Goth Ice Cream | Pom Poko • Injury Reserve • Andy Shauf
Plus a playlist history of 4AD
This week’s playlist is GOTH ICE CREAM, a mix of goth and goth-adjacent music from 1980-1990 inspired by this incredible photo of The Cure fans eating ice cream by Wist Thorpe from a profile of The Cure in Rolling Stone in 1989. I’m very fond of this one and I hope you like it a lot too! [Spotify | Apple Music]
I also have a bonus playlist for you this week called 4AD HISTORY, which has one song from almost every record released by the label 4AD in a loose chronological order from 1980 to present. I made this to satisfy my own curiosity while working on the goth playlist, in realizing the extent to which 4AD owned goth vibes in the 80s. This playlist charts all that early history, but also a few transformations along the way. It’s interesting to hear how much the label changed over the years while retaining a strong brand aesthetic. This features music from the likes of Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Modern English, Bauhaus, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, Throwing Muses, The Breeders, Belly, Lush, The Mountain Goats, The National, TV on the Radio, M. Ward, Beirut, Deerhunter, St. Vincent, Tune-Yards, Blonde Redhead, Purity Ring, US Girls, Big Thief, and many many more. [Spotify | Apple Music]
Too Sentimental For You
Pom Poko “Andrew”
Pom Poko are a band that clearly loves to keep a listener on their toes by constantly shifting up their arrangements and tossing a lot of sounds at you, and as such they run a high risk of producing cluttered, annoying songs. They sidestep this mainly by sticking to dynamic shifts that keep the focus on the core melodies of their compositions. “Andrew” has a particularly strong set of hooks, the best of which – “love is the, love is the, love is the…” – is ultimately just a very lovely bridge into the proper chorus. I am very fond of the way the band contrasts Ragnhild Fangel’s high breathy voice with lead guitar lines that feel a little rude and messy, these blurts of melody that feel spontaneous but are in fact deployed with canny precision.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Can We Press Rewind
Injury Reserve “Knees”
“Knees” is built around the opening chords of Black Midi’s “Sweater” but while the Black Midi song has a romantic grandiosity to it, Injury Reserve intentionally disrupt the rhythm to make it feels stumbling and awkward. This approach is brilliant for a song about grief – there’s scattered moments of grace, but it’s mostly the musical accompaniment to someone barely holding it together. Ritchie With A T’s vocal is mostly sung with a lovely, understated vulnerability but his performance also cracks apart, rambling off into verses that aren’t quite rapped but don’t quite register as spoken word either. But as much as this song willfully swerves into awkwardness the main thing that hits you and stays with you is the purity of the sentiment and the bits of beauty scattered throughout.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
And Everything Changed
Andy Shauf “Spanish on the Beach”
The character in “Spanish on the Beach” is a guy looking back on a vacation with his ex-girlfriend with enough hindsight to see exactly how the events of that trip foreshadowed the impending end of their relationship, but also a wistful nostalgia – “I wished it could be permanent.” Andy Shauf’s lyrics are plainspoken and economical as they glide along his melodies but they convey volumes of subtext about this guy and these fairly banal anecdotes. The third verse, in which he recalls fantasizing about a purposefully obnoxious public wedding proposal, is funny but also clever in sliding right by a crucial detail: “if I had bought the ring.” It does a lot to explain why the song feels more ambivalent than melancholy – he clearly had his doubts before this point, but now he seems to be wondering if he’d made the commitment they’d be together, albeit probably unhappy.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• Biz Sherbert of Nymphet Alumni wrote an interesting piece for Various Artists on Catholic iconography getting mixed up in some emerging esoteric online aesthetics.
• Marc Hogan of Pitchfork wrote about how indie labels are getting pushed away from pressing vinyl by the limitations of vinyl production, which may spark a backlash against the format with smaller labels.