Fluxblog 435: a lot of perfect 2023 songs
Plus new music by Margaret Glaspy, Tanukichan, and Addison Rae
This week’s playlist is FLUX FOCUS TRACKS SUMMER 2023, a selection of my favorite songs from this year so far. It’s an undiluted expression of my taste right now, so I think this playlist is perfect! This is basically a large chunk of the current Fluxcaviar playlist boiled down into something much shorter and more tightly sequenced, and also something that won’t be resequenced or eventually deleted so Fluxcaviar can eventually roll into 2024. Also, crucially, I do not do Fluxcaviar on either Apple or YouTube, so people using those platforms can have a version of this. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Eating Scraps With Delight
Margaret Glaspy “Female Brain”
One thing I like a lot about Margaret Glaspy is the way her music is always contrasting delicacy and bluntness in its physicality, which carries over to her lyrics and singing. She conveys warmth and sensuality as often as she’s putting up her defenses and guarding her boundaries, and it’s not presented as a contradiction as much as a reasonable way of living in a harsh world. Glaspy’s new record Echo the Diamond almost completely strips out the R&B aspects of her music and focuses on the more rough and cathartic side of what she does. “Female Brain” stands out as a particularly blunt and edgy song – overtly resentful and confrontational in its lyrics, and so taut and tense that it sometimes feels like it might snap with a little more strain. It’s a terse and scathing little song, not quite violent but definitely irritated to the point where that doesn’t seem out of the question.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Everything Looks Fast
Tanukichan “Don’t Give Up”
Tanukichan are very unapologetic about their extreme late 90s vibe, looking and sounding as though they’re a shoegaze band signed to Grand Royal in 1997 who were pushed through a time portal into our era. Toro Y Moi’s production on their new record only exacerbates this by placing a lot of emphasis on the percussion, which mostly sounds like how alt-rock drummers started emulating dance rhythms and hip-hop drum loops starting around 1996. Besides this the most interesting element of the band’s sound is how Hannah von Loon’s pummeling bass parts contrasts with her softly murmured vocals, as though she’s using her instrument to express a bold aggressive at odds with her more demure impulses. A lot of shoegaze music sounds like a small and sensitive voice trying to break through the noise, but in her case it sounds more like she’s trying to beat down her voice with the bass.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
He’s Doing Things To Me You’d Never Understand
Addison Rae “It Could’ve Been U”
Addison Rae is famous – and in many circles fully iconic – as a dance-centric Tiktok personality, and she’s been flirting with a pivot to pop stardom for a little while now. From what I can tell some of the hesitancy has been in finding the right music to suit her persona and aesthetic, which Stargirl’s Emma Baker has described (in great detail!) as a joyful expression of “embodiment.” Which is to say she has a seemingly effortless and carefree physicality, an incredible asset to any pop star but something that’s a bit ambiguous in terms of pairing with music that could potentially be hugely popular in the moment.
Going on Baker’s conception of Rae I think the most obvious type of song for her would be something along the lines of Whitney Houston’s classic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” or Beyoncé’s “Love On Top,” but even if someone could write a song of that caliber for her, I don’t think she’s necessarily ready to sing like that. The second most obvious thing, and probably more in Rae’s wheelhouse, would be to emulate prime era Britney Spears. But if your goal is to reach teens now, you probably have to meet them where they are, and so that means the best songs on Rae’s new EP are post-Olivia Rodrigo pithy rock songs with a little extra dance-pop gloss.
“It Could’ve Been U” is co-written and produced by Alexander 23, a rock-leaning pop producer whose best-known work is contributing to Rodrigo’s mega-smash “Good 4 U.” He does fantastic work here in crafting a tight, hook-packed song that fits well next to any Rodrigo rocker but also feels like something Selena Gomez might’ve done earlier in her career. It also sounds like something you could easily nudge into a killer EDM remix if that was required. It’s interesting to hear the song in the context of the track Charli XCX produced for this EP, which sounds rather stale – I assume Charli gave her pretty old scraps? In any case, it’s a situation where in shopping around for a style it’s clear that for the moment she’s got a couple songs that are fully of this current zeitgeist, right on down to the requisite ultra-literal first-person expression of resentment towards an ex. It sounds fresh and fun, and I have no idea whether this will be Rae’s pop lane in the long run but it suits her right now.
Buy it from Amazon.
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• I recommend listening to Panda Bear of Animal Collective and Paul Maroon of The Walkmen’s conversation on this week’s episode of Talkhouse for many reasons including the tangent about Maroon being in a fantasy sports league with Ian Svenonius and most of Fugazi.
• Eric Renner Brown profiled married rival big time music publicists Ambrosia Healy and Dennis Dennehy for Billboard.
• I really loved what John Paul Brammer wrote about the broader implications of the “dating app screenshot” memes in his newsletter ¡Hola Papi!:
I’m not saying there aren’t people in this world who want to hurt you, that the world isn’t a dangerous place, that predators don’t exist, or that dating apps aren’t chock full of freaks saying the weirdest, most off-putting things you’ve ever heard. Trust me, I know. I’m on these apps. I know just how weird and off-putting things can get! I’m also not making one-to-one comparisons between, say, people who post a silly screenshot of a Grindr conversation and people who think John F. Kennedy, Jr., is going to rise from the dead and throw the Clintons into tartarus.
No, I actually don’t have much to say about individuals at all. What I want to get across is that, taking these trends all together, they seem to point to a broad consensus forming that we live in a wicked world populated by predators who are hiding in the periphery of your sight, waiting for the very second that you put your guard down, giving them the opportunity to strike.
In such a world, vigilance is an absolute must, isolation is a wise choice, and boredom is incredibly rampant, leading to what I think of as recreational surveillance. Monitoring other people’s behavior and sending up the worst of it is both a public service and an opportunity to signpost your savviness, to proclaim to the world that you’re not the one to let this kind of deviant behavior get past you.
Huge +1 on Tanukichan's "Gizmo" record. It was one of my records of the year (so far) back in June, and you nailed the description. Just a fantastic release all around.