Fluxblog Weekly #102: The New Pornographers, Band Practice, Salami Rose Joe Louis, Living, Raekwon
April 6th, 2017
Learn The New Language
The New Pornographers “Darling Shade”
Whiteout Conditions is the first New Pornographers album without two key founding members of the band. Most obviously, it’s the first without any songs written or sung by Dan Bejar. You’d think this would be a big deal, but it’s kinda…not? Bejar typically serves as a foil for Carl Newman – the Han Solo to Carl’s Luke Skywalker, if you will – but this record benefits musically and thematically from a more unified aesthetic, and finds Carl moving into emotional and tonal spaces previously occupied by Bejar on their records.
The bigger change is that the band’s original drummer Kurt Dahle left the group before they toured for Brill Bruisers, and Whiteout Conditions features his replacement, Joe Seiders. They’re both excellent drummers, but Seiders has a tighter groove and an approach to fills that’s more crisply mechanical and less fluid. Seiders presence is the foundation for the aesthetic changes on this record – the chilly synths and spiky guitars, a persistent sense of sublimated panic, rhythms that seem to be endlessly moving forward to nowhere in particular.
Newman has said that they were deliberately drawing on the influence of krautrock “motorik” beats on this record, and finding a way to graft their usual harmonic maximalism to that sort of focused, propulsive tempo. I think that’s most obvious and successful on “Darling Shade,” particularly in the way the music seems to coast on the groove in the chorus. The song resembles some previous Newman songs – most notably “Dancehall Domine” from Brill Bruisers and “Secretarial” from The Slow Wonder – but the rhythmic approach shifts where the emphasis usually falls in his melodies. The beat is more robotic, but the vocal feels less heroic and more vulnerable.
The cryptic paranoia and cynicism in the lyrics seem to have different stakes. In “Darling Shade,” and in most of the others, Carl sounds genuinely rattled by the outside world, whereas he’d come off as merely dismissive or entirely inscrutable in the past. Other songs on the record focus on coping, or escaping, or just finding a way to survive. It’s much darker than the other New Pornos albums, but it’s a welcome shift, and a lot more resonant and relevant to this moment in time than most people would expect from a band that’s been around for nearly two decades.
Buy it from Amazon.
April 5th, 2017
All At Once
Band Practice “I Want You”
This song is barely over a minute but it’s an incredibly vivid and nuanced portrait of an ephemeral but intense relationship at a specific moment in time. There’s a bit of manic desperation, and a little naiveté, and awkward but genuine lust, and the looming weight of cultural expectations, and the implication of an uneven age dynamic. Best of all, there’s the way the song conveys anxiety in fidgety, increasingly agitated strums, as if playing the guitar was a nervous tic about the same as pulling your hair, shaking your foot, or grinding your teeth.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Salami Rose Joe Louis “Cyanotype of Blue”
Salami Rose Joe Louis composes her records as suites made up of short song vignettes, sorta like Robert Pollard when he’s in collage-rock mode, so the individual tracks can feel a bit abrupt out of context. I mean, I definitely wish “Cyanotype of Blue” was longer – the mood is so strong and the way it springs out of a sleepy mode into something a bit more swinging and bright could sustain at least another minute or two. But at the same time, there is something very compelling to me about songs that resolve themselves rather quickly, and records that are so full of musical ideas they don’t slow down to reiterate their own hooks.
Buy it from Amazon.
March 28th, 2017
Listen To The World Outside
Living “Glory”
Chillwave happened long enough ago that there are many young musicians for whom Washed Out and Toro Y Moi could be formative influences. Which is funny, because it doesn’t feel so long ago to me, but I was already in my late 20s and many years into doing this site when that went down. I can’t say for sure that Living are directly influenced by all of that stuff, but it seems like a very reasonable bet going on their music, which draws on a lot of the same aesthetics and effects but is a bit more early Britpop when it comes to melody. (Which is to say: they write better hooks.) The psychedelic vibe in “Glory” is so strong and seductive that I hardly noticed how strong the melodies were at first – that’s something that became more apparent with repeat listening. Now it’s not totally necessary to actually listen to the thing, since the chorus is lodged in my brain and shows up any time it goes clear. Pretty sure I was dreaming about it last night.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
March 27th, 2017
At Any Given Second It’s Real
Raekwon “Nothing”
The best compliment I can pay to Frank G, the guy who produced this track, is that when I first heard it I thought “wow, is Raekwon back with the RZA?” “Nothing” reminds me a lot of the eerie barebones minimalism of RZA’s work The W, especially the Raekwon showcase “Hollow Bones.” Both songs focus in on one particularly pained vocal moment from another song and loop it through the track, establishing an emotional baseline that contrasts nicely with Rae’s tough, throaty voice. The “I have nothing” sample is cut up in irregular patterns – it gets extended into a ghostly trill, stuttered or cut off, and sometimes looped in a more symmetrical meter. Even with Raekwon’s presence on the mic, the sample is the focus of the track. To some extent, that’s just the power of treble, but it’s also far more emotional than Raekwon’s sober, gruff rhymes, and the only element that resonates as much is a piano sample that gets dropped in occasionally for punctuation.
Buy it from Amazon.