Fluxblog Weekly #120: Nine Inch Nails, Margo Price, Mount Kimbie/King Krule, Oh Sees
August 7th, 2017
There Is No Future Point In Time
Nine Inch Nails “The Background World”
“The Background World” starts off as a fairly typical late period Nine Inch Nails song, with Trent Reznor singing a very Reznor sort of melody over contrasting keyboard parts – some burbling, some bleeping, some like the electronic equivalent of the ambient hum inside a seashell. Reznor sounds exhausted and frustrated, he sounds ambivalent about connecting with a world that seems increasingly miserable and hostile. This would be a very good song if that’s all there was to it, but after four minutes the music takes an interesting turn as one chunk of music starts looping over and over. It’s a Disintegration Loops sort of thing, with each repetition degrading the audio so it becomes more dull and abrasive. I like that the loop doesn’t connect just right – there’s a slight stutter to the beginning of each cycle, but that gradually disappears along with all other detail. By the end it’s just hideous, oppressive white noise. A little over a decade ago Reznor put out a song called “Every Day Is Exactly the Same,” and I think of this as a Trump-era correction: Every Day Is Just A Bit Worse.
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August 8th, 2017
This Town Has No Use For You Now
Margo Price “Paper Cowboy”
The character in Margo Price’s “Paper Cowboy” is the epitome of the old country expression “all hat, no cattle.” He’s what the late radio crank Bob Grant would call a “fake phony fraud.” If you take Price’s word for it, he’s a blowhard who only brings misery to the people around him. But as judgmental as this song is, Price still sounds warm and empathetic in her vocal performance, as though she can’t help but feel bad for the guy and wishes he’d be genuine rather than put on an act. The music also avoids a harsh tone, shifting from a soft ballad in the first verse into a groovy up-tempo country rock tune before eventually settling into an instrumental section that sprawls out into half of the song’s six minute runtime. This music sounds far too cheerful and relaxed to be the soundtrack to a grudge, and the song is better for that.
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August 9th, 2017
What The Mirror Thought It Saw
Mount Kimbie featuring King Krule “Blue Train Lines”
King Krule sings “Blue Train Lines” with an urgent, frazzled tone, as though he’s trying to fill you in on as many details as he can because there’s just not enough time. His heavily accented rasp sounds like a version of Joe Strummer raised on rap as he spits out lines about witnessing a girlfriend trying to kill herself. He sounds genuinely traumatized and rattled as he cycles through shock, fascination, love, guilt, and panic. His words are vivid and brilliantly constructed – “on the seedy floor in the back of a CD store” is an impressive internal rhyme – but his vocal is even more so, investing every line with raw feeling. Mount Kimbie’s track frames it all perfectly, giving King Krule space as he sets the scene, and then a quickening pulse as the stakes get higher.
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August 10th, 2017
The Underground Is Twice As Nice
Oh Sees “Jettison”
John Dwyer won’t ever let you down. If you come to an Oh Sees record looking for grooves and riffs and “wooo!” and relentless forward momentum, you’re absolutely going to get those things in some combination. Much like The Fall and Clinic before them, they know what their aesthetic is, and the variation is in the details. In the case of Oh Sees, they’re still riding out the possibilities of their double drummer lineup, and so a song like “Jettison” which would be just fine with a single drummer gets this added kinetic motion that emphasizes a restlessness in the guitar parts. The drums don’t really signal tension – there’s a relaxing swing to the groove – but they do give you this feeling that the music is in constant motion, like it’s a musical shark that needs to keep moving forward to survive.
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