Fluxblog 387: Angel Olsen • Warpaint • Oliver Sim • Suki Waterhouse
Also enter the Wu-Tang Universe with one of my most elaborate playlists
This week’s playlist is WU-TANG UNIVERSE, another exploration of the playlist format I debuted last week with BOWIE UNIVERSE and BJÖRK UNIVERSE. This one is a retrospective of the Wu-Tang Clan between 1991 and 2001 including classic songs from Wu-Tang and solo Wu albums, sample sources, features, and music by miscellaneous Wu affiliates. This is one of my favorite playlists I’ve made and I think it’s an excellent way to dive into the Wu body of work if you haven’t before. It’s a very long playlist but the volume of god tier astonishing music is extremely high! [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Here’s the track listing with some explanation of song selection…
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 in very precarious economic situation. Your donations are always appreciated, but I can say for sure that right now they’re more appreciated than ever.
Was It Always So Broken
Angel Olsen “All the Good Times”
“All the Good Times” has a soft and cozy texture to it – the gentle hum of the organ, the warmth of the bass, the light touch on the drums – that complements Angel Olsen’s sweet but sleepy vocal, making it all sound like she’s just woke up from a dream and reality is coming back into focus. That’s basically what’s going on in the lyrics, with her coming out of a relationship and it’s a little too soon to get an accurate sense of what was going on. Was it always a mess? When did they stop caring? How long did they just go along with it because it was the path of least resistance? This definitely could be performed as an angry song but it’s not at all, Olsen plays it with a lot of lingering affection that makes it easier to get how it all happened and why it hasn’t been easy to break away from. And getting that context just makes it more sad.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Under Your Clothes And Stuck In Your Hair
Warpaint “Send Nudes”
If you asked me what a song called “Send Nudes” by a band of women would be like I would have guessed something kinda darkly funny about some kind of awful relationship, but that’s not at all where Warpaint went with this. The title is used with some humorous irony around the silliness of the title phrase but it’s actually pretty earnest – this is a song about an intense and growing love, and even if it’s silly the request “send a couple nudes, baby” is not a joke. Warpaint play this song with jazzy nuance and a minimalism that makes your ear focus in on the details in the bass line and the percussion. The music feels as intimate and romantic as the lyrics, they really nail a spooning/whispering in ears sensation through the whole thing.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
A Little Louder Than It Sounded Yesterday
Oliver Sim “Sensitive Child”
Oliver Sim approaches a lot of bad memories and lingering resentments in “Sensitive Child” but doesn’t get too specific, opting to keep the lyrics focused on evocative images and abstracted details that bring him back to sense memories. It’s like the lyrics are just prompts for him to remember feelings and emote, and that emoting is the actual communication. I recognize this kind of tension, I am familiar with this kind of anger that gets stuffed around the corners of memories. Jamie XX’s arrangement moves around a central Del Shannon vocal sample but mostly responds to Sim’s emotional state and pushes into ugly, distorted territory that feels unusual for both himself and Sim. Moving into relatively unfamiliar musical terrain suits this song well conceptually – if Sim is going to get out of a comfort zone and confront very personal things, he may as well do the same with the tonal palette and rhythmic style.
Buy it from Amazon.
Die A Double Death
Suki Waterhouse “Moves”
“Moves” is a song with a sentiment that should seem entirely self-absorbed – I want something very badly and must separate myself from you to pursue it – but it’s expressed in a way that feels very generous to the person it’s being addressed to. Suki Waterhouse sings it as a big power ballad love song, something that sounds more like the beginning than the end of something. Maybe it’s more like putting something on hold in the hope of eventually having both? But the affection is unmistakable in her vocal, and the attitude of the song is focused on fighting for what she wants to the point that the melancholy in it is pushed beneath the layers of sound in the chorus.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• I strongly recommend you listen to Brian Hiatt’s long interview with Mariah Carey on the Rolling Stone podcast. Mariah is always a delight to listen to and she tells a lot of great stories in this one, including one that is prompted by Brian asking how she came up with a melody part on “Honey” and her starting “well, I was on a catamaran…”
• The Smashing Pumpkins have launched a new limited podcast series called Thirty-Three in which they will premiere songs from their forthcoming triple concept album ATUM with commentary from Billy Corgan on the new songs as well as selections from the Pumpkins discography. Corgan gets into a “they don’t want us to know about UFOs” tangent within the first ten minutes of the first episode, so you know it’s gonna be good.
• Here’s Keith Harris going long on seeing Pavement in St. Paul this week.