Fluxblog #326: Anna Fox Rochinski • Bad Bad Hats • Snoh Aalegra • Tyler, the Creator
Plus a playlist covering the funk boom of the mid 70s
This week’s Fluxpod is a hangout episode featuring Jill Krajewski, a music critic and senior social editor for Vice. We talk about Halsey's forthcoming collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails, the abuse allegations against Marilyn Manson and Rhye, St. Vincent, Jack Antonoff, late period U2, and the "Dave Grohl industrial complex." You can find it on all the podcast platforms and the Fluxblog Patreon.
This week’s playlist is FUNKY PRECEDENT: FUNK AND SOUL 1974-1977, an exploration of the funk boom of the mid-70s. Expect a lot of the classics, plus some deeper cuts. [Spotify | Apple Music]
To Solve The Noise In You
Anna Fox Rochinski “Everybody’s Down”
Anna Fox Rochinski’s Cherry is a perfect example of the distiction between a debut and a solo debut – the songs display all the confidence of a seasoned professional, but also the enthusiasms and undiluted idiosycracies of a musician who’s no longer confined by the democratic processes of being part of a band. Cherry sounds like a very deliberate album, the kind where it’s a safe guess that each song went through many revisions, arrangements, and mixes before arriving at something close to perfect. This approach can suffocate some material but Rochinski gives her crisp, tight arrangements enough negative space to breathe and give her expressive voice some room to move.
“Everybody’s Down” is a particularly strong showcase for her vocals, which seem to glide around her grooves as she makes her way up from the lower end of her register on the verses up to near the top of her range on the chorus. I’m not quite clear on the POV in the lyrics – the lines about offers and contracts are simultaneously specific and vague – but I love the way the refrain “who supports this brand of violence? / leave it to me to get to the bottom of it” comes across as a joke at the expense of clueless and privileged white people who mean well but rarely offer more than shallow gestures when it comes to trying to help anyone but themselves. It’s hard for me not to take the song as satire of complicit people waking up to a reality outside their bubble, but it’s not so brutal to have no sympathy for its subject. If anything, it feels like it’s meant for a self-aware audience who’s experienced some version of this awkward awakening.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Stop And Start It Over Again
Bad Bad Hats “Detroit Basketball”
Kerry Alexander’s voice is precisely calibrated to deliver even measures of wry humor and frank emotion in her songs, the recognizable point of view of someone who’s in touch with their feelings enough to be quite blunt about what they want and need but has the appropriate distance to see exactly what’s funny about the slapstick collisions of those wants and needs. “Detroit Basketball” opens with a killer line – “gotta find a man who deserves my kissing and doesn’t blow my money on the Detroit Pistons” – but briskly moves from the punchline to a resolution to move on and a chorus that delights in freedom, even if it’s the direct result of embarrassment. Like all the best Bad Bad Hats songs the structure is a sturdy and efficient sequence of strong hooks, the result of a thoughtful craft-oriented band, but it’s played with just enough casual cool that the vibe is not precious or try-hard. Everything about the song is just-so, the way any interesting person you know is essentially dialed in to a specific disposition.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Tell Me Different
Snoh Aalegra featuring James Fauntleroy “On My Mind”
“On My Mind” gives off a vibe of opulent sadness, a glamorous misery befitting a gorgeous celebrity sulking around a luxurious estate under overcast skies. The music evokes an aspirational gloom but Snow Aalegra’s vocal is more down to earth in its deliberately understated phrasing. You can feel her restraint on the mic, and it carries over to her lyrics – she’s hung up on a relationship that has ended very badly, but doing everything she can to keep her resentment and jealousies at a low simmer. She’s indulging in the cinematic sadness of the music but the part she’s playing is that of a woman trying to hold it together and making an effort to control her feelings. The tension at the heart of the song is that she can’t quite get her brain to cooperate, she can’t stop thinking about this no matter how much she tells herself stuff like “never having closure is the reason I’m open.”
Buy it from Amazon.
Perspective From The Beak Of A Bird
Tyler, the Creator “Massa”
Tyler, the Creator spends pretty much the entirety of “Massa” explaining himself to the listener, but with a sort of begrudging attitude – it’s like he can’t tell why he wants to explain himself to you, or why you’d need him to do that in the first place. This is a core tension of a lot of his music, this push-and-pull between wanting to be understood and resenting the implications of that desire. For a song that’s spilling guts about his motivations and pivotal moments in his life he seems very guarded, like he’s more interested in shaping your idea of him and setting the record straight on misconceptions about him and his class origins. The thing that jumps out at me in the lyrics is how many lines explain the context of his previous records – they’re not just mile markers for his personal growth, but clearly the focus of his entire life.
And of course this is the case for a auteur rapper/producer. “Massa” feels as powerful and confessional as it does in large part for Tyler’s expert framing of his own vocal. The production is crisp but the drum loop and organ parts feel just a little grimy, the arrangement is sparse but gets gradually more dense as the drama builds. Nothing is too ham-fisted, nothing is too subtle, nothing gets in the way of the nuances in his voice.
Buy it from Amazon.
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• I highly recommend Marc Maron’s interview with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy on WTF this week – it’s probably the second-best Murphy interview I’ve encountered after Tom Scharpling’s interview with him on the Best Show a few years back.
• This week on Decoder Ring I learned that Dan Kois, a man arguably responsible for me having a career in writing, is also arguably the man responsible for killing the Segway in the late ‘90s.