Fluxblog 396: Radiohead Universe
Plus new songs by PinkPantheress and Dummy
This week’s playlist is RADIOHEAD UNIVERSE, a chronological career retrospective including solo works, film scores, remix work, collaborations, records produced by Nigel Godrich, and music by close collaborators Clive Deamer and Tom Skinner. I find it very helpful to have all of this in one place as some of the chronology blurs in my mind and in getting a sense of the full breadth of their accomplishments together and apart. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Here’s the full annotated 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 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.
I revived the Fluxblog Tumblr this week, mainly because it occurred to me I was neglecting a good outlet for sharing images I was posting on Instagram and bringing my playlist projects to a different audience. If you’re on Tumblr, give it a follow!
Popped Up On Your Screen
PinkPantheress “Do You Miss Me?”
PinkPantheress started her career attempting to make music with a Kaytranada feel to it, and here she is on this song actually collaborating with him. She says she missed the mark on her own, but her instinct was always correct – his elegant grooviness meshes perfectly with her taste for jumpy late 90s beats and complements the cool tone of her singing voice. It makes me think of food – a very hot and spicy dishes cooled by a bit of cream, or something sweet given more dimension by a sharp saltiness. Her lyrics take a similar route, contrasting a genuine lovey-dovey feeling with intense possessiveness and jealousy that comes through midway in the song. The dark turn only makes sense with the stakes set by how deeply she’s into the person she’s addressing, but the sweetness doesn’t quite stand up to the sourness by the end.
Buy it from Amazon.
Dummy “Mono Retriever”
I’ve been wondering for a while why there aren’t more bands just shamelessly imitating Stereolab, particularly as I think artists can do that with relative impunity as Stereolab built their own sound out of shamelessly absorbing and reinterpreting ideas from older records. Dummy clearly is on the right track here – “Mono Retriever” owes a massive debt to the groop circa Mars Audiac Quintet/Refried Ectoplasm, but has enough of their own character and flavor to keep it from feeling like a weak impression. A lot of this comes down to the central voice being masculine and cold, but there’s a different kind of color palette to this. If Stereolab is more like bold primaries, this is a little more muted and blurry, particularly as the song nudges a little closer to shoegaze. Anyway, I’m an easy mark for this. I’ll take more, please.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• I was not very familiar with the jazz musician Jacob Collier before hearing his two-part interview on Broken Record this week but I quite enjoyed the conversation, particularly as it’s mostly a fairly accessible discussion of music theory.
• Off Panel is a comics podcast that regularly gets big name interviews but I particularly recommend this week’s interview with Ed Brubaker. He talks about his various projects with artists Sean Phillips and Marcos Martin, the state of the comics industry, and near the end casually tosses off a bit of industry information about how he got hired to write Uncanny X-Men in the 2000s that blew my mind. It’s funny - Brubaker never really wanted to write the series and only did it as a favor, but his contributions are central to some current storylines.