Fluxblog Weekly #132: Poppy, Demi Lovato, Kelela, Lake Ruth, Municipality
November 1st, 2017
Ice Cream Credit Card Modern Art
Poppy “My Style”
Poppy’s YouTube channel is an amazing piece of deadpan pop art that’s hilarious, ominous, mesmerizing, confusing, cute, and unnerving all at once. It’s a bit hard to explain – sometimes it’s modern dada, sometimes it’s a biting parody of the cult of personality, and sometimes it’s just straight-up funny. It’s always beautiful, but the aesthetic is deliberately sterile and surreal. The tone is somehow both serene and anxious. There’s a cloying sweetness to the character, but it’s undermined by Poppy’s vacant affect and the constant suggestion that this whole thing is a cult and you’re in danger of getting brainwashed and indoctrinated. There’s a lot of potent ideas in the mix here, but it’s all so off-kilter that it never comes off as a didactic critique. Mostly it’s just bizarre and fun.
Poppy’s music is just as clever and well-crafted as her videos. This actually took me by surprise – I’ve enjoyed the videos for a while, but usually skipped the songs because I figured they’d be kinda flimsy and less interesting than the sketches. I was very wrong. The songs on Poppy.Computer are consistently catchy and fun, and you don’t need to have ever seen a Poppy video to enjoy it. It certainly helps if you’re into artists deliberately fucking with you, though.
The lyrics play the same head games as the videos, but whereas many of the videos are maddeningly oblique, there’s more of a wink in the songs. “My Style,” maybe the best track on the record, is where she lays out the basic ideas: Her aesthetic embraces random contradictions, she’s a product, she loves you, she will destroy you. Truly, no one has ever sounded cuter while threatening to break your neck.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 2nd, 2017
You Know How To Leave
Demi Lovato “Daddy Issues”
“Daddy Issues” sounds like Demi Lovato is straight up singing the subtext of another more artful or demure pop song. It’s like having the most literal interpretations from a Genius annotation replace the actual lyrics of a song, and the effect is vaguely jarring – like, wait, aren’t you supposed to be bullshitting us at least a little bit? At this stage in pop music we’re used to hearing pop stars be blunt and vulgar, but Lovato’s incredibly direct lyrics and forthright vocal style projects both a charming guilelessness and an impatient desire to be understood. The music is just as emphatic as the words, and I love the way the keyboard comes down in the chorus as if it’s underlining her lyrics a few times over.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 30th, 2017
Falling Into The Sky
Kelela “Waitin'”
The bit from “Waiting’” that gets me is the melodic turn on “Damn, didn’t we have a good time?,” as the song shifts into pre-chorus mode. It has the lovely understated elegance of mid-‘90s Janet Jackson, and signals a feeling of relief and clarity. In the context of the lyrics, it’s the moment where Kelela’s chance encounter with a recent ex has her reexamining their past and contemplating whether they might actually have a future. She nails a very specific combination of emotions in her phrasing – giddiness blended with skepticism, with a bit of nostalgia, loneliness, and anxiety tossed in. The excited feeling is dominant, so you get a sense of where this story is going even if she doesn’t spell it out.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 30th, 2017
Nothing But A Show
Lake Ruth “Empty Morning”
Allison Brice’s voice has a high, delicate tone that floats gently through “Empty Morning” like a light breeze. It seems to move through the electric piano chords that guide the song, and through the treble of the guitar and snare hits. There’s a languid pace to the piece but the music is always moving forward, Brice’s voice pushing towards its conclusion. When the song finally reaches the end, the beat stops with a few rapid hits. As romantic as the music sounds, the end is oddly unsentimental: Hey, we’re here. We’re done.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Municipality “Miles Away”
I don’t say this to belittle the band Municipality, but the degree to which this song sounds like The Clientele is astonishing. As in, it can be difficult to imagine that this is not Alasdair MacLean leading another band. The particular tone of the voice, the melodic style, the guitar tone, the way the drums fall into this pocket that’s loose but precise. It’s a dead ringer, and I mean this as a compliment – this is a winning sound, and it’s not as though there aren’t around 300 fake Joy Divisions out there we have to all pretend are fresh and exciting. Also, “Miles Away” is an incredibly lovely piece of music, and frankly, better than a LOT of actual Clientele songs. If you’re going to go with someone else’s style, you really ought to at least do it as well or better.
Buy it from Bandcamp.