#rare thing

[bayfuzzball7050]

Guys please excuse the inactivity (like just from drawings cuz I’ve been reblogging like crazy) have an Osaka

[hahaheart1]

Happy twosday² lads

[luckynumbergreen]

I am guilty of this. It’s so easy to get caught up in the routine of everyday life that you forget you have choices, that you are free to live, that you must live and that although rare, living your life is probably the simplest thing you can do.

[godsavetheanimalz]

@springlullaby tagged me to list 10 songs I’ve been listening to lately thank you!!!! 🖤🖤🖤

1. FKA twigs - Mirrored Heart

2. CocoRosie - Smash My Head

3. HANA - Cowgirl Bebop

4. beabadoobee - I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus

5. Frances Quinlan - Rare Thing

6. Sudan Archives - Iceland Moss

7. Rocketship - I Just Can’t Get Enough of You

8. Charly Bliss - Supermoon

9. Lucy Dacus - Fool’s Gold

10. Poliça - Driving

I’ll tag @graveyardgirls @chemtrailmix @erikasally @strangemercy1 @smibeans @smoke-stungeyes @eyelashwish @742evergreenterrace @christianmilf @wildflagsure @margaretadua @iwasasprinter @bigolemess @golden-coyote @postcitywave @kickerofelves @pxisonoak @quietquietlife @kindaglow @passedouttosuperchunk @stillundone @palalaaaa @made-by-magic @itskristinenotchristine @zesteea @angelolsengf @mitskisolsen @imchasingbrightness @thethotwithoutfear @hazelstreet @seeingghostsinthepark @candlecoma @just-an-earthbound-misfit @lessdead @subjective4 @olivethebird @passivef1re @sweetsoundofignorance @constant-contra @lisafranksnightmares @nourishwhatcounts @sstrawbrrymilk @mirallesbihonest @brightclear @dubistsehrschon @restourchemistry @sunflowervelvetqueen and anyone else who wants to do this thing!!!! 🖤🖤🖤

[thesuper17]

SINGLES ROUND-UP

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"home with you" - fka twigs

“home with you” is the third track to be released leading up to fka twigs’ sophomore full-length, MAGDALENE. It’s a little uneven compared to the stunning “Cellophane” and “holy terrain” but it firmly re-establishes the singer’s commitment to experimentation over comfort.

Separated into a rough ABAB structure, “home with you” is intentionally jarring in its transitions. In the first section, the singer delivers almost atonal, hyper-processed vocals (calling The Knife’s Karin Dreijer to mind) atop creepy synth keys.

Lyrically, this first section is characterised by feelings of alienation and discomfort, with fka twigs lamenting her own success: “The more you have, the more that people want from you/ more you burn away, the more that people earn from you”. 

She points out how she’s never seen a hero like her “in a sci-fi”, a seemingly trivial complaint that alludes to the frustrating inability of her personal triumphs to shift the larger cultural hegemony.

Full piano chords enter to underpin her lines, which are offered up with growing intensity as the whole mix is gradually enveloped in a fuzzy distortion before evaporating completely, prior to reaching any release. 

The B section arrives after a full moment of silence, and immediately evokes a contrasting sense of purity. The distortion and unsettling harmony of the first section is replaced with sweetly melancholic piano and a multi-tracked, choral vocal. In line with the music itself, the singer's words soften, as she considers the feelings of another and commits to their wellbeing. 

The second instance of this B section sees the addition of whirling woodwinds that coalesce above the piano, dislodging the melody from any easily identifiable rhythm. She repeats the last few lines in new formations as instrumentation floats all around like leaves blown up from the forest floor. 

Having spent the rest of the track wanting more than anything to be needed by her "lonely" subject, the singer ends by admitting she never mentioned that she "was lonely too". Unlike the song's beginning, this confession is not alienating. Both her and the song's subject are lonely, it’s true, but some comfort is found in sharing it.

---

"Lose You To Love Me" - Selena Gomez

More so than any aspect of her career itself, the personal and mental health struggles of Selena Gomez have dominated the cultural narrative that follows the former Disney actor turned pop star.

After a relentlessly publicised break-up with fellow teenage sensation Justin Bieber, Gomez has stepped in and out of the limelight a few times, and spoken candidly about the support she’s leaned on in the intervening years. Unlike contemporaries, her musical output has been incredibly sparse, and public appearances comparatively rare, nakedly anti-commercial choices made – one can only assume – out of personal necessity, rather than complacency.

All this combines to set a rather strange stage for Gomez’s new single, “Lose You to Love Me”. Other artists, particularly within a genre where universality is revered above all else, might have been tempted to return from an exile with a broad statement of self-empowerment, or at least confident indifference. Gomez takes a more vulnerable route. The much-touted lead single for her second album doesn’t merely reference her past life, it exhumes it entirely, with mixed results.

It’s not a unique conceit by any means. “thank u, next” immediately comes to mind as a point of reference for this kind of pop song as a hyper-visible personal narrative. But where Grande applied a soft touch, somehow knitting her trauma into something light and magnanimous (even meme-able), “Lose You” is anything but. Stubbornly slow-paced and self-serious, the tension between the song’s ostensible truth and its more prosaic, mechanical obligations is difficult to resolve.

There are moments of disarming honesty which are rendered sharper by our shared knowledge of the players. In a normal break-up song, the lament that “In two months, you replaced us/ like it was easy/ made me think I deserved it,” would have some weight, but here it conjures real faces and events, anchoring the pain in a more concrete place.

Mostly though, that power Gomez wields, the listener’s understanding of her specific context, is squandered. It’s pertinent we can imagine the aforementioned line appearing in a generic break-up song, especially considering it’s the most painful depth she plumbs throughout the entire track. There’s a refusal to commit to specificity, or really anything serious enough to risk the song’s commercial potential, and it leaves “Lose You” stranded somewhere between the relatable and the personal, lacking the power either could impart.       

p.s. high-key Inception vibes from the outro piano part, no? ---

"Rare Thing" - Frances Quinlan

“Rare Thing” certainly doesn’t represent a reinvention for Hop Along frontwoman Frances Quinlan, and the attempts it does make towards textural development are alternately enjoyable and disappointing. Nonetheless, the artist’s first solo release is, at the very least, as exciting an example of what makes her one of modern rock’s most compelling vocalists as anything in the band’s back catalogue.

Ever reluctant to pen a simple earworm, Quinlan’s melody sprawls in unexpected directions throughout the track, dislodging to a new key just as the listener’s ear acclimatised to the last. Her timbre effortlessly switches between airy falsetto and the scratchy upper reaches of her register in tandem with a characteristically off-kilter composition and band performance. The most significant departure here is obviously the addition of synths, and while it would be dishonest to suggest they’re transformative on a stylistic level, they offer a fresh palette and do some justice to the individual billing Quinlan commands on the single.

This comes with a slight trade-off: the fluttery strings and intricate guitar lines that pepper Hop Along’s songs are absent here, replaced with denser, full arrangements. Harp-like synth blossoms and a detailed bass line pushed high in the mix ensure the instrumentation never approaches boring, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that something has been lost, more than gained, in the transition from full band to solo artist.

Lyrically, Quinlan is slightly more anchored on “Rare Things” than the fragmented stream-of-consciousness style she adopted for Hop Along’s last release. 

The personal revelations she offers here feel like the fruit of therapy, or at least careful self-consideration, speaking of ‘love that doesn’t have to do with taking something’ and how she ‘only managed to stay small by making giants out of strangers’. This vulnerability is touching, and helps counterbalance a composition which might otherwise risk feeling complex for complexity’s sake.

[losangeleslovesyou]

FRANCES QUINLAN : RARE THING

[ask-doctor-dimension]

WIP + Explanation! So, i’ll keep it short. Was gone for a bit of time, couldn’t post. Been working on something I’m gonna launch tomorrow, but in the interim I’ve been working on my humans, and I had a (albeit one who doesn’t believe she is one, which is bullshit) model to work off of! Still, working on developing my faces, trying to find a balance between cartoon and realistic. ( i did sketch from a ref as opposed to sketching from a skeleton, I’m working on incorporating some features bit by bit into my style) Story posts will resume on the 8th!!