Fluxblog #325: Magdalena Bay • Zoee • Snapped Ankles • 박혜진 Park Hye Jin
Plus a look back on the pop of 2012-2015
This week’s playlist is REIGN OF POP: 2012-2015, an exploration of 2nd term Obama-era bops and pop mutations during the social media boom. Get down to the recent past! [Spotify | Apple Music]
If you missed it the first time around you can find the #DANPILLEDSUMMER show Jesse Hawken and I recently recorded for his show Junk Filter on the Fluxpod podcast feed now. It’s two hours of Steely Dan chat! Regular episodes resume this coming week, and you can now find the full Sonic Youth audio essay series on the Fluxblog Patreon.
Speaking of the Patreon – if you don’t want to subscribe to that but do feel inclined to donate to the site (i.e., me, the person who does all of this alone) – you can hit up the Fluxblog Ko-Fi. Help is extremely appreciated at the moment!
The Storm Was Underneath
Magdalena Bay “Chaeri”
“Chaeri” starts at a hot simmer but gradually builds up to a rolling boil, incrementally building the intensity of its longing and grief until it’s overwhelming and cathartic. Magdalena Bay, always great students of the history of modern pop, seem to be deliberately paying tribute to Robyn on this track but I think they delve into a darker emotional palette here. They’re also going into a very different sort of relationship drama, a platonic friend breakup that if anything is far more damaging and agonizing than the end of most romantic relationships. Mica Tenenbaum sings about feeling guilty, for not understanding that she was hurting this other person, for not getting she was being a “bad friend.” She’s torn up by complicated and conflicting feelings – she’s defensive, she’s self-flagellating, she’s empathetic, she’s concerned about their well-being and mental health. The lyrics start from the position that it’s all done and there’s nothing left to repair, and the pleading chorus is all coulda-woulda-shoulda. But she doesn’t sound like she’s entirely given up hope for reconciliation, even when that hope comes with the understanding that she must suffer for it: “Better crucified than alone.”
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Even Our Shadows Are Blue
Zoee “No Great Endings”
“No Great Endings” is a fairly straightforward song that feels a bit bent and warped by the strange gravity of Zoee’s voice, which sounds something like a depressed faerie. You mainly hear this in a keyboard part that seems to wobble like jello at some points and in others more like a crude caricature of a harp. But it’s there in the rest of the arrangement too, which moves with a solid groove but projects a dazed and detached vibe. The lyrics are full of poetic descriptions in the verses, but chorus is quite plain and direct: “Where to put this pain? / It’s always the same.” The emphasis on pragmatism is interesting – she doesn’t sound like she wants bury it or deny the feeling, but is jaded enough to half-expect more is on the way. It’s less like an expression of denial and more like imagining a plan to carefully catalog it all in some kind of emotional library.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
A Great Time To Be Alive
Snapped Ankles “Shifting Basslines of the Cornucopians”
Snapped Ankles, a group of anonymous British musicians who dress up in what looks like ghillie suits designed by Matthew Barney, have an elaborate mythology around their new record which involves a character called The Cornucopian. This is their avatar of the capitalist glutton, the hedonistic striver who reaches for material luxuries they can hardly afford. The character is given voice in this song, a crazed carnival tune that sounds like it should be signifying a good time but actually feels sweaty, paranoid, and unbalanced. The vocals strongly resemble that of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith in tonality, phrasing, and sentiment as they spit bitterly sarcastic lines such as the opening “it’s a great time to be alive if only you’ve got some funds.” The ideas they’re working with could come off a bit too didactic in lesser hands but this lot stays on the right side of satire and wisely place their greatest emphasis on rhythm and texture. You never need to pay attention to the words or look into their context to understand exactly what kind of bad – but still fun! – vibe they’re putting across here.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Even If You Can’t See It
박혜진 Park Hye Jin “Let’s Sing Let’s Dance”
“Let’s Sing, Let’s Dance” is built around a piano part that conveys an ambiguous feeling – from some angles it’s diluted melancholy, from others it’s more like diluted joy. The chords signal the calculated elegance of a hotel piano bar, but the actual tone is obviously synthetic and likely the output of a cheap keyboard. Park Hye Jin embraces the neither-here-nor-there quality of this part, essentially making it a neutral state that the rest of the song is trying to either nudge into something else with beats and bass, or escape through the proposal of the title – to sing, to dance. The composition never moves beyond this vibe but as an album opener of a dance record it’s very promising. It sets the scene for more ecstatic music to come while presenting a very recognizable empty but yearning feeling.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Here’s Samantha Hissong at Rolling Stone with a great report on what’s happening to smaller artists as they scramble to book concerts while every big gun in the industry is trying to do the same thing at once.
• I loved this discussion of the infamous “lawn mower” episode of Mad Men on Gretchen Felker-Martin and Sean T. Collins’ new Cut to Black podcast.
• Tom Scharpling’s book It Never Ends came out this week and I encourage you to experience it as an audio book, as read by Tom himself – like, this is one of the great broadcasters of our era, why WOULDN’T you want to hear him read it to you?