Fluxblog #332: Deep Tan • Italia 90 • Sleigh Bells • U2/Sun Ra Arkestra
Plus a playlist of 1998 dance club bangers and Street Fight on the podcast
This week’s episode of Fluxpod features one of my favorite podcast/radio guys Bryan Quinby, the co-host of Street Fight Radio and The P.O.D. Kast. We talk a bit about his experience at this year's Gathering of the Juggalos and then get into a bunch of rock music he's loved over the years including Korn, Radiohead, The Cars, Ty Segall, King Khan & BBQ Show, Type O Negative, and Danzig. You can find it on all the podcast platforms and on the Fluxpod Patreon, which you really should sign up for soon if you’d like to hear Zeptember, a weekly series for September in which Sean T. Collins and I explore the Led Zeppelin discography.
This week’s playlist is JACK NICHOLSON PARTYING IN MIAMI 1998, a two hour set of dance tunes from 1998 that a 61-year-old Nicholson could have been raging to while he was at a club in Miami in the summer of 1998. It’s a lot of fun! [Spotify | Apple Music]
Also I’d like to note that the Narrators: Post-Brexit Post-Punk and FluxCaviar Best Music 2021 playlists on Spotify have been updated quite a bit, so worth checking in with even if you’re already subscribed.
Minds Of Creeps
Deep Tan “Deepfake”
“Deepfake” feels both zoned out and twitchy with paranoia, contrasting but not exactly contradictory states of mind that suit a song about learning your image has been altered without your consent. There’s a feeling of powerful alienation in this music, not just from one’s sense of identity and autonomy, but from anyone else. Singing half the song in French emphasizes the sense of detachment here, as though making statements like “my body is no longer mine” in a language besides English might keep the feeling more private. The song simmers in anger but never boils over into rage, settling more into a feeling of shell-shocked alienation as the English lyrics offer a harsh judgment along with a bitter shrug.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
A Hell Of Your Own Making
Italia 90 “Borderline”
Italia 90 fit into the ongoing wave of bands from the UK and Ireland mixing half-spoken vocals with post-punk derived aesthetics, but vocalist Les Miserable’s approach is noticeably less wry or literary than a lot of his peers. In “Borderline” he sounds abrasive and hectoring as he repeats lines about making cowardly and lazy decisions that lead one to a misery that just gets deeper. Is he talking to you? Is he talking to himself? Is he talking about society, man? Could be all of the above! I like that lyrics as blunt as this could still come across as ambiguous – it’s not even clear whether this is meant to be a show of tough love or just rubbing salt in someone’s wounds.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Landmines In My Mind
Sleigh Bells “Justine Go Genesis”
Sleigh Bells is a band, but they’re also a blueprint and a prototype of what rock music could become. In this way “Justine Go Genesis” – a glorious hybrid of Slayer riffs and Spice Girls pop decked out with breakneck drum & bass beats and a stray organ parts straight out of ? And the Mysterians – is both classic Sleigh Bells and next-level Sleigh Bells, pushing everything to a new degree of ultra-hype frenzy. It’s faster, harder, catchier, brighter. It’s a thing that’s made to jolt you, to make you feel more alive and in the moment. I hear it as a rejection of the world as it is, a refusal to live on anyone else’s dreary terms even if doing so means attempting to force your fantasy into reality. The point of view in the lyrics certainly presents dodging boredom and misery as a life-or-death prospect, and every beat and twist and turn in the song feels like you’re right there with her outrunning some awful fate.
Buy it from Amazon.
As The Music Played I Saw My Life Turn Around
U2 featuring the Sun Ra Arkestra “When Love Comes to Town” (Live at the Apollo)
The original version of “When Love Comes to Town” was written entirely by U2 but performed as a duet with B.B. King, a move that displayed the band’s incredible clout at the time as well as their good sense to realize that they’d written a legit blues rock song that might sound like a cheap affectation if they’d recorded it by themselves. It’s not just that King lended authenticity to the sound, but that his voice – and his co-sign – made it easier to hear what U2 had written. Nothing was going to stop anyone from thinking U2 were indulgent and hubristic in this moment of their career, but anyone with generous ears would hear a song with fully realized potential that made the most of Bono’s earthy poet sensibility and King’s soulful howl.
This version of “When Love Comes to Town,” recorded live with the Sun Ra Arkestra at the Apollo in Manhattan thirty years after the release of Rattle & Hum, maintains the core of the song while taking it to another place entirely. U2 bring the temperature of the song down a bit, letting Bono’s voice simmer at the lower end of his register before letting him cut loose a bit more towards the end. This decision probably came from Bono’s vocal range diminishing a bit with age, but it does the song a lot of favors in terms of dramatic tension and emphasizing the more sensual qualities of his voice. It also gives a lot of space for the Arkestra to carry a lot of the expressive weight of the song, punctuating the song with strutting fanfare, trilling leads, and unexpected bursts of treble. The Sun Arkestra was an inspired choice for this occasion – it’s easy to imagine a more pedestrian horn arrangement for this song, but their accompaniment is more colorful and sophisticated than it strictly needs to be and brings out a character in the song beyond what U2 or King ever had in mind.
Buy it from U2.
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• Tatiana Tenreyro wrote extensively about the abuse allegations against Michael Milosh of Rhye over at the AV Club.
• I enjoyed Questlove going into very specific detail on what made the late Charlie Watts such an incredible drummer.
• It was such a pleasure to hear Lizzy Goodman get Rob Sheffield to talk about his writing process on her Difficult Artist podcast.
• Shallow Rewards is back with a kinda brutal episode on the topic of The Cure’s Wild Mood Swings, a record Chris Ott sees as the nadir of Robert Smith’s career.