Fluxblog 457: the dawn of ALTERNATIVE
Plus new songs by Bullion & Carly Rae Jepsen, Omni, Drahla, and Boeckner
This week’s playlist is THE DAWN OF ALTERNATIVE 1988-1990, a collection looking back on a transitional era as "alternative" becomes a marketing term and radio format bridging out of college radio and underground scenes. There’s a particular sound to this era, very crisp and vaguely fancy, as though a lot of the major label stuff has a nice matte finish to it. This one features all the major acts of the period – R.E.M., Morrissey, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Sinead O'Connor, Tracy Chapman, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 10,000 Maniacs, New Order, Erasure, They Might Be Giants, The B-52’s, Faith No More, The Church, U2, Midnight Oil, XTC, Pixies, Love & Rockets, Jane’s Addiction – plus others who would go on to define the next wave as the 90s fully kicked in.
This playlist was directly inspired by the past several months of Tom Breihan’s Alternative Number Ones column for Stereogum, which has been working through the earliest days of Billboard’s Modern Rock/Alternative chart. It’s a paywalled column but it’s well worth your money, and Stereogum is a good publication to support, especially these days.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
Open To Persuasion
Bullion featuring Carly Rae Jepsen “Rare”
I hear “Rare” in terms of temperature – the bass is at a low simmer, the synth textures and Bullion’s voice have a slight chill. Neither is at an extreme, but the contrast is still quite sharp. His voice and cadence feels very formal and polite to me, he sounds like an introverted and cerebral person trying to reason his way though something quite emotional. Carly Rae Jepsen isn’t that much warmer in tone on this track, but she comes across as more present and down to earth. You get the feeling that she’s trying to acclimate to his vibe, trying to feel things as he feels them. With this in mind I quite like the ambiguity of the chorus – “deep in the heart, deep in the heart” – because it sounds like they’re trying to make love work, but at least one of them has to dig deeper and work harder for it to click.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Unbox Paradise
Omni “Plastic Pyramid”
I’m a big fan of songs in which singers interact like they’re talking to each other, particularly when the lyrics aren’t particularly obvious and it’s like listening in on a very strange conversation. That’s the case in “Plastic Pyramid,” a twitchy post-punk song that seems to conflate fast fashion with travel in which Omni’s Philip Frobos trades lines with Izzy Glaudini of Automatic in a listless “are they on a bad date?” tone. (Love the way she seems to audibly roll her eyes at the question “are you hydrated, baby?”) in Glaudini was a terrific choice for this role – she’s always got this droll cool girl quality, but the song allows her to embody boredom, passivity, and vague contempt at different points.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Drahla “Default Parody”
Here’s another post-punk song. I read a tweet today by the English music critic Tom Ewing who was lamenting how post-punk started as a framework for experimentation and pushing beyond genre constraints, but its cyclical revivals treat the sound as a genre like any other. It’s iterative rather than explorative. I think this is a good point, but I don’t think the intentions of the artists who establish a genre ever really factor into how other artists end up playing with their conventions. Every genre convention wasn’t conventional at some point.
Drahla are very good at what they do even if what they do isn’t at all original. I think the post-punk aesthetic is something that’s mostly interesting depending on the energy of the execution, how much musicians throw themselves into the deep end of the sound. “Default Parody” has a cool groove and appealing deadpan vocals, but it clicks mainly because the guitarists sound like they’re having a great time wringing the sickest, most abrasive sounds out of their instruments. Even if a lot of the song feels rigid and mechanical, those guitars make it all sound wild.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
A Machine That Only Brings You Sorrow
Boeckner “Lose”
One of the oldest conventions of this blog is using a line from a song as the title of the post, ideally something abstract and evocative. Sometimes I don’t have a lot to work with, but in the case of “Lose,” it’s like top to bottom cool abstract evocative lines. “Living blind in isolation,” “every star in retrograde,” “this is a city of doorways,” “the vanishing neighbors,” “some Eldritch strange eraser,” and that’s just the first verse. Dan Boeckner built the song to feel like a speeding car, the lyrics feel a little like quick glimpses out the window as you zoom away from somewhere, not necessarily towards someplace in particular. It’s hard to shake how doomed this song feels – everything is crumbling around him, he was bound to lose his love – but Boeckner sings with so much heart and go-for-broke intensity that it overpowers any of his cynical impulses.
Buy it from Sub Pop.
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ª Glenn McDonald, a very early music blogger whose The War Against Silence site directly influenced me early on, was recently laid off from Spotify where he was instrumental in writing many of its algorithms. He's posted two very interesting essays recently, the first mostly about Spotify’s Daylist playlists, and the second largely about his work with “collective listening” and genre curation on the platform. I think these posts may demystify a lot of how Spotify and similar services actually work and how much of that is dependent on the creativity, craft, and vision of people like Glenn.
• Here’s Nick Sylvester casually throwing a nuke at you in his newsletter post about Playboi Carti’s radical artistic decisions.
• Here’s a piece the New York Times ran a month ago about the “Live to Tell” AIDS memorial sequence of Madonna’s current tour, which I saw earlier this week. This part of the show blew me away, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for days.
• Speaking of Madonna, I am extremely impressed by the obsessive research that went into this Wikipedia list of unreleased Madonna material. I’d love for her to eventually anthologize this stuff, but I think she may be too much of a perfectionist for that.
• And here’s an honest misunderstanding on the r/pavement board.
