Mix XXXVIII — Let the Poem Be Made.
Billie Eilish — Ilomilo There’s something about this album that hovers somewhere between interesting and understated quality and “lucky shot” for me. I can’t get completely into it, mostly because it just doesn’t seem like much is happening in it. Nothing fully takes you over and becomes a real jam. But those little blops and bloops are catchy and simple. It’s really like hearing one of your friends pick up one of those synths and stumble upon a demo or a beat that they like and start playing simple notes over it. This song’s production got me in a specific way, though. The way it wavers and alters between the channels during that one part in the chorus sets a tone for the whole song. I think once you know it’s coming, I think once you know that this is the precipice for the track, it grants a new spirit to the song altogether. This song’s low and drowsy catchiness belies something marvelous and genius about Billie Eilish, but I really can’t stand her apathetic public persona (during this album promotion and tour phase).
BTS — Boy With Luv Saw this video one morning, and stopped because I had NEVER heard a song by BTS. EVER. So with it being my first song from them, it hooked me immediately. I jumped and wanted to go and listen to all of their albums and pick the best of the best and get “really” into them. Then I backed up and exited the daydream and just downloaded this song. Dude, this song is as if they dropped a crabbing cage to the bottom of the pop music ocean and pulled up a bounty of hooks and strung them together and draped them across a mantel at a fireplace during a friendly get together. Man, and one thing that makes this song even better is that it fits that really indescribable moment of not being able to understand the lyrics, so all you have to do is let the song and the rhythm do the work. I bet if I know what teenaged lover the lyrics were trying to appeal to, I’d fall away to the side, but without it? Mm. Unreal track.
Yeasayer — Fluttering In the Floodlights I had Madder Red on a mix a few years ago, and that song is absolutely genius. It’s strange and catchy and has a narrative all its own. This one is brilliant for different reasons altogether. It’s catchy and dancey and has the charisma of the eighties, where regardless of how much you wanted to have a good time, you could still reach pretty far and have a good time with it and not seem like you were overly corny. Such a cool song.
Red Hearse — Violence Another Jack Antonoff project comes rolling around. I mean, this guy gets his hands deep in with some of the coolest artists and writes nearly faultless singles each and every time. This one has a lot more of that brooding, dark kind of style with a lot of cool background production and fuzzy breaks in the wings. Above it all, there is a cool and confident falsetto vocal line that combines all of the things that have made songs from guys like Justin Timberlake feel unique and dominant in the pop realm. This whole album is filled with top tier material like this, song after song, catchy in their own way. It just so happens that this one has the perfect personality to get itself clawed under my skin forever.
Somos — Alright, I’ll Wait I discovered this band just briefly before the band’s guitarist passed away. It adds a lot of soul to the release, one that I had to come back to and revisit once I heard the news. Love the light and airy guitar sound on this whole song, with lots of pedals and reverb over the more or less effortless singing that rolls over the top of the song. The “heavier” parts of this song ring perfectly, doing more by way of emotional release than deep and driving chords. I feel this one in a way that I feel so many of my favorite songs. It’s got the same DNA.
PUP — Closure Fun ass track. I can feel the beer being thrown at the show her, the fingers being raised to the rafters. The mic stand falling over. The pile-ons. The dusted and scuffed floor. “There’s a part of you that’s still part of me. I need closure.” is such a succinct line, one that is remarkably easy to relate to if you’ve ever been neck-deep in a relationship that ends abruptly, one in which you need everything of yourself back immediately and it just will not come back the easy way.
Hikes — Extra Mile I heard this one on discover weekly on Spotify and was halted. This was the perfect track. I couldn’t believe it. I kept listening to it again and again. The mathy guitars, the high pitched voice, the fullness. A “Steve Song” if I’ve ever heard one. The record drops sometime this month, and I can’t wait for track after track to give me an excuse to wear my air guitar strap SUPER high, the neck of the nonexistent guitar somewhere around my shoulders. Let’s not forget the earnest, close to the microphone, almost spoken wordplay. Tick all the boxes. We’ve got a song built for me.
Seizures — Toxophola This record is genius. I can’t tell if I like it more than everything else that came out this year, or if I’m just simply not ready for it yet. Each time I listen to it, I feel like I missed something, but thinking back on it, I know there is a remarkable piece of work here. It’s like a jazz album, all kinds of creation and style coming together as one, but it’s heavy and dark. Breakdowns that lay in wait for those who have lasted long enough to find them. This song really encompasses the album as a whole. It’s on the cusp of becoming something from second to second, it’s almost rolling into the pocket and having a “part” that you can get down with, but also doesn’t quite settle, doesn’t last long enough, doesn’t sit still long enough to get a good picture of it. It is frenzied and raw. One of the realest records that’s dropped all year.
Car Bomb — Nonagon These guys came out with an album this year as well, but I have had this song on deck for a long time. It’s hard to select a single track from the album, but this one seemed to suit it best. The breakdowns are punishing. The pedals are used ingeniously. Each one of these sounds has gone through the grinder and come out and the other side in a new and alien form than it did when it entered. It reminds me of a more experimental Fear Factory at times. I heard this record before I heard Frontierer, and for a while, I honestly couldn’t tell them apart. If you dig this track, definitely go back and listen to the full length that it came from. Hard to listen to one song without the ones that surround it. And son, those laser blasts??
At the Drive-In — Proxima Centauri I go back and forth between which At the Drive-In record is my favorite, from In/Casino/Out to the one which this came from, the Vaya EP. And while the big one, the one that got us all involved in the first place was Relationship of Command, there is something about those two that feel so distinctly and purely At the Drive-In to me. For me, while the Ward/Bixler balance was always what made this band incredible, there is also something visual about the way these guys’ live performance embodied what their music sounded like. It was a component that helped to understand the cage that they were building around the beast that they were enraging. This song has so many elements that I can visualize them, with the signature start-stop formula, the mad scientist ups and downs of Omar’s guitars… this song forever characterizes the band as I remember them. Plus within the lyrics, there are the words “Caligula time warp” which is… absolutely unreal. There is something so apt about the pillar of this song being a countdown. These dudes are always… always on the verge of combustion. In the Holy Trinity of favorite bands forever.
Bear vs. Shark — Buses/No Buses Bars of Gold is a band that is made up of dudes from this band, and they dropped a record this year. It’s so good and so representative of what BvS was about. Marc Paffi’s voice is SO DAMN DISTINCT. It’s like a dude standing at the end of a block trying to yell directions to you but you constantly think you’re following them wrong. They repressed their two records on a vinyl set a couple of years ago, and it has been the best to digest all at once. Both of their full-lengths are frantic rides through wild territory with tour guides on acid. There are elements of hardcore, “emo” (which version do you subscribe to?), and sweaty rock shows all tumbled into one tumbler and poured into a red solo cup. You have to drink it all immediately. This song is frantic, that YELL of the chorus gets me too hype, and that clean break is such a great indication of the quiet places that they go.
Denzel Curry — YOO Sometimes I read my texts, and I cannot believe how many O’s there are that populate the number of times I say “Yo.” Hearing this skit puts things into perspective.
Milo — Mythbuilding Exercise №9 This is one of the best albums that I’ve discovered this year. Hands down. End of story. I wanted to write about it. Fuck it, I wanted to write a letter directly to it. The beats are top tier, some of the most laid back and lo-fi ensembles put together. As a rhymer, Milo’s choice of words are so profound and deliberate, NEVER bringing himself into the territory of EGO BOOST and/or NARCISSISTIC MASTURBATION. I’ll hear words in some of his songs and have to pause, cock my head, then dash back a few seconds to hear the line, the bounce back to the beginning of the verse. Then shit, head back to the beginning of the whole damn song. This was the song that put me on the path, the breadcrumbs that I followed to the candy house where I got devoured by the artist.
Viktor Vaughn — G.M.C. The obsession with MF Doom continues. Yet another of his personalities comes through on the record Vaudeville Villain. There are so many tracks on here that want to make their way onto this mix, but this song’s beat with the… “convenience store bell ring”[??] sample. That little electronic guitar riff that pops back in. The background underwater boom-bwom. The highly distorted modem handshake. So cool. With Doom, there’s a lot of stories being told at one time, so it’s easy to lose the script, but his flow is impeccable. Clean, but directly from the street. The type of spitting you’d hear if you pop in an Uber in NYC and the driver does not give a FUCK if you hear what he’s saying to his boy on the other side of the phone call.
O K H O, Saito — Macchiato It’s simple. This is pretty electronic music, lo-fi and mellow. The electronic glitchiness of it just adds to the beauty, frames it in a warbling and staticky television screen. The tape warbles and moves. The audio is broken and old in many ways. It hyperventilates. Whole record by O K H O and Saito comes in at under 30 minutes and is WELL worth the listen if you need to kick back and get your mind ironed out.
Skeeter Davis — End of the World I love the fatalism of this song. It’s a classic, timeless chorus. I feel like everyone knows it. The reference to it being “the end of the world” is so excellent, capturing the raw and very real scope of horror and desperation immediately following a breakup.
La Dispute — Rhodonite and Grief Artwork on this record is SUPER cool. Something out of a planet-scaled sci-fi story. Their record from a few years ago really hit me in a special way, and this one came around with smarter takes, more well put together song structures. But I feel like this track has a home somewhere between both. The light backbeat the rows away, the sparse clean guitars that dot the sweeping clouds that the vocals trace. Jordan Dreyer’s poetic and still life lyricism always frames such austere and humane moments, almost like a post-hardcore Norman Rockwell.
Natalie Merchant — Wonder I got caught up in hearing another Natalie Merchant song, noticing that she has such a unique delivery and vocal sound. I think I’ve underappreciated her for a very long time, tying her up and tossing her aside with some of those mid-90s “Single” writers, songs that soundtracked a time, but never really went further than a wide stroked sound. As I grow older and my tastes diversify, and I find more and more of my taste for female singers grow deeper and warmer, her songs (from that era specifically) have taken on a bigger life, one that I can hear in many of the newer artists I listen to now. There may not be a rebelliousness to it, a more pedestrian, journal-writing sense of loss, but the Old Earth core is there. This song sings of being “A Wonder”, something special, created uniquely and something that many come from far and wide to take note of this person. I know this might sound a little like a “LIVE. LAUGH. LOVE.” driftwood Instagram post, but here’s a question I want you to think about: What would make someone travel distances (great or small) to wonder, to marvel at you? There’s something[, man].
Big Thief — Forgotten Eyes I had never heard of Big Thief before this year, but they are having an UNREAL 2019. Two records released (one of which may be my favorite of the year; I can’t really tell yet) and both of them having songs that kick me in the chest that I have to sit down and jot down thoughts while hearing them. This song is 10000% one of them. The absolute transparency and exposure that are put on display here are some of the most beautiful musical visions that have been shared. The delivery of the line, “everybody needs a home and deserves protection,” is captivating. Remarkable. Also, in a personal way (hopefully you find it somewhere for you as well), the line “no crying but it is no less a tear” resonates in a billion different ways.
Hand Habits — Yr Heart This song feels like the words that you whisper to your lover while you’re laying outside in the summer heat. Hand in hand. “I can feel you push your fingers through the fabric of all of my thoughts.” Syncing up and having a simulacrum, an equilibrium that only the two of you vibrate within. This song makes me feel. Become closer with the ones that we love. Let this person know you. Make it so that they will never forget you. Put on hold the things that make you human, and are what All the Others see you as. Show them the things you are, the voice you hear in your head, the legs that walk in dream, the creations you have on the tip of your fingers. “I will not harm you. I will not alarm you.”
Silversun Pickups — Rusted Wheel For a while, these guys were flawless. Three albums that are forever in the pantheon of my favorite records. I went back about a month ago and listened to them end to end at home, physically, and eventually had to keep going back to them digitally while at work. There is such a galaxy that they embody. While they built more traditional rock songs over time, this whole record, Carnavas, is going to be more of an environment for me than it is an album. It’s an atmosphere. I have a very distinct feeling about the album, sitting on a balcony in Miami, listening to the CD that I bought because of the art on the cover, discovering it and writing in a journal and feeling, for once, that I had no worries. I think at this point I had my feet under me and I had no idea of the future and it wasn’t feeling like a pinhole closing but instead a universe expanding.
Placebo — Ask for Answers A friend had this record back in the day because of “Pure Morning” and he would play it a lot. Then, I always thought the songs were ‘really cool’. The guy’s voice was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. As I got older and got broken, and made mistakes and put things back together, and became stronger because of it, I realized that these songs are some of the saddest moments in my music listening life. The desolation in this song, the betrayal, the moments where you know (YOU KNOW) that where you are is not where you want to be, and especially who it’s with… you’re asking these questions to blank pages and to mirrors of yourself and the answers are the most obvious ones. “These bonds are shackle free”. You’re the only one keeping yourself here, you’re the only one keeping yourself anywhere.
