Fluxblog Weekly #96: Lana Del Rey, Goldfrapp, No Joy, Fog Lake, Operator Music Band
February 20th, 2017
Nowhere In Particular
Lana Del Rey “Love”
The key to Lana Del Rey’s music is that she understands that certain types of sadness and yearning are very satisfying feelings, sometimes more so than most positive emotions. This is especially true when you’re terrified of actual intimacy – being with someone is scary, but pining for them lets you experience the rush of love without the parts that make you uncomfortable and insecure. “Love” is sung from a remove, with Lana observing young people doing young people things, and experiencing innocent, earnest passion for the first time. There’s a bit of envy and loneliness in her voice, but you can tell she’s invested in these other people and their happiness. Even if she’s afraid on some level that she can’t have this or can’t anymore, she doesn’t begrudge them for these simple joys. She seems to like the tragic romanticism of being the outsider on the periphery, the wounded person who can claim some distance from these people with their ordinary lives. She gets to feel like the special one, even if it’s an empty feeling.
Buy it from iTunes.
February 21st, 2017
Like Lucid Dreams
Goldfrapp “Anymore”
Goldfrapp have spent their entire career vacillating between meditative, delicate ballads and glammy dance pop, mostly doing one style at a time per record. As the time between Goldfrapp’s records increase, so does the space between these phases, and so “Anymore” is the first proper banger this band has released since 2010. It feels very refreshing. The song, a straightforward dance tune about lust, feels confident and slightly nostalgic, as though Alison Goldfrapp is reconnecting with some part of herself that had gone dormant for a time. The glee in this song seems directly connected to the feeling of “oh yes, I’d forgotten how this felt, and didn’t realize I still could.” It’s a familiarity that is not taken for granted.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 22nd, 2017
The Mess Is In You
No Joy “Hellhole”
I feel like a lot of the artists who’ve made shoegaze music in the past decade and a half have set a very low bar for themselves. It’s a style where you can get by on very little, and artists who legitimately pushed the genre forward, like A Sunny Day in Glasgow in the mid-00s, were mostly shrugged off in favor of far less interesting and imaginative bands. No Joy have evolved into both the best shoegaze act of their era, and also something a bit beyond those parameters. (Of course, they also get underrated and unrecognized by the culture industry.) Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd have staked out an interesting musical space for themselves – increasingly bold vocal harmonies crashing into shifting planes of abrasive rhythm guitar and ambient noise. A song like “Hellhole” manages to sound fragile and brutal at the same time, and the way they contrast these elements suggests that those extremes aren’t as opposite as they might seem.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 23rd, 2017
Your Image Stains My Mind
Fog Lake “Side Effects”
The first half of Fog Lake’s Dragonchaser is a pleasant, spacey haze – acoustic guitars jangling in icy reverb, with an androgynous voice murmuring lyrics that strongly suggest the name of the record isn’t some D&D thing. But a bit over halfway through the record, everything perks up considerably. The guitar gets a bit jauntier, the vocals are much more clear, the melodies are stronger, the recording sounds more deliberate and professional. And the lyrics follow suit, shifting perspective from a hazy, numb moment to looking back on “the days we lost.” It’s a powerful musical and thematic shift, but taken out of context record’s two centerpiece songs “Medicine Road” and “Side Effects” work as discrete expressions of melancholy and regret. Both songs are about missing an intimate connection with someone they had to get away from, but I think the latter is particularly good at contrasting nostalgia and affection with memories of pain and despair.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
February 24th, 2017
Having No Sense Of It All
Operator Music Band “Koma”
It’s pretty easy to parse Operator Music Band’s influences, or at least their lineage – elements from well-respected acts like Devo, Stereolab, Broadcast, Neu! and Add N to X are all right there on the surface. But as other bands have demonstrated, simply referencing or borrowing from the right artists isn’t enough. Part of what makes this band click is that they’ve embraced a very dynamic and tactile approach to music that can often feel more cerebral and static. “Koma” moves between moments of energetic rocking and more blissful grooves, and keeps moving forward with urgency until they deliberately hit the brakes and come to a full stop at the end. But even that sets up further momentum, as Dara Hirsch counts down the final seconds.
Buy it from Amazon.