Fluxblog Weekly #146: Britta Persson, Girls Aloud, The Rogers Sisters, A Frames, Max Tundra
As of the beginning of this month, Fluxblog has existed for 16 years. I am going to celebrate this occasion by revisiting a lot of old favorites from over the years that have slipped into obscurity. In some cases I’ll be writing about songs featured here many years ago with a new perspective, and in others, I’ll be writing about songs that I love that I never got around to covering on the site. It’s remarkable how much great music from the past decade is almost completely forgotten today, or doesn’t even exist on streaming platforms. I want to do what I can to put these artists and songs back into the world. History gets erased when no one bothers to write about it.
February 5th, 2018
Feeling A Feeling Because It’s A Feeling
Britta Persson “Cliffhanger”
The word “cliffhanger” is never sung in this song, but it’s an appropriate title for a song that’s so ambivalent and unresolved. Britta Persson is singing from the perspective of someone in a relationship that’s seemingly stuck in a pleasant rut and is wondering if there’s a direction and purpose to it, or if they’re just passively following the path of least resistance. It’s hard to say which option she’d prefer, particularly as she seems to distrust her own emotions. She asks herself if she’s “feeling a feeling because it’s a feeling,” and is dismissive of some woman she read about in free magazine, saying she “doesn’t want to be a teenager forever.” But her feelings do get quite strong – she’s rather emphatic when she sings that she’s ready to move on. But after that, the song reverts to the vague emotional space it starts out in.
This is such a vivid portrayal of a state of indecision, and the anguish that comes from fearing that you could be settling for less than what would make you truly happy. And then, the added anxiety of not even knowing what would make you happy in the first place. And of course, a third layer of feeling guilty for wanting more when things are basically fine and you don’t want to hurt your partner. Maybe “cliffhanger” isn’t quite the right word for this. It’s more of a stalemate.
Buy it from Amazon.
Note: I wrote about three songs from Britta Persson’s Kill Hollywood Me when it came out 10 years ago. The first post was about “At 7,” the second was about the title track, and the third was my first shot at writing about “Cliffhanger.” I strongly recommend the album, but especially these three magnificent songs.
February 6th, 2018
The Beat Gets Closer
Girls Aloud “Biology”
The British girl group Girls Aloud were essentially a front for the songwriting and production team Xenomania, who created nearly all of the groups tracks. Xenomania, led by the producer Brian Higgins, specialize in super-charged pop that’s precisely engineered to deliver as many strong hooks as possible at a relentless pace. Their songs are pure sensation, calculated by expert writers to be melodically dazzling, structurally dynamic, and extraordinarily energetic. There’s a ruthlessness to Xenomania’s approach that carries over to the lyrics, which tend to be either misanthropic caricatures of the lives of rich assholes or what amounts to a sort of “chick-lit” lorem impsum. Girls Aloud had some ballads, but even in those, the emotional content of lyrics seem entirely besides the point. You get the sense that Higgins would wonder why someone would bother to write something emotional or sentimental when you could have a more musically interesting turn of phrase that didn’t mean much but stood out a bit more, like, I dunno, “we’re gift-wrapped kitty cats” or “there’s black jacks running down my back and I say STOP!”
“Biology” is one of Girls Aloud and Xenomania’s finest songs, and it’s a great example of their aesthetic. The song starts off with a stomping blues riff played about three times faster than you’d expect, but then shifts on a dime into a more straight forward up-tempo pop track that just gets faster and more emphatic as it goes along. It’s never quite dance music – there’s rarely elements of house or disco in Xenomania tracks, it’s always more like an extremely glossy and hyperactive sort of rock music. That’s part of why the blues intro and interlude here fit so well, and why the emphasis is played on the loudness of the chorus rather than the sway of a groove.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 7th, 2018
Youth Culture Costs Too Much For The Youth
The Rogers Sisters “Money Matters”
The best songs by The Rogers Sisters offer moments of ecstatic catharsis but never let go of a central tension. Their records came out during the middle of the George W. Bush era, and reflect an anxiety and hopelessness particular to that period – offended and angry, but also resigned and powerless. It’s the sound of getting worked up about something, but then realizing you’ve achieved nothing at all.
Most artists who made anti-Bush music in the ‘00s were roundly mocked for it. Not by right wingers, but by left-leaning indie music critics who felt like any statement made in a song was ham-fisted and gauche. So even The Rogers Sisters, whose lyrics fell in an odd place between direct statement and cryptic suggestion, were criticized at length in the Pitchfork review of their best record The Invisible Deck for being too strident and pedantic. (Brian Howe is a good writer, but the tone of that review is extremely unfair.) I remember feeling this peculiar anxiety too, and thinking that nearly any “political” sentiment in art was awkward, and that somehow any statement of dissent needed to be extensively vetted or something. Everyone was so embarrassed to be caught being anti-Bush or left wing in public, even if that’s exactly what they were. Doesn’t this all seem quaint now? These days you’d be more likely to be dragged for being apolitical.
“Money Matters” is hardly a pedantic song. It’s actually rather oblique in structure and hard to parse beyond its skepticism of the way “youth culture” and indeed most other forms of counterculture require the purchase of goods and services as a form of gatekeeping. Jennifer Rogers sings the song with the bitter pithiness of an outsider looking in – observant and wise, but removed and alienated. It’s not necessarily an anti-capitalist song, at least in as much as Rogers doesn’t see capitalism as anything she can escape, but it’s definitely about the way money and class permeates and corrupts everything, even opposition to such things.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 8th, 2018
Civilization Was A Hoax
A Frames “Black Forest II”
A Frames’ Black Forest was largely ignored at the time of its release in 2005 and has only become more obscure as the years go by, but it’s one of the great punk masterpieces of the 2000s. The sound is sharp and sterile, brutal yet elegantly composed. The tone is relentlessly bleak, and obsessed with societal collapse, nuclear annihilation, and the darkest periods of human history with a particular focus on World War II. This music suited the George W. Bush era, but seemed a bit hyperbolic at the time. Thirteen years later, it exactly sounds like the prevailing mood – anxious, furious, and hopeless. Erin Sullivan’s lyrics are blunt and impressionistic, sketching out a loose history of evil and catastrophe going all the way back to the Sumerians of the Fertile Crescent. “Black Forest” appears in three forms at the beginning, middle, and end of the record, and its spiky sound and apocalyptic lyrics suggest the notion that in Sullivan’s mind, every society is doomed to collapse. We’re all killing ourselves over and over and over again, and everything that we build is destined to burn. Maybe that’s why the record opens with the most bombed-out and desolate version of the musical theme, and ends with the most agitated and harsh version – the record begins with the nuked remains of one world, and ends with another entirely inevitable doomsday.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 9th, 2018
Intricate Patterns Of Light Dictate The Tone
Max Tundra “Glycaemic Index Blues”
It’s been a decade since Max Tundra released a record, which I suppose makes him the My Bloody Valentine of glitchy quirky English electronic pop music. There was a time when I would have said “ah, a genre of one,” but in recent years A.G. Cook, Sophie, and the PC Music crew have pushed the Tundra aesthetic into more contemporary and postmodern directions. Max’s music isn’t for everyone – it’s incredibly hyperactive and bouncy, like vintage video game music played at double or triple speed. The vocals keep up with the tempo by densely packing the lyrics with witty jokes, mundane observations, and profound thoughts that all somehow fit into intricate rhyme schemes. It’s a lot to take in, but it’s not hard to surrender to the energy of it, or just be in awe of Tundra’s relentless joyful creativity. And despite how self-consciously clever the music can be, it’s also remarkably vulnerable and sincere, particularly when he’s singing about having crushes and wanting to be loved.
Buy it from Amazon.
Note: Here’s a post I wrote about Max Tundra’s song “Number Our Days” that I like a lot, and another reviewing I concert I saw him perform in 2009. I have very little recollection of this show today, but it sounds like I had a very good time.