Fluxblog Weekly #115: Selena Gomez, Fleet Foxes, Liars, Matthew Dear, Fair Game Sessions Compilation
Hi there. Before we get into the posts for this week – well, really the past two weeks on either side of the '96 survey – I'd like to strongly recommend a new music podcast by two very good friends of mine, Molly Mary O'Brien and Chris Wade. The show is called And Introducing, and the premise is that in each episode they will discuss a memoir by a musician. The first three episodes cover Duff McKagan from Guns N' Roses and Travis Barker from Blink-182 (a two-parter, because his life is so absurd!). The show is very, very funny. Please check it out! The next episode will be about Ronnie Spector.
June 26th, 2017
Call Me An Amenity
Selena Gomez “Bad Liar”
If I’m being honest with you, I really didn’t expect my favorite pop song of 2017 thus far to come from Selena Gomez, a singer who up until just now I’d considered kinda boring and not particularly talented. But here we are, and I’m happy to have been wrong about her.
“Bad Liar” is mainly written by Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, who’ve worked together on Gomez’s music in the past and have clearly learned the best way to showcase Gomez’s personality is to not crowd her voice and allow space for the nuances in her phrasing to thrive. The Gomez of “Bad Liar” is flustered by her infatuation, and the verses have a low key anxious energy – she’s beating herself up a bit, and making odd references and jokes that are considerably more clever than what you’d reasonably expect from contemporary mainstream pop. The Selena Gomez in this song is a very clearly recognizable person – I’m not sure if it’s Gomez, per se, but it’s an intriguing and relatable character. Gomez’s previous hits with Michaels and Tranter, “Good for You” and “Hands to Myself,” cover similar ground, and convincingly present the singer as the pop star for horny introverts.
Gomez’s phrasing in this song is outstanding, tilting from the dry, understated humor of the verses to a sweet, high hypnotic tone for the chorus. Her voice may seem reedy and thin in other contexts, but here it’s perfectly suited to the melody and structure and conveys just the right balance of lust and neurosis.
And yes, that is the bass line from Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” It’d be easy for Gomez, Michaels, and Tranter to be lazy and just let that familiar, perfect groove do all the work in the song, but there’s so many strong hooks and interesting moments in “Bad Liar” that it kinda just settles into the background as this twitchy pulse that connects the sentiment of the song to the anxiety pop of 40 years ago.
Buy it from Amazon.
June 27th, 2017
Slack In The Lines
Fleet Foxes “Mearcstapa”
At some point between Fleet Foxes’ second and third albums, the emphasis of Robin Pecknold’s music shifted from the human voice to the guitar. His voice is still there, ringing out with a lot of echo, but it’s moved from the center of his arrangements to the periphery, like he’s some spectral presence lost in the empty spaces and skeletal structures of the music.
I like the way Pecknold’s music on Crack-Up emphasizes the tactile nature of the instruments. The guitars, bass, cellos, and violins carry melodies and form structures in the music, but they also sound like – well, metal strings. This is both literal and abstract. “Mearcstapa” opens with overlapping guitar parts that sound like wires swaying on a light breeze, evoking in my mind the image of some broken piece of infrastructure in the middle of nowhere. A jazzier guitar part that comes midway through the song is considerably more graceful and conventionally beautiful, but that passage is relatively brief.
You end up back in the same desolate space before drifting out on an ambiguous melody played in rounds by a string section. The composition comes together to feel like some kind of journey, but there’s a strange absence of strong emotion. It reminds me of clinical depression, of feeling like you just can’t access your own feelings and so you just get increasingly numb. That string outro gets under my skin because as much as it announces that something significant has definitely happened, the feeling of it registers as either “now what?” or “so what?”
Buy it from Amazon.
July 4th, 2017
I Like To Say That I Feel Alive
Liars “Cred Woes”
“Cred Woes” is built on the steady thud of an electronic beat, but the overall production feels wobbly and unstable, as if it could just crash or collapse at any moment. This is partly achieved by introducing musical elements that seem to fizzle out before they get a chance to resolve as they would in a more typical song. There’s a guitar solo that starts off about a minute into the track that sounds as though they shrugged and went “oh, never mind” after plucking out five notes. A minute later there’s a jaunty guitar riff that sounds as though they considered turning the song into “My Sharona” but then opted out of that too. I love these little moments because they indicate a conventional rock moves while the song itself lurches forward like a robot with bad wiring. Angus Andrew’s vocal performance adds to the effect by projecting a glib arrogance, like he doesn’t even know he’s riding this doomed machine.
Buy it from Amazon.
July 5th, 2017
A Sense Of Regret Which Feels Like Nothing New
Matthew Dear “Modafinil Blues”
Matthew Dear sings “Modafinil Blues” like a man who is extremely distressed but trying very hard to keep that feeling under the surface. His words are bleak yet oblique, suggesting some catastrophe is imminent or already underway. There’s a sense of grim inevitability in the music, like you’re caught in an undertow that felt like a gentle pull at first but is now dragging you down along with everything else around you. The most intriguing thing about this song is the way it falls into some ambiguous space between goth romanticism of sorrow and a far less sentimental depiction of grey, flat depression. It’s mostly erring on the side of the former, but the most resonant moments convey the latter.
Buy it from Amazon.
July 5th, 2017
Fair Game Sessions 2008
DOWNLOAD IT
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks “Gardenia” / The Mountain Goats “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” / The Long Blondes “Too Clever By Half” / Robyn “Be Mine!” / Goldfrapp “A&E” / Olga Bell “Videotape” / White Hinterland “Dreaming of the Plum Trees” / Yelle “Tristesse/Joie” / Au Revoir Simone “Through the Backyards” / Ted Leo “Bottle of Buckie” / The Slits “Love Und Romance” / Maxi Geil & Playcolt “Makin’ Love in the Sunshine” / Dirty Projectors “Rise Above” / James Rabbit “George Gershwin” / Childballads “Stuart Hassle” / The National “Start A War” / Silje Nes “Dizzy Street” / Bob Mould “Hardly Getting Over It” / Dean & Britta “Strange”
This is a collection of songs from live sessions recorded for the public radio show Fair Game back in 2008. I was a writer and producer on the show, and produced the music segments. Don’t let the word “producer” fool you – all the serious recording work was done by the engineer, which was almost always John DeLore. I did the booking though, which I think is pretty obvious if you know anything about my tastes in the mid to late 2000s. There’s a few acts here who rarely if ever got any attention outside of Fluxblog.
A few notes:
• All of these tracks are from sessions that generally included 3-5 songs. (Robyn and Goldfrapp were exceptions, they only did two songs in their sessions.)
• Yes, that Olga Bell track is a cover of Radiohead. That was still a pretty new song at the time, so it was a bold choice for a fairly unknown artist at the time on a national radio broadcast.
• The piano that you here in many of these sessions is a gorgeous old Steinway grand piano. You could always tell that keyboard players were really excited to get to get a chance to play it.
• My favorite moment in any of the sessions we did is in the James Rabbit recording here, when Tyler improvises a funny story in the middle of the song. You could see that the rest of the band weren’t sure where he was going, but they played along really well. There is one moment where he gestured to one of the female members of the band to sing after mentioning Meredith Monk, and after she shook her head, the piano player did it for her. “George Gershwin” is already a joyous song, but this bit just makes it feel even more magical and alive. It’s a shame everyone ignored this band; they were really special.
• Getting the chance to meet Ari Up at The Slits session was a great experience. She was such a larger than life character, but also incredibly generous and kind to everyone around her. I remember getting this “oh my GOD” jolt when they started playing “Love Und Romance,” which is my favorite Slits song. I didn’t expect them to play any oldies at this session.
• The Childballads song has never been officially released, which is a shame. It’s based on “Street Hassle” by Lou Reed, but Stuart Lupton rewrote all the lyrics to be about his own life. It’s a heartbreaker.
• The Robyn and Long Blondes sessions were never actually aired because the show was abruptly canceled.