Fluxblog 465: love in moooooooooootion
Plus new songs by Crumb, Tyla, and Anysia Kym
This week’s playlist is LOVE IN MOTION, a tight two hour set of joyful sexy bangers - French house, filter disco, bloghouse, indie sleaze, etc - from 2003 through 2013. This one is just a lot of fun to listen to and I’ve personally played it a lot since I made it! I hope you have a good time with it. [Spotify | Apple | YouTube]
4 Months Apart In The Same Bed
Crumb “Amama”
That bright trebly sound in “Amama” is not guitar, it’s electric sitar. It’s not played in a way that screams “you’re listening to a sitar,” which I find it usually the case with the instrument, but it’s definitely apparent once you know what it is. It sounds like Lila Ramani is transposing a regular guitar part to the sitar, so you don’t get a big drone but you do get this wobbly haze of very high pitched notes. That ultra high end is very pronounced in contrast with Jesse Brotter’s bass, which bounces off a particularly funky groove by drummer Jonathan Gilad. Like a lot of the best Crumb songs, it really moves while also feeling very stoned and zoned out. Ramani’s lyrics aren’t super legible in the mix, but they’re quite good – a little story about falling in love with someone who’s only ever too close or too far away.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Drag Me Off The Floor
Tyla “On and On”
“On and On” is an unusually melancholy song about partying, one in which the South African singer Tyla sings about enjoying a party so much that the thought of leaving it and going back to regular life is incredibly depressing. It’s late in the party, she can feel it winding down, and she’s at the bargaining stage of grieving the end of the night. The beat is danceable but the song is more of a ballad, and Tyla sings it with just the right degree of poignancy. She’s not overselling it, but she’s not minimizing the emotion either. You get a sense that there’s some stakes to this that she’s not getting into, something this party is giving her that’s otherwise in very short supply in her life.
Buy it from Amazon.
Your Best Investment
Anysia Kym “Test Your Patience”
Anysia Kym is mainly a producer, and it shows a bit on her new record Truest in that the track composition and arrangements are very interesting and convey a lot of confidence in the studio, while she seems a little shy on the microphone. This isn’t necessarily an issue, at least not on “Test Your Patience” where some vocal timidity seems central to getting across the feeling of the song. The whole song feels smooth yet tentative, like she’s tip-toeing her way through a lot of volatile motions both within and without. The vibe is relaxed, but only in a calm-before-the-storm sort of way.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• At long last, Tom Breihan has written about Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” one of the most cursed and complicated #1 hits of all time in his The Number Ones column at Stereogum. Really great stuff, but I understand why he was not looking forward to writing this one.
• Craig Jenkins pulled off something very difficult in this essay about Kendrick Lamar’s recent Future and Metro Boomin song – he made me interested in the drama of a rap beef.
• Keith Harris wrote a very thoughtful and conflicted review of Sleater-Kinney’s recent show in St Paul, which sounds like a pretty deflating gig relative to the one I just recently saw them play in Brooklyn. This will be interesting or relatable to anyone who’s ever loved an artist deeply but then started drifting from them for whatever reason.
• Todd in the Shadows is back with a new Trainwreckords episode about Faith Hill’s Cry. I love all the episodes in this series!
• I enjoyed the Blackbird Spyplane interview with Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend, particularly the bit about how to approach optimism in middle age.
Great link roundup!!! I loved Faith Hill's "Cry" hahahahaha