December 2023 - Easy Listening, Difficult Listening
Albums
Water From Your Eyes - Everyone’s Crushed
According to the band’s official blurb, this is “a swollen contusion of an album.” Amazing. I’m not really sure what it means, though.
For me, this album is defined by its disjointedness. All the instrumentation is jagged and almost painful to listen to. The time signatures are weird. The vocals are strangely deadpan, almost disinterested. Despite all that, there’s a sense of humor here, and a beat that you can bop along to as long as you’re not trying to count to 4.
It sounds like this album came out of a pretty difficult time in their lives. Rachel Brown has talked about recording it at the same time that she was working 14-hour days on various film and TV projects, and Nate Amos was struggling to get sober at the same time. It doesn’t take a long leap of imagination to hear a lot of bleak capitalistic grind in this album, especially in songs like “Buy My Product,” which is… well, like… about capitalism, obviously.
That said, it’s interesting - and frustrating - to read interviews with them. They seem to want to deflect questions about what their intentions are, and often go into oblique, dry tangents about things like a drunk guy telling them that they sound like “sandwich rock” and then listing a few dozen reasons that might be. The more I read about them, the more sense the album makes. It’s not like I can tell you what lyrics like
One, two, three, four
I count mountains
One, two, three, counter
You’re a cool thing, count mountains
are supposed mean, but it feels like something that they, as people, would create. Their vibe reminds me of spending all day moving stuff from one apartment to another, then someone asking me about work. They’re exhausted and frustrated, and they don’t really want to talk about it too much unless they have to.
At any rate, it’s a brilliant, original, and challenging album. And before I end this little blurb, I have to ask you to spend some time taking in that beautiful, stark album cover. They both look impossibly cool.
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - The Silver Cord
I don’t care, guys. I love this album.
For those who don’t know who they are, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are a psych-rock band, one that creates music at an astonishing, breakneck pace. Since 2011 they’ve made at least 25 full albums, to say nothing of all the various live albums, EPs, and solo projects they’re also doing. With all that material out there, it’s not super surprising that they have some breadth of sound as well. My favorite of their albums, Polygondwanaland, includes some metal, some prog, some jamming, some folk, some psych… it’s just kind of everything rock and roll.
Even with all that, The Silver Cord is a pretty wide departure for them. For starters, there are virtually no guitars in here. It’s almost entirely synths. Instead of taking inspiration from across the history of rock, they’re fairly narrowly focused on a bygone era of electronic music. It’s heavily indebted to people like Georgio Morodor and Tangerine Dream, who explored a space-age utopian sound. We haven’t heard much of that recently (or I haven’t, anyway). There’s also a fantastic song, “Set,” in which it suddenly becomes a My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult track.
Of course there are lots of detractors out there who wish that they stuck with their rock elements, but as stated above, I don’t care. I love it. And honestly, I don’t know why you would bother being disappointed. Just go listen to the other album they put out this year, or wait 3 months for them to release the next one.
If you ever run into the person who told them that it’s ok to rap, though, slap that person in the face for me.
Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter - SAVED!
If you want to experience this the way I did, you should stop reading this and just put it on. I’ll give you a few minutes to do that.
Back? Yikes, right? Ok, take a breath.
Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter is a persona adopted by the experimental artist Lingua Ignota, which makes a lot of sense. Both acts explore the depths of trauma and grief, and the hostility that organized Christian religion has to unbelievers (or even to its own congregations). The difference is the sound. Lingua Ignota’s experimentation attacked the listener directly, assaulting them with complicated chorus-less soundscapes, but Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter plays it much straighter, adopting the dirge-like repetition that one might expect from an earnest Christian musician of the early 20th century. To my ear, the new version is actually quite a bit more challenging. In a way, it’s quite beautiful, and the vocal trills and cracks sound right, too. To be honest, I found it pretty easy to turn Lingua Ignota off. Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter insists on being listened to, in the way that it’s so difficult to suppress curiosity about an ambulance called to the next-door apartment. I know I don’t really have to involve myself in this horror, and I should turn away and do something else, but I find myself kind of transfixed even while physically curling up with stress. I feel like I need a massage after listening to this.
This is also an album with which the art is inextricable from the artist. I wasn’t even done listening to it before I had to get to googlin’ and try to figure out exactly what her relationship is to organized religion. The answer (of course) is that it’s complicated. She was raised Catholic, turned away as an adult, and then in 2019, "renounced her teenage atheism" and became fascinated with “divine retribution.” It’s hard to imagine that the content of this album is meant to be taken completely at face value, but it doesn’t seem like it’s completely ironic either. I think that’s probably a lot of what’s so uncomfortable about SAVED!. It refuses to be filed in one column or the other, and it’s impossible to think about it outside of Hayter’s larger artistic vision.
It has to be said as well that she’s a survivor of domestic abuse, from her childhood through a number of abusive relationships as an adult. As recently as 2021 she accused her ex-boyfriend Alexis Marshall, the frontman of Daughters, of sexual assault, rape, and emotional abuse. Trauma seems to have followed her through her life, and clearly it’s been the basis for a lot of her work.
She’s done a number of really fascinating interviews in which she really digs deep into her influences and intentions. If you’re interested, here’s a good place to start. There’s way more to say about her than I’ll be able to here, and despite her insistence that she’s not a feminist, I’m sure that a feminist literary academic could come up with mountains of theses on her work. Someone go get a JSTOR account.
The South Hill Experiment - SUNSTRIKES
What is with these bands and their all-caps?
A couple of months ago I highlighted these guys’ track “Chameleons” from their first album, MOONSHOTS, and I commented that there was a lot I liked about it, but the album didn’t really hold together for me or get to the same highs as that one track. Well, this album really does hold together. Astonishingly well. It’s a lush world of jazzy chord changes and dreamy melodies, and I’m hoping it’ll serve as a nice palate cleanser for those who are listening to it right after Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter.
I’m writing this literally a week after the album came out, so I haven’t managed to turn up a lot of information about it. It’s so new that Tidal isn’t even able to take a guess for what to play after it. The best I can do is tell you that The South Hill Experiment (or S/H/E, as it’s stylized), is Baird and Goldwash, a pair of brothers who have solo projects but mostly serve as studio musicians. They’ve worked with some major artists though. Most notably they were on Brockhampton’s TM and ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE (I swear, these guys and their caps).
This album is wonderfully mellow. I don’t understand why they went with “O SOFIA” as the single instead of “Snake at the Altar,” but I suppose it doesn’t matter very much because the people paying attention to them are probably going to listen to the whole album anyway. Maybe they just liked the all-caps.
Miracle Musical - Hawaii: Part II
This is a weird one. In 2014, some of the guys from Tally Hall, an indie band that flourished between 2006 and roughly 2011, made this: a concept album which takes the form of a weirdo musical. I’m tempted to try to talk about the story that it tells, but it’s fairly abstract and theories on the subject vary from a simple love story about a man and a woman to something about the fall of the Twin Towers. Um, I’m partial to the former interpretation… I think it’s just “Variations on a Cloud” that’s about the Twin Towers, and that’s not even on this album. But I’ll let you look into it yourselves.
Ok, so what’s here? Well, it’s certainly playing with the sound you’d expect out of a musical - lots of major chords, complicated piano accompaniment, narrative lyrics, duets… but it’s also quite a bit weirder than that. For one thing, there’s a lot of production work in here, with ping-ponging vocals, an entire track of backwards-masking, and heavy use of autotune. I did find myself thinking about Brian DePalma’s bizarre musical film Phantom of the Paradise, but that makes for a pretty weird “musical” itself. It’s possible that you can also pick up a bit of the whimsy that Tally Hall was working with, especially on tracks like “Black Rainbows,” but this strikes me as much more ambitious than what they were doing back then. I think the album really opens up at track 3, “Black Rainbows,” when it suddenly turns tropical, and then shortly thereafter you get the intricate and sinister “Murders.”
Hawaii: Part II really flew under the radar when it was released, but has recently been rediscovered by the internet. I wonder if it has something to do with the advent of hyperpop, in which this kind of operatic melody would be right at home. And of course the autotune. It’s possible that I’m just comparing it to hyperpop because I need to explain to myself why I’m ok with the autotune.
Tracks
Dead Pony - 23, Never Me
Dead Pony is too good a band not to have an album already. Whenever that happens, it’s going to be fantastic because they’ve already got a backlog of great singles going back to 2020. This track’s EP, War Boys is definitely worth a look as well, but “23, Never Me” is definitely the biggest banger.
Barry Can’t Swim - Sunsleeper
This is the kind of track I want to hear at the end of a sunrise DJ set at an outdoor festival of some kind. It would be the perfect, exultant thing to kickstart people on their last fumes after a full night of partying.
Findlay - Ride
Is it cheating to put this here when I already highlighted TTRRUUCES last month? Well I’ve got a big ol’ crush on Natalie Findlay, so too bad. To say that directly, Findlay is the former project of the vocalist from TTRRUUCES. Kind of. If you watch a video of TTRRUUCES and then watch a video of Findlay, you might notice that it’s… exactly the same people. Apparently, Natalie Findlay had a project named after herself, then decided that actually it should have like, a band name, to show that it’s actually a collaborative effort. She did the reverse Rod Stewart.
Anyway, “Ride” is fantastic, but I easily could have put “Night Sweats” in here instead, from the same album The Last of the 20th Century Girls. They’re very different songs, and I love them both. Also, I sincerely hope that they had anywhere near as much fun making the video for “Night Sweats” as it seems like they did.
Sofia Kourtesis - Madres
Sofia Kourtesis has made a brand out of this kind of blissed-out, summery house music. It’s a great break from all the other electronic music out there.
As a tangent, I recently went to an ambient synth show at which everyone brought yoga mats and watched the whole thing lying on the floor. It was amazing, but they could’ve played 1000% more Sofia Kourtesis.
Demob Happy - Voodoo Science
Demob Happy are an interesting combination of sounds that somehow roll into a single thing. You’ve got some powerful Queens of the Stone Age vibes with the guitar riffs, some Tobacco… uh… noises, and a vocalist who clearly takes his cues from John Lennon. You can hear it both in the sound of his voice and in some of the melody construction, both in this track and in the call-and-answer construction of the also-great “Token Appreciation Society” from the same album, Divine Machines.
Somehow all of that works out to being a single thing. I really want to like more of this album. Once in awhile I can get into “Earth Mover” but honestly it’s just those first two tracks that are the real winners.
Promiseland & Julian Casablancas - 3D Flower
This is one of those magic collaborations that happen sometimes. Julian Casablancas (the guy from The Strokes) has certainly never made anything like this that I’ve ever heard. His collaborations with The Voidz certainly get weird and kinda electronic, but I’ve never heard them do anything so danceable. It makes a little more sense for Promiseland, who do a lot of very on-the-nose industrial music, but never anything with such interesting weeee-oooos, and never anything where the vocals weren’t supremely annoying. But together, magic!
“Promiseland” is a fun band to leave on shuffle for awhile because your streaming service will inevitably get confused eventually and play something by a Christian band of the same name.
Cameo Blush - Silkworm
This track came out at roughly the same time as Two Shell’s magnificent Icons and plays like an escapee from that album. I’ll always take another Two Shell track, even if they didn’t make it.
joe unknown - Ride
There’s a lot to like in here, with the great groove, the running gag between “my” and “your,” and the “ohhhhhhh-waaaaaaa-ohhhhhhhhh!” that I think is actually him saying the word “ride.” It kind of reminds me of Sleaford Mods. You may see more of him in the future because he recently released For Better, for Worse, and I need to spend some time with it.
Kay Young - The Way You Look at Me
A little pop music with a killer bass line a la Adele/Amy Winehouse/Lizzo. I like that she doesn’t hide her accent on “daunce” and “exci’ed.”
Disq - Cujo Kiddies
It’s great to veer from laid-back 90’s rock vibes to a brief techno beat takeover and then right back again.
Orient Heights - Ascent
I talked about trance music at length a month or two again, and apparently it’s leading me down a bit of a rabbit hole. This isn’t a fantastically original track - it’s more like a fastball down the middle. There’s a reason tracks like this work.
Florence + the Machine - Heaven Is Here (IDLES Remix)
This is what I always wished Florence + the Machine sounded like. It’s also what I wished The Yeah Yeah Yeahs sounded like. I guess it’s just what I wanted a lot of things to sound like.
Project Gemini - The Children of Scorpio
I imagine that someday I’ll do a post on here that doesn’t include any 60’s-esque psychedelia, but this isn’t that post.
Kiltro - Curicó
Kiltro’s Instagram describes him, among several other things, as “Zapatos-gaze.” I don’t think that describes this song especially well or anything, I just like it. This is more like a spanish (Chilean, rather) guitar tune drenched in delay.
Moses Gunn Collective - I Can Cry
Imagine you took the vocalist for Echo and the Bunnymen and gave him a great pop bassline and chorus instead of the full pathos of “The Killing Moon.” Is it better this way? Well no, but it’s still pretty good.
Mr. Gnome - Psychonaut
This track is pretty uncharacteristic for Mr. Gnome. They’re generally a pretty intense, ambitious art-rock project, and this is more like “Diving Woman”-era Japanese Breakfast meets Glass Animals. I really love that “la la la” breakdown in the middle.
AJ Tracey - Little More Love
The rest of this album is a little slow for my taste, but a great hook is a great hook. I hope we get some more stuff like this from him.
Todd Rundgren & Rivers Cuomo - Down With the Ship
I’m as surprised as you are.