Fluxblog 369: Belle & Sebastian • Hot Chip • HAAi • Sabrina Claudio
Plus a playlist of experimental/noise indie from the mid 00s
This week’s playlist is LOGICAL VOLUME: EXPERIMENTAL / NOISE INDIE 2003-2007, a retrospective of the vital arty end of indie rock in the 2000s featuring the likes of Black Dice, Lightning Bolt, Marnie Stern, Wolf Eyes, Animal Collective, Excepter, Gang Gang Dance, Deerhoof, Liars, Battles, Dirty Projectors, Hella, and many others. Special thanks to Christopher Weingarten, Cortney Harding, Larry Fitzmaurice, and Chris Wade for help on this one. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I went back through the furthest depths of the Fluxblog archives to compile a set of interviews I did back in 2003 with The Best Show’s Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster, along with Andrew Earles, who was a contributor to the show at the time. These are in fact the first interviews any of them did about The Best Show! I was a very early adopter and I was a pretty relentless booster of the program in the early days of the site. The three interviews are now all on one page, they were previously scattered among posts from April 2003.
All The Brightest Sunbeams
Belle & Sebastian “Working Boy in New York City”
I’ve been fascinated with how Stuart Murdoch integrates Christianity into his lyrics for a long time now, particularly as he’s become emboldened to do this quite overtly as his career progresses. Murdoch’s version of Christianity focuses on the most kind-hearted and optimistic elements of the faith and jettisons pretty much everything else, mostly just extrapolating the good ideas into the praxis of being a decent and empathetic person in the world. “Working Boy in New York City” is a great example of this. This is a light and groovy number in which Murdoch addresses a gay guy who hasn’t been open about his sexuality with some people and basically offers generous words of support and affirmation. It’s a sweet little pep talk of a song with a chorus that zooms out from this particular person’s issues to speak to a wider audience – “everybody gets an even shot at making heaven, wide is the gate.” It’s such a sweet sentiment for a song, and all the more so given that it’s set to one of Murdoch’s prettiest melodies in years.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
If This Is Working, It Makes My Play Null And Void
Hot Chip “Down”
Alexis Taylor has a nice voice, but it runs a bit cold – a little distant, a little introverted for a guy fronting a dance band. That unlikely fit is a big part of what makes Hot Chip interesting, they’ve certainly cornered the market on making dance music by and for sensitive nerds rather than the sort of sexy extroverted people that a lot of dance music is implicitly for. “Down” contrasts Taylor’s voice with a much bolder vocal sample from an obscure Universal Togetherness Band funk track that was reissued by the Numero Group a while back. That vocal is hot and passionate – “you sure know how to break it all down!” – and it provides a hook and something for Taylor to react against. He’s basically taking the common trope of “working it” and pushing it to a self-aware extreme, of being willfully run ragged by a demanding partner. But it’s no complaint. This is a very subby song, and he’s absolutely loving it.
Buy it from Amazon.
It’s The State Of Mind
HAAi featuring Jon Hopkins “Baby, We’re Ascending”
“Baby, We’re Ascending” sounds like a rave in a wind tunnel, implying a submission to powerful outside forces in two different but complementary ways. The music feels urgent but Haai’s vocal is very peaceful and grounded, describing an epiphany that makes her feel as though she’s moving towards grace and the sublime. The lyrics are vague enough to mean whatever you need, but it seems to me that she’s talking specifically about music here. She’s experiencing a moment of transcendental beauty through someone else’s music and realizing she has the power to commune with it, or make her own – “I could be the whole symphony.”
Buy it from Bandcamp.
To Avoid Potential Heartbreak
Sabrina Claudio “Protect Her”
Sabrina Claudio is singing from the perspective of a very exhausted woman in “Protect Her,” a song that’s basically about deciding it’s best not to go out in case she meets someone and falls in love again, which could only end poorly. This song comes at the end of a record that gets into a lot of romantic turmoil, so it makes a lot of thematic sense to close out on an expression of “you know what, I give up.” But as with pretty much everything else on Based On A Feeling, this is a song that sounds extremely romantic and seductive. That central irony is what makes it all click, though – even when she knows better, the pulls towards love and lust is just too strong. The first line of the chorus rings very true – “I fall in love too quickly” – but the concluding line – “girl, just stay home tonight” – just sounds like, at best, a temporary solution. There’s just no protecting a heart that wants connection this much.
Buy it from Amazon.
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• Here’s Alana Mohamed in Real Life writing thoughtfully and provocatively about the emerging culture of treating “the algorithm” as a sort of mystical and divine presence in online life.
• Karina Longworth’s current season of You Must Remember This about the “Erotic 80s” has been excellent so far but I particularly recommend this week’s episode about 1983 with a focus on Flashdance, Risky Business, and the critical fallacy of the “MTV aesthetic” in film.
