Fluxblog 497: late night music
Plus new songs by Cleo Sol, Lola Young, and The Cure
This week’s playlist is after 1:30 am, a 2 hour soundtrack-style collection not intended for daylight hours. This one is focused on romantic soul, blues, blues-based rock, and jazz from the mid 20th century, and I like it a lot. It took a little while to get just right but I think the finished version has a strong musical arc and a distinct vibe. I had a moment of incredible inspiration while listening to this the other day, and hey, maybe you will too.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
My Smile’s Not The Same
Cleo Sol “Fear When You Fly”
The majority of people making traditional 20th century-style R&B music today are young enough that, almost unavoidably, their frame of reference for the music has been filtered through five decades of sampling in rap. I feel like this gets filtered back into the traditional music in different ways – Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill keeping one foot firmly planted in hip-hop, or Amy Winehouse going full retro but with a post-rap attitude. This Inflo-produced track by Cleo Sol is a little more subtle – it basically sounds like a new soul song comprised entirely of the “good parts” of old songs that would’ve ended up as samples on top-shelf rap records. I’m not sure if this is a deliberate thing, if this is something Inflo is consciously thinking about in the studio. But it’s hard to imagine that on some level this post-rap filter is informing how the song is written, or how individual parts have been recorded so they feel more like a Madlib or Kanye West production than 60s or 70s soul records. It ends up sounding like a product of creative reverse-engineering.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Lola Young featuring Lil Yachty “Charlie”
“Charlie” is, at its core, also a traditional R&B song, but the execution is much weirder. The production by Solomonophonic & Manuka makes the track sound like a Quiet Storm-era soul track with the middle torn out, leaving Lola Young sounding like she’s belting her vocal over a bigger sound that isn’t there. There’s bass and drums and guitars, but they feel slightly off and naked in the mix, like they’re deliberately drawing your ear to textures that would ordinarily get ironed out in the mixing. It sounds very cool and feels fresh to me – familiar but a little alien, and with lead guitar flourishes that have a little extra flamboyance and sparkle in this context. Lil Yachty shows up near the end to give voice to the titular Charlie, which adds some dimension to the lyrics, but given how often he’s appeared on R&B-ish songs with peculiar arrangements, it seems like he’s mostly come by to give his blessing to another artist doing something he’s into.
Buy it from Amazon.
Ending Up As Nobody
The Cure “Drone:Nodrone”
Robert Smith has been dwelling on his mortality since the start of his career, and as a young man seemed to operate on the assumption that he had to get as much done as he could before he ran out of time. This is why hearing him ponder his “one last shot at happiness” in “Drone:Nodrone” hits me so hard—it’s very dramatic but doesn’t sound hyperbolic. He seems genuinely concerned that he’s running out of opportunities to find peace and joy, and doubtful that it’s possible in the first place.
“Drone:Nodrone” is something of an outlier on Songs of a Lost World—an aggressive and relatively up-tempo song along the lines of 1997’s “Wrong Number” on an album that mostly feels like “Oops! All Plainsongs.” In this context it provides a dynamic shift away from grandiose expressions of grief and zeroes in on Smith’s frustration. He sounds exasperated by getting to his age without having “answers,” and warns the listener that the answers he does have “are not the answers you want” because the only conclusion he’s come to with any confidence is that he doesn’t know anything. There can be peace and joy in embracing this humility, but he mostly seems horrified by the pointlessness and endless mystery.
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Nyshka Chandran reported on an ongoing succession drama around the future of The Loft parties – which were originated by the late David Mancuso in his Greenwich Village apartment in 1970 and have carried on for over 50 years since – for Resident Advisor.
• The great cartoonist Charles Burns was interviewed by Sam Wolfson of The Guardian about his new book Final Cut. I think it’s the best thing he’s ever made, and if you’re at all familiar with his body of work you’ll know that’s very high praise.
• Adam Offitzer of Hear Hear put together a collection of playlists for “calm, hope, and anxiety relief,” which includes a jazz playlist I made a while back.