Fluxblog Weekly #80: No Panty, Ari Lennox, Drugdealer, Heavy Heart
If you're looking to lightly goof on Bon Iver and his fans, here's a quiz I made over at BuzzFeed that ran over last weekend. I'm also particularly fond of this weird one that has nothing to do with music at all.
October 31st, 2016
Cornbread And Empanadas On The Weekend
No Panty “Singin’ My Song”
Salaam Remi imagined No Panty as a party; a physical space to go see mixtape rappers perform live. The party became a group – Nitty Scott, Bodega Bamz, and Joell Ortiz, all NYC rappers of Puerto Rican heritage – and the group made a record, and the record sounds just like a party. Bamz and Ortiz are both great, but these songs are dominated by the raw star power of Scott. The group dynamic reminds me of the Fugees, where you have these two guys who would be the most charismatic rappers on someone else’s track put in de facto supporting roles alongside this extraordinarily expressive and confident female emcee. “Singin’ My Song” is the most immediate cut on a record full of obvious bangers, and lot of that has to do with how joyfully Scott bounces off the beat, and the way her voice bends and twists around the syllables of carefully constructed rhymes that somehow feel totally relaxed and improvised.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 1st, 2016
Fall Into Me Slow
Ari Lennox “Night Drive”
The melody line in this song and the vocal performance captured on this track are both remarkable, but I find myself obsessing on something relatively minor about the recording: There is something magical about the particular crack of the snare, something I can barely describe. It’s a perfect thwack sound, both precise and blunt. It’s firm and physical, and not at all fussy. It’s in direct contrast with the overt loveliness of the twinkling keyboard part and Ari Lennox’s voice, which has the grace of a jazz singer and the nimbleness of an emcee. It’s the perfect grounding for the song on both a musical and lyrical level, situating a romantic sentiment within something more immediate and tangible.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 2nd, 2016
My Mind Is Open
Drugdealer featuring Weyes Blood “Suddenly”
Everything about this song screams “I’m from the early ‘70s,” to the point that the only tell is in the production, which has a very contemporary digital chilliness to it. (I am not actually certain this was recorded and/or mixed digitally, but I would be a lot of money that it was.) The piano chords sound like they’re meant to deliberately evoke hits by Todd Rundgren and Carole King, and give you a grounding in some very familiar and wholesome vibe before drifting into a dreamier type of psychedelia. This is basically a love song about taking psychedelics, and Natalie Mering sings it with a tone that feels both intimate and weirdly detached, which is pretty much exactly right for the subject matter. She always sounds like she’s not quite there with you, and moving somewhere else with the chords.
Buy it from Amazon.
November 3rd, 2016
Draw A Circle Perfectly Around Her Heart
Heavy Heart “Teenage Witch”
The music sounds a bit more “teenage vampire” to me, if we’re being honest. But teenage witches are more interesting to me than teenage vampires, in part because while the metaphor of vampires is more about adults lusting for youth, witchcraft is about wanting to claim the powers of adulthood. It’s all secret knowledge and rituals and sisterhood, and often a lot of lust and rivalry. It’s barely a metaphor for being a teen girl – it’s more just an exaggerated power fantasy, like superheroes. This is the feeling Heavy Heart are tapping into here, filling this romantic and hyper-dramatic sort of shoegaze ballad with this mix of fascination, envy, and unprocessed lust for some other woman. The lyrics on the chorus get creepily possessive – “I want it, and no one can have it / so what if it isn’t worth it” – but I think the real power of this song is someone deciding that they can feel this way, and getting off on that. After all, a lot of witchcraft is just owning your desires without shame.
Buy it from Amazon.