Fluxblog 408: 21st Century Shoegaze
Plus new songs by Yuné Pinku, Andy Shauf, and Crushed
This week’s playlist is YOUR LIPS, MY MOUTH: NU SHOEGAZE ROMANCE, a mixtape-length selection of 21st century shoegaze tunes. It’s my (bloody) valentine to you all, and it features songs by No Joy, Tamaryn, Winter, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Alvvays, The Depreciation Guild, Serena-Maneesh, School of Seven Bells, and more. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
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For What That’s Worth
Yuné Pinku “Night Light”
The first few times I heard this song with absolutely no context the lyric that jumped out to me was “everybody’s saying we’re in love for what that’s worth,” sung in a vague and inscrutable tone. Is this something that’s so self-evident that it’s boring? Is she unsure of the situation? Is everybody dead wrong? Does she feel any sort of way about this?
A bit later I read that this song was written from the perspective of an AI and I can see how this makes sense. Yuné Pinku’s lyrics sketch out a simulated consciousness that responds to stimuli and has some intentions and imperatives, but doesn’t have much else filling up the spaces between incoming data and pre-coded responses. The character experiences “fun” and “love” as facts and doesn’t interpret much beyond acknowledging “this is happening.” Pinku’s track is like a little dance club snowglobe the AI exists in, singing dance music clichés over the chorus and engaging with existential thoughts like “it’s fake to die, we’re all still alive” like they’re just logic puzzles.
Buy it from Amazon.
How Things Could Be Completely Different
Andy Shauf “Don’t Let It Get to You”
“Don’t Let It Get to You” is built around a soft piano part that seems like an eternal loop of someone pausing and then stepping back, forever trapped in a pensive moment. It’s a song that seems to exist in the space between the aftermath of something and the start of some other, unknown new direction. Andy Shauf keeps the lyrics minimal, mostly setting up the POV of someone getting used to the notion that someone they knew would leave has left, and letting that piano part and occasional synthesizer buzzes carry the feeling of emptiness, light confusion, and vague relief. That buzzing sound is a particularly inspired part of the arrangement – it’s a sharp contrast with the acoustic guitar and piano, and makes the whole song feel more disoriented and lost.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Bathed In Silver Rays
Crushed “Respawn”
I think that if someone had played this for me and told me it was a coulda-been shoulda-been song from the late 90s or early 00s I would have believed it. Crushed are incredibly dialed into the adult contemporary by way of alt-rock aesthetics of that period, particularly in the quasi hip-hop drum programming, ostentatiously laid back bass line, and a clear, bold vocal performance that sounds like someone earnestly channeling Sarah McLachlan or the more restrained side of Alanis Morissette. This may be a pastiche but there’s no wink to it. This is real heart-on-sleeve stuff, a ballad about being given the chance to start again after a break up that embraces the “main character” grandeur of that feeling while being brought down to earth by the casual feel of the groove.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• I very strongly recommend the recent Episode One podcast in which all three hosts play Michael Imperioli giving a tour of his home. It’s packed with very good jokes, none of which I’d want to give away, but I do encourage you to keep a running tally of the names of their Imperioli’s many children as they pile up.
• I also recommend this week’s episode of E1’s sister podcast Fortune Kit in which Charles Austin and his guests create absurdly awful remixes of songs by Weezer, Electric Light Orchestra, Led Zeppelin, and Radiohead.
• Here’s Brian Hiatt at Rolling Stone with some interesting reporting on how things have become rather bleak for a lot of professional songwriters, and a lot of pop stars are to blame.