Fluxblog 431: summer music 2001 / RIP Sinead
Plus new music by Suki Waterhouse x Belle & Sebastian, Activity, The Kills, Tolhurst x Budgie x Lee + Murphy
New playlist THIS WAS SUMMER 2001 - get ur freak on to the music of the summer before... well, you know. This one should be a huge nostalgia bomb for anyone on the older end of the millennial demo, and contains a lot of songs that have become somewhat dubious cultural touchstones. (Think “Sandstorm” and “Butterfly”) [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
I appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered last weekend to talk about Blur’s The Ballad of Darren, which I reviewed for NPR Music last week. The process for this sort of thing is that you get on a call with a producer and they basically make you freestyle a version of your review. This was incredibly awkward to do, but as you can expect, the NPR folks know what they’re doing and made it sound very smooth and natural as a three-minute segment.
Welcome To My Life
Suki Waterhouse x Belle & Sebastian “Every Day’s A Lesson In Humility”
“Every Day’s A Lesson In Humility” is a title that could reasonably be applied to nearly every song in the Belle & Sebastian catalog, in as much as it’s basically the thesis statement of nearly everything Stuart Murdoch and his bandmates have written for three decades. It’s a world view that balances acknowledgment of life’s many difficulties with an equal awareness of the beauty in life, particularly in the smaller moments. This song, made in collaboration with musician/actress Suki Waterhouse, comes at the title premise idea from a few directions at once. It’s a song about shaking off little humiliations, it’s a song about wishing you could communicate with your younger self, it’s a song about trying to make the best of what you have. The most interesting angle in this song for me is how they approach relationships as a frustrating and beautiful mystery – you don’t know how long anyone will ever be in your life, and the amount of time someone’s in your life isn’t necessarily proportional to their impact.
Waterhouse, whose voice isn’t far off in timbre from that of central B&S member Sarah Martin but conveys a little more angst, fits very naturally into the Murdoch milieu. This would’ve sounded lovely in Murdoch’s voice but I think Waterhouse’s glamor is key in setting the scale of it, particularly in the way in places someone who arguably has it all – a music career, a modeling career, an acting career, her boyfriend is the guy who plays Batman – and asks you to understand her as an ordinary person doing ordinary things and experience ordinary emotions. She subverts her image, but also opens it up.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Pressed Up Against The Wall
Activity “Where the Art is Hung”
Travis Johnson’s arpeggiated guitar in “Where the Art is Hung” has an interesting weight to it – light enough to feel like an object floating in the breeze, but dense enough for that to feel like something that shouldn’t be happening. There’s a distinct supernatural vibe going on here and it only intensifies when Jess Rees starts singing, sounding like a ghost passing through the mix. The most impressive part of this song is that as the percussion builds to a climax it doesn’t change the implied density of the music at all. The drums sound as though they’re trying to keep a spirit in place, like a vain attempt to set a perimeter around something that can’t be contained.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
All Of The Drama And All Of The Fuss
The Kills “LA Hex”
The Kills have been away for quite some time now, but have returned with a couple songs that sound as though we’ve missed some of their creative evolution in the meantime. Jamie Hince’s arrangement on “LA Hex,” as well as its double A side counterpart “New York,” feels deliberately lopsided and hobbled. The beat lurches a bit, the music generally feels like a hole has been shot through it but it wasn’t enough to kill the song. Hince and Alison Mosshart sound like they’re muttering just out of synch with each other while making their way through a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, the main synth part bearing down on them like hot dry air. Hince keeps the song in the Kills comfort zone by tossing in that signature guitar effect that sounds sorta like a car engine, but then pushes in the opposite direction by adding a choir near the end. The choir part really makes the song, adding an unexpected dignity and grace to a song that feels like it could suddenly collapse at any moment.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee featuring James Murphy “Los Angeles”
Here’s an interesting mix of characters – the drummer of the most classic iteration of The Cure, the drummer from Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the producer of late period works by R.E.M. and U2, with the guy who does nearly everything on LCD Soundsystem records as a guest on vocals. James Murphy’s presence is pretty overwhelming on this song, to the point that the arrangement just sounds like something he would do left to his own devices – imagine Suicide doing a shuffle, but with a classic New York City guy singing about Los Angeles as if it’s a city full of literal monsters. I like how crazed Murphy sounds here, like he’s hamming it up just enough to make it clear he’s kinda joking, but not completely.
Buy it from the band.
RIP Sinead O'Connor - a real one, a troubled soul, a singer of extraordinary expressiveness, a person who demonstrated incredible bravery and integrity throughout their entire life.
O’Connor is most famous for her definitive rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” but she was an excellent songwriter in her own right. My favorite of her songs has always been “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” one of the best and most nuanced works of art I’ve ever encountered about trying to hold a relationship (and family) together despite one’s own volatile and difficult behavior.
Going back to that song after her death made me realize the extent to which the song would predict the rest of her life - “he thinks I just became famous and that’s what messed me up,” written before she became a household name and everyone else had the same assumption of her, and this part, which now serves as a fitting self-penned epitaph for her life in general:
Everyone can see what's going on
They laugh 'cause they know they're untouchable
Not because what I said was wrong
Whatever it may bring
I will live by my own policies
I will sleep with a clear conscience
I will sleep in peace
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Alfred Soto wrote a particularly lovely tribute to O’Connor over on his blog Humanizing the Vacuum. I also recommend reading Marcello Carlin’s essay about her breakthrough album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, Tom Breihan’s Number Ones post about “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and Sound On Sound’s article about the recording of that song, all of which were published well before she passed.
• Molly Mary O’Brien teamed up with DJ Louie for a Pop Pantheon episode about No Doubt and the puzzle of Gwen Stefani - the alt-rock pop star normie queen.
• Molly is the hardest working woman in independent music media these days so I also want to recommend the new episode of And Introducing in which she and Chris Wade interview Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay about Quantum Criminals, their wonderful new book about Steely Dan.
• I got to this somewhat late but I really enjoyed the Blackbird Spyplane interview with King Krule, particularly the part about his obsession with keeping notebooks full of ideas and drawings.