Fluxblog Weekly #246: Poppy, Selena Gomez, Cable Ties, Magdalena Bay, Mac Miller + Bob Dylan
Last week, out of pure curiosity, I asked people to name their top 3 Bob Dylan songs. The response was pretty huge and also very scattered across his massive discography, so I ended up putting together a playlist of every song at least one person mentioned as being in their top 3. You can find it on Spotify and Apple Music – it's kinda long, but sort of a perfect way to jump into his catalog spanning six decades.
January 13th, 2020
Let It All Burn Down
Poppy “I Disagree”
Poppy’s gradual shift towards a more abrasive sound has been interesting and only mildly surprising given that even her most bubblegum pop music was rooted in a trolling, “what’s even real, mannnn” questioning of commercial culture and YouTube mediation. But it also makes sense in that the sounds she’s been gravitating to – particularly the nü-metal guitar aesthetics – have only recently become understood as a form of kitsch. “I Disagree” is, on a formal level, basically a Sleigh Bells song with their more AC/DC approach to guitar riffing swapped out for a more Korn/OzzFest vibe. It’s a winning formula, and you really don’t need to pick up on any kind of wink for this to just be effective as an exciting and dynamic piece of music. But all the same, that wink – as well as Poppy’s overt femininity – is crucial for giving those guitar parts a fresh context that highlights everything thrilling about this style while cutting away all the less appealing baggage of sincere hyper-masculine aggression. You could see this is a sort of musical gentrification, particularly in that nü-metal is mostly associated with working class people, but I think what Poppy is doing works and does the original music some favors in retrospect by highlighting the most fun elements and giving those musicians credit for being effective and often deliberately funny.
Buy it from Amazon.
January 14th, 2020
All The Endless Places
Selena Gomez “Cut You Off”
“Cut You Off” falls into the same category as a lot of Ariana Grande’s best music: Sophisticated pop music bankrolled by the success of more market-oriented hits. Selena Gomez has great taste in melody – she favors a lot of busy-but-gracefully-light melodic turns, a thing I’m a real sucker for – and she’s shown a consistent interest in understated but stylish use of guitar. This song covers both, along with her draw towards music that conveys a low-key neuroticism. “Cut You Off” is about deciding to fully break it off with someone she’s been with for “1460 days” – so Bieber, then? – while sounding a bit nervous and wishy-washy about actually going through with it.
The distance between the lyrical proclamations and the cautious feel of the music is obviously the whole point here, and the arrangement is a series of contrasts between moments of floaty bliss and gently thudding hesitancy. The guitar solo near the end, performed by co-writer and producer David Pramik, is intriguing in the way it starts off restating the main melody with a touch of bluesy slickness but gets more halting as it goes along, like someone overthinking and getting self-conscious. If the song ended there, you’d be left assuming she backed down from a good idea, but instead it ends by just cutting off. A happy ending, basically.
Buy it from Amazon.
January 16th, 2020
Shifting The Goalposts
Cable Ties “Sandcastles”
Cable Ties specialize in brute force and velocity, two core values of punk rock that can nevertheless get underserved by bands who simply can’t go very hard. Every element in “Sandcastles” is stark and blunt, and played like they’re trying to bruise you on every impact. That’s all great, but the real draw is in the band’s approach to their vocals, which is like replacing the hot/cold dynamic of Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein with a more intense combo of hot backing vocal by drummer Shauna Boyle and a scalding hot lead by guitarist Jenny McKechnie. It’s a righteous sound for a righteous song, as McKechnie’s lyrics tear into over-militant activists who defeat their own goals with aggressive gatekeeping rather than open-minded coalition building. A good song for this year, obviously.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
January 16th, 2020
My Heartbeat Is In My Feet
Magdalena Bay “How to Get Physical”
Last year Magdalena Bay released an excellent song called “Only If You Want It” which sounded remarkably like Britney Spears in her prime and pushed the obsessive feelings at the center of many of Spears’ major hits to an absurdist extreme. “How to Get Physical,” from their new EP, does a similar trick – it has the sound and feeling of Kylie Minogue at her early 2000s pinnacle, but swaps out the casual lust and slick confidence of that music with a neurotic insecurity. Mica Tenenbaum’s voice matches the joyful/serene cadences of Minogue, but her lyrics describe a scene of feeling total cluelessness as she tries to figure out how to be seductive while dancing with someone but deciding that it’s for the best if she just lets them take control rather than potentially humiliate herself by making a move. I like the way this song places itself in the gulf between the idealized situations of pop songs and music videos and the actual lived experience of awkward, ordinary fans. How many pop songs have you heard where the vocalist is singing about the freedom of dancing? This is just the opposite, where the hook is a shrugging admission that she’s not “made for dancing” at all, so now what?
Buy it from Bandcamp.
January 17th, 2020
Right Before You Fall
Mac Miller “Circles”
There’s a lot of ways Mac Miller’s death at the age of 26 last year is heartbreaking and tragic, but the thing that stings the most if you didn’t actually know him is that he was just finding himself as a vocalist in the year or so before he died. Miller was singing more, and leaning in hard on the raspiness of his voice, and contrasting it with more elegant and organic sounds in collaboration with Jon Brion. In a song like “Circles,” which opens his new posthumous which he was working on with Brion at the time of his death, you can hear him confidently settling into a niche as a prematurely weathered man grappling with his demons and failures with a vocal style that communicated remarkable vulnerability and low-key pathos. In his voice and words you get a poignant mix of resignation to life’s difficulties – and the problems he created for himself – but also a glimmer of hope that he can move beyond all that if only he had some time to set things right and get back on track. Surely I don’t need to belabor the point of why hearing him sing a song expressing that mix of feelings is so heartbreaking to hear now.
Buy it from Amazon.