Fluxblog 373: Wilco • Phoenix • Grace Ives • Automatic
Plus I'll take you back to summer '07
This week’s playlist is THIS WAS SUMMER 2007, a fairly self-explanatory set of music that was popular or otherwise notable between May and September of that year. It’s a lot of fun. What a time to be Akon or T-Pain! [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
A Dream Retrieved From A Common Spring
Wilco “Mystery Binds”
Wilco’s Cruel Country is a gift to long-suffering Wilco fans who desperately wanted Jeff Tweedy to get back to making warm country rock records like AM and Being There again. I like but don’t love those records so of course I zero in on the outlier – “Mystery Binds,” a moody and more electric number more in line with the stark and aloof vibes of more recent Wilco records. The song moves like it’s trying to sneak out of a house, a soft chug that leads up to an elegant and vaguely familiar lead guitar hook played by Nels Cline. Tweedy’s lyrics seem to approach misery as a shared experience, like some kind of Jungian collective unconscious, but love as a more solitary thing. It seems true in as much as the person telling you this seems to pass on his sorrows freely, but clings jealously to love like he can’t risk sharing it and thus can’t receive new love. This music feels a bit cursed, but it’s rather lovely.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
A Purple Cloud In The Consommé
Phoenix “Alpha Zulu”
“Alpha Zulu” is a terrific comeback single for Phoenix in the sense that it sounds like a hyper-concentrated version of their aesthetic – the quintessence of the band delivered with exacting efficiency to make anyone who likes them at all go “oh yeah, Phoenix, I like them.” They’ve always been precise technicians of pop and this song delivers a sequence of hooks in well-timed intervals, most likely the result of a careful editing processing but in practice a smooth conveyor belt of catchy moments that build up to one of their finest choruses. The biggest hook is in the lead up though, that rhythmic chunk where Thomas Mars is almost like a Gallic Busta Rhymes with his “woo ha, singing Hallelujah.” He’s singing about preparing for catastrophe there; the rest of the song is more cryptic and full of imagery – “your Mona Lisa immortalized, décapitée,” “I must have died at 51 in 1953,” “a hologram waiting for the tie-break.” As with most of Mars’ lyrics from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix onward there’s always a sense that he’s writing in code, little things that he and maybe his wife will get, but there’s always the alternate explanation of this just coming from a playful use of English when it’s his second language.
Buy it from Amazon.
Something A Little More Revealing
Grace Ives “Lazy Day”
Grace Ives’ track for “Lazy Day” sounds urbane and sophisticated in a distinctly mid to late ‘90s way, like the sort of music you’d imagine for a hip but upscale bar in that era. But it’s not a total match as the implied scale of the music feels more small and private, and the sentiment is closer to what we’d call “self care” today. Ives is singing with a lot of self-awareness about being stuck in a cycle – “I got addicted to the hurt, then the healing” – and the song seems to exist in the healing part of all that. She’s just trying to chill out and enjoy herself, to feel comfortable in her body. Every emphasis in this song is on taking every little bit of pleasure available, and as the song moves towards its conclusion she sounds low-key ecstatic and then mildly contented.
Buy it from Amazon.
The Fading Facade Of A White Collar Dream
Automatic “Skyscraper”
There’s a line from Richard Linklater’s Slacker derived from Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies that was made more famous by R.E.M. when Michael Stipe worked it into the hit “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”: “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.” That feels very relevant to Automatic, particularly in this song in which Izzy Glaudini’s deadpan vocal and cold observation of the wealthy sounds like she’s withdrawing in disgust in real time. The focus in “Skyscraper” is on the way the extremely wealthy put a distance between themselves and the underclasses as an escape from reality, but it’s a precarious situation – if things go wrong, it’s a much steeper fall. Glaudini zeroes in on this fear of failure and the way it becomes a prison that can spoil the aspiration to ascend above the rest. In the climax of the song, the one part of the song that’s a little more harmonically rich than the stark skeletal sound of the rest of the track, she perks up the melody just to reach a bleak conclusion: “You’re lost in the fog, your skin fits so tight now you can’t move it all.”
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• This Fresh Air interview with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell is terrific. This is a guy whose life and career is so interesting that him casually mentioning his mother was the direct inspiration for the Bond character Pussy Galore is just a weird footnote in his story.
• Rebecca Alter’s feature story about the comedian Megan Stalter for New York Magazine is very good, particularly for how well Alter describes and analyzes Slalter’s comedic persona without sucking the fun out of everything.
PAVEMENT BONUS!
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