Fluxblog Weekly #227: Lana Del Rey, Cigarettes After Sex, Ghost Funk Orchestra, Hot Chip, Bat for Lashes
September 1st, 2019
You Blame The News
Lana Del Rey “Norman Fucking Rockwell”
What must it be like to be a man in a Lana Del Rey song? It’s a lot of mixed messages, for sure. The subject of this song gets high praise at the top of the first verse – “you fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you’” – but almost every subsequent line drags him mercilessly for his mopey vibe, bad art, and tiresome intellectual vanity. The magic of the song is that the core emotion isn’t pettiness or anger, but rather genuine affection and empathy for this wounded mess of a man despite these flaws. She’s definitely frustrated with herself for caring about him, but even when she’s dismissing his behavior – “you’re just a man, it’s just what you do” – she won’t completely write off his humanity.
As with most Lana songs, she’s asking the listener to consider that contradictory thoughts complete each other more often that not. The “man-child” here is aggravating, but he’s interesting, and loving, and allows himself to be vulnerable with her. She probably can do better, but is “doing better” always the point of human relationships? And even if love is just a game to be won, if put under the same sort of scrutiny as the guy in this song would she or any of us come out looking good? Love can’t work unless you’re willing to deal with flaws, and “Norman Fucking Rockwell” is just asking if this guy is worth the trouble and not quite arriving at a conclusion.
Buy it from Amazon.
September 2nd, 2019
Touch Me With A Kiss
Cigarettes After Sex “Heavenly”
There’s no catch to “Heavenly.” It’s a romantic song about romantic love, with nothing to subvert or undermine that feeling. Greg Gonzalez sings his lyrics with an earnest purity – his voice is soft and gentle, but there’s also a firm certainty in his phrasing. The music conveys lovey-dovey infatuation without a trace of anxiety or impatience. Gonzalez is presenting an idealized version of the sort of intense love that seems to stop time, or at least slow it down to a crawl. It sounds like eyes locking, lips pulling back from a kiss, and the tiniest physical sensations amplified times a hundred.
Buy it from Amazon.
September 4th, 2019
Sing A Weary Song
Ghost Funk Orchestra “Modern Scene”
Ghost Funk Orchestra make a jazzy sort of psychedelic rock that I suppose is essentially nostalgic in its major debt to ’60s recordings, but the actual music feels disconnected from any particular time or place, as it’s really just bandleader Seth Applebaum piecing together an imagined past from scraps of old music he finds beautiful and interesting. (As a collector of old magazines, I feel like I’m recognizing some common instincts.) Their new record A Song for Paul has an aesthetic kinship with Broadcast in their The Noise Made By People phase – the music sounds “accurate,” but there’s a slight implied ironic distance and enough modern touches to keep it from seeming like a replica. The most noticeable difference is in the vocal performance, which signals “indie” more than “60s” and contrasts with the more obviously retro funk psychedelia elements like a neon green stripe through a black and white photograph.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
September 5th, 2019
Fiendish For You
Hot Chip “Hungry Child”
Hot Chip have reached a moment of their career where their live show is essentially a DJ set of their greatest hits, and they present this to audiences with a maximum level of pride and zero shame. They are DJs at heart, and despite a lot of strong album tracks, they’ve also always been a classic singles band. Last night at Brooklyn Steel the group opened their show with a parade of some of their most crowd-pleasing songs – “Haurache Lights,” “One Life Stand,” “Night & Day,” “Flutes,” “Over & Over” – in the way a good DJ aims to get people on the floor as quickly as possible. It’s the opposite of how most live bands would sequence a show, with the goal of building towards a climax in the final third of a set. But the DJ logic works, and when they moved from “Over & Over” into the more recent single “Hungry Child,” the audience was primed to greet it as another great banger rather than an untested new tune to be burned off before the real hits.
It seems like part of Hot Chip’s ongoing project is creating a body of work that lends itself to this sort of performance or a killer greatest hits compilation, and writing new songs is a bit like figuring out what sort of songs they need to improve that end result. “Hungry Child” has a particular utility as a more pure sort of house track than they’ve typically made before, and brings in tropes of the genre that haven’t featured on the other hits. I particularly love the gospel-house elements, and the way the neutral but plaintive tones of Alexis Taylor’s voice contrast with an overtly passionate sound.
Buy it from Amazon.
September 6th, 2019
He Plays A Hunter And I Play His Kill
Bat for Lashes “So Good”
Bat for Lashes’ fifth album Lost Girls is a logical culmination of Natasha Khan’s body of work to date – an atmospheric synth pop record about supernatural romance set in a nostalgic ultra-cinematic version of late 20th century Los Angeles. Everything about the record and the visuals she has made to go along with it is extremely on-brand, to the point that while it’s all very good, it’s vaguely disappointing to me in the sense that as a long term fan I think I’d be more excited by a more radical stylistic or thematic shift. But that’s a cheap complaint when so few artists today can conjure this sort of extreme romanticism, even though there are so many who try. Khan’s craft is top shelf, her voice is gorgeous and distinctive, her taste is exquisite, and her reference points are specific.
“So Good” is the song on Lost Girls that strays furthest from Khan’s earlier work while staying firmly in the conceptual boundaries of the project. It’s a different flavor of ‘80s pop than she’s tried before – more bubbly and heavily programmed, and a bit closer to “cheesy” than “sexy.” It’s the song in the cycle in which her character swoons over the sexy vampire man while acknowledging his darkness and cruelty, and realizing that this turns her on. She sings the verses in a lower register but shifts up to her more natural high notes on the chorus, and the whole song brightens in that sequence. But it’s not a light of clarity – it’s more like a disorienting strobe light, and if she can focus at all it’s on small slivers of the moment she’s in.
Buy it from Amazon.