Fluxblog 360: Kali Uchis • Tyler, the Creator • Tame Impala | Automatic • Sales • Just Mustard • Folly Group
Plus a survey mix for 1964 and the debut of OTT FUTURE
This week’s playlist is the 1964 SURVEY MIX, a panoramic view of music in 1964 across genres, a snapshot of the point where the ‘60s truly becomes THE ‘60s. I kinda get why the ‘60s surveys don't get people as hype as the other decades I've done in this format but to me, they're some of the most interesting ones in terms of how the curation of this period tends to segregate everything and I like hearing it all jumbled together. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I’ve also slightly revised my popular WELCOME TO THE 90s: THE NEW POP 1989-1992 playlist and created a version of it on YouTube. The YouTube version is well worth checking out in that it’s almost entirely made up of official music videos and somewhat replicates the experience of watching MTV and VH1 in the George HW Bush era. [YouTube | Spotify | Apple]
The next Fluxpod Patreon exclusive miniseries, OTT FUTURE, will launch this weekend! This is going to be a four part series in which I talk to Chris Ott largely about the intersection of technology and music culture from a few different angles. The first episode will focus mainly on TikTok and Epic Games acquiring Bandcamp, and subsequent episodes will get more into media and the streaming giants, and then what it's like to be a parent of teenagers in this era. Subscribe now to hear it, and all the other miniseries and shows I have available for subscribers!
On Sunday and Monday of this week I saw my first two arena shows since the summer of 2019. I’ve missed seeing performances on this scale, particularly when the artists have the means to do a big production or turn the space into something like an art installation.
The first of the two shows was Tyler, the Creator with Kali Uchis and Vince Staples at Madison Square Garden, the first of a two night stand at the venue. Staples’ opening set was fine but lacking in dynamics – it was basically just him standing on top of a pyramid-ish structure with cool lighting. Staples has personality and some excellent material but his physicality seemed hemmed in by the staging, so it all felt kinda samey as it went along.
Kali Uchis’ set was a revelation, a headliner production with a headliner response in an opening slot. I had assumed she would performed with a band, but she actually performed to tracks with dancers in the classic pop star style. The dancers were deployed with a lot of subtlety – they were all dressed in black and focused more on gesture than movement, a complement to Uchis’ more colorful sensuality. She performed to a nearly packed arena and had the people in the palm of her from the start, getting a whole arena with lighters up for “Loner” just three songs into th set without any sort of prompting. Hits like “Dead to Me,” “10%,” “Sad Girls Luv Money,” “After the Storm,” and “Telepatia” got the biggest pop from the crowd, but the entire hour was on point. If she can land even one more crossover smash like “Telepatia” on her next record I think she might just graduate to headlining arenas on her own.
Tyler the Creator’s performance was a perfect combination of massive undeniable charisma and brilliant conceptual staging. There were four basic elements – a big house and a Rolls Royce on the main stage, a boat that traveled through the audience to a b-stage island – which provided both narrative structure and different ways of engaging with the audience. And wow, what an audience – incredibly diverse, mostly quite young, everyone hyped up beyond all belief for singing along, pogoing, screaming, and supporting Tyler in insult comic mode roasting a random guy in the stands who was trying to seem hard by chanting SHAKE YOUR ASS SHAKE YOUR ASS in thunderous unison. Throw in some excellent use of pyro and a set stacked with exceedingly strong material and it’s easy to see how Tyler got up to this level. I went in liking the guy and left the show being kinda obsessed with him.
The second of the two shows was Tame Impala at Barclays Center. I was hoping Kevin Parker would have changed more of the visuals from the last time I saw the band at Madison Square Garden in 2019 but it was mostly the same – tons of lasers, the big ring, psychedelic videos. It’s still an excellent production that suits the music very well but I guess I was ready to see him level up rather than stay the same. The highlights for me was mostly just getting to see them perform songs from The Slow Rush that have come to mean a lot to me, particularly as it was one of the records I listened to most during the darkest and most uncertain points of the pandemic. “One More Year” at the top of the show was especially cathartic for me, few pieces of music from the recent past resonate with me as deeply as the part when he sings “we’re on a rollercoaster stuck on its loop-de-loop because what we did one day on a whim has slowly become all we do.”
In The Service Of Desire
Automatic “New Beginning”
Automatic have an energy and attitude that reminds me a lot of what was going on in the earliest phases of this site in the early to mid ‘00s – all those skewed electro-punks with pop know-how and a hedonism driven by nihilism and/or pessimism. You can hear traces of the likes of Chicks On Speed, Le Tigre, Erase Errata, The Rogers Sisters, and Enon in “New Beginning,” but the music feels fresh rather than nostalgic. A lot of this comes down to Automatic’s sophistication in deploying their blunt minimalism, particularly in how judiciously they drop in the synthesizer. The groove is carried entirely by the rhythm section so Izzy Gluadini’s synth is used entirely as a punctuating effect, like this heavily distorted WRONG!!!! buzzer that gets slammed to put the listener on edge. This is a nice contrast with Gluadini’s vocal, which is rather cold and detached as she sings about human desire finding a way to overcome obstacles up to and including total societal breakdown.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
These Dreams Close To Me
Sales “Moving By Backwards”
Sales’ aesthetic template is essentially the same as that of Beach House – a generally drowsy sound built around the combination of drum machine, spare lead guitar lines that get a lot out of lovely tones, and a female vocalist who tends towards understated phrasing. The key difference, particularly on “Moving By Backwards,” is that Lauren Morgan comes across as a warmer presence in the music than Beach House’s Victoria Legrand, who has more of regal quality of elegant standoffishness. Sales is less dreamy and more overtly sensitive, with the minimalism of the track leaving Morgan’s vulnerable performance sounding particularly exposed. It sounds a bit like taking the core of a shoegaze song and removing all the sound that would normally bury it, but instead of shrinking in shyness Morgan just commits to singing it like she’s staring you right in the eyes.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Out Of Mind With You
Just Mustard “Still”
“Still” sounds like a love song gone wrong, as though the singer has been knowingly seduced into something quite ominous. The music is horror film by way of post-punk, a soft and innocent-seeming vocal from Katie Ball contrasted with cold industrial beats, eerie ambiance, and a severely distorted guitar part that seems to violently scrape through the surface of the audio image. Ball sounds like she’s sinking into something – I imagine something like the alien bringing men into the black tar in Under the Surface – but is cautiously happy to be succumbing to the experience.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Nothing We Said Had Any Real Meaning
Folly Group “I Raise You (The Price of Your Head)”
To some extent this song feels like a delivery mechanism for catchy get-everyone-in-the-club-screaming-along chorus, but my favorite parts here are actually the verses in which Sean Harper speak-sings a vocal flow that playfully glides around the beat he’s laying down on the drums. Harper’s lyrics come across like a polite and cerebral diss track in which he essentially tears into a sell out performer. The line that really knocks me out is more a sick burn on this person’s audience than anything else – “strange work to consider your finest / that catalyzes such shyness from the spineless.” This song’s dynamics will surely prevent it from ever getting that kind of response – the groove has post-punk twitchiness but krautrock drive and steadiness, and the bit where they stop cold for a second on a Harper singing “the world stops” is a clever way of pulling more of a rap production move in a rock song.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Here’s Craig Jenkins with a very thoughtful piece on Rosalía’s new album over at New York Magazine.
• Here’s Stuart Berman on Pitchfork talking to Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley about the ongoing efforts to curate Sonic Youth’s back catalog and release new recordings since the band went defunct a decade ago.
• Here’s Larry Fitzmaurice at the New York Times writing about Lorde fantasizing about life without fame.
I have exciting news to share: You can now read Fluxblog in the new Substack app for iPhone.
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.
The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.