Fluxblog 469: summer is ready when you are!
Plus new songs by Gesafflestein, Pearl Jam, Phish, and Tatyana
This week’s playlist is SUMMER IS READY WHEN YOU ARE, a 90 minute mix of surf rock, garage rock, and indie from various eras for a classic beach party vibe. This one features a lot of classic and modern surf rock bands, plus some curveballs that suit the general feel. Expect a ton of reverb.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
Laugh Out Loud With My Digital Friends
Gesaffelstein “Digital Slaves”
Gesafflestein’s new record Gamma is 100% sexy goth villain music, a stylish mish-mash of Depeche Mode, Suicide, Iggy Pop, Nine Inch Nails, Matthew Dear, The Cramps, and a dash of David Bowie. It’s camp, but only so much, and mostly just in the deadpan vocals. The textures and programming is sleek and seductive, a sound that perfectly suits the producer’s glossy black metallic mask. “Digital Slaves” is the most fun song the record, an old time rock and roll number with a spooky electronic makeover and gleefully nihilist lyrics. Like a lot of the best goth music, it’s winking and a little silly, but also fully committed to the darkness.
Buy it from Amazon.
Cutting Holes In The Clouds
Pearl Jam “Waiting for Stevie”
I’m of two minds about Andrew Watt’s involvement in Pearl Jam’s new record Dark Matter as producer and co-writer. On the one hand, I have yet to be impressed by Watt and find that his collaborations with much older legend-status acts like Ozzy Osbourne, The Rolling Stones, and now both Eddie Vedder solo and Pearl Jam feels like the human equivalent of training an AI on those artists’ material. You don’t get new ideas from a Watt production, you just get something closer to the average listener’s expectations of the artist he’s producing. Watt is a fan surrogate, and I think he’s attractive to major labels who want to get the most commercial potential out of their legacy acts and a flattering presence for artists, who get to work with someone rather worshipful who truly believes in them. It makes sense, but in the case of the Stones it’s notable that the songs on Hackney Diamonds that feel the most rote and formulaic have Watt songwriting credits and the one song that actually captures the band’s specific magic is a pure Jagger/Richards composition.
On the other hand, I was listening to Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament talk about the process of making the album with Watt on Broken Record and it was obvious how much the young producer had done to shake them out of exhausted creative patterns and push them back to more of a full-band collaboration. Gossard in particular sounded like he needed Watt’s enthusiastic confidence in him as a guitarist to get hyped up.
I think their previous album Gigaton is much better album and definitely their best record released after the 90s, but I can see how the process of making that one was more labored and less enjoyable. But on that record I could feel them pushing themselves, and Dark Matter sounds like them writing new iterations of stock Pearl Jam songs, and what I mean by that would be apparent if you flick through every album from Yield onward, which is effectively the same sort of songs sequenced in basically the same way over and over. They can’t capture the magic of Ten or Vs again, but they sure as hell can rewrite Yield forever.
OK, slight backtrack: “Waiting for Stevie” actually does get some of the old Ten magic, if just by pushing the band members towards strengths I think they’ve backed away from to some extent for fear of being too repetitive or veering into self-parody. Vedder’s voice is huge on this song, going full-anthem mode after years of a lot of semi-anthem mode. The main riff resembles Gossard’s parts on both “Black” and “In Hiding,” while the climax and outro brings Mike McCready back to end-of-“Alive” territory. This is indeed exactly what people think Pearl Jam sounds like, but in the best, most reverent way. If anything they’re trying to go bigger than ever here, and borrowing tricks from Soundgarden and Jane’s Addiction to get this song properly mountain-sized. I’m not crazy about the mix – it gets a little too tinny and I’d prefer a more pronounced bass sound like you get on “Breath,” but this is Pearl Jam: there will be dozens of looser, and more probably more energetic live recordings, assuming they don’t give up on it early because they already have to play “Alive” at every show and maybe this is just too similar in function?
Buy it from Amazon.
First Came The Light
Phish “Evolve”
Last summer I went to see Phish and they played this song. The show was part of a week of Phish gigs at Madison Square Garden, and it was pretty easy to get an inexpensive ticket on a whim on the day of the gig. Phish is known for having very intense and obsessive fans, but Phish shows – and “jam band” shows more generally – are perfect for casual listeners. It’s a situation where knowing a lot of songs going in helpful, but also sets you up for disappointment since there’s no telling what the band might play beyond ruling out whatever they played at the few shows. You’re meant to show up and just go along for the ride. It’s like a musical rollercoaster that they make just for you and the people in the room on that night, and then never again. I haven’t seen a lot of Phish shows, but I think that night was a particularly fun musical rollercoaster.
I know enough Phish songs to recognize some of the big classics in their repertoire, but not enough to know what they’re playing through most of a set. “Evolve” was one of the songs that really grabbed me in the show, especially when the chorus hook kicks in about halfway through. It’s a warm and generous song, relaxed and easygoing and optimistic to its core. It sounds more like Belle & Sebastian than you’d expect from them. I’d assumed it was an oldie, but it’s actually from a somewhat recent Trey Anastasio solo record, and it’s been rerecorded as the title track of the band’s next album.
Phish studio recordings tend to be pretty dry and matter of fact, like their goal is strictly getting a clean document of the basic structure of a song. That’s basically what you’re getting on this recording. It’s the song, and the song is good, but you don’t get much in the way of improvisational quirks or interesting audio texture. I think this is like how Fugazi would say their albums are the menu and their shows were the meal, but those guys put a lot more into giving their studio output a specific feel. I’m happy to have a nice clean and concise version of “Evolve” that I can post here and include on playlists, but I can’t help but feel the song might be better suited with a more ambitious studio approach. More overtly psychedelic, in one way or another? More room sound, to give a sense of space? Something like that.
Buy it from Amazon.
The Worst Version Of Myself
Tatyana “Down Bad”
The lyrics of “Down Bad” are extremely “written in 2023” but the sound is more like something that would’ve appeared on this site back in 2003-2007. It’s right on the edge of electroclash aesthetics, has a pulsing synth groove that resembles at least three LCD Soundsystem songs, and the vocal melody sounds like something that could’ve been on a Sugababes or Girls Aloud record. But despite sounding so much like music from nearly 20 years ago, it doesn’t hit as retro, maybe because technology hasn’t changed so much in that time to signal any sort of obsolescence. The lyrics are pretty standard for pop these days – bitter and cutting lines about a bad relationship steeped in pop psychology, but I really like the way Tatyana sings “falling for you is such a chore” in a taunting sing-song cadence, and how the verse about this person not having a girlfriend for “more than a couple months, maybe a year” is delivered with a mix of pity and dismissiveness.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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This was the week the critical tide turned against Taylor Swift, probably for a long time to come. I kinda saw this coming for a while, but you can really sense how many people were dying for this moment to come. Here’s some of the best negative reviews of The Tortured Poets Department.
• Lindsay Zoladz / New York Times
Also, here’s Andrew Gruttadaro trying to figure out why Swift would want to live in the 1830s of all possible eras for The Ringer.