Fluxblog Weekly #238: Beck • Taeyeon • Deerhunter • Boards of Canada • Jubilee
November 22nd, 2019
I Woke Up In A Movie
Beck “Everlasting Nothing”
This is an excerpt from my review of the new Beck album Hyperspace for NPR.
The record ends with “Everlasting Nothing,” a majestic ballad that’s among the best songs Beck has ever released. “I woke up in a movie, didn’t know if it was my whole life,” he sings over a stately guitar rhythm. “When it ended, I laughed before I cried.” A verse later, he imagines his rebirth as “a standing ovation for the funeral of the sun,” sounding less blunt and plainspoken and more poetic and abstract — that is, more like himself.
As the song progresses it grows grander in scale, and finally peaks with the ecstatic glossolalia of female gospel singers. The effect is similar to “The Great Gig in the Sky,” in which Pink Floyd used a similar arrangement trick to convey a cosmic notion of death and the afterlife. But whereas Clare Torry’s voice was foregrounded on that song, the gospel vocals in “Everlasting Nothing” are distant in the mix, like a siren call to oblivion that Beck is tuning out for the time being, choosing to stay grounded as he faces the unknown. It’s not quite a happy ending, but it’s at least a dramatic ride into the sunset, capping all the gloomy resignation with some sense of direction and purpose.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 17th, 2019
I Laugh For You
Taeyeon “하하하 (LOL)”
This is basically like a K-Pop version of Portishead, but who knows if that was even what these people were aiming for. One of the things I like a lot about K-Pop is that very often the maximalist aesthetic results in the writers and producers tossing a dozen different musical ideas into any given song and ending up with something fresh and distinctive if just by the novelty of the contrasting elements. “LOL” leans on a lot of trip-hop and post-Weeknd R&B aesthetics but there’s so much else going on in the song, particularly in the final third when you’re getting hand claps piled on “orchestra hit” keyboards piled on groovy organ and topped with a glossy guitar solo. Taeyeon’s vocal suits the femme fatale vibe of the music, especially when she laughs to the beat in a way that sounds very much like she’s taunting the listener.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 19th, 2019
No Pride Or Joy
Deerhunter “Timebends”
A lot of the time, even with an artist I love and have followed for many years like Deerhunter, I put off listening to stand-alone or pre-album singles. It’s just a matter of prioritizing, and I don’t particularly like the drip drip drip drip approach to releasing songs in advance of a full record because then you hear the record in full and it feels more like a compilation. So it took a few weeks to get to “Timebends,” but I heard it at precisely the right time on a day when its lyrics about feeling emotionally flat would really click with my experience in the moment. It felt like that joke where someone in a video is aware that the song is narrating exactly what they’re doing and what’s going on around them.
“Timebends” isn’t the first time Bradford Cox has stretched out the length of a song, but it’s the first time he’s written something that’s so deliberately epic. It sounds like the goal here was to make a perfect finale for live shows and built in as many fun instrumental tangents as possible, right on down to a drum solo. It’s over-the-top but not in a way that undermines the drama of the song and the way Cox seems to be mourning the loss of a part of himself and questioning whether anything has actually been improved. It’s a little sad, but mostly just…blank. It’s very “it is what it is.”
Buy it from Amazon.
November 19th, 2019
Yeah, That’s Right
Boards of Canada “Aquarius” (Version 3/Peel Session 1998)
The voices in “Aquarius” are all sourced from Sesame Street clips from the ‘70s, but only the bit of a child’s voice saying “yeah….that’s right!” signals itself as such. The rest either sounds remarkably like a numbers station or melts into incoherence, another texture in a psychedelic funk song that’s halfway between nostalgic vague familiarity and the unknown. In the context of Music Has the Right to Children “Aquarius” feels like a piece of a larger musical collage pulled from some Jungian collective unconscious of Gen X childhood. This version of the song – ostensibly recorded live in session for the BBC though I cannot tell exactly what constitutes “live” for this sort of music – feels somewhat looser and warmer, and somehow takes a different shape in isolation while being just about the same in structural terms. There’s a little more urgency to the rhythm and a bit more pop to the bass. When the numbers start falling out of sequence the mischief of it feels more pronounced, like you can tell that on some level the BoC brothers were enjoying the chance to mess with people’s heads in real time for once rather than well after the fact.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 21st, 2019
You Can Have What You Want
Jubilee featuring Maluca “Mami”
I always favor cultural omnivores as electronic dance producers. I’m not dialed into the ongoing narrative of this milieu to care much about the concepts, aesthetic purity, or subcultural contexts of microgenres, and I find it much easier to connect with the sort of DJs who have internalized every trick in the book for getting people to dance and are ruthless in their pursuit of delivering thrills. Jubilee is very much this type of producer, and while her record Call of Location doesn’t sound quite like my beloved Basement Jaxx, it’s very apparent that she’s cut from the same cloth. The record is all energy and joyful eclecticism rooted in a deep love and history with the music she’s drawing on. It’s not hard to dissect the mix of grime, Miami bass, and dancehall that comes together on “Mami,” but the song is so effective on a raw physical level that examining it that way is besides the point. She’s connecting the dots between these things, but mostly just in a “by any means necessary” approach to moving you.
Buy it from Bandcamp.