November 2023 - Weren’t the 60’s Great? I Mean I Have No Idea Because I Wasn’t Born Yet, but This Music Is Pretty Great, at Least

Albums

TTRRUUCES - JJUUIICES

I can’t tell you how excited I am about these guys. Their sound draws very heavily on the 60’s and 70’s psych-pop era, like The Beatles’ Revolver and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds - which I always want - but what’s really incredible is that they draw so many other things into it. “STFU” is a 90’s pop track, “Snakes” is a heavier rock sound, and how the hell did this electro-swing track called “Luxury of Self Destruction” get in here? And even more than that, how does all this stuff feel like a unified sound? It’s a quite a journey.

I’ve even come to love their name. I tend to roll my eyes at highly stylized band names with goofy spellings like CHVRCHES, Deadmau5, and Gnarles Barkley and all that, and I rolled my eyes at this too, except that I went looking for an explanation and it turned out that they have one (kind of). According to the dude in the band, Jules Apollinaire, it happened because he has a lifelong obsession with finding symmetries in words of the English language. Apparently that leads him to just leave notes lying around with words that he thinks are neat, and Natalie Findlay (who seems to be awesome in general - more to come next month) found one that said “ttrruuces” and walked around going “truuuuuuuuces” until it became their name. Now, I’m sure that’s not very satisfying if you were hoping it would mean something, but I’m into it. I think it captures something of their playfulness. I mean, check out those bouncy playful melodies on tracks like “STFU” and “The Big Goodbye.”

With the exception of track 1, I love everything here, even the ballads (I never like the ballads). I walk around with “The Big Goodbye” in my head for entire days.

Oh and before you go anywhere else, omg you have to look at their official site.

Simple Symmetry - XXX002

I went back and forth on whether to list this as XXX002 as I have it, or by the actual text on the album cover, which is “небылицы.” In the end, I went with this because it’s more googleable, and because as they put it, “We can try to explain to you what this XXX002 'небылицы' is all about, but we wont (sic).” Well ok, fine then, don’t. The Cyrillic translates as something like “fables,” for whatever that’s worth.

Anyway, you might remember another Simple Symmetry album appearing on this blog in the past, but this one is a pretty different animal. Where SORRY! WE DID SOMETHING WRONG was making very clear references to 1960’s/70’s psychedelia and took pretty big swings in its experiments (sometimes bordering on irritating), XXX002 shoots for a much more hypnotic, space disco vibe, a la Lindstrøm. It’s a really wonderful groove for getting things done around the house (or say, writing a blog).

Destroy Boys - Open Mouth, Open Heart

I love when an album cover perfectly captures what you’re about to hear.

For the first couple albums, Destroy Boys were punk, plain and simple. And they were great punk! They had a lot of 80’s punk influence, along with a lot of 2000’s era pop-punk. They were loud and angsty and they screamed a lot and it was great.

On this album though, they’re really pushing themselves to do some other things. “Lo Peor” and “All This Love” are quiet guitar/vocals ballads with complicated chord structures, and they’re addressing pretty serious topics. “Drink” is about alcoholism, “For What” is political, and “Bob” is just a short musing about how much it sucks to live with anxiety. Of course, punk music can and does do all those things, but it’s definitely a more complicated project than they’ve done in the past.

Don’t get me wrong though, there’s plenty of their old sound in here too. My favorite track might be “Locker Room Bully,” which contains the wonderful lines “You think you know everything / but you’re really fucking dumb.” I’m not being ironic. I love those lines. They’re a perfect expression of that particular angsty mood.

There’s a lot to dig into here. I also just learned that they’re playing at (checks notes) the MGM Music Hall?

Laufey - Everything I Know About Love

As my dad said about this album, “It’s so old-fashioned you can’t even call it retro.”

Let’s talk about the “cool jazz” era for a minute - the dominant style in the post-war period of the late 40’s/50’s. In the bebop era, which immediately preceded it, the hot thing was explosive, complex solos, high tempos, constant, blistering chord changes, and instrumentation that mostly stayed out of the way and let the soloists go nuts. Think Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk. This is the kind of stuff Kerouac talked about.

Cool jazz developed out of that world and was both an evolution and a response to it. The tempos dropped, the compositions smoothed out, instrumentation got much more lush and sweeping, and everything got generally, for lack of a better way of saying it, a lot more accessible. Those same musicians were the ones creating this stuff, too. In fact, it was Miles Davis - who’s not exactly thought of as an easy place to start with jazz - who created the album that’s often credited as the most most influential, Birth of the Cool. One way of thinking about it: jazz moved out of the smokey lounges full of amphetamines, whiskey, and heroin, and into the mainstream concert halls and home turntables of middle-class America.

Laufey is doing the cool jazz thing. Like, it’s not just that she’s influenced by that era, she’s doing that style, complete with all the excesses of lush composition you’d expect from that period. She does add a few elements that modernize the endeavor like modern production methods, use of soundscape, and the very modern technique of recording her own harmony parts so that you’re basically only hearing her voice, even when there’s a whole array of harmonies. She also has a few wonderfully contemporary-sounding lyrics like “[He’s] the first one to ever like me back,” and “I tell him that he’s pretty too / Can I say that? Don’t have a clue.”

I love this album. In particular, "Valentine” is just wonderful.

Joey Valence & Brae - Punk Tactics

Ok so: it’s the Beastie Boys.

But like, the idea of sounding like the Beastie Boys is a really good idea which no one else is doing, and they pull it off really well. Just sonically, it sounds right: blown out, low-fi production of opulent samples; deliberate, composed flow that trades off between one voice and the other; and of course it helps that Joey Valence’s voice just happens to sound an awful lot like Mike D’s.

But what I like is that they nail a lot of the things that work about the Beastie Boys, and which haven’t really had a place in recent hip-hop. It’s composed in such a way that it has to be a group. They’re both part of the same song in that they’re both part of every chorus - or even every line - not just trading verses. It really opens up after track one, and the rhythms don’t stay in one place - each track has an interesting variety of beat patterns, moving from half-time to double-time and back. It’s high-energy and the jokes are delivered with a straight face. Every song sounds different.

Now, I have to admit that as far as the actual rapping goes, it’s a little primitive. They’re not exactly Busta Rhymes, and the lyrics are largely humorous nerd-rap takes on hip-hop swagger, with soft irony at best. And that’s made painfully obvious when Logic comes in and absolutely slays a verse on “TANAKA 2.”

But, it’s an awful lot of fun. And I’m impressed with this album in part because they’ve moved so far beyond their previous. The Underground Sound was basically just a loose pastiche of old-school hip-hop. It was a joke, and it was simple to the point of being thin. This has so much more going on. They’re young, and if they keep moving in this direction, they could do some really awesome stuff in the future.

Tracks

Bilderbuch - Softpower

How do you construct the perfect pop/rock song? Take a Beatles organ riff, give it a Beck drum pattern, throw in a great guitar hook, drench the vocals in reverb and ping-pong, let the production spin into chaos every time the chorus comes around, and don’t edit out the rough edges. I wish they always sounded like this.

Deradoorian - Saturnine Night

It’s hard for me not to think about Kikagaku Moyo’s House in the Tall Grass with this one, which is probably not fair, given that I’m comparing the bands Kikagaku Moyo and Deradoorian. It’s not like saying that it “sounds like Queen” or something.

Anyway, this is a solo project by The Dirty Projectors’ Angel Deradoorian, who has one of the most incredible (I think real?) names I’ve heard in a long time. She’s been exploring a much more psychedelic sound since The Dirty Projectors, going all the way to straight-up sound experiments on Cosmic Garden. Lots to dig into here.

Cosmo Vitelli - Patient Zero

There’s a healthy amount of industrial in this electronic track by Cosmo Vitelli. I wavered on what to include from this album - Medhead is almost as much a Truus de Groot album as it is a Cosmo Vitelli album, but this is the one that spoke to me the loudest, so this is what I went with. Also, the album starts with a track called “7 Foot Clown in My Bed” and asking people to listen to it just seemed like a bridge too far. Nonetheless, if you skip around, there’s good stuff there.

As often happens with label heads, it was kind of hard to figure out what label Vitelli is actually the head of, but I’m pretty sure it’s I'm a Cliché, which is also the home of Bot’Ox and Redaxes, and which deserves more attention than I’ve given it.

Bodikhuu - Berimbau

I always chuckle at artist bios, having written a few of them myself. It’s hard to find 150 words to say that will describe an artist without pigeon-holing them, talk them up without making them sound like a douche, and also be interesting to read. But, I have to say that whoever wrote Bodikhuu’s bio absolutely nailed it. Rather than steal their thunder, I’ll just link it here.

Bodikhuu’s sound is generally a mix of hip-hop beats and exotica, a bit like you’d get from a producer like Madlib or Blockhead. It’s laid-back old-skool no-rap hip-hop production work. And yes, I enjoyed stringing all those hyphens together.

Viagra Boys - 6 Shooter

I almost feel like I have to apologize for this.

For as long as I’ve been aware of their existence, I’ve been really conflicted about whether I love or hate Viagra Boys. There’s no question that I hate their stupid fucking name. No question that I hate their singer, Sebastian Murphy, incessently screaming with obnoxious bravado. No question that I hate their sense of humor, which amounts to being vaguely offensive and calling it a day. And I don’t for a second buy them as “satire.” They remind me of that whole thing in the 2000’s in which trashiness was suddenly in vogue and we all stood by and allowed Kid Rock and Fred Durst to become celebrities.

But, here’s the thing: instrumentally, they’re really good. “6 Shooter” is a fantastic example of that. They’ve got a really hard, driving rock groove, an interesting rhythm section, and a wonderful injection of arrhythmic brass dissonance.

In short, the problem is that any time they come on, I’m like, “I like this. What is it? …shit.”

In fact, Welfare Jazz is really a pretty good album, and in some alternate universe in which the atrocious single “Ain’t Nice” didn’t exist, it could make the ALBUMS section above.

I have to also mention that I love their cover of John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves.” It’s a fantastic example of the microgenre of humorous country-tinged duets. All the best chaotic qualities of Viagra Boys are there, and for those 5ish minutes, Murphy dials it back a bit, his crass humor dovetails with the genre, and the presence of Amy Taylor (of the incredible Amyl and the Sniffers) lends a credibility to the whole endeavor. To quote her: “I was so excited when Viagra Boys asked me to do a duet with them. Sebastian is a classy man but let’s be true, we’re both insanely feral and gross, so the lyrics are perfect. I love tomato sauce and have a foul mouth so it’s like he’s singing right to me. What an honour.” Well… ok, that makes sense for you, I guess, Amy. I still think he’s awful, but thanks for this track nonetheless.

Oliver Sim - Sensitive Child (Soulwax Remix)

Did you like last month’s Oliver Sim track, but wish that it was completely different? Here’s Soulwax!

Tom Skinner - The Journey

If you asked me to guess what bands Tom Skinner was in before releasing this album, I would never have gotten it. Partly because there are just an awful lot of bands out there. Maybe I would’ve gotten Sons of Kemet within the first hundred or so guesses, but I don’t think I ever would have gotten The Smile.

Chase & Status, Bou, Irah, Flowdan, Trigga, & Takura - Baddadan

How did all those people fit into this track? The only name I recognize in here is Flowdan, whose voice sounds every bit as amazing as it always does. That man could record a reading of the entire biblical book of Numbers and it would sound exciting.

Chloé (Thévenin) and Vassilena Serafimova - The Dawn

It seems to be something of a trend at the moment for electronic producers to do collaboration albums with virtuoso classical musicians (see all the many things Henrik Schwarz does), and I’m here for it. In this case, we’ve got Chloé, primarily known for experimental DJ sets and productions, working with Vassilena Serafimova, a spectacular marimba player. This comes from their album Sequenza. Their sound is hypnotic, with the marimba playing nearly without stop for the entire runtime of the album, and Chloé providing shape and direction for each track. “The Dawn” is exceptional on the album because there are vocals and because the marimba steps out of the way for a bit. I’m also a fan of “Balani” which goes the opposite direction and just builds and builds and builds.

Figueroa & Amon Tobin - Back to the Stars

I’ve been talking a lot about 60’s era psychedelia lately, but few tracks go for it quite as hard as this one. It’s got everything, from the droning back end, to the leading guitar riffs, to the non-western background strings, to the vocal harmonies.

And Amon Tobin is involved, so it’s pretty much guaranteed to be fantastic.

Ka2 - ut i rommet

I can’t endorse most of what Ka2 does, but melodic techno is delicious.

Cari Cari - Belo Horizante

I love hazy, Bond-era slinkiness. According to Cari Cari, they founded the band specifically because they wanted to get their music into a Quentin Tarantino film. Makes sense.

Onipa & David Walters - No Commando

There’s a lot of music coming out of London right now which fuses Western-style dance music with that of West Africa. Ibibio Sound Machine is the most obvious example, but there’s also Pigeon, Burna Boy, and many others. I’m always on the lookout for this stuff because it’s such a fresh take on the dance music we’ve had forever. Also, Afro-futurist aesthetic is the best.

Gaupa - Febersban

Someone from a Japanese publication called BURRN! Magazine described this as Björk meets The Cranberries. That’s a pretty good description, and I’d throw in a hint of stoner metal.

If I were more of a metal fan, I imagine that I’d already know about Encyclopedia Metallum aka The Metal Archives. Sadly, this is the first I’ve heard of it, but it seems to be pretty comprehensive, and from what I’ve seen the “Similar Artists” tab is pretty on point.

Stereolab & Nurse With Wound - Simple Headphone Mind

I often forget just how good Stereolab really is. Nurse With Wound is experimental to the point of being nearly unlistenable for me, but as a collaboration they bring a healthy amount of shrill chaos to the track.

Visages & Strategy - Lunar Eclipse

Doctors recommend 1-2 glasses of wub per day.