Fluxblog #330: Interpol • Mr. Jukes & Barney Artist • Marcey Yates & XOBOI • GFOTY
Plus an Alt-Glam playlist and a conversation about pop's new emotionalism
This week’s playlist is ALT-GLAM 1995-1998, an exploration of alt-rock artists reinterpreting glam rock with very mid-’90s aesthetics. This one is relatively short and tight, and mainly exists because this was a vibe that turned out to have a pretty big impact on me both in the moment and over time. [Spotify | Apple Music]
The new episode of Fluxpod this week features returning champ Larry Fitzmaurice, the author of the excellent music criticism newsletter Last Donut of the Night. This time around we discuss his recent essay about "pop's new emotionalism" starting around 2017, which serves as a good springboard into some other adjacent topics in music and music writing over the past few years.
Set Black Fires
Interpol “Mammoth”
The sections of “Mammoth” sound as though they’re being played out of order, as though all the standard parts of a rock song – verses, choruses, refrains, instrumental breaks – were shuffled around in a bag and then tossed out, with the parts played in the order that they hit the floor. But despite the scrambled feeling, there’s an internal logic here and it’s all based on momentum. The song bursts forward at top speed from the start before seeming to crash into a wall, then stumble around in a daze, and then go back into a full sprint. The music feels drunk and belligerent, forceful and unrelenting. It seems lacking in grace, but only a band with a strong command of their own dynamics could pull this off without it sounding like a mess.
Paul Banks always sounds cranky and surly to some extent but on “Mammoth” he sounds incredibly peevish, which is kind of a funny thing to express in music. He doesn’t come across as angry, just very impatient and annoyed and aggrieved as he whines “spare me the suspense” or spits out the line “enough with this fucking incense.” He sounds like a goth dandy throwing a fit, and it’s hard to get a sense of the actual scale of his negative feelings here.
“Mammoth” is a very pure example of Banks’ lyrical aesthetics in that you get emotionally charged lines without any sense of context contrasted with weirdly specific lines that will make you wonder “…why would anyone sing that??” In this case you get the seemingly disconnected aside “there are seven ancient pawn shops along the road / and I know seven aching daddies you may want to know,” sung in a softer tone of voice in the delirious post-wall-crash refrains. It’s hard to piece together any kind of narrative here but the way the bits and pieces of this song do and do not click together seems to be the larger point of the piece, like it’s meant to be this thing that confounds your mind while compelling your body to move. You know you’re not supposed to know about the aching daddies, but you’re always going to want to try to figure it out anyway.
Buy it from Amazon.
The Text Is All Bright
Mr. Jukes and Barney Artist featuring Kofi Stone “Check the Pulse”
The English duo Barney Artist and Mr. Jukes are unabashedly retro on their record The Locket, which is so devoid of recent trends in hip-hop that it sounds like it could have plausibly been released around the late ‘90s alongside The Love Movement, Things Fall Apart, and Black Star, or maybe a little further up the timeline with Dilla and early Kanye West. No one should take this as anything but a compliment from me – novelty and innovation is nice, but so is working extremely well within established traditions. “Check the Pulse” is exceptionally warm and easy going, and the vocal performances keep up the kind vibe, particularly in the final third when the mic gets passed every line with the casual coolness of vintage Beastie Boys or A Tribe Called Quest.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Marcey Yates & XOBOI featuring Mars Black “Ghosttown District”
Marcey Yates and XOBOI are on a similar wavelength, but their reference points are a bit up the timeline – Outkast, Kanye, Dilla/Slum Village. “Ghosttown District” glides by on a lush, slightly zonked-out groove, with a vocal sample that seems to blow by like puffs of smoke. Yates and Mars Black fit snuggly into the pocket in their verses, coming off like steady constants in an arrangement that’s very dynamic for something that feels so much like lying down.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Just Like A House
GFOTY “Brand New Bra”
GFOTY is no longer affiliated with PC Music but her style remains garish and gleefully artificial in the grand PC Music tradition, complete with funhouse mirror versions of mainstream pop dynamics and gender performance. “Brand New Bra” is all vulgar camp, with her singing exclusively about having huge tits in ways that start off fairly run-of-the-mill but end up in more overtly goofy territory like proclaiming they make car honk sounds when you squeeze them. At the beginning it sounds like a song that’s going for “body positivity” but as it moves along it feels more like presenting the body as something inherently silly and weird, particularly in a world where some body parts end up being wildly commercialized and fetishized. I don’t think this song is pushing back on that so much as just having a laugh about it, like a horny cartoon turned into a song.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• Please make some time for this outstanding new interview with Michael Stipe in The New Yorker that gets into what he’s been doing in the decade since R.E.M. disbanded. I was very touched by how he talked about how the members of the band have become even closer friends over the past ten years.
• I enjoyed Al Shipley’s conversation with John Oates over at GQ – he speaks frankly about how Daryl Hall became the primary singer in the group, and they get into how “You Make My Dreams” came from behind to become their most popular song in this era of their career.