Fluxblog Weekly #121: Rock*A*Teens, Kesha, Liyv, Alvvays
August 13th, 2017
It Seems Just Like A Dream
The Rock*A*Teens “Across the Piedmont”
This song is nearly 20 years old, but I’ve only known it for a little while, after Carl Newman from The New Pornographers was tweeting about his deep love of The Rock*A*Teens. “Across the Piedmont” hit me right away and has been lingering in my mind for months. I wish I could have known it around the time it came out, mostly just so I could have an additional 19 years of it in my life.
The two most striking things about The Rock*A*Teens is their distinctive use of reverb on guitars, which lends the music a ragged ’60s garage rock aesthetic, and Chris Lopez’s incredibly emotive voice. Lopez sings with the maximum level of commitment, to the point that he’s often pushing his voice beyond its natural range because he clearly would not settle on underselling any feeling. The lyrics of “Across the Piedmont” are vivid in their specificity but vague in narrative, but Lopez belts out key lines with a red-hot passion that makes you wonder why he’d have such an urgent feeling about “the summer when I turned 23” in the first place. He’s implying so much more than what’s in the song, and that I can’t quite figure it out just makes it all the more compelling to me. I don’t know why he’s got this melancholy and nostalgia, but I am definitely acquainted with this emotion.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
August 15th, 2017
Life Is Just Our Party Palace
Kesha “Let ‘Em Talk”
There is an urgency to Kesha’s new album Rainbow that is very noticeable when you hear in the context of current mainstream pop music – it doesn’t sound like something that’s been calculated and revised several times over in the hope of finding success; it sounds like something that had to be made. Kesha sounds absolutely thrilled to making music after what can succinctly and understatedly be referred to as an ordeal with Dr. Luke, and every moment is cathartic in some way. I’m particularly attracted to “Let ‘Em Talk” because it so perfectly articulates this feeling of “I’M FREE!!!!!,” and Kesha has always been at her best when she’s singing about being joyful as a form of defiance. A lot of “fuck the haters” sentiment in pop music strikes me as petty vanity and delusion, but that’s not the case here. This really is about pushing back at the miserable, angry, hateful people in the world and finding the strength to be fully yourself and enjoy your life. Songs like this feel necessary now, and a lot more political than they used to be.
Buy it from Amazon.
August 16th, 2017
Just To Function
Liyv “Weeknight”
The sound of this song – perky and feminine, minimal in its arrangement but maximalist in the way its vocal hook is chopped up and reconfigured as a sort of drop – would’ve seemed ahead of the curve five years ago, and trendy two years ago. Now it just sounds like the zeitgeist, and only slightly stranger than the pop radio version of this aesthetic. Liyv’s vocal melodies make this song particularly sticky, and there’s something very compelling about the way her voice moves around the more jagged edges of the arrangement, like water rushing to fill the void. It’s the chopped up chorus that gets you though, but I will warn you in advance that it can be a little annoying to have this melodic phrase that sounds like it should be a set of words loop in your mind, because I find my brain keeps trying to interpret it as a lyric: “I want a kitten, I want a lil kitten.”
Buy it from Bandcamp.
August 17th, 2017
Don’t Sit By The Phone For Me
Alvvays “Dreams Tonite”
Molly Rankin sings “Dreams Tonite” with a pleasant wispiness that serves the song very well, both in the way it renders the main melody and portrays a specific type of thoughtful, self-effacing introversion. She’s singing about a relationship that’s gone cold, but the real tension in the song is trying to interpret raw, visceral feelings through a practical, cerebral mindset. There’s two rhetorical questions posed at opposite ends of the song, and they seem to answer each other. First, “Who starts a fire just to let it go out?,” and then “Who builds a wall just to let it fall down?” Clearly, the walls are the problem here.
Buy it from Amazon.