Fluxblog 513: let's listen to 2025 music
Plus new songs by Fernette, Destroyer, and Elita
I’d like to call your attention to my FLUXCAVIAR playlist on Spotify, which has been rebooted for 2025. I’ve been running this playlist for a while now, the idea is that it’s where I put new songs I like as I find them through the year. It’s my own default listening playlist. I update the playlist and its sequencing constantly, which is why I can only have it on one platform. It’s already a fairly long playlist after only one month, and there’s a lot of really exciting music in there. Jump in! If you were already subscribed, you’re still subscribed.
[Fluxcaviar on Spotify]
When The Anti-Sun Has Come
Fernette “Lowlands”
A few weeks ago I went to a show in support of the release of the second issue of the new music magazine Antics, which was booked by the magazine’s co-founder Tatiana Tenreyro. Fernette was the first band on the bill, and when they started playing I was stunned by their distinctive style and presence – it was like seeing Nico sing at a piano bar, but with robot aliens attacking on the periphery – and then I was mesmerized by the songs.
Danyelle Taylor, the singer, has the build and bearing of a 90s fashion model, and a vocal style not far off from Victoria Legrand from Beach House. She seemed intense and emotional, but also aloof and unknowable. She was flanked by Eli Dubois on piano and guitar, which he played both with a casual jazziness, and Rashid Ahmad, who fiddled around with mysterious electronic gear to yield sounds that had the abrasive tones of Autechre but the painterly, poetic quality of Kevin Shields’ guitar in My Bloody Valentine. I’ve heard a lot of things, but I’ve never heard anything quite like this contrast of slick, accomplished, and traditional musicality and total chaos.
The electronic noise aspect of the band is dialed down a bit in the studio recording of “Lowlands,” which was part of the live set. Ahmad’s sounds had a way of cutting through the other musical elements on stage, but in the studio it’s more like a backdrop. His sounds emote as much as Taylor’s voice, if not more so in some moments. The overall effect is odd and profound, like you’re hearing this woman sing out to a glitchy digital ghost that cannot sing back, but can make its presence known.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
We Are Now Entering A New Phase
Destroyer “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”
“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World” is densely packed with memorable and chin-scratching lyrics by Dan Bejar, even more so than is typical for a Destroyer song. It feels almost as though he wrote an entire album of lyrics, scrapped the music, but jammed all the best Dan-isms into this song instead. The line that immediately captured both my attention and imagination comes about two minutes in: “insane intercourse, constant swapping while I fall asleep in a bass.” It’s quite evocative just in print, but there’s something in the way Bejar delivers the line that renders it very ambiguous in tone. I can’t tell if he sounds prudish or perverted here, it could go either way on any listen. It’s both? He sounds, at bare minimum, fascinated by the “constant swapping.”
But like I said, that’s just one of many quotables in this song. I’m also quite fond of these:
“We are gathered here today to have a real nice time,” pomp dissolving into pleasant banality in the span of a few seconds.
“Absent friends, where’d you go?,” a question I think of all the time these days.
“Mirthless husk floating on an ocean” – it couldn’t be me.
“My life’s a giant lid closing on an eye,” grandiose but also self-diminishing.
“God is famous for punishing” – it’s true!
And of course: “Fools rush in, but they’re the only ones with guts.” Put this on an LED screen in public like a Jenny Holzer aphorism.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
I Get Obsessed
Elita “Girls on the Internet”
“Girls on the Internet” is a few different types of song at once – a moody goth song with a driving bass line, a pop song with an extremely girlish vocal performance, an indie song trading on layers of irony. The lyrics are straightforward – she’s singing about getting obsessed with girls on the internet, and craving their approval – but it’s never clear what the perspective is. Is this a girl who wants to be like these other girls in some way? Is this a lonely guy? In any case, it conveys both the fascination and frustration of parasocial relationships. These people feel so close to you, they take up so much space in your mind, but they don’t know you exist. They’re everything, and you’re nothing, and you’ve chosen this dynamic. So what does that mean?
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• Elise Soutar paid tribute to Marianne Faithfull in Paste, with an emphasis on centering her in her own life, rather than, say, The Rolling Stones.
• Paula Mejía shared some advice Marianne Faithfull gave her about dealing with heartbreak in GQ.
• Kevin Barnes talked about how they wrote the Of Montreal song “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)” on Song Exploder.
• I enjoyed listening to the Song Vs Song and Pop Pantheon episodes reacting to the Grammy Awards being actually pretty good for a change.
• Maggie Rogers was very charming in her appearance on the YouTube series Track Star*.
That of Montreal Song Exploder episode is a great listen into how the song came together technically. And also, Kevin Barnes continues to offer the most self-serving, deceptive framing about how they unexpectedly fired everyone else in the band. Watching them in the 2014 doc The Past Is A Grotesque Animal really altered my impression of their whole public persona, and it seems like a decade later they’re no closer to acknowledging their mercenary ruthlessness if they’re describing 2 of 5 members leaving the band in 2004 as “everyone else quit the band so it basically became a solo act” 🙃