I had read about punk in Time Magazine back when I was still in high school in Italy and it sounded scary and gross and random. Bands actually spitting on people! By the time I started college I was into the kind of new wave they played on the radio — KLOS, LA’s smooth and groovy rock station, would play a smattering of Elvis Costello, the Cars, Devo and such. KROQ came on the scene playing non-stop new wave in a Top 40 rotation style — everything from the classic CBGBs bands to the Go-Gos, X, Simple Minds, Killing Joke, The Cure, Siouxsie, Lene Lovich, etc. But straight up, abrasive and confrontational punk rock just went too far in my suburban teenage opinion. Then I one night I was sitting in my VW Super Beetle in the parking lot of the sprawling shopping center on El Toro Rd. near the Edwards Theaters, playing a cassette of Never Mind the Bollocks, and suddenly I got it. All the pain and rage and superiority of my youth distilled with raw and violent caterwauling British elegance and disdain — the Sex Pistols became the altar I worshiped at; a kind of ground zero where nothing that came before them was relevant except maybe ironically. They were really a genre unto themselves and hugely influential, but no other band delivered the same kind of haughty, poisonous, high-art sneering aggression.
I purged the dinosaur rock from my record collection and tried for a minute to get into what punk rock morphed into, but it was all so gray and humorless. I moved on through the velvety green pastures of post-punk and took deep dives into the likes of Nina Hagen and Laurie Anderson and Echo and the Bunnymen and eventually my next place of worship — a little band called the Smiths. So my point was… Right, that I’ve always considered the kind of hardcore that continued to pummel college radio airwaves well into the 21st century to be about the most banal and annoyingly hetero thing going, so imagine my surprise at coming across a band that fully wraps itself in the conventions of the style and comes up with something fun and spicy and hilarious. Otoboke Beaver is that band. Their song titles alone — “I am not maternal,” “I won’t dish out salads,” “Where did you buy such a nice watch you are wearing now,” “You’re no hero shut up fuck you man-whore,” “Do you want me to send a DM,” “Let’s shopping after show,” “What do you mean you have to talk to me at this late date?,” “Introduce me to your family,” “Dirty old fart is waiting for my reaction.” It helps that they’re Japanese and female and full of angry fun. On their new album Super Champon the production is as clean and shiny as a Ginsu knife and the sense of raging absurdity is irresistible.
Me and Radiohead have certainly had our differences over the years — their whiny anthems “Creep” and “High and Dry” really bring out the Kat Bjelland in me. “You. Are. So. Ob. Vi. Ous.” Plus Thom Yorke is such a bitter Betty in interviews. You’re a fucking multi-millionaire rockstar adored by millions, you tosser. But my ex turned me on to “Reckoner” which I came to adore, and I have to admit… um, yeah, anyway, they have a project that weirdly has its own name, The Smile, even though it’s still Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and it’s really rather lovely despite another tiresome album title (A Light for Attracting Attention). “Pana-vision” is delicate and dreamy before hitting a groove and soaring; “Skrting on the Surface” investigates similar pleasure principles to “Reckoner” but with much darker lyrics: “When we realize we are merely held in suspension / Till someone comes along and shakes us / As the pattern lines cross our fingers like a web / Do we die upon the surface?” Thom’s falsetto can really do things to you.
Sigrid is a Norwegian pop star in the Nordic tradition of A-ha, Roxette, Robyn and the like. In the fork review, they complained that her new album “never met a problem it couldn’t solve by the first chorus” — a bizarre criticism — isn’t that what we expect and deeply desire from a Scandinavian pop song? How To Let Go is full of brassy big sister know-how: on “Burning Bridges” it’s “I used sorry to keep you and that was my error / Cause I tore me apart tryna keep us together.” Not to mention “You cry, they don’t / Every single night / That’s how you know / You gotta let it go.” Elsewhere, when “It gets dark,” she realizes that it’s only “so I can see the stars.”
On the barnstorming hold-up-your-lighters “Bad Day,” she shares a scenario: “Everyone’s damaged, a little depressed / Every now and then we get that feeling in our chests / Some days, I’m a loser, brush my teeth in the dark…” She brings in Oli Sykes, her own private Bryan Adams, to give the second verse maximum 80s power ballad pathos: “No matter how hard I try, I always come undone / Backed in a corner, uncomfortably numb / Watching myself become a shadow of someone…” And they come together for a climactic “When the world is on your shoulders / And the weight of your own heart is too much to bear / Wеll, I know that you’re afraid things will always be this way / It’s just a bad day, not a bad life.”
A new Organ Tapes album is like warm rain coming down from heaven, peed by melancholy angels. I am not worthy of such gifts, or maybe I am and that’s the point. The cover is Tim sitting hunched over, looking down at worried hands, in the middle of smudgy high-rise windows reflected in an infinity pool. The image is smeared and displacing, all quivering, subdued amber and gray. Following up Hunger In Me Living, 2019’s tight and definitive statement of Organ Tapesness, Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao (“Sing the song that no one cares about”) is sprawling and relatively unkempt. It bears the spirit (if none of the volume) of emo from the start, with a sampled bit of dialogue about God: “Nothing’s came, but that ain’t gonna stop me. Eventually He will come into my life. I hope it happens. It’s gonna break my heart if it don’t.” This time out, Zha’s arrangements are largely analogue, but his vocals are as always disguised in vaporous autotune. He’s a master of harmony and effortlessly soaring choruses, and he hits a peak on “heaven can wait,” sighing over finger-picked guitar, “I used to say it was all a release / When I sharpen my songs through my teeth / Colored and shaped / Am I bold when I speak / I just hope that the meaning can bleed.” The song is bisected by an odd/perfect electric guitar solo layered over chattering crowd noise, and resolves in heartbreak: “In October two thousand nineteen / I loved and I still can’t believe / Surviving the smoke / Cold as a dawn on a beach.”
Side one of the the vinyl, which of course I bought, continues that line of thought, wrapping up with the simple, guitar-strummed “submission” — “Come to find out that love is not what I thought / But it will and it won’t be exactly what I had envisioned […] I was young and I said I would change and I did and I didn’t / Holding the scraps, falling into submission…” There’s nothing like a song to help you process old trauma, and it did…
I got so crazy busy in April and I needed some little breaks to do something stupid, so I plunked down the 15.49 for a month of Netflix and got busy watching Selling Sunset. It’s been a while since I’ve watched reality TV, and I got a strange sense of displacement from it — I guess I expected in to be somewhat anchored in the reality of the characters, who are ostensibly genuine real estate agents, but the stories and character arcs jump around so jarringly it almost feels like there’s a Lynchian intent behind it. Crishell (amazing reality TV name) is the new girl in the office; she’s the ingenue, an actress-turned realtor… kind of? The show can’t seem to make up its mind if she’s brand new or experienced. Christine, who gets painted as the uber-bitch, gamely jumps into a whole series of contrived conflicts. The best one is after Crishell indulges in some mild gossip with Davina about Mary and her boy-toy fiancé Romain, and Davina ends up calling her out for it publicly at a dinner for the whole office. When Crishell tries to deflect saying “I don’t remember,” Christine repeatedly yells at her “Do you have dementia?” It’s like there’s some kind of secret ingredient in the show, like potato chips, I just want to keep watching it forever.
Rapper Leikeli47 rules the world from some underground underworld club; her flow is Li’l Kim terrifying and her style is ferocious. She’s been wearing masks since way before COVID, as a way to conceal herself. The stylish, minimal beats on Shape Up subwoof me in all the right places. On “LL Cool J” she brags about bagging something hard and fine: “I got a lil’ weakness for them boys in the rough / It’s something ’bout pressure that’ll make a nigga tough.” But she warns him, “Like, make sure you keep up your ideal cut / ‘Cause I just wanna try you on when you all shaped up.”
Yung Lean’s new one couldn’t be more different — it’s all Scandinavian hip hop vulnerability, starting out with the chugging, Joy Division-evoking “Bliss” (featuring FKA Twigs) and the spinning, trebly druggy ecstasy of “Trip,” before shifting toward increasingly sad and dreamy, violet-bruised arrangements. You can’t help worry about Yung, how he seems to blithely flutter between life and death. Like on “SummerTime Blood,” which starts out with La-la-las: “Summertime blood, wash your hands, shake the lights on / We not really on the same level, we some icons / If the shoe fits, neon lights, see the signs on / Summertime tears, green cemetery sights on / You ain’t gotta figure me out or what I’m on.”
I finished up the month at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, which I program, and screened a block of my favorite recent music videos. Here they are (minus a couple that aren’t up online yet):