Fluxblog Weekly #180: Crepes, Wilco, Public Memory, Molly Burch
September 30th, 2018
Prepare Your Words
Crepes “As You Go”
“As You Go” is a marvel of rock craftsmanship – it’s neat and elegant in its construction, but still has enough physicality to keep it from feeling cold or sterile. Crepes thread a ’60s British Invasion sort of melody through an arrangement that nods towards jazzy rock, the Talking Heads end of new wave, and Tame Impala-ish contemporary psychedelia without ever feeling quite like it belongs in any particular genre. There’s a pleasing fluidity to this song as it progresses, particularly as it shifts into its extended instrumental outro and all the threads resolve before an unexpected guitar solo finale.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
October 2nd, 2018
The Books That You Don’t Read Anyway
Wilco “Poor Places”
“Poor Places” is about a very particular lonely state of mind, but the lyrics are all scattered thoughts and images: The sound of his father’s voice trailing off. Bandages, broken jaws, a drunk rock singer, an air-conditioned room at the top of the stairs. There’s moments of desperation, and details that are basically inconsequential but somehow seem essential to getting across the feeling.
And in the middle of all this oblique poetry, Jeff Tweedy sings one line that’s direct and entirely unambiguous: “I really want to see you tonight.” You don’t say that if there’s a real possibility of it happening. It’s the need that is unmet. It’s the help you can’t even really ask for. The guy in “Poor Places” knows he’s a mess, and he knows he needs to be alone. He can’t bring himself to care about anything else. But he’s longing for connection, affection, distraction. He can’t have it.
The ending of “Poor Places” is resignation bleeding into oblivion. He decides to shut out the world, and the song shifts from a delicate and elegant middle section into a graceless thudding rhythm and cacophony. There’s a sample from a numbers station recording, a woman crisply annunciating “yankee…hotel…foxtrot” over and over in a clipped mid-Atlantic accent. She sounds unreal and robotic. It sounds menacing in context, particularly as the thud of the beat becomes more aggressive. It also sounds completely meaningless, like some detail your mind fixates on as everything else falls out of focus. You just stare until your consciousness dissolves.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 2nd, 2018
That’s How They Do
Public Memory “The Line”
“The Line” will sound immediately familiar to anyone who spent a lot of time listening to the groovy nightmare music coming out of the U.K. at the end of the 1990s – UNKLE, Tricky, Primal Scream, Radiohead, Portishead, etc. It’s the hip-hop beat reconfigured as a death march; the electronic tones that sound like security alarms; the grinding terror and pervasive pre-millennium tension. Robert Toher, the writer and producer of this track, is also the vocalist, and somehow he manages to sound like Portishead’s Beth Gibbons singing through a speaker phone in a conference room. The music is very dystopian, but there’s a feeling through it that things are about to get much worse. Though this evokes music from 20+ years ago, you certainly can’t say that this is retro – this is what the world is like all the time lately, all those Brits just saw the future clearly. Toher is just capturing the mood rather than predicting it.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
October 5th, 2018
Make Romance
Molly Burch “Wild”
“Wild” is an expression of low-key envy, with Molly Burch observing another woman and wishing that she could be anywhere near as confident and uninhibited as she appears to be. Burch declares that it’s her “nature to be guarded,” and that may be true, but she sings the song with a theatricality that suggests she’s not nearly the wallflower she thinks she is. Or maybe this is just her mimicking the behavior – a little more vampy and a bit more campy than she might usually be. The song itself sounds light and sensual, and betrays very little of the neuroses on display in the lyrics. The looseness and easygoing loveliness of the tune feels more like it represents the vibe of the woman being observed than the feelings described in Burch’s words.
Buy it from Bandcamp.