Fluxblog Weekly #75: Hamilton Leithauster/Rostam, Julia Jacklin, Purling Hiss, Fudge
September 24th, 2016
In The Dark Where You Can’t See The Stars
Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam “Rough Going (I Won’t Let Up)”
Rostam Batmanglij is a great collaborator for Hamilton Leithauser for a lot of reasons, but primarily because he has such a great grasp on exactly what makes Leithauser such an interesting and distinct performer. In “Rough Going,” Batmanglij taps into my favorite aspect of his work with The Walkmen, a bleary-eyed late night drunken vibe, and pushes that to a theatrical extreme. The song sounds like it was written, arranged, and recorded on the spot in some ancient dive bar around 2 AM. Like a lot of the best studio recordings, it evokes a feeling of improvisation and immediacy despite being calculated and artificially constructed by design. I’d love to know just how much of this is live in a room, though – it feels so loose and Leithauser sounds so present in the moment and totally connected to the swing of the beat. The sax solo is wonderful too, and sounds completely off-the-cuff in the best way, like the sax player just happened to be in the room and decided to jump in when the moment was right.
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September 26th, 2016
I Cost More Than You Earn
Julia Jacklin “Leadlight”
Julia Jacklin isn’t breaking the mold with anything about the melody, structure, or style of this song, but everything about this song is executed with a seemingly tossed-off elegance that impresses the hell out of me. It’s a bit like how you wouldn’t criticize gorgeous handwriting because the person holding the pen was using the letters and words and sentence structure of a language, you know? This song is all about the contours of the melody, and how it sways gently between its changes, and the way Jacklin’s voice tips from sweet to sardonic and back again within two lines. I’m especially fond of this very Peter Buck-ish bit getting towards the end, but then, of course I’m going to be a mark for anything with a passing similarity to “Strange Currencies.”
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September 27th, 2016
It Won’t Last Forever
Purling Hiss “Fever”
Purling Hiss’ early stuff gave me the impression that they weren’t particularly interested in writing song-y songs, and were more about foregrounding the scuzzy surface of lo-fi garage rock. I don’t think that music worked very well, in large part because form is pretty important to that genre, and without it you lose the momentum that makes it exciting. I wonder if they came to that conclusion, because their new music is very structured and dynamic, and clearly built for thrills. All the sounds in “Fever” sound very hot – it’s all in the red so it’s hot in production terms, but also in vibe, because it feels like getting blasted with sunlight in a heatwave. But it’s the sort of too-hot that makes you feel extra alive, and everything about the song and the performances conveys reckless fun.
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September 29th, 2016
Sipping Nanny Nectar
Fudge “Young Vet”
Fudge is Prefuse 73’s hip-hop project with rapper Michael Christmas, and a lot of the thrill of it is hearing Prefuse bend his eccentricities as a composer into the consistent rhythmic frame of rap. If you’ve ever heard Prefuse 73’s music, a track like “Young Vet” will be very recognizable as his work – there’s just something about the way he chops up sound that’s like an audio fingerprint. He gives Christmas just enough stable measures to rap over, but the sound shifts a lot more than a typical rap track, and Christmas often seems like he’s being pushed into shaky ground. But he’s totally game, and his performances through the record, but especially here on “Young Vet,” sound fresh and fearless.
Buy it from Amazon.