Don't Bullshit Me
On Nick Hornby & Pauline Kael, Tanya Tagaq & Taylor Swift, Aubrey Plaza & the Perseids, personal Death Stars & the e.n.d. And a whole lot of new music...
For more than twenty years, I’ve been exchanging a quarterly mix CD with a handful of fellow music loons. We started because we never wanted to stop discovering music we might not otherwise seek out individually. Never mind keeping current; we just wanted to stay alert.
At least as delightful as the ongoing discovery, though, has been the seasonal sifting, curating, and making sense of our own listening. Yeah, we still mail each other CDs. Not because we’re attached to CDs. Not because we’re old (although some of us are getting there). But limiting ourselves to 80 minutes, and really thinking about running order and binding threads, if any, turns out to be pretty satisfying work. Helps narrow the infinity of choices. Makes these discs at once more permanent than a list— because they physically exist— and more ephemeral, because they are essentially of the moment in which we made them.
I can’t really send you all CDs (though I’d love to). But I can offer this hyperlinked track list and my liner notes.
Couple of suggestions for best use:
As you’ll see, these aren’t necessarily songs recorded this year, or this decade, or this century. Many (though not all) are new to me this quarter. The idea isn’t best or rarest or most surprising discoveries. This is what I’ve been listening to lately, period.
My selections for this group skew toward shorter tracks, and also poppier or at least more song-based ones (with exceptions—see Blanck Mass below). As the gospel of High Fidelity teaches, a good mix is from the mix maker but for the recipient. There’s a wilder side to my listening (usually in the car, or when I’m alone, so that neither my family nor my cats chase me from the house; my brother used to call it Music to Kill a Goat), and I will post about that some other time. Then there’s the music to which I write. That’s another list.
I used to write music criticism professionally. First prose I got paid for. I was okay. Good listener. Good seeker-outer. Good describer. Not always sure enough of my own socio-cultural reads (I was 23, and instinctively resistant to scenes, especially the one roiling around me in Seattle at the time), a little too beholden to my own tastes (though they were wide-ranging, at least). A little too in love with writing the stories the music made me imagine, rather than the stories of the music and the world from which it sprang. A little ambivalent about the whole idea of writing about other people’s art.
These round-ups aren’t criticism. But they’re informed by the years I wrote criticism, and a lifetime of reading it. Call them fan’s notes. Hope they get you listening. Or hunting. Or curating your own mixes. And then posting the track list somewhere or sending it to me.
This week’s cover image is taken from Molly Kirschenbaum’s one-person Hollywood Fringe Festival show, Hot!:(. You’ll read more about that below. The photo was taken by Caity Krone. Reminds me in all kinds of appropriately disconcerting ways of the cover of the first Roxy Music album.
Taking next week off. Back in early December with more new fiction. As always, thanks for being here. Any reposting, responding, sharing, or subscribing/supporting hugely appreciated.
Don’t Bullshit Me: The Fall 2021 Music Round-up
These days, I don’t so much listen to music as strap it on like a life preserver. I’m not thrilled about that; music’s too important. But the waves really do keep coming, and they’re hitting high and hard and fast. We take our rafts where we find them. Here’s what kept me buoyant this fall:
They describe themselves as “pinkish punk”, and there is a J-pop cuteness to the way they fling English around that could feel out of tune with the times. Except that it’s cute, not cutesy, and some of what they’re shouting is “SHUT UP”, and then they spell out “e-n-d” again, and then again, and that groove is ferocious, and this really might be the e-n-d. So SHUT UP.
Been making my way backward and forward through this reclusive British collective’s catalog since being flattened by their Untitled (Black Is) release last year. They draw beats and grooves from some whirling headwater where soul and electronica and gospel and hip-hop all eddy together, and their lyrics, saturated with Black experience, come in cryptic flashes, like bits of chopped up texts. This one’s more direct than their norm: “They say you’re fine/people, what do they know”, “Don’t want your mind disease/no bullshit please”, “Can’t bullshit me”, all sung in the defiant but world-weary tone of a woman who knows you’re going to try.
MOLLY KIRSCHENBAUM—Yes Bitch Slay
I’m approximating, I think, but at the end of her tepid New Yorker review of the original “Heathers” way back when it came out, Pauline Kael finished by asking, “Where’s the sting?” If she were still here, I’d find a way to introduce Kael to Molly Kirschenbaum. Both Molly’s songs on this list are taken from Hot!:(, their electrifying one-person show, which won the Encore Producers Award at the Hollywood Fringe Festival a few months ago. The hyperlink is to a video of the whole performance. Molly’s a former student, and I had the privilege of helping them with a polish of the script. But in ways that will be immediately obvious, this is (and could only be) all Molly. It is raw. It is funny. And it stings like hell.
Like Sault, Sneaks trades in elements scooped from old and deep pop waters. Her recombinations and epigrammatic declaiming haven’t always landed for me. This does. Part of it’s the sound, which marries one of those icy but irresistible early electropop drum programs to a vocal too deadpan not to be funny. Aubrey Plaza does Debora Iyall? Even if it’s comedy, though, “Sanity” radiates weirdly inclusive snark, which makes the whole thing taste just right for the times. Like a Warhead. The way she speak-sings it, “Crack, that is the sound of my whip/when I get done with you” is neither proposition nor threat; it’s just really fun to say. And whatever spell she’s casting with “If the kids complain, let ‘em complain”, I dare you not to chant it with her.
Maybe the most music-as-lifejacket track on this list, and it knows it (“Ain’t a Gap Band song/but I guess it’ll do alright”). Dylan Hicks is from Minneapolis, writes novels for noted literary presses like Coffee House and criticism/essays for the Village Voice, the Paris Review, etc. There are tracks on the rest of Accidental Birds that tilt toward arch. But this one’s just silly, and so much the better for it. It shudders, it spins, it goes “bounce-bounce-bounce”, it puts “the custom hydraulics on my Chevy Caprice.” If there’s a song in this world that can make me “dance like Twyla Tharp” (or just an organism that understands its legs), I haven’t found it. But this makes me bounce, laugh, and sing, and any song that hits that trifecta is one I’m going to need.
A GREAT BIG PILE OF LEAVES—Pet Mouse
It’s no “2541”—what is?—but this ode to transient days delivers a stealth hit of that delicious, destabilizing longing for in-between times, people we barely met (even while living with them), couches where we crashed and stayed a while that feels particularly poignant and precious now. The lyrics add some contemporary touches (“We didn’t always get along/The language barrier kept us apart”), but the core is “Finally settling/but everyone is moving out”. Plus, that guitar riff is mighty.
HASSAK ETHNO FOLK ENSEMBLE—Bala Oiyn
I’m not sure I’ve met a more restless music hunter than I am, except the ones I made. By the time my son was a tween, he was out virtually combing the Steppes, scouring the Sahara, seeking sounds that stirred and awoke him. The day he brought me to Tanya Tagaq’s work may have been the first moment I was almost sure I’ve been a passable parent. Nowadays, both he and my daughter are off roaming and connecting and studying and exchanging in person. But they still send back wonders. My son’s favorite of this year—and mine—might be this dazzling Khazak group. The flow of cultural and musical influences through and around their Turkic music—that Hanggai-like Inner Mongolian gallop, the tectonic tremors of Tuvan-style throat singing (not present on this cut), the sybzgy melodies gliding out of the crags like high mountain birdsong—gives the whole thing a surging, constantly evolving life. Deeply of its region, yet wide open to the world. It’s enough to give one hope, or maybe even fall in love with people all over again.
KACEY MUSGRAVES—Cherry Blossom
I have as much respect for Taylor Swift’s songcraft and talent as anyone. She’s a pop genius, straight up, a Hall of Famer no matter where she goes from here. But if I’m a betting man (which I’m not, really, except when afforded the opportunity to write unnecessary and absurd sentences like the following), I might bet this: Kacey Musgraves is more likely, sometime in her career, to make one of those records from which I pull a selection for every subsequent playlist I make for the rest of my life than Swift is. Do I really believe that? I don’t know. But even when Swift isn’t writing about herself, which she is definitely starting to do, her songs are about her. Whereas even when Kasey Musgraves is singing about herself—as on this reputed divorce album—her music turns outward, does that magic pop trick and becomes about you and me. Partly, I think, it’s her production choices, which are not exactly radical but less genre-defined. More, it’s the quality of the singing, which has an old-soulness (as opposed to agedness) and humility that envelops and includes rather than awes. If she ever gets off a whole collection of tracks as catchy as this one, she’ll have crafted the perfect Christine McVie record we all deserve.
Like his late, celebrated dad, James McMurtry seems not so much to leaven depression with storytelling as survive depression through it. The songs on his first new album in seven years float a little further from the bleeding edge than usual, the guitars more forceful but never forced, the grooves that crucial half-step faster. I don’t know that I’d say this record is more fun, exactly; like all his (and his dad’s) best work, it’s threaded with fury at human idiocy (including his own), bruises old and deep, chasms decades wide and unbridgeable. When he repeats lines like “I don’t want to think about that”, you believe he doesn’t, and you know you don’t either (even though you will). But just often enough, he returns his focus to the sweet surprises of just plain surviving. Like “Cashing in on a thirty-year crush/you can’t be young and do that”.
I’m a sucker for texture. Always have been. If more shoegaze bands had come up with songs as memorable as My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” or Slowdive’s “Machine Gun”... let’s just say I’d be more familiar with my shoes. This desert waft of “wonderful disarray” is too strange to fit any preexisting template, but it blurs moonlit horizon edges and double yellow lines like almost nothing else I’ve heard all year. And it does so mostly acoustically: brushed drums, woodwinds, blooming trombone (didgeridoo?) oases, flitters of flute way off in the mix like the Perseids glimpsed or maybe just missed in the corner of the eye, all floating over a rhythm and guitar riff that unfold underneath as much as in front of you. All the more irresistible because it’s never quite welcoming. Like the desert. Just because it pulls you in doesn’t mean it loves you.
THOMAS ANDERSON—Girls of the Apocalpyse
Already wrote extensively about Thomas and his terrific new record on this Substack. But it has certainly stayed in my rotation. Here’s maybe my favorite song from it. Pretty much sums up the zeitgeist:
“When your mind completely slips
Their memory hangs on with a grip,
Traveling in their slow ellipse
While the savage curtain rips,
Still they make your teardrops drip,
Still your heart completely flips.
Girls of the Apocalypse
Bat their eyes and paint their lips,
On abandoned runway strips
They steal your heart and ammo clips…”
For me, music hunting isn’t just about the opportunity to strew my friends or loved ones with the gift of more art they might not know (though that is fun, and I love being that guy probably more than my friends and family love me being that guy); it’s a restorative thing. As long as I keep finding more people spinning magic out of living, I can believe in us as a species. Some of my finds (see HasSak) originate far from my experience, and require guides to locate and contextualize. Others, like this longtime Houston indie songwriter, feel impossible for me to have missed. This song is fifteen years old. It’s got that joy-in-melancholy skip to it that goes right down my personal Death Star chute and blows me to pieces. Every time. And when he sings, “I just can’t stand myself/when I sound like everyone else/talking ‘bout the way that things should be”, it feels like he’s speaking directly to me in this moment as I wage my lifelong (and, yes, potentially losing) battle against becoming Get-Off-My-Lawn Man. Another manifesto I can call my own. Another catalogue to go exhaust. Thanks, Arthur Yoria. Sorry I’m late.
Another talented former student, this one a filmmaker/storyteller as well as a longtime musician. Jordan’s music has always radiated kindness, mining an unabashed (and un-airbrushed) jangle-pop warmth that is reflective of the man but in danger of feeling from another possibly imaginary time, before he was born, when we all expected to like each other more by now. I’ve also been waiting for him to unfurl one of those soaring choruses his art seems built to support. Damn if he hasn’t gone ahead and done it. Yes, the pandemic and careening crazy out there seem to have tempered his songwriting, but tempered it in both senses: moderated and inflected the aspiration, but also sharpened the hooks and steeled the resolve. The refrain gets airborne and stays there long enough that when he says we’re going to reach “The moment when this winter ends,” I believe he still believes it.
MOLLY KIRSCHENBAUM—One Person Show (Cry Onstage)
The bring-the-house-down finale of Molly’s performance, almost too achingly, horribly of this moment, in which our narrator, whose affirmation and sense of self have come from years of (sometimes) well-meant commendations for “not being the ingenue type”, one of those “fucking boring... pretty girls who cry onstage”. They’ve been cheered for their insight, their acid wit, their way with words. All of which they are pretty sure they really do have. So why do they wonder if they’re still supposed to—if they’d “kind of like to”—if it’d be “kind of nice to”—cry onstage? Heartbreaking and beautiful in the best American songbook tradition. Except this is a whole different book.
It’s been more than a decade since those first few Fuck Buttons records rocketed into my earspace, spewing noise and shards and surprising explosions of electronic beat and beauty in all directions. They are still among the instrumental computer/synthesizer-focused collections I play most. Blanck Mass is a solo project from ex(?)-Button Benjamin John Power, and I’ve always liked it fine, found the music hypnotic and the sounds attractive, sometimes even stirring. But this...this is a gorge to plunge into, howling with wind currents that bang me into rocks and whip me off them again. Set me soaring. So many surprising turns from the moment that first whispered “Beepbeep” surfaces in the mix. So much racket. So much tune. So much hard, dangerous beauty. The kind I think I currently trust most.
Interesting take on the music of all kind of a bit different from the classical Mozart and Beethoven, yet both have music that takes the mood from a delicate melody joyful strings to melancholy set in the depth of reflective despair.