Fluxblog 420: let's go back to the summer of 1980
Plus new songs from Snow Strippers, Avalon Emerson, and Bruiser & Bicycle
This week’s playlist is THIS WAS SUMMER 1980, an interesting moment in time in which disco was dying down, new wave was thriving, rap and dancehall were being born, metal was ascendent, and no one knew what the 80s might be. It’s a wild transitional time when “Theme from New York, New York,” “The Breaks,” “Back In Black,” “Could You Be Loved,” “Another Brick in the Wall,” “Whip It,” “Morning Train,” “Funkytown,” “Biggest Part of Me,” and “A Forest” were happening all at the same time. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Feeling Really Sad
Snow Strippers “It’s Goin’ Bad”
“It’s Goin Bad” is a dark synthpop song along the lines of Crystal Castles’ or Ladytron’s best work but the sound is pushed into the red like a shoegaze song, blaring over the vocal to the point that the lyrics are barely intelligible but the despondent mood is still perfectly legible. If anything, that bleak mood is more clear this way. She sounds overwhelmed and defeated in a way that feels very particular to being in one’s late teens to mid 20s, kinda glib about it all and more than a little bit in love with their sadness. The music is a little overbearing in just the right way, pushing everything towards pure sensation in a way that makes the song as a whole this dreary and grim thing that feels absolutely amazing.
Buy it from Amazon.
More Ancient Than The Rocks Between Us
Avalon Emerson “Sandrail Silhouette”
“Sandrail Silhouette” has a lot of familiar elements of shoegaze – the guitar rhythm and tone and the vocal melody and delivery suggest this is the work of someone who’s heard My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless so many times that Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher’s mannerism have been fully internalized. Avalon Emerson could’ve stopped there and had a pretty good song, but she went a little further by adding a string section and horns and ended up with something sublime. I love the way the hook played by the string section feels slightly separate, as though the shoegaze elements are something superimposed over a more “solid” musical structure. The vocal part is also foregrounded in a way that goes against shoegaze convention, drawing on the context of how these sounds are arranged in other songs to imply that in this one you’re getting a crisp and clear image of something that’s typically obscured by clouds.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
The Shards Of Glass Will Cut The Sky
Bruiser & Bicycle “Aerial Shipyards”
It isn’t hard to reverse engineer Bruiser & Bicycle’s aesthetics, at least not if you were paying attention to indie rock in the mid to late 2000s. This sounds like the work of musicians who were steeped in very specific records at a formative age – The Shins, Girls, Modest Mouse, The Flaming Lips, and most especially Animal Collective. I try not to overemphasize “this sounds like that” here as it can be lazy and unfair to artists, but there’s just no getting around the degree to which the vocals in most of their songs sound like Avey Tare. It’s in the contours of the melodies, it’s in the specificity of the cadence, it’s in the timbre of the voice. If I heard this without context I probably would have just thought it was a new Avey Tare band, albeit one considerably more normal than his other bands.
But this is no complaint. I have long admired Avey Tare’s gift for melody and it’s nice to see that become an influential aspect of Animal Collective rather than the surface elements of their work. Also, the scramble of influences – however identifiable – is what makes Bruiser & Bicycle stand out as something fun, distinctive, and little wild. “Aerial Shipyards” is full of playful twists and turns, a song with the structure of an epic but played scrappy enough that it comes off as more like a low-key whimsical lark. The lyrics are wordy but very vivid in laying out what I interpret as a metaphor about how all of life is graceful and fascinating but doomed to eventually crash one way or another.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• I enjoyed Tom Breihan’s review of the country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan’s first big arena show in the US, which gave him an occasion to explain why this guy has blown up so quickly.
• The New York Times has a new piece on Connie Converse, the singer-songwriter from the early 60s Greenwich Village scene who mysteriously disappeared.
• My friends Molly and Chris did a great episode about Bono’s memoir for their show And Introducing in which they arrived at what I think are some fresh takes on him and U2.