Fluxblog 384: Hot Chip • Dora Jar • Aidan Noell • Glove
Plus a playlist of luxurious late 70s/early 80s grooves for your...yacht?
This newsletter is free, but the work that goes into making Fluxblog and the playlists and the podcast etc takes up a lot of my time. I don’t like pestering people into signing up for the Patreon or doing one-time donations on Ko-Fi, but I will say that right now would be an excellent time to do this as I’m entering a very precarious economic situation. Your donations are always appreciated, but I can say for sure that right now they’re more appreciated than ever.
This week’s playlist is WELCOME ABOARD: LUXURIOUS GROOVES 1977-1982, a collection of mellow R&B, smooth soft rock, and gentle disco with immaculate production aesthetics. I’ve always despised the “yacht rock” term and think it’s mired in tacky and condescending Gen X irony and has resulted in a lot of poorly curated playlists and live events. This playlist is basically my corrective for all that – a very recognizable cultural moment and aesthetic, but with a tighter chronological focus and more expansive in what gets included in the mix. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Some Primitive Healing
Hot Chip “Freakout/Release”
The first time I heard “Freakout/Release” was at Hot Chip’s show at Avant Gardner in Brooklyn back in May, well before a studio version was available. This was an advantage in that I could be genuinely surprised by the big turn in the song when it happened as I was coming to it without “spoilers.” This part of the song, in which the band shift into a heavy rock riff after starting off in a classic Hot Chip electro-funk mode, is a bit less dramatic in the studio recording. Some of this is probably in just mixing it so it made sense as a track, but it’s still a thrilling dynamic move that delivers on the promise of the title. The structure of the track is like an answer to Alexis Taylor’s lyrics, in which he’s fretting about feeling jaded about music and not getting the kind of rush he got from it in the past. He’s blaming it on everyone else – “music used to be in love, but now people leave it or take it” – but the song implies that the answer is simply shifting it up and breaking out of old patterns. A lot of a thrill is just enjoying something you didn’t expect, so why not toss a big dumb guitar riff?
Buy it from Amazon.
Addicted To The Sting
Dora Jar “Bumblebee”
“Bumblebee” is shamelessly sunny even with its somewhat self-pitying lyrics, though even the darkest lines come across as more playful than genuinely angst-ridden. The opening line “obviously you’re already over me” sets the tone perfectly – sure, there’s some bad feelings to be felt, but the stakes are pretty low and you’re listening to someone who’s trying to have some fun. It’s definitely a young person’s song in the sense that it’s approaching some emotional realities of dating that become very mundane as you move along, but it feels remarkably well-adjusted in outlook and thus more appealing to my adult ears. It’s sweet, it’s light, it delights in the very notion of possibilities even as some of them close off.
There’s a lot of extremely literal music made by very young musicians today that I can’t really get into because the teenager-ness of it is so strong that I don’t think even a well-constructed tune can withstand the cringe factor for anyone older than the intended audience. I don’t think music marketed to teens was always like this – when I was a teenager anything made specifically for teens was deeply uncool and we mostly just got the same music marketed to people in their 20s and 30s, and I think the waves of teen pop through the 2000s and 2010s always had an eye towards scaling up to mainstream credibility. The algorithmic hyper-specificity of TikTok has pushed a whole generation of kids to make music specifically for their cohort in a very utilitarian way, and while this is interesting it feels like deliberately disposable music. A little like fast fashion?
Buy it from Amazon.
Headed For The Highest Heights
Aidan Noell featuring Nancy Whang “Sharevari”
It’s not easy to make an effective cover of a classic electronic dance song – you can update it to make it sound modern with new technology but strip out a lot of the song’s character; you can radically alter it and bring it into another genre; you can try to clone it but what’s the point of that? Aidan Noell and Nancy Whang’s interpretation of A Number of Names’ 1981 Detroit underground banger “Sharevari” stays very true to the track’s original arrangement and dutifully replicates its beat programming and keyboard parts, but they transform the vibe of the song with their vocal performances. The original mix features vocals from a guy who sounds like a dance club Dracula – a vague European accent, a seedy but dignified attitude. Noell’s voice sounds more youthful and innocent, like she’s only recently descended into this sexy underworld and is excited to tell you all about it. The original sounds like it’s fronted by a seasoned old seducer, this one is more like the seduced taking a crack at the seducer role.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Hypnotic Sensation So Obscene
Glove “Modern Toy”
Halfway through Glove’s grinding rave-up “Modern Toy,” after the second fake-out ending, Brie Deux sings a line that made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it: “How does he handle heavy machinery?” The first few verses and choruses are all about alienation from culture and labor, and a “modern guy” who is disposable and forgettable. Deux sings it all like a vicious taunt, like she’s a representative of the system that’s making these men useless. But that switch up offers hope – maybe he does have a utility, some useful skill? Maybe it’s literal, maybe it’s about how much he can cope with being a cog in this machine. Maybe this strapping man doesn’t have to be destroyed, even if that would provide some cheap kicks.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• Justin Curto wrote a great Vulture profile of the xx’s Oliver Sim in advance of the release of his first solo album Hideous Bastard. I saw Sim perform a lot of this record recently and was incredibly impressed by his new material and the change in his persona and stage presence, so I’m very excited for this record to come out in a few weeks.
• Larry Fitzmaurice has some interesting thoughts on “post-pandemic” music and “pop chaos” in this new Last Donut of the Night post, which also gets into some very personal tangents about his experience in getting sober.