Fluxblog 359: Kate Bollinger • Belle & Sebastian • Goose
Plus a playlist you throw on at a wedding reception or something
This week’s playlist is PLACE SERIES #4: MULTI-GENERATIONAL PARTY, a set of music meant to be played on random that is intended to please a lot of different people without getting too obnoxious. You can think of it as like, “elevated wedding DJ.” It includes music from the mid-60s up through the recent past, though it was kinda tricky to figure out contemporary hits that didn’t feel too drowsy and minor key to keep the mood going. [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
By the way if you have other ideas for the Place Series – ie, playlists designed as the soundtrack to a situation/environment – please feel free to suggest it in reply to this email!
The other playlist for this week was kind of an experiment to see if I can make something almost no one would want, and I think it worked – THEY ALSO MAKE MUSIC, a collection of songs by actors with a sideline in music. (As opposed to musicians with a sideline with acting.) [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
A Confused Point Of View
Kate Bollinger “Who Am I But Someone”
Kate Bollinger’s music often feels very light, both in the sense of weightlessness and illumination. This is a lot of the appeal of her music, which mostly feels like it was created specifically to sound wonderful on a breezy spring afternoon. But it’s also a little ironic as Bollinger’s lyrics are consistently very neurotic, not so much that she seems cripplingly neurotic, but definitely like someone who overthinks a lot of things and is prone to getting deep in existential thought spirals. “Who Am I But Someone” is more in the latter category, a song in which Bollinger sounds fairly serene as she considers why she feels stuck in repetitive self-defeating behaviors. “Who am I but someone who will resign to the comforts of who I always was” is definitely a sentiment I can relate to, but I’m intrigued by how even the more depressive lines are expressed as if in a state of total emotional equilibrium. She’s not coming at this from a state of angst, it’s more like half meditative half analytical. She’s singing about inertia, but she sounds like someone who’s identified a problem and is actually fixing it through cognitive behavior therapy pop music.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Every Awkward Fumble Should Be Framed
Belle & Sebastian “Unnecessary Drama”
Part of the long term charm of Belle & Sebastian’s body of work is the way they seem to deliberately operate at a 20-30 year lag from musical trends, gradually picking up new sounds to integrate once they feel sufficiently old and nostalgic. In the case of “Unnecessary Drama” they’ve caught up with rock dynamics of the early 2000s, which is ironic since they actually existed at that time and sounded nothing like this. Or at least the core rhythm section didn’t – aside from the core groove and the particular sound of the bass, this feels very much like a Belle & Sebastian song, though the punch of the chorus combined with the harmonic approach actually brings them closer to Twin Cinema era New Pornographers. (I saw them play shows with The New Pornographers in 2005! The slow drip of influence, maybe.)
“Unnecessary Drama” is one of the most interesting post-pandemic songs I’ve encountered, largely because unlike most artists’ impulse to approach the subject matter from a place of expressing anxiety and dread, Stuart Murdoch focuses more on the need to face the situation and figure out a way to thrive in it. This is a very Murdoch point of view – even before the pandemic, large chunks of his body of work dealt with basically the same situation of pushing towards joy and human connection through personal issues and chronic illness. Murdoch is never patronizing in doing this either – in this song he really puts a lot of the focus on the difficulties and nuisances, and all the possible mistakes that can be made along the way. But the song is asking you, even if this is your “so-called life,” what else are you going to do if not actually live it?
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Overhead In Heaven
Goose “Dripfield”
Goose are a jam band in both practice and cultural context but “Dripfield,” the title track of their forthcoming third record, doesn’t really sound like anything you’d reasonably expect from that world regardless of whether you have positive or negative associations with it. “Dripfield” sounds more like the work of a band rooted a general post-Radiohead lane of alt-rock, a song that would sit comfortably alongside the likes of Sigur Ros, My Morning Jacket, TV on the Radio, Muse, or Coldplay at their most adventurous. If you told me this was produced by Brian Eno, I’d believe it – it certainly has the feel of when he applies his aesthetic vision to striving, searching, epic rock music. If you’re looking for the jam band elements you can find them, mostly towards the end of the song when the tension breaks and a bright guitar solo feels like it absolutely could head off into a more improvisational direction but instead settles into a gently decelerating outro. I’m very curious to see where Goose go with this – if they keep moving into this type of rock while maintaining the philosophies and concert structures of jam band music they would be exploring very new musical territory. Like, I don’t think anyone was ever wondering what it’d be like if U2 and Phish could somehow be the same band, but this is making a good case for what that might be like.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LOVE the place series idea