Fluxblog 394: MorMor • Saay • Max Tundra • Spoon
Plus a playlist heavy on dark romance and forward momentum
This week’s playlist is DRIVE YOUR CAR IN LOOPS, a very vibe-forward selection of songs heavy on dark romance and/or forward momentum. This one was sparked by the cover image, which is a photograph by Matthew Rolston from the August 1989 issue of Interview. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I was the guest on this week’s episode of Jesse Hawken’s film podcast Junk Filter. Unlike our previous collaborations we did not talk about Steely Dan, but rather American Hustle, a generally misunderstood movie we both love by the unhinged maniac filmmaker David O. Russell. You can find the episode on all podcast platforms!
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.
Crimsons Skies Disguise A Dying Flame
MorMor “Days End”
The first half of “Days End” makes MorMor sound like he’s dwarfed by the sound, as though he’s crawling through some huge tunnel of bass groove and percussion, singing out his angst only to have it echo off the walls back at him. That all drops out for the second half in which it’s just him and layers of ambient keyboards – he sounds free, he sounds like he’s singing directly into your ear, but he still sounds trapped in his feelings. The temperature of the song shifts along with the implied space of it, the warmth of all that bass replaced by the chill of the keyboard tones. There’s a before/after thing going on here too, the lyrics suggesting the that second half is where he lands once he accepts the person he’s singing to has truly left him. It sounds like a very lonely sort of freedom.
Buy it from Amazon.
I’m Not That Type
Saay “Mind Ur Business”
“Mind Ur Business” belongs to a pop tradition of songs expressing something like “actually, I’m doing great without you and breaking up was a good idea!,” a type of song that’s become particularly ubiquitous over the past ten years or so. Saay, singing in both Korean and English, comes across as more relieved than aggrieved, and the song’s very ‘90s R&B groove conveys confident low-key sexiness with only a trace of melancholy. It’s not a flirty kind of song but you can feel her reconnecting with that part of herself, or more broadly settling into a true comfort in her skin after spending some time having to adjust for someone else whether they asked for it or not.
Buy it from Amazon.
Subsidizing The Drum Programming You Hear Today
Max Tundra “Lights” (A.G. Cook Remix)
Within a few minutes of having the thought “I wonder if the hyperpop people know about Max Tundra?” I had an answer in the form of this remix, which comes from a mini-album of remixes and covers of Tundra’s songs that was released earlier this year. (I totally missed it despite following Tundra on social media, but it’s easy to miss these sort of things.)
Tundra’s three albums from the 00s are singular in their aesthetics – extraordinarily tuneful songs gleefully subverted by his odd glitchy programming and clever lyrics, playful in spirit but meticulous in construction. It’s easy to draw a line from these records to what A.G. Cook has been doing over the past several years, especially the early days of PC Music which really went in on pushing the sounds of modern pop production to grotesque and silly extremes. It makes a lot of sense that Cook reworked “Lights” in particular – if there’s any clear precedent to his music, a blueprint for his sound, it’s this song. The remix is only a mild update, the structure and novel conceit of it are fully intact.
The vocal part of “Lights” is sped-up and clipped, it sounds a bit like playing only the vocal of the song at double speed and losing some syllables along the way. The lyrics are dense and diaristic, Tundra veering between poetic language and quotidian detail as he describes the day jobs he worked to pay for his music making and being so deep into studio mode that the only romantic imagery that come to mind is in the beauty of the lights on his array of equipment. It’s lovely but awkward, and some of the meta tension of the song is in how vulnerable Tundra is willing to get in the lyrics, but also defensive enough to distract attention from the actual words he’s singing.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Hear His Name Spoken In Every Room
Spoon “The Devil & Mr. Jones” (Adrian Sherwood Reconstruction)
The only thing that’s surprising to me about Spoon having Adrian Sherwood create a dub version of their most recent album Lucifer on the Sofa is that it’s taken this long for Spoon to actually have a dub version of any thing. You can hear the influence of dub on their studio work going back to Kill the Moonlight, to the point that the final mix some songs in their catalog sounds like a dub version of a more normal rock recording. Sherwood, one of the great icons of dub, does some great work with Spoon’s raw material and in the case of “On the Radio” and “The Devil and Mr. Jones” pushes the songs to become something much better than on the original record. The latter song takes on an entirely different character with Sherwood at the boards, unlocking some ska vibes that were only lurking beneath the surface of the original arrangement. There’s a lot of heavy reverb and psychedelic warping in the mix but the song is pretty much intact, even if Britt Daniel’s voice often gets abstracted to the point of pure sound. It works as a Spoon song, it works as dub – pretty much the ideal for a remix.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• Here’s Brian Hiatt at Rolling Stone on how TikTok zeroed in on one moment in a new Carly Rae Jepson song and basically decided it was the hook of the song instead of the actual chorus.
• Tom Breihan has made it up to Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” in his The Number Ones column and correctly gives it a 10/10 score.