonnie Stiernberg wrote a nice piece for Inside Hook about Hacks, which just concluded its first season. I strongly recommend watching Hacks!