Fluxblog 392: King Gizzard • Taylor Swift • Genesis Owusu • Say Sue Me
Plus a playlist of some very good electronic music
This week’s playlist is BABY, WE’RE ASCENDING, an assortment of largely mellow and moody songs from some of the key figures in electronic music over the past 20 years. I think there’s a lot of potential utilities for this one – work soundtrack, rainy day music, zoning out on transportation, background music for a gallery or fancy boutique, to name a few. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
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 as I’m still in the market for a new full time job. Your donations are always appreciated, but I can say for sure that right now they’re more appreciated than ever.
Positive Pressure Airless Death
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard “Iron Lung”
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have been churning out records at a dizzying pace for a decade but I’ve only recently jumped into their body of work. But the timing seems right as I’ve hit them at an inflection point in their career in which their songwriting has reached maturity at the same moment they’ve fully embraced jamming out and merging their psychedelic aesthetics with jazz fusion. “Iron Lung” is a perfect example – immediately hooky and sophisticated in its grooviness, but set up to give the band room to explore within the structure. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of someone incapacitated in a literal iron lung, so there’s some irony in the music being all about movement and passage. But the idea seems to be that the body is broken but the mind is free to roam, and the Gizzard boys’ guitars take this guy hovering near death to the edges of the universe.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
They Said The End Is Coming
Taylor Swift “Sweet Nothing (Piano Remix)”
The Taylor Swift songs that have connected with me the most over her past few records are the ones that offer a window into her steady long term relationship with Joe Alwyn, her songwriting collaborator on a handful of songs including “Sweet Nothing,” my clear favorite on Midnights. Swift is famous for writing about big tumultuous romantic dramas, but songs like this and “Invisible String,” “Peace,” and “Lover” find something deep and affecting in much smaller moments. These are the songs with the biggest stakes and she focuses on the fragility of this happiness in each of them, and in the case of “Sweet Nothing” and “Peace” she dwells on how her extraordinary life puts this intimacy in constant peril. The sweet low key romantic scenes in this song get crowded out by paranoia in the chorus – “they said the end is coming, everyone is up to something” – and a fear of slimy entertainment industry creeps in the bridge. But the point of the song is that this relationship is her refuge from all that, something solid and real and dependable in a life otherwise full of conflicting pressures and people who know who she is but don’t really know her.
I like both versions of “Sweet Nothing,” though I strongly prefer the “piano remix” found on the Target edition of Midnights. The song is something of an outlier on the album both musically and thematically so the arrangement of the proper album version has the neon lights palette of the rest of the record. The piano part sounds cuter, the high notes twinkling like little Christmas lights. The “piano remix” shifts everything closer to a Folklore palette, though the strings and woodwinds that add color and weight to the arrangement have a tonality I don’t think she’s approached before – gracefulness but not grandeur, downplaying drama but highlighting a wounded humility. I’m glad Swift thought enough of this song to make sure it was included on the main version of the album, but this more low key and earthy version feels more “accurate” to the mood and sentiment of the piece.
Buy it from Target.
Can’t Be Sitting Gentle In A Storm
Genesis Owusu “Get Inspired”
I like the lyrical conceit of “Get Inspired.” Genesis Owusu gives voice to all the reasons making art can seem silly when there are so many problems to be faced in the world every day and then shrugs it off – sure, OK. He concedes a little, but only just to dial down the scale of his message to some bit of useful and realistic advice: get inspired. Owusu’s punchy rhythmic cadence sells the tough love and the irony, the track pulls some tricks from the likes of TV on the Radio and Devo to project a manic urgency. He’s not telling you how to get inspired, but he’s nudging you towards the why of it all. How is anything positive big or small supposed to happen without that spark?
Buy it from Amazon.
40 Different Shades Of Black
Say Sue Me “Elevate Me Later”
This version of Pavement’s “Elevator Me Later” – aka “Ell Ess Two” – does the best cover move, which is to fully honor the melodic and structural character of a song while totally changing its feel. Say Sue Me transform the song into a melancholic bossa nova tune, a move that makes total sense in retrospect the moment you hear how the chords and melodies fall into this template. The original from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain aimed for a sort of antsy melodrama – emphasis placed on “those who sleep with electric guitars” and “the city we forgot to name” – but this one feels more like the gentle shrug of someone who’s learned to lower their expectations, the emphasis placed on “so why you complaining? Ta!” I love the busy high note noodling they added around the groove here, it fills out the space in the song nicely while bringing a bit of nervous energy to the mix.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• The New York Times has a great and fairly elaborate feature celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stevie Wonder’s classic Talking Book.
• The Times also has a pretty deep interview with Bono of U2 by David Marchese, who specializes in pretty deep interviews with famous career artists.
• Here’s Amy Odell at Slate on why Kanye may be able to salvage his standing in the fashion world despite…everything.