Fluxblog Weekly #216: Meernaa, Squid, Father John Misty, Lonely Island
June 20th, 2019
What It Truly Means To Bash
The Lonely Island “Focus on the Game”
The vast majority of The Lonely Island’s comedy has been focused on goofing on masculinity, and as they progress through their career their delight in mocking the absurdity of machismo only seems to intensify. In this way, The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is the pinnacle of their catalog to date – a rap opera visual album about famed steroid abusers José Canseco and Mark McGwire at the peak of their baseball careers in the late 80s. The record isn’t so much about the real life Canseco and McGwire as it is about how the pre-adolescent Lonely Island guys imagined them to be, a fantasy of hyper-masculine success built out of the images and messages they’d internalized from absorbing ’80s culture as children.
The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is hilarious; the only thing that’s been anywhere near as funny this year is the Lonely Island-produced I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. But it’s also incredibly sad in the way they explore their characters’ loneliness, paranoia, insecurity, and ‘roided-out rage. They’re just enormous two baby men obsessed with winning the love of their distant fathers, and oblivious to how other people are taking advantage of them. They love to objectify women and are obsessed with attaining their notion of male physical perfection, but chafe at being objectified by women.
“Focus on the Game” is the most melancholy song in Bash Brothers, and also probably the most lovely thing they’ve ever made in terms of pure melody. It’s a song about feeling lonely at the top – they’re both isolated and depressed, and terrified that their terrible secret about getting juiced up on steroids will come out and they’ll lose everything. The moment that kills me in this song is near the end where José and Mark’s perspectives overlap, and they address that they’re the only ones who truly understands the other. But this just pushes them apart, as they also realize that they’d be complicit in each other’s downfall. The phrase “you’re the only one who knows what it truly means to bash” shouldn’t be as poignant as it is in this song, but they made it work.
Buy it from Amazon.
June 20th, 2019
But My Mojo Is Gone
Father John Misty “Date Night”
Josh Tillman loves to play the heel in his own songs, and he’s exceptionally good at it. He knows what’s up in culture, he’s aware of his reputation, and he knows what he looks like to you. He’s not really that guy, but he’s enough like that guy to satirize it and poke holes in a particular form of bohemian masculinity. His character in “Date Night” is a dangerous but charming creep who’s a little too clueless to be good at manipulating other people. He aspires to be a grifter, but he’s actually the mark – he’s just far too obsessed with creating an image for himself to give much thought into anyone else’s motivations or desires. You get the impression that you could trick this guy into anything if he thought you were cooler than him, or that it would give him some edge. He’s ultimately just a bad date, some goon who’s trying too hard to seem nonchalant, quirky, and impressive, and mostly comes off as a frantic mess. It’s probably not too hard for a guy who gave himself the name “Father John Misty” and carefully crafted a louche “homeless billionaire” look for himself to get into this mindset. But he’s 100% in on the joke even if you’re not.
Buy it from Amazon.
June 18th, 2019
Rotting Cesspit Fear In Your Eyes
Squid “Houseplants”
I can’t claim to know all of the music that’s been coming out over the past few years, but I have screened a LOT of it and one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s very rare to hear anyone younger than 35 really scream these days. I have theories about this, but let’s not get into it. I’m just getting at how to hear a new band with a screaming, hugely expressive singer is a rarity now. It sounds extra unhinged.
Ollie Judge, the drummer and vocalist of Squid, sounds like a fucking maniac on this song. It’s not cookie-monster-vocal machismo or anything you’d typically get out of metal or grunge. It’s more bug-eyed and deranged, and the lyrics are so cryptic and odd that it’s all the more weird and jarring. It’s unsettling to hear a guy screaming “HOUSEPLANTS! HOUSEPLANTS!” like he’s having some sort of episode. The music is essentially punk but there’s bits of krautrock and jazzy skronk in the mix. Given that Judge has some vocal similarity to James Murphy, it comes out sounding like if all of LCD Soundsystem were dosed with bath salts.
This is fantastic and I want more of it.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
June 17th, 2019
This One-Way Mirror
Meernaa “Ready to Break”
“Ready to Break” is a very dense and rich piece of music that nevertheless feels loose and light. That’s mostly due to the way the song’s syncopated percussion seems to be at some distance from the keyboard chords and lead lines, with Carly Bond’s emotive voice lingering somewhere in the space between. There’s some interesting twists and turns here – it starts off as an 80s sort of funk pop ballad, but takes off on a tangent for the last couple minutes that sounds like if Robert Fripp and Sheila E sat in on a Janet Jackson song around 1986. There’s a real joy to this music, particularly in the way they seem to utterly delight in the sounds of the chords they choose, and how they pack them into the song with a lot of grace and style.
Buy it from Amazon.