Fluxblog 441: a slow night at the bar
Plus new songs by The Clientele, Vanishing Twin, Wilco, and Blonde Redhead
This week’s playlist is PLACE SERIES #8: SLOW NIGHT AT THE BAR, a mix of warm, mellow, often melancholic music for a 5 hour shift at a bar or elsewhere. This one was directly inspired by reading that someone had a good experience playing last week’s playlist during their bar shift last weekend while I was at a bar on a slow night. It was indirectly inspired by a lot of great playlists I’ve heard at bars over the years, most especially at High Dive, which is depicted in the thumbnail art. This one features a lot songs I love that haven’t fit in very well on previous playlists, so it’s nice to give them a place to shine. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
Walk All The Way To The Moon
The Clientele “Garden Eye Mantra”
The beauty of The Clientele’s seventh album I Am Not There Anymore is in how it sounds like a self-contained world made of some other person’s memories, so listening to it feels a bit like jumping into a stranger’s brain and trying to make sense of how they draw connections between feelings, personal iconography, and how they interpret their past. Alasdair Maclean doesn’t make this easy – he’s generous with melody and vivid detail, but avoids being literal or linear in favor of something more like dream logic. For me this approach feels a lot more personal and intimate than someone actually spelling it all out for you, in part because it feels more like connecting with how someone actually thinks and less like how you might build a story about your life.
A lot of the mysteries suggested in the lyrics come across as mysteries to himself as well – like, what is the garden eye? Why does it seem so ominous, but also like an image conjured by a child based on how they interpret something mundane in a garden? It feels significant in that “Garden Eye Mantra” shifts from gorgeous and breezy chamber pop with a dubby beat to something far more heavy and menacing when it comes up, like dark clouds rolling in midway through a clear day. The same part recurs near the end of the record at the conclusion of “I Dreamed of You, Maria,” but in a more relaxed form that suggests some kind of resolution. I take it as a personal mythology or superstition from childhood, first presented in the emotional reality of a kid and then later on as a fading memory of something long outgrown.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Mouth Is A Machine
Vanishing Twin “Marbles”
“Marbles” is a song about feeling alienated by a language barrier and the difficulty of learning a new language after another is so embedded in your psyche and body that you never think about how it works. This is an interesting idea for a song, particularly one that’s built on a rather mechanical-sounding funk groove. Vanishing Twin conjure a very spooky and surreal sound here – psychedelic and mysterious, very physical on the low end but cerebral to the point of feeling hopelessly lost in thought on the high end. It’s a very stoned sort of song, but the kind of stoned that has your mind drift out on logical tangents that sidestep regular thought processes.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Hollow Honeycomb
Wilco “Ten Dead”
There is perhaps no musician better equiped to articulate the particular mix of sorrow, frustration, and fatigue of learning about yet another mass shooting than Jeff Tweedy, a guy who always sings in a warm but weary tone. “Ten Dead” sounds like late period Beatles on two hours of sleep, with Tweedy singing in a shellshocked near-monotone in the verses as he relays what he’s heard on the radio: “Ten dead, ten dead, now there are ten dead.” You get no context, you get no sense of what’s going on. All you get here is an empty feeling in the gut that you try to fill with the disgust and sadness you know should be there but is hard to access through the numbness of repetition and the abstraction of the situation.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Even Stars Are Closer
Blonde Redhead “Kiss Her Kiss Her”
“Kiss Her Kiss Her” is emotionally fraught but musically fairly placid, a romantic song from the perspective of someone being left out of the action whether by choice or pragmatism. Kazu Makino’s lyrics seem to come from the perspective of someone who is urging someone – their partner, their crush, their friend? – to pursue another woman, even as she insists “it’s gonna end in tears.” But whose tears? Ambiguity serves this song well, particularly in giving the sense that Makino is portraying an unreliable narrator who’s clearly trying to stifle themselves and come across as magnanimous despite some strong negative feelings.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• I’d like to shout out Marc Hogan’s review of The Clientele’s new album in Pitchfork from a few months back as I think it’s one of the best written album reviews I’ve read in a long time and does a really good job of providing context and insight that genuinely enhance the experience of listening to the record. Marc’s been in the game for a long time now and it’s great to see him always getting better.
• Vulture’s Fran Hoepfner asks a provocative question - did Taylor Swift recently attend a New York Jets game to as a ploy to swerve search results away from criticism of her nonstop use of private jets?