Fluxblog 429: post-punk guitars
Plus new music by Kaytraminé, Glüme, Anohni, and En Attendant Ana
This week’s playlist is LACERATING ANGLES: THE POST-PUNK GUITAR SOUND, a collection of songs from between 1977 and 1984 that showcase the harsh and “angular” guitar aesthetic that emerged at this time. A lot of the reason I made this one was thinking about how this sound barely existed until just before I was born and by the time I was a teen this was just part of the vocabulary of rock music. I was trying to imagine what this felt like when it was all brand new. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Sunday She Want Cuddle
Kaytraminé “Ugh Ugh”
The keyboard drones in “Ugh Ugh” sound like the summer to me, but not necessarily the aspects of summer people usually romanticize in pop music. This feels less “fun in the sun” and more like the zapped, lazy feeling of walking around in oppressive heat and dense humidity. Kaytranada’s track is laid back to the point of feeling lethargic, which pushes Aminé to make his vocal performance as dynamic as possible to keep the music moving. He sounds like a guy who thrives in this sort of weather but can’t understand why everyone else can’t keep up, frequently dipping into a lightly condescending tone through the song as he makes it clear he believes that the scope of his ambitions are far greater than most anyone else’s. Even when he’s borrowing a lot from Lil Wayne’s cadence and vocal tone he sounds fully embodied and totally casual in his confidence.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Could You Please Turn It Up
Glüme “Brittany”
“Brittany” is a romantic synth pop song with a hazy atmosphere so thick that it sounds like you could choke on it, like fog from a smoke machine. Glüme presents the title character as a charismatic and wild person who invites obsessive infatuation in the way she influences her to feel more present and alive. There’s hints in the music and lyrics that this won’t last, but the song is permanently frozen in this magical moment where these two women cut loose listening to Lana Del Rey. The most peculiar aspect of this song is the second line – “I like girls but my mom was the one I couldn’t change.” This bit of context connects to the autobiographical elements of the rest of Glüme’s album, which is often about her experience with growing up with a stage mother. But in this song it suggests something a lot more complicated and confusing – like, is she drawn to Brittany because she’s in some way like her mom? Is this some oedipal thing? The whole song feels like it’s swinging between extreme self-awareness and unexamined raw impulse, an awkward but exciting frame of mind.
Buy it from Amazon.
It’s Just Fire And Darkness
Anohni and the Johnsons “It Must Change”
I first heard “It Must Change” with no context besides being familiar with Anohni and immediately clocked that it was borrowing a lot from Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” As it turns out this is much more than a vibes-based aesthetic choice, and that the record is meant to be something of an echo or continuation of what Gaye was trying to do over 50 years ago. I think this serves Anohni well in that it gives listeners an easy path into her rhetorical goals – Gaye’s sound is relaxed and familiar, but also a music specifically devised to feel conversational and overtly message-based with a weary but not abjectly miserable tone. Anohni’s lyrics tell you what most reasonable people already know – climate change is tipping towards a catastrophic stage, petty hatred and division keep us miserable and unable to make necessary changes. Somehow all that is the sugar on this pill, the bitter part is stated near the end: “We’re not getting out of here, that’s why this is so sad.” She sounds exhausted and exasperated to an extent that the best case scenario is humanity figuring out how to be at peace before everything totally falls apart. So yes, fully agreed: it must change.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
The Comfort Of A Zone
En Attendent Ana “Same Old Story”
I was trying to figure out exactly why Le Attendent Ana reminds me of Stereolab despite not actually playing music much like anything Stereolab ever produced. I think it comes down to the French accented vocals and their approach to harmony, which are not far off from how Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen sang together in the band’s middle period. Much like Sadier, Margaux Bouchaudon sings with a tone that seems lightly authoritative, sharply erudite, somewhat wry, and sometimes surprisingly warm. They both have a gift for making harshly critical lyrics land in a way that seem sensitive to how they may be received yet are not diluted by a front of false kindness. “Same Old Story” is a tightly wound but very groovy song, more peevish in tone than angry, but not so much that it gets in the way of the music’s more fun and playful qualities. The tone is just ambiguous enough that you could take this as a break up song, a self-directed song about frustration, or kind of a mean flirt.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• When this Talkhouse podcast episode with Jon Wurster interviewing Stewart Copeland of The Police hit my feed I dropped everything I was doing to listen to it immediately. As a longtime Best Show fan I know how much Jon adores The Police and getting to hear him ask Copeland about odd moments in The Police’s history and technical drumming stuff was a thrill for me.
• Thanks to Larry Fitzmaurice I am now aware of Owl City’s astonishingly terrible recent music, which basically sounds like someone asked an AI to generate a love song set at a circus in the style of The Postal Service. Everything about it sounds awkward and uncanny in a way that feels particular to this moment in time. Somehow everything this guy makes ends up sounding like an unfairly brutal parody of Ben Gibbard, which just makes me bad for Ben Gibbard.
• Speaking of Ben Gibbard, he was very thoughtful in his recent appearance on the Broken Record podcast when discussing Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanicism and The Postal Service’s Give Up, both of which came out 20 years ago.
So glad you highlighted En Attendant Ana - such a lovely album.