Mix XXXVII — A Lavender Trace
Jesus Piece — In the Silence Get it out of your system, guys. This is about the heaviest this is going to get this time around. Jesus Piece is some of the most aggressive, straight forward hardcore around and it’s utterly fantastic. What I love about this particular track and the way that it blended with this mix in particular is that reverby, flangey guitar part that is segmented in amongst the chugging, standing majestically like a sunset in a battlefield. It feels like being palmed in the chest by Tilda Swinton in the Dr. Strange moments, as different half-lives of your body separate themselves into the time stream. Ya feel? The breakdown at the end doesn’t hurt its cause AT ALL, as that’s generally the type of thing that this genre is one of my go-to favorites for. The opening of this track’s stripped down sense of itself is brilliant as well. Some hat, some simple drums, and a haunting string in the background feeling like a cowering structure below the groan of a roaring fire.
The Prodigy — Timebomb Zone What was so great about The Prodigy’s new record is that it was the exact thing I wanted from them, the type of record that could have dropped any time in the last twenty years and been relevant to whatever movement they were a part of at that time. It’s aggressive and kinetic and in your face. That “timebomb zone” hook is absolutely viral, gets in your head for years at a time, and yet doesn’t have the sappy corny hook that a pop song would have. I guess this is what you’d call EDM at this point, electronic music, stripping away any kind of ancient thought process to it. But for me, this is what I often think of as TECHNO, a genre name and description which has been long dead. It simply makes sense to me, describes exactly what this song is. I was supposed to go see this group perform live in NYC in May, but with Keith Flint’s recent passing, it came with a heavy heart that I would never get to watch this legendary act in person. Awful. Glad that their timeless music will be with us forever.
HEALTH — FEEL NOTHING An acid trip of an experience, HEALTH will forever encase my heart in plastic wrap and inhale from a laced pile of cocaine and see exactly how far I can push the experience. There’s a beauty about the vocals, about the dream fountains that they let flow as the verses rail on, but also there’s an aggression throughout, a way that they are able to create a feeling of the lack of safety. Those chugging riffs are menacing, like war drums on an approaching viking ship. It feels like glamour pushed to the fringes of a war torn nation, it feels like ego gone beyond the threshold of bravery and into the hell of hubris. Somehow within these parameters, there is an enormous hook, a perfect song length that doesn’t allow you to grow tired or callous of their whims. God bless HEALTH and all they bring to our table.
Tirzah — Do You Know This album stole me away with the way it sounded absolutely broken. It rocketed to one of my favorite records of the year, simply because it knew how to sound like it wasn’t downloaded properly. There were sounds that happened throughout that eerily sounded exactly like I’d just downloaded a low latency version of a bootleg record. The pops, the whirrs, the skips, it all threw me back to a downstairs “computer room” where I would leave things downloading overnight just to see if the album would sound right and a new version of a song I loved would be interesting in the live version. Vocally, Tirzah leaves her vocals sparsely talented, utterly vulnerable and revealed in the light of untuned confessionals. Most of the shimmer of this song is the editing and production, but the way that the bulk of the vocals remind me of a smoky voicemail absolutely make me swoon. There are powerful low vibrations here, deep undertones and distant headphone discoveries on this song. It’s a simple portrait that deserves the research to find a heart that the artist has revealed.
Ellis — All This Time The first time I heard this song, I was absolutely WOW’d. An ‘oh my god,’ moment. The beautiful singing above the gnarly guitars. There was a Purity Ring kind of feeling about the way she was lacing those words across power lines. This has moments that remind me of Marla Singer’s death rattles, things that are reminiscent of farewells. Unpredictable goodbyes. The last time you see the brake lights driving off. There’s that Azure Ray longing that shapes itself in the form of photographs you’ve tucked away in boxes you can’t throw away. The fuzz here is addicting, one that pulls you in the way the moths follow the stars deep into a fatal burn. This track kicks off a quadrilogy of songs that feel like shaky cocaine dreams you have on uncomfortable couches, the lapsing scene around you blazing with the effort of time out of joint.
Nothing — Blue Line Baby And once again, the drift here, the sense of lift and tidal wave dream drowning is prevalent. The wonderful thing about Nothing is that their band name truly resembles the sense of the core of what their music can help you find. Within the haze of their distortion, you can find a place of floating wombness, a uterine coma that covers you in the psychedelia of your own cause, your own mode. The vocals paw at you through a pollen while the guitars create a steady sonar that you can feel the shapes around you in, they generate a force field that you can shape sounds within.
Teenage Wrist — Black Flamingo There’s an underdog sense about this band, a thought of them being underground and unappreciated by the people who would normally be captivated by them. I’m in love with their understanding of how to keep a grungy sound alive, but to keep that idea of “_____-wave” present with the pedals and the gear that they use to add a spice to their sound. That being said, their hooks are powerful and enormous, especially in this track. Their record from last year was one of my favorites, one which I listened to as one that ‘came out today’, but one that jolted right to one of the potential albums of the year. Teenage Wrist knows when and where to use heavy riffs to bridge giant choruses and smooth verses and this is one of the most perfect examples of how to exemplify that balance. It’s tough to believe that this record dropped in 2018.
Cloud Nothings — Echo of the World This song has the sense to me like early Jean Luc Godard, keeping the fourth wall broken down with elements of cinema verite, the way that you can smell the blood, smell the street, smell the makeup of the actors. This feels real. This feels raw. Even the suspense between the moments of largesse has a tangible flesh about it. There’s organic girth. I believe in the band’s aggression. This record reminds me so much of when I was first getting into aggressive music that wasn’t necessarily “heavy”, bands like Recover, …Trail of Dead, and These Arms Are Snakes. It’s the length of the repetitions, the tolling of every bell, like holding your breath underwater to see how long you can survive, every second feels like an eternity and every moment you don’t come up for air feels like a triumph.
Gulfer — Babyshoe Ah, the classic noodley guitar moments of Gulfer. I came back to their record late in the year with a different outlook, listening to so many records at once reviewing the year in 2018 in its entirety. For one reason or another, this song in particular had this massive and legendary appeal to it. It wasn’t only energetic and spastic in the way that this genre tends to bring, it wasn’t only stripped down and honest due to the style of its production, it had a bigger story to tell because of the aforementioned elements and beyond. The ticking clock of the hi-hat in the long instrumental bridge is one that seems to keep time to the epic of youth stretching out into the drone of maturity. This song seems to be the most attentive to itself, a band having a moment while jamming where the collective consciousness of the members becomes one braided individual, where any witness/audience becomes secondary to the music making purpose.
Blis — Ugly There’s that nimble fingered gladness here that I clearly have an affinity for, but also almost as if Claudio from Coheed & Cambria joined into a vocal persona with Jim Ward and fronted this band. There’s magnificence here, the way the delicacies ache forward in a trudge, a solemn walking of the plank into a depth still pulled out of focus. The exhibition of restraint in the verses is rumbling and boiling with anxiety, with distress. The backing vocals placing full palms against the ice of which they’re frozen below. And, I mean, from a practical standpoint, what’s up with that baby chatter that starts to manifest right before the song straps on its aggression?
Lifted Bells — Three Doves What more can I say about Bob Nanna and his exploits that I haven’t said in thirty six mixes prior to this? The man is a genius, one of my biggest idols, a brilliant creator. His unmistakable artistic flourish is present in all of his bands, all of his endeavors. It’s like long exposure highway light shows that are then played on the cleanest guitars. Even the heavier parts, the ones that are busheled together like earnest gifts of flowers, have a beauty where in any other creation would come across as heft. On this song, waves break perfectly like morning sunrise glimmers on imagined beaches on tourism board commercials. The maladies are crisp. This is a beautiful sigh of a song. It feels to me like the moment of pause you give yourself before you ask someone you barely know a question you desperately crave the answer to. I’m forever in awe of how bands in this genre fit what seems 32 notes in the space of 4. That part near the end, where he croons “Good night DeAngelo, ain’t that easy”, with the bass riff and the wildly shaped feedback manifests quite possibly the most AGGRESSIVELY ugly face I’ve ever made.
Covet — Glimmer I want to see a breakdancer pop and lock to this song. What a gem. It’s the result of people growing up listening to American Football’s earliest self titled LP and then knowing they can make music just like it, but then they throw a ton of juicy production on top of it. This one is ripe for staring deeply into fractals, for minding all the veins on the leaf of a flowering tree, for counting the eyelashes on a sleeping lover. For timing the breaths of the earth.
The Voidz — ALienNNatioN I was fascinated by this record. Julian Casablancas has really had the key to my musical heart since the release of Comedown Machine, and even this record as varied and strange as it can be at times, it has unbelievable hits. This song has a super cool background loop, a very subtly unforgettable hook and part of its brilliance is that it has a coy way of never becoming bigger than an introduction (or an outro[duction]). The chorus is smarter and more catchy than many of the biggest pop tracks out right now and the lead synth part is an earworm for the ages. The bassline makes you feel like you’re an enormous cartoon character wearing bell bottoms and walking through a cartoon city where all of the buildings bow and sway in time with your well-timed strut. Even the ugly falsetto is trying just hard enough for me to relate with it.
Snail Mail — Pristine Every time this song comes on, I think I share it with someone. There’s a little of that Smashing Pumpkins guitar kind of feeling to it, a little Silversun Pickups. And then the big spotlight shows up on Lindsey’s “I won’t love anyone else” and there’s a swoon that takes me down. There’s a power here, something in the direct communication. An isolated thought that has been held back for far too long, the tipping point. Spoken, this would be a shaky voiced ultimatum, but when it’s sung, it’s a rigid finger to the chest. This is an admission that there is an altar that the recipient is placed upon, but could be one made of wicker just as soon as one made of marble. We can be anything. Even apart.
COTE — Green Light When trying to share COTE’s albums (or songs) with anyone who didn’t have Spotify during the end of last year, it was extremely difficult. There were other artists with this name, people I never knew, people I REALLY didn’t want others to get this one confused with. But even looking into her facebook (456 followers), twitter (104 followers) and instagram (353 followers) I was blown away with how absolutely buried she is. This song has all of the cool strength of elder stateswoman Jenny Lewis and the effortless marvel of Florence Welch (ya know, of And The Machine). Her album was one of the best of last year, and I’m not even sure it got a quarter of the love it deserved. That soft and beautiful five note key progression is enough to be forever memorable, but it’s only one of the endlessly smart decisions that makes this song a treasure.
Prince Innocence — Sharon Stone There’s a mystical quality about this track. A glistening purple sparkling drift that pulls you in the direction of the calming current. There’s even crickets which for me represents the sound of stars blasting the light of their dying timeline directly into our eyes. There’s an element of water about this track, and somehow I don’t understand how a simple melody, a collection of sound and the lengths at which they’re sustained can convey that, but it does. Whether it’s the open ocean or a flowing stream, for me it’s unmistakable, like a flashback I can’t shake.
Big Thief — UFOF This song came first and the album came later, but I don’t think there’s a better song that would give me the right way to express how this album has really taken over since the full length dropped. There are a lot of different sounds coming together on here that make it an early contender for one of my favorites of the year. There’s that higher pitched, spectral voice that floats through the looping music, almost like a faint scent. It’s reminiscent of a well-loved Elliott Smith track, a name that I hesitate to drop because of how simply heralded his legacy is, but there’s a likeness to it that’s too great to ignore. It’s the uncertainty, the fear of expression, but the certainty of emotion that suits this track marvellously. This whole track is a sleeper hook, one with three choruses braided together to make one ornate woodwork. This track is a spiritual experience for me.
Arctic Monkeys — Batphone I was stoked about this record because, let’s be honest, I really liked “Do I Wanna Know?”, “R U Mine?” and “Arabella” from AM. And when the single for this album came out, BOY was it weird. Completely not what I was expecting, completely ‘weird’, and definitely off-putting. I was experiencing some type of aphasia. The math wouldn’t add up. I was listening for one thing and hearing another, and I kept listening again and again to see if I’d recognize some codex to break another guitar riff that would have it make sense to me. That’s not what the song was, and certainly that’s not what this song is. It’s got a spooky sense to it(?), but the more I listen to it, the more interested in the song I become. There’s a narrative on the backburner, a world that’s been built that this song exists in. The lyrics at first begin to fire off like random synapses, almost like running through a stranger’s twitter timeline. But when I started to see the world that the song was being transmitted from, once again, it was a shape that began to reveal itself through a songwriting sonar. I compare the record altogether as a Kubrick film, and I think if you apply that context to this, if you continue to turn the dial on this by degrees, the story takes shape.
The Caption — Leaving Coming up out of Long Island and its seemingly endless depth of incredible musicians has offered me the pleasure of meeting some of the most artistic and brilliant minds I’ve ever stumbled across. One of those minds is possessed by Jack Tangney, someone who I’ve seen embody a dozen different roles within the vocal musical space, each of them their own spectrum of genius. Jack’s ability to have bell clear tones, even at the height of his frenzied manias is certainly a talent I will always laud. This track definitely spotlights his flawless vocal tone amidst a stripped down and dew sweet backdrop. Maybe it’s because I know (knew?) Jack for a time, caught some of his wild creativity in person, let it touch me the way motivational speakers can send people into new career paths and/or tremors and speaking in tongues, but this song is a marvel to me, and the first time I heard it, I wanted everyone I know to feel what one of the mad men of Long Island are capable of creating.
boygenius — Ketchum, ID This song feels like an experience to me, something that I used to experience in various stages of my life, when I was around people who used to create music, people who had singing voices as hidden (and unhidden) talents. There’s a raging creationist fire here, melting raw material of past experience and life events into a liquid that’s clear and pure, light and airy, but one that will cool quickly to an unbreakable shelter. It sounds like three individual confessions and observations, ones which rise up to the surface of a cauldron and swirl only to dissipate. After each of these chants, they come together as phantom voices that burn, wither and float up into the sky as ash that have shapes as permanent and temporary as the continents on which we live. While the track has definitive lyrics, affirmed events, there is a fluid sense of emotion that I can feel through these words, regardless of the way they’ve been encased in language.
