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Travel By Foot
A slow climb, hopefully, through some new music.
Himanshu (Heems) – Nehru Jackets
Long and chaotic, 25 tracks in 73 minutes, an explosion of sounds (Yuck, Twin Sister, Kate Bush, during one particularly strong run of songs) and styles the way Das Racist’s mixtapes were explosions of English and American lexicons. Names of foods dominate here, too, but now they’re the junk that’s going to kill Heems, even as he wears it on his body as thug handles. “Long and chaotic” can also mean confused, messy, indulgent, and some will say that Heems hasn’t decided what he’s trying to do here (always shorthand for the critic’s own indecision), but I’d say this one’s excesses make it endlessly fascinating, complicated. “I’m complex,” as it’s been said on a Das Racist song. Here’s the rare atmosphere of Julia Holter’s Ekstasis smashed down and drawn back out as mixtape overload, expansive with close, echoing rooms and a tight, hot press of humanity.
Best Coast – The Only Place
They say Bethany Cosentino’s lyrics are “weak,” which is obvious, and then irrelevant, and finally incorrect, as one starts to notice how the words say so much more than they say. (So they must mean that her lyrics reveal personal weakness, because if they meant “bad lyrics,” they’d say “bad,” right?) Look at the way the sunny ideals of opener “The Only Place,” whose inhabitants get so much done, quickly give way to “the gray” of “Why I Cry”: We learn that setting isn’t everything, and soon Cosentino’s worrying about her chronic craziness and laziness, and on “Last Year,” about paying the bills with her songwriting. “What will become of Bethany?” the album asks in spite of itself, and we immediately conjure her as an older woman, no music scene any longer interested in sustaining her. Here’s an album about how briefly we’re allowed to wield art as livelihood and how little chance there is of making any lasting impact, about how in the long run we’re probably destitute and definitely dead, but until then we’re allowed to live in a weird, tolerable, wonderful present.
All this from a line about writing songs for money? Well, I can tell on this album that Cosentino knows she’s gonna get old, is all I’m saying. For now, the pathological insularity of her songs, as they exist on the page, might reasonably make some listeners a little queasy, but it’s also the music’s strongest claim on their attention. As for me, I didn’t quite get Best Coast’s debut Crazy for You at first (wondering if they were already spinning their wheels after some lovely early singles), but when I did, my love for it revealed its sincerity as a profound idea, and I’m still right there with this band. “My Life” has their best moment since that album’s endless want you’s and miss you’s on “I Want To”; when Cosentino sings that she doesn’t want to die, she wants to live her life, you might hear how much that means.
Beach House – Bloom
Many of the songs on Bloom are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next song. Another album that made me feel that way was Teen Dream. To make one such album is a miracle. Here is another. (adapted from Roger Ebert’s review of No Country for Old Men)
The Twilight Sad – No One Can Ever Know
This gave every advance appearance of being their most despairing album yet, but in fact it’s their lightest, a relative distinction but an important one. With synths largely taking the place of guitars, loudness and catharsis no longer seem possible, but the uniform prettiness and white-grayness of these songs make the album its own kind of emotional whirlpool.
Maxïmo Park – The National Health
We had no reason to expect we’d ever hear from Maxïmo Park again, after a cancelled tour in 2009 (that I would’ve been able to catch!—damn) and solo albums from multiple band members, but here it is, album number four, just arrived in my mailbox, and upon the first couple listens, it’s as immediate as the buzzy, sprinting best of Quicken the Heart. An early standout is called “Take Me Home,” also the name of my favorite song of the year so far—Perfume Genius’s very different kind of love song. To be honest, I tend to judge Maxïmo Park’s plays at love from a greater aesthetic distance than I do Perfume Genius’s naked affections, but my ultimate admiration is no less sincere.
Bright Light Bright Light – Make Me Believe In Hope
Rod Thomas, the man behind this album, has been compared to Robyn, which is an adequate judgment of his superior intelligence as a pop songwriter, but an understatement of his maximalist aesthetic (or her minimalist one). Hear the way “Feel It,” already so firmly planted in 1991, adds soul diva backing vocals to the mix, not because we didn’t already know where we were, but because the impeccable production, so full of detail, somehow has the sonic space and sharpness to allow it. And again and again, Thomas’s voice cuts through the mountains of effects so cleanly. “Make me believe in hope” is a modest demand for an album to make, since even hope is still once removed from fulfillment, and modest demands are not beyond this album of abundant riches to make. If nothing else, it makes me believe in a small kind of hope, one where, in the wake of Katy B’s unfortunate non-ubiquity, there might yet be something good to listen to at the club.
The Weeknd – Echoes Of Silence
When you miss a phenomenon all you can really do is try to work backwards to its origin, so I’m starting with the third of The Weeknd’s three beloved albums from 2011. This one immediately gains a fan by demonstrating Abel Tesfaye’s uncanny Michael Jackson imitation, and if the rest of the songs are the aftershocks of a long year of Tesfaye’s own pathological insularity, well, they make strong claims, too.
Fiona Apple – When The Pawn, Extraordinary Machine
At the beginning of Extraordinary Machine, she sings:
I certainly haven’t been spreading myself around. I still only travel by foot and by foot it’s a slow climb, but I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.
At the end, she sings:
Go out and sit on the lawn and do nothing, ‘cause it’s just what you must do and nobody does it anymore. No, I don’t believe in the wasting of time, but I don’t believe that I’m wasting mine.
She doesn’t lie (she reportedly spent seven years walking her dog before making her new album) and her words indicate that it’s maybe a good project before each of her long-awaited albums to take the long view of her career and her art, condense her small catalog and make her more prolific than she has any intention of ever being. Consider me prepared.
Killer Mike – “Big Beast”
My only memory of Killer Mike before the advent of his new RAP Music was Big Boi’s suggestion on Outkast’s “Snappin’ & Trappin’” that his angry guest calm down. Twelve years later, that’s exactly what Killer Mike hasn’t done, though of course a certain calm has to reign before such an assured succession of solos as “Big Beast” can even be conceived. Still, the end result is rattling, so much so that I think I’ll have to wrap my head around RAP Music one song at a time.
Latrice Royale – “Good Luck”
I’ve long suspected that Basement Jaxx’s “Good Luck” is one of the great self-empowerment breakup anthems, a more venomous “I Will Survive.” When drag powerhouse Latrice Royale took on the song at a recent Pride event, she confirmed my suspicion, because I trust her judgment and her good taste implicitly, and because she exploded the song’s every combustible line.
