Fluxblog #352: Max Changmin • The Smile • Guerilla Toss • Cat Power
Plus a look back on the indie music era of 2011-2014
This week’s playlist is FUTURE STARTS SLOW: LIMINAL INDIE 2011-2014, a look back on a phase in indie music that now seems like a bridge between two very different eras. These in-between phases can often be the most interesting times in retrospect! [Spotify | Apple]
This playlist fills a hole in a chronology of playlists I’ve made covering the evolution of indie/alternative music dating back to the early 1970s. Here’s where it fits in the chronology – all of these playlists can be found on my Spotify and Apple Music pages, along with other playlists covering sub-genres in focused detail.
Leaving Like A Dream
Max Changmin “Airplane Mode”
“Airplane Mode” opens in medias res on a verse, the atmosphere around the gently rolling bass line already so thick that it feels like unexpectedly walking into a room full of dry ice fog and dramatic lighting. The particular guitar tones and the starkness of the arrangement remind me a lot of the xx, but with a more overtly pop density of composition – imagine if Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft ditched Jamie xx for Max Martin while still aiming for their familiar hyper-romantic vibe. Max Changmin, a veteran of the K-pop duo TVXQ, sings with light R&B inflections like Justin Timberlake at his most wistful and brings a perfectly calibrated level of cinematic romance to the song. It’s not so much to be overly syrupy, but just enough to feel like a more restrained and tasteful choice to fit into a moment in a rom-com depicting a pained yearning for something that might be lost forever.
Buy it from Amazon.
Some Gangster Troll Promising The Moon
The Smile “You Will Never Work In Television Again”
I love that Thom Yorke basically waited until people entirely topped asking for him to make straight-ahead rock music to get back to making straight-ahead rock music, and I also love that Jonny Greenwood, the other member of Radiohead anyone would have reasonably expected to be uninterested in making straight-ahead rock music is the one doing it with him. It’s a bit contrary in the way you’d expect them to be, but The Smile also just makes sense as a creative move. It’s not surprising to me that Thom Yorke would want to move away from the more electronic and rhythmically dense music he’s made on his own for a very long time now. It is totally logical to me that Jonny Greenwood, a guy with an aptitude to write and play just about anything would gravitate to the opportunity to focus on bass guitar, the instrument he hasn’t had much opportunity to explore since that’s his brother’s role in Radiohead. And it makes sense that they’d play this with a drummer like Tom Skinner, who plays with more blunt physicality than Radiohead’s Phil Selway.
It’s not hard to imagine “You Will Never Work In Television Again” as a Radiohead song, but to transfer it to that template would likely mean adding some extra layers of sound that would diminish the rough simplicity of the arrangement. You could make the song more dense and louder, but the point is made well enough by Yorke’s frantic guitar and Skinner’s bashed out percussion, with Greenwood lurking behind the din adding subtle contours to the music. Yorke’s vocal lags just behind the beat like he’s chasing the song down and yelling at it as it accelerates away from him. There’s some resemblance to “Bodysnatchers” from In Rainbows and the Bends era b-side “Permanent Midnight,” but for the most part this is a different kind of rock song for Yorke and Greenwood, something that’s more primitive than what they’ve previously attempted but informed by the nuance and complexity of the music they’ve made together and apart over the years.
Buy it from Amazon.
Melt In Every Dimension
Guerilla Toss “Cannibal Capital”
The tonal palette of “Cannibal Capital” is bright and super saturated, a throwback to the sort of indie music that was a few steps removed from kid’s music that was ubiquitous through the 2000s. But Guerilla Toss aren’t particularly twee, just energetic and colorful – the rhythm is twitchy and the lyrics express a gnawing, overwhelming and near-constant angst. It’s become rather banal for musicians to sing about anxiety now but Kassie Carlson takes an interesting wide angle on the ideas here, imagining emotions as a delicate economy prone to surging highs and crashing lows brought on by external factors. The chorus and bridge parts aim for ecstatic catharsis but don’t quite achieve escape velocity, maybe in part because that’s the part of the song where she’s wondering if escape is even possible. This metaphorical economy is just the same as real literal ones – you can imagine something much better, but could you ever actually make it happen?
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Be My Shrink For The Hour
Cat Power “Bad Religion”
Chan Marshall does a lot of things in her covers that I typically hate – she slows songs waaaay down, significantly alters melodies and chord progressions, emphasizes the lyrics over the music. But this all works for her because her approach isn’t a matter of just playing a song, it’s more about showing us how she’s heard a piece of music and connected with it. It’s as though she’s heard something that has moved her, scribbled down a lot of notes and lyrics that resonated with her, and then she made another piece of music based on that. Her version of Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” barely resembles his original, trading out his muted gospel for a cautious rhythm and guitar and piano tones that will sound familiar to anyone whose heard her ‘90s recordings. But you can really feel how she internalized his song, particularly the parts in which he’s spilling his guts to an anonymous cab driver because he feels like he’s under siege and he’s desperate to finally just say some things he can’t stop thinking about. Marshall zeroes in on the exhaustion at the core of the song and moves from there, connecting to her own terrible memories by way of Ocean’s exasperated vulnerability in the original recording.
Buy it from Amazon.
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• Lee Ranaldo seems very cold on the prospect of Sonic Youth ever getting back together unless they’re all inspired to create a new body of work, and I’m glad to hear that.
• I really enjoyed this in-depth musical analysis of Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” from a Livejournal post all the way back in 2009.