Fluxblog Weekly #130: St. Vincent, Beck, Corgan, Werewolf Diskdrive, Electric Six
October 15th, 2017
Give Me The Answer
St. Vincent “Fear the Future”
I have always felt like an optimistic person. I may be cynical about a lot of aspects of humanity, but I genuinely feel like humans are always fighting towards a better world. Not a perfect world, but slightly better. Somehow, I still feel this way, though it’s been very difficult recently. There’s a lot of emotional wear and tear on keeping up with the outside world – opening Twitter or Facebook now feels like a direct portal to everyone’s undiluted rage, confusion, and anguish. If you can’t turn off your empathy, it’s completely draining. If this is your primary window on the world, it seems like an unending nightmare. Everything in the world is shut out except for the the horror and the screaming and the fighting. It makes you fear the future.
“Fear the Future” is a bit of an outlier on St. Vincent’s Masseduction, though it’s clearly important enough to Annie Clark that the song title is also the name of her forthcoming tour. A lot of the other songs have a sleek, playful quality to them and directly address sexuality, but “Fear the Future” is more about intimacy. There’s panic and drama in the sound of this track, but Clark’s voice seems cool and centered. She’s singing about love in the midst of terror and violence, of shrinking your world down to “me and you” to keep focused on what matters and to remind yourself there’s more to life than chaos and catastrophe. When the chorus ends on her proclaiming “I fear the future” before the bottom of the music suddenly dropping out, I don’t hear actual fear in her voice. It sounds a lot more like she’s bravely staring the future down to me.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 16th, 2017
Ephemeral Facts Are Confusing Me
Beck “I’m So Free”
The surface of Beck’s Colors is glossy and upbeat, as though Beck and his collaborator Greg Kurstin went out of their way to make a record that would sound mainstream and contemporary. They seem most directly inspired by Phoenix – and frankly, a lot of it is better Phoenix music than their own recent album – but the overall aesthetics fit in with commercial quasi-indie acts like Foster the People, Portugal the Man, and Fitz and the Tantrums. There’s also a touch of the tropical vibes that have been all over pop for a while now, and a general chill, stoned Los Angeles feeling to it.
It sounds kinda like Beck trying to make a record for “normal” people, but not quite hitting the mark because he’s an oddball to the core. It’s like the bit in Clifford when Martin Short is asked to make a face like a normal boy and Short makes a series of faces that leap directly into the uncanny valley of human facial expressions. Beck is possibly the greatest and most versatile mimic in the history of pop music, but he can’t will himself to be ordinary. But it’s very interesting for him to try, and I respect that an artist as accomplished and canonized as him would seem this sincerely engaged with contemporary mainstream sounds. In this way, the record is his equivalent to David Bowie’s Let’s Dance – an elder statesman engaging with popular music relatively late in his career, if just for kicks.
The lyrics of Colors tell a different story. Beck’s words are lucid and straightforward, almost entirely setting aside the surrealism of his best known work in favor of more direct and philosophical approach. The lyrics seem to pull back and forth between a dissatisfied yearning and a sort of zen contentedness. It reminds me of George Harrison – cycles of anxiety and vague, formless dread followed by moments of spirituality and perspective.
The song that really jumped out at me both musically and lyrically is “I’m So Free,” which is more rocking than anything else on the record, and has a sentiment that seems to be rooted in his background in Scientology. He’s singing about some feeling of enlightenment, and being “so free” of what seems like what Scientologists would call “suppressive persons.” It’s a bit rattling to hear Beck sing “I’m gonna freeze out these enemies” – he’s never really seemed like a guy with an enemies list, you know? But there’s other lines that suggest he’s casting out negative parts of himself, so perhaps I’m reading a bit too much into this.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 17th, 2017
Run Past The Solstice
William Patrick Corgan “Processional”
I saw Billy Corgan perform a solo show at the Murmrr Theater – actually the Union Temple of Brooklyn with a makeshift stage – over the weekend. The opening set was his new solo record, Ogilala in full, and the second set was a career-spanning setlist ranging from late period material to deep cuts from the classic ‘90s Smashing Pumpkins catalog. This second set was excellent, and genuinely surprised me several times over. I never expected to ever see him play “Starla” live, much less a gorgeous solo piano version. There was also a lovely piano arrangement for “Soma,” an inspired simplified versions of “Muzzle,” “Annie-Dog,” and “Age of Innocence,” all big favorites for me.
It was a very intimate and generous performance, and it was met great enthusiasm by the audience whether he was playing the new material or songs from his most famous records. (He received at least five standing ovations from the entire audience, including when he first came on stage.) I feel like on some level the motivation of the audience was to show Corgan how much he is appreciated, since he so often seems bitter and misunderstood. He seemed genuinely moved by the love of the audience. He also seemed at peace during much of the performance – there is a serenity at the core of the new songs in particular, perhaps the effect of being a new father. He ended the show with “Farewell and Goodnight” from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and made a point of telling the audience that the song was written with James Iha, and then clarifying further that it was mostly James’ song. There was a lot of affection in his voice when he talked about James, and it was so nice to hear knowing that they had been estranged for a long time.
James Iha plays on the studio recording of “Processional,” and it’s the first song they recorded together since “Untitled,” the final track recorded by the Pumpkins in their original run. The song is low key and lovely, and feels relaxed in a way that Corgan rarely seems, even on his most mellow songs. If you’d asked me to peg which cut on the record featured Iha, I might not have chosen this – it’s so simple and spare that it doesn’t announce itself as a song with a guest star. But I think it’s meaningful that these guys came together for a song that feels so calm and graceful. It’s like a peace offering, or a prayer.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 18th, 2017
Yes Please And Thank You
Werewolf Diskdrive “Hamburgers & Hot Dogs”
This essentially sounds like Liars in electronic punk mode, but with the lyrical concerns of Weird Al Yankovic. This is a throbbing, dirty electro banger about strongly preferring hamburgers and hot dogs (and a few other lowbrow, generally unhealthy foods) over trendy, healthy foods like kale and quinoa. It is gloriously silly, but played totally straight, to the point that it’s a lot more like a “slobs vs. snobs” class thing than a gleefully childish Tim & Eric thing. (They, of course, wrote their own wonderful “Hamburgers and Hot Dogs” song.) But really, it’s the music that makes this so impressive – this does not need to be such a banger, and yet it is. I would love to be at the kind of loud, sweaty party where this gets people going. This really ought to be the “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” of 2017.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
October 19th, 2017
A Predatory Aura
Electric Six “Sex with Somebody”
Electric Six have spent the past 15 years releasing music year in and year out that mercilessly satirizes contemporary masculinity. The characters in Dick Valentine’s songs are vivid caricatures of delusional idiots, desperate creeps, obnoxious blowhards, and wannabe alpha males, but like… these days a lot of that is less cartoonish and more like photorealism. “Sex with Somebody” is a groovy “end of the night” low key disco song sung from the perspective of some guy with an urgent need to have sex with literally anyone who will let him, and at first it just seems like the joke is that Valentine is just singing the subtext of lots of other pop songs. But the song is really more the character’s desperation and loneliness, and how he only can feel validated in this way. It’s not about sex or human contact, just about serving his ego and acting out a social ritual. It’s all benchmarks and no humanity.
Buy it from Amazon.