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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years

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BEABADOOBEE - I WISH I WAS STEPHEN MALKMUS

[6.33]

Your editor wishes we covered "Bobby" by Beabadoobee, because "'Bobby' by Beabadoobee" is more fun to say and the title is less loaded.

Kylo Nocom: Describing this as an example of the trite canonization of rock legends would be an easy takeaway, but the lyrics imply something much smarter. Prior to this, Beabadoobee was making hazy "bedroom pop," the kind that draws ire for perceived lack of authenticity and algorithmic panic. In 2019, this scene is losing starpower fast, and there now exists a need for them to establish themselves beyond the twee of their DeMarco-isms. Clairo's transition to lusher production from bedroom pop aesthetics was brilliant, but the discourse on Immunity had an irritating focus on The Guy from Vampire Weekend making the Industry Plant good. Beabadoobee's evocation of Malkmus is symbolic for the same reasons, but nobody can misinterpret the narrative she wants to put forth: "I wanted change, no one forced it." She understands the power of image, and she makes out indie rock-isms to be as temporary as dyed hair. Her adoration of Pavement is authentic but never willfully conservative; I don't hear "God, give me Dan Bejar's voice" but rather a sly wink at those who understand that all that separates pop with an indie rock façade from true indie rock is if the video gets put on Vevo. If my interpretation is off-base, so be it. She's far outdone her hero just by knowing how to write a hook. [7]

Alfred Soto: "Have you heard Beabadoobee?" a student asked today. Now this song appears twelve hours after my first listen. I like the concept: oblique nod to "Cut Your Hair," although only a fan of Stephen Malkmus and his fabulous pre-1995 hair would care so much about inserting lines about hair dye around vocals as kittenish as his at his best and a guitar racket. [7]

Alex Clifton: Having "your brand is shit" immediately followed with the line "you're up your butt" is strangely charming, the teenage jadedness that sees through all fakery combined with the rage of a childish insult. That's about as much as I've got to differentiate Beabadoobee from her peers; her music recalls Snail Mail, Mitski, and Let's Eat Grandma, but I've yet to figure who she is. "I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus" runs a little long and gets repetitive after a while, but Beabadoobee sounds like she's got a knack for drawing out the right emotions in a song. [5]

Julian Axelrod: Pavement's never been my thing -- too unfocused, too atonal, too up its own butt (to steal a phrase from our subject) for my liking. But I love a good hero worship anthem, and Bea Kristi's side-eyed writing refracts her idol's most obnoxious traits through a distinctly Gen Z lens to create a squalling ode to insularity. Whereas Malkmus gleefully denies his audience simple pleasures, Beabadoobee sounds exhausted by her relentless search for satisfaction. (1999's "slacker" is 2019's "unemployed".) In a brutal twist, she finds herself falling for a boy who embodies the worst traits of the man she admires. They say you should never meet your heroes, so becoming them is the next best thing. [7]

Iain Mew: I'm old and I don't care about Pavement, which might be perfect for listening to this (also I loved "She Plays Bass."). I don't know how true to them it is, but she makes easing into its detached ramble sound both fresh and like there never could have been any other way. [7]

Ian Mathers: I genuinely can't decide if I find this annoying or catchy, but it kind of feels like that's what she's going for? [5]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Beabadoobee #pop #music #music review #writing

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lovejustforaday · 3 years

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2020 Year-end list - #1

SWIMMER - TENNIS

Main Genres: Twee Pop, Soft Rock A decent sampling of: Pop Soul, Psychedelic Pop, Dream Pop, Art Pop

I’ve been a casual fan of Tennis for a while now since their last LP Yours Conditionally dropped in 2017. The band has an established niche, making music that fuses twee pop sensibilities with the retro sounds of so-called ‘dated’ genres like soft rock, surf, and 70s pop soul. Someone who spends less time with their music might shrug them off as just another cute little indie band obsessed with the times long past, and I’ll admit myself that this wasn’t on my AOTY radar when it was first announced. But then they dropped the lead single “Runner” at the end of last year and I had the faintest feeling that this was gonna be a big moment for them, and it turned out that my intuition was right this time.

Swimmer is a gorgeous and delicate musical experience about a love that survives to the end of the world, an ornately decorated wedding cake laced with celestial hallucinogens. While I’m at it, here’s a quick hot take that’s sure to get me murdered by some boomers: this album is better than Rumours by Fleetwood Mac and pretty much all of ABBA’s greatest hits (both artists that I am also fond of). Tennis has been refining their craft and their sound for a decade now, and if past releases in their discography represent footsteps in the band’s evolution, then Swimmer is closer to a parsec of evolution.

The band consists of Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley, a quirky couple who celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary this year, which is essential context because Swimmer is largely a testament to Moore and Riley’s beautiful relationship and a mature reflection on what it means to spend that much time with someone and know them that closely. When I say the two are quirky, I mean that in the best way possible – Moore and Riley seem to be a genuine two of a kind, a pair of unabashed, offbeat love birds who would gladly leave their regular lives behind to spend months living on a sailboat together with only a few possessions (they did this twice, in fact). I mean, they even dropped this LP on Valentine’s Day. They’re so genuinely nerdy with their love for each other; I want to say that this LP wouldn’t work nearly as well if it was anyone else’s relationship.

Regardless, the music of Swimmer still speaks for itself. Everything is a huge improvement of their last LP, with better production, incredibly infectious hooks, more ambitious songwriting, and a surprising amount of lyrical depth. Still largely maintaining the band’s guitar-driven, twee 70s pop fusion formula, this time they add little traces of sparkly psychedelia that are just enough to leave you feeling love struck. Riley’s guitar work is a big highlight, gliding around melodies and leaving little musical bits of fancy frosted sugar coating everywhere without ever coming off as flashy. The album has a retro sound, but it also has a distinctly modern quality with its honest reflection on darker subject matter and characteristically millennial elements of irony and subversion.

“I’ll Haunt You” begins the album with a gentle, wistful ballad examining the unlikely topic of mortality, as Moore reflects on her own signs of aging before proclaiming “I will haunt you when I’m gone” to her lover Riley. The saccharine twee pop veneer of Moore’s golden voice is so thick that it’s easy to miss the lyrical depth of many of these songs, betrayed only by the conviction of her words. The mood picks up fast with “Need Your Love”, a lively soft rock composition with prog influences, featuring a major tempo shift between its verses and chorus that is ridiculously gratifying to hear each time it switches.

“Runner” is absurdly catchy, both a brilliant pop song and a shimmering sea of little stars that goes higher and higher as Alaina Moore reflects on her very religious upbringing and how it has influenced her perception of human desire. Apparently this track took Moore and Riley a full year of almost non-stop songwriting and editing to get the end result they wanted, and the care and work that was put into it really shows. Title track “Swimmer” is the only song where the darker undertones are fully reflected in the instrumental composition, with a gloomy psychedelic rock dirge about Moore’s fear of swimming and the time she and her husband went to release his late father’s cremated ashes into the sea. In this context, the water itself represents death.

The album reaches an epic climax with its finest song and penultimate track “Late Night”, a warm twee pop serenade that begins soothing the listener with its twinkling refrain, all while Moore philosophically ponders the topics of love, religion, sex, womanhood, and identity. The track eventually bursts into a whirlwind of ecstasy as she triumphantly declares “I am the master of my ship / My ship, the master of the sea” and “I think I'm finally feeling free”, conquering her fear of the water and likewise her fear of death, while asserting her freedom to live as she chooses. This was my other favourite song of the year besides Jessie Ware’s “Spotlight” – “Late Night” fills my heart with joy whenever I hear it and it makes me want to spin in endless circles of euphoria.

Finally, the album closes with “Matrimony II”, a soulful baroque pop song that celebrates the idea of love as a gravitational orbit between two celestial bodies as they pull closer and closer until they are mutually destroyed, beautifully mirroring the opening track’s reflection on the relationship between love and death. This song in particular was written by Moore in dedication to Riley to commemorate the anniversary of their wedding, and I think it’s the perfect choice for a closing track because it really ends the album with such an elegant thought.

In short, Swimmer by Tennis is a collection of indie pop songs that’s not that far from perfect. It’s so funny, this was only the second album from this year that I listened to and it ended up crushing everything else in its path.

It’s almost a miracle that during such a dreary year we were given an album that is so celebratory, so life-affirming, and so unafraid of what the future may hold. Truthfully, Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley have given me more than just faith in the future of the music industry; they have given me faith in the future of humanity with their good vibes and their determination to live as their own true authentic selves. So here’s to Tennis and 2020, here’s to the radical past, and here’s to a better future.

Edit: Bumping this down to a 9. Still the most exciting thing I heard in 2020, but in hindsight I think it flows a bit awkwardly at times (particularly the intro “I’ll Haunt You” which feels like it was cut short) and I don’t think this is quite up there with my other 10s. 2020 was kind of a slow year in music for me (crappy year in general obviously) so I wanted a clear decisive AOTY masterpiece. Looks like I didn’t get one this time, but I’ll be checking out some of the stuff I missed.

I still stand by this being better than most of the 70s soft rock it pays homage to, and indeed better than any other act right now that has been putting out similar 70s “kitsch” revivalism.

9/10

highlights: “Late Night”, “Runner”, "Matrimony II”, “Need Your Love”, “Swimmer”, “How To Forgive”

#tennis #tennisband #tennismusic #swimmer #retro pop #70s throwback #twee pop #soft rock #psychedelic pop #best music #aoty #aoty2020 #year-end list #album review #music review

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dustedmagazine · 7 years

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Dust, Volume 3, Number 7

The Jerry Cans

Whether they come from Ladakh, Nunavut, or Detroit, the albums featured in this instalment of our bite-sized review column managed to catch our ears. Whether jazz, techno, or just plain unclassifiable, maybe they'll catch yours too. Contributions from Bill Meyer, Ian Mathers, Olivia Bradley-Skill, Justin Cober-Lake, and Eric McDowell.

Aaron Dilloway — The Gag File (Dais)

The Gag File by Aaron Dilloway

Is The Gag File a compilation of jokes or a compendium of emetic influences? The album cover’s image of a ventriloquist’s dummy may suggest the former, but this is show business of a particularly queasy bent. Slowed-down vocal and rhythm loops mix with a chorus of whistles to distinctly uneasy effect. A narcotized narrator assures the listener that “It’s alright” over and over, sinking into a miasma of sci-fi synths that give way to a party where everyone sounds too wasted to perform the sexual act prescribed by the Little Feat song on the hi-fi. Paradoxically the passages where Dilloway gets his noise ya-yas out are the moments of relief, since they invite you to bang your head in time to the locked grooves and spliced tapes rather than think about what’s really going on.

Bill Meyer

Kelly Lee Owens - s/t (Smalltown Supersound)

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There are plenty of wonderful first albums out there, and also plenty of wonderful, let’s say, fifth albums; what’s significantly rarer than either of those on their own is a debut that has the quiet self-assurance and comfort in its own skin that’s much more typical of those great fifth albums. All of which is to say that Kelly Lee Owens is the kind of great first album that’s seemingly leapfrogged over the typical stumbling blocks you often get with early work. Owens uses deceptively simple elements as a producer, and manages to range all over the place stylistically and structurally (even in terms of the genres she evokes; while this is pretty much all electronic, even dance music, at times she brings to mind the gentler end of shoegaze or twee pop or any number of other things) while still feeling like a coherent emotional and sonic statement. She’s no more sui generis than any artist, moments here strike sparks off the likes of anyone from the Field to Glasser or the namechecked-here Arthur Russell, but she always has her own distinct voice. For someone who’s just getting started, it’s an incredibly accomplished and captivating one.

Ian Mathers

Various Artists — Where the Mountains Meet the Sky: Folk Music Of Ladakh (Sublime Frequencies)

Where the Mountains Meet the Sky: Folk Music of Ladakh by [see album description]

You can’t head much farther north than Ladakh and still be in in India. In times past the Himalayan region was on the Silk Road trade route, but now it has been isolated by the closure of the border between India and China. Folk culture is languishing, and this LP fits into the lifelong effort of one man, Morup Namgyal, to document it before it passes. Five of the record’s tracks come from his collection, the rest from more recent recordings made to accompany a film about him called The Sound Collector. Where the Mountains Meet the Sky could fairly have been put out under Namgyal’s name, since he sings on eight out of nine vocal selections. But even though his throaty voice puts the songs across quite effectively, focusing on him misses the point; it’s the survival of the songs that matters, not the identity of the singer. The instrumental accompaniment (tablas, drums, flutes and a double reed instrument called a surna) is sparse, and hard to fix to a single tradition, with droning timbres and irregular beats that sound fairly Indian coexisting with melodies and rhythms that feel closer to Tuvan folk music.

Bill Meyer

Tiny Vipers — Laughter (Ba Da Bing)

After two albums of hauntingly spare and direct folk-adjacent music as Tiny Vipers, the last in 2009, Jesy Fortino took a break to get a civil engineering degree. Now she’s back, but in a form significantly altered enough to match the magnitude of the change in her life; where once Fortino’s voice and acoustic guitar were foregrounded, here there’s none of the latter and precious little of the former. Instead Laughter features synthesizers and tape hiss, arpeggios and loops. The result is just as captivating as those older Tiny Vipers records, but in an entirely new sense, where the songs are as dense as “The Summer of Moments” or as tentatively beautiful as “Crossing the River of Yourself”. “K.I.S.S.” indicates that Fortino can make these kinds of songs work with her lyrics and vocals just as well as with her old setup, so the real question this fascinating, exploratory effort leaves the listener with is whether she will wind up following its lead and integrating these sounds and structures with the strong lyrical viewpoint of past work, or if the more abstract and experimental likes of the 14-minute title track are a more accurate indicator of where she’s going.

Ian Mathers

ADULT. — Detroit House Guests (Mute)

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ADULT.’s music summons nocturne sleeplessness, paranoia, and meditation. In Detroit House Guests, the hyperactive and anxious dance music of their last album, The Way Things Fall (2013), has given way to a more trance-like, hazy sway. Wide-awake restlessness and solitude permeate through its emphasis on repetition, reverb and echo. Yet despite the album’s circular and looping approach to melody, the album isn’t stuck in any one direction. The duo worked with a number of collaborators, who include Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Lichens), Michael Gira (Swans), Lun_na Menoh, Douglas J McCarthy (Nitzer Ebb), Dorit Chrysler (NY Theremin Society), and Shannon Funchess (Light Asylum). Their added presence is felt, in a good way, through the album’s wider sound and scope. ADULT. feels less insular than it has in the past, and reminds us of the various textures the nighttime can hold. By not restricting itself to the headspace of the club, ADULT. experiments with a myriad of energies that span from jittery insomnia to fertile dreams, between dusk, twilight and pitch black skies. Favorite tracks: “P rts M ss ng”, “Uncomfortable Positions”, “As You Dream”.

Olivia Bradley-Skill

The Jerry Cans — Inuusiq (Aakuluk)

The Jerry Cans would appear to be a highly localized act. They come from Nunavut in northern Canada, sing mostly in the Inuit language Inuktitut, utilize local throat singing, and even started the first record label in their territory. Far from being a “welcome to global cultures” lesson, the band demonstrates how to skillfully build a world of sounds. The music on their latest album Inuusiq centers on traditional folk and roots-rock sounds, almost always maintaining a high level of energy (the album’s English title is Life, after all). Their Celtic influence comes through with both the fiddle and rollicking approach to performance. “Maikliqta” brings a personalized element of reggae, but it doesn’t sound out of place next to the hoedown of “Paniarjuk.” With touches of pop around the edges of its songs, the band just sounds full of gas and ready to go. The language might not always translate easily, but good roots is good roots.

Justin Cober-Lake

Bottle Tree — s/t (International Anthem)

Bottle Tree by Bottle Tree

Keeping up its reputation as a champion of local talent, International Anthem presents the self-titled debut album by the Windy City trio Bottle Tree, featuring Ben Lamar Gay, A.M. Frison and Italian transplant Tmmaso Moretti. As the 7” single “Open Secret” first attested, this isn’t quite the Ben Lamar Gay we sampled on the 2015 compilation Nine/Two at Constellation, nor the one in assistance on Jaimie Branch’s recent standout debut, also on International Anthem. For Bottle Tree’s spare and funky soul persona, he trades cornet for keys and compositional duties, keeping his presence largely behind the scenes or else in the middle ground, as a buffer of sorts between Frison’s fluid vocals and Moretti’s clattering, twitchy beats. Over the cassette’s 30 minutes, the trio gets significant mileage out of contrasted layers, deft structural pivots and sudden harmonic cadences. While fans of Frison’s Coultrain project will find lots to like on this nimble, grooving and mellow gem, Bottle Tree is the perfect opportunity for everyone else to get to know these three important and too far under-the-radar Chicagoans, too.

Eric McDowell

#dusted magazine #dust #bill meyer #ian mathers #olivia bradley-skill #justin cober-lake #eric mcdowell #aaron dilloway #sublime frequencies #tiny vipers #kelly lee owens #adult.#the jerry cans #bottle tree

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