Fluxblog #335: King Krule • Nessa Barrett • Ari Lennox • Metronomy/Spill Tab
Plus a playlist of dive bar classics and my Rolling Stone 500 Best Songs Of All Time ballot
This week’s playlist is PLACE SERIES #3: INSTANT DIVE BAR, a collection of songs that will recreate the atmosphere of a classic hard rock bar at the push of a button. You probably know most of these songs! I’ve been meaning to do something focused on this sort of energy for a while and this framing made the most sense to me. [Spotify | Apple Music]
Rolling Stone unveiled their newly updated 500 Best Songs Of All Time list this week, and I think it came out pretty well. I was part of the voting body for this project and the playlist I made of my ballot is publicly available on both Spotify and Apple Music. I am very strategic in my voting on these things – I focused my votes mainly on 80s/90s Gen X artists because I know they’re the ones who need to be protected from the giant crushing fists of Boomer and Millennial hegemony, and I tried to vote for songs I thought other voters might get behind.
For example, “Rid of Me” isn’t my favorite PJ Harvey song, but it’s the one I had a hunch others would go for, and I was correct – it made the list. In other cases I pushed for songs I hoped would make it – “Express Yourself” by Madonna, “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” by Janet Jackson,” “Peg” by Steely Dan – but luckily enough people voted for other songs in their catalog so they made the cut. There’s a few songs, like Stereolab’s “Metronomic Underground” or The Knife’s “Heartbeats,” that are immensely meaningful to me and I just kinda crossed my fingers for them. All told, half of my ballot made the final list and most of the other artists I voted for got in on different songs. Not bad!
There’s no proper Fluxpod episode this week, but you can catch an excerpt from Zeptember, the miniseries Sean T. Collins and I are doing about Led Zeppelin that’s exclusive to the Fluxblog Patreon. The clip, which is on all the major podcast platforms, is a ten minute chunk focused on “Black Dog” from the second episode. The third episode, covering Presence, In Through the Out Door, and Coda, will be out this weekend, and the final episode with a long Q&A segment is out at the end of the month.
Nothing Wrong In Sinking Low
King Krule “Alone, Omen 3” (Live)
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate “Alone, Omen 3” from the experience of the early phase of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It arrived just before things started to go very badly; this particular live recording is from one of the few shows King Krule was able to perform before Europe went into lockdown mode. This song was fresh in the world when its sentiment – solitude as source of both agonizing loneliness and restorative/meditative self-care, a permission to let yourself feel your sadness, a promise that you are never truly alone – was more potent and relevant than its author could have ever anticipated. There’s no way a lot of the people who probably needed it actually heard it, but at least in my personal experience it was valuable and helpful.
“Alone, Omen 3” sounds like it’s slouching somehow, and there’s a sort of gentle tumbling quality to the arpeggiated guitar and the beat that’s like the lackadaisical gait of a person walking around aimlessly. The bits of exaggerated digital echo in this performance are a nice touch, I imagine it as bits of noisy reality poking through the haze of a loneliness that makes you feel like you’re in a bubble removed from the world. Archy Marshall’s vocal at the end of the song when he’s shouting the reassurance “you’re not alone, you’re not alone” comes across as more broken and desperate in this take, more collapsing in the face of futility than heroic on the album recording. In either case he’s still pushing against something to get this message out, fighting against a world where it’s too easy in the best of conditions to feel atomized and adrift.
Buy it from Amazon.
Rip My World To Pieces
Nessa Barrett “I Hope Ur Miserable Until Ur Dead”
“I Hope Ur Miserable Until Ur Dead” is another in a line of Gen Z pop-rock hits that use classic alt-rock dynamics as a backdrop for lyrics very rooted in social media-driven teenage drama. As the title suggests, this is a gloriously petty song and the heaviness, tension, and melodramatic angst of this music is perfectly suited to this musical approach. That said, it is funny to me as a person who grew up with alt-rock as a default setting of popular music, to hear these sounds fully absorbed into the drama of generic Popular Kids when the version of this from the ‘90s was always coming from a more adult perspective and/or was garbled up with abstract and poetic language. There’s absolutely zero room for ambiguity in this song, just earnest invective and unfiltered emotional brutality. It’s unapologetically immature in its sentiment, and the wild mood swings of the arrangement give the message a heavy punch and the shaky volatility of a sudden emotional tantrum.
Buy it from Amazon.
Hit The Right Spot
Ari Lennox “Pressure”
There’s a lot to find charming about “Pressure” – the pleasing curls of the melody, Ari Lennox’s coy delivery, the light and relaxed tone of the groove – but the thing that puts this song over the top for me is a small detail. It’s the way a small snippet of vocal sample is dropped in as sort of punctuation, an unintelligible but raw and raspy vocal that contrasts sharply with Lennox’s more silky vocal tone. It’s deployed brilliantly but sounds like it might have started as a happy accident, like some stray fragment that happened to fall at the right spot of a ProTools session. It’s an unexpected texture that grabs the ear and highlights the best qualities of Lennox’s voice while nodding towards a more uninhibited style as an aspirational state. In a song where Lennox is coaching a guy on exactly how to fuck her, it comes across like establishing a goal – “I want you to get me there.”
Buy it from Amazon.
Scribble Your Name On My Wall
Metronomy featuring Spill Tab “Uneasy”
The bass in “Uneasy” has a very mid-00s indie sound to it, enough to spark a pang of nostalgia for the “Young Folks” era. The tonalities may feel a little deja-vu but the meat of the song is more contemporary, at least in that Spill Tab’s vocals and lyrics are very much in line with a post-Billie/Lorde aesthetic. But whereas a lot of the singers in this lane settle for a rhythmic wispiness Spill Tab’s melodies are a bit more generous and “Uneasy” moves through a few very strong hooks that tangle loosely around the bass groove. The relaxed vocal performance contrasts nicely with the lyrical sentiment – she’s singing about a very intense attachment to someone who’s clearly keeping her at arm’s length, so even the most startling things she says comes across as totally level-headed. There’s a nice ambiguity here: Is she actually being totally reasonable, or does she not fully get that she’s being bad with boundaries?
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• If you want to get really bummed out about James Murphy I recommend reading this extensive First Floor interview with DFA co-founder Jonathan Galkin, who ran the label essentially on his own for nearly 20 years before being unceremoniously pushed out of the company by Murphy’s lawyers. The good news is Jonathan – a cool guy who’s been a friend to Fluxblog since the earliest days – has a new label called FourFour.
• This piece about the Dear Evan Hansen movie by Nate Jones at Vulture makes a strong case that the technical decisions made to compensate for the 27-year-old Ben Platt playing a young teen have backfired horribly and resulted in an accidentally avant-garde work.