Fluxblog 388: Talking Heads Universe / Missy Elliott Universe
Plus new music by The Orielles, Courting, and СОЮЗ - and a visit to the Pavement museum!
I have two new “universe” style playlists for you this week. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with this format – making these is a bit like putting together a big puzzle. I have a lot of ideas for this so I’ll probably be making a lot of these for a little while.
First up it’s MISSY ELLIOTT UNIVERSE, a retrospective for one of the great geniuses of hip-hop covering her parallel careers as a rapper and producer including her production/songwriting work, features, and some sample sources. It’s an incredible and groundbreaking body of work – please pass it on to someone you think would love it, I really want this one to find its audience. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Here’s the full track listing…
Next up it’s TALKING HEADS UNIVERSE.
The thing with Talking Heads is that they’re commonly associated with a scene, but not really the one they were an integral part of through most of their career. This playlist, which includes various side projects and work by their many collaborators, makes a case for David Byrne serving as one of the most fascinating connectors in pop history, and as this is a playlist this doesn’t even get into their collaborations with visual and performance artists. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Here’s the track listing…
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.
Yesterday I visited the pop-up Pavement museum in downtown Manhattan which is part of a larger Pavement project by filmmaker Alex Ross Perry. The museum is full of real and fake Pavement ephemera, and all the fake stuff is very well fabricated and plausible. Perry is playing with the tropes of rock myth making and the haziness of memory, basically Mandela Effect-ing little bits of Pavement history like Stephen Malkmus appearing in an Apple “think different” ad in 1997. It’s a truth Perry has made for you because it’s just as good, and he’s rearranged it so it looks like like today through Sunday at 475 Greenwich Street.
Speaking of Pavement, I’ve been maintaining a spreadsheet of their set lists every night of their current reunion tour. They vary quite a bit every night and they keep adding new songs! I am about to see five Pavement shows this week and I figure I’m likely to see everything they’ve been playing and more.
A Whisper In A Seashell
The Orielles “The Room”
I’ve been covering The Orielles here and there on this site since their earliest releases and while there was definitely growth apparent along the way nothing they’ve done before set me up to expect anything like their two most recent singles “Beam/s” and “The Room.” There’s some musical continuity with their past work but the sharp aesthetics of these new songs and the increased scale of their ambitions make them sound like a new band. They say they wanted the new music to reflect their interest in cinema and I absolutely hear it in the dynamic shifts that hit like cuts between shots, and in a palette that somehow sounds the way a high contrast black and white film looks. The vocals keep shifting along with the beats, bass, keys, and fake strings – sometimes it’s a casually confident recitation of poetic lines, sometimes it’s more of a whisper, sometimes it’s clearly sung with a touch of English R&B in the inflection. They’re pulling from a lot of inspirations but landing on something that feels very distinct, like they might have really figured out exactly who they are as a band this time around.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Watch All The Ships Sink
Courting “Famous”
The members of Courting are very young men and “Famous” is very much a song from the point of view of someone who’s only just starting to realize they’ve aged into adulthood. I remember this being a confusing thing – wait, people I know are doing x, y, and z now? I’m expected to make actual decisions? Some of it is time flying, some of it is feeling confused why anyone would trust someone your age to do anything at all. The bittersweet current that runs through “Famous” is Sean Murphy-O’Neill feeling like he’s losing his grasp on social connections that have been meaningful to him. His vocal is kinda like a young English version of James Murphy and he approaches “All My Friends” sentiment from a very different angle, already nostalgic and wanting to pull everyone he knows back together again not long after they’ve left.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
A Pile Of Unexplored Objects And Words
СОЮЗ featuring Kate NV “I Knew It (Я так и знал)”
A lot of the time when I write about songs in languages I do not speak I try to find the lyrics online and run them through translation to English if just to get a rough idea of the sentiment. In the case of this song the full lyrics are presented in English on Bandcamp despite it being sung entirely in Russian, which is definitely helpful but also a little odd. But the lyrics are in fact pretty key to getting what СОЮЗ and Kate NV are going for here, and only hearing this as a lovely slightly jazzy kinda Brazilian 70s lite FM sort of song strips it of pathos and irony. The lyrics set up some imminent doomsday scenario but digress into a lament on the futility of documenting the past and creating art with the idea of preserving something of yourself through time when everything can be wiped out so easily. Some things may remain, but when they are found will they even be understood? The light and breezy tone of the music seems a bit at odds with the heaviness of the lyrics, but then again so much of the sentiment comes down to trying to shrug and let go of any attempts at immortality and just live in the moment.
Buy it from Bandcamp.