Fluxblog Weekly #5: Jamie xx, Florence + The Machine, Damaged Bug, Ratboys, Jim O'Rourke, She's So Rad
June 1st, 2015
Music In Your Eyes
Jamie XX featuring Romy “Loud Places”
A lot of the appeal of Jamie XX’s music is that it’s an extremely introverted version of music designed for extroverted situations – dancing in clubs, going to parties, being at festivals. It’s dance music, but at a remove from the physical experience, focused almost entirely on the sensation of sound and the expression of feelings. “Loud Places,” a song with his XX bandmate Romy Madley-Croft, brings all of the subtext in Jamie’s music to the foreground. It’s about being an introvert looking for intimacy, and dealing with these “loud places” as a necessary part of finding someone to be alone with. Jamie’s music evokes the feeling of being alone in a crowd, and when the sample drops in the chorus, the feeling of a snippet of music overlapping perfectly with your emotional state for just a moment. That bit in the chorus where Romy and the sample sync up is truly beautiful – it’s the sound of unexpected connection, even if it may not be the sort of connection she went looking for.
Buy it from Amazon.
June 2nd, 2015
Every City Was A Gift
Florence + The Machine “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (Demo Version)”
This recording may be labeled as a “demo” version, but don’t mistake for anything remotely minimal or skeletal. This is a fully produced song complete with a string section, and the main difference between this and the final, official recording is that the album version has even more strings, and goes even bigger than what is already quite huge the first time around. This is about what you’d expect from Florence Welch – she’s a woman with an enormous and powerful voice, and her band and producers are constantly challenged to find ways to appropriately showcase it. I prefer the somewhat less ornate version of “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful” for two main reasons – the mix on the album version sounds oddly sterile and featureless to me, and I’m not crazy about its extended string coda. It’s also nice to hear a recording of this band that allows the song to feel big without every element of the arrangement competing with Welch’s voice for power and intensity.
The song is terrific either way, though, and stands out as one of the best things Welch has written. The majority of the tracks on her new record are, as Douglas Wolk puts it, breakup songs “from the point of view of someone who is absolutely convinced that her breakup is the most devastating thing that has ever happened to anyone.” But this one is coming from a different place – it deals with the struggle of a long distance relationship, but more than anything it’s a love song about cities in general, and Los Angeles in particular. It’s interesting to hear a voice that mainly deals in songs about broken love and quasi-religious themes be used to express awe for a skyline. It should probably happen more often! I know this feeling well, and it’s a powerful thing.
Buy it from Amazon.
June 3rd, 2015
Bizarre To Say The Least
Damaged Bug “The Frog”
Damaged Bug is John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees. The difference between the two projects is that Thee Oh Sees is more of a traditional rock band where he plays electric guitar, and Damaged Bug is more of a studio band where he plays synthesizers. There is otherwise not that much difference between the two – Dwyer’s melodic sensibility is the same, though I think keyboards bring out the best in him, at least in terms of writing melody. Dwyer straight up mimics Silver Apples and Can in a few Damaged Bug songs and I love him for that, but I’m most excited by a song like “The Frog,” which I think could’ve easily been a guitar-based Oh Sees tune, but in this form benefits from the odd neon ambience of these droning synth tones. It’s a very cartoonish sound contrasting with a song that feels more earthy, so the overall compositions exists in some implied uncanny valley between those two extremes.
Buy it from Amazon.
Ratboys “MCMXIV”
“MCMXIV” is a travelogue song, with Julia Steiner jotting down bits of experiences and observations in a trip through the midwest. It doesn’t really add up to a coherent narrative, but there’s an emotional through line in the chorus – “I had no idea what to think about you / you had no idea how much I needed you.” The whole song is built around that sort of confusion, of knowing a feeling is incredibly powerful and important, but not really having a sense of what that feeling actually is. The feeling of dislocation makes the emotional experience more literal – moving through space with purpose, but not connected to it at all. Just passing it by, taking in it, and letting it sink in later on.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
June 4th, 2015
Floating Above Everybody
Jim O’Rourke “Half Life Crisis”
“Half Life Crisis” is the kind of song that’s so straightforward and melodically pleasing that you don’t really pick up on how lopsided its structure is until you actually give it a close listen, or look at it laid out on a page. The first chunk of the song is a string of verses separated by brief instrumental refrains that seem to get more ornate as the song moves along. Then the song shifts into an extended outré section that tilts the main melody somewhat, and introduces a lead guitar part that sounds very George Harrison to my ears. It’s a very lovely and elegant piece of rock music that distracts you somewhat from lyrics that are so sharply critical of someone that it’s hard to imagine it’s not about a very specific person. O’Rourke is singing about someone who’s been knocked down a few pegs after believing themselves to be a big star, and though his words aren’t outright hostile, it’s pretty clear that he’s savoring the schadenfreude.
Buy it from Amazon.
She’s So Rad “Sewn Up Sunrise”
Maybe about 40% of this song belongs in the shoegaze genre, but the rest of it – wow, I don’t really know how to classify that. There’s a few different categories of psychedelic music floating around in “Sewn Up Sunrise,” but they never really collide. Moving through the song is like passing through weather systems, and though you have to get through some stormy sequences, the end of the journey is pretty chill and relaxing. I love the lead guitar part at the end – it’s just a bit jazzy, and fits nicely with a groovy bass line that carries the song but sometimes feels slightly disconnected from the atmosphere.
Buy it from Bandcamp.