Fluxblog #403: John Cale • New Pornographers • Nighttime • Belle & Sebastian
Plus a playlist of early 60s jazz
This week’s playlist HI-LIFE: JAZZ SELECTIONS 1961-1965, a mostly mellow assortment of songs by mid-century jazz greats. While all of this is within a specific bracket of time and covers major figures of the era, it's not meant to be taken as a historical document in the way a lot of my playlists are, it's just songs and a feeling, nothing definitive. But if you want to get a sense of jazz in this era, it at least points you in the direction of which artists to look into. It feels reductive to call this “background music,” but this really is a good playlist to have on the background while you work or hang out with people. Would work at a bar or restaurant too! [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I will be DJing the NIGHT RIPPERS party with my friends Chris Wade, Molly O’Brien, and Ryan Antiart at the Elsewhere Loft in Brooklyn on this coming Wednesday, January 18th! This will be my first time DJing in quite a while – the general idea of this party is connecting the dots on a few generations of “indie sleaze” and since I’m on 9:30-11 PM I intend to be very ruthless with dropping The Hits. This event is FREE, but you can RVSP here.
I appeared on my old friends Jack Shepherd and Tanner Greenring’s podcast about rom-coms Strange Bedfellows this week to discuss Singles, Cameron Crowe’s film about young-ish people seeking romance in Seattle just before grunge blew up in 1991. Check it out!
The Way You Live Today
John Cale “Night Crawling”
The most interesting aspect of “Night Crawling” to me is how much of the keyboard tones and beat patterns sound like the very early 90s, or maybe drifting out slightly further into mid-90s trip-hop production. I’m not sure whether John Cale was specifically reaching for that feel but it sounds great, particularly in contrast with his weathered voice. His lyrics express a frustration with someone he’s known for a long time and the perspective of his advanced age doesn’t seem to help him get through the confusion and grievance. There’s a lot of disappointment in his voice and in the general feeling of the track, as though the weight and tangle of history has only made things more difficult. Where’s the wisdom, where’s the clarity? In this song every conflict just ends up a stalemate, and everything becomes a game that became tedious many years ago.
Buy it from Domino.
It’s A Noise Between
The New Pornographers “Really Really Light”
“Really Really Light” is something of a novelty in The New Pornographers catalog as one of very few songs co-written by Carl Newman and Dan Bejar, and is all the more intriguing in that Newman built the song around a Bejar chorus. I didn’t know this before I heard it and once I had that bit of information this was tremendously obvious – that bend of the melody around “my heart’s just like a feather” is extremely him, to the point that I feel like I’ve already heard him sing this somewhere before. They’re both playing against type and meeting in the middle here – Bejar supplying the pretty harmonized chorus, Newman building verses around an oddly shaped riff that seems to cut diagonally through the rhythm so everything feels slightly lopsided and disorienting. The verse lyrics by Newman are typically opaque and mostly signal an uneasy ambivalence, but that chorus is like deliberately opting into a “head empty, just vibes” mindset as Newman and Neko Case aim for something effortlessly lovely and, yes… really really light.
Buy it from The New Pornographers.
Guiding Our Hearts Through The Passage Of Time
Nighttime “When the Wind is Blowing”
“When the Wind is Blowing” is a pastoral folk song first and foremost but the most interesting parts of the arrangement are when the musicians of Nighttime emulate the sound and feeling of wind. They’re not going for a stormy sort of wind but more like a stiff breeze passing through the night, something that lightly rustles up the trees and messes up your hair. Eva Louise Goodman’s voice sounds a bit dour but also fairly serene as she sings about the night landscape with low-key awe and humility. She looks around and sees life mid-cycle, noting her place in it, and opening herself up to where the winds of life may send her.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Blood And Intimacy
Belle & Sebastian “Will I Tell You A Secret”
Most of the songs on Belle & Sebastian’s Late Developers are sunny and sleek up-tempo numbers but “Will I Tell You A Secret” is an outlier, a short and relatively unadorned folk pop song that’s much closer to the band’s early style. The arrangement is very direct and simple, mostly acoustic guitar, harpsichord, and Stuart Murdoch’s voice focused sharply on articulating a melody so beautifully shaped that it sounds immediately familiar, as though it’s been with us for hundreds of years. (Maybe it has?) The lyrics return to a frequent Murdoch theme – addressing someone you’ve once had a romantic relationship with but over the years the relationship became more of a close friendship. As ever Murdoch approaches this with kindness and grace rather than bitterness or disappointment, but there is a melancholy to this song however much he tries to obscure it with gratitude and a generosity of spirit. He’s lamenting something that’s been lost – a child that was never born, and a void in his life where their casual intimacy used to be.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Phillip Sherburne wrote a terrific profile of Yo La Tengo commemorating the 40th anniversary of their existence for Pitchfork.
• Chris Wade and Matt Christman have launched a new history podcast called Hell On Earth about the 30 Years War and how much that moment in history directly echoes the situation we all find ourselves in at this stage of the 21st century. I know Chris and Matt have been working intensely on this for months on end – it’s going to be worth your time!