July 2023 - Dark Wave, Cold Wave, Hard Wave, No Wave
Albums
Pixel Grip - ARENA
In stark contrast to last month, when all I wanted to listen to was laid back psych-rock and alt-pop, 90% of what I listened to in June was hard-ass, oppressive goth music. For the sake of this blog, I’m going to break up my reporting on all of that into at least a couple of months, because like, I’m sure people want to hear other stuff too.
But to start with: Pixel Grip!
Pixel Grip are a bit unusual in the world of dark wave. Generally, I would expect a dark wave song to put you in a slow-swaying, hazy malaise. Pixel Grip involves a lot more headbanging, and takes a slightly more antagonistic stance with their listeners, throwing in nonsense lyrics and sometimes open (if ironic and hilarious) insults. It’s also unusual in that you can understand any of the lyrics at all. Case in point, “ALPHAPUSSY”:
Your pussy wait
My pussy go
My pussy fast
Your pussy slow
My pussy rock it
Your pussy don't
Your pussy don't pop
My pussy explode
Not all their stuff is this hard, ofc. For a different flavor, see “Play Noble” or one of my favorites, “Dancing on Your Grave.”
I found track 2 a little irritating the first time I heard it. I’ve since come around to it, but skip it if you need to.
Ichiko Aoba - Windswept Adan
Ichiko Aoba is generally considered a folk artist, but this album is reaching for something much more ambitious - it creates its own ethereal universe with piano, glockenspiel, guitar, drums, complex chord changes, and a pleasant dreaminess that I think matches the aquatic theme of the album art. According to her, this album is intended to be “the soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist.” It’s a beautiful inspiration, but I think it sells the music short a bit, in that the music creates the universe - I don’t think it’s lacking anything in itself. But that said, it’s her art and what do I know? She also cites Studio Ghibli as a major influence, which makes a lot of sense.
Sidenote: some of her music is featured in the 2019 remake of Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Neat!
Gaspard Augé - Escapades
This is another case of someone totally nailing it with their album art.
The so-called EDM Explosion of the 2010s casts a long shadow over electronic music today. Everything is created with some reference point in that era. To be fair, there was a lot going on at the time - dubstep, trap, techno, industrial, probably forty or fifty subgenres of house… - but did you know that people made electronic music before 2005? It’s true!
On this album, Augé skips right past all of that to a time when people were still exploring the sonic possibilities presented by synthesizers and drum machines. A time when the beats were a bit stiff and the synth patches were crude, when people like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Mort Garson were still inventing the sounds that we hear every day. It’s loud, unsubtle, stridently major-chord, and a lot of fun. Take a look at the photo he used for the single “Force Majeure.” Big time Georgio Moroder vibes.
By the way, Augé is a member of a major electronic music duo from the mid/late 2000s. I’d recommend listening to it first and then trying to guess which one. It’s not immediately obvious, but more like a “now that you say that” kind of thing.
Skalpel - Origins
As the 1990’s gave way to the 2000’s, electronic music was seeking out new directions, and trying to expand beyond the old mainstay genres like house, techno, and drum-and-bass. One major thread was to try to make electronic music something “intellectual” - i.e. more than “just dance music” - which led to the creation of a number of genres like downtempo, “IDM” (one of the most obnoxious terms I know of), and various experimentations with incorporating non-Western samples and rhythms. But more than anything, it was an era marked by attempts to incorporate jazz.
This is the era in which Skalpel came on the scene. There are lots of subgenres I could rattle off here by way of describing their sound: nu jazz, acid jazz, broken beat, groovera… but maybe it’s easier to just say “they were on Ninja Tune” and leave it at that.
Origins captures so much of what was going on in that time. Naturalistic drum sounds, soulful vocals, piano, standup bass, and a beat pattern that would feel right at home in the CD collection I kept on the floor of my mom’s car when I drove to school. But it goes quite a bit beyond what was possible at that time, both in terms of the complexity of the instrumentation and in the quality of the recording techniques. Dig all that negative space.
And if you haven’t, dig into some of the Ninja Tune stuff from the 2000’s. I can make recommendations if you want, but there’s a lot to explore.
Ibibio Sound Machine - Electricity
Ibibio Sound Machine would be awfully fun to see live. They’ve been around for awhile now, and while their general sound is the same as it ever has been - an electro take on funk/soul/afrobeat - they’re still evolving, as you can hear on this album with the explosive opening track “Protection From Evil.” This album is fairly representative of their career so far, but to my ear, a bit harder than their past stuff. Maybe not coincidentally, this is their first album produced by Hot Chip.
The vocalist, Eno Williams, is from the UK originally (and that’s where the rest of the band is from), but she spent a lot of her childhood at her family’s home in Nigeria. A lot of her lyrics are adaptations of stories and folktales she heard there as well.
But yeah, lemme know if you get tickets.
Molchat Doma (Молчат Домаa) - Etazhi (Этажи)
Jumping all the way back to the beginning of this post: goth shit.
As you might get a hint of from the album cover and the Cyrillic, Molchat Doma draw inspiration and aesthetic from the post-Soviet world. They’re from Belarus, but the lyrics are Russian. Unfortunately I don’t know Russian (or Belarusian, for that matter), so I have to rely on other people’s translations. From what I’ve gleaned, it seems like their lyrics aren’t explicitly political, but describe the Soviet and contemporary landscape in Belarus as both being pretty bleak, and to give you some translations here, their band name translates to “Houses Are Silent” while the album name translates to “Floors.” It seems like bleakness is a theme for them. They hadn’t given any explicit political opinions in interviews either, until the invasion of Ukraine. They condemned that pretty forcefully. And maybe not surprisingly, they’ve done extensive tours in the US and the EU, but never in Belarus.
Anyway, the music: um, also bleak. But in more of a Robert Smith kind of way.
Genre notes: Molchat Doma are described as cold wave. What’s cold wave, you ask? Is that like dark wave? Yes, it is. Honestly, I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly the difference is supposed to be. When “dark wave” was coined back in the 80’s, it basically just meant “new wave, but dark.” and when "cold wave” was coined - at almost exactly the same time - it meant “new wave but cold.” So that’s very helpful. Plumbing the depths of the internet to figure out what exactly distinguishes them, the most descriptive explanation I’ve been able to find is that dark wave tends to be more sweeping and overwhelming, where cold wave tends to be more minimal and stark. That’s a somewhat satisfying explanation, but it seems like splitting hairs. A more precise explanation goes, “dark wave is from the US or UK. Cold wave is from anywhere else.” It feels very plausible that music critics would be that as arbitrary as that and not want to admit it, so I think the latter explanation is probably the truer one.
Regardless of which criteria you go with, Molchat Doma is cold wave. There you go.
Tracks
Lemon Twigs - When Winter Comes Around
This is a beautiful, beautiful song, in the style of the 1960’s-era folk experiments. Just today I found myself walking around the house, humming it. It’s worth exploring some of Lemon Twigs’s other works as well. They seem to have two distinct modes: one like this song or “Corner of My Eye” and another in more of an 80’s/90’s pop vein. It’s all very good, and the album Everything Harmony is well worth exploring, but “When Winter Comes Around” is such a killer track that I often just put this one on by itself.
barnacle boi - Overcome.
I haven’t really been keeping count, but I suspect that I’ve said at least a dozen times that I fucking love trap music. However, “trap music” is not always an especially useful term because it’s so firmly associated with the EDM iterations like Flosstradamus and DJ Snake. This is frustrating for at least a couple reasons.
For one thing, “trap music” originally referred to a style of rap, not a style of EDM. I’ve heard more than one story about where the term came from, such as “trap house” which referred to a house that sold drugs, “the trap” which was a description of impoverished black neighborhoods from which it was difficult to escape, and “trappin’” which referred to sex work. Whatever the origin of the term may have been, at least the sonic characteristics of “trap rap” carried through to the EDM version: low-BPM, half-time bass with triple-time percussion, cinematic rising and falling production.
The other thing that’s frustrating is that the term is simply too broad. There’s an entire other world of trap music divorced from both the hip-hop world and the EDM version, which (and we’re getting around to the point now) is where barnacle boi sits. That world is called “wave music.” If you find that term annoying, my only answer is that I think it’s intended to be.
At any rate, wave music takes all of the above characteristics of trap and makes it into a laid-back, trippy landscape that isn’t really fit for dancing. Instead, just kind of melt into it. More on wave music to follow.
Tstewart & Machinedrum - isle of the blest
Tstewart and Machinedrum are the same person. Glad to see they’re finally on the same page.
“isle of the blest” comes from a beautiful, contemplative album called elysian, which is a wide departure from his Machinedrum stuff. Here, he’s doing a Philip Glass-ian thing, with long repetitions of complex piano and guitar arpeggios over slow bass sounds that give it direction. It’s quite lovely.
Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek - Bal
My understanding is that these guys are Turkish by way of Hamburg, and that the lyrics are largely inspired by Anatolian folklore. I’m not sure that I know any Anatolian folklore, but I’m definitely curious now. Maybe someone in some smoky Hamburgian club can explain it.
Bot’Ox - Bearded Lady Motorcycle Show
When you pair buzzy guitars with an electronic music sensibility, a lot of things can happen, not all of it good. Here, though, we’ve ended up with a long-form, evolving, driving rock song that just keeps getting harder through its 7-minute runtime. Delicious.
When I started writing this paragraph, the first thing I put was, “there just isn’t enough long-form evolving rock music out there,” but then I realized that it would imply that I wish there was more Phish in the world. I do not. There’s plenty as it is, thanks.
Mansfield.TYA - Auf Wiedersehen
I love me a good “Unh!”
Otto - About You Now
There’s an awful lot of music out there attributed to an artist named Otto, and honestly, I haven’t taken enough time with it yet to give a comprehensive report on what’s there. One thing I can say is that this track seems to be a bit of an outlier, at least in the context of its album, World Greetings. On “About You Now,” the hyperactive bouncing production is offset by the dreamy, reverby vocals. On all the other tracks, the hyperactivity seems to be the star of the show. YMMV on those other ones.
One other thing I can say is that there seem to be at least 3 different people named “Otto” (which shouldn’t be surprising since it’s like, a normal-ass name that people are just born with). Fortunately the other Ottos are in pretty different genres - rap and latin pop - so it’s not as confusing as it might be otherwise. But on the other hand, who knows? Maybe he contains multitudes, most of which I don’t care about.
Miynt - a bit of papaya
I haven’t had much in the way of funky basslines in here yet.
The verses in here have a nice James Bond-esque sultriness, combined with a bit of 70’s/80’s pop.
The HU - Yuve Yuve Yu
The HU made quite a splash when they first appeared in the US back in 2019. Hard rock with Mongolian throat singing? Who’d say no to that? Anyway, The Algorithm gave them to me this month, and I appreciated it.
Etran de L'Aïr - Toubouk Ine Chihoussay
Etran de L'Aïr is a good example of a particular sound that I’ve been hearing a lot of lately out of northern Africa. That slightly twangy electronic guitar, quick catchy riffs, and short, repeated vocal phrases. Keep an ear out and you’ll pick up on it here and there (especially in this blog). Apparently these guys were a wedding band in Agadez, Niger until about 2020 when someone from the NYT caught wind of them. I don’t have any weddings coming up, but if I ever do I’ll look for their agent.
Dyzphoria - Discipline
Earlier I teased that I would talk more about wave music later on. Well here we are!
It turns out there’s also thing out there called “hard wave,” which is supposed to be… uh… wave, but harder.
Ok so if you’ve been keeping your genre chart up to date, the family tree now goes something like this:
Electronic Music -> Bass Music -> Trap -> Wave -> Hard Wave
Earlier I implied that the name “wave music” is kind of a joke. Well, a generous interpretation of the “hard wave” situation would say that it’s kind of a joke on a joke - wave music is the soft version of trap, and hard wave is the hard version of the soft version of trap. If that’s accurate, it’s pretty funny.
Unfortunately, I think these guys take the name seriously. Sigh. Some of it’s pretty good though!
Frost Children - FLATLINE
I have to admit that I don’t have the stomach for a lot of the hyperpop that’s out there, so it helps me if when it starts to verge into something else - in this case, it kind of reminds me of some of the 2000’s era electronic experiments by artists like Basement Jaxx. Before you say it, yes, I realize that it’s a little silly to suggest that hyperpop could “verge into” anything, given that hyperactive genre switching is the whole point of the thing.
Anyway, arrhythmic vocal glitches!
Hatchie - Nosedive
I imagine that there’s some alternate timeline out there in which Japanese Breakfast still sounds like “Diving Woman” and Hatchie sounds like this. I’m not sure what I’d have to give up to make that true, but I’d be willing to come to the table.
The Dare - Girls
Sometimes a song just speaks to me.