Song of the Day

Song of the Day: “Let’s Call It A Day” – Alex Lahey

November 20, 2017 by krisis

Let’s play a free association game. I’m going to say a musical genre, and you think of the first three bands that come to mind.

Ready?

The genre is “rock.” Go!

I’m willing to bet that for a vast majority of readers that none of the three bands include a female front person. Whether your associations had a historical lens and involved The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, or your brain went to 80s bands like Van Halen or Guns’n’Roses, or you thought of modern rock mainstays like Pearl Jam or Foo Fighters, I’m willing to bet you didn’t name any lady rockers.

What is it about women in rock that requires us to label them as “women in rock” instead of just “rock,” as if the genre sans descriptor denotes a male-only version of the music?

Even when woman singers and female-fronted bands escape the “women in” tag, they tend to get grouped into some sub-category, like “acoustic rock” or or “art rock” or “singer/songwriter” – or, even just “pop.” Yet, even with less women in rock’n’roll than men, it’s not hard to name women in all of those categories, like Heart, The Pretenders, The Breeders, or PJ Harvey.

A large part of the allure of Aussie rocker Alex Lahey’s debut full-length record for me is that it’s unquestionably rock without needing any further description. Yes, there’s a retro tinge to the arrangements, but this is surging, modern guitar rock that’s not discernibly different in genre than Arctic Monkeys or Imagine Dragons or whatever it is that modern rock radio is playing these days.

(Seriously, what do they play? Yet more Foo Fighters, I guess. There is always new Foo Fighters to play.)

I was introduced to Lahey via her cover of “Torn” for Triple J radio. I loved her bright, plaintive vocal and how she slashed at power chords on her guitar. That was enough for me to bookmark her name and notice when her full-length debut I Love You Like a Brother dropped a few weeks ago.

It’s a terrific, charming rock record from front to back, full of Lahey’s a gently-self-deprecating charm and a bevy of textured, unique band arrangements to keep it from ever feeling too sameish. I’d say if you enjoy Best Coast or Dum Dum Girls, you would probably like it.

Of all the strong songs, “Let’s Call It A Day” is that one that captured my imagination the most on the first play, maybe because it so clearly illustrated to me the inclination to sub-genre-ize a rocker like Lahey just because she is a woman. [Read more…] about Song of the Day: “Let’s Call It A Day” – Alex Lahey

Song of the Day: “One Foot” – Walk The Moon

November 13, 2017 by krisis

It must be paralyzing to be a famous musician.

I find it hard enough to write songs that I feel stand up to my increasingly large oeuvre of material, and I don’t have millions of fans waiting with baited breath for even a hint of my newest work.

I’ve also never delivered an album as relentlessly charming as two of our household’s favorites from 2014: Taylor Swift’s 1989 and Walk The Moon’s Talking Is Hard.

Together, they have dominated our stereos, iPods, and kitchen dance parties for the last three years. Between them, they contain some of the first songs EV6 learned as sing-alongs, including bath nights shouting out the chorus to “Bad Blood” and spinning around in the kitchen while somehow letting the rush of words from “Shut Up and Dance With Me” tumble out of her tiny mouth.

As it happens, the follow-ups to both of those 2014 records dropped on Friday – Reputation and What If Nothing, respectively. Both LPs have the unenviable task of following nearly-flawless smashes, each with a specific sort of sonic gestalt that is easy to imitate but difficult to evolve into something new.

I am fascinated by these sorts of high-wire follow-up records. How many near-perfect albums can you think of that have a near-perfect follow-up? Does Tusk hold up to Rumors? Music to Tapestry? Bad to Thriller? Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie to Jagged Little Pill?

Do you repeat the formula? Do something deliberately and almost obtusely different? Or do you just writing the songs and whatever happens happens?

I spent this past weekend listening to Reputation and What If Nothing. I suspect Swift’s record will going on to be recognized as a total dud which she’ll later renounce; more on that some other time. Today I’m here to talk about Walk The Moon.

One of the reasons I was so obsessed with Talking Is Hard was the specificity with which the band sound-checked famous 1980s artists and their trademark sounds. They used both their songwriting and production to quote the recognizable sonic palettes of acts like Talking Heads, U2, Duran Duran, and Paul Simon.

It was a fun parlor trick, especially when combined with ruthlessly catchy hooks. Yet, to repeat that theme of earworm nostalgia wholesale on a new album wouldn’t work. It would feel stale and expected – an imitation of an imitation.

What’s a catchy, retro band to do? “One Foot” is a good hint, not only because it’s the lead single, but because it comes after a pair of unusual opening tracks on the album.

It certainly sounds a lot like “Different Colors” from Talking Is Hard. It’s also a little ridiculous with its leading falsetto hook garnished with a tuneless little war whoop from the entire band. It’s also pretty plain beneath all the studio dressing, repeating a single four-chord progression the entire song.

I think this band is good when they’re a little ridiculous and plain. Self-consciousness wasn’t behind the best songs of Talking Is Hard, and it’s certainly not a factor with the silly braggadocio of the verses of “One Foot” and the gang chants of the hook.

It’s a song that sounds very much like Walk The Moon and not like anyone else in specific. What feels distinctly gone from this single (and, much of the LP) is the specificity of the band’s retro references as well as an occasional modern pop/rock sameness. “One Foot” feels like a song entirely of today, but also somehow also a song hot off the heels of the Pretty Woman soundtrack in 1990. Maybe that’s because there’s a little hint of the vocal bombast of “King of Wishful Thinking.

We need more unselfconscious music. This song might be calculated as hell – in fact, it’s probably likely to be as the lead single – but that doesn’t stop of from feeling unpredictable and infused with a wild sense of joy.

(PS: Check out this nifty acoustic version – I didn’t expect the songs to have such good bones under all the production.)

(PPS: Here’s the band discussing some of these songwriting challenges.)

Song of the Day: “Happy Birthday, Johnny” – St. Vincent

November 6, 2017 by krisis

When was the last time a song made you cry?

I cry at a lot of music and not just at the sad parts. I cry at awesome crescendos. One time I cried over Weezer’s Hash Pipe.

I cannot tell you the last time I cried over a song one of the first few times I heard it before hearing St. Vincent’s “Dear Johnny” from her new LP Masseduction this past week.

I’m not sure what’s so crushing about it. It’s not overtly sad. It’s not, for example, Janet Jackson’s “Again” or something. Yet, there I sat in my bed, openly weeping as it played on a loop, until finally I broke the spell by getting up to figure it out on piano.

I wanted to play it on piano so I could dissect the sadness of the song. I wanted to understand its power over me. I even sent it to Gina, my sister in musical DNA, hoping she might be able to explain it to me.

This is not Annie Clarke’s first reference to Johnny, who has been a recurring character in her music. I wasn’t responding to some overarching story of his, although the tale in this song is rather sad. Not sad enough to make me cry on command, though.

Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll
Intended it as a cautionary tale
You said you saw yourself inside there
Dog-eared it like a how-to manual

The secrets of the song unfurled themselves for me as I inched my way through it by ear on piano. The piano figure in the verse opens up an increasing delta between the vocal melody and the supporting arrangement. The melody stays in the same range of a few notes, twinkling over and over like a star or an SOS while the piano figure gradually descends, breaking out of the key signature in its first step, introducing a new bass note on every chord.

Remember one summer we walked in Times Square
I showed you the zombies with hundred-inch stares
You took a Bic, set your hotel on fire
We took the blame, took the bags to the train

It’s a common melodic device, but here it is more than that. The widening gulf between the melody and the bass notes mirrors the drifting apart of St. Vincent and her erstwhile Johnny. She used to bring him gifts and now he’s cursing at her image on television screens. Does she still feel the same love for him? She claims she does. She’s still wishing him happy birthday, after all.

Happy Birthday, Johnny
Wherever you are
Happy Birthday, Johnny
Wherever you are

Yet in each chorus there is a slight sourness beneath her wistful “wherever you are,” a little aural wince in the form of a passing diminished chord – again, breaking the key signature of the song. The passing chord isn’t necessary. All it does is add specificity to the stepwise ascent and an extra oomph of resolve to the next chord.

You could describe the chorus – and in fact, the entire song – in the same way. Annie isn’t wishing her dear Johnny a happy birthday just because. It’s not for his benefit. It’s a forced, extra little step she’s inserting to try to find her own resolve with her memory of a friend who is no longer the same person he was to her before.

(Maybe it is she who has changed?)

These little touches give this quiet, unassuming song a heft far beyond its words and music. When it lilts into the final refrain, the slightly tweaked lyrics hit like a sucker punch:

Annie, how could you do this to me?
Of course, I blame me
When you get free, Johnny
I hope you find peace

She’s laying Johnny’s ghost to rest in her life, but she cannot grant him that same serenity in his own. He’s lost to her, his face rapidly receding into the memory of one of the biggest stars in rock today.She’ll still sing this hymn, though. And maybe sometimes, when she is playing in New York City, she will scan across the crowd and imagine for a moment she sees his face.

Song of the Day: “Look What You Made Me Do” – Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox featuring Kenton Chen

October 30, 2017 by krisis

The problem with perfection is the same one as the one with success: both are an expression of infinity.

If you are driven, you can be successful but still feel you aren’t successful enough. If you are a perfectionist, you can control every little detail but still feel you could have done more.

In each case, you’ve halved the distance between you and the infinite – there is still an infinite distance left to travel.

I think about this concept a lot, but never more than when I am considering a well-made album. Isn’t that the perfect intersection of success and perfection, plus some other nearly-infinite-to-measure quality of talent? As an artist, how do you go back into the studio when your last album is a critical and financial success, and just perfectly executed? It’s a tightrope act from which a lot of acts tumble.

Case and point: Taylor Swift’s 1989. It’s as perfect of a pop record as I’ve heard in my life. Every single song could survive on the radio as a single. And, unusually for a golden pop LP, it actually took home the Album of the Year trophy at the Grammies – a rarity.

I don’t think there is any way to top 1989, so Taylor just … didn’t. At least, not with her lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” of off Reputation, out next week.

Swift has a habit of releasing somewhat bare, unusual lead singles, but this one is less than that. The entire songs lacks for melody before it dissolves into an embarrassing faux-hip hop retread of “I’m Too Sexy.” The overwrought lyrics, usually a Swiftian specialty, but here coming off as protesting too much. And the cinema-quality video, which mashes up a lot of disconnected elements. (Why is she a zombie at the beginning? What is with the Beyoncé rip-off dance break).

Yes, I know it currently has over 600 million streams on YouTube. That’s the kind of half-infinite success you can maintain after a long streak of near-perfection.

If there’s one good bit of the song (and the video, as it happens), it’s the string-tinged bridge with little tinkles of carousel music. It’s everything the rest of the song isn’t but wants to be – catchy, lush, and foreboding.

It’s from that point that retro arrangement wunderkind Scott Bradlee developed his band’s cover of the song. Described as a cover in the style of a James Bond theme song, it picks up the strings theme from the bridge and stretches it luxuriously across each verse to turn the previously bare vocal into a poisonous vamp.

Song of the Day: “Liability” by Lorde

July 3, 2017 by krisis

I am always fascinated when a teenage musician – not just a singer or player, but a songwriter – becomes a global star.

It’s a selfish fascination. I remember being that age and being full to the brim with inspiration. I recall feeling like songs were bursting out of my brain every single day, sometimes faster than I could write them down. I would naively follow all of my melodic impulses, no matter how transgressive, and for as many awful choices I see in hindsight there are the occasional flashes of brilliance.

I can never decide whether it is good or bad that YouTube didn’t exist at the time. I love that the teenaged songwriter version of me is a Schrödinger’s cat of internet fame; we’ll never know if he would be beloved or ridiculed.

For those selfish reasons, I have been more fascinated but the journey of the precociously talented Lorde than I was with the slick Justin Bieber or the initially folksy Taylor Swift.

All three are mega-talented songwriters, but they both express that in different ways. Bieber’s expression was about the casual, effortless coolness of being in the in-club. Taylor Swift was about transformation – from country kid who sang about being an underdog to pop bombshell sweeping up Grammys.

Lorde’s expression has been the utter opposite of them both. She’s almost too full of effort compared to Bieber, and as self-conscious as Swift but more wild and free than she has ever allowed herself to be.

Lorde’s songs are brimming with that wildness, starting with “Royals” – a song so basic yet so vividly evocative. Each feels like an aperture into her wildly buzzing creative mind, controlling the flow, letting just enough of her interior world through that we can make sense of it.

Despite the electricity of her songs, Lorde’s Pure Heroine wasn’t the world-altering smash of, say, Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill. It’s not a singular, unassailable achievement. She could and would be able to follow it up, and just has with her sophomore effort, Melodrama.

There are a lot of interesting, mature moments on Melodrama, but none so arresting as the bare piano balled “Liability.” Maybe that’s because Lorde is an obvious mastermind, controlling every little flutter and breath noise across her discography, but “Liability” is her sparest song. It’s a bare piano ballad – just keys and her voice.