Fluxblog Weekly #4: Nocturnal Sunshine, Moresounds, A$AP Rocky, Smurphy, Waterbed & Pixies
A lot of stuff on the Fluxblog this week! I actually have a glut of material I want to cover in the near future, so I may be going back to the old "two songs in one day" mode more often in the coming weeks.
Also, here's a music trivia quiz I made earlier this week: How Well Do You Actually Know '80s Pop?
May 25th, 2015
Forever And Ever Today
Nocturnal Sunshine featuring Catnipp “Down by the River”
It sounds as though Maya Jane Coles made the main keyboard part in this song to be a deliberate anxiety trigger. I certainly can’t hear it without feeling some kind of fight-or-flight instinct kicking in, or feeling trapped in some difficult situation. Catnipp’s vocals on this track taps into that vibe, and pushes into into a scenario in which sexiness and danger blur together, and the threat of violence is both terrifying and truly exciting. This is extremely bleak music, but it’s hard to deny its sexiness and strange gravity.
Buy it from Amazon.
May 26th, 2015
Tell Him Already
Moresounds featuring Fracture “Dead and Bury”
I remember feeling very disappointed when I first heard dubstep music because the name of the subgenre implied that it’d be like dub reggae. And like, for the most part, nope. But this track is kinda what I would’ve imagined – a French producer doing his own version of classic dub with modern DJ equipment and elements pulled from miscellaneous electronic subgenres that have popped up over the past decade or so. “Dead and Bury” mostly lingers in that pleasantly stoned, head-nodding space you’d expect from a dub track, but there’s a tonal shift with a pitched-up vocal part that comes in about a minute and a half in that moves the song into a far more emotional place. It’s a really beautiful moment, and unexpected in the best way.
Buy it from Amazon.
May 27th, 2015
The New Me Is Gonna Take Some Getting Used To
A$AP Rocky “Excuse Me”
The most interesting tension in A$AP Rocky’s body of work is the push and pull between his stoner aesthetics and obsession with elegance. Those aren’t opposite things, but they do contrast in interesting ways – so much of both of Rocky’s albums is like this impeccably crafted haze, and he just sorta struts through it with casual grace. He has exceptional taste in sound – maybe a lot of that came from Yams, but I’m inclined to think he’s internalized that influence by now – and I think he’s got a better and more adventurous sense of how to frame his voice than any rapper of his generation aside from Kendrick Lamar. “Excuse Me,” mainly produced by Jim Jonsin, is flat-out gorgeous and flips a sample from a Platters Christmas album into a composition that’s both stately and haunting. I love the way Rocky sounds with the backdrop of droning, sustained tones from an extended sample. He’s done this before, namely on “LVL” from his debut, and it really complements the subtle melancholy in his voice.
Buy it from Amazon.
Smurphy “Aquarius Risinn”
Smurphy’s music is low-key bewildering – it’s very odd and disarming, but also so ambient and comfortable that you can just kinda shrug off the parts that straight-up sound like frogs croaking in a swamp. “Aquarius Risinn” is about as songy as she gets, with a breakbeat coming in midway that feels a little like something that could’ve been on a mid-90s DJ Shadow or Tricky record. But the vibe is different, trading the smokiness and grime of that era for something that feels brighter and more…watery? I suppose that’s it, maybe? This is all so wonderfully abstract that any attempt to put this into words is kinda futile.
Buy it from Amazon.
May 28th, 2015
Jet Stream Laser Beam
Waterbed “Do2Me”
This song was introduced to me as being like a post-Grimes thing, and I can definitely hear that on the surface, but to my ears this track is rooted mainly in late-80s, freestyle-influenced bubblegum. It’s also a direct descendent of the spirit of a lot of Janet Jackson’s music of that era, as it’s intensely joyful music about experiencing the excitement of infatuation. You can’t make this sort of pop music without having a totally uncynical view of love and romance – you just can’t fake pure optimism, no matter what key you’re singing in. That said, a song like “Do2Me” can work pretty well as a substitute for that crushed-out feeling if it’s completely absent from your life at the moment.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
May 29th, 2015
I’m Only Visiting This Shore
Pixies @ Kings Theater 5/28/2015
In Heaven / Andro Queen / Ed Is Dead / Nimrod’s Son / Indie Cindy / Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) / Here Comes Your Man / Bagboy / Crackity Jones / Isla de Encanta / Gouge Away / U-Mass / Tame / Snakes / Caribou / Magdalena 318 / Subbacultcha / Brick Is Red / Hey / Silver Snail / No. 13 Baby / The Holiday Song / Greens and Blues / Cactus / La La Love You / Where Is My Mind? / Vamos // Wave of Mutilation / Debaser
I decided to go to this show at the last minute, almost literally. I had an interest in seeing this show for a while, but I was reticent about it because the ticket prices were kinda high. I looked the show up on Stubhub an hour before it began and discovered that people were slashing their prices quite dramatically, and scored a pretty good ticket that was $80 including the original service charges for just $20! The venue is about a half hour from where I live in Brooklyn, and I got there just before they got on stage. Very solid spur of the moment decision.
Pixies “Greens and Blues”
I know a lot of people hate that Kim Deal is no longer in the band and that the Pixies have a new album, but those things don’t really change the fact that the Pixies are excellent live and that Black Francis is one of the best rock singers of all time. Look at that setlist – even if you can’t stand the new songs, there’s still 22 Pixies classics in there. I think the new songs are OK for the most part – certainly not on the level of the original run, but above average for late period Black Francis material. I truly love “Greens and Blues,” though, and think it’s one of the best songs he’s ever written. I was vaguely nervous they wouldn’t play it, and pretty emotional when they did. (I wrote more about that song and the conundrum of the Pixies over here.)
As for the Kim thing: You can’t replace her as a presence on stage, and it’s not the same without her. But Paz Lenchantin does a fine job of playing her bass lines and singing her parts, and she’s close enough to replicating everything that you don’t really think too much about it during the set, and some people might not totally realize it’s not Kim. (The girls next to me actually asked me if that was Kim up there near the end of the show; they were genuinely unsure about it.)
Buy it from Amazon.