Fluxblog #327: Clairo • Desperate Journalist • Wet Leg • Fake Fruit
Plus an entire podcast episode about Of Montreal!
This week’s episode of Fluxpod features the comics artist and writer Hazel Newlevant and is entirely focused on the Of Montreal catalog. We go deep on Kevin Barnes’ brilliant and emotionally volatile body of work, touching on songs from several of OM’s albums but with a particular emphasis on Skeletal Lamping. You can find the episode on all the podcast platforms and on the Fluxblog Patreon.
Echo Chambers Inside A Neighborhood
Clairo “Amoeba”
Clairo’s voice usually sounds small and fragile, an impression exacerbated by production moves that wash her out in reverb or multitrack her vocals so it’s like musical baklava, lots of thin layers not quite adding up to anything you could call dense or firm. The smallness feels like a key part of what’s being expressed in any given song – it’s vulnerability, it’s passivity, it’s a sense of helplessness. “Amoeba” is a bit of an outlier in her small discography in that there’s a little more density and confidence in her vocal than usual as well as more groove and sway to the arrangement. The vibe feels a bit Todd Rundgren to me, the majestic but cozy melancholy of a full-time introvert. The lyrics sketch out some lovely specific images of suburban malaise but there’s some ambiguity at the core of it, as it’s hard to tell whether she’s addressing someone else or singing in the second person. “Aren’t you glad you reside in a hell and in disguise?” definitely stings more if it’s self-directed, and I’m inclined to think that’s the case here.
Buy it from Amazon.
Teenage Hangups Are Hard To Beat
Desperate Journalist “Fault”
“Fault” plays a classic post-punk/goth trick of aiming for absolutely epic melodrama but undercutting any of the preciousness that might go with that with blunt instrumentation that signals brute force and a total absence of sentimentality. Jo Bevan’s vocal here sounds quite a bit like Siouxsie Sioux and that totally works for the song, as she successfully channels her fierceness as well as her potent undercurrents of anxiety and dread. The lyrics are basically about living in a horrible apartment situation that offers shelter but no comforts of home but it’s mostly a jump-off for more philosophical musings about whether or not your problems are the result of passivity or actively making bad decisions.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
I Got The Big D
Wet Leg “Chaise Longue”
A few months ago I wrote about the boom of English bands playing post-punk style music with half-spoken vocals and I wish I could have retroactively worked Wet Leg into that piece because their debut single is truly one of the best specimens to come out of this aesthetic thus far. “Chaise Longue” cruises along on a slightly twitchy groove that gives off a “let’s go out for a joyride…but oh my god, what if we get caught???” energy, and features a vocal performance by Rhian Teasdale that’s coy and mysterious, but overtly sexual. A lot of the lyrics feel like Teasdale deliberately writing things that are theoretically subtle in saying something very horny, but actually landing on something that’s more lewd and lascivious. (“I went to school and I got a degree / all my friends call it ‘the big D’,” “Is your muffin buttered? / Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?”) The tone is playful, even more so when they start flirting with theoretical audience members in a deadpan tone, but there’s just enough ambiguity and vague menace to in the track to keep it from feeling cutesy or like a novelty. It’s more of a trickster thing – they’re clearly fucking with you, and they’re very good at it.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Keep The Mother In Mind
Fake Fruit “Lying Legal Horror Lawyers”
“Lying Legal Horror Lawyers” is the kind of politically-charged punk song that gives you enough scraps of information to pick up on what the band is trying to lay out, but not enough connective tissue in the lyrics to get, like, a nuanced position. But nuanced positions are besides the point – this is about using the energy of this music as a vehicle for venting frustration, and in this case it’s “men’s rights” activists, the courts, and attempts to take children away from their mothers. Just going on the vibes and the tone of Hannah D’Amato’s yelps and shouts here it’s clear enough that their basic position is that “men’s rights” are laughable, the courts are embarrassing, and the band is siding with moms broadly or possibly even universally. You get the sense she’s reacting to a particular story, but that’s lost in the abstraction of the twitchy groove and punchy chorus. In any context we can all agree that lying legal horror lawyers suck. Fuck those guys!
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• I generally recommend the British comedian James Acaster’s music podcast Perfect Sounds, which is entirely focused on records that came out in 2016, but particularly this new bonus episode in which he visits Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood at his home to discuss A Moon Shaped Pool in detail.
• Here’s a good article by Derek Robertson in The Ringer about the reemergence of Steely Dan as a major cult act, with some thoughts on the matter from Donald Fagen himself.
• The critique of the relaunched Gossip Girl in this episode of Parasocial Delights featuring Biz from Nymphet Alumni is so sharp and relentlessly correct that I feel like if I worked on the show I’d have to just immediately resign upon hearing it.