Fluxblog Weekly #90: Nine Inch Nails, Run the Jewels, Chavez, Alexander F, Kool Keith
January 9th, 2017
You’re Not Really What You Know You Are
Nine Inch Nails “Burning Bright (Field on Fire)”
Trent Reznor approaches record formats like a painter – some works are large canvasses, others are diptychs or murals, and a few here and there are miniatures. Not the Actual Events is in the latter category along with Brokenand the first How to Destroy Angels EP. As with those previous small scale works, it’s a complete thought with a distinctive aesthetic. The songs have the raw garage punk urgency of The Slip, but it’s far more cluttered and abrasive, and mostly avoids the melody and harmony at the core of even Reznor’s heaviest music.
Not the Actual Events is a deliberate mess; it’s a calculated replica of a chaotic state of mind. It starts off with a punk song that cuts out just as it starts to accelerate, as if the song just crashed into a wall, and then lurches though a middle section that sounds lost, desperate, and confused. Reznor and Atticus Ross go wild with texture – there’s a lot of clashing and overlapping planes of sound, and stuff that sounds like Joy Division strangling My Bloody Valentine guitar parts to death. Reznor’s voice is present through the whole thing, but it’s often obscured or nearly incoherent as he recites lyrics that are closer to free verse than his usual rhythmic and melodic cadences. The themes aren’t far off from where he was last time around on Hesitation Marks – he’s afraid of backsliding into old habits and destroying the life he’s built, and overwhelmed with paranoia about a world in decline. It all ends with a sort of thwarted catharsis in which Reznor finds the strength and clarity to push back against all of this anxiety, and he gives himself some space for a clear, relatively calm vocal melody to cut through the blaring guitar. But in the same song where he’s singing about being forgiven and free, he’s telling himself “you’re not really what you know you are.” It doesn’t feel like a victory.
Buy it from Amazon.
January 10th, 2017
Live At The Garden
Run the Jewels “Call Ticketron”
Run the Jewels have been great from the start, but I think it’s taken them a bit to transition from “project” to full-time collaborators. The intensity and chemistry has always been there, but Killer Mike and El-P sound emboldened by the realization that RTJ has becoming the defining work of their long careers, and seem thrilled to give the people what they want. These are guys who’ve built their reputations on projecting confidence, but they’ve never seemed as sure of themselves as they do on these new songs. It must help to know when you’re writing songs exactly how excited people will be to hear them, and what will make people lose their shit when you perform live. “Call Ticketron” is one of the songs that seems built specifically for the live show – there’s the “l-l-l-live from the Garden” refrain, sure, but it’s more in the way the track contrasts its vast negative space with a rhythm that tightens up a lot before releasing the tension. El-P and Mike switch up their approaches to the beat through the song, with the former lurking around it at the start, and the latter ratcheting up the tension in his last verse by packing in the syllables and leaning into internal rhyme.
Buy it from Amazon.
January 11th, 2017
Left As Easy As It Came
Chavez “Blank in the Blaze”
Chavez songs share a similar formal logic in which tension is introduced and then doubled or tripled before it is released. Matt Sweeney and Clay Tarver’s guitars on the new song “Blank in the Blaze” alternate between melodic part that tighten up like coils of metal wire or riffs that clench up like fists. The approach is exactly the same as when they more regularly produced music 20 years ago; this could easily be an outtake from Ride the Fader. There are some bands who could come back after a long hiatus and end up feeling different, but it makes sense that Chavez would snap into their distinctive groove, since the band emerged from a set of clear formal rules and restraints. And all of those rules are there just to make sure that you get exactly what’s at the end of “Blank”: a soaring sensation of triumph tempered by a feeling of exhaustion and lost.
Buy it from Amazon.
January 12th, 2017
Burn Up In The Sunrise
Alexander F “Soft Coffins”
“Soft Coffin” is a song that does its best to be kind and reassuring to some anxious, depressive person, but doesn’t seem to actually understand what this person is going through. It’s sympathy and love, but not exactly empathy. And while that’s not ideal, it’s something I think all of us feel from time to time when someone we care about is hurting themselves one way or another and we just want them to stop and to acknowledge they are loved. Alexander F’s song has the hallmarks of an uplifting arena rock song but the underpinnings of something more uncertain and twitchy, and the lyrics spike sweet sentiments with jokes to mitigate the tension and to keep it from being prescriptive. It sounds like a very recognizable mix of kindness and awkwardness and exasperation.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
December 19th, 2016
A Sweet Fine Old Lady
Kool Keith and Kutmasta Kurt “Your Mom Is My Wife”
Kool Keith was on such a hot streak in the late ‘90s that he was somehow willing to throw a song as excellent and immediately appealing as “Your Mom Is My Wife” in a vault for 20 years. I have no idea why this track was scrapped back then – maybe Keith had second thoughts about releasing a song in which he condescendingly treats the then-current generation of rappers like his literal sons and demands homage and respect. (Hip-hop itself is the mother, obviously.) But regardless of his motives at the time, the song has aged very well. So well, in fact, that I didn’t realize it wasn’t a brand new tune the first few times I heard it, and only discovered its origin upon Googling it in advance of writing about it. The lyrics are even funnier now that Keith is old enough to be the actual father of many contemporary rappers, though it is pretty amusing to think that this old man routine was coming from a dude who was about 33 at the time it was recorded.
Buy it from Bandcamp.