Once a month at around 8 oâclock, a group of people in their mid-thirties wander into a bar called Jeromes at Rivington F+B, right off the Essex stop on the Lower East Side. They come to listen and sing along to bands like American Football, Sunny Day Real Estate, and...
There are myriad downsides to culture basically deciding that music is freeâor at least that access to all music everywhere is worth ten dollars a monthâbut the fact that pop stars donât need their albums to actually have great songs has to be one of the worst. In an era when album sales are a negligible sliver of an artistâs revenue, pop music has been relegated to brand-enhancement duty, and need not be noteworthy so long as the person singing it is getting attention. Iâve lost count of how many impotent Katy Perry choruses have been rehashed by her sound-alike du jour (âBlack Widow,â âDominoâ) or how many pop artists have utilized the easily-reproduced EDM âbapâbapâbap-bapâbapâbapâ rhythm for easy airplay (Coldplay, Maroon Five, Rihanna). This is not the case with Carly Rae Jepsen. While her more powerful peers maneuver like theyâre gunning for the pop-star equivalent of WWE World Heavyweight Title, that Carly Rae Jepsen, with her less-than-larger-than-life personality, released an album full of slappers like itâs the simplest thing is a goddamn revelation.
God, Emotion is so good. I once used the phrase âchorus pornâ to describe the pure ecstasy Haim produced on Days Are Gone (2013), but I wish I had saved it for Emotion. Like Days Are Gone, Emotion evokes the â80s with new wave synths, bass slaps, cheesy horns, and glittering production. Itâs a deceptively dense record, one where songs that ran you over on listen one run you over with a completely new element youâd missed until listen ten. Carlyâs back with the modest voice and whimsical attitude that made âCall Me Maybeâ a smash, singing sweet narratives to someone who is either her best friend or the significant other making her heart go aflutter. The checklist Emotion satisfies is short and simple: its themes are universal enough that any listener ought to be able to identify with it, and its quality is indisputable. The result is a nearly anonymous album of stellar pop music, one where it seems all the attention was placed not on positioning Carly Rae as a cultural force, but on making sure Emotion makes you smile.
Take the recordâs first music video, for âI Really Like You.â Carly isnât even in the damn thing for two-thirds of it. Instead, Tom Hanks, one of the least problematic Hollywood actors, goofily lip-syncs the track and its 11-year-old level of emotional expression while on a jolly romp through New York City. Not even a Justin Bieber cameo can sully such a saccharine, no-holds-barred play for your pleasure centers. Emotion is a lot like that. On album opener âRun Away With Me,â Carly, introduced by a saxophone run through about eight zillion âshimmerâ presets, invites you to do as the title says, putting you and Carly in cahoots for a great escape from lifeâs doldrums. Thereâs trouble lurking on the outside of Emotion: boy problems, rejection, fame blues, depression, but nothing Carly canât solve with the power of positivity. Sheâs taking you on a feel-good ride, dammit, and youâre gonna feel good, even if she has to kick down your door and force you (which is basically the plot of âMaking the Most of the Nightâ).
When Carly isnât fighting forces of negativity with sheer sunshine, she revels in the power of liking someone a lot. In addition to âI Really Like You,â there are tracks like âLetâs Get Lost,â wherein sheâs curled up next to her beau on a long drive simply hoping he takes the long way home. Thereâs also âGimmie Love,â where she asks, star-struck, for love over a thumping, ever-building groove, such that by the end, the message turns sweetly desperate. One of the things that made âCall Me Maybeâ so successful was its shy, giggly undercurrent, as if its chorus was blurted out in a nervous deluge. That endearingly awkward approach to romance survives to Emotion. On âI Really Like You,â Carly pauses to ask, âDid I say too much? Iâm so in my head!â In âYour Type,â she sings âI still love you, Iâm sorry, Iâm sorry, I love you,â like sheâs furiously typing out a post-breakup text message. Little moments like these make her triumphant turns feel more impressive, particularly a massive final chorus that goes âSometimes I wish that I could change / but not for me, for you / so we could be together forever / but I know, I know that I wonât change for you / cuz where were you for me?/ When I needed someone?/ When I needed you?â
Itâs this unassuming persona that thankfully keeps Carly below the level of top-tier female pop stars. She isnât a diva, has no beefs, gossip, or mega-brand to speak of. When she sings about being hounded by âBuzzfeed buzzards and TMZ crowsâ on âLA Hallucinations,â it sounds like just that: a hallucination, simply because itâs difficult to imagine a world whereTMZ is trying to dig up a juicy scoop about Carly Rae Jepsen and Buzzfeed allowed haters into its midst. Emotionâs retro-pop bliss without angle or ego (imagine a track opening with someone sexily whispering âItâs Carly Rae Jepsen, bitch,â and barf) lends it a refreshingly timeless quality thatâll surely land it high among many best-of-2015 lists. In a year where pop stars fight for brand supremacy, sell personas, and get the most coverage from media outlets for their tweets, itâs funny that the yearâs best pop album doesnât once feature the singer talking about herself.
Skylar Spence loves Super Smash Brothers Wii U. He also sucks at it, but is content to be interviewed while I destroy his ass over and over again. Since Ryan DeRobertis dropped âFiona Coyneâ and it garnered instant acclaim as a âSong of Summer 2014â contender, heâs been a busy...
Ava Luna open up about their third LP, 'Infinite House,' before their record-release shows at Baby's All Right (4/17/15) and Silent Barn (4/18/15).
There's a mischievous air of cool around Ava Luna. With Infinite House, their third LP, they're laughing at inside jokes in between fractured funk stomps and screeds of Beat poetry. Find them recalling Janelle MonaĂŠ at her most adventurous on lead single "Coat of Shellac" or the Black Keys before they went major on the fiery "Billz." Draw lines betweenInfinite House and the Inherent Vice soundtrack as the hypnotic "Tenderize" echoes the neurotic snap of Can's "Vitamin C" and "Steve Polyester" finds Becca Kauffman giving a surreal monologue in the same way Joanna Newsom reads Pynchon prose. Ava Luna are quirky and confident, mysterious and compelling. Their compositions are gleefully loose rock interpretations, postmodern soul tunes perched on the line between brilliance and the abyss.
Infinite House is their most polished record to date. "Polished," in this case, does not mean that Ava Luna's jagged edges have been sanded away. Rather, they've been accentuated. Dave Fridmann's production lets each eccentricity in their particular vein of stellar postpunk deconstructionism shine. "Tenderize," for example, finds band members in conversation with the producer as the song struts with a jerky relationship to the beat, whereas songs like "Black Dog" and "Company" feature brash, pounding guitars mixed to clipping fuzz, as though the band were too loud to contain on tape. Subtle flourishes like these make Infinite House a strong successor to 2014's Electric Balloon, where similar ideas competed against each other in a less cohesive mix.
"[Electric Balloon] was basically a collection of songs, loose in spirit and execution," says founding member Carlos Hernandez. "This one turned into one whole work. With Dave, it felt very much to me like the songs were metamorphosing into this space I couldn't even conceive of."
If Infinite House sounds mystical, it's not by accident. "This record wrote itself," says Hernandez. "It tells a story, and whatever that story might be, I'm still trying to interpret myself, to this day." As the legend goes, Infinite House was born from the band's stay in a house overrun by weeds and the forgotten possessions of prior inhabitants deep in the Mississippi woods. "It felt...beyond human there," says Kauffman with a wry chuckle. "A neighbor told us a ghost story about our area, and the hairs on our neck were raised at all times, keeping an eye and ear out for...something else." The experience imbues Infinite House with bits of Southern Gothic chic. Take "Steve Polyester," for example: He's a character described as "a landscape, a ruby lined in gold, shaped like a cockroach." He's a legend produced by the environment. The scents, vibrations, and open space of Mississippi â basically the antithesis of anything you'd find in New York City â offered Ava Luna the chance to divine inspiration from nature and touch the transcendent only found when escaping everyday life.
But a return to everyday life is inevitable, and therein lies the central conflict of Infinite House: as Hernandez frames it, reconciling the "mode of perception" one feels when surrounded by quiet nature or experiences in the bustle of New York.
"Take a song like 'Billz,'â" he says. "People think 'Billz' is about financial stress, but in my mind it's about suddenly realizing that a person you care for, or a job, or an artistic pursuit, or any sort of belief, eventually falls by the wayside as the entropy of humanity creeps in." This entropic creep gives Infinite House a nervous, almost urgent quality, as ideas get fired off quickly, given little time to age before their beauty gets stale. When the album's first chorus comes in, the band wailing "Do you appreciate my company?" over pounding guitar chords, the question sounds desperate, betraying a need for connection in a city of resentment.
"Trying to bottle up a sense of freeness and wonder and take it with you â whether that be in the form of a walk in the woods or a person you really care for â is ultimately the thing that's going to save us," says Hernandez. Whether he intended to or not, he and the rest of Ava Luna have succeeded in imparting such a sense. Infinite House is ultimately an upbeat record, one teeming with grooves and the confidence of a band at their full potential. "It feels like the resolution of a goal I set out when I started this band," Hernandez says proudly. "It's a bit damning to say, 'What's next? I don't know,' but for now, I'm happy and proud it came together the way it did."
Wherever Ava Luna go next (and let's not go nuts here â the album came out Tuesday), here's hoping they're as heady, wild, vibrant, dark, and confident as they are now.
Earl Sweatshirt is rapâs most compelling and frustrating redemption story. We root for Earl to be cocky again, to spit with the mind-boggling flow that characterized EARL (2010), to step out of the internetâs murkier shadows and into the spotlight weâve reserved for him once he gets a little pop in his sound. I think we do this because we secretly feel guilty to have cheered for him when all he did was rap about raping sluts in a pre-feminist hot-take world, but also because we recognize his immense talent. The way he builds Eminem-cribbed rhyme schemes through stoned-eyed flow make him a natural successor to DOOM, or even Shady, in theory. Heâs compelling in this hypothetical realm, where his skills promise incredible records. In the actual world where his weird, bitter, and sad music might be directed at us, the culture that produced him, heâs a bit more frustrating.
According to legend, the outlandish rape fantasies he spewed as Odd Futureâs most talented but perverted prodigy earned him literal exile to a reform school in Samoa, which in turn lent his existence to meme-ification and eventually monetization. OFWGKTA started shouting âFree Earlâ on everything because âFuck you, Momâ wouldâve been too childish a catchphrase, even for their wacked-out standards. For a while there, Earl was almost mythical. Where was he really? Would he ever come back? And how much better would Odd Future be when Earl returned, seasoned, matured and ready to rule the OF Army alongside Tyler? His return marked the culmination Odd Futureâs fifteen minutes, when cultureâs patience for their misogynistic shenanigans had run thin and Earl was charged with renewing the groupâs value. No one expected that he wouldnât really want to.
The first signs of a darker Earl came in the form of a few syrupy guest spots, notably his verse on Frank Oceanâs âSuper Rich Kids,â which sounds like it was mumbled out the side of Earlâs mouth while he laid stoned out of his mind on Frankâs couch. Then came his albumDoris (2013), where one of the first things he says is âI heard you back, I need them raps nigga / I need the verse, I donât care about what you going through or what you gotta do nigga / I need bars, sixteen of âem.â Weâve been tentatively fucking with Earl ever since, adjusting our ears to a slower, more joyless Earl constructing obtuse rhymes in a monotonous drone tweeter DragonflyJonez aptly called ââyour turn to read a paragraph in English classâ flow.â If you jumped off Earlâs bandwagon after the mild slog that Doris turned out to be, understand that his new album, I Donât Like Shit, I Donât Go Outside offers no glimpse of the Earl that once held the world waiting for the next imaginative profanity to escape his mouth. Instead it offers post-return Earl doubled down: pitch-black, depressed as hell, his navel-gazing loathing infused with a bit more venom. Is it enjoyable? By design, no. Is it interesting? WellâŚ
No one can claim that I Donât Like Shit isnât honest. Not because its content is particularly confessional, but because the intensity of Earlâs apparent sadness, hanging over the record like a depressive shroud, seems to be the point in itself. Tyler infused self-loathing into his records to create a more demonic, well-rounded persona, and oftentimes did it very effectively. Here, Earlâs malaise is his end. Most of I Donât Like Shit consists of minimal beats meandering while Earl pops Xanax, drinks whiskey, and delivers endless fuck-youâs to the legions of hos and bros he canât trust. Three songs in a row prominently feature a depressive inability to trust, from a reference in âGriefââs chorus, to the first lyric of âOff Stopâ (âHow you doin, and whatâs your motive ho? / I only trust these bitches about as far as I can throw âemâ), to the chorus of âGrown Upsâ (âDonât know where Iâm goin, donât know where Iâve been / Never trust these hos, donât even trust my friendsâ). Then he smokes a bit of weed out of sadness, or takes a painkiller to feel stoned, or drinks to feel nothing, repeat over and over again. Earl is the content, and Earl is sad.
The major issue with I Donât Like Shit is that itâs a personality-driven record driven by a guy who doesnât display all that much of a personality. Which is a shame, because Earlâs personality was one of the most exciting things about him. Even Doris had spots like âChumâ that offered striking insight into his character. I Donât Like Shit instead offers rehashes of tired themes in largely forgettable verses, albeit with great rhyme schemes. The beats, save for âMantraâ and âGrief,â are mostly undercooked spooky-piano bits over which Earl gives his hypnotic miasma of vowel sounds. Guest spots are the most thrilling bits of the album: Vince Staplesâ verse on âWoolâ is a record highlight simply because he doesnât sound like heâs about to fall asleep, while Ratkingâs Wiki opens âAM//Radioâ with a verse that through his trademark brashness and sing-song pride ends up being an ad for Ratkingâs music instead of Earlâs. When Earl comes back in, the track immediately falls back into the gray sonic palette the rest of the album works in, as if Wiki didnât just provide a desperately needed splash of color.
I Donât Like Shit is an album is bereft of joy, meaning its major takeaway is, again, frustration. Itâs certainly a step down from Doris, and I doubt time to digest it will be as kind to it as it was to its predecessor. Itâs a record where Earlâs phenomenal technical talents go wasted amidst dull lyrical bile and snoozy production, almost as though it was phoned in. People accused Doris of this as well, but I Donât Like Shit takes it a step further. Itâs genuinely difficult to tell if Earl actually enjoyed making this record, or if he even still enjoys making music. Who, then, is I Donât Like Shit for? I think yes, itâs for Earl, as a therapeutic expression of pain. But itâs also something that Earl understands his audience, who since his return heâs regarded like dogs hungry for his labor, will lap up. Itâs a cynical, darkly personal record without any pretense of giving a shit about how it is received. So frankly, I donât give a shit about receiving it.
Jeff Rosenstock still feels like shit, still drinks beers alone, still continues to rage, rage against the dying of the light. On We Cool?, the former Bomb the Music Industry! frontman is where heâs always been: watching Robocop in his living room with booze and weed. That, or heâs bouncing from couch to couch, wearing on his friendsâ patience, saying hi when he can, but mostly falling out of touch. He still hasnât met a hook he couldnât assimilate to his manic style of power pop, still hasnât met a note he didnât think he could sing. In fact, thereâs very little thatâs different about We Cool? from Bomb the Music Industry!âs last few releases. The main difference, announced in the title of track one and referenced over and over again, is that Jeff Rosenstock is getting older.
This has literally always been true, and Jeff is aware. In âThe First Time I Met Sanawon,â off 2010âs frantically-titled Adults!!!âŚSmart!!! Shithammered!!! And Excited By Nothing!!!, he led this shout-along pledge: âAs we get older, everyday feels longer, and although I know Iâll struggle, I will do my best to never get tired.â He was 27 then. Now 32, things are getting a little dire as a future heâs been fighting his whole career looms taller and darker on the horizon. You canât really use scare quotes when calling yourself an âadultâ at 32. You canât play a house show to kids who snuck in booze. Not with friends in the suburbs, holding jobs, having kids. Jeffâs a grown man whoâs been ten (goddamn) years old his entire life. The major difference between Bomb the Music Industry!âs older releases and We Cool? is that on We Cool? the self-aware debauchery feels quietly sadder.
Take album standout âYou, In Weird Citiesâ: the song is a raucous ode in the classic Rosenstock tradition to friends spread across the country, but its nostalgia is tinged with frustration. The first chorus goes, âIâm always getting high when no one is around, cuz nothing makes me feel anythingâs worthwhile / Nothing makes me happy / Iâm like a shitty child / Nothing makes me laugh / Nothing makes me smile.â Though this is hardly the first Rosenstock chorus devoted to solitary intoxication, compare it to, say, the chorus of âHurricane Wavesâ off Vacation (2011): âYou get yourself a bottle and say âI donât love anything anymoreâ / You get yourself a bottle and say âI donât do anything anymore.ââ In the latter, you, the listener, are invited to engage. You hear a certain disillusionment sung back to you with the earnestness of one who has been there, survived, and come out okay. We may not love anything or do anything, but that there is an implied âweâ gives the lyric a comforting populism. That comfort is missing from We Cool?, as Jeff sings not about the nobility in being pieces of shit together so much as the sadness in being a piece of shit alone.
This is why We Cool? sounds like a Bomb the Music Industry! record but inspires more bittersweet melancholy than this-is-my-life-type fervor. Itâs a punk rock record in twilight, one last âfuck youâ to the passing of time. Of course, it wouldnât be a Jeff Rosenstock record without some knowing sense of humor about the whole thing, and Jeff confronts the limits of his shelf-life with the same brutal honesty thatâs made him such a beloved songwriter in the punk rock community for the past decade. âGet Old Foreverâ finds him drinking malt liquor at a house show, awkward and embarrassed. âIâm Serious, Iâm Sorryâ finds him drunk and relating to a girlâs recent loss of a close friend, but worried about being a condescending old guy about it. In the video for âNausea,â a young crowd in a basement buys knives from his merch table, cuts him open, and pulls all the tacos out of his stomach. Itâs a fittingly comic accompaniment to a song about Jeff shutting out people who try to get him to talk about life after punk. We Cool? is to Jeff Rosenstock as the âYouâre Getting Oldâ episode is to South Park: a serious, but still funny admission of age.
It was always going to be like this. Things were always going to get sadder, weirder. The realities of We Cool? were the anxieties of Bomb the Music Industry!. But with Bomb, all that could be pushed off, because there was a Youth to make the most of. I was at Bomb the Music Industry!âs last show in Brooklyn about a year ago and saw Jeff play an acoustic set of Bomb stuff at my alma mater a couple months later. At the time, I couldnât understand why he would break up the band when their music was as strong and their fans as into them as ever. We Cool? helps to answer that. It is a post-Bomb the Music Industry! record, literally and symbolically, sounding like the beginning of a new chapter (even if Bomb gets back together, which, if the bandâs general âwhatever, manâ attitude is any indication, could happen). Jeff will go on figuring life out, go on getting older, and report back to us on how thatâs going come next album. And weâll be fine.
č˝ĺč - ĺăăĺăŁăŚÂ is a record about drowning. Vaporwave has historically worked best when itâs held a grotesque mirror to pop culture, conflating nostalgia and irony in an effort to destroy the narratives that built the techno-capitalistic zeitgeist. That is not č˝ĺč - ĺăăĺăŁăŚ. Rather, it exists in a place above dreaming and below waking life, submerged below consciousness, where tones and time float ethereally by while language morphs into a soothing miasma of vowels. It colors the world in an uncanny light, not skewering media so much as it is the quotidian, making the familiar confusing and strange with a sonic makeup thatâs more like a smooth-jazz lucid dream. It is an excellent album for not feeling alive.
č˝ĺč - ĺăăĺăŁăŚÂ (âFace to Faceâ) comes from t e l e p a t h ăăŹăăˇ, a prolific artist on the Dream Catalogue label. Populated by Bandcamp vaporwave producers less interested in irony as they are playing within the genreâs ever-important aesthetic, Dream Catalogue generally trades in spacious ambient crafted by time-stretching and lightly rearranging obscure pop music. Though the process is ostensibly very simpleât e l e p a t h ăăŹă㡠released 20 albums in 2014 in addition to contributing to numerous collaborationsâDream Catalogueâs exhaustive F R A G M E N T E D M E M O R I E S compilation illustrates just how titanic t e l e p a t h ăăŹăăˇâs sound is among his peers. Whereas some Dream Catalogue artists lack a niche or worse, dabble with jokey absurdism, t e l e p a t h ăăŹăăˇâs excellently-crafted arrangements, watery palette, and tendency towards maximalism have helped make him a hot artist among the tiny community who still cares about vaporwave. č˝ĺč - ĺăăĺăŁăŚÂ is his masterpiece, a massive, impressively consistent mix of dreamy vapor slush, melancholic and beautiful, a warm, digital facsimile of soul.
Which isnât to say itâs necessarily easy to get into. The hour long âăăŞăăŽćăć°¸é ăŤâ (âYour Love, Foreverâ) sits boldly at track two, serving as the mammoth gateway to t e l e p a t h ăăŹăăˇâs dreamscape. A slowcore endurance test with two long, major payoffs, the track is the albumâs signature experience. Itâs a love song stretched into an ocean, smoothly and languorously working towards killing any sense of linear time. A voice whose humanity was left several pitches upwards goes wailing a soul-slathered chorus over and over again, trudging through a cyclical emotional arc where every dissonant suspension in the simplest chord progression is pressed achingly too long. Every microcosm of emotion in a pop phrase is playing out in epic scale; the minor fall gives way to the major lift, the anticipation of a V resolves to an ecstatic I, repeat, on and on and on, until the song fades into a reality where thereâs still two thirds of the record to go.
That âăăŞăăŽćăć°¸é ăŤâ succeeds so powerfully makes it a new benchmark in vaporwaveâs hypnotic potential and serves as a sort of indoctrination to the rest of the album. The rest of the tracks are nowhere near as exhausting, but the intense emotional color survives in songs with stronger loops and mesmerizing melodies. âăˇă˘ăłć°´é˘â (âCyan Water Surfaceâ) chugs along at a meditative clip with buoyant backing vocals supporting a lonely smooth-jazz saxophone lick and a vocal soloist singing something incomprehensible and heartbreaking. âäťĺ¤ăç§ăŽćâ (âTonight, My Loveâ) works a bit more menacingly, a sharper 20-minute expanse pierced occasionally by a hellishly down-pitched vocal riff. That Voice, the down-pitched trip into the uncanny valley that has become such a signature of vaporwave, t e l e p a t h ăăŹă㡠uses as a conduit to his musicâs heart. Throughout č˝ĺč - ĺăăĺăŁăŚ, That Voice expresses yearning, calmness, and intense loneliness without words, a canvas onto which a listener can project whatever they want.
This is the thing with č˝ĺč - ĺăăĺăŁăŚ: it responds to how willingly one submits to it. It can serve as that canvas that can speak to love or ennui, be that mirror to a subconscious confusion or the isolation inherent in being an individual. Because of what it demands, it lends itself well to obsessive listening. Songs speak in different ways on different listens, not to mention the fact that because itâs so damn long itâs easy to work through in chunks. And, perhaps crucially, there is the comfortable knowledge that the larger world will never know about it. A fascinating part of t e l e p a t h ăăŹăăˇ, Dream Catalogue, and whatâs left of the vaporwave movement is the willful obfuscation of the genreâs artists. Anonymity is of the utmost importance, so while č˝ĺč - ĺăăĺăŁăŚÂ could be considered a paramount release for the genre, in the past three months it was immediately overshadowed by five new t e l e p a t h ăăŹă㡠tapes. Itâs as though these mixes, powerful as they can be, are never to be given much artistic stock, as theyâre being tossed off; there will be a new one by the end of the month.
Then, thereâs conspicuous elephant in the room: that the recordâs name and song titles are all in Japanese. The implications of using Japanese characters and aesthetics is a topic for a different essay, but what it does artistically for many listeners is create a barrier, an understanding that they will not have a clear grasp on what is being communicated. These layers of obscurity have helped keep t e l e p a t h ăăŹăăˇâs Facebook and Twitter follower counts in the modest hundreds, but all evidence suggests that success beyond the smaller pockets of the internet is not a priority. Rather, it is the art, strange and lush, willfully obscured reflections of post-modern humanity, passed around excitedly or faux-ironically on tumblrs that the general public will never frequent, that thrills before it gets tossed aside with other internet ephemera. This bergs the question: what to do with music thatâs free, simple, powerful, but ultimately of little cultural impact? Cherish it: as the world grows more connected, awash in more content than is humanly tweetable, music that exists far outside the zeitgeist could start sounding like the only music thatâs speaks to it.
Beach Slang - Cheap Thrills On A Dead End Street review: You're 23 and drinking PBR.
Itâs 2004 and the world clicks into view. Youâre thirteen years old. American Idiot comes out. Music opens up to you in a way it never has before. It feels vital, revolutionary. Your first rock show is a Green Day concert at Giants Stadium. Your Dad drives you. Jimmy Eat World and Against Me! open, and he spends their sets adjusting his earplugs. Green Day plays and he spends the rest of the concert standing, having as good a time as you, though heâll deny it to this day. Six months later, you write a sentence or two about every song on Kerplunk.Â
"I miss when it was possible to pretend faceless corporate bigwigs at Nickelodeon were the ones dictating Ariana Grandeâs music career and not, you know, her own people. Those were better times. Judging by the mild sexualization of the âAriana Grandeâ brand, her musical disassociation from the retro pop-vocal sound that helped Yours Truly (2013) hold up surprisingly well, and the endless media blitz that has kept her name and perpetually-hearing-the-voices-of-angels face plastered on your Facebook feed, the plan for My Everything was to mold Ariana Grande into a full-blown contemporary pop-star. To that end, mission accomplished, because now itâs cool to make fun of her. We are at the point in the Ariana cycle where Pitchfork gives its seal of approval to the obviously shittier album and snarky pubs get their rocks off ribbing her outfits and poor enunciation, which, as far as pop-backlash is concerned, is pretty tame. Itâd take a Scrooge-y heart indeed to foster active hatred for Ariana when her entire thing is pre-sexual looks, genuine (looking, at least) attitude, and bequeathed-from-God pipes. It should be the easiest thing in the world for a PR team to sell. So why is My Everything hot garbage?"
I wrote on why the new Ariana Grande album sucks a big one.
RIYL: the confusion and hurt of getting old in a world that still refuses to understand you; motherfucking whoa-ohs.
I grew up a huge Brand New fan. This was pretty unavoidable. Half my teenage years were spent in an online music community where Jesse Lacey was on par with Jeff Mangum and the other half were spent as a bookish teenager in the subfaction of the tri-state areaâs pop-punk community where it mattered whether you were team Brand New or team Taking Back Sunday. Especially on their first two albums, Brand New were perfect for a sixteen year-old fuckboy. They were wordy and had a tongue-in-cheek façade of macho-douchebaggery that they occasionally let drop to reveal the sensitive douchebag underneath, all with massive choruses that you screamed along to like they were the goddamn truth. I wrote about their Deja Entendu (2003) when I was nineteen as part of a âTop 100 Albums of the 2000sâ feature and the blurb paints the record like the quintessential document of the Sensitive Alternative Boy, the thing that got âusâ (as a writer, I was still totally under the impression everyone in the world was a white boy from Poughkeepsie) better than any of the dime-a-dozen emo records that defined mid-â00s pop culture. The point is, Brand New were the band that I wedded myself to, as they were one of the closest approximations of âmeâ I could identify in a musical group. And one day they didnât matter anymore.
This is how it went with bands like Brand New or Taking Back Sunday or Fall Out Boy or whichever was your poison during those formative years when FEELINGS were culturally the most important thing ever. They got left behind. Their fans got older. Feelings changed, priorities shifted, and the Livejournal-esque metaphors in songs like âThe Quiet Things That No One Ever Knowsâ just didnât resonate the same way they did to sixteen-year-olds in the mid-2000s. No amount of nostalgic scab-picking has worked to bring them back, either. Brand New stayed somewhat relevant by expanding into darker, more mature territory, but Taking Back Sunday shit the bed after reuniting their original lineup, Fall Out Boyâs comeback felt cheap, and pretty much every other âitâ band from that generation I can think of either disintegrated or left the pop-punk aesthetic behind. As trends from formative years tend to do, the whole emo thing got put in a box in an attic, to be looked upon as a gentle reminder of an embarrassing but sentimental time, but assuredly dead.
So itâs 2014 now, and hereâs this Hotelier record packing melodrama in the form of motherfucking whoa-ohs in the first song. Youâd be forgiven for brushing it aside. I mean, it almost feels cloying when you put it on. Singer Christian Holden comes in a-wailing âOPENTHE CURTAINS, SINGING BIRDS TELL ME TEAR THE BUILDINGS DOWN!â and the fortress of cynicism goes to work picking it apart. For starters, the opening track of Home, Like Noplace Is There (lol) is called âAn Introduction to the Albumâ (lol), and by the time those aforementioned whoa-ohs rear their sentimental heads The Hotelier have essentially hit every point on the âteenage nonsenseâ checklist. The first time I listened to it, I got to the chorus of âYour Deep Restâ that goes âI CALLED IN SICK FROM YOUR FUUUUUNERALâ and I put it away as a record Iâd outgrown before it even grew on me. It was meant for a self that Iâd left behind. Most likely, I wouldnât come back to it. Only I did. At first, in what I perceived as moments of weakness (âBoy, I could really use some whoa-ohsâ right now), then with comfortable familiarity, and then with fervor, because Home, Like Noplace Is There is not a record it brings me back to being sixteen, but rather a record that breathes life into memories, uses the grand-scale emotions of mid-2000s emo not to talk about girls or parents just not getting it, but about some serious-ass shit.
Thereâs a ghost hanging over Home, Like Noplace is There in the form of a friend who committed suicide. Heâs the âyouâ addressed in every song, in apologies (âI called in sick from your funeral / The sight of your family made me feel responsibleâ), accusatory diatribes (âYou cut our ropes, left the umbilical / Now Iâm lost and I canât take this path back homeâ), and simple recitals of the events leading to the end. It listens like hurt expressed via pop-punk clichĂŠ, but the giant choruses, anthemic shuffles, and voice-shredding octave jumps feel like musical motifs revisited to evoke the a shared past. On âIn Framing,â we get this lyric packaged in a galloping chorus: âWith your nature reversed and our home as our cage, you caved and you asked is this coming of age?â Itâs a short, stark scene, packing the turn from adolescence into adulthood with the appropriate anxiety. One turned back, leaving the narrator to make sense of it all using the means he knows. âIâm sorry. This isnât easy. I donât know,â he yells in the middle of a long, bitter screed against his friend. It listens more like âWhere the fuck are you, dude?â
Home, Like No Place is There is one of those records, the kind that either donât really affect you or turn you into a blubbering pile of jelly depending on whether or not you ever thought âpop-punkâ was something that actually needed defending, but less disputable is the fact there is a fuck-ton of heart in this impeccably written record. Holden delivers lyrics like anxieties piling up on top of each other, bending thoughts around the ends of musical phrases so that the next idea is already half-expressed by the time your ear catches up. From âAn Introduction to the Albumâ: âYou felt blessed to receive their pleasant / Sound of things that break / Make you cringe inside yourself / Thereâs a child counting stars in their time / Out of their day, in the corners of their frame,â and so on until an appropriately cathartic climax. And while weâre on lyrics, my god, the way Holden can evoke a character: âWhatâs that note youâre writing there? Why are you giving me this back? This was a gift from when we met back when you werenât so upset!â; âIâm just jealous because I tried mapping out your mindâs inconsistent ways / Tangled and untied, I watched your ends to start to fray.â Itâs melodramatic, yes, but the layers to the narrator of Home, Like Noplace Is There are vast. This guy cycles through a series of emotions, each feeling valid, each feeling like an appropriate result of confusion in the wake of a huge loss.
Observe how it concludes: the emo record for the sixteen-year-old concludes its narrative with a bow, generally something poignant and either sweepingly epic or fittingly somber to put a definite âThe Endâ on things. American Idiot (2004) has âWhatsername.â The Black Parade (2006) has âFamous Last Words.â Taking Back Sunday always would swing for the fences. Brand New, too. But things donât quite resolve for Home, Like Noplace Is There. With a story this heavy, one expects a resolution where the narrator reconciles the events and moves on. Instead we get âDendron,â wherein we get an ambiguous admittance of responsibility (âI felt the noose tighten up on your collarbone and I felt the fun in the small of your backâ), a suggested nod to the appeal of suicide (âYou were right to doubtâ) and a final lyric that throws the whole situation back on those who, in the face of mental sickness, did all the wrong things: âEngraved in the stone by request and recurse of friends dead: âTell me again that itâs all in my head.ââ Itâs an end that doesnât suggest peace but continued disillusion.
Home, Like Noplace Is There is about a lot of failures, but the most egregious is that of a world that didnât understand the recordâs narrator or his friend. And in this style, where so many âparents just donât get itâ screeds have been laughed off as asinine prepackaged on the shelves of Hot Topic, it hits like a truck. Itâs about the narratorâs failure to understand his friend, and itâs about the friendâs failure to adjust. Both positions valid. There are no winners in this record. Itâs a tragedy about the confusion and hurt of getting old in a world that still refuses to understand you, and experience tells us the best way to capture that emotion is through some motherfucking whoa-ohs.
Man, shit just keeps getting weirder, doesnât it? If you spend a great deal of your existence on the internet (and if youâre reading this review of a vaporwave album on Cokemachineglow.com, chances are you do), you understand the bizarre unreality of the Twitter-verse, how news cycles du-jour run their course before theyâre replaced by something equally transient as all the hubs of the internet desperately churn out content until together they form a great, dull din, like the auditorium in the âBand Geeksâ episode ofSpongebob where everyoneâs unabashedly just going âblah, blah, blah.â So hereâs this Nmesh albumâa curated collage of â80s commercials, ancient Youtube clips, dream philosophy, sports broadcasts, saleswomen totally jazzed on Avon, and other weird media shit ripe for an Everything is Terrible recutâclicking on that visceral level that causes music writers, yours truly included, to toss around buzzwords like âzeitgeist.â Because, look, if weâre being honest, the zeitgeist of 2014 is fucking weird.
Not coincidentally, the zeitgeist of 2014 is also âYou.â A moment in the second half ofDream SequinsÂŽÂ assures âThis is a story about you as you are led through an adventure in your own mind.â Dream SequinsÂŽÂ is the vaporwave nightmare dâannĂŠe and also something of a state-of-the-genre address. Strange how a genre barely out of its infancy can have a retrospective, but Dream SequinsÂŽÂ feels like a culmination of its various touchstones. It builds the total narcissistic immersion created in albums like Mac_Floral Shoppe_ (2011)âitâs no coincidence that the iconic âItâs all in your headâ lyric from that record is echoed by an academic in this one. It turns modernityâs constant stream of media into a hazy trip, like the dream your subconscious would produce if you fell asleep with a radio, television, and looping DVD menu all playing at the same time. Pieces of the din are isolated, de-contextualized, and allowed to bleed in to each other, forming something hellish and seductive, gorgeous and a little terrifying, comfortable nostalgia spat back grotesque and caricatured. âThis is a story about youâ where nothing is trustworthy or logically sound. Itâs ego-death via pop culture, a bizarre landscape constructed from the digital and analog ruins of the immediate past. Best to just get lost in it, because shit isâŚwell, you get it by now.
Dream SequinsÂŽÂ most closely resembles Daniel Lopatinâs Ecco Jams (2010) with its slowed, androgynous vocals and firm stance in uncanny valley, but it also recalls the best Vektroid material in how it liberally chops adult contemporary and library music and even pushes into house territory with âClimbing the Corporate Ladder.â This makes for a genuinely engaging listen, as the foundation holding Dream SequinsÂŽÂ together is constantly shifting. In âRainforest Suite v1.3,â a percussive, jungle vibe gives way to a vintage Mr. Potato Head commercial, and the juxtaposition makes the latter oddly terrifying. Later, radio nonsense suddenly clicks brilliantly into a sparkling celebration of Avon that isnât nearly as ironic as it sounds. Dream SequinsÂŽÂ deftly negotiates vaporwaveâs tongue-in-cheek relationship to capitalism, skewering its machinations while isolating the idealism needed to make it run. When the Avon track finishes with a chorus of âAvon, you make meâŚsmile!â, the artifice behind the sell is obvious, but damn if it isnât a little bit appealingâhow wonderful it would be if some mascara could solve my problems for five fucking minutes.
This is the trick that makes Dream SequinsÂŽÂ such a compelling record: it creates an atmosphere of a found-footage-dream-journey without sacrificing honest-to-god tunes, and ends up striking the perfect balance between being heady and intuitive. âClimbing the Corporate Ladderâ and âÎVÎN⢠NiteMare Liquid Mascaraâ are genuinely hypnotic tracks that make capitalist devilry deliciously seductive: you dance to them while simultaneously contemplating your part in the corporate machine. Dream SequinsÂŽÂ actively works to hypnotize you, even going so far as to kick off with a âYou find yourself getting tiredâ bit at the beginning, and then indulging you in media familiar, comforting, and hip. However, when these media are stripped of context the things that make them comforting become a bit gruesome, a bit sad. You love Mr. Potato Head because of a catchy jingle with a cute kid. Avonâs just the product of these impossibly friendly women who just talk mascara all day and probably never shit. Itâs all idealism shown through a funhouse-mirror lens. And for it, Dream SequinsÂŽÂ is mesmerizing. Itâs a perfect marriage of politics and music.
Vaporwave is a remarkable product of the 2010s in how hyper-accelerated and fervent its arc has been as a phenomenon; in the span of four years, itâs gone through explosion, backlash, death, and revival. Even more intriguing is the intensity of the genreâs gesticulation ostensibly taking place within an extremely miniscule faction of the internet (read: people who read Tiny Mix Tapes). Its politics have both been argued academically and dismissed as bullshit by artists within the genre. Saint Pepsi made dance music out of it and incited vitriolic comparisons to Skrillex. The line between being a sincere pastiche and a purely ironic gag is constantly tread by an internet fan base that Iâd wager has ceased to tell the difference between the two. So when Nmesh ends Dream SequinsÂŽÂ with a chop-up of Anthony Fantano tripping over himself trying to make sense of Floral Shoppe, itâs both the funniest thing and an oddly perfect summation of where vaporwave is right now. Itâs a joke for people in the know and a massive break in the fourth wall, yet it doesnât really feel out of character for what the albumâs trying to do. The world Dream SequinsÂŽÂ reflects is a little broken, a little weird, where nothing holds meaning for very long before being gobbled up by the postmodern condition and decontextualized as another piece of media to be mashed together with the next one. By mocking Fantano in this way, Nmesh illustrates how far Fantano and critics like him are behind this idea. Tough to blame them though; to succumb to the idea that oneâs work is just another, tiny ping in the great din of the internetâŚthat shitâs more than a little weird. Itâs actively terrifying.
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