Fluxblog 535: indie dance bangers
Plus a Just Like Heaven festival report and new music by No Joy and Guerilla Toss
This week’s playlist is 50 INDIE DANCE BANGERS. It’s mostly remixes, all bangers, and from the peak blog house era of 2003-2011. This isn’t necessarily meant to be ALL of the best songs like this, or an exhaustive survey. It’s just a good time, and includes LCD Soundsystem, Hercules & Love Affair, Hot Chip, The Knife, Robyn, Justice, Soulwax, The Gossip, and many others.
[Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube]
It’s Understood That It’s A Movie
No Joy “Bugland”
Jasamine White-Gluz seems to get closer to fully realizing the sound in her head with every No Joy release. No Joy started as a fairly normal shoegaze band, but as it’s become more like White-Gluz’s solo project, the sound has become gradually more ambitious and genre-agnostic while retaining an essential spacey and ethereal quality that connects all of the records.
“Bugland,” the title track of a new record made in collaboration with the musician and producer Fire-Toolz, is a leap beyond where White-Gluz left off with 2020’s Motherhood. The sound is more “electronic” than ever, but also more direct and aggressive in its guitar sound, and more lush in its vocal harmonies. Everything is dialed up, and no artistic bet is hedged.
It sounds like a lot of familiar things from the 90s and early 00s, but also like nothing else. Listening to it is like hearing a cross section of layers, like a fossil record of music history that’s not quite in chronological order. Or maybe it’s like slipping out of relative time, and chronology doesn’t matter as much as how it all fits together. And is that such a strange thing? That’s basically how anyone experiences the past 70 years of popular music on streaming services now.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Guerilla Toss “Psychosis Is Just A Number”
“Psychosis Is Just A Number” is an aesthetic curveball from Guerrilla Toss, a band who’ve spent a lot of time developing a distinct style based on heavily saturated keyboard tones. This song is more like their version of classic post-punk, with most of the musical emphasis placed on a thick and twitchy bass line and bursts of abrasive guitar. It still sounds like Guerrilla Toss – exuberant, vibrant, cheerful in spite of bleak lyrics – but with the instrumental emphasis reversed. Theoretically this version should feel more “normal,” but it doesn’t. They’re just too quirky for that to ever happen.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE
Last weekend I attended the Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena, which was my first festival experience in 11 years. It was a pretty good experience, but I’m not sure if I’ll be going to more festivals in the future. Even just one day of this is a bit rough on the body at my age. You can check out this Instagram post for clips of what I saw in chronological order: Of Montreal, Panda Bear, Hercules & Love Affair, Perfume Genius, Courtney Barnett, Toro Y Moi, TV on the Radio, Slowdive, Empire of the Sun, Rilo Kiley, and Vampire Weekend.
Vampire Weekend followed through on an idea proposed in a recent episode of Vampire Campfire and replaced the usual unrehearsed audience requests covers portion of their show with A SALUTE TO INDIE. They played 5 rehearsed covers of classics by Phoenix, Tame Impala, Beach House, Grizzly Bear, and TV on the Radio. It was a perfect idea for closing out Just Like Heaven, effectively a millennial indie nostalgia fest.
LINKS LINKS LINKS LINKS
• I went to Just Like Heaven with Molly O’Brien, so here’s what she had to say about the experience on I Enjoy Music.
• Todd in the Shadows is back with a new episode of Trainwreckords about Limp Bizkit and the end of the nu-metal era.