Vampire Weekend - "Classical"

As often with Vampire Weekend, I find “Classical” objectively lovely, melodically deft, overflowing with instrumental flourishes, and difficult to connect with emotionally. But their elegance usually benefits from up-tempo urgency, and they keep it moving.

The expansive, tangible production reminds a bit of early Broken Social Scene. Paul Thomas Anderson said he had to scuff up the film grain on Phantom Thread so it didn’t look like an episode of The Crown. Vampire Weekend seem similarly mindful to leaven elegance with grit, overcooking their sound so the fried edges start to show, sending guitar glissandos slurring through the background, buzzed and baldly off beat.

And there are undeniable sugar rush pop pleasures on offer: the central guitar/synth hook spinning through like a fluorescent carousel; the bridge that weds gentle sax skronk and dinner piano cascades; and the grand finale, a sudden snap of the song’s nervy Fatboy Slim shuffle to 4/4 snare-stomp hoedown.

Bullion (feat. Carly Rae Jepsen) - "Rare"

The Most Serene Bedroom Synth Pop and almost more sketch than song; vamping for four minutes, doing just the shyest strut. Hushed vocals like two tired young parents mumbling into the microphone between late-night feedings, trying not to wake the sleeping baby next door. Precious but not twee and almost painfully emotionally guarded, “Rare” prods at a feeling it seems unable to articulate, settling at last for its vague mantra: Deep in the heart, deep in the heart. 

It charms with the clever care of its craftmanship though: the gentle syncopation woven throughout, the vocal melody dancing on tip-toe through the open spaces just behind the song's insistent low-light pulse; the immaculate, velvet clarity of the production. And then building confidence in its second half, it ventures a few humble rock-star moves, slo-mo synth solo on the bridge, layering vocals with soaring falsetto runs in the coda, until, oops -- we woke the baby, song's over.

Mannequin Pussy - "Sometimes"

A liminal punk paradox: a passionate expression of ambivalence. I set myself ablaze / sometimes. I love the twilit gliding rush of this song, open strumming that circles and paces but never manages to resolve, and feels like it reconfigures itself on the fly. I am a sucker for a type of song I reductively mentally file as "New Order rip-offs" and while this is not one, there is a trace of that here, and maybe this is the closest Mannequin Pussy gets.  Clean chiming verses like a dream of running in slow motion through the city at dusk, and then (kicked off by a truly magnificent Marisa Dabice scream) the crushing bridge arrives like the sleepwalker jolted wide awake and sprinting through traffic, horns blaring, buses and delivery trucks bearing down. And finally, fully one-third devoted to the coda, where the song is allowed to gently disintegrate, and the spirit ascends. 

Immediately satisfying and subtle, "Sometimes" is a grower. It was one of my favorite songs of last year, and I like it even more now. 

 

Thom Yorke - FeelingPulledApartByHorses

Just posted a micro-review of Yorke's new single (listen to each song here and here) on eMusic, thought it turned out well:

"The first track menaces (but not in a particularly great way): rough-edged eerieness by way of lo-fi percussion and a misanthropic bassline. Kinda builds to a swirling kinda-climax, but is strongest when content to simply swagger.

The second track meanders (but not in a particularly bad way): crisp, understated, carried by a disconcertingly plain and affecting vocal melody that alternates with more of Yorke's spooky shenanigans. Do I hear a trace of reggaeton in that two-stepping kickdrum, Thom?"

I like working within these length constraints, Christgau-style. Maybe I'll do more.

The Beast and Dragon, Adored [Spoon Feeder: Vol. 5]

This title of this song has always appealed to me: evocative, esoteric and apocalyptic, it is one of the more baroque examples in the Spoon catalog. The song itself, though, I've always felt is somewhat middle-of-the-pack, interesting for the way it steadily builds an atmosphere of dread, but ultimately just somewhat lacking in vitality.

"Beast" establishes Gimme Fiction's repetition-fetish immediately: for most of the song, Spoon stretches out a simple, ominous minor-key chromatic piano progression into a half-speed dirge. Major-key choruses attempt to deliver a release sufficient to match the verses' continuous tension-build (amplified by Britt's strangled guitar salvos, like miniature car collisions), and the second chorus succeeds a bit with its little extension/variation on the initial chord progression. However, the slightly oppressive lethargy of the song is never fully counterbalanced by Britt's vocal performance, and the song has conspicuously few enlivening melodic flourishes by the band. Is it horrible? Not by any means. The end result just comes off as just the slightest bit... well, dull.

At the very least, though, "Beast" does serve as an interesting and relatively effective album opener: an unsettling call-to-arms ('when you don't feel it, it shows, they tear out your soul; and when you believe they call it rock-and-roll') that also functions as a sort of overture and scene-setter for the album (this theatrical, song-as-album-prelude/overture notion is reinforced by the song's lyrics, which reference two later songs, "I Summon You" and "Never Got You").

I Turn My Camera On [Spoon Feeder: Vol. 4]

Kill the Moonlight was a breakthrough album for Spoon, and part of that success can be attributed to "The Way We Get By", arguably the first song by the band to gain traction beyond their fan base as a "hit" single, at least in the limited sense that a song released on Merge Records can be a "hit". Earlier songs might have had the potential to make this broader mark ("Car Radio", for example, released on a major label itself, ironically), but predated the song-centric age of the mp3-internet and the burgeoning expansion of Indie to the point where it had its own sort of pseudo-mainstream centralization (as a side note/tangent, you could argue that England, a more culturally and geographically compact country, had this structure long before us, but that it took the Internet to create the same sort of phenomenon in the sprawling American continent).

Each Spoon album since then has had at least one single of obvious and immediate appeal; on Gimme Fiction, "I Turn My Camera On" fits this bill, and it's easy to see why. This is a song built for immediacy: with its limber octave-hopping, tick-tock tension bounce and Britt's pure falsetto coo lead vocal spinning mundane nonsense into catchy, spunky nonsense (as many great pop songs do), it is Spoon's most obvious attempt to adapt crowd-pleasing dancefloor tropes to their sparse idiom, all played at three-quarters speed for extra sonic separation, Kill the Moonlight-style. Speaking of which...

Stylistic novelty aside, the song is also interesting for how it neatly provides a bridge of sorts from Moonlight, maintaining the airy, negative space and immediacy of that album, but also displaying the structural simplicity and groove-focus so characteristic of Fiction, an album which has less of the tidy, rapid shifts between ingenious melodic parts and rhythmic sections that characterized its predecessors. Instead, Fiction finds Spoon often exploring prolonged insistence on a single rhythmic or melodic motif, building ominous tension to points of controlled release (see "The Beast and Dragon, Adored", "My Mathematical Mind", "Never Got You"), or developing percussive chants of zen-like focus ("Was It You?", "Camera", "Merchants of Soul"). Fiction's reliance on repetition is probably one reason why, for many, it remains less accessible and immediate than its nearest siblings.

Decora [Spoon Feeder: Vol. 3]

A cover song can be a redundant nonentity, rock stars playing dress up as other rock stars, churning out a sloppy, blurred carbon copy; kudos to Spoon then for approaching others' compositions with the same enlivening creativity and minimalist rigor that they do their own.

Yo La Tengo's "Decora" evokes a hazy sort of slacker grandeur: narcoleptic vocals, slurred lead guitar slashing, simple bass quarter notes and a steady, simple drum thump. It's an endearing (if aloof) little song that ambles its way on-stage, taking its time getting where its going.

Spoon's cover extracts the nugget of tasty melody at the heart of the original and moves it to the forefront. Where the original plays hide the ball, burying its charms under a smoke screen of distortion and ambient guitar effects, Spoon lays all its cards on the table from the get go: Spoon's "Decora" begins with that distinctive (and entirely of their own creation) guitar-bass call and response riff, soon joined by an equally distinctive double tap-hiccuping drum beat. As on their other prominent cover, "Don't You Evah", Spoon seems here to have used the original song as a theoretical starting point, and put faithfulness secondary to tunefulness (as all good covers should); notice inspired details like the guitar and bass synchronizing after the first chorus.

Eventually the song edges closer to the original territory at the wordless, swirling choruses, but notice how within the first ten seconds the entire basic skeleton for Spoon's version of the song is introduced and defined: a spry, punchy, rhythmically engaging and witty translation; in otherwards, a Spoon song.