Fluxblog Weekly #112: Rainer Maria, Buckingham/McVie, Swet Shop Boys, Phoenix
June 12th, 2017
Streetlights Like Fire
Rainer Maria “Lower Worlds”
I never paid much attention to Rainer Maria in their first run. I was aware of them and definitely checked them out a few times and decided it wasn’t for me. So it came as quite a surprise that this song, from their first new record in 11 years, completely blew me away. “Lower Worlds” sounds enormous, like Jane’s Addiction in “Mountain Song” mode but with Dave Navarro replaced with the organ player of Clinic. I love the overdriven organ tone on this – the chords sound distressed and saturated, and connect with the beat to create this crushing mechanical noise. Caithlin De Marrais’s voice cuts through the treble with a mostly staccato melody that seems to punch up through the din, like she’s trying to break out from beneath it. It’s an incredibly cathartic sound, and greatly amplifies the emotion of an already dramatic piece of music.
Buy it from Amazon.
June 13th, 2017
Let The Night Unfurl
Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie “In My World”
The new album attributed to Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie is a Fleetwood Mac record in all but name. The rhythm section is John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, the music was intended to be a Fleetwood Mac record until Stevie Nicks opted out of the project. But there are post-’75 Fleetwood Mac records that don’t include Lindsey and others that don’t include Christine. Mac logic can be strange and volatile, but the constant seems to be that people must appease Stevie at all costs. I get it. But if this was a Fleetwood Mac record and you added a few good-to-decent Stevie tunes, it’d be the best thing the band had done since Tango in the Night.
“In My World,” a Buckingham composition, has the atmosphere of a classic Fleetwood Mac tune – melancholy, quasi-mystical, vaguely Californian. The hooks are immediate even if the feeling is subdued, with the strongest emotions caught somewhere between Buckingham’s finger-picked guitar notes and Fleetwood’s distinctive pocket groove. The chorus is a major earworm, but whereas you’d expect Christine to cover the harmony part, it’s instead the echo of a multi-tracked Lindsey knocked out of phase. Thematically, this checks out – he is singing about “his world,” so of course it’s insular and self-reflective.
Buy it from Amazon.
June 14th, 2017
Classy Like A Ring-Necked Pheasant
Swet Shop Boys “Birding”
My favorite thing about Heems as a rapper is his playfulness – he makes rapping sound like a fun game without tipping so far into nerdiness that he negates the swagger essential to nearly all great hip-hop. He seems to take great joy in finding a way to make a convincing rap out of any topic, not just to prove his prowess as a lyricist, but to display the remarkable elasticity of hip-hop as a form. In this case he is literally rapping about birdwatching, and gradually shifts from braggy, horny wordplay to just straight-up working in as many shout-outs to bird species as he possibly can on a three minute track. It’s ridiculous and wonderful, and I don’t think there’s anyone else who could’ve pulled this off while still sounding very cool.
Buy it from Amazon.
June 15th, 2017
Wreck The Spectacle You Live In
Phoenix “Tuttifrutti”
The new Phoenix album is meant to be an escapist fantasy, a dreamy European wonderland of a piece with the romanticized luxury of Thomas Mars’ wife Sophia Coppola’s body of work. But just as the surface aesthetic of her films are a front for directionless melancholy, Mars’ words undermine the up tempo summer vibes of his band’s music. “Tuttifrutti” in particular builds up a fantasy of wealth and indulgence just to imagine what it’d be like to tear it apart. There’s a resentful tone in his phrases – “don’t tell the broken hearted ‘that’s what you get’” – but there’s no clear narrative. It’s just a vivid setting and a relatable feeling, and the aesthetic is overpowering enough that the sentiment is relatively subtle.
Buy it from Amazon.