I’ve been dipping my toe into PC Music stuff from time to time for some time now; the knowledgeable philosophical crowd over at Tiny Mix Tapes can’t seem to get enough, but I always come away with an impression of sassy and gleaming production wrapped around nothing very remarkable. I saw Charli XCX on stage at Primavera Sound and dios mio it was draining to see someone posturing so hard. But I keep thinking, you know, if 30 Helens agree… so I gave the PC Music Volume 3 compilation a spin and there was a wow incredible track called “Pussy Money Weed” by Estonian rapper Tommy Cash. I am super tardy to Tommy’s party, but what a fucking talent: his videos are hilariously absurdist high art with insane choreography, and his rapping is smart and stupid and satirical and so much fun. Mrs YouTube won’t let me embed the mild naughtiness of PMW but do check it out and in the meantime here’s one that breaks it all down into specific currencies.
Marina Herlop makes avant-garde music with clashing time signatures, vocal and keyboard trills, generally plenty of treble, and abstract syllables for lyrics. It’s suitable for goatee stroking, but it’s also fun and inventive and occasionally mournful and kind of reminds me of bird songs; it would make for a perfect modern dance score, and probably has. Marina’s goddess voice is showcased most starkly on “Kaddisch,” but if I’m looking for a hit single I’m gonna go with opener “abans abans,” where the post-modern musicality resolves into a descending riff of Cocteau Twins-esque emotion.
Yves Jarvis’ world is velvety and ornate and seems to draw from the fertile soil of Love and Arthur Lee, effortlessly growing into a series of surprising, curlicued shapes, with his gentle, double-tracked vocals providing a through-line. His lyrics don’t deal with love much — it’s all more in the vein of philosophy or spirituality; it’s like witnessing a uniquely sensitive and intelligent soul striving to make sense of the existence he finds himself in, and growing into something magnificent in the process. “Watch me bootstrap / From the substrate underneath / Grasp abstraction and proxy,” he offers on “Bootstrap Jubliee.” “Gain some traction in this corporeal scheme / Cultivate some ego, order, self-esteem / Patterns emerge naturally / Narratives and paradigms will interweave.” He undercuts any self-importance in the final song, listing all the things his record isn’t, including important, cute, meaningful, useful, real or sexy, but then reaffirms that “This is song / And I’ll go to that end.” It reminds me of Love again, and the fanfare at the end of “You Set the Scene” — “This is the time and this is the time and it is time, time, time, time…”
Tirzah has fallen in love it seems — she has a new song called “Ribs” where she conjures maximum intensity with minimum effort, mainly just her lazy, oxytocin vocals and a strummed guitar, garnished with cymbal and incense. Oh, l’amour, l’amour, how it can let you down. Hmm. How it can pick you up again.
One album that’s really lighting up my early summer is Janky Star by Grace Ives — it’s soulful, it struts with insecurities and it just moves, inspired by pop music and even passing for pop at first glance. Grace spits out her poetry in short, brightly lit bursts, like on “Loose”: “Focused on a fingernail / I polished with a tack / Oh, what a loser sound / I let out when I hit the ground / I never squeal like that / I need some respite, please / Slumber under swollen trees / Let my eyes roll back.” Her dense, mad/fresh electronic arrangements like to dip into eightiesabilia. It’s the sound of dancing/stumbling through the intricacies of fun and fun’s bad consequences, taking in the richness of the imagery as it tumbles by. It’s got a lightness, a sweet vulnerability and pop-adjacency that reminds me of Shamir’s genius first album Ratchet. Cyndi Lauper too.
One of my number one most favorite favorite albums of 2017 was Saturday Night by Tim Darcy — that boy really knows how to rock and decostruct rock, plus he asked the all-important question “Is it fate or is it popsicle?” Deep in View by his new band Cola is more gritty and linear than the solo album. “Blank Curtain” is groovy rock perfection — bendy guitar notes meowing over bubbling bass and oracle-esque lyrics: “Is there a frame upon a frame? / I’m making décollage / Is there a notion to explain the mirror to the wall? / And the blank curtain / What’s on the other side / Of the blinding solar? / I’ll take it as it rides.”
In case you missed it, Cat Power released a cover of the Stones’ “Silver and Gold,” written in ‘69 by Keith Richards for Anita Pallenberg apparently. Not much you can say about something with such a stellar pedigree (although the first time I heard it I thought it was a dude singing, at least at the beginning); it’s designed for pleasure and does La Marshall deliver? Of course she does.
How to describe Saya Gray… she reminds me a bit of my weirdo boo Trevor Powers in the way she twists and layers R&B and guitar music into dark, rich and complex new forms but still turns out stuff you can hum in the shower. Her voice is a dazzling instrument, gliding from angelic coos to crystalline/raspy Martina Topley-Bird tones and beyond. The whole 19 MASTERS album is a fascinating listen but the Paul favorites are front-loaded. On “Saving Grace” her vocals skitter alongside a staccato bassline as she describes a troubled love affair: “We looked up at the night / And realized that we held up the sky with our mind’s holding eyes / Scorpio, you’re to blame / You say my name like the sunshine that soaks in the limelight of fame.” Sweet/sad “Wish U Picked Me” feels like the aftermath of all that — over strummed acoustic guitar she leaves a thought unfinished: “If I coulda said one thing it would be, it would be, it would be it would be, it would be, it would be, it would be…” And on “Sympathy for Bethany,” as fingerpicked guitar gives way to sax, she ruminates “Honestly, I always buy two ’cause when I move I’ll leave one with you and one with another / Honestly, we’ll get too close, I’ll go ghost, you’ll have my clothes in hopes you remember.”
Noon Garden is a British bloke with a lovely mop of forward-spilling hair and neo-Carnaby Street style; on Beulah Spa he dissolves effortlessly from poppy electronica into ecstatic green and pink and purple smoke, incorporating a wild array of textures and effects. He’s got a Marc Bolan sense of being dazzled and fully engaged with a world that’s colorful and violent and uncontrollable. On “Desiree” he’s “Feeling my best in the evening / Never a’mess with a demon / I’m setting off I’m striding into moonlight / Oh I wanna be home by midnight / To watch it rain down the mountain / Come and rain down the mountain / Lick my wounds / And know my place / Solitude and slow parades / Champagne holiday…” I’m trying hard not to use the reductive P word, but is it psych? Yeah I suppose it’s psych, kind of, there I said it, but it explodes beyond any template and bottom line it’s objectively overflowing with bangers.
So much cool Japanese music lately — Kikagaku Moyo are most definitely a psych band, with rocking sitars, shifting hypnotic vocals and the like. On Kumoyo Island (sadly their final album it seems), they can get quite soft and fluffy — on “Meu Mar” they sound kind of like the Carpenters. My favorite track is the dreamy “Gomugomu,” which sounds like something that’s been playing on a loop on a cruise ship lost in the Bermuda Triangle circa 1967.
I saw Aldous Harding at the Wiltern and it was pretty astonishing — she has this intense, theatrical stage persona that’s sort of like a sleepwalker, bizarre and raw and improvisational. She seems to be channeling something. The audience was completely entranced during the songs; none of the usual half-paying-attention chatter coming from the bar area. As each song ended people got increasingly rowdy with love and praise. Aldous didn’t react at all until finally she went “I admire you too, but right now,” (she made a vertical salute gesture, bisecting her face) “I have to focus.” It was one of those magical evenings where every song felt perfect, but the ultimate show-stopper for me was “Treasure.”
A rock in my hand, a living mirror
The braided cover, of love…
I’ve got my eye, on you now, treasure