Fluxblog #342: Habibi • Glenn Gould / U.S. Girls • SOPHIETHEHOMIE
Plus veteran music critic Douglas Wolk on the podcast
This week’s playlist is Bottle Service in the Lounge of Despair, two hours of dark and sleazy vibes featuring the likes of Portishead, The Weeknd, The Internet, King Krule, Tricky, Knxwledge, Tinashe, Lana Del Rey, and more. [Spotify | Apple]
This week’s episode of Fluxpod features arts critic Douglas Wolk, one of the major formative influences on my writing and the author of the excellent new book All of the Marvels. The episode is split between talking about his early days as a DJ, musician, and critic in the ‘90s and discussing the book, in which he wrote about Marvel Comics as a collective body of work after reading everything they ever published. You can find the episode on all podcast platforms and on the Fluxblog Patreon.
Some Help From Above
Habibi “Somewhere They Can’t Find Us”
We’re only just now starting to hear a lot of the music that was written during the darkest depths of the pandemic, which is interesting because it’s as close as we can get to a collective writing prompt for a massive chunk of the world’s musicians. Do you confront it head on and Say Something About It, do you just move on with what you’d ordinarily do, do you question everything you’ve done before, do you embrace limitations or chafe against them? I figure a lot of artists just fully shut down through this and we’ll never really know, though fully shutting down is also a valid artistic response to the situation.
Habibi’s new single “Somewhere They Can’t Find Us” was written mid-pandemic and while it’s not exactly screaming “I’M A PANDEMIC SONG” it’s very apparent in the tone and lyrics. The music aims for physical catharsis – big groovy beat, slinky bass, a classic indie club banger in the mold of The Slits or Delta 5. It sounds like four isolated people willing a party into existence. The words are more grim, evoking the bleakest days in New York City when “sirens sound day and night” was not at all an understatement. Despite that anchor in a time and place, the lyrical concerns are fairly evergreen – a desire for escape and community, an impulse to help others even if you end up giving more than you take. In a low key way, it resolves on a prayer to God.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
God’s Private Eye
Glenn Gould featuring U.S. Girls “Good Kinda High”
This song was created as part of a project in which the producer Billy Wild collaborates with contemporary artists with the goal of giving the late pianist Glenn Gould’s music new life in modern music. In the case of this song made with Meg Remy of U.S. Girls the Glenn Gould of it all is rather subtle, as it’s entirely subsumed into something that basically just sounds like a very good U.S. Girls song in structure, tone, and feeling. It’s a song with a strong melody and a sour tone, produced with just enough gloss that it sounds like if Britney Spears had recorded a Bond theme off the strength of the high-tech spy movie vibes of “Toxic.” But as far as the song gets from Glenn Gould’s classical context his piano part is still centered in the piece and is not chopped up or noticeably altered. As much as the piano is decontextualized his playing is clearly identifiable, a tone and touch that’s familiar to anyone who’s heard his Goldberg Variations.
Buy it from Amazon.
Since I Lost All Control
SOPHIETHEHOMIE “Natural Disaster”
The first few songs SOPHIETHEHOME released were all firmly in R&B territory, kinda like homemade semi lo-fi Erykah Badu music. “Natural Disaster” is a fascinating swerve into the indie rock lane while maintaining a similar vibe – her vocal style is mostly the same, but it’s recast in a song built upon a rumbling alt-rock bass line that I’d guess is aiming for Nirvana or Kim Deal energy but actually sounds just like “A Salty Salute” by Guided by Voices. It all comes together sounding very natural, as though this thick, heavy bass and clattering cymbals are there as a defense mechanism for this sensitive, vulnerable R&B ballad about feeling like you’ve totally screwed up a relationship and exhausted yourself emotionally. It’s too early to know whether this is a stylistic eureka moment for SOPHIETHEHOMIE or just a one-off creative cul de sac, but either way it’s very evocative and interesting.
Buy it from Amazon.
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• Here’s Carrie Courogen with a very good personal/critical essay on Aimee Mann and “sadness memes” in her Breadcrumbs newsletter.
• Here’s Jan Whitaker at Restaurant-ing Through History with a fascinating post unpacking the results of Gallup polling in 1966 about attitudes about dining at restaurants. The thing I find most interesting here is that most people did not like restaurant food at all and just sort of tolerated it for the opportunity to outsource cooking and cleaning. (By the way, this blog is a great rabbit hole to go down into if you’ve never visited it before!)
• Simon Vozick-Levinson of Rolling Stone interviewed Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood about the art they made for Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac, which is reissued in various deluxe packages this week.
• I try to restrain myself from linking to every The Number Ones post that Tom Breihan writes because they’re all so good but c’mon, he just got to Janet Jackson’s “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” and that’s one of my all-time favorite songs!